It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood, and people are running the usual errands that eat up the hectic minutes before work. This day couldn't be any more normal if it tried. The camera focuses on a tour bus where a woman sitting in the back is wearing a sweatshirt saying "I love Grandma," which is more or less the sartorial shorthand for "doomed" on this show. All she needs to do now is whip out pictures of the kiddies, and a hail of gunfire would immediately commence. In the next shot, a woman walks by with a child who's toting a red balloon. We're forty-five seconds into the show, and I'm groaning under the weight of all the symbolism already. The camera then lingers on three people: Photo Guy (taking pictures out on an envelope), The Man In The Ice Cream Suit (stopping to scan the headlines), and Starbucks Maiden (lots of hair, dealing with coffee in her commuter mug). They all stand still, as if transfixed by the ominous music, and then the sharp whine of a bullet starts the action rolling. The Man In The Ice Cream Suit is the first to go down, and his abrupt crumple cues the screaming and stampeding. Starbucks Maiden is next -- she makes an easy target, what with standing in the middle of an empty patch of sidewalk -- and then, as if to punish Photo Guy for thumbing through his prints while others ran around and screamed beside him, the shooter pegs him between the eyes too. There's chaos, mayhem, confusion, and then -- of course -- the red balloon drifting up toward a bright blue sky in slow motion.

In the next scene, enough time has elapsed for the crime-scene tape to go up, the goggling onlookers to gather, and the media horde to descend. A reporter is talking about how the investigation will look into a workplace dispute one of the victims was having, but her droning fades into the distance as Horatio and Calleigh arrive on the scene. Whoever's in charge of the Sergio Leone filter needs to take it down a notch; this scene is saturated with so much yellow, it's given Horatio the appearance of a suntan. And while I'm making petty aesthetic complaints, let me comment on Calleigh's outfit: she's petite, and she's curvy, so those overlarge bell-bottoms aren't doing her any favors. As her pants drag her toward the crime scene, Calleigh comments, "Can you believe it? It's national news and we don't even know what happened? Some alpaca herdsman in Peru knows more about our case than we do." Horatio commiserates, "Knows what to look for, he does." The two of them stop to survey the victims. The camera zooms in on The Man In The Ice Cream Suit and the neat hole above his eye as Horatio intones, "One over the left eye." We travel over to the Starbucks Maiden, whose wound looks like a gory bindhi, as Horatio says, "One right between the eyes," then we visit with Photo Guy, who has, according to Horatio, "One into the right eye. Boom, boom, boom -- and that's called the Kill Zone." Calleigh says matter-of-factly, "No messing around, clean and deadly." Speaking of no messing around, here's Sevilla to exposit a little on the unreliability of witnesses. Calleigh asks, "So how did three people get shot in broad daylight on a busy street, and nobody sees anything?" The entire Washington, D.C. metro area contemptuously shouts the answer while Horatio decrees, "Sniper."