Strange Beauty (Season 13, Episode 22)
Premise: A young woman abducted in a cab is found dead after a forced amputation, tying her to a severed leg pulled from the Gowanus Canal 11 years earlier.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 13, Episode 22
- Starring
- Det. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Det. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Det. Nick Amaro (Danny Pino), Det. Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish), Capt. Donald Cragen (Dann Florek), ME Dr. Melinda Warner (Tamara Tunie)
- Guest stars
- David Eigenberg as Dr. Hal Brightman, Patrick Fischler as Dr. Gene Brightman, Britt Lower as Jess Hardwick, Constantine Maroulis as Seth Moretz, Myk Watford as Captain Sam Reynolds
- Director
- Alex Chapple
- Writers
- Peter Blauner & Robin Veith
Summary
“Strange Beauty” opens with Rollins at a bar with Sam Reynolds, her old captain from Atlanta, who meets Fin and Amaro and then makes a pass she deflects by reminding him he is married; he says he is separated. Outside, she sees a young woman screaming for help in the back of a passing cab and calls it in. The cab proves stolen, and a mother, Shelly Raedo, identifies the woman as her daughter Nina, 19, who phoned at midnight asking for money to get home and saying she felt out of control. Nina had drifted away and covered herself in tattoos and piercings. Her ex-boyfriend, Pablo Desparo, turned her away that night, and a car service’s outside camera shows her getting into the cab, driven by a white man.
A man living on a Gowanus Canal houseboat fishes out a freshly severed left leg bearing Nina’s octopus tattoo. Warner says a surgical saw was used while the victim was alive and sedated with the anesthetic propofol. The same man found a leg 11 years earlier, three days before the September 11 attacks; its DNA leads to Lisa Everly, alive, who says that as an addicted prostitute she let a client remove her leg for $25,000 at a Bowery hotel. Nina’s body then turns up near the canal, dead of heart failure from propofol, with ears surgically reshaped into points months earlier. Tattoo artist Kenji Yashimi points to Seth Moretz, who is caught with a nitrous oxide tank from the practice of cosmetic dentist Gene Brightman and names Gene’s receptionist, Jess Hardwick, as the one who does body modifications. Rollins finds her at a Coney Island freak night, and Jess is arrested.
Jess, who lost her own leg to bone cancer at 15, says she does modifications but never amputations. Records show propofol ordered under the name of Gene’s brother, psychiatrist Hal Brightman, who denies it and steers suspicion toward Gene. Gene, whose mother lost a leg in a car crash, has an alibi with a male date and blames Jess. Jess then confirms she was Hal’s patient when she lost her leg and reveals that he resisted ending her therapy and that he stared at Nina when she came by the dental office with an infected ear.
Spoiler, the ending: Letting Hal think Gene is the target, the detectives get him to describe his brother’s supposed fixation, then point out that Gene is gay and that the profile fits Hal. Told he is on video putting Nina into the cab, Hal says she died of a reaction to the anesthetic and admits operating on six women, starting with Lisa, insisting he made them more complete. He is handcuffed.
Why it stands out
- David Eigenberg and Patrick Fischler play the Brightman brothers, with Britt Lower as Jess and Constantine Maroulis as Seth Moretz.
- Rollins’s former Atlanta captain, Sam Reynolds, makes his first appearance, and the dialogue alludes to the trouble with a deputy chief that preceded her move to New York.