Parts (Season 6, Episode 22)
Premise: A dismembered veteran leads the squad from a morgue’s body-selling racket to a black market in kidneys, and to a woman Munch cannot forget.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 6, Episode 22
- Starring
- Det. Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni), Det. John Munch (Richard Belzer), Det. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Capt. Donald Cragen (Dann Florek), ADA Casey Novak (Diane Neal), Dr. George Huang (BD Wong), ME Dr. Melinda Warner (Tamara Tunie)
- Guest stars
- Marlee Matlin as Dr. Amy Solwey, Marc Grapey as Russ Bianco, Kevin Carroll as James McGovern, Tyler James Williams as Kyle McGovern, Glenn Kessler as Leon Shragewitz
- Director
- Matt Earl Beesley
- Writers
- David Foster
Summary
“Parts” opens at an Inwood junkyard, where a car being crushed holds a woman’s head, arm and leg. The medical examiner finds semen in her throat and notes that the limbs were taken off at the joints with real skill. A knee implant leads to a veterans’ hospital doctor who identifies Manette Combs, an Iraq veteran whose painkiller habit turned to heroin. Her mother points to her boyfriend, Leon Shragewitz, a devout butcher at a kosher slaughterhouse who has missed a week of work. His DNA does not match the semen. The heroin is traced to a Crown Heights dealer, who says Manette sold sex, and a customer saw Leon drag her away. Found at a synagogue, Leon admits pushing her down subway stairs on a Friday afternoon, but he could not have cut her up and been back before the Sabbath.
Brooklyn’s morgue logged her as a Jane Doe and shipped her to Potter’s Field, where what is left of her body is recovered. Morgue assistant Mark Mogan admits selling unclaimed bodies for $2,000 each to Russ Bianco, who runs the body donation program at a hospital mortuary. Posing as Mogan’s coworker, Stabler meets Bianco, and the detectives then catch him delivering parts to a surgeons’ course. A rented wine locker holds his stock, including a homeless man, Thomas Taylor, whose healthy kidney a skilled surgeon removed while he was alive. The transplant waiting list puts Dr. Amy Solwey, whom Munch helped send to prison, at the top. Released on compassionate grounds, she has been steering patients to Bianco. Bank records show that James McGovern wired Bianco $125,000 for a kidney for his son, Kyle, who has polycystic kidney disease.
Threatened with losing her place on the list, Amy names the surgeon, Dr. Robert Swann. The detectives stop him mid-operation; the kidney becomes evidence, the transplant agency will not accept an organ that was paid for, and Kyle is too unstable to receive it. Munch then slips Swann and McGovern out of the squad room and brings Amy to the clinic to receive the kidney instead. Stabler and Novak stop it, and Stabler tells Amy to say Munch was never involved. McGovern, under arrest, asks to be with Kyle when he wakes, and a detective goes in his place to explain what his father did.
Spoiler, the ending: McGovern pleads guilty in federal court and gets 18 months, with his surrender delayed six weeks. The agency then moves Kyle to the top of the list. When a kidney from a motorcyclist killed in a crash proves a match for Amy, she turns it down so that it goes to Kyle, and tells Munch she will take her chances.
Why it stands out
- Marlee Matlin returns as Dr. Amy Solwey from the fifth-season episode “Painless”; she has said she was honored to learn that the producers had never before brought back a perpetrator.
- Executive producer Neal Baer said the character was brought back because Munch had become so involved with her.
- Benson does not appear in the episode.