Sometimes a cigarette burn is just a cigarette burn. There is a correlation between sexual sadism and pyromania; he learned that at a seminar once. The conflation of consummation and conflagration. It is, he thinks, the kinda shit a guy like him shouldn't have in his head. But it is in his head, and he does know, and this is not the first time, or the tenth, or even the hundredth that he has seen fire and sex mixed together. It is not the first, or the tenth, or even the hundredth time he's smelled it. Sometimes he thinks he's never gonna get that smell out of his nose. It is faint, here; this perp, whoever he is, spent a long time with his victim, but not that long. Their location was too public, and sound carries in the dorms. He didn't get as far as maybe he wanted, Fin thinks. The smell is not that strong; it is not as strong as it was that day, that day he knows he's never gonna forget. But sometimes a cigarette burn is just a cigarette burn, and the sun is shining, and the Captain is at the hospital with Rollins. Small mercies.
Phoebe asked him once why he's still with SVU. He isn't called, not like Liv is; he wants to help the victims, of course he does, and he knows how to, after twenty years, but he has no divine right to this job. Not like her. It's just that Special Victims is his home, now, and he doesn't want to leave it. As long as the Captain's there, I'll be there, he told Phoebe. You're still a soldier, aren't you? She'd said to him then, but her voice had been soft. Like she understood. Fin's loyalty isn't to the job; it's to Liv. They have seen too much, suffered too much, and said good-bye too many times to part with one another. When the ship goes down they will go down with it, the Captain and the first mate, standing proudly at the helm while the water rises over their heads. It makes him feel like maybe he's accomplished something.
He flinches when Kat says the victim's name; he misheard it, the first time. Thought it was Livie, and not Libby. It's fine, he tells himself. It's fine.
The perp asked the girl if he should burn her clothes off or cut them, and that makes Olivia's hands shake, just a little.
Someone asked her that, once. It's been a long time, and sometimes she goes months without thinking about it at all, but every now and then they catch a case like this one, and she remembers. The smell of piss and sweat and blood and her own burnt skin. The feeling of his hands on her, the cold metal bars of the bed frame; the sound of his voice, the crack of bone when she hit him. Sometimes, she remembers.
She remembers what came after, too. And a part of her wants to tell Libby that. In a couple of years, you won't even have nightmares about this anymore, Liv wants to tell her. In a couple of years, you'll be able to let a lover touch you without flinching. In a couple of years, he'll be nothing but some scars you can't look at on bad days, and forget about on good ones. Just give it a couple of years. That's not the kind of advice the kid needs to hear, so she keeps it to herself.
Besides, she's got bigger things to worry about. Someone approached Jessie in the park, and gave her their victim's stuffed animal, and Rollins is convinced it's got something to do with Henry Mesner. That's a name Liv isn't gonna forget in a hurry; she can still recall the wine red bruise on Nick's chest from where he'd been shot. Came close, so close, to dying, but he'd been wearing a vest that day. Like Dodds should have been wearing a vest, Liv thinks, and wonders if she's ever gonna forgive herself. They call the detention facility, and sure enough Mesner is out, and it's not a lot to go on, but then it turns out Libby's mother treated the little psycho, and they've got a hit on Libby's credit card, and things are moving, now.
In the car on the drive back to the station her right hand slides under the collar of her blouse, and finds the puckered scars that dot the tender skin just above her heart. Libby will have scars, too, now, in exactly the same place. Exactly the same. Sometimes a cigarette burn is just a cigarette burn, she knows that. But sometimes it isn't.
It's most definitely not fine. The second Keys mentioned the hardware store the hair stood up on the back of Fin's neck. There had been a hardware store, years before. Liv tied up, drugged and drunk and beaten and barely conscious under a tarp in the backseat of a car while her captor bought all sorts of horrifying things, and now this kid is sending a homeless man into one to buy exactly the same shit. Keys says something about a hand torch, and the smell is back in Fin's nostrils. It shouldn't be; he shouldn't smell anything but garbage and sweaty bodies. The smell in his nose isn't real, he tells himself; it's a memory. The broken pieces of Liv's life scattered around an apartment she'd been taken from hours before, the burnt end of a wire hanger sitting on pan by the stove top, the strands of dark hair still wrapped around it, and over all of it, that fucking smell.
"Shit," he says, very softly, as they walk away from Keys.
"What do you think he wants with a hand torch?" Kat asks apprehensively. She's new to SVU; a few more years, and she won't ask questions like that any more. A few more years, and she'll know the answers.
"Kid liked to set fires when he was younger. Played with matches. Maybe he's escalating."
That's not it, a little voice whispers in the back of his mind, and you know it.
"We gotta tell the Cap," he says.
"I'll call her-"
"No." No, this is one phone call that can't come from Kat. "I will."
"It was Keys," Fin tells her over the phone. "Kid gave him money, sent him into a hardware store to pick up some supplies."
Liv's blood runs cold.
"What kind of supplies?"
Fin rattles off the list, but as he gets near the end he hesitates. She hears it; he is not afraid. He's preparing himself.
"He bought a hand torch, Cap."
For a second she can see Lewis, standing by the dresser in the beach house, with the torch in his hand. His feral grin, the unholy light in his eyes. But he's dead, and she knows it, because she walked into the morgue and opened the drawer and looked down into his vacant face, and smiled when she heard the drawer slam shut, knowing that she was walking out of that room, and he never would. The vision fades.
"We don't know," she says, very softly. Fin knows what she means; that's a given. They're thinking the same thing. Thinking maybe he's doing this on purpose. Maybe he's taunting her. Maybe he knows. There's every chance he doesn't, though, and she can't let her team - or herself - get too fixated on any one explanation.
"No, we don't," he says. It sounds to her like he does know, though. Like he knows, like he can feel it in his bones, same as she can, and he's just being merciful, now, letting her hope that she's wrong for as long as that hope will hold out. She's not sure it's a kindness, but she's grateful for it anyway.
They find the girlfriend - who is, Liv thinks, the luckiest, stupidest girl alive - and they go through her phone. There is actual, visceral terror in Amanda when they find the pictures of Jessie. It is a terror Liv feels moments later when their scrolling reveals pictures of Noah. Rollins isn't the only one he's been watching. This kid is out to settle old scores, and he remembers them, and he's been watching, and he has pictures of Noah.
Amanda's girls are with their grandmother, and she rushes off to inform local PD. In her office, Olivia calls Noah's school.
"Is everything ok?" the receptionist asks.
There is a bitter, hysterical laugh lodged in the back of Olivia's throat, but she swallows it down.
It is not the first time she's had a squad car pick Noah up from school and bring him to the station. She wants to pray that it will be the last, but the words won't come. Over the years she has come to believe in God but she wasn't raised with religion and she doesn't feel like she's doing it right, somehow. The memory of Elliot crossing himself at Kathy's graveside flashes behind her closed eyelids; he knows how to pray, she thinks.
There's no time to think about Elliot right now, and so she doesn't. Doesn't think about how badly she wishes he was here, and how grateful she is that he isn't. Elliot doesn't know, not about what happened to her or the scars that are burned into her skin or how she has been changed, and she doesn't want him to. Not now. Maybe not ever.
Finding the girl tied up in the shower is not quite the same as finding the girls Lewis left hanging in closets, but it is close. Henry didn't assault this girl; he has not acted out sexually with any of his victims since Libby. And even with her it was, Liv thinks, almost an afterthought. Almost a necessity. Like he knew it was the only way to put himself on SVU's radar. Henry Mesner is no longer a child, and the victims of his atrocities are not Special Victims. He killed his family, to get back at them for institutionalizing him, for moving on without him. He killed the little boy, Liv thinks, for being the son their father always wanted. Those crimes are heinous, but on their own they would be a job for Homicide. The whole thing would be in someone else's court, were it not for Libby. He had to know that, she thinks. It had to have been intentional. He's had eight years to come up with a plan.
But what is the plan? That's the question. Everything he's done feels like an echo of Lewis's crimes. Not a copycat, not exactly; a message, Liv thinks. He hurt Libby to get back at her mother - but he didn't kill her, and that has to be, Liv thinks, because he wanted her to talk. He wanted them to know exactly what he said to her, exactly what he did to her, and how. The words he said, the burns on Libby's skin, the hardware store, the supplies for binding his victims - none of them have been bound, yet, except the girl in the shower, he must be saving the supplies for later - the hand torch, kidnapping his sister like Lewis kidnapped Amelia. He got their attention, attacking Libby and then using her credit card, giving that toy to Jessie, and then he left them a trail to follow. He wants them to know what he's doing. He wants them to know. Not the NYPD. Olivia and Amanda.
They do know, now.
Amanda and Fin are watching her like they're afraid she's going to shatter at any second, and Kat is watching them all, confused.
"We know what this is, Cap," Fin says, very quietly. Of course it's Fin who says it, she thinks. He doesn't know it, but she knows that he tried to get the whole team to perjure themselves just to cover her ass when Lewis died, and while she's grateful they talked him out of it, she loves him for it.
"We do," she agrees.
"What is this?" Kat asks.
They don't answer her right away, and she crosses her arms over her chest, angry now. These three, they've worked together so long that sometimes it feels to Kat like they're speaking another language. One all their own, colored by the things they've seen, things she doesn't even know about, let alone understand. Everyone's been treating the Captain carefully since this started. At first she thought it was just the pictures of the kids on the phone; Noah is currently sitting in Liv's office with a uniformed officer hovering over him, and he'll be there until this thing is done, but now she thinks that can't be the only thing that's bothering them. The way the team looked when they found that girl hanging in the shower, the expression on Fin's face at the mention of a hand torch; something else is going on here.
"My partner and I were the ones who took point on Henry's case," the Captain tells her. "He shot my partner."
The kid was ten the first time he came across their path, and he shot a fucking cop? The partner must not have died, Kat thinks, or else surely the kid never would have seen daylight again.
"Rollins interviewed him. It looks like he's going after the people he holds responsible for locking him up."
That might explain the pictures of Jessie and Noah on the phone, but it doesn't explain the crimes, not to Kat's satisfaction.
"But he kidnapped his sister," Kat points out. She knows she's being stubborn, but it's still not clicking, and they're all looking at her like they wish she'd just disappear so they don't have to have this conversation. "He hasn't gone near you or Rollins since he gave the stuffed animal to Jessie."
"He's taunting me," the Captain says, very quietly. "What he did to Libby, taking his sister...this is about me."
And Kat doesn't understand that at all, but no one is offering any further explanation, and there's no time to try to drag it out of them.
"So do you know where he's gone?"
"There's two possibilities, Cap," Fin says. And shit, Kat really hates that. From where she's standing there aren't any possibilities, but Fin and Amanda and the Captain, they're three steps ahead of her.
"What did he say to the girl?" Amanda asks.
They've all gone over her brief statement three times, but it's worth looking at it again, and so they do.
"He said they're going down to the water," Fin reads it off his notebook, even though they know it off by heart.
"Could it be he knows where the house is?" Amanda asks.
What fucking house? Kat thinks.
The Captain shakes her head, starts to pace, agitated, rubbing her thumb over her brow the way she does when she's trying not to say exactly what's on her mind.
"Maybe," she says. "The things he knows, he must have gotten his hands on the trial transcripts."
Kat's starting to think she'd like to get her hands on them, too.
"But the house wasn't that close to the water," Fin points out. "The silo was."
"And he took the sister," Amanda adds. "That sounds more like the silo than the house."
Kat understands each of those words individually, but together they form a riddle she can't solve.
"We can't bet it all on one hand," the Captain says. "Call local PD, have them send as many squad cars as they can to the house. They're looking for the car?" Fin and Amanda nod in unison. "Have someone stay with the girl, see if she remembers anything else. I'll go to the silo."
They're tracking this kid every way they can, and it's possible that before they get anywhere they'll get a hit on the car, or someone will spot him, or maybe he'll call in, or maybe he'll use the mother's missing credit card. The Captain doesn't want to wait, though; there's something fierce and half-crazy in her eyes, like she knows exactly where the kid is going, like she's going there too, like she'll run the whole damn way if she has to. Kat knows before anyone speaks that they're gonna try to leave her behind.
"We'll go with you," she says before they can stop her.
The Captain shoots her an appraising look, but doesn't stop her.
Fin's fingers are drumming anxiously on the wheel, and it's about to drive Amanda insane.
They're in one car, Liv and Kat in the other. Liv made them keep their vests on for the drive, and they've picked up some backup, trailing along behind them. By the time they reach the silo, they'll be in a convoy ten cars deep. It doesn't matter though, and Amanda knows it. If Henry is there, there's only one way this is going down, and it doesn't matter how many bodies are standing around at the base of that little ladder. Only one body is gonna go up it.
"We can't let her do this," she says.
"What makes you think we can stop her?"
He's right about that. No force on earth is strong enough to stop Liv when she gets it in her mind to do something.
"Shit," she says, and runs her hand over her face.
The Captain's grip on the steering wheel is so tight her knuckles have turned white. She's not using the GPS; wherever they're going, she doesn't need help to remember how to get there.
"You gonna tell me what this is about?" Kat asks her.
From the corner of her eye she sees the Captain's right hand slip beneath the collar of her blouse, her palm settling over her own heart.
"Something bad happened," the Captain says. "A couple of years ago. Henry must have found out about it somehow. He's recreating the crime."
That much Kat has figured out already; what she wants now is details.
"You were the investigating officer?"
The Captain is watching the road, so she doesn't turn her head, doesn't let Kat see her face. In profile, though, Kat can see the way the corner of her mouth ticks up. It's wry, and angry, somehow.
"I was the victim," she says.
Jesus, Kat thinks. She hasn't known the Captain long, but she's seen enough, and heard enough stories, to know that the Captain has bones of steel and balls of brass, and she never, not for one moment, imagined that something like this might lurk in her past. The hand torch, she thinks, and the burns on Libby, and the Captain's hand, still pressed over her own heart, and shit. The silence inside the car is oppressive; it is heavy with memory, and grief, and a terrible, seething rage.
Fin uses the car's bluetooth to make a call.
"Stabler," a man's voice echoes through the speakers, loud, and Amanda jumps. She wasn't expecting that. What the fuck is he doing, calling Stabler right now? The man hasn't come by the station since that night he went berserk in interview. Have he and Liv been talking since his wife died? If they have been Liv hasn't mentioned it, but she's looked more tired than usual, lately. Amanda wonders just how many secrets her Captain's been keeping.
"It's me," Fin says. Short and to the point.
"What's going on? Is Liv ok?"
And that's strange, Amanda thinks, that the first thought in Stabler's head is that something's happened to Liv. Strange that he sounds so scared. For a guy who just up and disappeared, she thinks it's a little late for him to be showing concern for Liv.
"She is for now," Fin says. "She may not be later. Something's going down, man."
"Where are you? I'll meet you there," Stabler tells him, and for a second Amanda thinks she hears the sound of keys jangling, like Stabler is already on the move, dropping everything to get to Liv, without hesitation. She likes to think that he would, but he's given her absolutely no reason to believe it.
"Nah," Fin says. "It's gonna be a mess down there. Will you go to the station, though? Noah's there. He might need some company. When this is done, either Liv is coming straight back to the station or she's going to the hospital and either way someone needs to look after Noah."
There's a moment of silence, then, as the weight of those words sinks in. Either Liv is walking out of there alive, or she's walking out broken, and the moment is heavy, stifling. In her heart Amanda wants to stop her boss from throwing her life away for the sake of a psycho like Henry Mesner, but she understands why Liv is so determined. Why Liv thinks she's the only one who can do this. Fin and Amanda, they'll watch Liv's back as best they can, but Liv is the only family Noah has, and that poor kid is all alone at the station, and the best they can do for him right now is a couple of unis and a man who walked out on his mom before Noah was even born. But Stabler's got kids, Amanda reminds herself. One more cop on the scene won't make any difference to Liv, but a friend at the station will make a world of difference to Noah.
"I'm on my way," Stabler says finally. "You call me the second this is done."
"I will, man," Fin says. Then he ends the call.
When they get there Liv is the first one out of her car, and she points to where the vehicle Henry Mesner stole has been parked, as close to the silo as he could get.
"He's here," she says.
Maybe he's not, Amanda thinks. The buildings down here are all abandoned, and it's unlikely he found another vehicle to commandeer. He's got his little sister in tow, and that would make it even harder for him to slip through the net, but maybe, Amanda thinks, maybe he tied her hands behind her back and chucked her in the water and watched her drown just like Snowball before he took off for greener pastures.
Or maybe not. Maybe Liv is right. Maybe this is what he wanted all along.
"Eyes open, guns up," Liv says to the crowd of officers who've gathered around her. "There's only one way in, and one way out. He's likely armed, and he's got a good vantage point up there. I'm going up first."
"Captain-"
"We all know that ladder will only take one person at a time," she says.
We all know, but that's not true; Fin and Amanda and Liv, they know that, but no one else gathered around does. It's not like it matters.
"And the whole point of this was to get me up there. So I'm going. You can come with me, but you hang back."
There's no one present who outranks her. ESU is supposed to be on the way but Liv isn't waiting for them and maybe she's about to get a whole bunch of people killed, but Liv doesn't seem to think so, and Amanda doesn't, either. This kid Henry, he likes to play games. He likes to be smarter than the people around him. He likes to watch his victims squirm. It's a curiosity to him, the suffering of others. He wants to play with his food, and he's not gonna shoot them before he gets a chance to have some fun.
"He's had a hell of a head start, Captain," Amanda points out. "He may have rigged the place-"
"He's not gonna risk hurting himself," Liv says. "And he's only got one exit, he's not gonna risk getting trapped up there, either. I'm going in."
And then she turns away, and starts walking towards the silo, gun in hand.
"Son of a bitch," Amanda mutters.
She follows anyway; she'd follow Liv anywhere.
"Henry!" Liv yells up the ladder, her voice echoing through the silo, eerie but determined.
"Glad you could join us, Detective!" he calls back. "Or is it Sergeant, now?"
"Captain!" she says.
"Good for you!"
"Listen, Henry, I'm coming up!"
"Just you! I see anyone else and I'm gonna kill her! And tell your boys to back off."
Liv looks back at Fin, and his heart sinks. Son of a bitch, he thinks.
"Fall back!" Liv yells to the officers who followed her this far. They look at her, perplexed, but ESU isn't there yet, and that makes her the boss. He shares a glance with Amanda; if Liv dies up there, or he does, someone will need to corral the other officers. They can't all risk themselves for Liv's sake. Someone has to pick up the baton. Amanda nods, angry but understanding, and everyone but Fin backs out of the silo. Liv looks at him for a long moment, and then presses her finger to her lips. Fin nods; yeah, he'll stay quiet, and he'll stay right here, and at the first possible opportunity he'll run up that ladder and shoot the little fucker in the kneecap.
I'm getting too old for this shit.
"It's just me and you now, Henry!" Liv tells him.
"All right, come on, then! And no gun."
For a second Liv hesitates and it makes Fin feel a little hopeful, but then she shifts her grip on her weapon, and hands it to him. It is an exchange that is somehow holy, the transfer of a firearm, the surrendering of her defenses. She is showing him trust, by giving it to him, but she is also rendering herself vulnerable. If it was anyone else, he'd think lamb to the slaughter. But this is Liv, and she is a survivor, and she's never needed a gun to save her own neck. He takes the weapon, and slips it into his empty holster. His own weapon is in his hands.
"No gun!" she yells. "I'm coming up!"
There is a moment when the sun is slanting in through the windows and the dust is dancing in the air and Liv is reaching for the ladder, her head tilted back as she looks up into the darkness above her, her profile proud, and strong, her hands steady, a moment when he looks at her and thinks she looks like one of those paintings hanging on the wall at the Met. Like something beautiful, and slightly unreal.
It isn't exactly the same. It couldn't be, because Henry is not Lewis, and there was no public trial after her encounter with that man in this place. He couldn't get the details right, because there's no way he could have known them.
It's close, though.
The girl is tied up, but she is sitting against the far wall. The table is no longer there; maybe it was stolen, or taken in for evidence, or maybe it just vanished. It doesn't really matter. Henry is leaning against the wall close to the opening in the floor, with a bored look on his face, and a gun held in a firm grip, pointed right at her.
"Hands," he says as she comes up.
It's a little hard to manage - I'm getting too old for this, she thinks - but she makes it the rest of the way up with her hands held above her head.
"Lift up your jacket, let me see your waist," he says when her feet find solid ground.
If he had been Lewis, he would have done that himself. Would have patted her down, and enjoyed every second of it. But he is not Lewis; the violence in him is not sexual. It is something else, something far harder to predict. She dutifully lifts the edges of her jacket, turns in a slow circle so he can see there's no gun at her hip. There's no gun tucked into her boot, either, but the kid didn't even think to ask.
"What are we doing here, Henry?" she asks him then.
If she shows concern for the girl, it may give him ideas about hurting her, so Liv doesn't even glance her way. Henry wants what Henry has always wanted - attention, and excitement. She can give him that, she thinks. She hopes.
"I've been waiting for you to get here," he says. "It took you long enough to figure it out."
"Oh, we figured it out when you bought that hand torch."
The more truth she gives him up front, the easier it'll be to lie to him later. And she wants him to know that she saw what he was doing, that his efforts have not gone unnoticed. The only thing that matters to this kid in the whole world is himself, and she'll flatter his ego as much as she can just to keep him docile.
"It was a good plan," she tells him. "How did you find out? About Lewis, I mean. You were locked up."
"We had television," he tells her. "Sometimes they'd leave it on the news. They did a whole special on you, how you saved that little girl. The reporter even did a segment on site. After I got his name, it wasn't that hard to find the rest of it. The internet is incredible, Captain. I didn't have much access while I was in that place but once I got out...oh, I found out all kinds of stuff."
I bet you did, she thinks. So that was it. He just happened to be sitting in front of the tv at exactly the right moment, and that one trick of fate led them here. Back to this place.
Better here than the house, she thinks. She's not sure she would have been able to walk back through that door again. It's a little easier, here. When she walked out of this place with Lewis's blood on her face, he was lying on the floor behind her, and he wasn't breathing. Standing on the front steps of that house with Nick, she'd been told that he was still alive, and the fear that gripped her then stayed with her until the day Lewis died. It was the fear that, no matter how hard she tried, nothing was ever gonna kill that bastard. That he was always, always going to win. Nothing assuaged that fear until the day she saw his body in the morgue. She tries not to think about the fact that Lewis killed himself; in her darker moments, she thinks that's the only way he ever could have died. Like the only force on earth powerful enough to kill that monster was the man himself.
"He hurt you pretty bad, didn't he?" Henry says, and for once his eyes light up. "Can I see?"
The list of people who have actually seen her scars, all of them, is very, very short. She's not about to add Henry Mesner's name to that number.
"Oh, I think you've already seen it," she says easily. "With Libby."
"Libby," he scoffs. "All she did was cry."
Fin is still down at the bottom of the hole, waiting. He can't come up while they're this close; Henry will see him coming. Somehow, she's got to get him away from the opening in the floor. She'd like to get the gun out of his hands while she's at it.
Slowly, very slowly, she starts to pace. Henry is following her progress with his gaze, but he doesn't budge.
Think, she tells herself. When he was a kid, Henry chose smaller children as targets. He isn't particularly strong; his power comes from surprise, because the people he hurts never see it coming. He likes weapons - guns, knives, fire - and he likes to move fast. But Olivia is not his father, determined to believe in his inherent goodness, and neither is she a college girl who's never been scared a day in her life. Liv knows how to fight, and she knows what he is, and that means he will have difficulty coming at her.
Unless he just decides to shoot.
"I bet you cried, too, didn't you?" he asks her.
She did, actually, but not as much as she might have. Mostly she was quiet, or she was screaming. There weren't that many tears. She didn't get enough fluid over those four days to spare a drop for weeping.
"I read the transcripts," he adds. "I read about all the things he did to you."
What would it be like, she wonders, to only learn about those four days from words on a page, to only get the dry, sanitized version they aired in the courtroom? Liv doesn't have that luxury; every second of it is burned in her memory, visceral, and real.
If he read the transcripts then he knows what Liv did to Lewis, too, how she left him crippled, how she tried like hell to kill him. She won't remind Henry of that now, though. It won't help her to remind him that she knows how to hurt people, too.
"Why?" she asks him. "Why the fascination with him?"
"You hurt me. He hurt you." Henry shrugs. "I learned a lot about trauma, in that place. I learned a lot about fear. I wanted to see if I could scare you."
Well, it fucking worked, Liv thinks.
"Why me?"
"Because I couldn't find that partner of yours."
Nick is safe on the other side of the country. For a second Liv thinks about calling him when this is all over, but then she decides against it. Nick left this world behind him. He deserves a chance to be happy. It'll just tear him up, knowing he wasn't here to stop this. It doesn't escape her notice that she has decided to protect Nick the same way she has decided to protect Elliot. Like they need her to keep them safe from their own demons. God, maybe she does have a savior complex.
"And since you hated me just as much as he did, and since you're the one who wanted to put me away so bad," he grins, "I decided it was time for some payback."
But he's gone about it all wrong, Liv realizes. The worst thing about Lewis was how much devastation he caused, just how many people he hurt, while she was helpless to stop him. The worst thing about Lewis was how he got in her fucking head. The worst thing about Lewis was how he tried to break her. How maybe he did; how he pushed her to the point of ignoring her own better angels, and crawling down into the dirt with him. Henry knows a lot of things but he doesn't understand people, and he damn sure doesn't understand her. Henry has been so focused on the physical pain he has overlooked the emotional. Physical pain, that's something Liv knows how to handle. That makes her feel a little better, somehow. This kid, he's just pushing buttons, curious to see what might happen. He thinks he's found the button that will shatter Liv, but he's gone about it all wrong, and she is stronger than he realizes.
This is a game two can play.
It's quiet, up there. Fin can hear their voices echoing through the hole but he can also see the kid's feet, and he knows he can't come up yet. Liv's got the kid talking; he's talking about the water, about a little boy named Oscar who drowned. About how he knows he's special. Perps all think they're special, in Fin's experience; they all think they're smarter than the cops, and they all think they're entitled to something. This kid, though, this kid actually is special, if only because he's a kind of psychopath that none of them have ever encountered before.
The kid actually thinks he's got a shot at walking out of here, Liv realizes. He really does think he's that smart. He really does think that day when the ocean didn't kill him, when he learned to move with it instead, was some kind of sign that he can navigate life more easily than the Oscars of the world. Like he's got some kind of secret knowledge none of them possess. But he's also running out of time; ESU will be here any minute, and when they arrive they're gonna override Liv's orders, and send men flooding into this building. It's going to get very, very ugly. Very, very soon.
"Can I ask you something?" she says. "Why go to all this trouble? We saw the pictures you took, you've been following me and Detective Rollins for a while."
That's been bothering her. He could have accosted her or Amanda on the street, or at home. He could have taken Jessie, or Noah. He could have done so many things, but he chose this. Why? Maybe, she thinks, because he doesn't understand love. He's never felt it, no matter how much he might have wanted it. He's never felt it, and so he doesn't know that Liv's worst nightmare is not something bad happening to her. The day he first found Noah, he found the one thing he could have used to break her clean in half, and he didn't even use it, because he doesn't understand.
"Yeah, I saw you both. Saw your kids. You're always alone with them," he says. "Both of you single moms?"
"Yeah," she says.
"You still see your ex, though. I've seen him, getting in your car in front of the school. He waited until your boy went inside, though. Is he afraid to let the kid see him with you?"
Liv almost laughs in his face; he thinks Elliot is Noah's father. For someone who has spent so much time studying normal human behavior, learning how to mimic it and how to manipulate it, he's still so young, and there's still so much he doesn't know about life, and the ties that bind people together. It may help her to play along, though; Henry holds some resentment towards his father, and his mother. Maybe she can use it.
"It's complicated," she says. "We're just trying to protect him."
"Like you protected me?" he sneers. "You didn't give a shit about me. You only cared about my sister."
Shit. Now he remembers the girl is in the room, and he turns towards her, gun raised.
"Everybody was always so worried about her," he says. The girl starts to cry, and Liv wishes like hell she wouldn't. It feels a little mean to even think it, but it would go easier for all of them if the girl would just stay quiet. That day with Lewis, Amelia was mostly quiet. She'd spent enough time with him to be terrified into silence, and she closed her eyes when Liv told her to. A part of Liv's mind wonders where that girl is now. If she remembers anything about that day, if she still dreams about it, sometimes, or if it has all been lost to the recesses of her memory.
"They had no problem getting rid of me," Henry is angry, now, advancing on his sister, and the girl is cowering in the corner, weeping.
Liv has to get his attention - and the gun - focused back on herself.
"What did you expect them to do, Henry?"
He whirls back towards her, angry, but he's not holding the gun as steady as he was before.
"I mean, really," she presses. They're running out of time, and she needs to end this. "You killed a dog. You hurt your sister. You pulled a knife on your mom. You shot a cop. What did you think was gonna happen?"
He's moving back towards her now, quick, but he's so, so stupid, she thinks. At the final moment, hubris has led him into a classic trap.
All his life, Henry has been feared. Since he was a child, everyone he ever met has been afraid of him. People avoid him, or tiptoe around him, or try to lecture him, reason with him, drawn in by the air of logic with which he normally speaks, thinking that there is a mind in there that can be reached, if only the right words are chosen. Shrinks have forced him to talk ad nauseum about his feelings, and his parents tried to warm his ice cold heart with hugs. The other kids in that place with him were medicated into complacency, but even the ones who weren't, they were like him. They planned things, waited for the perfect moment to strike, preferred to have the extra power of a weapon close to hand. There were probably boys there bigger, meaner, stronger than him, and Henry would have seen that, and weighed the risks, and avoided direct confrontation with them. Henry goes with the tide; he doesn't fight it.
And Liv is willing to bet everything she has that this kid has never been punched in the face in his life.
"I wanted them to let me do what I want!" he yells. "I wanted them to-"
She strikes hard, and fast; he's bearing down on her with that gun but he was never trained to shoot, only knows point and pull, and he wasn't expecting her to move, thought the gun alone would be enough to keep her check. Probably when he looks at her he just sees a tired woman, a woman like his mom, a woman who wants to help him, a woman who wouldn't even know how to begin hurting him, not without her gun. He's wrong. Her right fist collides with his face and his whole body shudders and she's on him in an instant; a knee to his stomach and a hand on his back, pushing him down while that knee comes up, and he's wheezing, and she bats the gun out of his hand, listens to it clatter as it skids across the floor. Fin must have heard it, too, because she can hear him racing up the ladder. Henry starts to struggle so she hits his face again, and then he goes down, and her knee settles on his back as Fin emerges, his gun trained on the kid while she wrestles his arms around.
Henry starts to scream, then, full-throated, flopping around like a toddler having a tantrum, but Fin and Liv have both raised little boys, and they both ignore him. Fin helps her get him cuffed, and they leave him there lying on his belly while Fin calls for backup and Liv goes to his sister. The whole time Henry is shrieking with the impotent rage of a boy who has just realized he cannot have everything he wants.
There is a piece of Liv's heart that really, really wants to kick him, and she knows Fin wouldn't say anything if she did, but they're trying to build a better police department, so she just focuses on untying the sister.
What a fucking day, she thinks.
The kid's got a black eye and his ribs are gonna hurt him for a while, but he's mostly uninjured, though he hasn't stopped crying. It's a snotty sort of weeping, and Fin knows it's just because he's pissed. He's pissed that someone else got the better of him. He's pissed that he walked into a room he couldn't talk his way out of. He fooled his parents, for a time, and then he fooled the shrinks, and then he walked out with his head held high, and he thought nothing could stop him. He didn't count on hurricane Liv.
They give their statements at the scene; the girl gives her story to one of the many IAB guys floating around, and Liv and Fin do the same, and it all pretty much matches up, but they're going to have to go back for an official debrief in the morning. Until then they can't talk to each other, so Fin takes Rollins back to the station in one car, and Kat rides with Liv in the other. They'll go back to base, hang up their vests, and then they'll go home, and put this whole thing behind them.
He hopes.
He calls Stabler from the car.
"What happened up there?" Kat asks as she drives.
The Captain is quiet, staring out the window.
"Kid miscalculated," she says.
That does nothing at all to clarify the situation for Kat, but the Captain doesn't seem to have anything else to say, so Kat doesn't push her. She figures she'll ask Fin about it later. Maybe he'll tell her.
But probably not, she thinks.
When they get back to the station it's late, and everything is quiet. All Liv wants to do is get her bag out of her desk drawer, check her messages, and take Noah home. The poor kid's been stuck at the station all day; he's probably asleep on the couch right now. There is nothing Liv wants to see more than her own son, her sweet boy, sleeping peacefully, and so she makes a beeline for her office, eases the door open.
As she steps inside, the breath catches in her throat. Noah is, in fact, asleep on the couch, but his head is resting on Elliot's thigh.
What the fuck? She asks herself. This is the last thing she expected, and she doesn't understand what she's seeing. How did he get here? How did he know?
He looks up at her, blue eyes steady, and full of questions. He looks, she thinks, as tired as she feels. But Noah is sleeping, and Elliot is a father, and he knows not to wake a sleeping child if he can help it. He doesn't move, or shout, he just keeps his gaze focused on her with an intensity that makes her stomach twist.
"You all right?" he asks her, very quietly.
At first she doesn't know how to answer him, but as she looks at him, sitting there in that wrinkled shirt with the sleeves rolled back and worry in his eyes, with her son sleeping in his lap like Noah's comfortable, there with him, as she soaks in the quiet and the sheer fucking relief she feels at seeing his face, the answer comes to her.
"Yeah," she says.
And she is, ok. What happened today, that wasn't Lewis come back from the dead to haunt her. It could have been, but it wasn't. A lot of people are dead, but they aren't dead on account of her. Rollins is in with Henry Mesner now, picking his brain, and Kat and Fin are keeping watch over her. It's over, now; the monster has been caught, and there's a grandmother coming to take his sister somewhere far away, and no more ghosts are gonna come walking. Her son is safe, and Elliot is here. She couldn't ask for much more.
"Lemme drive you home?"
She shouldn't. Her car is parked at the station and it'll make school drop off a pain in the morning, but it isn't the first time, and it won't be the last. And she really, really doesn't want to drive herself home tonight.
"Yeah," she says.
And for the first time in a very long time, she sees Elliot smile.