Season synopsis
Contains spoilers for this season and earlier seasons.
Catherine Willows leads a team still adjusting to Grissom’s departure, and Riley Adams’s resignation leaves her management under scrutiny. Sara Sidle returns to help fill the vacancy while Ray Langston advances in his forensic training. Their first investigation connects a young actress’s death to a murdered man whose body is stolen from the lab. Elsewhere, an officer’s shooting of a plainclothes colleague forces the investigators to distinguish racial suspicion from what the physical evidence actually establishes.
Ray follows a human-trafficking investigation through Miami and New York before returning to Las Vegas to pursue the missing young woman. Closer to home, he and Catherine begin tracking a murderer nicknamed Dr. Jekyll, whose victims bear evidence of grotesque internal surgery. The hunt grows increasingly personal, and a reporter’s death brings accusations against Ray himself. Catherine worries that his fixation on Jekyll is eclipsing his other work, even as the team continues examining the surgical clues.
The finale brings imprisoned killer Nate Haskell into headquarters to bargain over Jekyll’s identity. His clues lead the investigators to former restaurant employees and finally to Charlie DiMasa, a cook who wanted to become a doctor. Charlie has operated on his own father and shoots Nick when the CSIs arrive. Nick survives and kills him, saving Ray and Charlie’s father. The case is solved, but Haskell has prepared another attack: using a sharpened piece of his glasses, he repeatedly stabs Ray. The season leaves Ray bleeding on the floor.