I found out the next day that Elliot had been missing his cell phone for two days and had assumed that one of his kids had mistaken it for their own when he tried calling it and reached his own voicemail. The news that it had not been one of his kids, but rather Collins, who had taken it, left him quite disturbed, and I had the feeling I knew why.
"Where's the last place you remember having it?" I asked.
"Home," he replied. "I didn't even…I thought the twins might've taken it with them when they went back out to Queens on Sunday…" He trailed off there, looking upset, not that I could blame him for it. Collins had already gone so far as tobug my apartment; I wouldn't have put it past him to have done the same thing to Elliot's.
"Obviously, they didn't," said Olivia. She turned so that she could see us clearly and continued. "Cell phones might be easier to trace, but it's possible for him to make it look like he's in one place when he's really in another.
Elliot cast a confused look in her direction while Fin and I both smirked. We knew exactly what she was getting at.
"Besides that, we don't even know if he's using his real voice; it could be one of those voice-changing devices." I said innocently. Olivia cast an annoyed look at me but said nothing; Fin looked this close to laughing and Elliot still looked confused.
"What the hell are you talking about?" he asked. I shook my head.
"Old case," I said. "Don't worry about it." He didn't answer and silence fell over the squad room. It lingered for a while, and finally, Olivia spoke again.
"It's still worth a shot to try a trace," she said. "We're never gonna know what he does until we try."
"What would he want with my phone, though?" Elliot asked suddenly. "It doesn't make any sense."
"You're telling me," I said. "I'd have thought he'd want my phone."
"Probably figured yours would be able to get a hold of," Fin said to Elliot, "You're alone in that apartment; Munch is with the group from Baltimore. A missing phone would've been easier for them to notice."
I doubted that. With the four of us between two hotel rooms, with all our stuff, not to mention copies of case files everywhere, a missing phone would probably have been the last thing we noticed. But I said nothing; in a way, Fin was right, it would have been harder for Elliot to realize his phone was gone.
"That's beside the point," I said. "What we need to worry about is how we're going to keep this from reaching IAB." Olivia snorted.
"Yeah, right," she said. "They're convinced a cop is involved, and now they've got the brass telling us to report anything we might find to them."
"Screw that," said Fin. "What are they gonna do other than cause more trouble?"
"I haven't seen that uniform around lately," I remarked. "Whatever happened to her?"
"Sent her off to Staten Island," said Elliot. I shook my head in disgust at this. Staten Island had earned the nickname, department-wise, anyways, of 'career graveyard'. I couldn't believe the department hierarchy had gone so far as to do that to someone who'd had nothing to do with anything.
"They give a reason?" I asked finally.
"If you can call it that," said Olivia. She fell silent a moment and then proceeded to change the subject. "Why aren't the other two here?"
"I took them to the courthouse," I said. "They wanted to offer moral support." It was true, too, despite the skeptical looks that I suddenly found being cast at me. The trial had, unexpectedly, turned towards the defense, or so Abby had told me when I'd dropped off Kay and Tim. My theory had been right: they'd been saving their move until it suited them, and now they'd probably be able to turn the jury towards an acquittal.
"Something go wrong?" Elliot asked. I sighed.
"I don't know," I said. "Abby told me it's starting to turn towards the defense, but I gave her the lab results, so maybe it won't turn out too badly."
"Hope not." Olivia leaned back in her seat, an almost thoughtful look crossing her face as she did. "They amended the charges already?"
"According to Abby, they did it this morning," I said. "Walker's probably had a hand in the kidnappings and murders since the beginning."
"Well, the defense can hardly claim the prosecution held this back," said Olivia, "Not if they didn't know until this morning."
"Which they didn't," I said. "I just hope they can bring it into evidence so late in the trial."
"They should be if they haven't already started closing arguments," said Elliot. "Abby say anything about that?" I shook my head.
"No," I said. "She'd have told me that it was useless if they had. We might still have a chance."
I sounded a lot more confident about all of this than I felt, and the other three must have known it, because none of them said anything. I leaned back in my chair and picked up a pen, twirling it between my fingers as I waited, but the silence lingered, and finally, I spoke again.
"Abby says Baltimore's looking to extradite if we don't get a conviction here," I said. "There's a better chance that he'll serve time down there."
"At this point, I don't think anyone cares where he serves time, so long as he serves it," said Elliot. "She have anything else to tell you?" I shook my head.
"Not yet," I said. "All she'd say is that things are leaning towards the defense, but hopefully not for long."
Key word being 'hopefully'. Usually when things turned towards the defense, it meant we were already screwed over, no matter what else we did. Then again, the police could only do so much; Abby and Casey both knew it, but it didn't mean they wouldn't end up getting pissed off at the lot of us anyways.
The phone rang then; Olivia reached for it before any of us could move, frowning slightly before turning it to a speakerphone setting, like Abby had with her cell phone the night before.
"All four of you at once. What an unexpected surprise." Collins' voice filled the squad room; the hallway outside went silent, but we knew better: people were listening.
"What do you want, Collins?" Olivia was the first to regain her voice, which wasn't altogether surprising; the rest of us just sat there, for some reason unable to make ourselves believe what was going on. It was bad enough that Collins had already been inside the precinct, but the fact that he was calling here…Either he knew something about all of this that we didn't, which was more than likely, or he was trying to throw us off by giving us a false sense of hope. Laughter that was definitely not Olivia's brought us all back into reality; apparently, Collins had found something amusing in her question.
"What do I want?" he asked. "Nothing. I am merely calling to see whether or not you've gotten anywhere."
"You already know we haven't; why bother?" I asked.
"Does it matter?" came the answer. "I must say, Detective, giving the prosecution the evidence I left for you was a smart move. The trial has turned in their favor."
"How do you know?" I asked. "Have you been in the courthouse?"
"I hardly think that any of you believe that I am really that stupid," said Collins. "Of course I haven't been in the courthouse. The entire city is looking for me."
"But they care more about that little girl you've got than they do about you," said Elliot, cutting in before I could retort. "Tell me something, Collins, do you really expect to make it out of this alive if you're found and something's happened to her?"
"If something were to happen to me before I reached trial, Detective Stabler, all I would have to do is claim police brutality, and I could get the charges thrown out, as I'm sure Detective Munch is already aware of." Collins told him flatly. I looked over at Fin, who, out of the rest of the unit, was the only one who really knew anything; he said nothing. Elliot and Olivia, on the other hand, decided not to leave well enough alone and took it upon themselves to ask him exactly what the hell that was supposed to mean.
"I'm assuming then," said Collins, "That none of you have had the chance to meet Detective Lewis."
"You leave him out of this," I said loudly, "He had nothing to do with anything." Collins snorted.
"I beg to differ, Detective, if I remember correctly, it was he who started it all in a room that the Homicide squad referred to as 'the Box'."
"Get to the point, Collins," said Fin. "What are you trying to say?"
"Merely that you don't know your partner as well as you think you do; he is capable of a lot more than you might assume." Collins paused for a moment to give them time to mull this over and then continued. "No matter. I'm sure the four of you are quite busy; I shall let you get back to your work."
A click let us know that we'd been hung up on; none of us said anything and noises in the outside hallway resumed.
"That's great," Olivia said finally, dryly, "Now the whole damn precinct knows that Collins is literally laughing in our faces."
"What was he talking about?" Elliot asked suddenly, abruptly changing the subject. "It had to be something for you to react like that."
"Like what?" I asked, carefully avoiding looking him in the eye. "It wasn't anything."
"It was something," said Olivia, "You wouldn't have gotten upset if it was nothing."
Silence fell. For a minute there, I almost wished that Fin had told them all that I'd told him. But then I was glad that he hadn't; it would all make a lot more sense coming from me.
"Do you really want to know?" I asked. Elliot and Olivia both nodded; I sighed and leaned forward on my elbows.
"Bayliss wasn't there the first time this happened," I said. "Kay was, though. Baltimore's been called the city that bleeds longer than I've been a cop; the phone rings, we answer it, no questions asked."
"Child victims were always the worst…I drew primaries on the first murder of 1982…a little girl named Beverley Watkins. She had a charm glued to her mouth…it was the only clue we had. No one thought anything of it then, or even when the second murder happened. The third one, though…"
"Our lieutenant put the whole shift on it after that; the brass was on him about having a rookie as the primary once we found out we had a predator on our hands, but he kept me on…there were four of us: me, Kay, Stanley Bolander and Meldrick Lewis. He's the one Collins was talking about."
"Took us the better part of the year to find Collins; when we did, it was only me, Kay and Meldrick who were there. He…he'd left one of his victims on the headquarters stairs…thought she was dead, but she wasn't. Told us who he was, and where we could find him, so we went."
"He was alone there. Laughed when he saw who we were; said there was no way he'd take the fall for any of it. Meldrick and I went to arrest him…next thing we knew, Kay was yelling into the radio for ambulances: we'd been shot from behind."
I paused then and closed my eyes, still leaning forward, and once more wishing that Fin had already told them this. After a few minutes, I continued.
"About three weeks later, we got him again. Meldrick and I had come back to work a few days before; we talked the lieutenant into letting us handle the interrogation and it all went downhill from there."
"Meaning?" Olivia asked when I stopped again. I looked up at her and sighed.
"Meaning that he pissed us off enough to make us beat the hell out of him," I told her. "He probably got worked over at the prison, too, but he claimed police brutality, coercion….whatever he could think of. Abby…She tried everything she could to keep it all in, but she couldn't and we…we didn't have a case without it."
Dead silence filled the squad room after I finished. Elliot and Olivia were both staring at me in obvious disbelief; Fin looked indifferent, probably because I had already told him everything. After a while, though, Olivia spoke.
"Did you ever find out who shot you?" she asked. I nodded.
"It was Walker," I said. "Kay…well, she was the only one who could ID him, but he skipped town before anyone could nail him."
"And this is why you've been acting like this for the past three months?" Elliot asked. I nodded, and again, there was silence. It lingered until I spoke again.
"He only came up here because he knows I'm here," I said. "None of this would be happening if I'd nailed him the first time around…"
"Ain't your fault he's a sick bastard," said Fin. "Probably would have come up here regardless."
"If you're really the reason he came up here, then why would he make himself so obvious?" Olivia asked finally. "Does he want to go down for this?"
"No," I said, "But he's cocky. He wants to see how many of us cops he can screw over before getting a walk, just like last time."
"He's not getting a walk," Elliot said flatly. "Besides that, I doubt there's anyone at this point who would take his word over ours."
"You'd be surprised," I said, "Trust me. If he thinks there's a way to get out of it, he'll take it and run."
"Not this time," said Olivia, and silence fell again. For some reason, it made me feel a lot better to hear them talking out loud about this; I don't know why, but it did. Maybe it was just because we were all working as a unit again instead of being at each others' throats like we had been for a while.
"You know, you guys didn't have to start working this again," I said finally. "You could've just left me hanging."
"That's not the way it works, and you know it," said Olivia, turning back to the paperwork spread out over her desk. "We start something, we finish it."
"Or we get our asses chewed out by the brass, but that's another story," Elliot added. I snorted.
"Since when are we not getting chewed out by the brass?" I asked. "If they spent one day in here, they'd know exactly how hard it is to handle a unit like this…"
"Here we go again," Fin muttered. He turned back to his own paperwork, content to ignore the conversation that had just been started; Olivia, however, abandoned hers again and picked up where I'd left off.
It didn't hit me until we were ten minutes into the conversation that this was the first time since this case began that we'd been like this with each other. It was of small comfort, which, needless to say, was definitely what all of us needed by this point….especially since I had the feeling that things were only going to get more complicated from here on out.