Lucky Lewis
A couple of Finnish tourists get flashed by a pervert in the park.
After his release on bail, said pervert tracks down Alice (Judith Ivey), a witness who took a photo of the crime in progress, and sexually abuses her for several hours.
Pablo Schreiber plays the perp, William Lewis. Not that he's that famous, except as a TV Hey! It's That Guy!, and not that the reveal that he did it is a big surprise since it happens in the cold open, but still.
"Get down on your knees, open your mouth, and take Communion"; "You mean like, how disturbing it would be to make a fine, educated, cultured woman like that disrobe? How humiliating it would be? How she might try to cover herself with her hands?...You want to hear how I tied her to the bed. Not too tight, so I could watch her struggle....What about if I made her go down on my knees, forced myself inside of her. Or -- or you want to hear about the pyrotechnics? How I put out my cigarettes on her....How I branded her private parts with keys and hot hangers"; "She did things that she never expected to do. She never imagined possible. Her fingers, and her mouth. What do you want to hear -- that at the beginning, she said she would do anything, she begged me for her life, but by the morning time, she was begging me to take her out of her misery. Which one do you think I enjoyed more?"
When the cops ask the lab to put a rush on the DNA test, techs test both the perp's sample and the one from Alice's rape kit at the same time, against standard procedure because of the potential risk of cross-contamination.
Cragen (Dann Florek), who makes a one-on-one connection with Alice, and Benson (Mariska Hargitay), who elicited a detailed if technically hypothetical confession from Lewis.
Because the DNA evidence gets thrown out, and because Alice died of a heart attack before the trial even started so that there's no one to identify Lewis, the judge declares a mistrial and Lewis is released on bail...making him available to break into Benson's apartment and take her hostage just before we slam to black for the summer.
Rollins (Kelli Giddish) is taking pills for her shoulder; Amaro (Danny Pino) is spending more time with his kids; Benson is getting bored by Cassidy (Dean Winters) and his mookishness...though maybe that will end up being a moot point.