‘Law & Order: SVU’: Olivia Benson Tracks Down the Truth Behind a Missing Teen, and It’s Disturbing

Get ready for a gut punch of an episode as this week’s Law & Order: SVU follows Captain Olivia Benson diving deep into a broken child protective system to track down the truth about how — and why — a young man went missing. And did I mention he might be a murderer? Spoiler-filled recap ahead for Law & Order: SVU Season 26, Episode 10 “Master Key”.

We start the episode simply enough — a teenage boy named Anthony has gone missing from his group home – and his roommate saw him getting into a car with this man we later find out is named Colin Clark. Luckily for the police, Anthony is on probation, so he’s got an ankle monitor they’re able to track to a restaurant, but it turns out that Colin cut off Anthony’s monitor before they ultimately fled to a motel.

If you think you know where this case is going, no you don’t. Because when police raid the motel, they find Colin shot dead in the motel bed. And Anthony is in the next room holding a gun.

Anthony insists he was abducted by Colin and assaulted, which led to him shooting his attacker in self-defense while he was asleep, but things are starting to look weird. The evidence isn’t lining up when police find video footage of Anthony going with Colin willingly when he picks him up outside the group home, and the angle of the bullet wound on Colin indicates his body had been moved from a defensive kneeling position. And what is going on with this unidentified partial print on the gun? And why does Anthony seem so scared to tell the truth?

It’s up to Detectives Bruno, Velasco and Silva to start looking into Anthony’s past, and they learn that he landed in the foster system early and has ended up being one of those kids who never catches a break. He really seems to have fallen through the cracks of CPS, as he’s abused at his foster home and shuffled around until he finally ends up on probation in the group home after punching a kid at school.

Luckily, the detectives hear that he’s got a social worker named Michael who has really been looking out for him. But Michael is giving me bad vibes immediately, and the detectives aren’t shocked to find his fingerprint is the partial found on the gun.

Michael claims Anthony called him from the motel asking for help, and when he got there, he saw him in bed with Colin. He says Colin then got mad and there was a struggle for the gun — which went off with Anthony’s finger on the trigger. But Benson and ADA Carisi think he’s full of it.

They really need the truth from Anthony, and while the teen does confess he had planned to run away from his group home from Colin, he can’t come clean about what Michael was really doing there in the motel room. Benson tries to tell Anthony that this is his chance to have a real life, but Anthony doesn’t want to hear it.

It’s down to the SVU to get some hard evidence to close this case, and that evidence comes after tracking down some weird phone numbers in Anthony’s phone. It all leads to a Craiglist ad for Anthony’s services that’s connected to Michael’s phone. Benson realizes that Michael wasn’t just trafficking Anthony under the guise of a friendly CPS worker, he was trafficking dozens of kids under his care.

It’s his concern for those kids that convinces Anthony to tell the police the truth. He confesses that he first met Colin as a Craigslist john, but he was nice to him and offered to get the teen help and a fresh start out of town.

Anthony had wanted to escape Michael’s grasp, which is why he punched a classmate at school — he wanted to get an ankle monitor that would protect him from being trafficked anymore. But when his plan to flee town was enacted, and he was in a motel room with Colin, Anthony panicked and called Michael. Michael then forced him to point a gun at Colin, and when he wouldn’t shoot him, Michael used his fingers to press Anthony’s down on the trigger.

Confronted by Anthony’s confession, Michael admits to being at the motel but claims Anthony is a pathological liar — that is until he’s faced with evidence of his own trafficking website. Carisi is sure Michael will cut a deal so Anthony won’t have to testify in court, and it looks like the teen is getting a fresh start at the group home now that he’s freed from his trafficker’s clutches. Having Benson supporting you never hurts either.

This article was adapted from the latest episode of PopCulture Social Call, streaming weekdays on PopCulture.com’s YouTube channel. You can now watch this episode, which is embedded in the above article.

If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, you can contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or go to rainn.org.