COLLATERAL DAMAGE

Summary: A young girl is found right in front of Benson's appartment - brutally raped and beaten within an inch of her life. While the unknown teenager is lying in a coma, the SVU squad is searching for clues on her identity. Finding out who she is, though, is just the beginning of a puzzle with more than one solution. Benson and her colleagues have to untangle a threat that is much more than they bargained for: domestic abuse, school intigues and peer pressure pair up with much darker secrets.

PROLOGUE

"Baby, c'mon!"

"No, please…"

"Don't be like this, baby!"

"Stop it! I really don't…"

The muffled conversation she overheard had a familiar sequence for Olivia Benson. Quickly, she turned her head left and right to see where the voices came from.

At the corner of the house, right under a streetlight, she saw a young woman and her male companion discussing. They were so caught up in their conversation that they didn't even notice the police officer.

"Please, baby!"

"No!" The woman said, her voice sounding confident and relentless as she went on: "I won't have another dinner with your devil of a mother! She hates me, and she doesn't even try to hide her feelings. So why should I?" She walked towards Olivia, obviously intending to also enter the apartment building, and paid no attention to her boyfriend.

Olivia felt a rush of relief running down her spine and started to search her purse for her keys.

"Oh my God! Oh my God!"

"What is it?" Olivia immediately reached down to her belt, drawing her weapon, as she hurried down the stairs to the building and ran to the young woman, who had stopped at the middle of the pavement. Her boyfriend, too, had joined her.

"There… There!" She pointed at something lying in the bushes by the house.

In the sparsely lightened darkness, Olivia could make out a body.

"There's blood," the woman said in a quiet, shaky voice and pressed her hand against her mouth. "There's blood. I stepped into a poodle of… of something, and when I checked it, I saw it was blood!"

Acting routinely, Olivia took a small torch out of her bag. A pale, bloody face appeared in the middle of the light cone. "Call an ambulance," Olivia told the young man. "And 911."

"Jane Doe. Hard to say how old she is. Young teen," one policeman reported as he hurried to follow Elliot Stabler through the ER.

At the end of a hallway, Stabler caught sight of his partner, Olivia Benson. A serene smile appeared on his face for a few seconds, but it was gone again when Olivia turned around and faced him.

"How is the victim?" he asked, not wasting any time on formalities like helloes.

"She's still in the OR," said Olivia. "Someone beat her down and raped her several times."

"Right there in front of your apartment building?" Stabler asked, knitting his brow.

"Probably not. Maybe he dumped her there. It was close to midnight when we found her and it's a quiet neighbourhood. Or she walked there on her own and collapsed."

"That would mean she knows someone who lives near," he concluded. "How well do you know your neighbours?"

"I've just moved in last week. I have no clue who lives under the same roof as I do."

"You haven't seen her before?"

"No, I didn't." For a moment, a knew thought came up in her mind: A young girl – barely more than a child – had been found almost dead, left on the street to die. Naturally, she had come across many perverted, ruthless monsters that had been capable of doing much worse things. It was a part of her life, but that didn't mean it could leave her unmoved. Her throat was laced up by anger for a few heartbeats, and she balled her hands into fists. People always thought it was Stabler who was too hot-heated and acted to impulsively, but inside of her, too, was a deep hatred and the longing to make those cowards suffer who took advantage of the weak.

"Excuse me, are you from the police?" A blonde woman in her mid-forties in a grey costume had approached and catapulted Olivia out of her thoughts.

The tension in her muscles eased, and she replied: "I'm Detective Olivia Benson, and this is my partner, Elliot Stabler. We're from the Special Victims Unit."

"I'm Doctor Isabelle Norrison," the stranger introduced herself, "I just talked to my colleagues. The girl is out of the O.R. now."

"Can we talk to her?" Elliot asked.

"I fear that won't be possible. She's seriously injured. We could stop the bleeding in her brain, but the wound is still swelling and imposes pressure onto the inner side of her skull. The pain would be too much, so we had to put her into an artificial coma. She also has a broken cheekbone, three broken rips, a fractured cheekbone and severe wound on her outer and inner genitals." The confident doctor bit her bottom lip – and atypical gesture for a woman like her, Olivia thought, before she continued: "And that's just the new wounds." Her eyes got glassy as she said that, and the detectives both sensed that this case had hit a sensitive spot in Dr. Norrison.

"Only the new wounds?" Olivia repeated softly.

"The X-rays show several healed fractures." She raised the chart she had been holding during their conversation. "On her right upper arm and all fingers of the right hand, broken in a straight line as if they had been trapped in a door and her left ankle has been fixed with a surgical nail. There are also scars on her back."

"So someone has been abusing the kid for some time," Elliot said.

"Someone close to her. A relative or caretaker, perhaps," Olivia went on. "And when she didn't want to play along anymore, he wanted to end it his way."

"Are there any clues on her identity?" he asked the doctor.

"She's about fourteen or fifteen, it's hard to tell. But beside that, I can't help you. She was virtually nude when she was found."

Olivia glanced at her watch: half past five in the morning. "We can start asking people in the neighbourhood about her in a few hours." There was nothing else they could do right now.