Spooked (Season 11, Episode 6)
Premise: A double murder staged to look like a rape draws SVU into a cartel heroin case and then into a spy operation, with an FBI agent Benson trusts working against the squad.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 11, Episode 6
- Starring
- Det. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Det. Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni), Sgt. John Munch (Richard Belzer), Capt. Donald Cragen (Dann Florek), ME Dr. Melinda Warner (Tamara Tunie), TARU Ruben Morales (Joel de la Fuente)
- Guest stars
- Vincent Spano as FBI Agent Dean Porter, Paola Mendoza as Terri Banes, Muriel Hurtado Herrera as Ramona Rodriguez, J.R. Yenque as Manuel Rojas, Juan Carlos Hernández as Michael Garcia
- Director
- Peter Leto
- Writers
- Jonathan Greene
Summary
“Spooked” opens when thieves break into a padlocked truck and find a young man and woman inside with their throats cut. The woman’s breast implants have been removed and her underwear has been hung up, as if to announce a rape, and Warner finds that the killer left almost no trace apart from brown polyester stuffing of the kind used in cheap toys. The truck was rented by 18-year-old Carlos Martinez of Laredo, Texas, whose GPS leads Benson and Stabler to an abandoned drug house in Queens where the woman tried to burn her license. She is Ramona Rodriguez, and her roommate, Terri Banes, says the two barely knew each other. A technician, meanwhile, installs new squad-room phones, to Munch’s annoyance.
In Ramona’s apartment, Benson runs into FBI Agent Dean Porter, who says Ramona smuggled heroin inside teddy bears and Carlos was a hit man for Los Zetas, the Gulf cartel’s killers; he suggests rivals staged the rape. A safe deposit box, traced from a clue hidden behind a baseboard, holds Ramona’s one-way ticket to Mexico City and an incoming flight number. At Kennedy Airport, as a toy shipment is followed, cartel lieutenant Manuel Rojas takes Benson hostage with a gun built into a cell phone, and Porter shoots him dead. Porter says his informant blames the cartel, punishing the couple for stealing.
Warner then finds a woman’s blood and hair in the truck, and the DNA is Terri’s. The phone installer, caught clearing equipment out of Terri’s apartment, is Michael Garcia, a former El Paso police tech, and TARU’s Morales finds bugs in the squad’s phones. Porter claims Terri as a cartel matter. Tailing her, Benson and Stabler see her swap shopping carts with a man holding Ramona’s implants; the State Department gets him released. Morales decodes a SIM card from one implant into a list of names and addresses and notes that the bugs’ serial numbers were sanded off, an FBI habit. Terri turns out to be paid by a CIA front company. Benson invites Porter to dinner while Morales loads tracking software onto his phone, and after Cragen calls her about Terri, Porter rings Terri’s midtown hotel.
Spoiler, the ending: Arrested at the hotel, Terri says she is a CIA analyst who paid her cousin Ramona to carry the names of American agents in Cuba, hidden in her implants, to the Cuban resistance. When Ramona demanded more money, Terri killed her and Carlos, and Porter told her to stage the bodies. Porter arrives and the detectives move to arrest him, but Cragen, under orders from above, lets him leave with Terri. Benson asks Porter whether he shot Rojas to keep him quiet; he says she would never believe his answer.
Why it stands out
- Vincent Spano returns as FBI Agent Dean Porter, Benson’s case agent from her eighth-season undercover assignment; Benson thanks him for his help with her half-brother, Simon Marsden.
- Ice-T and BD Wong are credited but do not appear in the episode.