Law & Order Season 16 Episode Guide
Plot summaries for the sixteenth season of Law & Order, which aired on NBC from September 2005 to May 2006, featuring Det. Joe Fontana, Det. Ed Green, Lt. Anita Van Buren, Executive ADA Jack McCoy, ADA Alexandra Borgia and DA Arthur Branch.
- 1
Red Ball
A five-year-old girl vanishes with her mother’s car, and the ex-convict arrested for taking her uses the child as a bargaining chip, offering to reveal where she is if prosecutors set him free.
- 2
Flaw
A con man shot in an empty office tower dies with Detective Olivia Benson’s number on his phone, pulling SVU into a case against a mother and daughter who have slipped away from Benson before.
- 3
Ghosts
A gunman’s dying words reopen the ten-year-old murder of a 12-year-old model, a case Fontana always pinned on her father, and McCoy defies Branch’s caution to try the new suspect.
- 4
Age of Innocence
A husband fighting to end his brain-damaged wife’s life support is killed by a car bomb outside her hospital, and the trail runs from a bomb maker to an outspoken minister and the woman’s own family.
- 5
Life Line
A young journalist posing as a gang member is shot dead, and the trail leads to a Long Island real estate broker whose imprisoned son is at the mercy of the gang she was exposing.
- 6
Birthright
A 16-year-old murder suspect dies in a holding cell, and her autopsy points to a free-clinic nurse who has been quietly sterilizing young women she considers unfit to raise children.
- 7
House of Cards
A recovering addict is found dead and her five-day-old son missing, and the search leads to an Upper East Side woman who hid a miscarriage from her husband.
- 8
New York Minute
The shooting of a trucking-company owner uncovers migrants who died in his trailer and pulls in a citizen border-patrol group with secrets of its own.
- 9
Criminal Law
A gunman working through the witness list from a nine-year-old office massacre puts McCoy in danger just as the convicted killer wins a new trial.
- 10
Acid
When an old friend’s daughter, disfigured in a chemical attack, takes her own life, Van Buren drives the hunt for the attacker and then shades her testimony to keep him in jail.
- 11
Bible Story
A burglar is beaten to death outside a Lower East Side synagogue while carrying a desecrated family Chumash, and the investigation uncovers a bitter fight between the two cousins who own the building.
- 12
Family Friend
When the man accused of killing a mob-connected accountant is acquitted, a decorated retired detective shoots him dead, then threatens to unravel dozens of his old cases if McCoy prosecutes him.
- 13
Heart of Darkness
A freelance journalist with a severe mood disorder is found drowned in a hotel bathtub beside a forged suicide note, and his girlfriend’s claim that she simply helped him die begins to crack when a video shows a third person in the room.
- 14
Magnet
A gifted scholarship student at a Manhattan magnet school is strangled with a cello bow, and the wealthy classmate charged with killing him claims his attention deficit medication made him do it.
- 15
Choice of Evils
A teenage runaway is found shot in an empty Manhattan warehouse, and DNA leads to his mother, the former wife of a serial killer, who says she killed her son to stop him from becoming his father.
- 16
Cost of Capital
A junior investment banker’s body is dumped far from where he died, the trail leads to the boss he was secretly sleeping with, and the murder case ends up depending on what her teenage daughter overheard on a late-night call.
- 17
America, Inc.
A security contractor home from Iraq is gunned down in a hotel room, and the men accused of avenging a beheaded colleague bring the war into the courtroom, until one of them offers the government a wanted terrorist.
- 18
Thinking Makes It So
A bank manager helps rob his own branch while his six-year-old daughter is held hostage, and the rough way Fontana gets her location out of the kidnapper threatens to sink the whole prosecution.
- 19
Positive
A 14-year-old’s attack on a hospital official leads detectives to his little sister’s death from AIDS and to the doctor who secretly gave her an experimental vaccine meant only for animals.
- 20
Kingmaker
An undercover narcotics detective is executed after a newspaper column reveals she is a cop, and the leak traces back to a congressman’s combative chief of staff.
- 21
Hindsight
Det. Nick Falco becomes a suspect when a woman he met at a bar is found stabbed to death in his bathroom, and the case leads to a robbery crew and a family with an old grudge against him.
- 22
Invaders
Two home invaders armed with counterfeit DEA badges wipe out the family of the man who made the badges, and the hunt for them costs ADA Alexandra Borgia her life.