What happens in Vegas… The season finale’s first victim was Houston Dobbs, who was shot in the head. Shoe prints led the CSIs to believe there were two men with him. The gun used was a .38 or a .357, but Riley also found the bullet for a .22 in the car’s backseat. It came from a concealed weapon belt buckle (this handy item actually has a working .22 built into the buckle) that belonged to a collector named Wiley Schindler.
Where everyone knows your name: Brass went to check out the diner where Houston occasionally worked. Everyone knew Houston, especially the owner, Barbie, and a busboy named Walter, who suggested they track down Houston’s best friend, Bruno Curtis. Curtis, however, was nowhere to be found.
Let the chips fall: Hodges found an old casino chip in the car. It was from an ‘80s casino called the Hucks’ Club, which sounded a bit like Hugh Hefner’s old Playboy clubs, only with “kittens” instead of “bunnies.” When the club went out of business, the chips should have been destroyed. The surviving chips were collector’s items worth $1,000 apiece — just the kind of thing that would interest a collector such as Wiley Schindler. Wiley admitted to buying them, but said he didn’t kill anyone.
Risk takers: The chips led Ray and Riley to the Blue Bird Button Company. The company was abandoned, but someone had obviously been living there. A man, who turned out to be Bruno, ran and hid beneath a tarp that covered a hole in the ground. Bruno had a gun but had also been shot in the leg, so despite the fact that Riley told him not to, Ray went in before Bruno put his gun down. “I didn’t stop being a doctor when I became a CSI,” Ray told her. The hole in the ground also contained a lot more Hucks’ Club chips. The Blue Bird Button Company buried them instead of destroying them.
Plan goes awry: Bruno told Ray that after he and Houston had sold Wiley some of the chips, they’d thought he had come back to steal more of them. So they took him out in their car to get their chips back. Wiley had grabbed his gun. “He shot my best friend down,” Bruno said. But Wiley’s fingerprints weren’t found on the gun, so he was released.
Not exactly worthless: A gaming commissioner stopped by to tell Ray and Catherine that because of a loophole the chips could still be cashed in, so, um, could the CSIs please go find them? Pretty please…
Barbie’s dream house? When Ray showed up at Barbie’s to look for the other chips, he found she'd been shot to death. Brass had Wiley picked up, and he admitted that he’d bought more chips from Barbie, but that she’d been alive when he left. Then Greg discovered that someone else had posted an online auction of Hucks’ chips. It was the busboy, Walter, who just happened to be married to Barbie.
Quick draw: Ray searched the house and when he got to the garage, he found a bunch of chips in the car, plus the money that Wiley had paid Barbie, and a plane ticket in Walter’s name. But when he went to open the trunk, he found Walter hiding inside. He fired at Ray, who shot back and killed him. Ray checked him for a pulse and then, realizing Walter was dead, slumped to the floor.
It’s a shame about Ray: Early in the episode Ray had received a box with an old lighter inside, a picture of him as a soldier (they must have just used a still of a teenage Fishburne from “Apocalypse Now”) and a bronze star. He’d been in Vietnam, but he didn’t look happy to see that box. It seemed as though Walter might not have been the first man that Ray had killed. And he didn’t like doing it again.
In the mentor’s footsteps: Nick only had a cameo in the finale. He was heading for an entomology seminar in Honolulu. “We need a new bug man,” he told Ray. But can Nick fill Grissom’s bug-infested shoes?