August 17, 2021
"Liv!" Cassidy was saying as he came running up, shattering the veil of privacy they'd drawn around themselves and whatever hope Elliot had of salvaging his relationship with Olivia with it. There was no coming back from this, from what he'd done, from what he'd said. Whatever happened next, whatever happened to Mia, it would be on his head, and he'd gone and told Liv he loved her, at the worst possible time - he knew it was fucked up, say something like that to her when she was beside herself with worry over her child, but she had asked him, demanded an accounting from him, and he'd promised himself he was never gonna lie to her again - and there was no way, he thought, there was no way Liv was ever gonna forgive him. His personal woes took a backseat, though; it looked like Cassidy had news, and that was all that mattered now. Finding Mia, bringing her home safe before she got hurt or her illness took a turn for the worse. It had only been a few hours since she'd been taken and she wouldn't need another pill until bedtime and surely they'd find her before then. They had to find her before then, because if this manhunt dragged on through the night and into tomorrow their chances of finding her would drop from slim to none.
The Lieutenant, Myers, he must have noticed Cassidy running because he came darting around the corner of the van, and when Cassidy reached them and delivered his news the Lieu was there to hear it.
"That goth chick who works with Stabler-" Cassidy began, looking straight at Liv as if she were the only person in the vicinity, and Elliot couldn't blame him for that; Liv had that effect on people.
"Jet," Elliot supplied helpfully.
"Yeah, her," Cassidy said, still-laser focused on Liv. "She found something. Warehouse that wasn't on our map."
With help from OCCB, Missing Persons had compiled a list of all the properties that had ever been connected to Wheatley. Shipping facilities, storage facilities, trucking companies, private residences, most of it had been sold off or seized by the state after Wheatley had been arrested, but any one of those places could have been used to hide a child, and teams of unis had been dispatched all over the city in a madcap dash to cross all the possibles off the list. Cast a wide net and draw it in, that had been Myers's plan, and Elliot would've said it was a shitty plan only there didn't seem to be any better alternative. The possibility remained that they were wrong, that it wasn't Wheatley behind this at all, but Elliot's gut told him they were on the right track.
"Where?" Myers barked, and Cassidy jumped like a kicked dog; Jesus, he really must not have noticed that he had company. But Mia was his child, too, and he was as desperate to find her as Liv was, and Elliot couldn't fault him for not paying more attention to his surroundings.
"Brooklyn, near Gowanus Canal," Cassidy said with a grim desolation that made no sense to Elliot at all.
"Jesus Christ," Olivia said breathlessly, her face gone suddenly pale, her eyes gone wide as if in fear. Those dark eyes of hers, they were locked on Cassidy, not on the ground at her feet, not searching the heavens; she was looking straight at Cassidy, and he was looking back, and it seemed to Elliot as if they were saying something to one another in a language he could not understand.
"Seems deliberate," Cassidy said slowly.
"Did she say -"
"It's not the same building," Cassidy answered quickly; too quickly, damn him, he'd spoken so fast Olivia hadn't been able to ask her question in full, and Elliot was left in the dust, with no idea what the fuck they were talking about.
"But it's the same general area. Look, she got all technical on me, but the gist of it, I think, is that the warehouse is owned by a shell company that's connected to Wheatley's business. Supposed to do with shipping, exports, whatever, but the books were all bogus. The company went defunct but no one's bought the warehouse so it's just sitting there empty."
"We gotta get a team down there," Liv said sharply, urgently.
"We don't have anyone to spare right now," Myers said, and Liv spun to face him, fire flashing in her eyes. "Look, Captain," he added placatingly, though Elliot noticed the man had prudently taken a step back, out of the range of her fist, "we're running a grid search, we're reviewing security footage, we're going over case files, we've sent god only knows how many unis out to search the properties we did know about. We have a ton of manpower at our disposal but every last body we have is busy right now. As soon as the first team reports back we'll dispatch 'em to the warehouse. Shouldn't be more than an hour."
"I'll go," Elliot volunteered without hesitation, and all three of them, Myers and Liv and Cassidy, swung their heads to stare at him with varying expressions of incredulity on their faces. "I've already given my statement, I'm not doing anybody any good just standing around here. Me and my Sarge, we can go check the warehouse. We can go now.
It was the least he could do, and he was desperate to do something, to feel useful, somehow, desperate to help Liv in any way he could. This was his mess, Wheatley's interest in Liv his responsibility, and as far as he was concerned that meant it fell to him to make things right. The warehouse hadn't come up in the initial investigation and that meant Wheatley probably thought it wasn't on the NYPD's radar, and Liv and Cassidy seemed to think the location was significant, and that was enough of a hunch for him to go on.
"I'll go," Cassidy said. "You and me, Stabler, we can-"
"No," Olivia and Myers choroused in unison. She shot the Lieutenant a baleful look, and then continued, "if anybody's going down there, it's gonna be me."
"No," Elliot and Myers said this time, and the Lieutenant looked so exasperated then it was a wonder he didn't stomp his foot in frustration.
"Captain Benson, you and Mr. Cassidy are going to stay here. You are not working this case, you are the parents of the victim, and I can't let you in the field. You know that. Detective Stabler and Sergeant Bell can scope out the warehouse and report back to us."
"Put Jet on surveillance," Elliot said, beginning to pace as he turned the problem over in his mind, began to work on a plan. "Wheatley's smart, and he likes tech. If he was planning to use the warehouse as a bolthole he may have some kind of alarm system in place and we don't wanna trip it. If anything he's got there is running on a wireless connection Jet will be able to find it."
There was no way to know what they were walking into. There was no way to know if Mia was even inside that warehouse, and if she was, there was no way to know if Wheatley was with her. The man was too arrogant, too selfish, too much a megalomaniac to kill himself, so if he was inside probably he hadn't wired the place with explosives or anything, but if he wasn't there it was exactly the sort of thing he might do. He might even think it was funny, ironic, fitting, that Elliot Stabler should die in an explosion at the precise moment he discovered Mia. Elliot could be walking into a trap, but even knowing that, there was no force on earth that could have made him stand down.
"I'm going with you," Liv said grimly, and this time Myers groaned.
"Captain-"
"Fuck you, Lieutenant," she spat as the dam holding back the flood of her rage finally burst. It seemed to Elliot in that moment almost as if she had grown, almost as if she were ten feet tall and towering over Myers, vibrating with a righteous sort of fury, beautiful and terrible. "She is my child. And I am going. You got a problem you take that up with IAB and we'll deal with it after I bring my kid home safe."
"Liv, let me go," Cassidy said. "Stay here with Noah-"
"You stay here with Noah," she countered acidly. "Bri, that last UC op fucked your knee and you can't run for shit and you know it."
He hung his head, apparently cowed by her unvarnished recounting of his limitations.
"Look, Lieutenant," Elliot said, stepping forward, angling himself to slide between Olivia and the target of her indignation, "the Captain is my partner. We can handle this, and Sergeant Bell will be there to make sure we don't do anything stupid."
Or to help us do the stupidest thing either of us have ever done, he added in his own mind. That was the thing about Bell; she ran a tight ship, but she understood him, and she let him have his head - sometimes - and she was a mother. She'd know what was at stake. And she had a set of brass balls just about as big as Liv's.
"I don't like this," the Lieutenant said.
"Too fucking bad," Liv answered. "Bri, you got an address?"
Cassidy pulled his phone from his pocket, fired off a text to Liv with the information on the warehouse while Elliot caught Bell's eye across the parking lot and waved her over.
Everything was moving fast, now. All the cogs in the vast machinery of the NYPD had begun to rotate at full tilt, and the train had begun to lumber down the tracks. Maybe they wouldn't find anything at the warehouse. Maybe there was nothing to find; maybe it was just what it appeared to be, just another empty building, the last bequest of Wheatley's crumbling empire. Maybe one of the other teams would find something while Elliot and Olivia were on the road. Maybe Wheatley wasn't behind it all. Maybe Mia was already dead, or maybe they'd find her in Brooklyn. Maybe maybe maybe, everything was just a maybe, right now. But the only way to solve this riddle and bring Liv's girl home safe was to pursue every avenue available to them, and they didn't have the luxury of time, couldn't just sit around and wait for answers to come to them. This was what they did, Elliot and Olivia; they were SVU to the core, and they fought for children, and brought them home safe to their families.
It was good, he thought as they filled Ayanna in on the plan, as he and Liv and Bell went racing to the Sarge's SUV, as Brian walked slowly back into the school with his head hung low, as Myers watched them leave, fuming; it was good that Liv was with him. It was good, he thought, that they would do this together. Benson and Stabler, back on the streets, back in the fight. They had always worked well together; they had always been unstoppable together. That's how he felt when he was with her, ten feet tall and bulletproof. There was nothing they could not do, so long as they were together. There were a team, the team; she was the one person in the world who knew him best, the one he trusted most, and they would protect each other, and they would find her girl, and bring her home. There was no alternative.
Here we go, he thought as Ayanna gunned it, tires squealing, out of the parking lot, the light on her dash spinning wildly. Liv had climbed into the backseat and Elliot had joined her there, sitting beside her because his place had always been, and would always be, by her side. Her face was turned away from him, her eyes staring unseeing at the sights of the city flashing by, and Elliot was so tense he was hardly breathing, but as he sat there, willing the car to go faster - even though Ayanna was already pushing the limits of the SUV's maneuverability - Olivia reached across the space between them and laced her fingers through his, and he curled his fingers hard against hers, and held on tight.