Submission (Season 18, Episode 12)
Premise: A dog-fighting bust turns into a murder case when one of the dogs turns out to have swallowed a woman’s finger, and a reporter romancing the suspect complicates Cutter’s prosecution of the missing woman’s husband.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 18, Episode 12
- Detectives
- Det. Cyrus Lupo (Jeremy Sisto), Det. Ed Green (Jesse L. Martin)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Michael Cutter (Linus Roache), ADA Connie Rubirosa (Alana de la Garza), DA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston)
- Guest stars
- Lara Flynn Boyle as Dawn Talley, David Harbour as Jay Carlin, Adam Rothenberg as Marty Vance, David Zayas as Detective Justin Cabrera
- Director
- Constantine Makris
- Writers
- Ed Zuckerman
Summary
The Investigation
“Submission” begins when a stolen pet’s GPS collar leads police into an East Side townhouse and an illegal dog fight hosted by wine consultant Jay Carlin. A necropsy on a dead fighting dog uncovers a woman’s finger bearing pink polish and a chemical burn that turns out to be chlorine. The dogs belong to Mackey, an Ulster County breeder who once showed Carlin and his friend Marty Vance how they could tear apart a cat, and who now offers to implicate Carlin for a deal. Carlin points the detectives to Vance’s estranged wife, Lauren, who has been missing for a week without Vance reporting it; the polish in her bathroom matches.
Lauren’s divorce lawyer says she suspected Vance of hiding assets and planned to ask Carlin about Vance’s stake in his wine business; Carlin admits warning Vance that she was asking questions. Channel 8 reporter Dawn Talley airs a claim that Lauren was suicidal, and the detectives later find her with Vance in the hot tub of a Soho loft he secretly owns. Before the grand jury, Talley’s press-shield claim fails; she concedes the suicide story came from Vance and describes a map from his trash marking woods near the kennel. Deputies find Lauren’s handless body there, and Vance is arraigned for murder.
The Trial
As trial nears, the case looks thin: no one saw Vance near the woods, and the map is not on his computer. The prosecutors realize everything pointing to Vance also fits Carlin, whose business Lauren had been probing. A wine chemist finds that a $2,000 bottle of 1949 wine Carlin sold is a recent, far cheaper vintage, and a lab detects cesium-137 in one of his 1933 bottles, showing he refills old bottles and fakes corks with a chlorine solution. Seized video shows Carlin and Talley are lovers, and McCoy, admitting he was once played himself, tells Cutter to pick a defendant.
Cutter buys a day’s delay in jury selection and stages a conversation that lets Talley hear Mackey has found footprints near the dog pen. Carlin and Talley sneak onto the kennel grounds at night and are arrested for trespassing, and a recording of their trip shows Carlin knew the gate’s combination. Told his cellar is being seized as counterfeit, Carlin is charged with killing Lauren to hide the fraud, and Talley turns on him, saying he urged her to get close to Vance and that she saw the map at Carlin’s house.
Spoiler, the ending: Talley faces perjury and hindering-prosecution charges, the murder charge against Vance is dropped in court, and Lupo goes home with a newly adopted dog. No trial of Carlin is shown.
Why it stands out
- The title refers to the submission signal that normally ends a fight between two dogs, a cue fighting dogs ignore; Cutter later throws the idea back at Talley.
- Science exposes the fake wine: cesium-137, which entered the atmosphere only with nuclear testing in the 1950s, turns up in a bottle labeled 1933.
- Lara Flynn Boyle guest stars as reporter Dawn Talley, who invokes New York’s press shield law before the grand jury.