“The evidence never lies. But neither do we.”
The Nate Haskell case nearly destroyed them all. The “Dick & Jane” killer toyed with Langston, and when Haskell escaped from prison and murdered Langston’s colleague, Dr. Jekyll (Haskell’s protégé), the lab was left in ruins. Langston left Vegas, broken but alive.
The lab had been rebuilt — not just the physical space, but the team. Nick was promoted to assistant director. Greg became the night shift supervisor. Sara finally accepted a teaching position at the same university where Hodges now worked.
He raised a cup of bad coffee. Greg clinked his against it. And somewhere across town, in a quiet house with a garden and a dog, Gil Grissom closed his laptop, kissed his wife goodnight, and for the first time in decades, slept without dreaming of blood.
But the lab was different now. D.B. Russell (Ted Danson) had taken over as supervisor after Catherine stepped down to spend more time with her daughter, Lindsey. Russell was a family man, a forensic botanist with a folksy demeanor and a steel trap for a mind. He brought stability — and a new team member: Julie Finlay (Elisabeth Shue), a former crime scene analyst from Seattle with a specialty in blood pattern analysis.
Sara found Hodges in a back room, duct-taped to a chair with a bomb strapped to his chest. She’d seen this before — the helplessness, the ticking clock. She didn’t freeze. She cut the red wire, then the blue. The timer stopped at 00:03.
The Las Vegas Crime Lab had changed again. Russell took a position with the FBI. Finlay retired to a small farm in Oregon. Morgan transferred to the San Diego lab to be near her mother. Even Hodges — the eternal lab rat — left to teach forensic science at UNLV.