CSI:New York

Season 3 - Episode 20 - What Schemes May Come

Written By Bruce Zimmerman
Directed By Christine Moore
Guest Starring: Claire Forlani “Peyton Driscoll”
and Robert Joy as “Sid Hammerback”

The CSI team has their hands full when they are called to the scene of a man who wandered out of Central Park, in full Medieval armor and impaled with a lance. Finding evidence in Central Park that initially would indicate a jousting match gone deadly, the case takes a bizarre twist when Sid Hammerback discovers a startling similarity between the vic in the armor and that of a man who had been stabbed with an ice pick in the luxury suite of a downtown hotel the night before. Both bore the same set of fingerprints on their eyelids, as though the killer had gently closed the eyes of both dying victims. When they also learn that both young men were suffering from terminal illnesses, our team suddenly realizes what they might be up against – a flamboyant, Kevorkian-style murderer who is providing elaborate ‘fantasy deaths’ for those who want to go out in a manner they’ve always dreamed of, rather than waste away in a hospital bed.

Meanwhile, when the body of young man is stolen from the M.E. van while being unloaded at the back of H.Q., our CSI team must unravel the mystery surrounding the abduction as well as identify a stringy mystery trace left at the scene… a trace that proves to be silk from a ‘spider-goat.’ This hybrid trace leads our people into the shadowy world of genetic experimentation, and ultimately to a trio of brilliant Medical students who have been conducting illegal experiments in human hibernation in a secret basement lab. Thinking that one of their own (the vic) had died while experimenting on himself, the other two abducted his body before it could be examined in autopsy and threw it into the East River. To the shock of everyone, the vic that was pronounced dead on the scene washes up several hours later… brain dead, but very much alive. Mac and the team must perform a reconstruction that reveals off-the-grid experimentation in human hibernation and suspended animation in order to explain how Peyton could have declared our victim dead. When the investigation brings to light that one of the young men involved in this is the son of a powerful person in the Commissioner’s office, Mac must deal with the politics.