CSI:New York

Season 4 - Episode 8 - Buzzkill

Written by Jill Abbinanti
Directed by Jeffery Hunt
Guest Stars: A.J Buckley as "Adam Ross" and Robert Joy as "Dr. Sid Hammerback"

A young model, Jenna Donovan, frolics inside a giant martini glass atop a living billboard. Suddenly, sparks start flying and people scramble to get off of the billboard. When the chaos dies down, Jenna is found dead, electrified in her martini glass. However, her cause of death is not electrification, but pulmonary edema. The CSIs start trying to discover how she could have died. Stella talks to Lia Ramsey and Damien Barnes, the ad executives that created the billboard, who tell her that no one was up there that shouldn’t have been and that no threats had been made.

Meanwhile, Danny begins investigating a robbery that resulted in the death of a man and the potentially fatal wounding of a woman named Brandi Parsons. Brandi was shot in the head, and the man was killed during a robbery of a restaurant that only accepts cash. Brandi’s boyfriend, Paul Larkin, accompanies her and Danny to the hospital in the ambulance. The male victim had torn off his assailant’s mask. From DNA left on the mask, the CSIs are able to tell that Brandi had recently had sex with the shooter and he must have attacked her because she would have been able to identify him.

Later, Mac finds out that the doctor working on Brandi is receiving threatening calls and text messages from his brother’s phone. His brother was kidnapped and the kidnappers want him to let Brandi die. Dr. Hawkes is later able to identify a substance found on the shooter’s mask as a bat bone, which is only sold at one store. The CSIs find that Paul Larkin works there, only his name is Paul Campbell. From this they realize that he isn’t Brandi’s boyfriend and that he was in on the robbery. They go to his apartment and find he and his accomplice gone, but evidence that they had shipped the stolen money. The CSIs are able to track the address that it was shipped to, apprehending Paul and his accomplice and saving the doctor’s brother.

Sid discovers that some of the burns on Jenna were chemical and probably caused by marine diatoms, which can only survive in salt water. This leads Stella and Lindsay to search the water in the giant martini glass. In doing so, they find the beach ball that Jenna had played with, a small cut in it and Irukanji jellyfish – microscopic, but deadly – inside. They also find evidence that both a male and female had blown up the ball, which leads them back to Lia and Damien. Lia eventually confesses that she had put the jellyfish in the ball in an attempt to try to kill Damien who had stolen credit for her work.