A teenage girl disappears while on a high school class trip to New York City. The case is investigated collectively by Eames, Goren, Logan, and Barek. They determine that the girl was probably lured away from her class and then murdered by a boy named Ethan Garrett, who maintains a web site that documents the seedy exploits of his group, who model themselves on Frank Sinatra and his "Rat Pack." It also turns out that Garrett was the suspect in the abduction and murder of another girl whose family had just moved to the NYC area.

There is a complication: Ethan Garrett's father is a powerful local judge, Harold Garrett. Garrett warns his son repeatedly to keep quiet about the incident, that things will go away if no body turns up. But a body does turn up: Tianna, the local girl that Garrett had previously murdered.

The investigation turns to Judge Garrett, who apparently shared in his son's sex life and most likely was even the boy's mentor and partner in crime. Meanwhile, the body of the original girl is recovered in a salt marsh near Ethan Garrett's childhood home. The detectives suspect that since the young Ethan's dog had gotten lost in the salt marshes and had quickly decomposed, he stashed the body there in hopes that it, too, would quickly disappear.

When the cops bring the heat on Judge Garrett, he strikes back: he arranges for a series of excessive-force complaints to be brought against Logan, and he sends a private investigator to Goren's mother's pyschiatric hospital, to dig up dirt on Goren. This sends her into a pyschotic episode. Furious, Goren confronts Judge Garrett and forces him to admit that he had sex with the "field trip girl" that his son brought home. But because of his poor health, it is impossible that Garrett Sr. could have taken the body to the marshes by himself. It must have been the son.

But in the end, Goren realizes the truth: Mrs. Garrett killed the girl and took her body to the marshes. She was desperate to protect her son from his father's terrible influence and guilty that she'd let her son slip so far. She admits to the crime and agrees to plead guilty.

This should be listed as an episode, not a movie. NBC views it as a 2-hour episode whose initial premier only was a movie event.

And it's too much of a pain in the arse to move. :P

I thought Colm Meaney played the judge very well. I wasn't used to seeing him play such a bad character after all those years of playing O'Brien.