Author's Note: I highly suggest you do not read this until you have read "Beast" due to spoilers relating to the charater of Caroline Schmidt. This takes place four months after "Beast". This story is based on true events and all addresses excepting those that are completely accurate are purely from my imagination.
Disclaimer: I do not own anything from or related to "Law and Order: SVU" or any of the "Law and Order" series. I own the characters of Detective Caroline Schmidt and Catherine Schmidt, as well as any minor characters that have not previously appeared on the television series.
CHAPTER ONE
In the criminal justice system, sexually-based offenses are considered especially heinous. In New York City, the dedicated detectives who investigate these vicious felonies are members of an elite squad known as the Special Victims Unit. These are their stories.
DOINK-DOINK
The pretty young woman pulled a robe over her slender body and tied it tightly, grinning at the art students who were completing their sketches. They had been drawing her, and she had been posing nude for them.
"Catherine, if you'd like to take a look, I'm sure no one will object," said the teacher, gesturing to his students.
Catherine shook her chin-length, wavy brown hair out of her face and nodded, then proceeded to walk around the classroom, peering over the shoulders of the hardworking students. She could see that they were all in various stages of mastery of sketching: some were obviously very talented, while others, despite their efforts, left something to be desired. A particularly flattering sketch that depicted her as a mermaid basking on a rock made her smile warmly at the woman who had drawn it.
"These are really great," said Catherine, almost telling the truth.
She reached the very last student, a man in his mid-twenties who had a quiet, almost nerdy sort of way about him. When she approached, he shut his notebook quickly.
"Aw, can't I look?" she said playfully.
"It's not very good," said the man defensively.
"Oh, come on, I'll decide that," said Catherine, and she opened his book before he could protest.
What she saw turned her stomach, but she smiled all the same.
"Wow," she said softly. "This is really intense. Hey, do you think I could make a copy? It's so original."
The young man looked taken aback, but nodded all the same. Catherine hitched her robe a little tighter around herself and scurried to the teacher's office to make a copy and to make a phone call to the only person she could think of while her heart pounded.
DOINK-DOINK
Detective Olivia Benson sat at her desk, toying with a pen while she thought of how to connect the dots as eloquently as possible in a DD-5 she was working on. Her partner, Detective Elliot Stabler, finished his and leaned back in his chair.
"I envy you," said another detective, a young woman known as Caroline Schmidt. "I can never finish my paperwork that quickly."
"That's what comes from having an English major for a daughter," he responded with a grin.
"Well, I guess since I'll be riding a desk until who knows when, I'll get faster. We'll have to have a DD-500 race or something."
Elliot laughed, but silently wished Caroline wouldn't make jokes like that. It was hard to laugh about something so grim. Detective Schmidt would indeed be on desk duty for a long time, due to having a relatively serious case of cervical cancer. She had been on chemotherapy for a while now and had already lost most of her hair, a lot of weight, and had become too weak to work in the field. He watched her thoughtfully as she adjusted the stocking cap that covered her head and remembered vaguely the days when she always wore a braid or pigtails. He wondered how much she missed having long hair – or hair at all, for that matter.
A moment later, Caroline's phone rang and she answered right away.
"Detective Caroline Schmidt, Manhattan Special Victims Unit," she said professionally.
Her eyes went rather wide and she immediately began to try to calm whoever was on the other line. As she did so, she summoned Detectives John Munch and Fin Tutuola with a sequence of snaps and hand gestures.
"Okay. Okay…take a deep breath and tell me what happened…you have a copy? Good. Don't worry, I'm sending someone right away…oh, really? Okay. I'll let them know. Go there and stay there, but give him back the original…yeah, good idea. Don't let him know. Call me if you need me."
Caroline hung up and began writing an address on a slip of paper for Munch and Fin.
"That was Catherine," she said breathlessly. "My sister. She was at the Art & Soul school where she was modeling for the sketching class…you know, nude. She said she was sexually assaulted and she needs someone right away."
"Someone assaulted her in the middle of an art class? What exactly happened?" asked Munch.
"I don't know, I didn't ask because I could tell she didn't want to say over the phone. She's going to be outside the bodega on the corner of East 57th Street," said Caroline, handing over the paper. "I'll let Cragen know where you've gone. Please, please get there right away."
"Don't even worry. We're on it," said Fin.
Munch and Fin left the precinct and Caroline turned to Elliot and Olivia, shaking her head in disbelief.
"This is beyond bizarre," she said. "I never thought 'one of our own' would ever apply to me."
DOINK-DOINK
"Catherine?"
Catherine turned when she heard Fin call her name and rushed toward the detectives. Her hooded sweatshirt was zipped all the way to her throat, her eyeliner slightly smudged from what Fin assumed were tears.
"Thank God!" said Catherine.
"Are you all right?" asked Munch.
"I – I guess so. Yeah. Yeah, sure."
"Okay. Let's get you to a hospital and then I'll take your statement."
"I don't need to go to a hospital," said Catherine.
"I know you don't want to," said Munch as reassuringly as he could. "But it will help us gather trace evidence –"
"I have all the evidence you need right here," said Catherine, and she pulled a piece of paper out of her backpack.
Fin took the paper and unfolded it, then stared at the image. Without a word, he handed it to his partner and took out his notebook, ready to take Catherine's statement right then and there.
"Can you tell me what happened?" he asked quietly.
"This is a part-time gig for me. A couple of art schools ask me to come in and pose nude for them. I know it's only one step up from stripperhood, but it's good money and…anyway. Today I was at Art & Soul, and it was totally normal. Like, I stand there, I pose all naked, they draw me, the usual. Then the teacher asks if I want to go around and look at the drawings."
Fin noticed that Munch had been staring, obviously offended, at the sketch, and he nudged him to get him to stop and pay attention to what Catherine was saying.
"Well, I did, and they were normal, too. It's typical for some of the students to take liberties with the picture…you know, like insert their own creativity into them. One lady drew me as a mermaid, and another guy had me as Venus, stuff like that. Anyway, I get to this one guy and he tries to hide the picture from me, like I'm not going to snatch it and look anyway, because I thought he was just being modest. When I saw it, I just pretended to be all interested and impressed at the intensity of it, so I asked if I could make a copy. So I took it to the teacher's office, made a copy, and called Caroline."
Fin jotted down this last bit of information in the best shorthand he could manage and took the picture back from Munch.
"Do you have any idea why he drew you like this?" asked Fin.
"Isn't it obvious?" said Catherine. "It's his weirdo fantasy or something. I'm just glad I caught it so you guys can arrest him before he gets to do it."
For the picture showed Catherine, completely nude, standing helpless in front of a masked man whose arms were wrapped around her from behind. One hand grasped the Catherine in the drawing's genitals while the other held a gun to her head. It was a disgusting and offensive image, but Munch voiced the problem before Fin could.
"I understand this upsets you, but we can't arrest him just for drawing it," said Munch. "It's art."
"What the hell kind of art is that? That's the kind of thing that people draw when they're like…gearing up or something. It's obvious he wants to rape me!" said Catherine, her voice pitch rising until she sounded exactly like her sister. "Who knows how many others of these little sketches he has stashed around or how many he's carried out?"
"Look, I'm sorry, but I don't see how we can pursue this. There's no evidence that would suggest he's raped anyone, is there?" said Munch.
Catherine sighed and pushed her hair behind her ears. Fin put his notebook away and put the copy of the drawing into his pocket.
"Listen," he said. "I promise you that if anything comes up that leads to this guy, this drawing will come up in court. But there's nothing we can do if it's just a picture."
"So basically the freak draws however many nasty pictures like this he wants and gets off scot-free?"
"I don't like it either," said Munch. "But like Fin said, there's nothing we can do if he's not carrying out what he's drawing."
"Look, can't you just check on his priors or something? See if he's ever been arrested before and if he has, you could check him out and see if he goes anywhere with this," said Catherine, choosing her words in such a way that she sounded almost scarily similar to Caroline.
"What's his name?" asked Fin, pulling the notebook back out if for no other reason than to please Catherine.
"I think it's Lewis Moore."
"We'll see what we can do. Until then, can we give you a ride home?"
Catherine sighed again and lit a cigarette. "Sure."
As they walked to the car, Munch watched her smoking.
"I didn't know you smoked," he commented.
"I haven't since I was seventeen, and even then I barely did. I'm just so freaked out right now, I need to mellow out a little bit."
"I can imagine."
Before she'd even smoked the cigarette to the halfway point, she threw it onto the ground and stubbed it out, climbing into the car and leaning back against the seat, clearly distressed.