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 Sara decides to reopen the cold case using the bullet withdrawn in the surgery to try to find the criminal.

While Jim Brass is in surgery the team has two cases to tackle. The first involves a man, found decapitated on train tracks, with a 19-inch waist. Further investigation reveals that he wore a wasp corset, as was fashionable with gentlemen during the Civil War. The other crime scene is in a hotel room where a man is found in his boxers, dead, on the bed. Scattered around the room are evidence of a wild night of alcohol, drugs, and sex. Ellie, Brass's estranged daughter, comes to visit her father from LA.

A respected congressman faces trial for murder, but a suicide and confession during the trial cast new doubt on his guilt.

An unsolved case from Captain Brass's past reemerges when the mother searching for her missing family is hit by a car, but neither may be prepared for the disturbing answers that emerge in the case.