Party Down - Recap

A fight breaks out between two taxi drivers involved in a minor crash.
A girl calls 911 as the fight rages on. A semi bears down as the bigger
guy is punching out the smaller one. He has the presence of mind to roll
them both out of it's path. It runs through gates and a detour and into
the waters of the Hudson River. We discover the semi housed a party, as
kids start swimming to the surface in their party clothes. Not all were
lucky enough to escape. Jo, Mac and Don watch as the truck is opened. A
third body is discovered inside.

Don fills Mac in on the concept of 'truck parties'. It's the latest
craze in after-hours entertainment. In old-style rave fashion, the news
of the party is spread through social networking, by invitation only. Jo
points out that the trucks are supposed to remain stationary. The taxi
drivers fighting in the street didn't get a good look at the truck
driver's face. There are divers in the water looking for more bodies,
and the survivors are being transported to the precinct for further
questioning. Don's guess is that the driver saw the water coming and
jumped before contact.

Sheldon and Lindsay go to work on the truck. She tells Jo that it would
appear the driver is the one who padlocked the truck, since the key was
in the driver's side glove box. They weren't taking any chances on the
partiers escaping, either. They spot-welded the safety hatch shut.
Whoever did this knew people would suffer, and just didn't care. For a
variety of reasons, the hatch didn't hold or it would have been a mass
murder.

Sheldon tells them that the truck was rented using an alias, and paid
for in cash. Nobody even picked it up. The company dropped it off where
specified, and was scheduled to pick it up the next morning. He
hot-wired the truck so he wouldn't be seen when he picked up the keys.

As the survivors are questioned, it becomes apparent that nobody ever
saw or knew who the driver was. A man named Chris used a chair to open
the escape hatch. He saved most of their lives. Not all of them.

Cameron Marshall, age 27, drowned. Brett Hollister, age 25, took a blow
to the throat during the accident. He stopped breathing before the truck
sank. Victim #3 was so drunk that she exacerbated the hypothermia.
Victoria Enzo of Queens. Sheldon seems to recognize the name. Mac fills
Jo in. She's the daughter of Carmen Enzo, the head of Local #225
Sanitation Workers Union. Some work he did last year betrayed a boatload
of union workers. This accident could have been retribution.

Enzo arrives to speak with Mac. Do they have any idea who did this to
his girl? Not yet. He reminisces her playing dress-up when she was
little. She wore a bride dress her mom made her, and his job was to walk
her down the make-believe aisle. Mac says he's sorry for Carmen's loss,
but Carmen retorts that he has no use for Mac's sympathy. Mac tells him
he can know that every effort is being made to bring his daughter's
killer to justice. He reacts in anger, and gets up to leave. Mac informs
him that due to his business activities, they believe this accident was
a direct attack on Enzo's daughter. Her murder may have been a warning.
Therefore, Enzo and his remaining family may still be in danger. Enzo
tells Mac that his wife and children are supposed to be off-limits. Mac
tells him that not everybody cares about the rules. He also tells Carmen
he'll need the names of his most vocal opponents, both personal and
professional. He says it's a long list. Mac tells him to take a seat and
start writing.

Don calls him out for a word. There's someone he's got to meet. It's a
blond woman named Jessica, telling them that Vicky Enzo wasn't supposed
to be at that party. She was there in Jessica's place. It's her fault.
It should have been Jessica. She got the invitation in the mail a couple
of nights ago, said she would be a VIP. She was stuck late at work, so
she thought since she couldn't enjoy it, Vicky might as well.

They show the invite around, but nobody else got one like it. Two of
Jo's interviews, Chris Boyle and Abigail West, said they did get actual
invitations as opposed to Tweets or texts. Don says to add Neal Cooper
to that list. That makes four VIPs. The killer used those invitations to
make sure his targets would be in attendance. Each of the VIPs will be
questioned by one member of CSI. They each know something important, but
they just don't know it.

Danny shows pictures of the other three to Jessica. She says they all
look familiar, but that's because she's a bartender. She sees hundreds
of faces a day. Chris picks out Abigail's picture, he remembers her from
the party. Abigail says she can't remember, and Neal doesn't do much
better. Abigail is a housewife from Jersey, this was her first night out
in a very long time. Neal had been getting prank calls for months, some
guy telling him to watch his back. When Don asks Chris about prank
calls, he says yeah. He'd forgotten about them, but they were no big
deal. Just some guy, laughing.

Abigail says somebody had been going through her garbage, tipping it
over. Every day for a week. Her husband tied down the covers, and it was
still happening. They finally started keeping the garbage in the garage.
But this was years ago! Was somebody watching her, this whole time?
Danny tells the investigators that Jessica's car was broken into seven
times over a six-month period. Bottom line is that all four of them
suffered some form of aggravated harassment over a similar time period.
Until they can dig deeper, the only confirmed link between them is the
invitation.

Adam goes to work on the invitation. The paper is vellum. Very
expensive, no fingerprints. The ink is Japanese, and also ridiculously
expensive. But there was blood mixed in it. Human blood. It was mixed in
the ink before it was dried. He thinks it's from whoever created the
invitation.

Akiko Haruka is working at creating body art on a group of models when
Don and Jo arrive to ask her some questions. Jo asks her about the
invitation, and Akiko says she makes art, not stationary. Jo tells her
they matched the DNA in the ink to a Wanda Coe, aka Akiko. She puts her
blood in her ink, it's an authenticity marking. Some guy paid her $5k
apiece for four invitations, cash in advance. He probably gave her an
alias. She said he barely made eye contact, so she couldn't describe him
much. Dark hair, light skin, a bit of a stutter. Jo asks her to draw
him, so she does.

Neal sees the picture. Some guy was watching him one night when he came
out of a movie and stopped to grab a bite to eat. He fine-tunes the
picture Wanda drew. When Jessica goes past the room Neal is in, she sees
the picture. She recognizes him as Johnny, her ex-fiance. They met
senior year of college, and lost track of each other for a time. A
mutual friend set them up on a blind date. He proposed last year, and
she accepted but then she started seeing a side of him that made her
uncomfortable. He was possessive and needy, and she even caught him
following her. But he's the one that called off the relationship.

The other two had a similar situation as Neal, where they thought that
John Everett had been watching them. Mac figures their lives intersected
somewhere else, and they're just not making the connection. They break
into Everett's apartment, but it's empty. He went a bit overboard on the
deadbolts for such a nice neighborhood, and he has newspaper taped over
his windows. Mac says it's a sign of social withdrawal, a possible
symptom of paranoid schizophrenia. When he looks outside, Mac eyeballs a
black vehicle. He tells Danny he'll be right back.

Danny sees blood around the base of the wall and shows Don. The black
sedan contains Carmen. Mac reiterates his instructions not to interfere.
Carmen tells him what he knows about Everett. He has eyes and ears on
the street, just like Mac does. Mac sends him home, telling Carmen he'll
get a phone call when they have the suspect in custody. Carmen says if
he finds him first, maybe he'll give Mac a call.

Danny tested the blood from the apartment. It came up with two different
profiles, both male. One of the profiles is Everett. The other is
somebody he fought with in his apartment. They left behind hair and
blood. Maybe one of the two male VIP's is the other. Jo takes a call,
John Everett is dead. He was found in the water. Sid finds a wound
behind his ear, and it looks like there's something inside. Jo notes
that John was well-dressed, but the driver did everything he could not
to be seen. Jo thinks he was a guest at the party. Sid asks if that
precludes him being the host as well. Sheldon finds a 5th invitation in
John's back pocket. Wanda said she only made four. That means one of the
victims has been lying.

Sid removes the item behind Everett's ear as Lindsay goes to work on his
clothing. According to phone records, John was being harassed as well.
Hundreds of inbound calls, all lasting under five seconds. John has
rivets in his handmade biker boots. Those rivet marks showed up on the
driver's door of the truck. He may have been fighting to open the door
and free the driver, after the accident. So if he got him out, and
that's the guy who broke into John's apartment (leaving behind hair and
blood when they fought), John would have turned him in. So the driver
killed him.

The truck had a demon dog hood ornament, horned. One of the horns was
broken off on impact - that's the object Sid removed from behind John's
ear. Looks like one of their 'victims' was actually the driver, not
present at the party. They go to work questioning Chris and Neal. Neal
turns out to be their guy. He starts stuttering when he becomes enraged
at Jo. They were all from the same neighborhood, but the kids outgrew
him and he wanted to get even. They shouldn't have treated him like
that. They all had it coming.

As he's being removed from the precinct, Carmen Enzo shoots and kills
Neal to avenge the death of his daughter.

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