Stalked!
Updated 1999-11-21 16:00:00
It's a beautiful day, and the birds are in the trees, and a boy and his grandpa are sharing some quality time together in the park, and we all sit back and pick up our knitting and get ready to enjoy another heartwarming episode of . . . Special Victims Unit. Grandpa is telling Little Boy about the wonders of bird watching, but Little Boy thinks it's boring. "Grandpa, that's no fun! THIS is!" he says, flinging his Frisbee high in the air. That's right: what could be more fun than a lesson in Sick Irony Physics? Because the way that Frisbee sails through the air and promptly heads for a hedge thicket is due to the special electromagnetic pull that dead bodies in parks tend to exert on Frisbees, balls, badminton birdies, et cetera. Try it sometime, kids! Sure enough, our boy's Frisbee just about changes direction mid-flight and plummets right into the thicket. Grandpa says he'll get it, and makes his way through the bushes. Good call, Gramps, because the Frisbee has landed right next to the body of a woman in a business suit; she appears to have been shot in the face. He staggers back in horror, then turns protectively towards the little boy, who has just come up behind him, still wondering about his Frisbee. Grandpa hugs him. "I'll buy you a new one," he says. A new Frisbee? That kid's going to need a damn Sony Playstation to get over this. Soon Stabler and Benson are on the scene. It turns out the murder/rape victim was an ADA named Karen Fitzgerald. "I know her -- I knew her -- she was my age," stammers Benson, who says they had drinks together a few times after court. "The case is all yours," says the cop at the scene. So's this episode.
Roll the opening credits. Now we really feel dirty.
Cap'n Cragen comes out of his office and gets on everybody's case about getting on the case. Jeez, one commercial break and he turns into a hardass. I have to note here that Cragen looks kind of thin and pale in this episode, not quite his cuddly old Muppety self. I hope he doesn't have a tapeworm. Anyway, Benson says that ADA Fitzgerald was a hard worker, a one-hundred-percenter, a mover and a shaker. "You knew her?" Cragen asks. Benson says she was an acquaintance; she wishes they'd been friends: "She kept her head down and just concentrated on getting the bad guys in jail." Stabler remarks that with all the cases she'd worked on means "a dump truck full of perps -- people with a grudge." Cragen wonders if there's any evidence that Fitzgerald knew her killer. "He held a lot of anger," says Jeffries. "The guy beat her with a rock, raped her, and then took time out of his busy schedule to shoot her. Twice." Family members of Michelle Hurd get to hit the sack early tonight, now that her character has uttered her One Memorable Line for the whole episode.