CSI: Miami - The DeLuca Motel

“The Deluca Motel” was the start of the Eric Delko/Alexander Sharova story arc. Delko is at the episode title motel, a downsized locale where the beds are as Frank calls it “sludge sponges”, the sheets and coverings, the walls and tables, the seats and accommodations are available mostly to the wayward folks either down on their luck or criminals in hiding. Delko tells a curious Horatio—after a gunshot goes off (one of three) hitting a practically naked man (in just boxers), left dead in a pool, bleeding out—he feels eyes are watching him, as if he’s being followed. Ryan finds a piece of paper that leads Horatio to a Little Havana bar where an Enrico (Jordi Vilasuso), tending the bar, has connections for those willing to pay his price. This develops a plot involving Eric’s real father, a dangerous Russian, Sharova, who owned a factory in Cuba where his mom met him. A birth certificate from Cuba reveals that Eric wasn’t born in the US, and that his father was indeed Sharova…this will come into play later when Eric could be deported with his badge and police officer status removed. Worse than that, Eric might be marked for death, as bullet fragments found in his room where his arm was grazed determine that a different gun was fired at him than was responsible for the death of the victim found in the pool (determined to be unrelated to Eric, a hazing frat wannabe hit by an accidental bullet not meant for him, with his “pledge marshal” leaving him at the pool out of fear he’d be held as suspect). This one has some twists that are quite extraordinary. Like a shady couple (Nemec and Aycox) with “lost money” they hid in a vent and a spat the results in a gun going off (ditching the gun by throwing it over the hotel into the alley, Nemec doesn’t realize it goes off again, hitting a barrel of gas that leaves behind a puddle a three-wheeled hybrid motorcycle/ATV drives through conveniently), a pregnant dazed young woman (Maloney) whose husband had a heart attack near an ice cooler (she leaves him in her hotel room’s bathtub, covered in ice, that Calleigh discovers when moving through a ventilation shaft following scuff marks where the money was moved!), drug money that could exchange hands in quite a series of developments, a hitwoman (Alamudden) who takes out Enrico with the gun she found in the alley at the Motel DeLuca (Nemec’s gun he tossed!) in the hopes of throwing the scent away from her (tire marks of her ride give her away, though, as Boa Vista and Horatio uncannily trace them back to her hybrid motorcycle/ATV), and Eric perhaps not a citizen of the US (and Sharova supposedly gunning for him) opens the door to a lot of trouble. Eric’s team wants to rally around him but he has to come clean regarding his difficult situation, which Horatio is sure will get even more troublesome as the first hit went awry. Calleigh seeing that the pregnant Maloney gets the money her dead husband had notified the police about is certainly an unexpected development (Maloney just seems aloof and emotionally distanced; not sure it was the performance or a characterization, but her response to a husband’s death and wanting to keep collecting his disability pay through fraud certainly don’t paint her strongly at the beginning). CSI: Vegas always loved telling stories at sketchy hotels, so this was a fun episode to me where Miami starts there, where a number of peculiar characters and stories alternate, surrounding a location where Eric just happened to be as all hell broke loose. The hazing victim who gets killed accidentally is a crazy detour case that essentially starts off as the lead case until it is revealed that Eric’s own story arc is actually not related to it…and while Horatio alternates back and forth between the two cases, he stays busy and gets to the bottom of both as his team assists. 4/5