"Sorry I'm late, guys," Warrick said as he entered the crime scene and pulled on a pair of gloves, "Traffic's been insane all week. Some big store opening on the Strip, I don't know. What do we got?"

"John Doe, probably a dump job," Nick summarized, "He had a messed-up passport, a couple sets of keys, one of them with a car alarm remote on it, and a hotel keycard on him, too."

"Not a local, then. Maybe he's here for the same reason as everyone else and their cat is here."

"Probably." Nick shone his flashlight across the scrubby grass. "Got a footprint." He photographed it, the crouched down for a better look.

"This place is a haven for nature hikes. I bet there's footprints everywhere."

Nick grinned. "Not one with a date on it, I bet."

"Okay, I'll bite." Warrick went over to where Nick was hunkered and saw—

A discarded newspaper page, on which someone had stepped, leaving a decent impression of their shoe – what looked to be a running shoe, small enough to be a woman's – in the rumpled paper. The page was dominated by a full-color ad that fairly screamed to the reader that "WILLY WONKA'S WONDERFUL WORLD IS COMING TO LAS VEGAS THIS WEEKEND! For the first time in thirty years, WILLY WONKA will be opening a specialty store, right in the heart of the Las Vegas Strip! Come SEE the MARVELOUS confections and sweets of such ASTRONOMICAL CALIBRE that they could only come from… WILLY WONKA!" The last WILLY WONKA was in curled script three inches high, and below it was a colorful drawing of a laughing man dressed in a purple suit of a cut that had gone out of style nearly a hundred years ago, complete with a bold top hat. The cartoon man was spreading his arms like an old-time ringmaster, as though basking in his own aura of greatness.

The footprint had landed squarely on the purple ringmaster.

"I guess somebody doesn't like candy," Warrick suggested.

Nick traced the W in the last WONKA with a gloved finger. "Now that's interesting," he remarked.

"You sound like Grissom. What's interesting?"

"There was a W just like this one on one of the keyring fobs we got off our vic."

"Maybe he's involved with this opening."

"Maybe. Hopefully we'll be able to find some locks to go with those keys. In the meantime, we know for a fact that this print was made sometime in the last two days." He tapped the date on the newspaper: July 4, 2005, with the perfect ad to go along with the Independence Day festivities.

Warrick checked the date on his watch. It was July the seventh, Thursday – or would be for another fifteen minutes. The emporium, then, was scheduled to open tomorrow or the day after, but probably not if they had just found the owner...

"Charles M. Bucket, according to his cleaned-up passport," Dr. Robbins pronounced over the supine corpse in the morgue. "Country of origin, England. Age 22, good health – aside from being dead – and quite possibly the healthiest set of teeth I've ever seen. Not a single cavity, let alone any other sort of dental work. Not even caps." He pushed back Bucket's upper lip to show Grissom. Indeed, they were perfectly shaped and pearly white, the sort of teeth that toothpaste companies would kill to have smiling on one of their ads.

"What about the substance covering him when we found him?" Grissom asked.

"Here's where it started to get a bit strange," Robbins replied, "Sugar, cocoa, milk, all slightly turned. Rancid chocolate."

"Chocolate?" Grissom's brow furrowed.

Robbins nodded. "And I found more of it in his throat and lungs. Which makes the C.O.D…"

"Death by chocolate." Grissom arched an eyebrow at this.

"I'm putting out down as asphyxiation due to drowning, but yes. This man drowned – or was drowned – in liquefied chocolate. If I wanted to I could have my very own model of the upper respiratory system rendered in chocolate, though I doubt anyone would want to eat it. I sent a sample of it to Greg along with Mr. Bucket's clothes; maybe he can tell us the manufacturer, but don't hold your breath."

"I'd say a factory of some sort would have enough liquid chocolate to drown him in. A vat, maybe?"

"Probably. There aren't many chocolate factories in Las Vegas, though."

"Well, that should make this fairly easy, then."

"I found two more things that might interest you." He turned Charlie's head to the left, revealing a nearly hemispherical dent on the side of his head, a few inches back from the hairline. "He was hit fairly hard with something – judging from the size and shape of the wound I'd say maybe a billiard ball or something similar. Help me turn him." The two of them turned the corpse onto its side. "See, there's a matching wound at the base of his skull. I found a few chips of something red in the wounds, probably paint or similar from the weapon." Grissom could easily imagine an unknown attacker coming up behind the unfortunate Mr. Bucket, wielding a pool ball as an impromptu weapon – but…

"Chocolate and billards?" Grissom asked, furrowing his brow.

"So much for making this fairly easy. Sorry."

"Quite the opposite, actually. I've found that the more complicated the case is, the simpler the solution ultimately is."

"If you say so. We also found a couple of blond hairs and a few more of the white animal hairs on Mr. Bucket's clothes, preserved in the chocolate. Maybe the person who belongs to them can shed a little light on his demise. Nick's taking a look at them now."

"Good. If you find anything more, let me know."

Robbins nodded, and Grissom left the morgue.

Greg Sanders' eyes were positively dancing when Grissom entered the lab.

"I take it by your starry-eyed expression that we dohave a manufacturer for our chocolate sample?" Grissom asked.

"You take it correctly," Greg said, practically bursting with excitement, "See, chocolate contains basically the same ingredients, but each quality chocolatier has its own unique formula, its own way of mixing the ingredients, and so forth. And I can tell you right away that that sample was not your average cheapo Easter Bunny chocolate." With a quick shove of his sneakers, he launched himself in his swivel chair on a flat trajectory towards a desk drawer, from which he withdrew a large chocolate bar in a brilliant red wrapper proclaiming that it was a "Wonka Caramelicious Fudgytastic Bar". "It was Wonka chocolate." At Grissom's blank look, he added, "And I see that for once you have no clue what I'm talking about."

"I'm not much of a chocolate eater."

"Color me surprised." Greg rolled his eyes.

"Okay. Is this significant?" Grissom asked.

Greg raised his eyebrows in utter disbelief. "Only if you consider the finest chocolate in modern society significant. And this isn't just my opinion – after all, three billion chocolate-lovers worldwide can't all be wrong. Willy Wonka is a candy genius… maybe he's a few degrees off-plumb, if the stories are true, but he's an absolute genius nonetheless."

"What do you mean, 'off-plumb'?"

"You know, a little kookoo for Cocoa Puffs." Greg traced a circle around his ear to illustrate. "He's lived in his factory for maybe the last thirty years, pretty much alone, just making candy. It wasn't until ten years ago that he finally took on an assistant or something. That was insane. He had this contest, and the winner got to be his assistant in the factory. Some kid named Charlie, I think it was."

Grissom's attention had been flagging, but at the name he snapped back to attention. "Charlie?"

"Yeah. Charlie—"

"Bucket?"

Greg gave Grissom a long look. "I thought you didn't know anything about this."

"I do know that we have a young man in the morgue by the name of Charles Bucket," Grissom said gravely.

Greg was struck speechless at the news. He glanced at his chocolate bar, and then tucked it reverently away in the drawer.

"Now," Grissom continued, "I need you to find out how many factories in Las Vegas manufacture Wonka chocolate—"

"I can tell you that right away," Greg interrupted, still sounding a bit shaken, "There's only the one factory in the whole world, in England. It makes all the Wonka candy sold worldwide, not just the chocolate. Man, this sucks."

"Well, the fact that there is only one Wonka chocolate factory in the world actually simplifies things – since Mr Bucket was drowned in Wonka Chocolate, then our crime scene must be that factory."

"I was fourteen when the Golden Ticket Giveaway was held. Out of all the billions of Wonka bars sold worldwide, FIVE of them would have a Golden Ticket tucked in the wrapper. Every kid wanted to be one of those lucky five who got a free guided tour of the factory. Me included. And out of those five, only one kid would get the big prize. Charlie may well have been the luckiest kid on the planet. If what you're saying is true, then there's only one person who might have killed him – and I refuse to believe that Willy Wonka could have possibly killed his own apprentice."

"I can only follow the evidence, Greg, "Grissom replied mildly, with a hint of apology in his voice, "I can't help where it leads."

He patted Greg on the shoulder, then left. Greg looked morosely at the chocolate-stained suit laid out on the examination table.