Sara is back at the lab with her broken arm (fractured in two places). Everyone is staring at her. That’s so rude! She has to go see Eckley. Meanwhile, Gil isn’t returning Eckley’s calls. Eckley says this is as difficult for him as it is for her. I doubt it, Eckles.

Eckley: You and Grissom were in violation of lab policy. Sara: Are. Are in violation of lab policy.

With no intention of stopping. She says they started dating two years ago.

Meanwhile, out in the desert, a head wearing a football helmet has been kicked around by semis and finally comes to rest. Gil, Nick, and some black detective are investigating. Wait. Is that black guy supposed to be Warrick? Did they think we wouldn’t notice? “Ah, we’ll just throw in a random black guy and pretend it’s Gary Dourdan. No one will catch that.” Hahaha, y’all know I’m funny. Nick says that football has gotten a lot rougher since he played.

Gil takes off to follow the blood. Nick asks Greg if he knew about Grissom and Sara. Greg says, “Yeah,” in a very “well duh!” tone. Nick is a little dumbfounded.

Grissom finds the body that goes with the helmet. It’s also missing a hand and a football uniform. They find the hand twenty yards away two hours later. The MEs finally pry the head out of the helmet. He looks like a girl, but alas, he just has girl hair. He also has black powder in his hair and all over his clothes. Sounds to me like he was shot out of a cannon. Watch me be right. You can marvel later. For now, keep reading.

Non-fake Warrick is apparently divorced now. I’m sure Katharine is happy about that.

Hugh HeffnerSome old playboy who has playmateskitties lined up outside has been killed while dining. Brass shows everyone that the reason no one saw him murdered is that he was participating in the latest CSI show fad: dining in the dark. He pulls down the barriers and brings the room into complete darkness, then walks out of the room. Kat & Warrick are like, “Did he just leave?” The young ME (David) is like, “I have a body ovuh he-yah.” SarahK is like, “So… you always have your flashlights with you — daytime, nighttime, light switches, no light switches — but you suddenly don’t have flashlights? Did the flashlight monkey steal them all?”

Now we have a short little clip where we have to watch women having erotic sex with foodeating food in sensual fashion. There’s a sexy woman voice-over here, telling us all about how awesome food is. And the science of the tongue, brain, and endorphins. I’m so bored. Hey, it’s Alana from 4400! She’s the chef, and she saw nothing. She was in the kitchen, where she doesn’t even get to pee. Good to know that she’s not peeing in the kitchen.

The kitties tell their story. One has blood on her sweater, because she was holding on to him when she found he was dead. They thought he had a heart attack or just fell asleep like he did at the end of every meal.

Vincent (dead football boy) has a brother who was the one to take care of him. He used to play football.

Someone had mil-grade night vision goggles in the room! They track the goggles to one of the diners, that guy from Scrubs who wrote Cheers. I suspect him, because I’ve seen him before! He had the goggles to watch his wife, because she always wanted to dine in the dark with another couple. He discovered she was making out at the table with the man from the other couple while his wife ate strawberries. People are sick. His wife is unhappy with the spying. The whore wife is so righteously indignant.

The murder weapon at the dark restaurant is possibly a skewer.

The black powder in the hair was tire rubber. Turns out that it is go-kart tire rubber. So maybe I was wrong about the cannon. But don’t count out my theory yet.

At the go-kart place, the counter girl is chewing a massive wad of gum. She’s my suspect. The guy he beat in all his races is named Hot Rod, and he decides to run from Nick and Greg. Betcha he’s gonna say, “I was running because I have outstanding tickets on my record. But I didn’t kill anyone!” and they’ll say, “Ok, ok, then you’re not guilty.” At Hot Rod’s truck, they find a belt with lots of blood on its uniquely-shaped buckle. I wonder if the unique shape will be important!

So at the restaurant, all the waiters are blind. I suspect one of them, particularly the one that Brass interviews later.

There’s a table of men who act like twelve-year-old boys, and one of them got up during dinner to grope one of the kittehs. Also, a man proposed to his girlfriend in the dark, and then she gave him some under-the-table goodness (it’s dark, no one can see, after all) and bumped her head. There’s also a guy who really has to pee so so bad and has had to do so six or more times this evening. The twelve-year olds are hysterically laughing about it.

In the go-kart case, Hot Rod says that he and Vincent just raced, after dark, on the street where it would really count, because Hot Rod needed to feel better about himself. After Hot Rod won the race, he looked back, and Vincent had lost his head. So he dumped the body on the side of the road and towed the go-kart with his own using Vinny’s belt. Fake Warrick says, “So why you didn’t just ditch the karts?” That’s how we know for sure that he isn’t Warrick. Warrick is much more articulate than that — he would never use such poor sentence structure. You can’t fool us, CSI peeps!

Anyway, Hot Rod didn’t want to get the girl at the track in trouble for letting the two of them take the karts out, so he took the kart back to the track. I don’t believe him.

Eckley finally tracks Grissom down in his office and is hostile. Grissom tells Eckley that they… you know… became involved nine years ago.

Nick and Greg go back to the go-karts. The kart was moving when Vinny lost his head, they think.

At the lab, the MEs determine Hux was stabbed in the temple with a pen. The pen was ditched in the bag of one of the kitties, who has the logic all figured out and tells Brass to check out the chef. BTW, Hux really does look and sound a lot like Heff. Oh, and I think it’s incredibly tacky when crime dramas kill people who are so obviously supposed to be other real people. Not that celebrities are real people, but it’s still tacky. Oh, and if they do a story where a blogger who married another blogger after they met through their blogs is murdered, I’ll expect an apology or a big fat check.

The chef, it turns out, was a kitty years ago. She tells Brass that the reason she has the restaurant is because of her dead, blind boyfriend. And murder is bad for business. I still suspect one of the blind waiters.

Hux had honey in his hairpiece, a substance found at the scene.

The blind waiter I’d suspected used to be the sous chef when Alana was a chef and writing her book. He wasn’t always blind, lost his sight a few years ago. Anyway, the blind, dead boyfriend? Not dead. It’s this waiter, and he’s the reason she’s a famous author and chef. She hired him as a waiter after he lost his sight. He was insulted. He wanted a piece of the action, she fired him, and he murdered Hux to be bad for business. Did I say to suspect a blind waiter? Ah well, one out of two.

They run an experiment on Bustera ballistics-gel dummy and determine that he was decapitated by a blown out tire from one of the semis. Didn’t we see this one on Mythbusters? Except I think they did a car with a full windshield and busted the myth, but I could be wrong.

Sara and Grissom talk about when they got involved. Grissom thought they *did* get involved nine years ago, when he first met her at a conference. Sara says she’s moving to swing shift so there’s no supervisor issue and so she can have more daylight. They go watch the go-karts together and Gil gives one a spin. I hope he’s not decapitated! Sara watches Gil, smiling.