Clancy, dressed in a green jumpsuit, the standard dress code of Rikers, was walked to the prison interview room, escorted by one of the guards. Casey, Elliot and Olivia stood at the table waiting for him.
"I'm going back to my cell," Clancy said, and turned to leave, but the guard locked him in instead.
"No you're not, Mr. Clancy," Casey told him. "I called in a favor with the warden and the COs." She smiled and added, "You're all mine for the next 15 minutes."
"I got nothing to say to you," John insisted as he sat down at the table.
"Fine, then you can listen, because we do," Elliot said with a small smirk on his face.
"We know David wasn't Steven Moll's son," Olivia said, and watched as he slowly turned towards her.
"CSU matched the blood in your car to a sample taken when David had a doctor's appointment," Olivia explained. "Type B. Steven Moll and his wife were both type O. None of their parents had Type B blood either."
"The birth certificate he presented to your boss was fake," Casey said. "That was Beck's error, not double checking that Steven Moll's son was actually his own son. That's why you didn't tell him what happened, because he prides himself on having a flawless system."
"You think I killed Moll over something that petty?" John asked.
"No, but we think it was a contributing factor," Elliot said.
"When did you realize David wasn't Moll's son?" Olivia asked.
Clancy looked at her and answered after a brief pause, "Six weeks ago."
"How?" Casey asked.
"Moll had been having trouble with his mail lately, he asked me to go down to the post office and drop it off directly while David was in school. I'm in line and to kill time I'm looking at the bulletin board on the wall, 'Missing' posters…from all over the country, going back 10 years…and one of them had David's face, young, five years old, went missing in Florida."
"What did you do?" Elliot asked.
"Looked up the name of the family in the city where he went missing," John answered. "I got a box at the post office so nobody would know I was in contact with them. I wrote and told them I had reason to believe I knew where their son was, and if they could send me something with their DNA on it, a toothbrush, hairbrush, you know, I could find out for sure. SafeTCorp operates under the philosophy that if you want something done right, you don't leave it to the cops, what good are they at protecting people? All they can do is come in after the fact and photograph the victims' bodies. These people spent 6 years trusting the police to solve what happened, so I told them if they were going to trust me, they'd have to leave the police out of it. If Moll wouldn't have lied to me, had a whole song and dance about how lucky he and his wife were to have David and what a hard pregnancy it was and what a hard delivery she had…maybe I could've left it alone. I don't condone lying to kids about their birth parents, my parents explained it to me as soon as I was old enough to understand it. Guy goes to that much trouble to make up some story, what the hell else has he been lying about?"
"How'd you get David's DNA?" Olivia asked.
"Swabbed his mouth when he was sleeping," Clancy let out a small laugh, "that kid was always drooling all over himself. Then when the brush came in the mail, I took them both to a forensics lab out of state, make sure the doctor never found out what was going on."
"Deactivating the tracking device, then resetting it when you got back," Elliot said.
"You got it."
"And it was a match," Casey said.
John slightly nodded and told them, "Then a lot of things started making sense from over the years."
"Like what?" Olivia asked.
"He had nightmares all the time, every night in a week," Clancy explained. "I figured it was from his mom dying, and the threats made against his and his dad's lives. I used to ask him about them, a lot of them were about somebody taking him away from his family…then it dawned on me he was remembering his own abduction and didn't even know it."
"Did you ever suspect Moll of abusing David?" Casey asked.
"No…maybe I should've," Clancy said, "I should've known something was wrong the day I went there. David was 20 pounds underweight when I met him…I figured it was from losing his mom two weeks earlier, what the hell did I know? Like you said, they train us for everything, except how to handle kids."
"He starved David?" Olivia asked.
"No, he just wouldn't eat," Clancy said. "Funny the things that can happen when nobody pays attention, huh?"
"What about the housekeeper?"
"Eh, she cooked, he wouldn't eat, she mentioned it to Moll a couple times but she didn't want to lose her job so she didn't press it even though he didn't do anything about it."
"So what did you do?"
"What everybody's been accusing me of since day one, took on the role of a father figure. You'd be amazed how much of an appetite a kid gets when someone's actually around to know what's going on with him. In 3 months his weight was caught up, figured problem solved. They were just beginning."
"What do you mean?" Elliot asked.
"Aside from the constant nightmares, he was withdrawn, didn't trust anybody, didn't talk much, all of which seems on par with the situation. One time somebody chucked a brick through the front window, nearly busted his skull. Eventually he started climbing into bed with me in the middle of the night. My room was right next to his incase anybody would ever try coming in his window, I was the direct lifeline, Moll's room was at the other end of the hall."
"Why did Moll have private tutors for David?" Casey asked.
"At first we figured it was a security measure, you can't be kidnapped from school if you don't go to one, last few weeks I started rethinking that theory…he kept David out of the public eye as much as possible, there was as few chances as possible that somebody might see him and link it back to the missing child case in Florida."
"So why'd he suddenly start sending David to Spencer Academy?" Olivia asked.
"I can guess," Clancy sneered.
"What?" Casey asked firmly.
Clancy shook his head. "David's nosebleeds had been getting more frequent, they started getting preceded by migraines…doctors couldn't find anything again, one of them suggested it might be stress, couldn't explain though what a 12 year old could be so stressed about. Neither could I, the same night that I find out David's DNA matches the people I contacted, and I'm trying to figure out how to approach the subject with the doctor, David says every noise is making his stomach churn, he goes to bed early. Next thing I knew, David was shaking me awake. He'd had a grand mal nosebleed, everything was covered, the bed sheet, the pillows, his clothes, his face….the whole bed looked like a crime scene. Through all this, I started to wonder why the hell the doctor hasn't woken up and come to check on his own kid. Actually…I'd been wondering the same thing for a couple years, figured it wasn't my place to say anything. Something else had been bugging me over the years but I never said anything because I thought it'd cost me my job."
"What was that?" Elliot asked.
"In this job, you don't take any painkillers, tranquilizers, nothing that can knock you out, you're on call 24/7, you have to be able to wake up at a second's notice…half the time David was crawling into bed with me, I never heard him get up, never heard the door open, never heard him come in. I've never been that heavy a sleeper, one of my least endearing qualities where my ex-wife had been concerned. That night in particular, I figure David had to be freaking out, and again, I was dead to the world, why?"
"So what happened?" Olivia asked.
"I went to Moll's room and stormed in…he wasn't there, his bed hadn't been slept in. Even though my priority is to protect David, it's company policy Moll has to inform me every time he's leaving the house, I have to know where he's going."
"Munch would have a field day with that one," Elliot murmured.
"The company puts a tracking device on my car…it was my own policy to strap one on Moll's car. First month I was there, everything checked out, so I quit watching it. That night I checked, traced his car to a seedy hotel a few miles away. I was going to go down there and confront him about why he lied about David, and why he was ducking out at night without informing me…and then I found out why I suddenly started sleeping so well there."
Olivia's eyes widened as she realized, "He'd been drugging you."
"I found the pill bottles right by the bed, he'd been getting two doses of the same knockout pills from two different pharmacies, so he didn't have to short his own supply. He drank decaf coffee, I drank regular, all of it was instant…he'd been crushing them up and mixing them in with the grounds that any cup I drank had enough sedative to not only cancel out the caffeine but keep me unconscious for half the night. I went down to the hotel to confront him about all of it, and…"
Clancy made a choking sound and his chest was rising and dropping at the rate of somebody about to vomit. Elliot picked up the wastebasket beside the table and plunked it right in front of Clancy who stood up and hovered over it as he promptly threw up. Casey took a step back and grimaced, Olivia only looked on in dread of what they were about to discover. When the episode was over, Elliot took a Kleenex out of his pocket and gave it to Clancy who wiped out his mouth and tossed it in the wastebasket too.
"What happened at the hotel?" Casey asked.
Clancy breathed heavily a few more times, then straightened up and explained, "I show the desk clerk his photo, he gives me a room number on the fifth floor…I go up…and as I'm coming down the hall…the door opens and…this teenaged boy comes rushing out…he couldn't have been more than a couple years older than David…I know if I go in that room, I'm going to kill that bastard with my bare hands…I left the hotel and went back to the house."
"Why didn't you call the police?" Olivia asked. "Why didn't you tell your employer?"
"You're kidding, right?" Clancy snapped. "I call the cops and say that a well renowned doctor is raping teen boys, who're they going to believe?"
"You have a very esteemed company backing you, Mr. Clancy," Casey said. "I'm sure they would've taken your report very seriously."
"And then what?" Clancy asked. "They investigate, which means interviewing kids, interviewing David, asking them all sorts of questions, and if they even find the ones that he abused, what then? They have to go to court and testify and be subjected to all kinds of ridicule and character assassination, this guy can afford the best defense attorneys in the world and they would rip these kids to shreds on the stand and you all know that! I call up Beck and tell him what happened, it's the same thing, the press would eat this up, the world finds out he offered the best security possible to a child abuser, his name is ruined, the whole company is ruined, everything we all worked for goes out the window. I had to take care of the problem myself.
"So what did you do?" Casey asked.
"I told Beck that the week was status quo and uneventful, slowly started removing every trace of my being in that house. I started making arrangements to get David the hell out of that house."
"Was Beck sexually abusing David?" she asked.
"If he had been, he would've been more involved in David's life to begin with," Clancy said. "But it started to make sense why all of a sudden he was okay with him going to private school. It's all boys, most were a couple grades ahead of him."
"How could he be targeting David's classmates if he never went to the school?" Elliot asked.
"Because he knew David would bring his friends home, and every so often he made it a point to be home when they did," Clancy told them. "That way he could gauge which ones were most suited for his liking. It was all so brilliant, he knew how to victimize kids without ever leaving any physical evidence of it. There was no child porn on his computer, no messages exchanged with any victims, he just knew how to contact someone who knew someone who could bring him a kid for a couple hours a night, the same nights he was drugging my coffee."
"The same nights David was crawling into bed with you," Olivia said.
"So you understand his plan wouldn't have worked so well if he'd been a more attentive father," Clancy said. "I went back over the threats against him we had on file, some of them started to read differently. A lot of them called him an evil bastard who was ruining innocent people's lives…we always thought that was just grieving people who his trial drugs had failed..."
"But it could also be a reference to his crimes," Olivia said.
"But it's vague enough that nobody else would know what it meant," Casey added.
"The only thing I could figure is someone else out there knew the truth but wanted to spare the kids what would ensue if an investigation actually opened up…I started to think maybe some of these people that made the actual attempts on his and David's lives…just somebody who knew what was going on and wanted to settle things themselves and thought they could do it before the law could get involved," Clancy said.
"Do you think Moll's wife knew what was going on before she died?" Casey asked.
"I can't answer that, but if I had to guess," John shook his head, "I think she was as in the dark as everybody else was. She had to know the adoption was illegal, but I know when people are desperate enough to have kids, they don't care about something like that."
"So if he didn't kidnap David for the purpose of raping him, why did he do it?" Olivia asked.
"You tell me, you people are supposed to be the experts on that stuff," Clancy said. "I think it was more for his wife's sake and when she died, he just let everything go to hell. Maybe he counted on being able to use David when he was older to lure in more victims, but he had a type, younger kids wouldn't have done it for him."
"How do you know that?" Casey asked.
"One part of our training at SafeTCorp before we ever get assigned a case is a basic rundown in criminal psychology, it's to give us an insight to how the stalkers think and work, and since there were several threats made against a child we had drilled into us how child abusers worked as well."
"But Steven Moll flew under the radar," Casey said.
"He was smart, he knew how to not get caught, he just didn't count on me doing my job as well as I did."
Casey nodded and asked, "What happened the day of the murder?"
"I'd been up all night planning what I was going to do. I decided if it came to me killing Moll, leave the company out of it. I carried a third gun, untraceable, they didn't know. Next day I took David to school, pretended everything was normal. Went home, and I first asked the doctor why he lied about David's birth. He wouldn't answer me. I asked him flat out if he had plans to rape David when he was older like the other boys he was screwing…you know what that bastard did? He laughed…he laughed. A father accused of raping his own child, and he laughs!" Clancy's voice reverberated and bounced off the walls in the room.
"I told him I knew what he was doing and I was going to report him to the company and the police and I was going to have David taken away from him, and he said go ahead and try, it was the word of a distinguished doctor who's saved thousands of lives, versus the word of a professional thug, who would the jury believe? He turned around and I shot him. I wasn't going to let him get his hands on David, or on any other kid. I should've done it the night I found out, but I was still doing my job, David was my main priority, I had to get him out of the whole mess first."
"And after you shot him, what did you do?" Casey asked.
"I finished removing my stuff from the house, I deactivated the tracking device on the car, I packed food and bottled water so we wouldn't have to stop anytime soon where there'd be security cameras…and I waited until 3 o' clock, and I went to the school and picked up David just like I always did, acted like nothing was wrong. In the car I told him his dad had gone out of town on business, and we were going on a trip. During the drive, I told him as much of the truth as I could bear to let him know. I told him that I wasn't really his uncle, and that his parents weren't actually his parents, that they had adopted him when he was six, and that I'd found out that the adoption had been illegal and that whoever gave him to the Molls had kidnapped him from his real family, and that I'd found his real parents, and I was going to take him to them."
"How did he react?" Olivia asked.
"How do you think?" Clancy asked. "First he was in shock…then he was in denial, then he was inconsolable. We stopped off at a motel for the night, he couldn't eat, he couldn't stop crying."
"So you drugged him," Elliot said.
"I gave him a pill to calm him down, he had to stop crying or he was going to make himself sick."
"What did you give him?" Casey asked.
"An allergy pill, over the counter, he'd taken them before for colds, they always knocked him out and he'd sleep all night. That's what he needed."
"And he was still unconscious the next morning when you left the motel," Olivia said.
"He woke up shortly after we got on the road, he was still upset about everything."
"Where's David now?" Casey asked.
Clancy looked her dead in the eyes and answered, "Where nobody can hurt him anymore. He's with his parents and they are someplace where the media coverage of this mess won't reach them, least of all not easily."
"And that's why you let us think he was dead," Olivia said, "if we knew the truth, we could have him brought back to testify at the trial."
"Why didn't you leave New York, Mr. Clancy?" Casey asked, "A smart guy like you had to know what you were facing, with six figures in the bank, why didn't you close out your account and leave the country? You had to know by staying that the police would eventually figure it out and catch you."
"Catch? Miss Novak, I let them find me," John told her. "You think I didn't see the police cars trailing me out in the woods?"
"So why'd you speed up when we hit our sirens?" Elliot asked.
"I had no delusion of eluding anybody, but I wanted to see how far the police were willing to go to try to catch me. I certainly never intended to harm anyone."
Casey shook her head and asked, "Why'd you do it, Mr. Clancy? You knew how it would look, you knew you'd be charged with first degree murder, you had to know no jury would believe your not guilty defense with no defense, and why'd you reject Beck's lawyer for a public defender?"
"Rotting in prison doesn't bother me, getting the needle doesn't bother me, what am I giving up? My family's dead, I'm divorced, I have no kids, the only thing I had going for me was the job and I forfeited that the minute I executed Moll," Clancy told them. "As long as David was protected from all of this crap, I didn't care, he's already suffered enough. I sure as hell wasn't going to confess to kidnapping him, but I wasn't about to explain why that was either."
"Very commendable, Mr. Clancy," Casey said dryly.
"Anything else you want to know?" Clancy asked, "If not, I'll be returning to my cell."
"Don't plan on an extended stay here," another voice entered the room and got everybody's attention.
Clancy sprang to his feet at the sight of the gray haired man in the dark suit who the guard let in.
"Who the hell are you?" he asked. "Another defense shill?"
"My name is Jack McCoy, I'm the Assistant District Attorney overseeing the prosecution of this case," Jack answered. "I've come to let you know that within the week, the charges against you for Murder 1 and kidnapping will be dropped."
Clancy appeared unfazed by this announcement and only asked, "Amended to what, Murder 2?"
"No amendments, Mr. Clancy," Jack told him. "You'll be a free man."
Clancy folded his arms and asked, "Now why would you be stupid enough to do a thing like that? You can convict me on what you have."
"I might," Jack said, "Or the jury might prove very sympathetic to your cause…in which case, what is gained by wasting the taxpayers' time and money for what I can easily foresee as a losing battle? Off the record, Mr. Clancy, you're right, sometimes the system doesn't work, and while I don't condone street justice, usually…I think there were extenuating circumstances in this case that made it necessary. You didn't shoot Mr. Moll in cold blood, you shot him in defense of a third party, the boy he kidnapped, in defense of several third parties, the boys he raped. We often harp on victims about the right to face an accuser in open court, to get closure regardless of whether their attacker is put away or not…but nothing can prepare victims, young, traumatized, emotionally scarred children especially, for the attack they will face on cross examination by the defense. But because of what's happened here, all of Moll's victims, however many of them that might be, will see his picture in the obituary, and they will read how he died, and they will know that justice was served for them regardless."
"There's one more thing I don't get," Olivia told Clancy. "You had David, he really thought that you were his uncle, and nobody knew where you were...why not just take off and start fresh somewhere? You could've cleared out your bank account and been in the wind, you would never have been found."
John looked at her, and for a moment he didn't say anything. Then he answered, "Why would I do that?" He looked at all of them. "You're still on that kick about my ex and I not having kids?"
"You'd gotten very close over the years, it would be understandable," Olivia said.
"Why would I put his parents through that?" Clancy asked. He sat back down and told them, "My mother was a cop, she worked missing children's cases. Any time a kid in town went missing, she'd be up all night, even when she was off shift she'd sit up all night watching the clock, waiting for the phone to ring. I asked her once why she did it. She said there were two parents out there somewhere who weren't getting any sleep at night either, they shouldn't be the only ones suffering. David's parents already suffered for six years, can you appreciate what they've been through waiting to know if he was dead or alive? I loved that boy, but the only thing there was to do was send him home where he belonged."
"I thought we were going to plead Clancy down to Man 1," Casey said as they left the prison.
"The thought did cross my mind," Jack said.
"So what changed it?" Elliot asked.
"For one thing, he was right, if Moll was still alive, and arrested, he could afford the best defense attorneys who would rip apart any victims we could possibly find to testify against him. Moll's ruined enough young boys' lives, this time we'll let dead dogs lay where they are and count our blessings that the damage is less than it could be. David alone has been traumatized enough without finding out the full truth, if Clancy was willing to spare him the worst, so am I."
"You said 'for one thing', what's the other?" Olivia asked.
"His confession," Jack said. "I had to swallow a whole pack of Rolaids just listening to it, to keep from doing what he did in that trash can."
"Are we sure he's telling the truth this time?" she asked.
"It's the only time he's said anything," Jack said, "before he opened his mouth he was staring down a lethal injection, and he knew it."
"So why confess now?" Elliot asked. "Now the whole story's out."
"Because he made a mistake, he thought we wouldn't be able to find out where he sent the boy," Jack said.
"Who did?" Casey asked.
"An hour ago a tape was rushed to my office," Jack said, "shows Clancy putting David on a Greyhound to Florida on the same day Clancy was later arrested."
"He said David's parents wouldn't be able to see the trial coverage," Elliot said.
"The boy's name on the 'Missing' poster was David Bentley," Jack told them. "I made some calls, George and Dinah Bentley reported their son missing six years ago, they just recently sold their house and booked a flight for Belize, which reached its destination three days after Clancy was arrested. Wasn't one of the questions brought up earlier in the investigation, what happened to the $10,000 emergency cash the company gave Clancy?" Jack asked.
"You think he bought David a ticket heading from Florida to Belize," Elliot said.
"The emergency food rations were gone, he'd have something to eat during the trip to Florida," Casey said.
"So what happened to the rest of the money?" Olivia asked.
"My guess is he sent the rest of it with David for travel expenses or a down payment for them to get a house down there," Jack told the detectives.
"Doesn't Belize have an extradition treaty with America?" Olivia asked.
"It does for criminals, not kidnapped children being returned to their rightful parents," Jack replied. "Word of the trial would never get down there, and all of them get to start a new life together."
"And David's shielded from ever knowing the truth about the man he thought was his father," Elliot said.
"He really did think of everything," Olivia said.
"You still got the tape?" Elliot asked.
The SVU detectives and Casey were gathered together in McCoy's office, watching the enhanced security cam footage on the TV monitor. It had been zoomed in on Clancy and David, both of them wearing the same clothes as in the motel security cam earlier that morning. David was carrying a bag that had been identified as one of the travel bags Clancy carried on his job, no doubt containing the cash the detectives hadn't been able to turn up in their investigation. The bodyguard and the boy seemed to be having words, David still looked inconsolable as he shook his head and argued with Clancy.
"What's he saying, you got any idea?" Elliot asked.
"I had one of our experts in lip reading take a crack at it," Jack answered. "The best he could come up with is that he doesn't want to go to Florida, he wants to stay with Clancy."
"Talk about a conflict of interest," Olivia said.
On the screen the two parties continued to argue, the 12 year old boy was directly facing the camera now and mouthed something that everybody in the room was able to read.
"Don't go."
There were a few more words and David clung to John Clancy, who hugged him, cupped the sides of the boy's face in his hands, kissed him on the forehead, and said something that couldn't be determined. Clancy walked David over to the bus, David turned around and grabbed Clancy again, saying something else that was decipherable to everyone watching.
"I love you."
Clancy said something that could easily be interpreted as the same thing, and motioned for David to go. The 12 year old hauled his bag onto the bus and disappeared behind one of the blackened windows. Clancy waved goodbye, and as the bus pulled out, turned and walked away.
