Chapter 21 – Mom's Home

All four had their guns drawn by the time they entered the bathroom. Olivia already had hers out as well. God only knew where she had it hidden.

The ladies room appeared to be empty, but the good detectives knew otherwise.

Munch stayed outside the bathroom and guarded the door to prevent anyone from entering. Cragen stayed at the inside pf the door to prevent anyone from exiting. Fin crossed to the other side of the room and stood opposite Cragen. That left Elliot and Olivia to search the stalls.

One by one, they pushed the stall doors open to reveal nothing…until only the handicapped stall on the other side of the room was left. Guns at the ready, Elliot nodded to Olivia and counted back from three with his finders.

3…

2…

1…

As soon as he pointed to the door, Olivia kicked it in so hard that she and Elliot were almost hit with the recoil.

"Olivia help." Mackenzie pleaded. She was being held in the back of the stall with a gun to her head. Panic tears were free-flowing down her face.

Olivia knew she had to save Mackenzie, that was a given. But she also knew that Olivia the cop would be the only one able to do it, even though Olivia the mother was screaming to get out. "Emily, think of what you're doing."

If it wasn't for the fact that she had a gun to Mackenzie's head, Olivia would have to say that she found the woman slightly attractive. Just passing Mackenzie at 5'6" and shorter than Olivia at 5'7 1/2", she looked to be about 5'7". With her long wavy mahogany brown hair, blue eyes and neatly pressed outfit, she seemed to have just stepped out of a country club.

Emily looked Olivia over. "You must be the new mom. Olivia, is it? Well guess what? I've been Mackenzie's mother for fourteen years. I raised her."

"You did not." Mackenzie objected. "My teachers raised me. You put me in McKenna when I was only three years-old."

"Quite." Emily ordered and pressed the gun harder against Mackenzie's temple. "I may not have been the one who actually raised her, but my money paid for the people who did. I paid for her to stay in that school, I paid for all her extra-curricular activities, I paid for her horse and its board, I paid for her to go off campus and have professional acting and singing lessons, I paid for her to have professional pictures taken every six months so that her portfolio would stay updated, I paid for her braces and I even paid for a new library to keep her from being expelled when she went through her rebellious stage…So don't any of you try telling me that she's not my daughter."

Olivia noticed that she loosened her grip of the gun while she was arguing. She also noticed that Emily didn't seem to realize that she had been moving closer the entire time she had been talking.

'Alright keep her arguing.' Olivia thought. "But she's not your daughter is she? You kidnapped her from her mother who loved her."

"She didn't love her! She wasn't watching her. They were in a store and she put Mackenzie down and looked the other way. A loving mother keeps her eyes on her child."

"But Emily, you hardly ever had your eyes on Mackenzie. She was always away at school in a whole other country. For the fourteen years you claim to have been her mother, you only saw her for twenty-eight weeks. That's only seven months altogether."

"That bitch didn't deserve her. She was only seventeen and she had a two and a half year old. That's not right. She had her little bastard child while me and my then-husband couldn't even have one."

"But you had Courtney."

"Courtney's not my daughter. She was my ex-sister-in-law's baby. I was just supposed to carry the baby and when she was born, she was supposed to go with her parents, but then her mother and father died and Tim just had to take the baby in. It wasn't until Tim left and I found Mackenzie that I decided to raise Courtney as my own."

Olivia took another unnoticed step foreword. "What made you decide to do that?"

"I wanted Mackenzie to have a sister. Siblings are important, especially sisters. There's no bond like the bond between sisters."

"What about the bond between a mother and her child? You destroyed that bond between Mackenzie and her mother."

For once, Emily did not have anything to say.

"What about the adoption agency? How did you get them involved?" Olivia asked.

"They were the ones who handled Courtney's adoption. Since we were named as legal guardians in her parents will, she was only there for about a day, but I do know how to make a lasting impression. When I got Mackenzie, O took her there and with the help of this one guy, we forged her adoption."

'Lasting impression my ass.' Olivia thought. "What's his name?"

"Lawrence McKenna." He founded the McKenna academy. Mackenzie was the first one enrolled." The name brought a smile to the woman's face.

Olivia took that chance to make her move. The second Emily's eyes dropped, Olivia smacked the gun out of her hand and grabbed Mackenzie. After that, everything went in slow motion.

She remembered kicking the gun away and pushing Mackenzie out of the stall. As she was picking up the gun, she felt something wasn't quite right. That seemed way too easy. But she looked up to late. A flash of silver and a searing pain was the last thing she remembered before the world went black.