Paint it Black

Prominent art student Monica Dow is relaxing at the University spa with roommate Corinne Palmer when she starts to feel someone is watching her. She goes for her phone to call security but returns to find Corinne has been stabbed to death. Horatio’s team is called in but when he questions Monica he realises she seems rather forgetful.

Corinne is found to have scaling on her hands and the team soon discover that her computer keyboard was coated with thallium… someone was trying to poison her. Monica agrees to take a polygraph test but the results show signs of deception. She’s clearly suffering memory loss, so she could have witnessed the murder and not remembered.

Later, Horatio gets a call from Monica. She feels someone is watching her and needs his help. He arrives at her rooms to find she’s been attacked and has suffered knife wounds to her arms. The team process her but Tom believes the wounds to be self-inflicted. Horatio is suspicious and runs a check on her but finds she has no social security number – Monica doesn’t exist!

Horatio starts to believe she has dissociative identity disorder and soon discovers her real name is Alexis Taymor. Monica is her alter ego! With the help of a psychologist, the CSIs force Alexis’ personality to appear and she explains she’d been on drugs to control her problem but they’d stopped working. Analysis of the medication shows it’s been tampered with and only contains sugar.

It turns out Corinne’s boyfriend, Jared, had been paid $500 a month to sabotage the meds by the university’s artist in residence, William Oslo. Oslo confesses that only Monica produced her amazing art but Corinne was helping Alexis gain control. He’d tried to get rid of Corinne with thallium but it was too slow, so he’d resorted to a quicker method…