Chapter 7

Goren observed the young, obviously malnourished, beautiful girl sitting directly across the metal table. Between them sat a brown cardboard box, full of the objects Stabler and he had pulled from the window seat. They had run the two sets of prints that they had found through the criminal manifests, not finding a match; now this girl was the only person who could help put the pieces together. As he thought this, Goren became aware that as he studied the girl, she was scrutinizing him just as intently.

"So, Shelley. Do you remember what happened to your back?" She hesitated for a moment, glancing sideways at the mirror; one of her many lines of stitches was visible coming out of the neck of her shirt. She reached up to touch it, turned back to Goren, and nodded.

"With this?" He set the bloodstained whip on the table. She didn't even flinch at the sight of it, barely glancing for more than a second, but he received another nod in reply. Goren then pulled the first half of the picture, containing the mother and her son, out of his pocket and slid it across the table. This provoked the reaction he was looking for.

"Where did you get this?" She said, delicately picking up the photograph.

"Do you know who these people are?"

"It's Mary and her son Tyler." She threw the picture back on the table and slid her chair backward, away from the table. "And you don't need to tell me where you got it, I already know they're dead."

"We know it was you that called the police. You ran into me right after you made the call. You told us where we could find the bodies…now they can have a proper burial. You did a good thing Shelley." The girl just stood up from her chair and stared out the bar-covered window.

"I wish you would stop calling me that. It's not my real name."

"What is your real name?" Goren asked, rising and standing behind her. She turned around and sized him up (and up, and up) again.

"Sarah." Sarah walked around him and sat back in her chair. He joined her, sitting on the edge of the table.

"Okay Sarah. Do you want to tell me what happened in that basement?"

"I can't." She said, fervently shaking her head. "If I tell you anything, what happened to Mary and Tyler is gonna happen again to someone else, and that's if it hasn't already happened." Goren sighed and returned to the cardboard box. He pulled out the binder and dropped it on the table, making a loud noise, and opened it to the second page of names.

"What do these notations mean?" He asked, flipping through the pages. Sarah shook her head again and pushed it away.

"I can't tell you, two people are already dead because of me!"

"If you tell me who did this, I can stop that from happening again."

"It'll be my fault if more people get hurt."

"I know you were in that room Sarah!" Goren had raised his voice slightly, "Your blood is on the floor. And yes, if you don't tell me what I need to know and more people do die, it will be your fault-." He lowered his voice to almost a whisper at the look on her face, "because you didn't tell the one person who could help those other people, the ones you left behind." Goren stood up and pulled the other half of the picture out of his pocket, sliding it slowly across the table. This part of the picture showed another, younger boy, thirteen at most, sitting with his arm around a girl who was quite obviously his identical twin sister: a younger version of Sarah.

"Daniel…" She said, picking up the picture and holding it close to her chest. Goren walked over and kneeled beside her, one arm on the back of her chair and the other on her hands closed over the picture.

"We can still save your brother Sarah. But you have to tell me what happened and who did this. Can you do that for him?" Tears were falling from her eyes, but Sarah took another look at the photograph and nodded slowly, but surely.

"Okay." She said.

"Okay. Let's talk about the room in the basement." Goren said, pulling his chair around. He made a signal at the mirrored glass and Detective Stabler introduced himself and joined them at the table. Sarah pulled herself closer to the table, looking right at them.

"It was my first time ever in that room, but I heard the others talk about how awful it was."

"And your back?" Goren asked.

"One of the guests did that."

"Guests? What was this place used for?" Stabler asked. Sarah picked up the fuzzy handcuffs and tossed them to Stabler.

"You couldn't guess from these?"

"It's a…"

"You can say it. It's supposed to be a 'House of Earthly Pleasures', but it's just a high-class whorehouse." Stabler and Goren gave each other dark looks. "I guess that makes me one of the whores."

"Hey, that's not true Sarah." Stabler said.

"What happened to you is not your fault, is that clear?" Goren asked. She didn't respond. "Now, how did you end up in a place like that?"

"Mom said our dad split when he found out my mom was pregnant. We lived in an apartment until we were eight, then my mom died from some disease. No one came looking for us, so we lived in the park near our apartment. It was working out okay until somebody reported us to social services. After that, we had to move to another part of the city, that's when we met Mrs. Blue."

"Mrs. Blue?" Stabler asked, "Is she the one that owns the flat on 16th?"

"Yeah, but I don't think that's her real name."

"Okay, so you met this woman how?" Goren prodded.

"We couldn't get work in the other part of the city, we were starving. Mrs. Blue caught us sleeping on a school playground and said we could come stay with her if we'd earn our keep. I know it was stupid, we should have known better…"

"Sarah, you were ten years old, you couldn't possibly have known what was going to happen, let alone what to do about it." Goren said. "What happened at the house?"

"It was a different house then, this was the third house we had lived in. But she made us do things, have sex… Daniel was a favorite for little league coaches and other freaks." Goren swallowed in disgust.

"And you?" Sarah's eyes turned hollow.

"Mostly young rich guys, a couple of women. Daniel wanted to leave, so did I of course. The front door wasn't locked or anything, we could have just walked out any time we wanted to."

"Why didn't you?" Stabler asked, trying to hide his hatred for this Mrs. Blue and failing miserably.

"It was her little game, like holding a steak in a dog's face but keeping it just out of reach. There were almost 20 of us and she would keep three or four locked in the basement. She said she would kill two for every one of us that left the house, I wasn't the first to prove that." Sarah shuddered at the thought and had to take a break.

"It's okay, it wasn't your fault." Stabler reiterated.

"She killed four people that I know about, Tyler and Mary included."

"So what happened three days ago, when you made the 9-1-1 call?"

"That room you found in the basement, it was usually just for people with…those tastes, but one of her regular clients… one of my regular clients," She spit the terrible words out, "wanted to fulfill one of his little fantasies with me. The night before Mary and Tyler…" Tears began to well in her eyes, and she began to sob through her words. "He would beat me and then rape me, and beat me again. I couldn't take the pain, I begged him stop, but it just made him enjoy it more." Sarah could no longer form words; she clapped a hand over her mouth and just barely made it to the trash can before throwing up.

"Okay, she says that's enough for now." Munch had just come into the room; he helped Sarah to her feet and took her to lie down on the second story of the precinct. Goren and Stabler didn't move. Eames and Captain Cragen had followed Munch in, but they too remained silent. Stabler teetered on the edge of his chair for a second and then put a hand over his own mouth, dashing from the room.

"Holy God." The Captain said at last. Goren rubbed his eyes; the look on his face spelled true hatred to its extreme as he looked up at him.

"Where was God for her?"

"That's the first time I've thrown up from a case in four years." Stabler said, spitting into the sink. He and Goren were standing alone in the bathroom ten minutes later, unable to look each other in the eye.

"Says…ready to talk again." Munch had ducked his head in again for a split second; apparently he was incapable of normal speech patterns as well. Back in the interrogation room, Goren couldn't bring himself to open his mouth. Stabler was afflicted by the same condition, so they sat there in silence for several minutes.

"I guess you'll want to know about what happened next…" Goren looked her in the eyes for a moment, then nodded.

"When…" Sarah cleared her throat several times. "When he was done with me, someone carried me upstairs. I was in so much pain I can't remember much, all I knew was that I wanted to get out of there. I woke up at about noon the next day. Mrs. Blue had some bad news; her client wanted me again in the basement that night. Daniel, he wouldn't have it. He told me he didn't care if he was one of the people that died, but that I had to get out of there. He walked me to the door at 1:00, I hid in the neighbor's back yard, I was waiting for Daniel. But I had bled pretty badly and I fell asleep again. I woke up when Daniel came to tell me that Mrs. Blue had killed two people when she found out I was gone, he didn't know who. He told me to call 9-1-1 at the payphone up the street, and that he'd be okay as soon as the cops showed up to help us. But Mrs. Blue had sent her partner Frank out to look for me."

"Frank, was that the guy at the hospital?" Stabler asked. Sarah nodded.

"He was the one I was running from when I ran into you." She said, looking pointedly at Goren. "At the hospital, he told me my brother was next if I didn't go with him. I'm sorry I got you shot at."

"You didn't pull the trigger." He replied.

"I tried to wait for the cops on 15th street, but I knew they weren't going to show until Mrs. Blue could empty the house and get everyone into the next house."

"Why do you say that?" Stabler asked. Sarah laughed aloud.

"Half of Mrs. Blue's clients are cops or judges or government people! She probably blackmailed them into being late."

"And that's what this is for…" Goren said, reopening the binder. Sarah nodded.

"Like this one, Matt Harlbecker, then his phone number, 'Jack', who he paid for, how old Jack is, and the red dot at the end means this guy is a judge. She uses it to blackmail her clients into doing things she wants. Now what about my brother?"

"Okay…okay." Goren said, rising to his feet and pacing. "You don't know where the next house is?"

"No."

"This Mrs. Blue is calculating." Goren said through his hand. "She only left the evidence she wanted us to find. The whip, because she couldn't be caught with it, the cuffs-to make us think it was just a sex party gone wrong. The binder especially; she thinks we'll be so busy tracking down the people in it that she would be safe and no one would be looking for her. But she didn't count on not having you, Sarah. So we are going to be looking for her." Goren grabbed the binder and flipped the page. "Blue dots mean 'cop' right?" Sarah nodded.

"Yeah." Goren smiled slightly.

"I think it's time to do some blackmailing of our own."