Law & Order And SVU Crossover Recap: Benson And Brady Battle Over A Deadly Case Involving Someone From Liv's Past

Fact 1: This week's Law and Order and SVU crossover doesn't end well for someone from Capt. Olivia Benson's past. Fact 2: Det. Elliot Stabler does something very helpful, yet very gross. Fact 3: Benson and Brady do not play nicely for a good chunk of their time together.

Wanna find out how all these facts fit together? Read on for the highlights of Thursday's two-hour event.

At a church shelter, a young Latina woman comforts another. Something bad happened to her, but she doesn't want to talk about it except to say that it happened at "the warehouse." Just then, the shelter is raided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The two women run and evade capture, then split up: Sofia, the one who was asking for details about what happened, says she's going to the warehouse herself. The other woman begs her not to, but Sofia is determined. So they make a plan to meet up at a hostel uptown, and Sofia gives her friend a number to call in case anything happens. When the woman later goes looking for Sofia, she finds her dead body on fire in an oil drum. The woman calls the number — it's Benson's — in a panic.

Liv and Silva go to the scene with Riley, who wonders why anyone would call SVU instead of 911 about a dead body. Liv doesn't have any more details, and the corpse doesn't have any ID; the only thing they find with it is a belt buckle. The address of the warehouse rings a bell for Lt. Brady: She investigated a similar murder there two years before, but the main suspect fled to Mexico, and that was that. "Sounds like your boy might be back in town," Riley says. 

Carlos, the guy in question, is back; Riley and Silva apprehend him and bring him to Brady for questioning, but Maroun and Price point out that they can't charge him with murder without any hard evidence, and video footage later provides an alibi for the time of the new killing: Carlos isn't their guy. As Riley and Silva investigate, they're led to another man who was seen arguing with Sofia outside the fast-food restaurant where she worked. Turns out, that guy is a cop... and so was Sofia. Her real name: Det. Maria Recinos.

As longtime viewers know, Liv first met Maria in Season 7 when Maria was a child who'd been sex-trafficked to a pedophile living in New York. The girl called the police station one night and wound up talking to Liv, who kept her on the phone while the team hustled to try to figure out where she was being held. They eventually were able to rescue Maria after she'd been buried alive; in Season 25, Benson learned that Maria had become a police officer, and the two reconnected.

So the news hits Liv hard when Brady tells her; Benson immediately announces that she's joining the investigation. Maria's supervisor, Lt. Gomez, said he was worried about her and wanted to pull her out, but that she was insistent on staying undercover.

Using a WhatsApp number found with Maria's things, the NYPD sets up a sting in which Bruno, who's in touch with the person on the other end of the WhatsApp number. Turns out the trafficker runs a sex prison, and he's surveilling it, so he knows instantly when Bruno — posing as a john — asks the woman he's set up with about the guy who runs the show. Liv and Brady find the trafficker in an apartment across the street and physically take him down. But he has an alibi — so even though he's definitely the trafficker Maria was investigating, he's not the person who killed her.

Thanks to some old-fashioned police work, the squad finds Ana, the woman Maria was talking to at the shelter in the beginning of the episode. Brady's and Benson's questioning styles vary greatly — Brady is fairly blunt, and Benson is all huggy-soft-voice-let-me-get-you-tea — and the two policewomen have it out during a break in questioning.

"I'm just trying to create an intimate and supportive environment," Benson says. "Well, I'm starting to get the impression that you hold me responsible for Maria's death," Brady shoots back. And while they're bickering in the hallway, Ana bolts — "despite the supportive environment," Brady snarks. The next time they see Ana, she's dead after being strangled at a worksite. But there's DNA on her body, and the guy it came from is in the system, so that's something... right?

Nope. He, too, has an alibi. "The real killer tried to frame him," Baxter surmises. "And he's two steps ahead of us," Brady adds. ("It's Maria's supervisor, Gomez, isn't it?" I write in my notes.)

Gomez and Benson go to the church to talk to the priest who runs the shelter, thinking he may have had something to do with the murders. The father runs when he sees them, and when Liv catches up to her and Gomez, the priest grabs Gomez's gun and accidentally (?) shoots him. Then Gomez shoots the priest, killing him.

"There's something deeply off about Father Alberto's shooting," Benson later tells Brady, using it as justification for why she's having the lab compare DNA in Gomez's blood (from the jacket Liv was wearing that day) to that of semen found in Maria's body. It's a match. And when Benson and Brady go to the hospital to lightly question him, he makes an excuse to end the conversation. Soon after, a strange guy is at Noah's school, telling him to get in his car. When Liv approaches the car with serious WTF? Face, he car speeds away.

There's a lot more investigative work, but Brady and Benson eventually learn that Gomez was raping women at the shelter. They arrest him, and he hires Rita Calhoun as his lawyer. Calhoun presses Liv during her testimony, suggesting that her connection to Maria makes her an unfit witness at the trial. "I have never let my emotions interfere with my police work. Quite the opposite," Benson says. Wait, I thought you were supposed to tell the TRUTH on the stand?

Speaking of the stand: The prosecution's main witness changes her damning testimony against Gomez when one of his thugs — the same guy that was trying to get Noah to get in his car — arrives in court and glares menacingly from the back row. That guy is peeing when Stabler (!) walks into the men's room and steps up to the urinal next to him. He knows exactly who the thug is, and how he's in cahoots with Gomez. Stabler monologues a little bit, then shakes, zips up and bashes the guy up against the wall without washing his hands. Ew. "If you ever go near my friend and her son again, I will take you down. I'll take you apart," he threatens. THEN he steps to the sink to suds up (ha!), threatening Gomez, almost as an afterthought, on his way out the door.

Meanwhile, Benson and Brady get another one of Gomez's rape victims, who'd previously refused to take the stand, to testify. And her testimony is so impassioned, it seals the deal: The jury finds Gomez guilty of multiple counts of rape and murder.

"You really fought for these women," Brady tells Benson later, at a vigil for Gomez's victims. Apparently, beleaguered-female-public-servant-of-a-certain-age game respects game. "So did you," Liv says.  

Now it's your turn. What did you think of the episode? Sound off in the comments!