Bum bum! We open on a really creepy guy -- played by a total HITG whose name I totally know and cannot recall for the life of me right now, since whenever I'm presented directly with identifying someone, I blank. Seriously, I'd forget my own sister's name if given the chance. So, dude is in a darkened office, talking out loud to himself about what a mess someone was until his "healing hands" came along. He goes on about her dark hair, pale skin, and how he wants her. "I'm damned, but I don't care." Honestly, I thought we were going to break form and he was going to turn out to be this week's creepy murderer. Turns out that he's this week's murderee, Dr. Issac Waxman, who we see full of bullet holes on the floor. Whoever shot him meant it, too, since there are holes all over the walls. Cormack is narrating to Green and guesses the obvious: that it's one of his patients. Green compliments his sleuthing and tries to get a closet door open; it's stuck, so he calls another guy over to get it open. Inside is a mattress with pink bedding, a teddy bear, and a hairbrush. Nothing like a shrink having a young girl crashing in his office. That's not inappropriate at all.
Lupo is speaking with Dr. Ollis (again with a surely mangled spelling, and again with me wishing they'd do a better job listing the guest stars that appear each week) who is clearly distraught over Waxman's death. She tells him that he used to keep files in the closet but had moved them to storage last year. When he asks if he ever saw someone that didn't belong -- a young girl, perhaps? -- hanging about, she tells him that Waxman's patients were adolescents. So, it turns out he's even creepier than I first thought. (Or so it would seem...) She shared an office with him for 15 years, since he'd moved there from New Hampshire and never saw anything improper. Behind her, they're thoughtfully removing the body from the building, and she cries as she thinks about his family. His family, it should be noted, lives two blocks away. Green has had Connie at the scene, and she leaves to get a court order to look at Waxman's patient files.
Toe pick! Seriously, since the first glorious time I saw The Cutting Edge, I can't see Moira Kelly in anything without yelling that. It's like a strange cinematic version of Tourette's. Her teary story is that she went to bed at 10 PM and when she woke up the morning he still hadn't come home, so she walked the dog in Washington Square and then took her kids to school. She desperately tells the guys that she was home doing laundry, but when they ask to talk to her kids she tells them a little too quickly, "Not today." She then gets mightily offended when Green tells her they'll have to fingerprint her and swab her hands. When he asks if she knows about the mattress in his office, she only will tell him, "I'm sure it's not what you imagine." I realize the question of her guilt wasn't really the focus of the episode on the whole, but she might as well have just admitted everything right there for as badly as she tried to play innocent.
Connie is talking to the judge, who won't allow the cops to go through Waxman's records, but agrees to appoint her own shrink to go through them and see if he notices any red flags. I hope he's a better therapist than a researcher, as he misses the point completely, noting the 22 patients that mentioned "exploding." They tell him they're looking for actual violent potential and he gets back to it. Anita's job this week isn't to point out the obvious, but rather to remain calm and nice in the face of stupidity. Outside, Lupo is going through the evidence they have from the closet in Waxman's office. A metrocard swiped near Union Square Station and a skater t-shirt lead him to a skater hangout at Union Square Park, and the "$12 French lip balm" they find tells them it's a girl who's got money.
They head to the park where they do a routine in which Lupo pretends he used to skateboard and shows off a scar on his leg to get the sullen local skaters to give up that there's a girl named Amanda who fits the bill and just happens to be over buying a smoothie. The guys corner her and she screams about not wanting to go back somewhere. Green assumes she means to Dr. Waxman, but she actually means to her mom, and says that "Isaac" was protecting her from her mom. We meet her mom at the station, played by the mother from the AT&T Wireless commercials. She's pissed, probably about having been pulled from her busy schedule texting her BFF Jill. There's a creepy guy with her, Liam, who makes a snide comment about calling Amanda's father just so we know for sure he's not it. Lupo pulls him away and Green gets the whole story from mom: Liam has been knocking Amanda around (okay, so I'm paraphrasing what Mom is trying to dance around) and Waxman thought Amanda should be out of the house until Mom made Liam move out.
Inside, Amanda elaborates that Waxman told Mom that if Liam wasn't gone in a week, he'd call the cops. She also tells them that a lot of kids stayed at the office if they needed time away from their parents. When Amanda did go home, she found Liam's things still there, and she starts to freak out and demands to speak to Waxman. Either Green is really dense and just realized this or this week's writer thinks we're really dumb and need to be spoon-fed, but he whispers to Lupo that she doesn’t know Waxman is dead yet. She tells Lupo all about how Waxman saved her, and then falls apart when she's told that he's dead. On questioning, she tells them that Waxman mentioned a former patient who had been expelled for trying to buy a gun and was fixated on Virginia Tech.
Green and Lupo go to the kid's house, where he (Brandon) has locked himself in his room. His younger sister then calls from another room that Brandon is on his webcam. How she came to find this out, we don't know -- probably the Plot Device Fairy swept down to type in a quick URL -- but Brandon is holding a knife to his neck, despondent over Waxman's death, while messages pop up from other viewers convincing him to kill himself already. And man, do I wish that was a dreamt up plot point and not something I've heard about happening. Lupo busts through the door and tackles him, and Brandon is reduced to hysterics. With the decisive action and then his soothing the kid, this is the first time I've actually found Lupo (and Jeremy Sisto in general) attractive.
Clearly later, while Brandon and his dad are out at the mental hospital, Green learns from Mom that Brandon had been on antidepressants but Waxman had taken him off of them in favor of vitamins, an organic diet, and medication. Just call him Dr. Tom Cruise. They decided to switch him to a new doctor, and Green and Lupo figure Brandon thought Waxman abandoned him. Then, tucked away on a bulletin board, they find a paper shooting target. They head off to Bellevue to visit him with Dr. Olivet in tow, who asserts that a kid this depressed needed to be on meds. She tells them, "Waxman's a rule breaker, and that's very seductive to adolescents." Green says it more clearly: when he was a teen, he loved his uncle because his uncle bought him beer, so don't trust just how much a kid loved an adult like that. They go talk to Brandon, who tells them that Waxman said he could call even though Brandon was no longer his patient. Brandon called him four days earlier and Waxman reminded him to be a "rock in a sea of chaos." He then admits that he got a glock to shoot some kids at school, but that Waxman's advice kept him from doing it; Waxman took the gun and locked it in his desk. It's no surprise that they don't find a gun in his desk. They do, however, find a secret compartment with a tape recorder and a few tapes labeled "Meredith." They play it and clearly it's what Waxman was saying at the beginning of the episode, only this time we hear more, so that we know that he was sleeping with a patient.
Green, Lupo, Anita and Connie listen to the tapes, but Lupo tells them Waxman has no patient named Meredith. There's also no one on the tapes but him, talking about having sex in various places including the parking lot of a mental hospital. Nothing says romance like that. They muse over what they've got and figure if his wife found the tapes she'd freak out. Combining that with the fact that she's keeping them from talking to her kids to verify her alibi, they bring her in for questioning. Conveniently, at the same time Lupo and Green question the kids separately. The little boy, Donovan, lies unconvincingly that he was in the laundry room with his mom, but the little girl eventually tells them (robotically -- I'm not sure if she's not a very good actress or if she's supposed to be so scared she can't express anything) that she and her brother went looking for her mom and couldn't find her. They head back in to talk to Catherine (toe pick!) who maintains innocence until they play her a spot on one of the tapes talking about how ridiculous the age of consent is for Isaac and his mystery teenager. She tries to say she never heard the tapes while Lupo and Green start to badger her with scenarios of the murder, and she starts to chant the same mantra that Brandon learned, "I am a rock in a sea of chaos." They all look at her curiously and Green heads out of the room, then comes back in carrying a file folder. He confronts her with the fact that she was a patient of Waxman's when she was a teenager and that's when they first became involved, and she finally cracks. She slips up so they know she heard the tapes, and finally tells them ominously that Waxman had a sickness, "and when an animal is sick, you put it down." Anita takes the moment to arrest her for murder. Outside, she tells Green the confession better hold up since he violated patient confidentiality, and he opens up the folder and pulls out take-out menus and other assorted papers meant to look like a file. She glares at him as she walks away but clearly she must be relieved that her boys didn't break any laws this time.
Cutter and Connie are meeting with Catherine and her lawyer. He blusters even better than Cutter, but Connie is confident that the confession and motive, combined with the daughter busting her alibi is enough. Cutter offers a plea to Man One for 15 years, and Catherine pleads with her lawyer to tell them about Emma (her daughter) who apparently has suddenly realized she mixed up nights and that her mom really was doing laundry and wasn't out gunning down her dad in cold blood.
In Jack's office, they all gripe about the situation and snipe at each other, and Connie admits that with Waxman's sleeping with his underage patient, Catherine "deserves a medal" for shooting him. Jack admonishes her not to mention that again. The police still can't find Meredith, but they did find that Catherine called her mom the morning after the murder. Jack sends Connie packing up to New Hampshire to speak to the very mother who sent her daughter to Waxman when she was 15 years old. Cutter then tells Jack his plan is to keep laying it on Catherine until she takes a plea, and he also is going to do something about her alibi witness. When Jack asks, Cutter assures him he doesn't want to know what.
That would be going with Lupo to visit Emma and holding over her head that he's going to break her little brother down in court to know the truth while their mom watches, and that will "mess him up forever." It's a low point, even for Cutter. But it works; just as Lupo tries to stop him, and with tears spilling down her cheeks, she admits that her mom wasn't home that night. She then cries about it being all her fault -- she found the tapes and listened to them, and afterwards, not knowing what to do, left the recorder on the kitchen table for her mom to find. She then apologizes, and I take back what I said about her being robotic, because she broke my heart a little there. Outside, Lupo snarks at Cutter for his treatment of Emma, clearly disgusted. When Cutter says he's playing to win, Lupo asks if this is sport to him. Cutter condescends that he stick to his law books, as in books the law is much purer.
Meanwhile, Connie is up speaking to Catherine's mom. To Connie's surprise, she speaks reverently about Waxman, saying he worked wonders with Catherine when she got mixed up with a bad crowd and "saved" her. Conveniently, her mom was out and Catherine's call from that morning is still on the answering machine and her mom offers it up as evidence of how much she loved her husband. When they listen to it back at the office, Green notices a ship's horn which means she wasn't walking her dog in Washington Square Park, but rather was near the river. See kids, don't elaborate with extra details when you're lying. They're more likely to get you in trouble. we see Cutter with her attorney, who now wants to take the plea. But Cutter's not offering the deal any more, since they found the murder weapon in the river that morning. Her lawyer looks stunned at the evidence, then stunned that Cutter would rather prosecute to try and get her 25 years to life rather than have her take a 15-year plea.
The legal equivalent of running to Mommy about a dispute is to meet with the judge and whine about what happened. The judge asks Cutter to compromise, but Cutter goes into a diatribe about what Catherine did, adding that she would have killed anyone else she found in the office too. Judge agrees to send the case to trial ASAP and advises Catherine to let her lawyer speak for her, so she does the only logical thing and fires him on the spot. The judge grudgingly lets her do so but orders him (Mr. Whitney! Seriously, L&O, you have to either use character names, or actually update IMDB, or something, ANYTHING so that it's not such a guessing game to name characters) to stay on as an advisor. As an answer she declares that she's going to tell the jury the "truth" about how Waxman raped her and controlled her when she was 15 and that she lost her marbles when she knew he was doing it to someone else and shot him up to stop him.
The legal gang are all talking about the case -- Connie thinks there's no way she'd be acquitted but Jack reminds her she wanted to give Catherine a medal. He then tells Cutter he might have thought about leaving the plea on the table, and tells them he doesn't want her to get off with some bullshit 60-day sentence. Connie tells Cutter it's a slam dunk so he tells her about a case he lost where the defendant was found with his fiancée's blood and brain matter all over him, and there were multiple witnesses. Man, for your professional reputation I wouldn't go spreading that around, there.
Fortunately for his reputation, he's easier with Emma this time around when she's on the witness stand. She recounts that her mom was acting normal that evening when she sent Emma upstairs to do her homework. Catherine gets up to question her and has a hard time not acting like a mom -- asking how she is, holding her hand -- and is repeatedly admonished by the judge. But she has Emma recount a story about her dad pulling up flowers they had planted since he said Catherine didn't have his permission to plant flowers. I hope Emma finds herself a therapist better than her dad when she needs to work all of this out for herself later in life. Cutter gets up to ask just one more question, and Emma answers that she heard her mom say lots of times that she loved Emma's dad.
There's a sudden cut to Jack sounding worried about Cutter's witness, a Dr. Stronick who is an expert on child sex abuse. The only problem is that the research she'll be citing was condemned by Congress. On the stand, Dr. Stronick explains that her research shows that consensual sex between an adolescent and an adult caused no psychological harm. Cutter has her reiterate that she's not commenting on the morality of it, nor is she including any rape or forcible action in the study. Catherine gets up and points out the condemnation by Congress, but the doctor haughtily points out that Galileo's government censored his findings as well but the world turned out to be round. She then takes another tactic and tries to ask about Stronick's own daughters having sex with an older man. Everyone objects, and that's all she's got.
In Jack's office, he and Olivet are having a fight. She offered to testify for the defense because she was so sickened by the testimony of Dr. Stronick who only studies studies and has never counseled patients. Jack's pissed that she'd be working for the other side, but she's pissed at the idea that they'd use Stronick's study as evidence. Jack argues that many doctors other than Olivet could testify for the defense, but she's taken this research personally and wants to "set the record straight." Jack warns her that the gloves are coming off, and she leaves the office. He then turns to Cutter and says he has something that will help.
Olivet testifies about how adolescents having sexual encounters with adults have, in her case, had severe problems. At Catherine's questioning, she tells her that when it's with a therapist, it's a huge betrayal of trust, even if it's an adult who is the patient. Cutter gets up and fairly quickly drops his bomb. After getting Olivet to repeat how doctors should never have sex with patients, he asks if she has ever done that. Sucks to be her -- she has to admit that she got involved with a patient whose partner had died. And despite the fact that they terminated a working relationship, it still started when she was his doctor. She's practically shaking with fury as she answers. When she sees Jack and his motorcycle in the parking lot later, she tells him he hit below the belt in betraying a confidence. He pointed out that she just testified for a woman who shot her husband in cold blood. Touché. He said if that's what he had to do to nail Catherine, so be it. Olivet tells him it's not his finest hour, and he shoots back that it's not hers either.
Catherine's on the stand, telling the story of how Waxman began their sexual relationship and intimidated her into it, threatening that if she didn't trust him she'd get locked up in a mental institution. And people say romance is dead. This went on for three years including a lot of trips to a cottage on a lake. She goes on to tell the tale of Waxman driving her to a mental hospital, saying he'd have her locked up if she left him, and then he proceeded to make her have sex with him. That sound familiar? It does to Connie, who races out and back to the office where she grabs a tape, and also takes a quick look at a map on the computer. Back in the courtroom, Cutter brings up Emma's testimony of how much Catherine said she loved Waxman, but Catherine insists she was manipulated and didn't really know what love was. Connie comes running back in and gives Cutter a note. After a pause, he asks Catherine about the cottage on the lake, and the name of the town where it was located. She doesn't remember at first, but after a moment her eyes widen in horror. Cutter asks if she remembers now about the town called "Meredith." He then plays another of Waxman's tapes, in which he claims that he took her to the mental hospital to show her how his world would end if she went away. It's weird and ooky, but her face crumples at the odd romance of it all. It turns out the tapes were Waxman's notes on a memoir of his and Catherine's affair, and he wasn't cheating at all. He was creepy and had questionable practices, but he wasn't cheating! She freaks out about what she's done and then begins her mantra again as she starts to sob.
Of course we've got to wrap it up neatly in the office. Cutter tells Connie that Catherine accepted a deal of 15 to life, adding that the jury loved her and this was a break. Connie tells him to bust her if she ever again calls a case a "slam dunk." He watches her go with a little smirk that seems to be both from nailing Catherine and also delight at Connie admitting he was right. And Dick Wolf's title card comes up to remind us that he's sleeping right now in a bed made of SOLID GOLD.