SVU squadroom.
9:30 A.M.
I hang up, disgusted with myself, after trying my aunt's line in Connecticut for the fifth time. Sandy's always up early, when she's home. Elliot looks at me, concerned. "Hangover?" He questions, and I make a face.
"No. I just remembered. It's the middle of January. Sandy's somewhere in Miami. My uncle's a retired doctor. The benefits of marrying someone with money, eh?"
"Got any other relatives you can call?" Cragen raises an eyebrow.
"Sandy's kid, Rachel - last I heard, she was somewhere in Texas, but that was four or five years ago - I don't know where she'd be, now. Charlie's wife, Linda - she passed away last year. I have a couple of cousins, but they wouldn't remember or know anything about that house. I barely do. Any luck getting an ID for our vic?"
"Her prints were on file. She clerked for the city, in '90 and '91 - name's Amanda Morris."
I bite my lip, looking at the photo pulled from the woman's record at the DMV. "Damn it." I groan, softly. She's older than she was, when I knew her, her hair longer, but I know her.
"You know her?" Elliot questions.
"My sister." I mutter, running fingers through my hair.
"Okay. Did I miss something here?" He stops in front of me, frowning.
"Not my biological-by-blood-on-the-books-same-mother-different-father sister." I shake my head at him, impatiently. "My sorority sister, from twenty years ago."
"You don't seem like the sorority house type. Really, Olivia. Doesn't that lifestyle necessitate a liking for loud, crazy parties?"
I roll my eyes in John Munch's direction and respond like I always do. "Shut up, Munch. That's the guys' side of things. Things were a hell of a lot different, twenty years ago. And I was broke - the dorms at Siena were shit and I couldn't afford to live off-campus, because Mom wasn't feeding me money. Besides, it sounded like fun. Being an only child makes for a real lonely life, so these girls were as close as I was going to get to sisters."
"You know anything about her?" Cragen questions.
"She was pre-law, when I was in school. Taking courses at Siena, then Daddy was gonna shell out for law school at some top-rated place - Columbia or Princeton. I was only there for about a year and a half, so I don't know what she did after I took off back to the city and wrote my exams. I'm not sure if she stood for the Bar or not. Her father - something's got me convinced he was a cop. He wasn't NYPD though, and he wasn't local - State Trooper."
"Call the Bar Association. Run her name. Think she worked for the DA, Liv?" Cragen rubs a hand over his bald head.
"I don't know. I got the feeling that she wasn't so sure about law school, but that was twenty years ago." I open my desk drawer, to find a phone book.
A half-hour and some runaround later, I have my answer from the Bar. "Yeah. She did stand for the Bar. Fifteen years as an ADA in Queens. I called her office and they're faxing me her personnel file."
Cragen raises an eyebrow. "This is how many murdered ADA's we've caught? Two?"
"Three." I reply, remembering the friend of mine that Richard White got to, and then Jeff York, my ex, who was secretly gay. My mind wanders to Alex, forced into Witness Protection, but I know that's not what Cragen means. I get up to fill my coffee mug, and check the fax machine. Sipping from the mug in my hand, I watch the information come through the machine.
The boss himself made this pot of coffee. I can tell. He's had enough practice to know how to make a decent pot. If Munch had made it, I wouldn't be drinking it. I think he's creating his own little conspiracy, to kill us with something he's putting into the coffee when he makes it.
Elliot takes the sheaf of papers from me, when I go back to my desk. "Captain and I'll get the family." He murmurs. "You got what, two hours' sleep?"
"An hour, maybe an hour and a half." I shrug.
"Go." He nods to the stairs to the crib. "You'll fall asleep here at the desk and when you wake up, you'll be pissed because you've got a cramp in your neck and back."
"Aww, and I was gonna ask to borrow the car. Guess that's out, huh?" We've traded this joke so many times I've lost count. "You gonna come upstairs and tuck me in?"
Elliot glares at me, even though I see the smile in his blue eyes. He picks up a pen and throws it in my general direction. It misses my shoulder by an inch. "I guess you didn't play football in high school?" I drop it in on his desk, under his nose. He promptly grabs the thing and pops the end of it, into his mouth.
"Do you know how many pens you've destroyed, doing that?" I demand. That's one of a short list of things about him that piss me off. His habit of chewing on things - pens, straws, etc. And when he does chew on pens, they're typically ones he's stolen off my desk. He shrugs and nods, again, in the direction of the crib.
I go upstairs to the room filled with steel bunks with decent mattresses and blankets. It's a place to sleep. I shut the door behind me and chose the bottom bunk furthest from the door, shedding my shoes, socks, belt, watch and necklace before I turn back the covers and settle in there.
"Liv." There's a hand on my back, through the warmth of the old, yet clean wool blanket and cotton sheets. I groan, in protest, but roll over, face to face with my partner. "Wha'?"
"Time to get up." Elliot remarks, as I brush my hair off my forehead. "You've been asleep for two hours."
"I don't like you, Stabler." I glare at him, groping for my shoes. He only laughs. "Amanda's father came down - you were right. State Trooper. Mother apparently died when she was seven. Munch and Fin are going through her cases, looking for anything that looks suspicious, but right now, I guess it seems pretty neutral."
"Yeah. So what was the point of waking me?"
"Someone downstairs wants to see you."
I put myself back together, stop and check my hair with my hands, making sure it's not sticking up in seven thousand different directions and make my way down the stairs. Standing by my desk is an older woman in her mid-fifties, her greying hair cut short in a cut that really suits her face. She's shorter than I am, by a few inches, dressed in jeans and a blouse. Blue eyes meet mine and I smile. My mother's sister, Sandy. "What happened to Miami?" I question, as she pulls me into a hug. With our height difference - I'm five foot eight, and Sandy's no more than five foot four - this has always felt awkward.
She shakes her head. "Barry just had to come back early. I told him, it's about twenty degrees in Connecticut, probably with about a foot of snow down. And guess what? I was right. I left him at home to shovel us out. Not much snow down around here, though."
"It rained." I shrug. "You didn't come all the way from Connecticut to talk about the weather."
"Honey, I'm the sister and the aunt of a cop, okay? New York area code - that's you. And when you call me five times in one half-hour . . . "
"How did you know it was me? I didn't call from home."
"I told you, the area code. When Rachel calls, I get the area code for Houston - caller ID. You're the only person I know that still lives in the city. So what's going on?"
I sigh. "Sandy, we found a body, this morning, in the old house in Brooklyn."
She gasps, softly. "My God."
"Listen. Can you remember anything about who bought the house after it was sold?"
Sandy shakes her head. "They sold that old place in '75, because I'd just gotten married, Charlie and Linda had gotten married in '72 and Serena and you were out of the house - there was no point in those two being there alone, when Daddy had union benefits for housing. I think it was Charlie's genius idea to get them to sell. It was a family - you can't live alone in a place like that. I think they were new to the city - from someplace upstate. Mom - she hated to let go of it, though, but I think Dad was more than happy. I take it there's no one in it, now?"
I shake my head. "Abandoned."
"You can't remember it, but that old place was something nice, when Mom was there, taking care of it. Daddy and a few of his friends did all the work to that place themselves - built it."
"I remember getting yelled at for sliding down the banister."
Sandy smiles, slightly. "And climbing the tree in the backyard."
"Yeah. That too."
My aunt sighs. "I can't tell you too much about who bought the house, after Mom and Daddy moved out - I was busy trying to get a job and find a place for us to live. I was twenty-five, with a husband and a nursing degree, but no home and no job. Barry wasn't gonna have us living with anyone. No - I was gonna say you might want to go back and talk to some of the old neighbors, but none of them are there, now."
"Sandy." I look at her, straight in the eye. She's on edge about something. "What's up?"
She sighs. "Talking about the old house has got me thinkin' about something. I don't know if I want to tell you."
"What?"
Sandy rubs her forehead, her blue eyes sad. "Honey, you gotta understand, this was a different time, back then."
"What happened?"
"When you were first born, Mom and Daddy got Serena a little place of her own, 'cause that was what she wanted. She had the kid, but not the husband. She got herself a job, working tables, and she did all right for a while, for the first year or so, then Charlie started noticing stuff. She'd disappear, leave you with a neighbor, never show up for work - I think, one night, Daddy and a bunch of the boys came across her in a bar. She hadn't been home in a week. She was out of a job and about to lose the apartment, so Mom called Children's Services, I guess you'd call it now. She and Daddy filed for custody, until your mother got back on her feet. That was '67, and they kept you till '71 - you would have been about five, when your mother finally got her act together."
"But not for long." I comment, under my breath. "Why the hell didn't someone tell me this?"
"I was seventeen - I had no clue what in the hell was going on. All I know was that my big sister had screwed up and then her kid was in the house. Charlie always was quiet about it - he didn't think you needed to know."
"This is a joke. Charlie would have told me something like this." I protest. "Mom would have."
"Nope. Charlie knew you too well. You had enough going on around you, so why add more to it? And to be honest with you, sweetheart, I don't think your mother even remembered that. I'm sorry I can't help you."
"Someone could have told me this, Sandy."
She shakes her head, slowly. "I thought you knew. For years, I assumed Charlie or Serena, or someone had told you. And I just didn't want to call out of the blue and start talking. You know, Brian, being the family genius"-
"I'll agree to disagree with you on that one, Sandy." I murmur. She's referring to my uncle Charlie's son, Brian, who works for the Feds in Boston. She thinks he's brilliant; I think he's an annoying pain in the ass moron.
"Okay. Never mind. But it was Brian's idea to throw a little family reunion, down on the Jersey shore, in the summer - you know, it'd be good for you to show up."
I shake my head. "This is just another one of someone's attempts to show me how much I stick out."
"What do you mean?"
"Sandy, seriously. Look at me. Next to my mother, most normal people wouldn't even pin me as being her kid. I get stuck in a group of short, blue or gray-eyed blondes and redheads. When I was a kid, I really stuck out."
My aunt raises an eyebrow. "How? You were like the rest of 'em."
"Like hell. I couldn't walk, because I was too busy tripping over my own feet. I was five foot six when I was seventeen - Rachel's five foot five in her thirties. I'm the only brunette in all the photos. Anyone that I'm related to by blood looks nothing like me."
Sandy shakes her head. "You've never looked really closely at your grandmother, have you? You're tall, with a completely different body type than what she had, but you both have that same jaw and cheekbones - same nose, too. If Mom had been taller, every modeling agency in the city would have been after her in the '40's. And looks aren't everything. In the pictures, you stand out, but you're more like your mother than you'll ever figure out. You and Serena - both stubborn as damned mules, the two of you. Before she had you, she and Daddy used to fight over the Women's Lib movement. She was all for it, women getting out of the house, having equality. When she was younger, she reminded me a lot of you."
"You mean before some sociopath got her pregnant."
Sandy sighs. "You can't get over that, can you? Your looks might come from his side, but you're not a complete outcast. I see Charlie in you, once in a while. And not just the job - the both of you were always quiet, always thinking. I used to sit there and try to figure out what he was thinking - that was impossible, the same way it is with you."
I rub my eyes, wanting to go back to the case and forget this. I don't want to hear about I'm like the rest of my family. I'm not, no matter what Sandy says. I'm not. But I've got one question for her that I've never thought to ask. "Tell me something. Do you know why the hell Mom kept me?"
She shakes her head, blue eyes saddened again. "Sweetheart, I was a kid when you were born. But like I said, your mother was stubborn. That's the one thing he never took from her. I don't know why she kept you. They offered her to place you somewhere, an orphanage, till they found you parents - it was still pretty taboo for a young woman to raise a kid on her own, without a husband, unless she was widowed. But she made her choice."
"If it hadn't been for my sociopath of a father, I wouldn't be here." I murmur, shaking my head. "Did she ever give a reason why she wanted to keep me?"
"I know she didn't want a kid. What nineteen-year-old in 1966 wanted a baby, when she didn't know who the father was or where he was? I know she and my parents talked about what she was going to do, when you were born. I think she got attached to you, when she was pregnant - it makes sense. And then she couldn't let you go."
Cragen leans out of his office. "We got another one. Dump job at a cemetery."
I shudder, mentally, downing the last of the cold coffee in my cup and touching my aunt's arm. "Thanks, Sandy. I gotta go."
