Another day breaks, and Horatio and Delko are busy checking out the SUV. Delko notes that the fuel line survived the car's wild ride remarkably intact. Horatio, on the other hand, finds a cork with no glass attached to it, and a shard of glass in the back of the vehicle. Delko advances the theory that someone uncorked the cognac bottle, poured the liquid all over the doped-up woman, then set fire to her; the resultant blaze melted the bottle. Horatio rejects that theory: "See the char in the burn indicator. Look at this. It means that the origin of the fire was in the back seat and it traveled to the front seat. It also means that the fire was hot enough to melt the glass before the fire department got there." As Horatio's talking, we watch a time-lapse scene in which the fire does sweep forward and reduce the unconscious woman to an extra from the finale of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Delko's still a big fan of the she-was-covered-in-cognac theory. I know the alcohol would have burned off, but surely there's a chemical compound unique to cognac that would have been present, and thus detected already? Anyway, Horatio's more interested in what started the fire. Delko's all, "Maybe a spark on impact?" Horatio points out that nobody goes to all the trouble of stealing a car, removing someone's ID, doping up a person, and rolling a vehicle over a ravine to leave the fire to a chance spark. Horatio says, "I think that whoever did this wanted to make sure that this mother and child were never identified again." And I think that whoever wrote this episode is asking the audience to make a few huge freakin' leaps in logic, namely that the pregnancy was a motive for murder, and that a seven-week-old fetus somehow qualifies as a "child," as opposed to a developing embryo completely dependent on its host for survival.













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