WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Law & Order: SVU Season 23, Episode 7, "They'd Already Disappeared," which premiered Thursday, November 4th, on NBC. This article also contains descriptions of sexual assault.
As a woman, Tonya, gets thrown out of a café, her friend is going through some sort of withdrawal. They walk home and get catcalled. Tonya meets up with her sister, Daria, who gives her a backpack full of snacks and tells her she's worried about her. Daria wants Tonya to come back to the dorm with her, but Tonya refuses. Instead, Tonya visits a chef friend and passes off the backpack. The scene then cuts and Tonya is panicked and running from an unseen assailant. She calls her sister from behind a dumpster saying "he raped me" and asks to come live with Daria after all. But then the man sneaks up on her, grabs her around the mouth and threatens to kill her. The next morning, Daria is at SVU to report her sister's rape.
Daria replays the voicemail for SVU, with Tonya shouting her promise to get off drugs if only Daria can help her. Detective Amanda Rollins says they'll work to trace her number and Daria tells them Tonya is currently a sex worker. Rollins and Detective Joe Velasco go to a shelter to speak with women who know Tonya and they refer the two to another sex worker named Pleasant, who is the friend who was with Tonya the night before. She says she last saw Tonya last night and she never showed back up, but it's nothing new with Tonya. Detective Odafin "Fin" Tutuola speaks with Tonya's chef friend, Country, who gives him the backpack Tonya left with him. Back at the precinct, Daria confirms that's the bag she gave her. Then, one of the girls they spoke to earlier comes in and reports that one of the other girls, Beauty, is missing.
They say Beauty's been gone a few hours and left her bag behind. Normally they wouldn't be worried, but in light of Tonya's disappearance, they are. Velasco and Captain Olivia "Liv" Benson search the bag and find a cell phone. Benson asks Velasco to check against missing women reports at the local precinct. Rollins and Velasco go and are met with dead ends, but a cop gives them a file of missing women from the past year that no one is looking for, because of their low social status: NIH, or "no humans involved." There are at least ten women in the file and they recognize two as Tonya and Beauty. Rollins finds a third girl who looks similar and surmises they're looking at a serial rapist and killer.
Benson has a list of similar type of girls missing all from the same area. She asks who reported them, and there are no traces, but it most likely wasn't their families. There has been no further investigations into them. Fin and Benson meet with Medical Examiner Abel Truman to look into some deceased Jane Does. Truman confirms they were both strangled and raped, but the second victim had some organs removed post mortem, most likely by a meat cleaver. This leads Rollins, Velasco and Fin to go back to Country the chef.
They bring him in for questioning and bring up his assault arrest from a few years back, but he says it was in self defense. They then ask him about closing the other night and point to the street cams that show him driving at the time he claimed to be at the restaurant. They see a young woman in the car with him going north, but the car returning south with just him. They leverage his remaining parole to get him to talk and he says he dropped off Tonya at a mystery date at her request. Velasco and Rollins check out the address Country gave them of Tonya's date. They're met by a couple of kids on skateboards, one of them who asks if they're here about the vampire, a.k.a. the guy who lives in a building on the street and is only active at night, creeping around. They show him Tonya's picture and he thinks she's familiar, but doesn't know much more.
Velasco jokingly calls Rollins "Buffy" and they enter the house of the supposed vampire. They're immediately met with a strong smell and find a room full of dead and mummified bodies, posed around a table, much like Mother Bates in Psycho. They walk through to the next room and see Beauty and Tonya lying dead on surgical tables.
SVU arrives and Rollins confirms twelve total victims. The M. E. says he's never seen anything like this: DIY mummies. This killer used heaters, and he can see his technique improving with each mummy. They likely aren't going to get DNA from there. Chief McGrath shows up, rightfully disgusted, and he and Liv discuss the case outside. Benson says they have Country in custody as their only suspect. McGrath pressures her to make a case against Country because this whole thing "is evil." Velasco joins Liv and is visibly disturbed. Liv says she's been doing this for over twenty years and even she's never seen anything like this.
Benson and Fin interrogate Country more, making the connection that girls have gone missing since he moved up to New York, plus his stash of possessions belongs to many of the girls. They show him the pictures of the mummies and he looks shocked and upset. He recognizes, though, the living picture of Shanice and says he remembers driving her to the same street as Tonya a while ago. He breaks down, crying, at the thought that he drove them to their deaths. Then Velasco comes in: Truman has news. All the mummies were sex workers who had been strangled, all were partially dressed and had personal effects. They've found two women missing in the tri-state area in the past few years that match two of the mummies through their effects. But no one can find any points of contact or families to get in touch with. Both of the victims identified, they find, were reported missing while Country was in custody in South Carolina so it couldn't be him -- whoever did this is still out there and now knows his torture chamber has been found.
McGrath and Benson give an update to the press and plead for people to come forward with any information, offering a substantial reward. Velasco and Fin try and figure out who owns the building, but there are no leads. The same kid from earlier, Jamal, says he told them there was a vampire there. He says he's white and drives a pickup truck. Meanwhile, Daria comes by the morgue to identify Tonya's body. Truman instructs her to pull out a photo of the two of them so she can look at it right after she looks at the body, to remember Tonya as she truly was.
Fin and Liv go to visit the mother of one of the identified victims. She says she'll tell her daughter's son, who has autism, about his mother. She also tells Liv and Fin that Meredith, her daughter, took off with a carny and that was the last she saw of her. Her son, Jack, remembers the exact date though and he tells them: July 7th, 2016. He says he saw Meredith get into his gray truck and recites the license plate number for them. Rollins and Velasco track the truck to a house and a man: Trace Lambert. They find him at home with his mother and take him to the precinct.
They learn he has a light record, and they discover his whereabouts match the timeline of the missing women. He even worked at a carnival at the time Meredith ran off with that carny. Fin and Rollins show him pictures of the missing women but he plays innocent. They also tell him they have his truck tracked near the location of the mummified girls and he says it's a coincidence. He says he probably has bought heaters, too; not to create mummies but to keep his mother warm.
Velasco plays nice with Trace's mom. She obviously loves her son, but also scoffs at Trace having told her that he had a girlfriend. Benson comes in and she says that Velasco's charming and her son is a loser. Trace keeps denying knowing the dead women, saying he prefers classier women. Benson rejoins them and says she was talking to his mother about him. Trace is not happy about that, as Benson tells him that his mom says he's too soft to talk to girls. But, he counters, he's had a girlfriend: Meredith. Benson says Meredith felt sorry for him, and that she and his mom talked pitifully about him behind his back. Trace gets defensive, saying Meredith loved him. So, Benson asks, where she is now? She then baits Trace into confessing by saying that Trace's mom thinks he's too stupid to be a killer as methodical as the one they're looking for.
He falls right into the trap, dropping tidbits about the owner of the building and then confirming details of the case only the killer would have known, as Benson goads him. He casually tells her the whole story of how he killed the building owner by poisoning to make it look like a heart attack so he could have a mummy murder cave all to himself. "It was my plan," he says and Benson laughs at him -- until he confesses to killing all of them. He's upset because they were his and that was ten years of his work they disturbed. He then reveals details of all their deaths gleefully to Benson. He says he kept Meredith alive for days as she kept saying "no," and he wants Benson to tell his mother just what he did.
Later, Benson learns Trace's lawyer cut a deal, but the FBI is looking into more missing cases and he might eventually get the death penalty. The M. E. identifies more victims and vows to identify the rest.
Law & Order: SVU stars Mariska Hargitay, Ice T, Kelli Giddish and Peter Scanavino. New episodes air Thursdays at 9 p.m. on NBC.
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