--
Elliot awoke with a start, amazed he hadn't woken up before now. He could hardly believe what he was seeing. People- they surrounded him. And not people in captivity, either. These were throngs of young, free people bouncing and waving their arms in time to earsplitting music with a thumping beat and screaming lyrics. Most of the time the room- a huge room, a warehouse perhaps- was encased entirely in darkness except for restless, multicolored streaks of light. The sensitizing effect of the drugs, combined with his headache, the crushing volume of the music and sporadic but blinding flashes of light that cut across the crowd from time to time like lightning prompted Elliot to wonder if hell could be much worse than this.
But this was also a chance, and he wouldn't squander it. Elliot took a moment to study his new environment and look around. On the upside, it was nice to be clothed again, for a change. He was comfortable with his body and hadn't been shamed by having his clothes taken away from him as the other men probably had been. Nevertheless, being clothed did help him feel less vulnerable, so that was a plus. Not all these people could be a part of his kidnappers' group. In fact, Elliot was beginning to suspect that this "cult" was really just the two asinine losers he'd seen so far. Now the drawbacks of his predicament started setting in.
They had him in a straight jacket and pajamas, so he looked like a mental patient. His facial expression, which he knew had to be slack from the drugs, wouldn't help him convince someone to come over and talk to him, either. He tried to get his legs under him, but immediately felt a tether at the back of the jacket hold him in place, sitting firmly on the ground, his back against a wall. Hidden in plain sight, if anyone did notice him, he seriously doubted they would be interested in getting to know him.
Elliot searched the crowd; no one was even looking in his direction. He spotted some of the kidnapped boys; not all of them had been carried along on the journey, but one was suspended above the crowd in what was ostensibly a dancing cage. Another he could barely see several yards away, in a position more or less identical to his.
Elliot gathered as much air in his lungs as he could, and tried yelling at a nearby crowd of dancers bobbing with the music, oblivious to Elliot's presence. His voice was so weak, even to his own ears and especially in competition with the party's soundtrack, that the shrieking singer swallowed Elliot's voice whole and he continued to go unnoticed.
The effort of trying to be heard tired him, and Elliot had to fight the impulse to close his eyes against the sensory assault. He had to keep searching for his moment.
And there, as though his prayers had been heard by a higher power and instantly answered, he saw someone looking, no, staring at him. It seemed too good to be true- it was Olivia, watching him. It seemed impossible, but the woman he was looking at was Olivia, he was sure of it. She started cutting her way through the crowd sideways, back and forth, like a shark. Why was she taking her time?
"Olivia!" He had to call out to her, as she appeared unsure about who he was. Gradually, she continued to move closer, never taking her eyes off him. Her face looked weird- overly made up and gaudy. And then he knew, of course, that it was indeed too good to be true. This was not Olivia, but some girl, probably still a teenager, with similar short, dark hair but definitely not his partner.
Yet she continued to move closer to him and before he had decided how to approach the delicate subject he needed to discuss with her in this hellhole, she was literally on him. Elliot leaned back as she attempted to grind her rough-hewn short skirt into his face. The fingers she caressed his face felt like biting spiders and he had to shake his head furiously to get her to back off. The girl, knowing when she wasn't wanted, shrugged at him as if to say, "your loss" and started to leave. He was blowing his chance.
"Don't go!" His whisper-volume plea happened to coincide with a rare and brief drop in the volume of the music, and she turned back to start towards him again, smiling with renewed confidence.
"I need to tell you something!" The crushing noise was back, but by this time she read his lips sufficiently well enough to lean in, her ear pressing next to his mouth.
What was said next nobody but the girl could have possibly heard, but anyone watching would have seen her playfully lascivious smirk turn downward and known that whatever the words were, they made her uncertain and frightened. She pulled back and froze, not knowing what to do next.
Elliot lifted his folded arms as much as he could and pointed at them with his face.
"Get me out!"
The girl reached out hesitantly and fumbled with the top buckle until she had the idea of using her glowsticks to illuminate her work. She had just pulled the first strap loose when a claw-like hand gripped her shoulder and jerked her upright. It was the woman responsible for Elliot's disappearance, made up in elaborate face paint, now just inches away from Elliot's champion.
Elliot kicked at the woman as she gracefully stepped out of his reach, pulling the girl with her. Now it was his captor's mouth that held court with the girl. A moment later the girl was nodding- apologetic and embarrassed. She waved goodbye to Elliot with her lower lip thrust out in a comical pout, and then she was gone.
The woman now turned her glowering attention to Elliot, slowly wagging her finger at him like a metronome. He had misbehaved. She walked back to him with a swagger, and sharply kicked his right shin with the reinforced toe of her stiletto boot before swiftly swooping down into his ear.
"Next time those legs kick at me, you're going to lose them."
Just as swiftly, she reattached the strap that the girl had undone. The woman continued to hover directly over Elliot, gloating.
"Well? You got something to say to me?"
With flared breathing, Elliot nodded, reared back and spit squarely in her face. As she straightened herself from her crouching position, her expression never wavered, and the visage of her spit-spattered, smug superiority struck a chord of terror in him he didn't know existed. She reached behind her and then stabbed him in the shoulder with such violence, he was afraid the needle would break off under the skin. His near-silent scream accompanied a crescendo in the soundtrack of this abyss, and even Elliot did not hear his own voice.
--
If the detectives had learned one thing, it was that the night shift at the credit card company was not exactly the most helpful crowd.
"We're just here for emergencies."
"This is an emergency" Olivia argued.
"No, for example, if you drop your card down a sewer grate at two in the morning and can't pay for a cab to get home. That sort of emergency I can help you with. I can't give you someone's personal information; you'll have to wait until our manager gets here in the morning."
"It is the morning." Olivia said, using the phone receiver to support the weight of her head.
"I mean after the sun comes up."
Olivia hung up and pondered what to do until then.
"We could go back and recanvass the college. The frat party college. You know the one."
"You, my dear, are a textbook example of diminishing returns." Munch said, not bothering to move his chin from his chest.
"Huh?"
"Go home." Cragen translated. "Get some sleep. If you don't get some sleep soon, you won't be any good to anyone, least of all Elliot. That goes for everybody. There's nothing more anyone can do for at least another few hours. Don't make me pull rank."
"Another few hours. Every hour he's gone, Captain, they're doing something horrible to him. I know it."
"Olivia, that's exactly the kind of sloppy thinking we can't allow ourselves right now. I want you in your bed within the hour, and don't drive. Take a cab. We've got a long day ahead of us tomorrow."
--
Olivia started toward her shower but her feet took her past the bathroom and directly to the bed. She barely set the alarm before she was deeply asleep. Even unconscious, she could feel the weight of fear, guilt and uncertainty she carried, until somehow magically, she was back in time.
Back at the dreaded date, enduring her companion's boorish, long-winded opinions on subjects she couldn't have cared less about. Then she heard an unlikely sound. Over the din of clinking utensils, clattering plates and conversation from all sides, and despite her cell phone being wedged at the bottom of her purse, she heard its unmistakable ring. It took her a while to dig it out, but she answered before the voicemail picked up, and there was Elliot's voice.
"Elliot! Are you okay?"
"Yeah, why wouldn't I be?"
For her life, Olivia couldn't remember why she would think he might not be just fine.
"I don't know. Never mind. What's up?"
"I got a call from that clerk. She overheard some customers talking about a frat party going on tonight. But I hate to interrupt your date, so if you want to skip it…"
"It sounds serious. I'll meet you at the station in half an hour. Don't leave without me." Olivia stood up to gather her effects, apologizing profusely to her date and offering to pay for her half. Of course, he accepted her offer; she wouldn't have expected this guy would do anything else.
Feeling an elation at going to meet Elliot that she couldn't explain, Olivia jumped in her car. She was driving directly towards work, but now the streets seemed to converge in the wrong places, shifting their positions in relation to one another. She checked the time, and it had been hours since Elliot's call. Had she been lost all this time? Olivia called Elliot's desk, but there was no answer. She contemplated calling his cell phone when her own cell phone rang.
"Hello?"
"Olivia." It was Elliot, but he sounded drained, lifeless.
"Elliot, what's wrong? Are you still waiting for me? I don't know what's wrong with me, I can't find my way. Where are you?"
"Oliviaaaahhhh." This time, Elliot carried the last vowel sound of her name until it gradually turned into a horrible, choking, gurgling sound.
Petrified, Olivia dropped her scalding phone. When she picked it back up, the line was dead. She jumped when the phone rang again. The caller ID said it was Elliot, but this time she didn't want to answer.
She awoke, thrashing in her own bedsheets, to the sound of her cell phone insisting on her attention.
"Elliot?"
"Sorry, no." Fin's voice, dry and unamused as always. Comforting. "Just got word over the wire. There was a rave last night upstate, and another kid missing. The locals found a girl who thinks she may have seen Elliot. We'll be there in about two minutes to pick you up."
--
Munch and Fin filled in as much detail as they knew after Olivia got in the backseat, still straightening her socks. A couple had gone to an unlicensed rave, and when the female half of the pair couldn't find her ride home afterwards, she became concerned and called the local police. The police, in turn, had arrived just in time to stop the few remaining stragglers from leaving, and questioning had followed. One of the officers became particularly intrigued by a girl's story that one of the attendees had claimed to be a cop, despite his bizarre attire.
"Anybody out there missing one of their own?" was the way the half-joking inquiry came across Fin's desk early that morning.
The drive took several hours, and by the time they trio arrived, everyone in the warehouse was obviously weary of each other's company. Munch and Fin split up to chat with other officers and partygoers standing about, while Olivia made a straight line for a pixyish girl with short, dark hair and raccoon eyes.
The girl sat uncomfortably near the opposite wall, legs akimbo. Olivia did her introduction and asked the officer standing over the girl to please give them a minute.
"You said you talked to someone last night who claimed to be a cop? What did he look like?"
"It was dark, but he was an older guy. Looked like he didn't really belong here. Brown hair. He was wearing some kind of straight jacket thing. Looked like he was kind of out of it."
Olivia reeled.
"You saw someone helpless like that and you didn't even think anything was wrong?"
The girl pulled out a folded flyer advertising the rave. The event was promoted as "crazy" and "insane" and there was a cartoon of a man in a straight jacket, his tongue lolling to one side, his eyes bulging and toes splayed as though he were being shocked..
"There were a few guys here last night dressed up like that. I thought it was part of the theme."
"And you talked to him? What did he say?"
She reiterated his words in a rote, disinterested monotone.
"He said, um, 'I'm a cop. I've been kidnapped. Please help me."
Olivia's eyes rolled into the back of her head as her lids closed tightly. He had been here, right here.
"So did you?"
"Did I what?"
"Help him?" Olivia was losing patience.
"I started to, I did, okay? But then this woman came over and pulled me off him. She said he was decoration, and that he was hers. And that I shouldn't mess with other people's property."
The rage building in Olivia almost got the better of her, but she pushed it back down.
"Who organized this party? Who gave you this flyer?"
"I don't know who put it together; there was just some guy on campus handing out flyers to everybody. I didn't know him, though. It was just some guy. He looked like another student."
"I'll need you to talk to a sketch artist and put together drawings of the guy handing out the flyers and of the woman who talked to you last night."
"Well, okay, but she had on make-up. I mean, that Day-Glo stuff, all over her face. I don't think I'd recognize her if I saw her again."
"When was the last time you saw the guy you talked to, or any of the guys dressed like him?"
"I don't know. Maybe around three or four this morning. I wasn't really watching the time, I was just…"
"Just flying on E and aiding and abetting kidnapping and torture. I ought to have you arrested right here."
The girl flinched, stricken.
"Uh, don't worry. You're not under arrest." Munch handed the girl his card as he led Olivia away. "Call us if you think of anything else."
--
Back in the car, the detectives traded notes from their respective conversations. Munch had talked to the girl whose date failed to give her a ride back home, and in fact, he had failed to show up again at all after he left her to get something to drink. No one else knew much; the men in the straight jackets had been largely ignored or regarded as atmosphere, and if there were any suspicious vehicles or other activity in the area, no one had noticed.
"You know we can't continue to keep this in-house anymore. The fact that these lunatics are carrying their victims to parties for their own entertainment is important information. We're going to have to put this out there for the other investigators in the state. It may help them get a break." Munch felt the need to explain the decision he and Fin had already made, even as Fin dialed his cell phone to have this information disseminated across the state.
"Yeah, I know." Olivia said, defeated.
Hours later the detectives were back in the city, and Olivia watched as the day began turning dark again. Going on 72 hours missing now.
"Well, we didn't want to say anything on the way up there, but I think it's unanimous. You have got to take a shower." Munch dropped this news on her with heartfelt sincerity.
"This is not the time for jokes, Munch."
"I'm not joking. You got some sleep, now you've got to take a few minutes to freshen up so the rest of us can stand to be within a six- foot radius of you."
Olivia leaned forward from the backseat.
"Fin, do you have something to add about this?"
"No comment."
"I started to last night, but I was so tired. I just couldn't make it." Olivia said.
Munch nodded.
"Obviously. Look, we'll wait out here in the car for you. Just please, I'm begging you, run into your apartment and reacquaint yourself with soap. Just for a minute."
"I know what you're trying to do. Get my mind off Elliot for a little while. I appreciate it, but I'm okay. I lost it a little bit at the warehouse, but I'm all right. Thanks for trying, though."
"Sure thing." Munch waited a beat, then, "So, you're still going to take that shower when we get back into town, right?"
Cragen called then, fresh from an unpleasant talk with the credit card company.
"They're getting the information for us now; it should be coming over the fax any minute."
The detectives waited anxiously for Cragen to come back on the line. The next time he spoke, his delivery sounded like a eulogy.
"The credit card belongs to a woman named Juliet Francis. She's an 87 year-old grandmother from Topeka."
"Stolen." Olivia gritted her teeth so hard, she thought she heard one of them chip.
--
Elliot and the other captives were left in the stale air of the van until night. He spent this time the same way he had since being punched in the shoulder with the supershot: ashen, unable to move and struggling to expand and contract his lungs. He would not die like this, not here, and not from these people. But every breath was a conscious effort, and sapped what little energy he'd kept in reserve. A thin sting of saliva connected his chin and the floor when he was carried out of the van under cover of darkness and tossed recklessly onto the floor of the of the first room, the one that he'd originally woken up in.
A kick to his abdomen sent him alternately skidding backwards, towards the far side of the room. Elliot coughed and wondered whether one of his lungs might have collapsed.
"Not dead yet?" The kick had come from the dumpy young man, but the voice belonged to the woman. "Let's see what we can do about that, after we have a little fun."
--
Fin offered to go find some of his old informants to see if any of them knew who was moving stolen credit cards out of the Midwest and, if so, whether any of them knew the mystery woman who apparently frequented the kinds of stores Olivia and Elliot had visited that day he went missing.
In the meantime, Olivia studied the composite drawings Andrea and the girl from the rave had helped create. One of the pictures was of an unremarkable young man, while the other two sketches reflected what had to be two different women, and Olivia wondered just how many people were involved with this well-hidden conspiracy.
--
Olivia and Munch spent the next day talking to more students, some of whom had been in attendance at the party where Elliot disappeared, some had been found by investigators in other parts of the state. The detectives in other areas had been happy to receive the new lead that the boys were not only disappearing from parties, but also were being taken to parties once incapacitated. Some of the missing students had been taken to other parties during the past several weeks, and they eagerly followed up on these relatively fresh leads. None of the incoming news was of much immediate interest to Olivia and Munch, however. Everyone they talked to who saw the students could only say that they appeared to be "wasted" so no one had mingled with them or questioned who they were. Olivia dutifully made notes of the conversations and the details of what had been discovered, but none of it promised to help find Elliot, so she mentally filed the information as irrelevant.
In the course of talking to a particular student for the second time, Olivia's phone rang; she recognized the number as originating from upstate.
"Hi, Ms. Benson? This is Officer Adamson, remember me?"
Olivia did remember. He was one of the officers from upstate assigned to investigate the rave where Elliot had been seen.
"Just thought you'd like to know, we found that boy reported missing from the rave."
Olivia's brain woke up.
"Where? Did you find the others, too?"
"No, turns out it was a false report. The guy had a falling out with his girlfriend and left her at the party without a ride home. So she calls us and reports him missing, while he goes to an old friend's house a couple of hundred miles away to sulk. He didn't even know we were looking for him."
Olivia had to bite her tongue. Didn't this officer realize how cruel he was being to raise her hopes like that?
The caller continued, "I know we should charge the girl for filing a false report, but if she hadn't, we might have never known about your guy and the other abductees being here, so I'll probably just give her a stern talking-to."
"Yeah, okay. That's fine. Thanks." Olivia hung up and saw Munch watching her anxiously. She shook her head, no.
Almost immediately her phone rang again; this time with a completely unfamiliar, yet geographically closer, number. When she answered the call, the voice on the other end hissed something indistinctly.
"What? Speak up, I can't hear you."
"This is Andrea, you know, from the store. I'm at a place called Strapped- do you know where that is?"
Olivia smirked in spite of herself.
"Yeah, I know. I thought you said you didn't hang out with those crowds in places like that."
"I don't, okay? This is a sister store to the one I work at; I'm filling in for someone else. Listen, okay? She's here."
Olivia almost didn't want to believe she'd heard what Andrea said.
"The customer who pulled Elliot's card out of the trash that day?"
"Yes, okay? She's like, looking around, but she could leave any moment."
Olivia snapped her fingers at Munch.
"We'll be there just as soon as we can. Do not, under any circumstances, let her leave. She's used bad credit cards at your store, so you can hold her there until we arrive. Whatever you do, just don't let her go, understand?"
--
Olivia watched the woman named Janine Burke through the mirror on the other side of the interrogation room. They had arrived at the store to find Andrea accusing Janine of shoplifting, and Janine arguing rabidly that she was being falsely accused. The tactic seemed unnecessary to Olivia's way of thinking, but it did the job and had kept Janine there until the detectives could arrest her.
They had her for the credit card fraud; Andrea and her boss helpfully filed the complaints against Janine. Now Olivia would have to use that leverage to find Elliot. She eagerly wanted to talk to this woman, but knowing that this might be her first and last chance to find her partner, she performed a little prep work, starting by calling Casey. After giving Casey a brief introduction to the present situation, Olivia got the point.
"I know you haven't been kept in the loop, and that's my fault. But right now, Elliot is out there somewhere, and if they haven't killed him already, they will. Some of those boys who were taken have been gone for months, and they may still be alive. But they won't keep Elliot around that long; he's too dangerous, so I don't have months to look for him. If I can't convince this woman to talk, give up her accomplices, and tell me the location of these guys, he's dead."
"I can appreciate that. What do you want me to do?"
"I may have to offer this woman full immunity against any charges that could be brought against her in relation to these disappearances."
Casey responded more or less the way Olivia predicted.
"I'm sorry, but I can't get on board with that. Olivia, you don't anything about this person yet. She could be incidentally involved, or she may be the ringleader. And I am not about to give immunity to whoever has been calling the shots here. Isn't there any way to confirm her role in these abductions?"
"That's what I'm trying to explain here, Casey. She is the one, the only one that any investigator in the state has been able to catch. I'm not going to immediately throw a sweetheart deal on the table, but if she's smart, it'll eventually come to that. I need to know that you're prepared to make that deal." Olivia waited for an answer but Casey was stuck on something else Olivia had said.
"Oh, that's right. These guys have been taken from all over the state, right?"
"Yeah. Also, they've been drugged and taken to parties for their kidnappers' entertainment. Casey, I know that maybe I should be seeing a bigger picture here, but all I can think about is getting Elliot back alive. Will you help me or not?"
"Let me think about it. I need to make some phone calls."