CSI:New York

Season 2 - Episode 8 - Bad Beat

Written by Zachary Reiter
Directed by Duane Clark

Poker. The new craze. The new occupation. Prevailing opinion among twenty-somethings these days is that hard work is for suckers. The new gamble is not whether to buy or sell but whether to call or fold. Why sit behind a desk when you can sit behind the green felt making millions playing poker? Everyone’s doing it. When a cocky player gets caught cheating at a high-stakes home game, he takes a beating and then gets tossed out of the apartment. Moments later, the doorbell rings and the owner of the apartment looks through the peephole to discover he’s staring down the barrel of a twelve-gauge shotgun. Bam! Mac and his team chase down the cheater with the help of blood, fingerprints and a partially burned cigar ring found where the cheater was sitting. Stella infiltrates a high stakes game to catch the cheater at it again, but the CSIs are thrown when they discover that blood at the crime scene does not only matches the cheater: there are two donors; the killer is still on the loose. As ballistic evidence stacks up, and a reluctant witness comes forward to divulge a murderously close call, the CSIs find that what they thought was a cheater’s revenge was actually the result of a tragic misidentification.

Down in Central Park’s Strawberry Fields, our CSIs come across a dead body that they instantly recognize as Tara Stanfield – the popular weather girl at Channel Two. Blunt trauma to the head appears to be the cause of death. Who would have wanted such a sunny personality dead? Autopsy reveals that the victim didn’t die from the blow to the head. She drowned, and there’s no evidence that she was dumped. So how does someone “drown” on dry land? The trail winds through the newsroom, where jealousy and competitiveness result in more than one possible suspect as well as the married producer Tara had the bad judgment to sleep with. Most surprising, DNA recovered from under the victim’s fingernail matches… the victim herself. Even though there are no scratches on her body. What is going on? Using weather-related forensics and recovered glass from the scene, our CSIs track down a killer who had more invested in the victim than she had ever intended…