Missing Pieces (Season 13, Episode 5)
Premise: A Buffalo couple report their baby stolen with their car on Halloween, and SVU works to learn what really happened to him on the drive to New York.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 13, Episode 5
- 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), ADA Casey Novak (Diane Neal), ME Dr. Melinda Warner (Tamara Tunie)
- Guest stars
- Lisa Joyce as Allie Martell, Dennis Flanagan as Tim Holland, Meredith Holzman as Moira Martell, Jarlath Conroy as Mr. Coogan, Charlie Tahan as Calvin Arliss
- Director
- Peter Leto
- Writers
- Julie Martin & Warren Leight
Summary
“Missing Pieces” takes place on Halloween. Amaro is trick-or-treating with his daughter, Zara, and his mother, and Benson is out with Calvin Arliss, when Allie Martell, in from Buffalo for the parade, runs out of a bodega screaming that her car has been stolen with her three-month-old son, Nate, in the back seat. Her boyfriend, Tim Holland, arrives from a dispute with a Craigslist landlord who rented their apartment to someone else, and he explodes at her. An Amber Alert goes out. Allie says Tim is jealous but has never hit her, yet Buffalo police have a domestic incident report that her sister, Moira, made while Allie was pregnant. Moira tells Fin and Rollins that Tim twisted Allie’s arm and that she watched the couple drive off with Nate on Sunday afternoon.
By then the car has turned up abandoned near the Willis Avenue Bridge with a broken window, no baby and only Tim’s prints on the wheel. Nate’s car seat surfaces when Efraim Hernandez buys it from a street seller in Tompkins Square. The seller, Mr. Coogan, admits smashing the window of the locked car at dusk and taking what was inside, but says there was no baby. Then the lab finds feces and traces of Nate’s soy formula in the couple’s cooler. Allie admits they did not sleep in the car on the way down, as both had claimed, but at the Binghamton Motor Lodge, where Fin learns they drank at the bar with Nate in his seat under the table and argued over a pumpkin costume. Allie draws a map, and Nate is found buried with his blanket and a toy. Warner finds a healthy, well-cared-for baby with no injuries.
Separately, each parent confesses: Tim says he shook Nate to stop his crying, and Allie says she fell asleep while bathing him. Novak is ready to charge both, but Warner says neither account fits her findings. With Allie a smoker and Nate bottle-fed, she suspects sudden infant death syndrome, though she cannot yet confirm it.
Spoiler, the ending: Pressed again, Tim says he passed out drunk and woke to find Allie holding Nate, and Allie says she put the fussy baby in their bed, on his back, and woke to find him not breathing. Sure no one would believe them, they hid him in the cooler, drove to New York, buried him and staged the theft. Told that Nate most likely died of SIDS, Allie asks to see Tim. The couple are then let go and sent home.
Why it stands out
- Two weeks after the episode aired, detectives in the Seattle area investigating the disappearance of two-year-old Sky Metalwala, whose mother said he vanished from her parked car while she went for gas, noted the similarities; the episode had been rerun the night before he was reported missing.
- Amaro’s daughter, Zara (Alison Fernandez), and his mother (Nancy Ticotin) appear for the first time.
- Charlie Tahan returns as Calvin Arliss, the boy Benson briefly had guardianship of in Season 12’s “Trophy” and “Rescue.”