After a 16 year old kid is found in a box on the beach at Coney Island, evidence leads our CSIs into the circus, where rivalries between two warring trapeze families may have led to the boy's murder. Eventually the evidence reveals the only explanation for the teen's death is suicide, and Mac and Stella learn that life truly imitates art under the big top. After a large pool of blood is discovered in a fifth floor apartment, Danny searches for the blood's owner, and finds a woman's body shoved into a trash chute in the building, but the woman isn't the tenant from the crime scene apartment.