Chapter 6 – Shadows' Waiting
"You could have fucking listened to me, bitch," the woman said, stabbing her finger at Olivia.
"I'm sorry," Olivia answered softly, standing her ground as well as she could. "I made a mistake."
"And how many other women did that guy rape because you thought I was lying?" she demanded.
"Four," Olivia whispered, closing her eyes. She had almost quit when she realized what exactly the price had been for her mistake. Four women. Kidnapped, raped, terrorized.
"Because you looked at me and thought 'she's a junkie. She must be lying,'" the woman spat out.
"Yeah," Olivia agreed with her.
It wasn't a huge leap to make. The woman in front of her was a poster child for strung-out addicts – too pale, too skinny, track marks on her arms, dark circles under her eyes, and the smell of betrayal and manipulation that most addicts wore like cologne. The vic's mother had been a well-off socialite, and it had been obvious to Benson when the vic had come in to report her abduction and rape that she was manufacturing a story to cover her latest binge.
She'd been wrong. It had happened, and the perp had done four more women before the case had come back and bitten her in the ass. Cragen had to talk her down from quitting, and it had been the hardest thing in the world to put her purse back in her locker and take up the threads of the investigation like it was any other case.
"How many women did you fuck over just as much as the men who raped them?" the vic asked, getting in Olivia's face.
"We all make mistakes," Liv answered, trying to hold her ground. "I made one when you came to me. I should have been there for you, and I wasn't. I've done my best to make up for it."
"YOUR BEST ISN'T FUCKING GOOD ENOUGH!" the vic screamed.
And so it went. She didn't know for how long. Every time one was done, another would step forward. Vicious, accusing, furious, and damning her for her mistakes. She hadn't believed them. She didn't notice a vital clue. She wasn't there in time. She hadn't pushed hard enough. She hadn't looked long enough. And each of these people had been failed by her. Failed, betrayed, ignored, lost.
The worst was that she knew each person's face, though she couldn't always remember their names. The cases went all the way back to when she was a raw recruit, on patrol and giving up the idea of long nails because she just couldn't get her reports typed properly. Then she started seeing the ones she didn't know about, the ones she hadn't worked on yet, the people she would fail in the future.
"She was a stupid kid!" he yelled. "She was mad at me because I wouldn't let her go to a concert, so she made a stupid accusation."
"I'm sorry," she said, trying to put her hands between their faces, shield herself somehow.
"I'm her father," he roared. "I would never do such a thing!"
"I can't-"
She turned from him and walked straight into Elliot.
"What was it, Liv?" he asked. His voice was deadly soft. "I get Kathy back, and you can't stand that, so you said what you did?"
"What? No," she whispered, backing away.
"What did you think, that IAB wouldn't investigate an allegation like that? That a detective made against her own partner?"
She ran into someone behind her, and their hands clamped down on her shoulders, keeping her from backing further away.
"What was it?" he asked again. "You wanted a pound of flesh after I broke it off with you? You had access to everything – fingerprints, hair follicles, clothing fibers. You did a good job."
"Elliot, no," she shook her head.
"It took Cragen pulling every string he had to get the evidence re-examined. You think they treat cops well up in Attica? Especially ones up on a rape-homicide?"
"NO!"
She lashed out with all her strength, desperate to escape. In the tangle of arms and fists, legs and feet, she tripped, and landed on the stone floor, bruising her arms and almost breaking a wrist.
In the dark. Breathing so fast, it sounded like she was sobbing. Then she realized she was sobbing. She pulled herself up into a kneeling position and buried her face in her hands, weeping.
"Not bad."
The lights came back on, and the woman was watching her with detached interest.
"None of the others managed to break loose at all," she said. "Even Kennedy – who I never really liked, just a little too aggressive with the 'Look at me! Look at me!' lesbian chic – she never pulled it off, though she got close a couple of times."
Olivia looked up at her. She had never hated anyone just as much as she hated the woman in front of her just now. At least the woman noticed.
"Oh, right. We should probably get down to business." She shook her hair back and crouched down beside her. "What's your second question?"
That wasn't too very hard.
"How do I get out of this and back to the real world?" Olivia asked. "And while you're at it, give me a name to call you."
The woman opened her mouth and stopped. "Yeah, well, at least you didn't waste a question on the second part. It's Anyanka, but call me Anya. I have better memories from that name anyways. As for the second part," she paused to take a deep breath, "you can't get yourself out of this. At least, not by yourself. That is, you can't get yourself out of here. Remember what I said about his invitation and all?"
"That no one could enter or leave without his permission," Olivia repeated.
"Exactly. And even though there's really no here here, you're stuck. It's going to take someone from the outside to get you out."
"There's no here here," Olivia repeated, again, using the same inflection so that it wasn't a question.
"Right," Anya nodded. "This," and she patted the stone floor, then stood and walked over to the curved wall, "and this," she patted the wall, "it's pretty much all in your head. If you can convince yourself that it doesn't exist, you stand a chance. That is, of course, if someone can reach you before the ritual disembowelment."
It felt real enough to Olivia. She checked her hands, which had dots of blood from where she'd scraped them on the last fall. Between the tears on her cheeks, the scratches and bruises she collected, and her response to Anya's answer, she must have looked discouraged enough to reach even Anya's cynical heart.
"The good thing is," Anya said, sitting down beside Liv, "you're driving this guy nuts.
She stopped herself just before she said 'really?'.
"I mean, he's had his hands on you a pretty long chunk of time and you haven't once actively considered killing yourself," Anya raised her eyebrows and gave an impressed nod.
"Tell me more about getting out of here," Olivia sighed, sitting back against the wall. She couldn't remember the last time she'd been this tired.
"Well, the tough part is anyone else getting in here," Anya started. "Remember, it takes his permission. If someone does get through, though, they'll be able to see directly in, just like he can. If someone gets in, and you're still alive, and you can manage to convince yourself that you're not in a stone prison to the point that you reach out through the circle and someone grabs you right then…" Anya calculated the odds, cocking her head to the side as she ran through numbers in her head. "…Maybe. Of course, just the shock of passing through the barrier could kill you."
"Fine," Olivia answered. "How do I stay alive until help comes?"
Anya blinked at her. "Oh, that's simple. Don't die."
And she was gone before Olivia had the sense to try to throttle her.
Faith waited for him outside the bathroom as he pulled on clothes left for him, folded, on the counter. At a guess, they must have been Woods. Giles was a little shorter and not as broad across the shoulders. Wood looked like he had a serious strength training regiment going.
"Where's Giles?" he asked as he came out.
"In the study," Faith answered.
"Let's go. It's time to get moving," he said, tucking the black t-shirt into his jeans.
"Detective," Faith called as he passed her.
"Yeah," he looked back at her.
She stopped and looked uneasily to the side.
"Faith, what is it?"
"You…you called me a killer twice," she put a hand out in explanation. "But you know that Willow killed a guy. Pretty much so has everyone in here, except Xander. Robin, not for lack of trying on a couple of occasions. The newbies, well, they still haven't seen their first vamp. But…is that all I am?"
He turned to face her.
"I read the file, Faith." He looked at her steadily. "You've got at least two murders to your name – that city assistant and some harmless archeology expert. Notes on your file said you killed for pleasure, for gain. I'm a cop. I get to see people killed for love, for lust, for gain, sometimes even out of self-defense. It's pretty rare to see someone kill just for pleasure, and it's always ugly."
"But…I'm not…I'm not like that anymore," she said in a pleading voice. "Yeah, I did some complete crap. I was really twisted up, you know? I've been working so hard, and I think I've got some stuff figured out. But…"
"But what?" he asked.
"Is that the only thing I'll ever be? A killer?"
He couldn't help but wonder what Huang would make of this woman.
"I'm not the one to decide that, Faith," he shook his head.
She nodded, understanding, looked like she was going to pull on her bravado again, but stopped.
"Don't tell Robin," she said softly, pushing her hair back, "what you figured out about me, okay?"
His eyes narrowed as he watched her. "Faith, you think he doesn't know?"
She looked up at him, all dark eyes and pale complexion.
"He was a principal at a high school. If he worked for even a semester, he's seen it in the students. Maybe he didn't figure it out as quickly as me. I see it a lot more often. But he already knows."
He left, giving her time to collect herself before she joined them in the study.
"What do you mean we don't have anything?" Cragen roared.
The squad room was filled with people who froze and looked surreptitiously for a place to hide. There were detectives from five different squads now working directly under Finn and Munch as they scrambled to cover as many leads as they could. The detective Cragen had just shouted at quailed visibly. Finn stepped up behind him and put a hand on the man's shoulder.
"Cap'n, they have been through everything we can think of. Social Security, state and federal prison systems, hospitals, every narc informant I ever knew about, every blood relative in the tri-state area. No one has seen this guy for two years. Far as we can tell, he hasn't collected a paycheck, paid a credit card bill, slept under a roof, or taken a piss under his original name or any other. Every single paper trail on this guy gives out by September 2003."
Cragen looked ready to explode. "We have got a detective out there, people. We don't just turn over every stone, we turn over the whole goddamn bedrock. We burn down the forest if we have to. We find her. NOW."
The detectives and officers who had been frozen broke and took off at twice their original speed.
"Captain," Munch said, coming up with a careful tread.
Cragen collected himself. "Yeah, John, what have you got?"
"Look, I don't know how much it has to do with Liv going missing, but we are getting the freakiest reports back from CSU onsite in that labyrinth."
"What do you mean?"
"Detective there says they've had to remove five techs – five – for what he can only describe as a super acute case of the heebie-jeebies. They come out of there saying someone's watching them – sometimes from behind the walls, sometimes from inside the room, even though they've got it lit like Yankee Stadium."
"What is this?" Cragen asked, rubbing the back of his head. "Some kind of mass hysteria, like that ER incident a couple of years ago?"
John opened his mouth to argue that the ER case hadn't been mass hysteria either but a sly conspiracy by FEMA to test emergency readiness, but choosing the better part of valor, decided against it.
"Doesn't seem like it, as two of them were replacements brought in after the original three had been taken to the ER for psych eval. Couple of them said they saw the guy right there – same description as Harper's. Of course, no one can put their hands on this guy. Someone shouts, and as soon as everyone else runs in, he's gone, and you've got a tech saying he needs a little quiet time in a rubber room."
Cragen pressed his lips together, doing his best to juggle priorities and possibilities while God alone knew what was happening to Olivia.
"Tell the CSU guys to go in with pickaxes and sledgehammers if they need to. Tear the walls down, if that's what it takes. Find out what the hell is going on in there."
John nodded and stepped away.
"Finn," Cragen called.
Tutuola looked up and stepped in when Cragen signaled for him.
"Go find Elliot and keep an eye on him," he said quietly. "I know he'd never have gone home. He's out there looking for Harper. Maybe he's got something on him, maybe not, but I want you to keep track of him and report back. I'll keep you posted."
"You got it," Finn nodded.
It had been a long time since Cragen had prayed, not since the horrible stretch of time between the news filtering in of a plane crash in the Everglades and the call from the airline, informing him that it was indeed his wife's flight. Too much time was passing. Their perp, it seemed, had gotten more violent with each death. Every moment Olivia was in his hands was another moment the perp could mess with her. It seemed less and less likely they would get her back in one piece.
It was a beautiful spring day, the kind of day you took a mental snapshot of and looked at on days of misery. She sat on a bench in Central Park, in a tank top and shorts – something she hadn't worn in years. Her arms stretched out on either side. She looked good. She knew she looked good. She was up for promotion and on the road to make detective before she turned thirty. She checked her watch, wondering how long she'd have to wait this time.
Not long, it turned out. An attractive woman with short silver hair was walking towards her. She smiled with pride. It had been a good month. Mom had been sober almost the entire time, a relative miracle since Liv had been out on her own. There had been no late night phone calls, no guilt trips that left her reeling and numb, no visits over to her mom's place to clean up vomit and shards of glass and put her mother to bed.
She stood and held out her arms. Her mom came into them, and they hugged, wholeheartedly. She grinned until her cheeks ached. And deep within her, a tiny voice wept. No, not this. Don't take this from me.
"So, what's on the agenda?" Liv asked, sitting back down, her mom sitting beside her. "We have bookstores, shoe stores, I hear you can still get tickets for Rent, if you move fast enough."
"Let's sit down and chat," her mother said, patting her knee. "We haven't had a heart to heart in a long while now."
It should have put her on her guard. There was no such thing as a heart to heart with her mother. When she was sober, it was hours of girltalk with laughter and fun. When she was drunk, it was recriminations and screamed accusations of abandonment and betrayal. It should have put her on her guard, but it didn't. She was too lost in the beauty of the day and of her mother's smile.
"Well, okay," she nodded, still grinning. "You are looking great. What's going on? New man?"
"No, sweetheart," her mom shook her head. "I've just been doing some thinking, and I came to a realization that helped me clear up a lot of unhappiness in my head."
"Oh? What's that?" It couldn't possibly be that her mother had finally decided to sober up. She had been waiting for that since she'd been old enough to make the connection between the woman she loved with all her heart and the monster that took her place when alcohol was at hand.
"Well, and I hope you won't take this the wrong way, dear heart," she patted Olivia's knee again and gave her a glance, as though testing the waters. What could it be? Had she met someone? It didn't seem likely, but still… "I realized that, all those years ago, when I found out I was pregnant with you, I should have had an abortion."
Olivia froze, as she had when she'd been six or seven and heard her mother in the living room or kitchen, throwing things in a drunken rage.
"What?" Her voice sounded small even to her.
"Well, you remember what I told you, baby, about the man who took advantage of me?"
She remembered. She remembered having it thrown at her anytime there was a disagreement between her and her mother. I was raped, and you were the result. You're a horrible daughter, and you should never have been born. I gave you everything, and look what you took from me. She remembered far better than she wanted to.
Her mother was still talking, as if she didn't realize Olivia was sitting there, tears starting to spill down her cheeks. "There was the humiliation. I mean, everyone knew. They knew what he'd done to me. I couldn't quit. I had to have the money, so I had to put up with their whispers and their leers. One of the managers even came to me and warned me that I'd better not even ask him to help, since he was married, of course. If I hadn't wanted to get in trouble, I should have kept my legs closed."
She shook her head ruefully. "I wish I'd been braver. It was still illegal, of course, but I could have found a doctor. For God's sake, I could have left you at the hospital, if it came to that."
"Stop," Olivia whispered. "Please stop."
Her mother wasn't listening, though. She was lost in her own thoughts. "It would have been so much easier. I could have quit. I could have gotten a job somewhere else and told that son of a bitch to stick it."
She came back to herself and turned to Olivia, either not noticing or not caring, that her daughter's face was wet with tears. "So, what I've decided, sweetheart, is that I'm done being a mother. You're on your own. I gave you the best twenty-four years of my life, and now it's time for me to reclaim my own. If I'd been smart, I never would have had you, but then, that's all water under the bridge, right? I can't change the past, so I'm going to take charge of my future."
"Mom…" Olivia reached for her, only to have her mother catch her hands and gently push them back.
"You're a strong girl," her mother smiled. "Really you are. You'll be fine. Now, I need to be going, so give me a kiss."
She leaned forward, tilting her cheek towards Liv, and Liv, close to throwing up, rebelled, jumping to her feet and backpedaling from the bench.
"Stay away from me!" she yelled at her mother.
"Olivia, that's rather the idea, isn't it?" her mother chided. "Now sit back down like a good girl and give me a kiss goodbye."
"YOU'RE NOT REAL!" Olivia shrieked. "THIS ISN"T REAL!"
Her mother turned stern and got to her feet. "That is enough out of you, young lady! You do not get to make a public spectacle of yourself at my expense."
She reached out to Olivia, to take her by the wrist, like a small child, and Liv yanked her arm back, pulling her mother off balance.
"Get away from me," Liv ground out through clenched teeth.
Her mother's face turned dark with rage, and in a moment, the monster of her childhood nightmares stood before her.
"You selfish little brat!" her mother screeched. "You whiney shit! After all I've given you, after all I've done! You treat me like this?"
"You're not REAL!" Liv screamed in return.
Her mother grabbed her arm and pulled her close, but unlike all the fights of her childhood and adolescence, her mother no longer had the upper hand. No police officer left the Academy without a thorough grounding in self-defense. They drilled until blocks and strikes were automatic. She twisted her arm, breaking her mother's hold, and lashed out in a backhanded strike to the face.
Her mother was thrown back, far harder than she should have been, turning in the arc of her fall until her head met with the corner of the bench in a horrible, meaty crunch. Liv hadn't seen a great deal of death, not even in two and a half years of patrol, but she knew before her mother's body hit the ground what had happened.
She screamed, not even knowing she was screaming until her voice tapered off and she sobbed for breath. She was at her mother's side, pulling her up by her shoulders and shaking her, but there was nothing left to the woman. Instead of her mother, she held a human-size doll of meat, lifeless and floppy.
She was still screaming, beating the ground and howling until her voice broke. Then her stomach bucked, and she was throwing up, heaving nothing, as she hadn't eaten in hours.
Hands, soft and gentle, touched her shoulders, her temples.
"Sshhhhhh," a voice said, even softer and more gentle than the hands. "Sshhhhhhh."
She didn't fight. In the darkness, another woman held her as she sobbed and rocked back and forth, trying to bleed off the pain. When she tired, long before the pain dwindled, she lay in this woman's arms, curled like a child against her chest.
"Sshhhhh," the woman said again.
She was young, younger than Liv, at least. Her eyes were a silent, vibrant blue-green.
"Olivia," she said in a voice of quiet care, "this is my gift to you. Remember."
It was the middle of the night, and they stood in a room that smelled funny and looked scary. Olivia was five. She was proud she knew that number and would tell anyone who asked. She was five. But just then, she stood against her mother's side, face turned against her mother's hip, protected by her mother's hand cupping her shoulder.
"She's sick!" her mother yelled. "I don't care if he just had his head cut off, you get the pediatrician down here. NOW."
"Mrs. Benson, any of the other doct-"
"It's Miss, you sanctimonious seat warmer, and none of your ER quacks are touching my little girl. You've got a pediatrician on call, you call him, now, or so help me God, I'll have you up before your licensing board, and you can explain to them why you didn't fulfill your duties."
There was scurrying and people blinking in startled fear. Her mother kneeled beside her.
"I'm sorry, baby," she whispered, combing Olivia's dark hair back with her fingers. "I know you don't like it when I shout, but I won't stand for them not taking care of you."
She put the inside of her wrist against Olivia's head and made an angry noise.
"Still burning hot. Come here, baby."
She picked Olivia up and cradled her against her shoulder. Safe, Olivia turned her face towards her mother's chin and closed her eyes.
She was crying when she woke, but it was the easier, worn out crying of exhaustion.
"She fought like a tigress for you," the other woman whispered. "You were always her first care, her first love, even if she couldn't show it in a healthy way."
"Who are you?" Olivia whispered.
"I'm help from a friend. My name's Tara."
"Where's Anya?" she asked. Her throat ached with the hurt of screaming for so very long. She sat up, taking her weight from Tara, but staying in the same place so that they touched, leg to leg. The contact of another human being, warm and real, was more comforting than she had words to describe.
"She returned. Each of us…we have a job. No, not a job, a duty. We were asked, we said yes, and when it's time, we're here, and when we've done what we can, within the…the requirements of the duty, we return."
"Who are you?" Olivia asked again, trying for something more than a name.
"You met Willow?" Tara asked, tucking her chin so she seemed to look up at Olivia.
"On the street. She tried to warn me," Olivia shook her head. How long ago had that been? How naïve had she been that she hadn't even considered heeding Willow's warning.
Tara smiled a tiny, cautious smile. "We were together once. I know she still misses me."
"So, you're here because of Willow?" Liv asked, feeling like if she stood, she might fall over, she was so tired.
"I'm here because of you," Tara answered. "To help. Willow is the connection that allows me to be here."
"Anya answered questions," Liv said, rubbing her eyes. "though you're a lot better at that so far. You…gave me something I'd forgotten for so long, I never knew it was there. Is that your what you do?"
"Some. I can show you what you ask to see. Only true things, only things that have happened, and only three of them."
"Three. That number keeps coming up," Liv sighed. "And what happens after you've given me those three?"
"Then I return, and one other comes to you," Tara said.
Liv tried to laugh, but it dissolved into another bout of crying. "Ghosts of Torture Past, Present and Future?"
Tara took her hand and pressed the other to Liv's cheek. "Maiden, Mother, Crone, the three Fates, the three Graces, it's a pretty important number."
"Can you show me Elliot?" Liv asked. "I have to know he's all right."
Tara moved her hand up to Liv's forehead and looked into her eyes. Liv slipped into those calm wells of silence.
This room was crowded with people and things. Elliot stood beside a table, arguing with another man – Giles.
"She's there!" Stabler swore, stabbing a finger into the map. "Everything points to this spot – it's the scene of the first murder, it's where Liv disappeared."
"I understand you, Detective," Giles said, looking up from the maps and books spread across a heavy, oak table. "But we cannot simply rush in there. If it is his…his desmense, it will be bound by powerful protections – protections, may I remind you, that you and your partner blithely stumbled onto in the first place."
"Don't you think I know it's my fault she was taken?" Stabler demanded.
"Not your fault, Detective," Giles answered, "but an honest mistake made by someone who did not have all the facts he needed, which is why we need to make sure we have all the facts before we tear in there on a rescue mission."
"Guys," a woman called from the doorway, "we've got a complication."
There was a man standing behind her, coolly self-possessed.
"Finn?" Stabler gaped. "What the hell are doing here?"
"Cap asked me to tail you, Elliot," Finn answered. "Figured you'd head straight for that address you copied John on." He looked over the room, casing the joint and all those inside. "So, I hear there's more than one Slayer nowadays. Any a'you had any thoughts about clearing out the vamp nest off of 136th?"
Stunned silence met his request. Giles finally cleared his throat and set aside the book he'd put before Elliot.
"We have other priorities at the moment, though we could certainly take a look at it later."
Finn nodded. "So, this goon's got Liv, how do we take him out?"
