The long-running crime drama continues its 14th series. In this week’s episode, an elderly woman is found murdered in her apartment. Suspects include a Nazi war criminal who stands to gain from her death and a record producer who promotes racist music.

When 78-year-old Leah Glaser is found dead in her apartment, the broken security chain on her door indicates that she may be the latest victim of a spate of ‘push-in’ robberies. Detectives Briscoe and Green obtain the details of these attacks, and interview Stan Wallace, an elderly man who tells them that he was robbed by a Latino man who barged into his flat and held a gun to his head. Wallace’s testimony leads the detectives to the home of Pauline Morris, an employee of a homecare agency that cared for five of the robbery victims – where they find a telescope stolen from Stan Wallace. “This is a pretty good scam,” says Green. “You help out the elderly, and then you help yourself to their things?” Morris denies having anything to do with the robberies, but acknowledges that her ex-con fiancé, Joe Vasquez, might know more.

Ambulance driver Vasquez has an alibi for the time of Leah Glaser’s murder, but his colleague admits that he took the victim to a meeting downtown. Leah’s daughter tells the detectives that her mother was a Holocaust survivor who was working on her Shoah testimony – a videotaped account of her wartime experiences, designed to contribute to a record of what happened during the Holocaust. “She should come through all that – and then die in some stupid hold-up?” she asks, tearfully.

It also emerges that Leah had been working with the Office of Special Investigations, which handles cases relating to war crimes. Leah was a witness in a deportation hearing regarding Stefan Anders, a German national who emigrated to the United States in 1948.

Now living in Manhattan, Anders was the SS officer in charge of the camp where Leah was a slave labourer – and is accused of murdering six prisoners in front of her. Without Leah’s testimony, explains the OSI officer, “he’s gonna die in that nice soft bed on East 91st Street.” The fact that Anders had a sizeable motive for wanting Leah dead enables the police to search his home – much to the satisfaction of the OSI.

Anders tells the police that he had nothing to do with Leah’s death. “Search all you want,” he says. “I’m not hiding anything.” However, it looks like he is lying when officers find a locket belonging to Leah Glaser – but Anders claims that somebody sent him the necklace in the post. He also denies the war crime allegation, insisting: “I never harmed a prisoner. Not one. Not ever.” Later, Dan Jensen, Anders’s high-powered lawyer, points out that his client did not need Leah dead – the revelation that he was an SS officer, which he lied about when he arrived in the US, is enough to get him deported.

One element of the case strikes ADAs McCoy and Southerlyn as a little strange: how can a retired mechanic like Anders afford the expensive Jensen? It emerges that Heritage Records, a record company which prides itself on its incendiary, white-supremacist output, has been raising funds to help Anders remain in the country. The Heritage website goes so far as to describe Anders as “an innocent man targeted by Zionist opportunists”.

When the prints of Heritage producer Kyle Mellors (Logan Marshall-Green, ‘The OC’, ‘24’) are found in Leah’s apartment, the detectives find themselves with two suspects. “You’re going down, Mr Mellors,” promises McCoy. “And your hero’s going with you.” But is there enough evidence to imprison both men?