Chapter 33: Knowledge
"I guess I shouldn't be surprised to find you here," Fin Tutuola drawled.
"I was in the neighborhood." Reese shrugged. "Just a concerned citizen."
"Two concerned citizens," Shaw said, coming up behind Fin where they all stood half in shadow at the far end of the alley. "Couldn't expect us to let this go on."
As Fin switched his attention to Shaw, Reese reached into his pocket quickly, tapped out a sequence of numbers, force-pairing his phone with the stocky SVU detective. He had no interest in the man's phone conversations, or his life; but he wanted to be able to hear the interrogation of the playboy the SVU's uniforms had just taken out in handcuffs.
"…and while you're talking to him, talk to the other guy who mysteriously turned up on your doorstep bout a week ago. The one the little boy called 'Unchi'. The little girl, Sasha, in there, said they were all brought over in the same 'box on a ship' by a man they called 'Unchi'. If this is the same one, then Unchi isn't just a small-time smuggler and trafficker, he's in it up to his eyeballs and he could have some valuable info on the identity of the next higher up in the Russian organization—and maybe HR as well," Shaw finished.
"Good thinking," Fin nodded approvingly. "Okay. Thanks for the info." He turned, started to walk toward the waiting cluster of police cars, ambulances and fire trucks, then stopped and turned. "Hey."
Reese and Shaw paused in the act of getting into John's GTO, turned. "Tell my homegirl if she keeps walkin' round with that silly grin on her face she's had since that incident with Walker, she ain't gonna intimidate nobody," but he was grinning too. "I ain't never seen her that happy before and I know it's you." And he headed off back down the alley.
Shaw raised an eyebrow as she looked at Reese over the top of the car. "Come to think of it, I have noticed she's smiling even more than usual. For her, at least." Then a sly smile crossed her face. "Come to think of it, so have you."
"Get in the car, Shaw."
She got in, but he wasn't off the hook yet. Not by a long shot. She'd been seeing this coming for months, now. The morning that Harold had called her to ask her to drop by Joss's apartment and checkup on the patch job that John did on her back, she'd seen him standing shoeless in Joss's kitchen. And then when he'd immediately laid into Joss about having been stupid the night before—which Shaw agreed with. She hadn't seen a need to say anything to Joss; John would say everything Sam would have thought of. And more.
And when she'd seen John and Joss come back from the Catskills two weeks ago, something had changed between them. She was furious with Walker for what he'd done; but she was also a little bit glad that he'd been the catalyst that brought John and Joss together. She'd never been in love, thank goodness—never wanted to be, either; but John and Joss were both good people, and they deserved each other. She genuinely liked Joss, and her son was pretty cool, and she had a calming, balancing effect on John and Harold—which alone would have endeared her to Shaw even if she hadn't personally known the detective.
When Harold had called her to ask her to clear her schedule last night, she'd suspected something was up. "Is John on standby, too?" she'd asked, apparently casually, but Harold knew her better than that, damn him.
He'd replied with "John is going to be busy tonight. So is Joss. You don't want to interrupt." His choice of words had confirmed her suspicions, and after she'd gotten off the phone with him, she'd ordered one last drink at the bar she'd been in and silently drank it to them. And then, this morning, when John came in to the Library, she'd noticed his body had a lot less tension in it—but his subject matter, and the pacing he'd done, told her what she wanted to know about the evening—and that Joss had let enough of her guard down to have a heart-to-heart chat with John. And that reminded her…"So are you gonna go hunt down Paul Carter?"
"No." John bit the word off.
"Want me to?"
He didn't answer her; instead, he changed the subject. "Finch said you were the one who told him about the Guardians."
"Yep." She knew what he meant by this particular comment, but she was damn well going to make him work for the information he wanted. After all, he was making her work for the information she wanted. It was only fair.
"He said Abernathy said that you and he haven't always been on the same side. Then you responded back that you haven't exactly been enemies either." He turned serious eyes on Sam. "I—we—may need some help before we finally put HR out of business permanently. And with the Russians and HR on the same side—back to where they were before Joss tried to start a war between their organizations—we may need some serious help. The kind with heavy firepower. It couldn't help to have them on our side. So if this is something that you wouldn't mind telling me, Sam, I'd really like to know."
She thought about that for a long moment. Yes, she could see what he was talking about—and he, too, had been suspecting that they weren't going to take down HR's army by themselves. And especially not Joss, by herself. Sam couldn't imagine any way in which that scenario would happen without someone—namely Joss—being murdered.
And that would kill John. And Harold, too.
So. "About two years ago I was sitting at the bar in a diner having dinner when a man came in with a wife and a teenaged son. Looked like the perfect family, but there was something else going on. The boy was too tense, the mother was limping a little." She closed her eyes, leaned her head back against the passenger at headrest, remembering. "They had a discussion at their table. Sounded innocent. It got intense. Next thing I know the guy's screaming at her, and the boy looked terrified. And then he hits her, right there in the middle of the restaurant." She saw John's knuckles whiten on the steering wheel. "Yeah. I had the same reaction. I walked over there and caught his arm before he could hit her again. Told him to pick on someone his own size." She grinned grimly. "I was all ready to teach him a thing or two if he took a swing at me there. Unfortunately for me, and for his wife, he didn't. He took her and his boy out of the restaurant.
"I followed them to a house on the upper west side. Nice place. Lots of money. Didn't help the people living in it. Boy ran out of the house to his friend's place ten seconds after they got home, and shortly thereafter the wife comes hurtling bodily through the front window." She stared out the window at the dark streets passing. "Her name was Lynne Farr. I picked her up. Got her out. Took her to my apartment. Bandaged her up, told her she could do a lot better than that, if not for herself, then for her son. She said she didn't have anywhere to go. I gave her my apartment, told her to stay there until she could find another place. Next morning, she went to a divorce lawyer and filed for a divorce. That afternoon she picked her son up from school and took him there, told him to stay there while she went to get their things from their house." A hard swallow, an instant, almost instinctive lockdown of her emotions, an instinct that barely needed conscious thought. "She never came back."
"He killed her."
She nodded, taking a quick surreptitious swipe across her eyes and hoping John wouldn't notice. "Strangled her, threw her in her car, drove to a lake. Buckled her body into the seat and put the car in drive. The cops found out she was murdered, of course. He wasn't smart enough to really make it look like a convincing accident. Suspicion fell on him. He was arrested the next day, and the boy went into foster care. I was trying to keep an eye on him when it came out that he had a biological mother living in Western New York. A half-Iroquois, half-Asian biological mother."
John's head snapped around so fast she wondered if his neck was going to hurt later. "Yes. Cam Arlington. See, when she was a child captive living there with her Aunt and Uncle, she got pregnant by one of the pedophiles. They starved and beat her until she miscarried, then called an unscrupulous doctor to excise her ovaries so she would never get pregnant again. The doctor, Peter Cromwell, sold her eggs to an egg donor bank. When Lynne and Brian Farr found out early on in their marriage that Lynne's eggs were defective and she couldn't get pregnant, they went to that egg bank and picked out a donor. The eggs happened to be Cam Arlington's, and they had one child out of that; Brian Farr Jr.
"He was about five when it came out that Cam's eggs had been sold to a fertility clinic. Olivia Benson—she was a Detective then—went to let Lynne know how the egg her son came from had gotten to the donor bank; Brian Farr Senior didn't want Cam to have any contact. He made that clear. She respected that wish, then years later when Senior killed Lynn and the State was trying to find out where to place young Brian until his father's trial, they took him to his biological mother.
"Brian Farr Senior skipped bail here. Went out to Arlington's place, kidnapped Brian Junior and one of his friends, the daughter of one of the Guardians' other members. Spunky little redhead named Erin O'Hara. I followed him from New York City out to Arlington's place, fully intending to kill him. The Guardians, however, were also hunting for him. He'd kidnapped two of their children, after all." She shrugged. "I wanted to kill him. Preferably hands-on, very slowly. They didn't agree."
"So you both were looking for Justice. Just didn't see eye-to-eye on how you wanted that justice dispensed." John couldn't hide the smile. "So that's what Abernathy meant when he said that you haven't always agreed, but you've never been enemies."
"Yes. I consider Cam Arlington a friend, even though we don't see much of each other, don't talk as much. She has her hands full with her property, her business—she makes and sells traditional Native American clothing and musical instruments—and the various members of the Guardians send their kids up to her every summer for a kind of camp—she takes Abernathy and Benson's son Auggie as well as Warrant Officer Hart-Burnett's and Faireborn's daughter Marissa, and there are a couple more members out on the West Coast—the O'Haras—who have a pair of redheaded twins, Erin and Evan, that come east for winters and summers. Last I heard Brian changed his last name to Arlington, like his mother's, and he was planning on joining the military. Third generation in his family to do so. Cam's so proud of him."
"So that's how you know the Guardians."
"Yes." She looked at him. "I trust them completely—the same way I trust you and Harold."
John nodded. "I see why." They drove in silence for a time. "She's been through a lot, hasn't she."
Sam didn't even have to ask who he meant. "Yes, she has. And she still remains, essentially, a good person. She does have a dark side—I'll wager she really did want to punch Walker's ticket, even though her conscience would have bugged her later—but you solved that dilemma."
John shook his head. "If I'd known what you just told me back there on the mountain, I would have let her. Irregardless of what Joss might have wanted."
And that reminded Sam of the beginning of that conversation. She ostentatiously pulled one of her knives and made a show of checking under her nails. "So that brings me back to my original question—do you want me to pay Paul Carter a visit?" She flicked the knife tip along the curve of one nail. "What he did and what he said to Joss isn't any different than what Brian Farr did to Lynne. Except he didn't kill her. But that's only because she had enough sense to get out before it got to that point."
"If she had stayed do you think he would have?" John's voice was very quiet.
"Yes. Absolutely." Sam didn't even have to think. "That's the way the story always ends. Blood and death." John nearly choked as a sudden image of Jessica, dead in a fight with Peter Arndt, flashed through his mind's eye. Blood and death.
"She has a scar on the side of her head." His voice was so quiet Sam had to strain to hear. "She said he threw a vase, it broke on the floor, and she slipped on the rug and fell on a piece of it that cut her head. Finch found a hospital record of Joss getting stitches on her scalp—the night before she went to a divorce lawyer."
"Slipped on the rug? Lamest excuse in the book." Sam snorted. "Don't tell me you fell for that story."
"She said she would never lie to me. About anything that concerned her safety, Taylor's safety, or anything I needed to know."
Sam rolled her eyes. "John, think about it, okay? Is your knowing whether she slipped on a rug and cut her head, or knowing if he threw it at her or broke it over her head, going to make any difference in her safety now?"
A pause. Then, quietly, "No."
"Is knowing the truth going to make any difference in Taylor's safety now? Remember he's seventeen years old and he plays sports."
A pause. "No."
"So do you think she's going to tell you the truth, knowing that it's going to make you want to confront her ex-husband?"
He didn't answer her. He didn't have to; his silence was answer enough.
"Depending on how long ago it happened, you could always ask Taylor. He really likes you. He'd tell you."
"I don't know. He loves his father."
"He loves his mother more. In case you haven't noticed, his loyalties lie entirely with her. He likes his Dad, he loves his Mom. I don't think you're going to have a problem getting him to tell you the truth."
John drove in silence for a while.
What Sam said made sense; he hadn't thought about it, but knowing what had happened that night so long ago, what had finally driven Joss to file for a divorce, wasn't going to make a difference in hers or Taylor's safety now, and it wasn't something that she would feel he needed to know. Especially not if it meant that he would get even more upset with her ex-husband—she had to know he was upset at what she'd told him this morning—than he already was.
He wanted to be upset with her for lying to him—or at least telling him an edited half-truth—but he also knew that that was just the kind of woman she was, and he was not going to change that. And this was the woman he'd fallen in love with, and he didn't want to change anything about her. She was perfect the way she was.
He was just going to have to figure out ways to find out things she didn't want him to know. And, as he'd already seen with the state of her finances, Taylor was the next closest ready source of information. He didn't have a problem with pumping the boy for information if it would help in the end, and Taylor hadn't seemed to mind talking to John about things that most people would think went out of the boundaries of a normal relationship.
Not that what he and Joss had was a 'normal' relationship, in any sense of the word…
"I take it from the radio chatter that you two had a successful evening," Finch said dryly. "A huge bust of ten pedophiles, four dead, the ringleader, and four child sex slaves trafficked into the country. The media is going wild."
"There were others in that room. Couldn't cover them all. Had to protect the kids. I remember some of them, Harold, so I'm going to need your help identifying them so we can hunt them down, one by one." Sam said laconically.
"I thought you would want to do something like that, so I took the liberty of isolating and capturing surveillance video footage from a camera near the scene. It's good enough quality that identifying the persons escaping won't be too much of a challenge."
"Good. " John dug his phone out of his pocket. "I force-paired this one with the SVU Detective, Fin Tutuola's. Want to listen in when he interviews 'Unchi' from the alleyway by the market. I don't know if he'll do it tonight; let me know if he does."
"Where are you going?" Harold twisted in his seat.
John grinned. "Joss is working late tonight. I'm going to take the time to get acquainted with Taylor."