Maria Gonzalez, a woman in her mid to late 40s, the cleaning woman who had reported finding Dr. Moll's body, sat on a stool in her kitchen and let out a big exhale.
"When I get home and realize I forget to mention Dr. Moll's brother, I was horrified," she told Fin and Munch, "please no think I was...obstructing investigation."
"Not at all, it's perfectly natural," Munch assured her, "stumbling on a murder scene is a big shock."
"I just saw Dr. Moll and…I just thought about David," Maria said. She looked at the two detectives both fearfully and hopefully and asked, "Did you find him?"
"Not yet, we're still working on it," Fin said. "What can you tell us about Roger?"
The cleaning woman laughed a little. "Mr. Moll nice man, helps."
"Helps what?"
"Helps clean," she answered, "he do all the dishes, he cook."
"Sounds like a sweet deal," Munch commented. "Does he have an actual job?"
"No, he stay home with David while Dr. Moll works," she explained.
"Even sweeter," Fin noted. "How long have you worked for the Molls?"
"Three years."
"So you never knew Dr. Moll's wife?"
She shook her head. "I replace last woman."
"Who was she?"
"Uh, she send Christmas card, Doctor keep."
"Would you know where it is?" Fin asked.
"Si," she nodded.
"Looks like we're going back to the crime scene," Munch said.
"I'll call Liv and Elliot, I've got an idea," Fin told him.
Fin and Munch steered the cleaning woman clear of the crime scene in the living room, she took them to the doctor's home office and pulled the Christmas card out from a mess of papers. It was a family picture Christmas card featuring a mother, father, grandmother, and three children of varying ages. The family name was Valdez and the card was signed Marisol.
"Do you know where Marisol lives?" Munch asked.
"No, sorry," Maria said.
"Can you tell if anything is missing around the house?" Fin asked.
"I take look," she said and left the office.
"Oh wait," Munch followed after her, "we've been all over this house, we haven't been able to find a single picture of Dr. Moll's brother, are there any?"
"He no like photographed," Maria said, "uh, but there was one."
"You know where it is?" Fin asked hopefully.
"Yah," she answered, "I know…David terrible about bookmarks."
She went over to the dining room and picked up an old large hardback copy of Tarzan of the Apes. There was a bookmark sticking out of the middle of the book, she pulled it out and handed a photo to the detectives.
The picture featured Steven Moll, David, and a man fitting the given description of Roger. He was as tall as the doctor, built similarly, had a clean cut complexion, buzzed dark hair, but unlike the doctor who looked dressed for business, Roger was dressed in khaki cargo shorts and a gray T-shirt.
"Where was this taken?" Fin asked.
"Last year on vacation in safari," Maria told them.
"In Africa?"
"No, no, safari park."
"Oh you mean the one in California?"
"Si, that the one."
"Mrs. Gonzalez," Olivia came down the stairs, "you know the house pretty well, can you tell us if anything is missing from David's room upstairs?"
The cleaning woman followed Olivia up the stairs with Munch and Fin trailing behind her.
David's bedroom was more or less the ultimate 12 year old boy's room, the bed wasn't made, the floor was scattered with older kids' toys, worn out sneakers, dirty clothes, a baseball bat, a catcher's mitt, a skateboard, a set of roller blades, a squash racket, a lacrosse stick, there was a leaning stack of CDs on the dresser next to a boombox, a 10 inch TV on the other side, a stack of comic books piled on his desk, and various other odds and ends typical of an adolescent boy laying around everywhere.
Maria laughed and said, "Oh yeah, this David's room."
"The only room in the whole house that looks lived in," Munch noted.
"Si, si, Dr. Moll never approve, luckily he don't look until after I clean," she explained.
"Is anything missing?" Olivia asked.
"How could you tell?" Elliot responded.
Maria looked over the contents of the room, then pulled open the closet door, then looked through the dresser drawers, and shook her head.
"No, nothing missing," she said.
"Where did Roger stay?" Olivia asked.
The cleaning woman led them down the hall to another room. A guest room that looked like it hadn't ever been lived in.
"Mr. Moll's things gone," she said.
"What was here?" Fin asked.
"Clothes, cologne, weights," Maria nudged her toe against a spot on the floor, "always kick, never fail, always kick."
"There's no indention in the carpet," Elliot realized.
"Get CSU back here and tell them to take the bedding for any DNA he may have left behind," Olivia said, "skin cells, dandruff, anything."
"Did Mr. Moll have any girlfriends over?" Elliot asked the cleaning woman.
"No, Roger no bring women home," Maria said as she left the room.
"That don't mean nothing," Fin said, "They could still find semen traces on the bed."
"Let's track down this Marisol Valdez and see what she has to say," Olivia said.
Marisol Valdez was a woman in her early 30s who knelt down on the living room floor to pick up her youngest child's toys as she told the detectives, "That's right, I worked for the Molls for three years. I was cleaning houses to raise money to pay for the continuing education I signed up for once I finished what my student vista would cover, so I could become a citizen who actually had prospects. Now I'm an ESL teacher, the only toilets I scrub are my own."
"What was your impression of the Moll family?" Elliot asked.
"Nice wife, cute boy, sad what happened," she said.
"What did happen?" Olivia asked.
"Mrs. Moll was fine when I first started working there, then about a year later she started feeling sick, she had some disease…"
"Cancer?" Elliot asked.
"That would be ironic, wouldn't it?" she asked as she dumped the toys in a box in the corner and closed the lid, "Doctor who specializes in cancer drugs and can't save his wife…no, it was one of those diseases named after somebody, I can't remember what. She got really bad over the next year, finally she had to be hospitalized and was put on life support, they waited a couple weeks hoping for a change, then they pulled the plug. That poor boy, he was inconsolable, he cried for two weeks."
"What about Dr. Moll?"
"Well he was never around to begin with, and he sure as hell wasn't there after she died," Marisol answered. "So I became the mother figure in the house. I guess he figured if he kept working he wouldn't have time to miss her, but it sure didn't do David any favors. That kid needed somebody around him all the time, he'd have panic attacks if he was ever left alone, and I was only there until 5, but I started staying overnight because his dad wouldn't get home until midnight."
"So that explains Roger moving in," Elliot said.
"Oh yeah," Marisol replied dryly. "Good old, dependable, trustworthy Roger."
"I'm guessing you didn't like him," Olivia said. "Did something happen?"
"I guess you could say that."
"Did he try anything with you?" Elliot asked.
She looked at the two detectives with an almost amused look on her face and catching on to their implication finally said, "Oh no, nothing like that. No. I mean don't get me wrong, Roger was a nice guy, he always helped me when I cooked dinner, he always did the dishes. Dr. Moll had tutors coming to work with David every day, so we centered the sessions in the kitchen so we could keep an eye on them. And David sure looked up to him, those two were closer than he was with his own dad."
"So what went wrong?" Elliot asked.
"You were the only woman regularly in the house, was there any unwanted attention?" Olivia asked.
"No, nothing like that," she shook her head, "there was a little harmless flirting but it never went past a few innuendos, you know, just making conversation to lighten things up."
"But you left."
"It wasn't anything he did, it was just the whole arrangement that made me feel uneasy," Marisol answered.
"How so?" Elliot asked.
"Two weeks after Mrs. Moll dies, in comes Roger, the doctor's brother who hasn't been in the picture for years," Marisol explained. "His brother's wife has been sick for a year, where's he been? Dr. Moll would be gone sometimes, out of town, or out of the country, he said on business but I don't know for what…so it was just me and Mrs. Moll and David. Before she got bad she was saying how hard it would be on David because they didn't have any other family, their parents were all dead and neither of them had siblings."
"You're sure of that?" Elliot asked.
"I didn't forget," Marisol told them, "she said no other family. I stayed on for a year for David's sake because he was still adjusting to losing his mom, but I finally had to leave because the whole thing made me uncomfortable. If Dr. Moll swings that way, fine, but at least have the guts to admit it instead of telling this kid this new guy's his uncle."
"O-kay," Elliot was starting to feel a little sick. "Did either of the men ever bring anyone home?"
"No, before everything clicked I wasn't surprised about the doctor, he'd just lost his wife, but his 'brother' never brought a woman home either, that's when I started adding it all up."
"Uh huh," Elliot was never comfortable during these kinds of conversations, no matter how many times he'd done it on the job. "So they didn't bring any women home, did they ever bring any other guys home?"
"No, nobody," Marisol answered. "I felt bad for leaving David but he seemed to be doing alright, and as much as I don't like what was going on, I know it's not illegal so there wasn't anything I could do, though God knows what that poor kid's been a witness to over the years. He really believes that that man is his dad's brother."
"Yet you still sent a card last year," Elliot pointed out.
"I did that for David more than anything, I didn't want him to think that everybody normal in his life had abandoned him," she said.
"Got a big problem," Olivia told Cragen and the rest of the squad as she pointed to the victim's picture on the board. "The ex housekeeper says that Moll never had a brother."
"That actually jives with what we found out about Roger Moll," Munch said, "nothing, no property in his name, no utilities, no taxes filed, no arrests, no social security number, not even a birth certificate."
"So who the hell was the guy living with them?" Fin asked.
"I don't know but something else seems suspicious," Elliot said, "when we went back to canvas the neighborhood, a woman across the street said the family had lived there five years, but the dad told the principal at David's school that they moved around a lot and his work didn't permit him to put down roots until recently."
"Not even his dad, this fictional uncle posing as the dad," Olivia pointed out.
"Got more bad news," Fin said, "whoever this guy is, he's no fool. Mrs. Gonzalez said there's food missing from the kitchen, a whole loaf of bread's gone and a pound of deli chicken was gone from the fridge. There was a case of bottled water last time she was there, the whole thing's gone."
"He's smart, he knows not to stop at convenience stores for food because of the surveillance cameras," Elliot said.
"He's driving an older car, no GPS on it, so there's no way to track his movements," Fin said.
"And with no name, we can't track his cell phone either," Olivia added.
"CSU went back to the house again to take Dr. Moll's bed sheets and to dust 'Roger's' room for prints, this guy may be good but he was there for four years, he can't erase every fingerprint he ever left and there's no place more likely than his own room," Cragen told his detectives.
"But what do we do in the meantime?" Olivia asked.
"We have to find out who the hell this guy is," Elliot said.
"And then figure out why he killed the dad and took the kid," Munch added.
"And where," Fin said.
"Captain, I need a minute," Elliot said, "I feel the need to do a quick rosary. Maybe a miracle will fall on us and we can find this guy before things get any worse."
"Say one for me too," Munch suggested.
"I'm with the housekeeper on this one," Cragen told Olivia, "People are still narrow minded but not as bad as they used to be, why would a guy call his boyfriend his brother instead of just coming out? He's an affluent doctor who saves lives, he lives in a multi million dollar mansion and isn't bothered by his neighbors…"
"Though there're still the death threats," Olivia said, "maybe getting them because of his work is different than getting them because of his sexual orientation."
"Either way he's rich enough he can afford the best security there is," Cragen said, "wouldn't it be easier to just tell the world, and his son, the truth?"
"Everybody says this kid lost it when his mom died, it would be confusing enough for him to comprehend his dad dating another woman after her death, but a man?" Elliot asked.
"Something still doesn't gel," Fin said. "Marisol said Roger was moving in 2 weeks after Mrs. Moll died, so where did he and the doctor meet?"
"Maybe they were seeing each other before she died," Munch guessed.
"Definitely can't tell your 8 year old son that," Olivia said.
"Might be though," Elliot said, "maybe he wasn't faithful through their whole marriage."
"Just because he's bisexual doesn't mean he's a total degenerate," Olivia felt a need to point out.
"Straight men do it all the time," Elliot said, "isn't that what this whole thing's about? Equality between all sexualities? Why should we be inclined to think somebody who plays both teams isn't just as likely to stray?"
"Still, why would this guy kill his boyfriend and run off with his kid?" Cragen asked.
"Well despite how far we've come where gay rights are concerned, custodial issues with two people the state has a hard time recognizing as a legitimate couple are still a bitch," Elliot said, "maybe they had a falling out, 2nd guy decides to take David for himself and make sure Steven can't get him back." He felt some of the eyes in the room on him and decided to point out, "Hey it's not like we haven't seen it all the time in this line of work, straight parents and gay. When somebody gets pushed too far and threatened with losing the kid they think of their own, they can take drastic measures."
Cragen looked around at his detectives and noticed that Olivia was looking towards the floor and breathing harder, looking like she'd just been punched in the gut.
"You alright, Olivia?" he asked.
She looked at him, and the others and said, "I just thought of something. What if we were wrong about this from the start? What if these two men weren't sleeping with each other?"
The others looked around the room at their fellow SVU detectives and slowly starting to realize what she was saying.
"What if the dad and this guy are both pedophiles and they're sharing the kid?" Elliot voiced the thought everybody had in mind but nobody had wanted to give voice to.
"We've definitely seen plenty of that in this line of work," Munch reluctantly agreed, then added, "but never seen two of them living together."
"But it does make for an easy cover," Fin said, "people already don't want to suspect parents could do that to their own kids, the dad having a brother would especially keep them under the radar."
"But we're still back to square one," Elliot said, "Why'd the other guy whack the dad?"
"They still could've had a falling out," Fin suggested, "second guy still figures why not take off with the kid? That way he wouldn't have to share him with anyone."
"Alright, we're going to need some help on this," Cragen said, "I'm calling in reinforcements."
"Who? The FBI?" Elliot asked.
"No, we need to get in both of these guys' heads, I'm going to call in Huang and Skoda."
"This should be interesting," Munch commented.
The phone at his desk rang and he went to answer it while everybody else talked amongst themselves about what their next move was.
"We got a break," Munch said as he hung up the phone, "they matched the fingerprints to a name."
"Guy been arrested?" Elliot asked.
"No, you're not going to believe this one," Munch answered. "And apparently, we have to go meet with the guy who supplied the information."
