CHAPTER TITLE: "Eye of the Beast (Countdown)"
PAIRINGS: None specified
SEASON:
Late Season Four. Alex Cabot is still around and the Stabler
marriage is still, well, stable-ish.
RATING:
M
WARNINGS: Lots of language, more implied violence.
Big ol' angst fest.
SUMMARY: They were taught that your partner is like your blood - and they were watching each other bleed to death.
DISCLAIMERS: See Chapter 1
AUTHOR'S NOTES: This first scene backtracks about 30 minutes from where Chapter 5 left off to show what happened between Olivia and Fin's entering the morgue and Cragen's phone call to Elliot.
"Eye of the Beast (Countdown)"
Monday
Jan 20th
9:05
pm
Autopsy
suite, County Coroner's building
"Y'know, I hate it when it's kids," Fin muttered.
Neither Warner nor Benson needed to be told this, they knew he did. They said nothing because nothing needed TO be said. They'd seen his reaction to the Chaumont arson and contrary to popular belief, Fin was actually quite sensitive.
"Why they gotta get mixed up in this crap?" The question was rhetorical and no one was really expected to answer it. Olivia didn't want to try, and they all knew God certainly wouldn't. So it just hung in the air as they approached the table that held the young body Doctor Warner had been given custody of.
The air was chilled, the temperature in the suite typically kept a few degrees lower than the rest of the basement or the first floor, and in spite of Warner's best efforts over the years, always smelled faintly of formalin and other chemicals meant to help slow the degradation with which time battered the dead.
Despite the nip, Olivia had her gloves off and her coat draped over her left arm - she was still overheated from her row with Elliot and the cold was a soothing balm on her outstandingly frazzled nerve endings.
"Homicide?" Benson asked as she and Tutuola looked at the petite Asian girl lying on the stainless steel table. A block had been slid under her neck to keep her head from lolling to one side or the other. She couldn't have been more than twelve.
"Not at first glance," Melinda said. "But that's why I asked you to come down for a look," she directed at Fin. "I found this," she held up a tiny sealed packet of white powder, "...inside her mouth, the inside of her lip. Along with this." She folded the girl's bottom lip down and on the inside tattooed in crude black ink were the letters F.U.C.K., upside down as if the girl had pulled out her lip and done it herself.
Olivia made a face and shook her head. "You know you're getting old when they start teaching that in home ec."
"Have you seen anything like this before?" Warner asked Fin.
"Yeah." Tutuola nodded with a grim expression, hands in the pockets of his leather jacket. "Gangs'll do it when one of their cronies goes AWOL. They track 'em down, kill 'em. They don't even bother asking questions, they just assume they're about to be caught out and eliminate the threat. The girls they'll usually rape before they kill, the guys get their goods chopped off, then they tattoo them with that. Humiliation to the extreme. You don't get on these guys' bad sides."
"I didn't find any evidence of rape," Warner said and let go of her lip. "But then I haven't done the internal exam yet. What about this?" She held up the sealed packet of cocaine between two fingers.
Fin shook his head in disgust. "It's their way of the last laugh. She was trying to go clean."
"Sick bastards," Olivia murmured somewhat absently.
"Anything I should watch for specifically during the post?" Warner handed the packet to her tech, Dante. Christine, her other tech, was celebrating her anniversary with her husband today and had left hours ago. "Take that up to Evidence?"
"Sure thing."
"You finishin her tonight?" Fin asked.
"No, first thing tomorrow morning." She pulled the blue drape cloth up over the girl's head. "My concentration has a bedtime, and she deserves the attention at its fullest."
Olivia had tuned out the conversation as Dante left the suite and Warner moved off. There was a quiet commotion sounding from the upper floor. A door shutting. A chair scuffing along the floor. Voices were louder than the detective thought they ought to be in a coroner's office at nine o'clock at night. Especially since there'd hardly been anyone left in the building when she and Fin had gotten here. She tilted her head. "You hear that?"
She was looking at the ceiling as if they could see through it to the source of the ruckus. More voices. Shouting. Footsteps were heavy and fast as whomever they belonged to ran down the hall. Someone laughed and another door was shut.
"Some party," Benson commented dryly and with the same kind of grin at Fin and Warner...but something about the noise was sending a little alarm ringing in her head. She couldn't nail it down, nor could she extract a reason for why it was bothering her.
A cabinet or something metallic was slammed. Hard. Fin was frowning, the same alarm that was showing in Olivia's eyes now starting to clang for him.
"What's wrong?" Warner had moved the body to the freezer and quirked an eyebrow as she came back to stand next to the two.
"Something don't feel right..."
A double succession of pops, like the last popcorn kernels in the bag exploding in the microwave, made all three of them jump and their heads shot to the suite's double doors as a man yelled and they heard what sounded like something heavy hitting the floor in the hallway. Another man swore incomprehensibly.
"The hell...?" Fin muttered. He recognized the sound - what he couldn't process was why he was hearing it here. Instinct was sending his hand towards his firearm.
Warner looked annoyed with the noise what she thought was her staff were making as they left for the night and she moved to the doors to investigate the commotion before either Olivia or Tutuola, their mental alarms now shrieking at them, could stop her.
"Doc--"
"Melinda..."
The double doors were flung open, smacking hard against the walls on either side. Popcorn kernels that had not been grown in any other place but a munitions warehouse exploded again from two different directions and Fin shoved Olivia to the cement floor as acrid gunpowder filled the room.
Melinda Warner had already gone down screaming.
Present
time (9:42 pm)
Precinct
The entire street block around the station house was in chaos and the street cordoned off an additional block in both directions as Elliot pulled his car to the curb and jumped out without turning his headlights off. Red and blue flashed against brick and turned snow strobing through eerie colors as it piled on the ground and continued to fall around them. Squad cars lined the street on either side, the sirens Elliot had heard earlier now silenced. Local emergency vehicles, fire engines, Paramedics, ambulances, as well as units from Chester sat interspersed between the throng of marked and unmarked police sedans. A black S.W.A.T. truck was there and men in riot gear, transparent shields absent, were taking positions at various strategic locations with their radios crackling.
The media, unsurprisingly, had also already arrived; a woman and a cameraman under a flood lamp stood by a dark NBC news van down the street several yards away from the perimeter that had been built from crime scene tape and construction barricades.
Snipers were being placed, though because the morgue was below ground and had no windows, the best they could hope for was Jay or his armed companion venturing up into the ground floor offices. As Elliot showed his credentials and was allowed through he could see the blinds had already been tipped closed. He didn't need to check to know the door was locked.
The unrest inside headquarters was even worse than outside, only this was a more controlled form of chaos. Everyone had a place, had a job. Desks had been rearranged and slid together to create one long table surface down the center of the room and computer technicians from the precinct were setting up communications and surveillance equipment and connecting various terminals from the office to a master network. Jeans and t-shirts separated officers that'd been called at home from those still on their shifts and not one of them could stand still.
Manhattan's Hostage Rescue Team, or HRT, task force was already on scene and two of them were speaking with Cragen. Obviously the situation fell under the captain's jurisdiction, but both precinct and specialized task force would need to coordinate flawlessly and the men who led both knew this. George Huang, the unit's criminal profiler, was also a member of the consultation panel connected to the HRT and was in the precinct quietly waiting for the moment when he would become the crisis team's most valuable asset. Every once in a while the flash of an emergency medical professional's badge caught the eye as they stood by ready for action or consultation.
The TV in the corner was on, the volume down low as live news broadcast of the standoff being recorded just down the street played out on the screen.
"Goddamn vultures," Stabler cursed savagely to himself as he strode into the squad room turned crisis command center. He tossed his coat one-handedly to some random chair against the wall and began to roll up the sleeves of his sweatshirt - he'd not changed back into work clothes when Cragen had called him. "We're only twenty minutes into this shit and they're already circling. What do we got?"
"You're looking at it." It was John that answered. He appeared out of place and oddly diminished in faded jeans and what looked like a gym shirt; Elliot had never seen him out of his dark slacks, dress shirt and tie before. For the first time since knowing the man, John Munch looked old.
Cragen had finished his conversation with HRT and strode over. "Everything went down about five after nine," he began, repeating a bit of what he'd relayed over the phone. "The few people from the ground floor offices say Jay came into the building with another white male, thirty to thirty-five, in black pants and a denim jacket. Wheylan started ordering them out and then his buddy pulled a gun. Last person out of the building says he was having a hard time controlling this accomplice, was yelling at him, trying to calm him down as they headed for the morgue."
"Unreal." Elliot crossed his arms and spread his stance. "Two guys with guns just waltz into the county coroner's building and no one bats an eyelash until after things go apeshit?" Phones were ringing around him. He blocked the noise out.
"He was in uniform, Elliot," Munch stated. He looked fidgety, like he didn't know what to do with his own body. "He wouldn't have had to go through the metal detectors. Guard did everything by the book. There was no way he could have known Jay was going to hand a second gun to his buddy once they were both through."
"Bastard thought of everything didn't he." Stabler looked at Cragen. "You told me one of the techs from the office said she heard screaming. What's the word on injuries?"
"Few bruises here and there. Jay's accomplice got a little rough with some of them as they were clearing the ground floor. Nothing serious we know of."
The 'yet' was left unspoken.
A bitter taste filled his mouth as he asked, "Warner? Fin and Olivia?"
He thought he saw something flicker in John's eyes as Cragen paused and then shook his head. "Nothing yet. We're trying to get a team into the building to pull the security tapes and get fiber optics in."
"Olivia'd have had her phone on her."
"We can't get through," the captain said. "It's either off or just not being answered, and Jay's not calling us." He took a breath and went on. "HRT's talking to the city now and we're getting blueprints. John's already called the contractors who built it; they'll be here within the hour. The bay doors that lead into the autopsy suite from the parking terrace in the back are hydraulic. City's cut power to the building. There's no way out but through us."
Elliot rubbed both hands down his face. "Christ."
Cutting the power was protocol. It gave the people outside some control. It worked. But because of the place Jay had chosen to turn into his own little Fort Apache, protocol this time was a double edged sword. It would keep him and his accomplice in and leave them unable to access anything, but it would destroy evidence in the form of the bodies Warner had in her freezer. Not to mention that, because the morgue was in the basement and it was the end of January, without heat the autopsy suite was slowly but definitely going to get very cold. All they could hope was that the weather stayed overcast and snowing...if it cleared and the insulating cloud cover lifted, temperatures would drop below freezing.
"The freezer is self contained," Cragen was saying. "It's on its own power."
"Oh that's great news," Elliot muttered facetiously with a bitter shake of his head. "So the dead bodies'll be fine." 'Now what about the three bodies outside the freezer that are still breathing?' He thought to himself. Stabler moved his hands and looked at John. Munch had gone strangely quiet and looked slightly unfocused. "Okay." Elliot looked to his captain, his nerves on fire. "What d'we do."
The Asian criminal profiler the squad depended on in so many cases had come over to them. "At the moment, detective, there's nothing we can do," Huang replied. "Aside from what's already being done. I can't assess Jay's mental state until he begins talking to the primary negotiator. And right now we can't contact him. The phone in the basement is outside the autopsy suite...it's unlikely Jay or his accomplice is going to risk leaving the safety of a windowless room to answer a phone in the hall, and even if they did take that risk, we can't connect to that line. The only form of communication we have right now is through Detective Benson's cell phone. Whether he calls us or answers our calls to her number, the first move has to be his."
"So what're you saying here?" Elliot persisted impatiently.
Cragen, hands in his pockets, gave a helpless shrug. "We wait."
Elliot sighed, his blood boiling. "Perfect."
11:17
pm
Autopsy
Suite
Detective Tutuola sat with his back to one of the stainless steel cupboard doors that made up the counters lining the autopsy suite. A permanent scowl crinkled the corners of his dark eyes and furrowed the lines in his forehead as he watched the two men that had stormed the morgue little over an hour and a half ago. The main power was off, and they looked eerily luminescent in the yellow glow of the emergency lighting that had blipped on when the electricity had been jacked.
Jay looked like a man gone mad - and he probably had done just that, Fin thought - but it wasn't a violent or psychotic type of glint in his eyes. He looked scared. He kept pacing back and forth near the back of the room, shaking his head and muttering "not like this" under his breath. His hands trembled and he kept chewing on his lower lip. He was unstable, definitely, but not coming across to Fin as overtly dangerous.
No, the one that scared the ex-narcotics detective right now was Jay's accomplice. The man was younger than Jay by several years, and was already totally out of control...
/Fin jerked his head up at Warner's cry. The M.E. was curled on her side on the floor, holding her right knee in a vice.
"Melinda!" Olivia exclaimed in shock from underneath him. Ignoring the two gunmen, she pushed up to her hands and wiggled free.
"Jesus!" Jay hollered, looking horrified. "The fucking hell are you doing?" He shouted at his friend, shoving him backwards a few steps.
"Hey, man, you're the one that wanted help with this fucking idea," the man bit back.
"I didn't tell you to shoot anyone!" Jay raged.
"Melinda..." Olivia had crawled to Warner's side. "Okay...it's okay honey." She pressed her own hands on top of the doctor's; the pant leg of her scrubs was soaked at the knee. The doctor had her eyes closed tightly and was breathing fast. "Melinda look at me. It's okay..." Olivia kept murmuring. She left one hand over the wound and reached up the other to the table top above them where she'd seen a roll of paper towels.
"DON'T!"
Olivia flinched hard and froze mid-motion as the tip of a semi-automatic handgun touched the side of her head.
Fin, who had been moving to help her help Warner, froze as well. His eyes were glued to the weapon "Jay..."
"Fucking hell, man," Jay growled and slapped his friend's hand away, hard. "She's a cop!"
"Yeah? And what if she'd been goin for her fucking gun.."
"Jay..." Olivia's voice shook but she didn't look up or move any further towards the paper towels. "I'm just trying to stop the bleeding. If we don't get it under control right now she'll bleed to death, and then you'll have murder on your hands."
"Christ," Wheylan swore again. "Fine." He angrily shouldered his partner out of the way and bent. He pulled Benson's Colt from its holster; out of habit she had donned it when Cragen had called her even though she was off duty. Fin wisely already had his out and it dangled from his finger by its trigger as Jay reached for it. He snatched it up then threw both weapons in the enormous Rubbermaid trash bin in the far corner. "There, you happy?" He snapped at his buddy.
After a tense few linger seconds the other man backed down. The reason Fin and Olivia were trying to stem Warner's bleeding was momentarily forgotten as the two worked to do just that./
Jay allowed them to use whatever resources available in the suite to help the M.E. and it had taken almost thirty-five minutes to get the bleeding under control and Melinda comfortable. Thankfully, the doctor had been conscious and alert enough to help them and they'd even managed to get the wound stitched closed. The wayward bullet from the barrel of Jay's accomplice's weapon had gone clean through, but her knee-cap looked ruined. Olivia's coat was acting as a pillow to prop her now thickly bandaged leg up and Fin had given up his leather jacket to keep her warm and help discourage shock. Self-diagnosing, Melinda had assured them both that it wasn't too serious. Hurt like a bitch and would take weeks to fully heal, she confessed, but was not immediately life-threatening. Even still, her dark skin was the pale washed out color of overly-diluted chocolate milk and Fin knew that his and Olivia's first priority was to get her out and into the hands of other medical professionals. Thank God she'd at least been shot in a medical type facility.
Now Olivia sat next to Fin, with Warner next to her; they were clasping hands and all three had been quiet for some time now.
"How're you doing," Olivia asked the other woman quietly, concern heavy in her brown eyes.
Warner squeezed the hand she was holding, giving it a pat along with a little smile to let the detective know she was, in fact, all right. She was, however, holding that hand a little tighter than she otherwise might have.
"What's goin on here, Jay?" Fin, after several minutes of silence, risked conversation. His voice was level and non-confrontational.
"Wasn't supposed to go down like this," the man muttered curiously.
"Like what, Jay?" Olivia ventured carefully after a long pause. His friend had his gun trained on all three of them. The three of them had to tread extremely carefully, and each of them knew it. One wrong word or move, and they were finished.
"This..." Wheylan gestured around the darkened room. "I didn't want anyone to get hurt!" He oddly glanced at the double doors that led into the hallway. "I just wanted them to see, to know how stuff really worked..."
Just then a muted ringing sounded from the pile of coat bunched up under Warner's knee. "The hell is that?" Jay's buddy barked. "Whose fucking phone is that?"
Olivia dimly realized that her phone had been ringing almost non-stop for about an hour, but she and Fin had been so focused on helping Melinda, she'd tuned it out. Obviously Jay's friend had not done the same. She glanced at the pocket she knew the phone was in, and then looked up at Jay.
"You know procedure here, Jay," she began coolly. "They're not going to stop until you talk to them."
"It's yours?" His sweating companion thrust the barrel of his weapon at her again.
"Ryan!"
"Hey, back off!" Fin shouted at the man at the same time as Jay. He'd had it with this prick. But at least said prick had a name now. "Jay, c'mon man," Tutuola switched moods in a flash to talk to the other officer, and his voice was again calm and steady. "At least answer it so the station knows everyone's okay."
Jay looked from Fin to Olivia...then waved the hand holding his own gun impatiently. "Yeah fine, whatever. Answer 'em. I'm sick of the ringing anyway." His friend had cut the wires in the cord of the phone out in the hall ten minutes ago to keep it from ringing already and annoying them - the mobile was their only connection.
Sharing a surprised and somewhat wary look with Fin, Olivia bent forward and carefully slid the sleek silver flip phone out of the rumpled pocket half-mashed under Melinda's knee. With no further protestation coming from either Jay or his buddy, Ryan they now knew him as, she shakily opened the mobile. Her movements were slow and deliberate and she kept her eyes on Jay and Ryan the whole time as she pressed the green button.
Any sudden or abrupt motion from herself, Fin, or Warner could mean a bullet for any one of them.
11:20
pm
Precinct
As Jay's superior on scene, and because he had dealt with situations like this many times in his career, Captain Cragen had been given the responsibility of primary negotiator. The individual who had the only direct contact with the captors. The man talking him through the actual negotiating, basically feeding him his lines, would be Huang. Both men sat at the line of desks turned command center table at the communications equipment. Huang was holding headphones to one ear, Cragen was wearing a headset. The rest of the HRT were milling about the station conjuring up strategies for possible scenarios no one really wanted to consider.
The captain glanced at the clock on the wall as the ringing continued in his head. On the tenth ring he went to terminate the connection before he heard, again, the mechanical voice tell him, "the cellular customer you have called does not answer." His finger was resting on the latch when he heard a click. A split second later, contact was finally made.
"Benson." A female voice sounded through the speakers and relief flooded him so strongly he had to rest his forehead in one hand.
"Olivia. Thank God," Cragen breathed, rubbing his eyes. A collective sigh seemed to go through the crowd of crisis management personnel gathered in the squad room.
Elliot's eyes were riveted to the speaker phone as if, if he stared at it hard enough, he could see his partner through it.
It was extremely atypical to have a captor let one of his hostages answer ANY phone, let alone their own phone...but he wasn't about to argue what was 'normal' with himself right now. He would take what he was given. "Are you all right detective?" Don asked.
"Fin and I are okay," she reported. Munch bowed his head with an unusually audible sigh and another officer clapped him on the back. "Warner's hurt."
"...t wasn't me!" They heard distantly, in the background. "It wasn't supposed to happen like that. Tell them!"
"It was an accident," Olivia came back carefully.
"How serious?" Cragen was waving an EMT over to listen in.
"Her knee-cap looks shattered, but we stopped the bleeding and closed the wounds. She says she's all right."
"Ask her if the bullet passed through or is still lodged in the patient's leg," the paramedic prompted Cragen.
"Olivia did the bullet go through?"
"Yeah, it went clean."
"Was Wallace all the way..." they heard Jay mutter from the background again. Fingers in the squad room snapped and several officers jumped to computers to try and get a fix on the new name, partial as it was at the moment. Elliot had to clench his fist to keep himself from reacting when one of those officers sat down at what, before two hours ago, had been Olivia's desk.
Huang was looking at Cragen, his hand over his own mouthpiece. "Jay," he mouthed, and Cragen nodded his understanding. They had to get Jay on the phone and right off the bat needed to negotiate Warner's release. He was just so damn loathe to abandon his detective for the unraveled officer holding her and Fin at gunpoint...
"Olivia you know the city's cut the power," he began, dragging it out just a bit longer. "We're going to do everything we can to resolve this as fast as possible, but it's likely the basement's going to get pretty cold in the meantime."
A pause. Then, "We understand."
"How much power do you have left?"
"What're they saying?" Jay asked nervously. He sounded closer this time.
"He just wants to know much power my phone has, Jay," they heard Benson tell him in a passive, calming tone. Cragen cheered silently. Keep them calm while staying calm yourself was the name of this game. There was a tense pause, and then she answered. "The cell was fully charged on Sunday." Elliot jerked his hand at a technician nearby and he jogged over to the detective.
"She's got a Motorola V171 flip," he said of Olivia's cell phone. "We need model specs, we need to know how long that battery's gonna last." The tech nodded, moved away to get this information, and Elliot focused again on the speaker phone.
"Now what?" Jay asked. "Who're you talking to?" He sounded nervous, agitated, but his voice was laced with more curious undertones than anything else.
"Captain Cragen," they listened as Olivia spoke to him patiently. "Them talking to me isn't going to do anything, Jay," she went on. "They need to talk to you. They have to know what you need, you know this..."
"Dude, who the hell is she to go on about what's gonna help us outta this shit," a new, angrier male voice sounded through the squad room. "She's full of bullshit," he ranted. "This whole thing is bullshit!"
"Ryan, shove it," Jay snapped. "You came because you fucking wanted to."
Cragen wrote Ryan Wallace on a piece of chewing gum wrapper - it had been the only piece of 'paper' near him at the time - and handed it to Elliot who in turn handed it off to the officers already working on getting information about this accomplice. Now they had a first name too.
"I know how this shit works, okay?" Wheylan went on. "Look, I...shit. I gotta think, this wasn't the idea. I just need to think." Silence for a few seconds. "Look, tell 'em to just call back when I got it worked out. Need to just think..." His voice trailed off and got quieter like he was moving away from where the phone could pick him up.
"Captain," she came back on the line.
"We heard, Olivia," Cragen confirmed. Huang was trying to catch his eye. He looked left at him and the profiler was tapping his watch. He nodded. "We need a time frame..." he told his detective.
"They want to know when you'd like them to call back," Olivia said to Jay, skillfully wording it so that right off the bat Jay felt he had some control. They didn't hear a response from him, he had wandered too far away for the phone to pick it up, but a second later she came back with, "An hour."
"Okay," Cragen breathed. "An hour," he confirmed.
"Hang up the damn phone already," the man they now knew to be Ryan Wallace snapped from close by. "Gonna waste all the fucking batteries."
"Olivia," Cragen said quickly before she could terminate the connection.
"Captain."
"Be there," he said bluntly, his tone ordering her and Fin to keep themselves and Warner alive until they made contact again. A moment later there was a click, and the line went dead. Don looked at his watch. Nine minutes of conversation total.
Chaos.
The moment the call was cut, the squad room, which during the conversation had been still as the grave, erupted in noise.
"People!" Cragen silenced them with a raise of his hands. "All right. We've got a lot of information to gather and share and only an hour in which to get it organized." His first priority was Warner and he looked at the EMT that had listened in. "Tell me something good..."
"It sounds good," the young man said with a nod. "With the slug passing clean, there's less risk of infection. Your detective said they stopped the bleeding and sutured the wound. As gruesome as it sounds, a morgue does have the equipment and supplies necessary to properly treat injuries. Gauze to stem bleeding, wraps to keep pressure bandages in place, antiseptics for cleaning purposes.." He looked at them all. "Baring the onset of shock, for the time being I think she's gonna be okay. Obviously we need to think long-term as well," he added. "But from here, right now, it looks good."
"Thank you," Cragen nodded, only slightly uplifted by the positive prognosis. "Lieutenant," he barked next at the HRT team leader.
Phil Aston was a brawny, slightly pot-bellied man of about fifty and he spoke with the confidence of a man who had been doing this a long time and was good at it. "I'm inclined to think we've got more of a barricade situation here," he stated. "Technically, a hostage situation is defined as a crisis which occurs when one or more people are held against their will with their release contingent on certain demands being met. So far, this guy's not made any demands. Actually it sounds like he doesn't know what the hell is going on."
"Jay's behaviour thus far would certainly suggest this is the case," Huang spoke up. "His comment, "It wasn't supposed to happen like that" lends to the conclusion that, whatever his goal is, he probably never intended to take hostages to achieve it."
"The fact that Fin, Olivia and Doc Warner are his hostages right now kinda suggests otherwise," Elliot said shortly.
"Actually," the profiler went on unfazed by Stabler's temper. "I honestly don't think he wanted to hurt anyone. Think about it. He forced people from the building before going to the morgue and the office technicians we talked to said the only one of the two that were rough was this accomplice." He looked at Cragen, continuing in his characteristically calm tenor. "Melinda was working later than usual tonight. Detective Tutuola went to the morgue as a favor to her, and Olivia just accompanied him. There's nothing to suggest there was an hostile intent against anyone." He shrugged. "I think the three of them were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time."
"I don't believe this," Elliot snorted angrily.
"Detective," Cragen cut him off with a warning glare. "What do we know about this accomplice yet," he asked no one in particular. "Anything?"
A computer tech from the precinct handed him a sheet of paper with notes written next to the driver's license photo. "Ryan Wallace, age thirty-seven. Works demolitions for Massachusetts, lives in Boston."
The man was slightly overweight with no neck. His face was round face and an uneven beard was trimmed close to his skin. His eyes were small and hair the license stated was brown was already receding. He could have been in his forties.
"Background check turn up anything interesting?" Munch asked, his shoulders tense. His usual sardonic mannerisms were gone and the man was nothing but business.
"Clean as a whistle," the tech replied to their disappointment. "Never been convicted on any charges, misdemeanor or otherwise. One speeding ticket when he was seventeen, that's it." Oddly, though, the tech was grinning.
Cragen frowned at him. "I've either got something up my nose, or you're about to make me a very happy man, Ron," he said.
The tech named Ron nodded. "The latter, Captain." He handed Cragen another sheet of paper. "Wallace's father, Benton, was a cop for Boston PD. Worked narcotics. Twelve years ago this guy's squad raided a warehouse in Wakefield and closed a case they'd been on with their homicide for over six months."
Cragen raised an eyebrow. "And why would this news make me such a happy man...?" He didn't follow how it connected to anything or why such a connection, if it existed, was relevant.
"Two years ago, a kid from that raid went parole," he went on. "March of that same year Benton Wallace was shot dead next to his car outside a bar in Cambridge."
"Noooot feelin' any warm fuzzies," Elliot remarked sarcastically.
The technician reached out to the papers in Cragen's hand and flipped a page. "Wallace's killer? Same kid." Eyebrows went up. "It gets better." He turned another page and smiled. "Benton Wallace was Jay Wheylan's uncle. He and Ryan Wallace are first cousins."
There was a pregnant pause.
"Jesus Christ," Elliot muttered. "The son of a bitch's had an agenda the whole time."
"So he lives with this anger over his uncle's death for two years," Cragen puzzled. "But the Chaumont cases tosses him over the edge?"
"Jay never mentioned this incident with his uncle in any of my encounters with him," Huang said. "But my guess would be that the catalyst for his sudden destabilization now was Angela," he supplied. "It wasn't just the cop the perp hurt this time, and in fact the cop himself wasn't actually harmed. But a child was killed."
"Captain!"
Heads turned and followed a frenzied looking A.D.A Alexandra Cabot as she breezed into the congested squad room. She looked even stranger than Munch; her hair, usually with every blond strand exactly in its place, was in a loose disheveled ponytail and she was dressed in blue warm-up pants and a white sweatshirt. She had her glasses on and Elliot was fairly certain she was wearing neither make-up nor bra.
"I just heard." She sounded slightly out of breath as she looked at them all. "Donnelly called me, and it's all over the news. I came as fast as I could. What do we know?"
It was Cragen who answered her. "Olivia and Fin are okay, but Warner got hit in the crossfire."
"Oh my God," Alex looked horror-struck and put a hand over her mouth. She'd had lunch with both women less than twelve hours ago.
"She took a bullet to the knee," Elliot supplied before she got too upset. "Olivia said she and Fin stopped the bleeding and closed it up...doc told them she was all right."
"You talked to them." Alex looked between Elliot and Cragen incredulously, knowing as they did how unusual it was for the negotiation team to actually talk to a hostage.
"To Olivia," Cragen nodded once. "On her mobile. Wheylan won't talk to us yet. We have an hour and then we call again."
"Speakina mobiles.." Elliot craned his head around, searching the room. "David!" He hollered and the same man he'd talked to earlier weaved his way over. "What've you got for me?" He put a hand on David's shoulder.
"You're not going to like it," the man said solemnly. "Detective Benson's phone is the same as my wife's. If Marci's phone is fully charged and she doesn't plug it back in between when she takes it off the charger and when it goes dead, the battery usually lasts about two days. Give or take a few hours depending on how much she's actually using it during that time."
"Liv said her phone was fully charged on Sunday," Elliot said to Cragen.
"So we've got twenty-four hours?" The captain looked to David for confirmation. "Give or take?"
David hesitated, and shook his head negatively. "We don't know when she put it on its charger. Assuming she did so Saturday night so it would be ready on Sunday, her phone would have been fully charged for only about half of Sunday. The second she takes it off and uses it, that count goes down." He looked at the clock. "In twenty minutes, it'll be Tuesday," he said. "With the continual use the phone's going to be put through I'd say her battery's got fifteen, maybe eighteen hours max left before it kills."
Munch made a noise deep in his throat and sat down heavily, rubbing his forehead. Alex put a hand on his shoulder.
Elliot looked at the same clock David had referenced like a man who's about to be executed counts days. Eighteen hours, he thought on the high end of the estimation. The clock's hands stated that it was 11:40.
Seven.
They had until seven o'clock tomorrow night to talk Jay Wheylan down and get his hostages released. After that contact would be severed entirely and other, more extreme measures would have to be taken to achieve resolution.
When the sun set on Manhattan tomorrow night, Elliot and John would either be taking their partners in their arms...Or on Wednesday Captain Donald Cragen would be conducting funeral services over three caskets draped with flags.
The countdown had begun.
End Part 6
A/N - Please review if you haven't already ((begs)) :D Many, many thanks to those of you still following the story :) You're what keeps it going!
