Anyway, the two men wander up the driveway and Ecklie asks for a rundown; Brass explains, "Wife comes home from canasta, finds him dead in the driveway. Calls 911, no signs of forced entry. The alarm was off, nothing seems to be missing, welcome to the party." Apparently, the hostess has forgotten her company manners: Catherine sees the guys show up and blusters, "What's going on? This is my scene!" Ecklie explains that the high-profile case woke up the supervisors, so "All hands on deck, Cath. Grissom's lead on this. He's the senior supervisor." Catherine smarts, "If it's all hands on deck, what are you doing behind the tape?" Ecklie tells her, "You know if I cross the tape, my name goes on the crime scene log that gets subpoenaed by the defense, and I have to testify. Juries find me reptilian and repellent. Something about an evil cackle and a deplorable tendency to twirl my moustache as I swirl my big black cape? So in the interest of keeping the conviction rate high, the DA's asked me to step off." Or something like that. Catherine smarts off by asking when the last time Ecklie testified was. Warrick looks up from the stairs he's working and bellows, "About the same time you worked a scene instead of peeing all over it to mark your territory, boss." Oh, he does not. He just works. Ecklie points out that his job is no longer to process crime scenes, but to herd all the little left-brained whiz kids who do. He points out, "I run interference for you guys, starting with the press." Thus primed for dealing with the public, Ecklie proceeds to throw meat to the hordes of reporters.

Catherine has to settles for rolling her eyes and looking irate. Gil says mildly, "It's nothing personal, Catherine. Cases like this rain down hard. You need all the help you can get." Catherine snaps, "I need help, not supervision." Oh, so the seniority and chain-of-command thing only works when you want it to, huh? Gil just assumes a martyred look, then heads toward the man who's made a career of long-suffering looks. He asks Warrick to give him the skinny on the fat man who fell. Warrick tells him, "Initial observations when we got to the scene: obvious impact on the face. Severe facial contusions -- broken nose, cracked teeth. No shoe prints. No tracks from the cast-off. No sign of a weapon."

That would be because they're standing on the weapon. Bruce took a face-first header into the stairs -- something we see in a special effect that was evidently laid off from Disney's Haunted Mansion. I can see why.