Law & Order: Criminal Intent Episode 7.04 Lonelyville

Writer Noah Brezner is a failure at his career and in his marriage. After being stood up on a date, he is approached by two beautiful women and easily talked into having a three-way with the bombshells. After partying all night with the women in a hotel room in New York's Lower East Side, Noah wakes up to a big surprise: Anya, the stunning blonde, is dead, tied up with erotic Japanese Bondage 'kinbaku' ropes. Worse, Noah finds an incriminating photograph that frames him as the girl's killer.

After Noah disappears, Logan and Falacci arrive on the scene and suspect that an S&M game may have gone a bit too far. The astute Falacci notices that Anya wears real emerald earrings, not your typical accessory for someone with cheap shoes. Surveillance video from the hotel elevator reveals Noah with Anya and another woman, but the third woman's identity is hidden from the detectives' view.

Turning to credit card receipts for the next lead in the case, Logan and Falacci interview Gerry Mitchell, an overweight sad sack whose card was billed for the hotel room the night of the murder. Gerry insists that the credit card must have been stolen, and that he was home playing an online computer game when Anya was killed. Meanwhile, at a local coffee shop, Noah is fidgety and nervous around his girlfriend, Tammy Mills. He wraps a checkbook in some newspaper and leaves it on a nearby table. The mysterious third woman from the opening scene collects the ransom payment.

When M.E. Rodgers reveals that Anya's body had been bruised before her murder, Logan and Falacci realize that she was involved in an abusive relationship. It's also clear from the autopsy that Anya recently gave birth. Someone out there, watching the baby, must have contacted missing persons. The detectives find Anya's good friend Olga, who had indeed been watching Anya's baby. Olga makes a positive ID of the heretofore unidentified body. She confirms that Anya had been in an abusive relationship with her live-in boyfriend, Nikos, and that the couple had fought over Anya's recent computer activity. The detectives arrive at Nikos's Greek Diner and bring him in for questioning.

Nikos is devastated when he sees a photo of Anya's dead body. Though he was abusive, he was not her killer, and he has the alibi to prove it. Nikos was in the back seat of a car with one of his waitresses on the night Anya was killed. When close scrutiny of Anya's computer records reveals she was talking to a man named Chris Sherman, the detectives have another suspect. Chris had met Anya on a website called 'MarriedButSoLonely.com', but after only one date, he had seen enough of her. Someone out there had highjacked his account and was using his email to keep in touch with Anya. Pressing further, Logan and Falacci decide to go to the website and look for a man matching the description of the person they had seen in the hotel surveillance video. They arrive at a profile for 'lonelyman', who turns out to be Noah Brezner. Logan and Falacci go to Noah's home and surprise his wife with the emerald earrings she had been missing. She tells the detectives that Noah keeps a studio in the village and they quickly make their way to see him. After bringing Noah in, he reveals that it was indeed him in the video and that he must have been drugged by a third woman, a brunette. But he insists that he didn't kill Anya. Although Noah points to a bartender who could exculpate him, Logan arrests the writer for murder.

The bartender, Patrick, denies that Noah was involved with any 'mystery brunette'. When the noose starts to tighten on Noah, he blurts out that he was blackmailed by the brunette. He sends the cops to his writing studio to recover the photo that would confirm his blackmail story, but the photo is not where he said it would be. In addition, Logan finds the same natural jute ropes that were used to tie up Anya. Noah, already in a deep hole, had also dipped into his wife's coffers for the $200,000 for which he claimed to be blackmailed. When the detectives bring in Noah's girlfriend Tammy to verify his story, we are surprised to see the mystery brunette, Leanne, as her attorney. Logan and Falacci are not shocked to hear that Tammy does not corroborate Noah's tale. Feeling pressure from the police, financially ruined, and devastated that his girlfriend lied, Noah has run out of options. Alone and betrayed, Noah kills himself at Riker's.

When M.E. Rodgers goes over Noah's autopsy, it's clear that he was anything but a Japanese bondage expert: it took him three tries to hang himself in his prison cell. Suspicion begins to focus on Tammy, Noah's girlfriend, who had recently left her husband and moved to New York to be with a man named "Lee". Upon closer scrutiny of the case's previous suspects, Gerry Mitchell and Chris Sherman, Logan and Falacci reveal that Tammy and her partner seduce married men, videotape them, and then blackmail them. Women were targeted as well: Tammy and her partner videotaped Anya and threatened to go to Nikos with the information, ostensibly forcing her into cooperative prostitution in their scams. When the detectives recall Noah's story that there was a third woman, a brunette, it becomes clear that the bartender, Patrick is also being blackmailed by these women. In fact, Patrick has a blackmail video of his own. The tape reveals his blackmailer, a brunette, is none other than Tammy's lawyer, Leeane. "Lee" is not a man after all, and Tammy's scamming and lesbian relationship with her lawyer has run its course. Preying on Tammy's sympathies for Noah, as well as her quick-to-love sentimentalities, Logan and Falacci expose the women's scheme, flip Tammy against Lee, and charge her with murder.