Earlier Wednesday night I was watching "Pushing Daisies" on ABC (a wonderful program), which involved a murder victim who practiced polygamy and was eventually murdered by one of his four wives. Two hours later, I was watching "Life" as Charlie Crews and Danni Reese investigated the murder of a man with two wives.

And I thought to myself, "Insert Mitt Romney joke here."

If you thought the two gunshot victims in the freezer was bad last week, wait until you see this one. Crews and Reese are called to the scene of a possible accidental death. A man was standing at his refrigerator with the door open when the stove exploded. The refrigerator door protected him above the waist, but his legs were practically incinerated, leaving half a man, upright, and on the floor with a mildly befuddled expression on his face. Hm, where's my cell phone?

Since the victim kept his wallet in his suit jacket pocket, Crews discovers his ID. Or rather, his IDs. One driver's license identifies the man as "Edward Farthing", the other as "Joseph Gale". Both licenses have different addresses, neither of which is the murder scene. Speaking of which, it seems there's very little to the murder scene, besides the man with the missing legs and the ruined stove. A few pieces of silverware. A few shirts. A chair. He may have died in this house, but it looks barely lived in.

Crews and Reese split up and head to the addresses on the victim's two licenses. If you guessed they're about to meet the newly-widowed Mrs. Farthing and Mrs. Gale, you're right. It turns out that the widows were seemingly married to two completely different men. The Farthings were married five years and shared interests in physical, down-to-earth activites. The Gales for three, and their passions were more intellectual. Both women take the news better than one might expect, but it seems they both dreaded this day. Apparently their husband(s) was some kind of government spy whose job required long hours, longer absences, and late-night phone calls. (Men watching this - don't think most women will fall for this.)

Rather than upsetting the women further with the truth about their husband, Crews and Reese discover that while the victim, real name Rudolph Farthingale, was indeed a government employee, he actually worked for the IRS identifying tax evaders. His cubicle seems as boring and bland as his B-average grades and his empty third house. (I wish I'd known tax agents made enough money to afford three houses. I wouldn't care about ad revenues then.) The only thing exciting about him is he was a closet bigamist - and someone rigged his pilot light to kill him.

The obvious suspects are the widows, both of whom are invited to the murder scene. The women are stunned and disbelieving at first, but they quickly realize that their marriages were the same in crucial ways. Although Farthingale always told one wife that he "was looking for the person not not obeying the law", and the other that he "was not looking for the person not obeying the law". Hm, just the odd sort of discrepancy that would stick with Crews. In the short run, however, both detectives sense that the women had no idea they'd been lied to.

Noting that Farthingale lived two dissimilar lives, Crews decides to track down the similarities between the two marriages. It turns out that the victim was a very light sleeper, and tended to sit in a chair in his living room, staring. Crews finds himself looking at five bottles of wine, Reese at five baseball caps. Five, five. They bring the wine and the hats back to the station, where Lt. Davis joins them. Eventually Lt. Davis cracks the mystery when she realizes that the teams on the caps and the years on the wine bottles correspond to five targets struck by the "Free State Bomber" and the years in which they happened. Crews couldn't know this, as he was in prison in the years the bombings occured in.

This dovetails with Crews' theory that Farthingale - who perhaps lived a double life because he wanted to be a spy, a man of mystery - may have uncovered someone's dirty deeds, and that someone had Farthingale murdered. Remembering the widows' remarks about this mysterious person "not not obeying the law", Crews goes back to the IRS with Reese. "Not not obeying" is the same as obeying, so they're not looking for a tax evader, but a taxpayer. It turns out that Farthingale was investigating one Leonard Slatz, who only filed tax returns in certain years. Guess which ones. (Well, actually, no, not those years, the years BEFORE those years - it made sense in the episode.)

Slatz, unfortunately, just has a post office box for an address, and he cleaned it out two days before the detectives arrived, fleeing in an RV. Crews eventually retreats to the house where the murder took place. Going through Farthingale's receipts, he sets up yet another "mystery wall", discovering multiple receipts from a fast-food joint which were paid with credit cards belonging to "Farthing" and "Gale". Since neither of his marriages were big on fast food, Crews and Reese conclude Farthingale went there because he was following Slatz. And wouldn't you know, the restaurant is directly across from an RV park.

At first, the park leads to another dead end. The clerk claims that Slatz took off without paying his bill, leaving a few things behind. They follow him into a back room, where the detectives very, VERY narrowly avoid a different kind of "dead end". The clerk flees, exposing himself as the real Leonard Slatz, and Reese pursues him, only to be stopped in the bare nick of time by Crews. Crews has discovered that Slatz rigged explosives in the building to a tripwire which Reese almost tripped. They avoid the trap and pull Slatz from his RV when police cars block his escape.

A very tricky mystery. Good thing Crews didn't have anything else on his mind, huh?

Well . . .

Crews' investigation into the Seybolt homicides takes a drastic left turn when Detective Ames, the lead detective on the original case, is found in his car with a bullet in his chest and another in his head. While Crews was with Davis and Reese when the shooting happened, Davis doesn't put it past him to have a conspirator.

Yes, that's right, Crews quickly becomes the department's prime suspect. Besides the obvious (Ames took twelve years of his life, and his marriage), witnesses saw the "argument" Crews and Ames had in a previous episode. (It wasn't that much of an argument.) While Davis doesn't take Crews' badge and gun, and in fact keeps him on the Farthingale case, she does tell him that Internal Affairs will be investigating, and that Davis will take a personal interest in the case.

Naturally Crews calls Constance Griffiths in NYC, but in the meantime he meets his union representative, John Garrity. ("NYPD Blue" fans will recognize Garrity, who played the ill-fated Detective Roberts in several episodes before he was thrown out a window.) Garrity sits with him while an Internal Affairs agent asks him some questions. Crews responds with intentionally vague Zen sayings.

It might have helped if Crews had Constance with him, but there's a story behind that. Constance shows up at his home (with a new haircut), informing him that she's back from New York permanently. Apparently the District Attorney's Office has been after her for some time, and she finally accepted their job offer in the wake of the Cudahy incident. Seems she's tired of clients who are nothing like Crews. So next time they see each other, it'll be "official business".

Yeah, that's why her husband is staying in New York.

Crews sighs that they "took my lawyer from me", but Constance still takes his side the following day, when she calls to tell him to go home. Crews returns home to find Internal Affairs searching his house. Crews anxiously expects them to find his mystery room, but inside the room they find only blank walls and empty shelves. It seems Constance also called Ted to tell him to remove anything from the house that Crews wouldn't want found. (Ted knew about the room because he'd been "looking for porn". Have you seen the girls Crews brings home, Ted? He doesn't need porn.) Apparently Ted learned a few things in prison, like picking locks. I thought prisons were supposed to rehabilitate people.

Still, it's no fun to be investigated by the "Rat Squad", and something finally goes right for Crews. On the day of Ames' funeral, an older policeman with a mustache comes into the station. Crews (and the audience) instantly recognize the man in a photo with Ames which we saw on Crews' wall earlier in the episode. Hey, we've been wondering who that guy was, and he's coming right over to Crews' desk.

Why, you ask? Because he's Jack Reese, Danni's father, of course. (You can feel the plot thicken.)

What does all this signify? See below. (Since apparently tonight's answer to "So, What's Up With Ted Earley"" is "Nothing". Other than saving Crews' mystery wall, Ted is practically nonexistent in this episode.)

- In terms of The Big Mystery, this episode was a bit of a bonanza. Besides giving Jack Reese a face and tying him more closely to Ames, we're left to ponder something very interesting. Constance informed Crews that she accepted the job offer from the D.A.'s Office a week before Ames was killed. Crews' lament that they "took his lawyer" from him instantly makes me suspicious. It's safe to say that the people responsible for framing Crews for the Seybolt homicides would love to see him back behind bars. So if Crews is accused of murdering Ames, then it would make sense to deprive him of the legal mind that got him out of prison in the first place. It's entirely possible that one of the conspirators is either a district attorney, or pulls strings within that office.

- Constance claimed that she took the job because she was tired of defending the scum of the earth. Considering she left her husband back in NYC, it's quite possible that she just wants to be near Crews. And if she's a D.A., then she can't be his lawyer, and if she can't be his lawyer, then there's no ethical reasons for not dating him. And considering she helped Crews out not once, but twice in this episode, it's quite possible that she wants to be his ally inside the judicial system. (Her new hairstyle, by the way, makes her look like she just got out of the shower.)

- Once again, we have no idea why Lt. Davis is on his mystery wall, but her automatic assumption in this episode that Crews is guilty of murdering Ames has us wondering - what's the real deal with Davis? At this point she's willing to concede at least that he's done some good detective work so far, but why doesn't she trust him? Or accept that Reese trusts him? It makes her look suspicious, when we don't even know why we should suspect her in the first place.

- The storyline with Farthingale's two lives was done well, but it really tested my willing suspension of disbelief. Even with his wives working, how could Farthingale pay for three houses on his government salary" Did he have a family, and if so, how did he explain not introducing them to his wives? Could two modern women REALLY be that gullible and never suspect that he was simply having an affair? Why did this man lie to his wife and marry another? There was definitely a credibility issue here.

- For now, the MasterCard "Uncovering" commercials have stopped. No word on whether they will return in the future.

- As soon as Ames turned up dead, we were treated to more documentary footage of him being interviewed. The caption below his face now lists him as "deceased". If this is a real documentary being made, why would the filmmaker change the captions in midpicture? It's because the TV writers didn't want to reveal Ames was going to die in a later episode, I realize that, but it reminds us we're watching a TV show and not real life.

"Life" returns in two weeks, after a special two-hour "Deal or No Deal" next week. Previews reveal a girl found dead with a guitar in her hands, and a tense meeting between Crews and Jack Reese. Showdown.