CSI:New York

Season 1 - Episode 7 - Rain

Written by Pam Veasey
Directed by David Grossman

Rain pours down on Chinatown and a sea of black umbrellas bloom. Suddenly a man on fire bursts from a building, collapsing in the middle of the street as horrified bystanders look on.

Mac Taylor and Stella Bonasera examine the charred body of the formerly flaming man. The victim appears to have been wearing a plastic mask. The CSIs enter the empty storefront and find a 4x4 foot hole cut into the wall, leading into the safe deposit vault of the Chinatown First National Bank. Several of the safe deposit boxes have been pried open. An oxyacetylene tank lies on the floor. They find a charred Caucasian male with a gun next to his body, a plastic mask melted onto his face.

Detective Flack tells the CSIs that the fire started when two security guards interrupted the robbery and during the ensuing gunfire, a bullet hit the acetylene tank causing it to explode. Stella finds a trail of blood, leading out to the back door. One of the robbers got away and two died.

Inside the safe deposit vault, the entire CSI team collects evidence. They reconstruct the events; the perps cut through the wall, after the bank manager and security guard each entered the alarm disarming code. Tony Fenn, the security guard heard a sound and when he checked the vault gunfire ensues and the robbers head out the way they came in. However, a bullet hits the tank and the place goes up in flames.

Later Mac and Flack look around the empty store adjacent to the bank, accompanied by Rob Bloom, the leasing agent. Bloom claims that a week earlier he received a letter from the owner who said he was no longer interested in renting out the space. The investigators ask for that letter.

In the Trace Lab, Stella examines the evidence she found on the vault floor, including a small jade monkey and some beads from a bracelet. She is able to pull a partial print from a jewelry clasp, belonging to Joanne Cho, the bank’s manager. Further investigation reveals the robber brought the bracelet with him to the bank.

Stella confronts Joanne about the bracelet. Joanne tells her the robbers had kidnapped Joanne’s eleven-month-old baby girl, Doris, and she had asked for proof they still had her. The robbers had threatened to kill Doris if Joanne didn’t do what they asked. A ransom note arrived that afternoon.

Mac studies the cut and paste ransom note. He researches the phrasing and the fonts. He tells Stella the typeface can only come from three magazines; Gotham, The Hamptons and Playbill. Stella tells Mac she found sodium poyacrylate on the baby’s clothing but wasn’t diapers but rather fake snow. They connect the dots: Playbill magazine and fake snow mean “theater,” a show set in wintertime.

At an off-Broadway theater they discover the lifeless body of Kevin Moretti, the third robber, lying face down in a pool of blood. Bloody baby prints trail away from his body but no baby is to be found. Mac and Stella speculate that Moretti must have been trying to meet someone in the theater. Stella retrieves a long black hair from the body and a missing letter from the ransom note, cut from the inside of a magazine, which as a partial zip code on the reverse side.

Danny tells Mac that five shots were fired at the crime scene. A bullet pulled from the pillar in the vault is from Marvin Hummel, the second security guard, but its location doesn’t make sense when compared against Hummel’s report. If Hummel’s story is true then the bullet stopped in mid-air, turned left, and hit the pillar. As they examine Kevin Moretti’s body, Dr. Hawkes finds traces of mercury, glass fibers, and lead in his system – the same components found in the lungs of the Ground Zero clean-up crews.

Stella shows Mac a ransom letter Joanne Cho received an hour earlier. It demands two hundred thousand dollars in unmarked bills to be delivered to the New York Bystander newsstand, South East Corner of Central Park. They find that the same person who signed the signature on the letter to the leasing agent wrote the ransom note. The ransom paper has indentations on it of Chinese characters.

Flack tells Stella that Joanne Cho wants to put up the ransom. They sit in a car-watching pedestrian’s walk by the ransom drop off newspaper stand in the drizzling rain. Finally, a white man approaches the newspaper box and suddenly a convey of forty or more police cars appear sirens screaming. Stella is shocked and the suspect disappears. Flack tells her that it’s an unannounced terrorist response drill. She retrieves the money from the newspaper box and hands it to Flack. Stella finds a nondescript mask on the ground, in a muddy puddle. Stella tells Mac that the mask blended the suspect’s face into the crowd. Mac finds a partial print off the newspaper vending machine.

Stella tells Mac that they translated the Chinese characters from the indentation on the ransom note and found the name “Nina Chang.” She worked in the theatre as a make-up artist. They are able to use the partial zip code they found to locate the whereabouts of a Nina Chang, living two blocks from a construction site.

Stella and Flack and three uniformed officers enter Nina Chang’s apartment. Nina admits to meeting her boyfriend, Kevin Moretti, at the theatre. She took his loot bag and left him to die on the floor. Nina claims she doesn’t know where the baby is. Mac tells her to write the pledge of allegiance on a pad of paper. Her writing matches the ransom note and forged signature of the letter to the leasing agent. Unfortunately there are no matches to the partial print Mac lifted from the newspaper box.

Danny and Stella determine, based on the ballistic evidence in the vault that Marvin Hummel shot at the wall for no apparent reason. Hummel is slammed into a parked car by Danny and Flack. Danny tells him that he should have never fired his weapon.

Mac interrogates Hummel. Tony Fenn was supposed to go home but decided to wait out the rain. Then he heard a sound from the vault and went to investigate. Hummel followed and when Tony took a hit and went down, a wounded Kevin Moretti knocked over the oxyacetylene tank on this way out of the vault; Hummel pulled his gun and fired away from the robbers. Tony, still on the ground, realized he was on his own and struggled to make a last shot his bullet ignited the oxyacetylene-filled air, exploding the vault.

Mac tells Marvin Hummel he could have been a hero and returned the baby. Why didn’t he? Marvin says it never would have gotten to that if those guys hadn’t messed up at the bank. Mac tells him, there’s always something you didn’t expect. If only Tony had gone home. If only it hadn’t rained.

Mac sees Stella handing Doris, the baby, to Joanne Cho.

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