When Joanne Crooks is assaulted without rape at home, Catherine, Grissom, Nick, Warrick and Capt. Brass assume the investigation. They find fingerprints on the windows and they learn that the criminal is escalating in his crimes. They fear that he soon will rape his victim since this was his first break in. Meanwhile, Sara learns that the paraplegic prosecutor Melissa Winters will be submitted to a surgery of high risk. Three years ago, Winters was shot on the neck in a home invasion where her husband as killed, but the murderer has not been found. Now the bullet has moved and she needs the surgery. Sara decides to reopen the cold case using the bullet withdrawn in the surgery to try to find the criminal.

CSI tries to figure out who put a severed head in the ball return during a championship bowling match, while Dr. Langston reinvestigates the case of a wife accused of shooting her husband after the wife kills herself in her prison cell.