Chapter 2

"I just don't get it. Who the hell is she?" Elliot tossed the paperwork he'd been going through disgustedly on his desk. It's like Lynn Baker doesn't exist."

"Maybe she's on the run from her abuser - a parent, a husband maybe," Olivia guessed.

Her words made sense to Elliot. He nodded. "And the diner hoods? You think that's related?"

She looked thoughtful. "Could be. Revenge? Punishment? It seems like an awfully brutal and public attack for a stranger opportunity rape. The guy went right for her - didn't bother either of the two women customers."

Elliot nodded. "Maybe that's why she wouldn't talk about it. Protecting the creep, even after what he did to her. You know, sometimes I just don't get women."

Olivia looked sharply at him with the "you better shut the hell up now" look that he'd come to know quite well after all the years they'd worked together. She should really trademark the thing, he thought, taking a swig of coffee that was growing cold in his cup.

The sketches of the perps made from the witness descriptions had so far come to nothing, and forensics was still running the physical evidence, although nothing much had turned up.

Stabler had to report their lack of progress to their boss, which hadn't gone all that well either, he thought ruefully. A further discussion with Carelli hadn't shed much light, other than that Lynn had only worked at the diner a few months, she was quiet, did an adequate job, and wasn't particularly friendly with any of the staff or patrons.

"She's always been sort of… odd, I guess you could say," Dino Carelli said, looking like he'd been trying to come up with the right word to describe Lynn. "Quiet. But not meek - she definitely wasn't taking any shit off anyone. She never did get chummy with anybody in the place, even Janey, who's a sweetheart. She just kept to herself. Didn't ever have any friends or family that I saw…"

The Janey in question turned out to be another waitress, an older woman, who wasn't working the night of the robbery. The robbery and assault had obviously hit her hard. She was more than happy to tell the police what she knew, even though it wasn't much. "The only thing Lynn ever told me personal about herself is that she was from Chicago." she said, sniffling a little bit, a tissue clutched in a pale wrinkled hand. "She didn't talk much. Just went outside and smoked on her breaks." She asserted that she had never seen Lynn with anyone, man or woman, heard her talk about anyone, or heard her talk to anyone, other than for her job.

"Did she seem afraid of anything?"

Janey thought for a while, frowning. "She was never scared to work late, I know that. It was great for me because I didn't have to work 'til closing anymore. She'd leave at midnight or one am, bold as brass, just walking down the street all by herself - in this neighborhood! Dino offered to walk her once but she laughed at him."

Didn't sound like someone who was hiding from a psycho husband or stalker, Elliot thought, frowning. Baker continued to be a mystery.

"You know, there was one time she did seem kind of nervous," the older woman said, pursing her lips looking as if she was weighing the decision whether or not to say anything.

"When was that, Ma'am?"

"A couple of your fellows - policemen - in uniforms, though, came into the diner for some coffee one night. Lynn told me she wasn't feeling well and had to use the ladies room. Asked me to serve them even though she usually handled the booths. She didn't come back until after they'd left."

"Did she say anything afterward?"

"No, and I didn't ask. Poor thing did look a bit ill - very pale. This was shortly after she'd started and I didn't want to make trouble for her, so I just forgot about it. I don't know for sure it was because of the policemen. She might have just felt sick."

"Did it ever happen again?" Benson asked.

"No."

"How often do you get cops in the diner?" Stabler asked.

"Oh, not usually. They're normally smart enough to stay out of the place." She chuckled a bit. "Not that Dino doesn't do a fair meatball hero once in a while."

Having seen the diner, Stabler thought it'd be a pretty desperate beat cop to want to spend his dinner break in that place.

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"That kind of blows the running away from a husband or boyfriend theory," Benson said later when they were going over witness statements. "If she was afraid of the uniforms, that's something else. Sounds like she might be in some kind of trouble." She asked Munch to run Lynn's name and description through outstanding warrants.

The computer search turned up nothing that looked likely, however. The description of the diner assailants remained un-useful as well. Stabler knew that he and Benson were going nowhere fast with the case.

"Detective Stabler?"

He looked up from his paperwork to see a woman from Crime Scene. "Yeah?"

"I got the fingerprint results back."

"Finally. Anything interesting?"

"Well, there were a lot of hits from the offender database. But it's a public diner in a bad part of town. A lot of people have been in there, and, well, you saw it - who knows how long it's been since they've cleaned up the place. Some of these prints could be from ages ago." She handed him a long list.

He looked at the paper. Long was a bit of an understatement. A lot of arrests for petty theft, shoplifting, vagrancy, that sort of thing. A few for more violent crimes - assault, weapons violations. Most of these would just be the clientele that such a greasy spoon would attract. But they'd have to check them all out. Elliot wasn't looking forward to slogging around the city tracking down a hundred lowlifes who probably just stopped in the diner for coffee or a doughnut one morning. But that was the job. With luck, one of those lowlifes would turn out to be the doer. He'd learned a long time ago that anything was possible.

"Thanks. We'll get on these." he set the list down on his desk, wondering how many of these names he could pawn off on Munch and Fin.

"Uh, there's something else." The woman said, hesitantly.

He looked up at the perky brunette in the Crime Scene jacket. Childers, he reminded himself of her name. She was relatively new, he recalled, transferred in from some other city. He'd heard that she did her job well - very professional. He also remembered, a bit uncomfortably, that Olivia had once told him that the new CSU officer was single. Not a true attempt at a fix-up, he knew, just that sort of statement put out there to gauge his interest - whether he was getting on with his life again or not after signing his divorce papers.

"Uh huh?" he asked.

"I, uh, got a hit on a missing kid."

"What?"

"On some prints from the diner." Her face turned a bit red. "Well, it isn't procedure, but I… I always run unknown prints through the missing child database."

"You do?"

"Uh, yeah. It hasn't ever turned anything up. I guess I just always think that maybe one day…" She trailed off.

He looked at her, knowing there was more to this story, and that she wanted to tell it. She had bright blue eyes, he noticed, that contrasted with the dark brown of her hair, which was about the same color as Olivia's.

"My sister disappeared when she was twelve," the woman said, blinking. "We never heard from her again. I mean, I know it's a long-shot. I just figure that maybe one day I'd find her. Or turn up some other missing kid." Her eyes were sad. "I know what it's like to wonder. So I always run the prints. Just in case."

He nodded. "It's a good idea."

"It's a waste of time and resources." She looked guilty at this - spending time and money on something that was so personal. "It's never turned anything up." She shook her head.

"Looks like it did today," he said, taking the piece of paper, scanning it. "Theresa Conner, Age 6, reported missing from Oak Park Illinois, June 8, 1996."

Almost ten years ago, he thought, calculating in his head. That would make her about sixteen today. Why might she be at the diner? Runaways ended up in New York City all the time, but she'd only been six when she'd gone missing.

It was looking like the diner robbery and rape case was growing cold, with an uncooperative missing victim and no leads on the perps, but this, at least there was a chance for something good to come out of this mess of a case, Elliot thought. He asked Munch to find whatever he could about the missing child case.

It was Olivia who first made the connection. "Oak Park."

He looked up, eyebrows raised inquiringly.

"I think that's a suburb of Chicago. And Janey told us that Lynn said she was from Chicago."

Stabler thought a while. "But she'd be sixteen years old. Lynn looked older than that. Twenty or more, I'd guess."

Benson pursed her lips. "But we can't be sure. She could look older. What if Lynn is Theresa? Her parents are probably still looking for her."

Munch's call to the Oak Park police precinct resulted in a blurry fax of a cherubic six-year old girl in jeans and a t-shirt. Stabler and Benson looked closely at it.

"What do you think?" she asked. "I didn't get a close look at her that night. Could it be her?"

Cops get pretty good at recognizing people from photographs, even old ones, and Stabler had been a cop a long time, but he couldn't be sure. Kids changed so much growing up. Brown hair, he saw on the description, might be the same shade. The girl in the photo was plump, though, a far cry from the angular woman he'd interviewed. Still, there was something about the nose that seemed familiar. "I don't know. Could be."

"They'll be emailing us a better picture. Maybe we can have the sketch artist age it."

He squinted again at the black and white photo and the missing child report that had also been faxed. "Went missing at a city park. No real leads. Nobody saw anything. Nobody heard a word. Suspected stranger abduction."

A call to the lead detective on the case, who was luckily available, yielded nothing substantial. "To tell the truth, we expected her body to turn up in a ditch somewhere - just had that feeling, you know? But it never did." Detective Osterweiss said in his bland Midwestern accent.

"You like anybody for it?" Stabler asked.

"Nope," he replied. "We checked out all known sex offenders in the area, looked at anybody we could think of who had access to the kid - teachers, delivery men, neighbors. Big fat goose egg. No evidence, no leads."

"How about the father or another relative?"

"Mom said the father was out of the picture. Said they didn't have any other relatives."

"How is the Mom? Still holding out hope?" Stabler asked.

"I don't know. It's strange. She left town a while after Terri disappeared. We haven't heard from her since."

That's unusual, Elliot thought. Very unusual. Normally the families of kidnapped kids stayed put - as if the kids might someday remember where they lived and show up at the front door. "Sounds like maybe the mom's the doer. You guys consider that possibility?"

"Yeah, we looked at her. She had an alibi - was with some other moms in the park when the kid vanished. And I got the feeling she really cared abut the kid."

"But she left town."

"Yes, but she told us about it. I talked to her around the time she was leaving. Said she couldn't take the memories of the place -" the detective said, "driving past the park every day, having everyone stare at her in the supermarket… She gave us a forwarding address."

He gave Elliot the address they had for Mrs. Julia Connor - in a place called Racine, Wisconsin, although he warned him that the occasional case updates he sent her had started coming back marked No Forwarding a long time ago.