Written By Brianna Yellen and Samantha Corbin Miller
Directed By Michael Pressman
A girl goes missing and SVU is called in to find the 15-year old. When the girl turns up dead, Sgt. Dodds begins to feel overwhelmed by the case. The detectives get a break when Dr. Warner is able to get a partial DNA match, but it soon turns into a headache for Benson, as the match is to a dead man who had many children with different women. As SVU weaves through a complicated family history, Dodds becomes determined to find the man responsible.
Tropes
- Be As Un Helpful As Possible: averted (unusually for this genre) in the case of George Marino, who goes out of his way to help the cops find his half brothers even after Dodds tried to extract a false confession out of his brother Robbie.
- It's All My Fault: Dodds blames himself when Lily turns up dead because he thought she was just a runaway and didn't treat the case with the urgency it merited. Benson tells him it wasn't his fault because Lily's fate was likely sealed from the moment she was abducted (which the killer confirms in his confession — she was unconscious in the back of his truck for most of the time between her disappearance and her death, so the chances that SVU could have found her during that time are nearly zero).
- The Casanova: Ray Marino was handsome and charming and, in addition to having children with at least three women, he always had one woman or another taken with him and flirting on every one of his bus runs (he worked as a bus driver).
- Cowboy Cop: Dodds nearly extracts a false confession from one suspect, advocates for getting the DNA from every male between 20 and 30 on city island, and says the squad should "just pick [the suspects] up and find an excuse later". Once Fin finds a way to get the perp's DNA legally Dodds arrests him (in front of a cellphone-wielding public) aggressively enough that Carisi has to pull him off the guy.
- Irony: Despite the fact that she'd recently made radical changes in her life, the victim actually encountered her killer not in some place or situation that was new or unfamiliar to her, but in one of the places that she'd been going to all along — the swimming pool where her swim team practiced, where he worked as a vending machine stocker.
- Massive Numbered Siblings: By the time all is said and done, the detectives have identified six children fathered by Ray Marino, and there's no guarantee that there aren't even more out there who don't relate to the case.
- Never Trust a Trailer: The trailer for the episode made it look like it was going to be about Benson's son Noah going missing. Noah's disappearance turns out to be a minor element (he just wandered off to play with another kid) that's wrapped up before the end of the teaser, while the bulk of the episode centers around a case involving a missing teenager that wasn't even hinted at in the trailer.
- Social Climber: Shortly before her death, the victim had started hanging with a new crowd of popular girls whose pastime was crashing frat parties at the local college, explaining to a friend that she wanted to go from "the pool girl to the cool girl."
- Stalker with a Crush: the vending machine stocker stalked the victim, watching her at the swimming pool every day, before getting up the nerve to approach her.
