Kneeling next to the wall and disregarding the cold and damp, Elliot frantically re-secured the papers and reports in the file, not caring which order they were in but cursing the loss of her photo, before standing and almost running downstairs. His thoughts were frozen on the face of the man, and yet spinning sickeningly fast with memories and emotions.
Going to Munch's old desk, he pulled the three files he had discarded towards him and tried to remember which one of the rape victims the guy in the photo was linked to, but his brain seemed depleted of coherence, made barren by the nauseating dread that had settled over him.
He muttered the three names under his breath, sour syllables rolling off his tongue with ease before his mind singled in on one and the image in his mind became clearer. Opening Kirsty More's file, he rifled through until he found the CD with the security camera footage he was looking for. Putting it into the computer, he waited impatiently as it whirred slightly before loading, and the scene of a convenience store became clearer, people standing in line before the cashier.
Moving the recording forward, he stopped it when he saw their 2nd victim on the screen and leaned in, looking closely.
There was the guy, standing two people behind the girl, holding a magazine. The image was slightly fuzzy but as he zoomed in, it was clearly the man that Don had shown him on his cell.
His knees slowly gave way until he hit the chair, the impact and horror of a memory became fully realised as he remembered sitting in that very room, with that very image in front of his eyes.
He looks up as Olivia walks into the room holding a CD which she immediately loads into the computer below the screens, pulling up a chair and sinking into it. It's lunchtime, the day after their second victim was raped in her apartment, and he goes over and hands her the sandwich he got while she was gone.
"This the security camera footage?" He sits down beside her and takes a bite into his own lunch while she distractedly opens hers before immediately forgetting it and focusing on the screen.
"Yeah. Hopefully there is something here."
Reaching over and grabbing his notes from the previous evening, Elliot is struck by the fact their victim, Kirsty More, has been in as definite in a routine as Laura was. Coming home from her work as a PA, she would stop at the store every evening for some necessity or desire, usually a candy bar or milk for her morning coffee. A comment she made sticks in his head,
"If someone wanted to follow me, it wouldn't be hard. I'm a creature of habit. Nothing ever changes in my life."
Before him, he sees the angled view of a store, the cashier at the back of the picture and the shelving reaching towards the camera. The time stamp declares it three days before their victim was raped. Liv quickly forwards through until she gets to the time Kirsty said she usually went in, from 7.30pm onwards.
They sit in soft silence, both watching people coming and going with their lives without even considering that they may be watched. After ten minutes, Elliot stands and gets coffee but Liv doesn't even glance down when he puts it beside her hand, her attention entirely on the screen. She has eaten three bites of her meal but distractedly dissects the rest, tearing up small pieces of bread and the paper around it and piling them up as she watches.
He leans back on his chair and sips his own coffee, not paying attention as people come and go behind him in the room, contemplating the slightly blurred figures.
Suddenly Liv points and pauses the tape.
"Is that her?"
Elliot shifts forwards and looks at the girl with dark hair, holding a carton of milk and wearing the long coat she had said she always wore. Without bothering to confirm that it is their victim, they watch as she stands in line, keeping an eye both on her and the people in the store around her.
Behind her there is a guy with dark, almost black hair, and behind him another guy with lighter hair. The first glances at his watch twice while he is waiting, the other plays with his phone and then puts headphones in. Neither are wearing gloves, and both are of a similar, average, size.
Kirsty walks out and both guys leave soon afterwards.
They skip through the next 20 hours and focus in again on the following day, 2 days before the rape. Watching the video speeded up to save time, the people are jerky and awkward, puppets directed by an unknown puppeteer. They see Kirsty enter the store again and slow it down, looking closely at the screen to check through the other people around her. There is a woman with a stroller loading a basket with groceries, and an older man with a walking stick, but other than that there appears to be no sign of a viable suspect until someone in a hoodie comes into view.
Elliot leans over to pause the image and looks closely at the guy.
"You think that's the man from last night? The one that was second behind her?"
Liv looks unsure.
"Carry on with the tape?"
Kirsty picks up a candy bar and goes to pay, but the guy doesn't move from browsing the magazines. When she waves to the cashier and then leaves, he puts the magazine back on the shelf and walks out after her, hands shoved in his pockets.
Without speaking, Liv gestures for him to rewind the tape and he does so, stopping when she points to the screen. As the guy turned, they could see his face, and Elliot zooms in.
"Looks like the same one."
Elliot grunts in agreement, and they stare at him for a couple of seconds, carefully assessing his face for identifiable features. He's a normal looking man, probably just over 6ft, but under the bulky clothes they can't judge body type or exact weight. His hair is covered by the hood of his sweatshirt, but it's undoubtedly the guy from the night before.
Keeping the screen up, Elliot prints off the insignificantly fuzzy still before they settle down to the stunningly tedious task of going through the next two days of clips.
Elliot feels a morbid foreboding when they get to the day of the rape and he watches the last images of Kirsty going through her day, glancing at the time stamp and knowing that in less than ten minutes she will be attacked and raped. In twenty minutes she will lie on her apartment floor and sob down the phone to the 911 operator. In fifty minutes, she will recount the ordeal as Liv hands out tissues and he curses silently that this is the same MO, and they now appear to have a serial rapist.
Less than an hour. How much can change. He wants to pause the tape and stop her leaving the store but that's not what they do. They just scrape up the scattered pieces out of the sordid depths and try to wipe some of the pain from them. They can do nothing for the stains left behind.
Olivia sighs as the images end.
"We'd better speak to the cashiers, see if they recognise him." As she speaks, she leans back in her chair and runs her hand through her hair.
"You gonna finish that?" Elliot nods towards the torn up bread and scattered paper, but she shakes her head. "Let's go then."
The footage on the screen had long finished by the time Elliot's memory fadee, but the feeling of Olivia still hung in the air. Their conversation on the way to the store, the gentle comfort in the idle talk, and her almost imperceptible shifting of attitude as they prepare to show the picture to Kirsty were all so clear that he wanted to reach out and touch them.
Kirsty hadn't recognised him, but when they had shown the picture to the first victim, Laura, she said she might have done, although she couldn't pinpoint when or where.
Putting the CD back into its place in Kirsty's file, Elliot couldn't help but remember another CD that must be in Olivia's. Pulling it out, he traced his finger lightly over the rainbow surface, wondering if he should watch it or not. It wasn't necessary at all, there was no information on it pertaining to their perp, and it was still seared into his mind, branded in all its devastating clarity.
"He, Munch and Fin are all standing in front of a TV screen in the squad room, surrounded by officers both on and off duty as the news reporter begins. There is an aura in the air, so thick that it blankets them with combined fear, stress and a desperate longing. The pain in Elliot's chest is so sharp that he dreads it breaking out, slicing the paper thin defences that remain.
"We now cross live to a NYPD appeal here in Manhattan, concerning the disappearance of Special Victims Detective Olivia Benson, who has now been missing for over 24 hrs."
The Chief of Detectives appears on screen, standing at a podium, Cragen slightly behind and to the side of him.
"This is an appeal to anyone who may be able to give us information pertaining to the disappearance and whereabouts of Detective Olivia Benson. Please be assured that all calls and information will be treated with the utmost discretion. I hand over to Captain Cragen with the details. Thank you."
Cragen steps forward and Elliot is already tensing, not wanting this to happen but knowing that it must. He doesn't know how he is going to bear hearing the details in such a public way, yet another reaffirmation of reality, but his eyes won't leave the screen as the Captain starts speaking.
"Olivia Benson was last seen walking into her apartment building," a picture of which flashes up, "at between 8.30 and 9pm the evening before last. She was wearing black suit trousers, a navy blue shirt and a black coat."
Now there is the photo of her on screen, her dark eyes seeming to catch Elliot's eye, and he is flooded with desire for her presence. There is the slightest trace of a smile on her lips, and seeing her picture in the place that so many missing peoples has been before causes his stomach to clench and the muscles through his jaw ache with emotion.
"We believe that she entered her apartment, as signs of struggle were found. However, we have no further leads as to the events that followed, or her whereabouts at this time. If you think you may have seen her, or may have information that may lead to her or someone who may have something to do with her disappearance, please ring this number...."
As Cragen reels off the tipline and thanks the public, Elliot turns away and Munch lies a hand on his shoulder.
"Maybe something will come of this," he says quietly, but there is no conviction within the statement and Elliot doesn't respond. He can't, even if he wants too. His chaotic feelings are holding his voice hostage while screaming for release, for the tension and flood of emotions to cease. It's violently overwhelming and within that moment, he feels like he may never be able to speak again."
Blinking, Elliot realised he was still holding the CD of the press conference in his hand, having never loaded it. He put it back in the file and closed it before leaning his elbows on its surface and rubbing his hands across his face. Time was doing strange things, and he felt like it must be days since Don came and fetched him, instead of just a couple of hours.
The still of the guy that he pulled out of Kirsty's file was still in front of him, taunting him, and he stared at the face. If it would do any good to punch a piece of paper, tear it into shreds with his teeth, cruelly annihilate it, he would, but he knew that it would be a pointless task.
There was movement across the room and Don came over to him, sitting on the edge of the desk and nodding down at the picture.
"You were right. I'm sorry." The apology from the older man was another needle in his numb heart, and he shook his head.
"Don't be. You weren't to know. None of us were." Elliot tried to sound reassuring but the words didn't come right, instead appearing gruff and caustic.
"Then why do you get to blame yourself, but I can't blame myself?" Don asked, a quiet statement rather than a question but Elliot let the words circle through his head for a minute before shaking it.
"I don't know."
"After all, it was me that told you to look for other suspects. After Joanna." Hearing the guilt shooting through his words, Elliot wanted to shake him, make him see sense, and a small voice in the back of his mind commented that this is what people so often wanted to do to him. To make him realise that it wasn't his fault.
"They're in the squadroom, Olivia and Elliot leaning against her desk, Munch and Fin on Munch's, and Cragen to one side of the board. It's the morning after their third victim, and even though the DNA results haven't come back yet, all three pictures are up, with a line leading to a single, unknown perp.
"I still think we should try and hunt down the store guy," Elliot suggests. "He's the only one we've got that ties even two of our victims."
"But your third didn't recognise him, and neither did your second, even though we saw him around her. And your first wasn't sure," Fin interjects.
"He could still be the guy. Laura said she thought she knew him from somewhere," Elliot keeps pushing. It's all they've got, and with no security camera footage that can chart Joanna's movements over the last few days, barring a miracle it's all they're going to get.
"It's a pretty standard looking man El. And none of our vics actually got a look at their rapist," Liv says, and he throws her a quick glance of annoyance that she is in the process of shooting down the only lead they have. Cragen nods.
"I think we need to look for another connection. Go back to all three, go through every second of their days, try and find SOMETHING that ties them together, other than they are all single women who come home later in the evening and might have seen a guy who we have no identity for."
Elliot sighs, goes to pick his coat up from the back of the chair, and Olivia gives him a look, but hers isn't of irritation. Instead, there is a sympathy that she cannot agree with his thoughts, and it does its job, settling his frustration a fraction. They walk out together."
A more cynical, acerbic, biting voice suggested that perhaps who to blame was Olivia herself, since she hadn't backed up her partner when it counted. That was the worst, the same sense that he thought rang through the head of survivors of rape when they tried to make sense of their experience, blaming themselves so there could be some control, some meaning. He hated it because it made him feel like a victim. But what right did he have, to act the injured party, when it was her that was gone?
"Perhaps you could entertain the notion that neither of you were at fault."
Both men looked up at the new voice in the room, and Don rose up when he saw Alex standing in the doorway.
"Hey," he said as she moved over to them, putting her bag down on a desk and leaning in to kiss Don on the cheek. She nodded at Elliot and put a hand on his shoulder, but he didn't stand up, instead just reaching out with one arm so that it touched her back for a second in companionship. "You heard then."
Alex nodded.
"Grapevine works fast, especially for something like this."
There didn't seem to be much more to say for a second, and Elliot could feel Alex's hand squeezing his shoulder harder. Perhaps it was a gesture of comfort, but he could also feel the tension radiating from her that was also present both in himself and Don next to them. The waiting for the storm to hit.
Suddenly, a small sound of shock broke the silence, and Elliot looked up in surprise at Alex as she leant further over him.
"Is this the guy? The guy Fin's bringing?" Her voice rose towards the end of the sentence and both men stared at her in concern as she lifted the paper. Her hand was shaking, a tremor matched in her tone.
"Yeah," Elliot confirmed, watching her face grow visibly paler. The composed elegance seemed to be slipping, and a fragile vulnerability appeared in her eyes, horror flashing across them.
"Alex, what is it?" Don asked, and shifted slightly towards her as if she was about to faint.
"I recognise him. This guy."
"What!?" Astonishment rang through Elliot's voice and he shot to his feet, his words scorching the air around them as he turned to her. "From where?"
Her face was marble white, as if it was she that was the ghost from the past and not Liv or the man in the picture.
"He....he....." her voice wavered faintly and Don held out a hand to her, holding her elbow, ready to catch, "he was outside Olivia's apartment. The day of the press conference."