Soon after a young girl, Laine McAlister, is raped in her apartment building's stairwell, Detectives Olivia Benson and Eliot Stabler meet Laine in the hospital and find her extremely shaken with a large cut on her hand. After an unpleasant exchange with a man she claims is her boyfriend, the detectives become suspicious that she may have fabricated her rape to get attention. Their suspicions grow when she waits to reveal that there was an eyewitness. As the gravity of the situation intensifies, Benson and Stabler find themselves in a race to track down the witness and get a testimony before it is too late.

Detective Olivia Benson and Detective Eliot Stabler are called to the scene of a crime where an investigative journalist has been found dead in her bed with an "X" carved into her cheek. Captain Donald Cragen recognizes the killer's tactics from a similar case thirty years earlier, when the "Bedtime Butcher" murdered five women in the Bronx. The trail leads the detectives to a patrol cop, a jealous ex-lover of the prime suspect, and even sends Benson on a dangerous undercover mission to uncover the truth.