T Minus 6 Hours

T Minus 6 Hours

Elliot hated hospitals. He hated everything about them. He hated the brightly lit hallways. He hated being sick. He hated other sick people. He hated the antiseptic stench of the rooms. He hated the stiff, rough sheets on the black plastic mattresses. He hated the hard plastic chairs. He hated the person who thought bright orange would be a nice soothing shade for hospital waiting rooms. He hated the doctors and nurses. He hated the janitors who walked around incredibly slowly, peeking into rooms as they mopped or emptied trash cans as though they enjoyed being around sick people. He hated the hideously long amount of time he spent waiting, since his self-flagellation didn't merit as much attention as the ten car pile-up on the George Washington Bridge.

And he really hated the snarky glare on Fin's face which hinted that Fin would be exacting revenge on Elliot at some point in the future for making him sit in the hospital too.

He wanted to voice his appreciation that Fin had brought him there instead of Bellevue. But he couldn't make the words come out, since he was pissed off over being at a hospital in the first place. Especially because the anger was mostly directed at himself for fucking up his hand rather than at Fin for making him get it fixed.

T Minus 3 Hours

With the accident victims treated, Elliot had gotten as far as into an exam room. The nurse asked the general, prying questions. She looked at his hand, seeming, at least to Elliot, to find some amusement in prodding the swollen flesh. She used an irritating baby voice to tell him that they were very busy, but that the doctor would be in as soon as possible.

He ignored her directions to change into the gown, opting to sit on the stretcher and stare at the wall. He was pleased to be away from Fin's condescending face for a few minutes.

T Minus 2 Hours

The doctor, although Elliot was pretty sure he was just there for "Take Your Adolescent to Work" Day, issued stern warnings repeatedly about how clearly Elliot needed to relax. It was only after Elliot unhappily accepted two spa recommendations, as well as a lecture on how he shouldn't feel uncomfortable because lots of men enjoyed the refreshing getaways at nearby spas, that the doctor sent him for some x-rays. It was a waste of time, he'd declared, because Elliot's hand was obviously broken, but he did it anyway.

A half hour later, the doctor returned and said that Elliot's hand was broken in three places, holding the x-ray to the fluorescent overhead light, he showed Elliot how the metacarpals that formed the base of his first three fingers were fractured. With a disappointed sigh, the doctor told him that it was really far too swollen at that point to really do much with it. So Elliot endured the misery of having the doctor and a pair of nurses maneuver his hand onto a splint and then wrap it tightly with an elastic bandage. It hurt like hell, but he wasn't gong to ask for any pain meds. He was simply in too much of a hurry to get back to work, to return to Howie's house, to find Olivia.

He listened with half an ear while the doctor referred him to an orthopedist should he want to avoid permanent damage, especially since it was too swollen to examine thoroughly. It was his left hand, so Elliot didn't really care. On his list of priorities, Olivia took the top five million spots at that moment.

T Minus 1 hour

Struggling to button his sleeve around the splint, Elliot found his way to the waiting room. By the time he found Fin, he'd given up on his shirt and was working instead on getting his blazer over his splint. He figured if he was going to be allowed to keep working, he needed to hide the evidence of his injury.

Fin was pacing back and forth, moving his phone from one hand to the other. He started for the door as soon as he saw Elliot, paying no attention to Elliot's issues with his coat. "Finally."

Preoccupied with his sleeve, he fell behind. He shoved his arm through it, tearing the lining and jarring his hand within the splint. It hurt more than he remembered and he supposed he deserved it. He jogged a few feet to fall in step beside Fin. "Sorry."

Fin looked at him out the corner of his eye. "I wasn't going to tell you this because I think you really should go home and knock yourself out with some painkillers."

Elliot's eyes were immediately riveted to Fin's face. "What?" He didn't have time to issue the threat.

Fin held up his hands in surrender. "I figured I wouldn't survive it." He shook his phone. "Casey got the warrant."

For a moment, Elliot couldn't move or think. He was truly dumbfounded. The new poster boy for flabbergasted. He simply stood there, staring, his mouth hanging slightly open. As sure as he'd been that they would get the warrant, he couldn't believe that it was theirs. They had every right to go back to Howie's house and tear it apart, to take that steel vault door right off the hinges, to find Olivia, to bring her home. Finally, he swallowed hard and tried to clear his throat.

"Did they go in? Did they find her?" He'd been in the emergency room for hours. For all he knew, Olivia could have been found and was sitting at the precinct or home or even somewhere in the same hospital.

Nodding, Fin started walking again. "They're in there, turning the place upside down. Munch was all freaked out by the pictures of Maggie."

"Did they get in that door?" He didn't know why they'd even bother with the rest of the house that obviously hadn't seen traffic since some time in the 60s.

"They've got ESU in there working on it."

As they climbed in the car, Elliot thought about all the home improvement books that had been piled up. "ESU? How well installed could it be if the dumbass did it himself?"

Fin shrugged, driving at an excessively fast speed, knowing it still wasn't fast enough for Elliot. "Munch said something about a bomb shelter. Psycho parents must have had it installed."

The car's wheels were still turning when Elliot jumped out. He heard Fin's curse when he realized his passenger had jumped ship. But his feet didn't slow down as he ran for the front door, not stopping to look if cars were coming when he crossed the street, barely pausing long enough to flash his badge at the officers blocking the door. He headed straight for the kitchen, shoving through the group standing around as they pawed through Howie's belongings.

Cragen and Munch were standing in the doorway, as close as ESU would let them get while they were cutting through the door. Munch nodded at him. Cragen held up his hand, trying to prevent Elliot from shoving past and yelling at the ESU.

"They're working as fast as they can, Elliot."

Common sense told him that he wasn't going to get anywhere starting a fight with the other men there or using his fists to reason with the damn door again. He wasn't quite sure what to make of it since his common sense had been remarkably lacking in the previous few days. He nodded, swallowing back the urge to scream. "What's taking so long?"

Cragen motioned at the door. "Six inches of steel, Elliot, and it extends the entire length of this wall."

Munch waggled his eyebrows. "And people call me paranoid."

"According to the blueprints, this should lead to the basement." Cragen shrugged at the plans rolled up in his hands. "The parents filed for permits to build a bomb shelter in 1961. They never completed the paperwork, but it would appear that they went ahead and built it anyway."

Elliot sighed. "And to think they seemed like such an upstanding, law-abiding family."

"How's the hand?" Cragen nodded at Elliot's splint which stuck out in its glaring whiteness against the gray of his suit coat.

"It's fine." He didn't go into details. He hadn't been listening all that closely when the doctor was talking to him.

Munch jumped in, sensing Elliot didn't want to discuss the hand he'd fucked up in a fit of temper. "We figured out why Howie went after Olivia, though."

Elliot turned to Munch, his first thought to ask him why anyone cared while a god damn vault still stood between them and finding out if Olivia was ok. He glanced in Munch's direction, not bothering to focus on the photograph the other man was holding. "Because she looks like Maggie."

Munch's confusion was evident as he turned to Cragen. Cragen's brow furrowed and he cocked his head to the side. "Exactly how do you know that?"

Realizing he'd just given himself away, he bit his lip and tried to think of an excuse. "Why else would he kidnap her?"

Cragen and Munch looked at one another, neither quite believing the lie, neither one calling him on it. But Munch couldn't hold back a flippant remark. "Uh, maybe cause he's nutty as a fruitcake?"

Elliot was saved from having to respond by a loud shout from the ESU team. They'd gotten through enough of the door that it was starting to lean, causing them no end of trouble in continuing to cut. They were calling for help supporting the weight so they could finish the job.

But Elliot didn't see the group of guys who were helping. He didn't see Munch and Cragen moving to help shoulder the weight of the steel. He didn't see the considerable stretch of steel that remained to be cut.

He saw a narrow opening into the blackness behind the door. He wasn't the skinniest man around; Munch certainly would have had an easier time of it. But Elliot wasn't about to let a chance to pass him by. He pushed past the men, squeezing himself through the opening. Had he given anyone a chance to stop him, they might have pointed out that he didn't actually know what lay on the other side of the door. They might have cautioned him that he was about to plunge headfirst into a stairwell.

Through some stroke of luck, he managed to catch his footing and grab hold of the rickety banister with his right hand. Muffled curses followed him for a moment, followed by the faint, familiar sound of Cragen's voice. He must have warned them off because he didn't hear anymore complaints. Not that it would have mattered.

"Olivia!" The door wasn't soundproof, so she should have been able to hear him screaming for her earlier. He tried to rationalize that she must have answered him, but that he'd been hysterical and continued screaming and therefore hadn't heard her. "Olivia!" He decided she was unable to reply for some reason.

He ran his hand along the wall, finding the light switch and turning it on. It did little to chase away the darkness, a faint spread of light emanating from the bottom of the steps, barely illuminating them with what couldn't have been more than a 15 watt bulb. He took his time on the steps, telling himself it wouldn't do to get himself killed seconds prior to finding her.

When he reached the bottom of the steps, he realized there was nothing at all wrong with the lighting. In fact, the low ceiling held several lights mere inches above his head, close enough that he could feel the heat radiating from the bright bulb. There were several other spotlights set in the beams of the ceiling and under any other circumstances, it would have been brighter than day.

Except that the decorating had clearly been left to Howie. And just as Elliot would have suspected had he taken the time to think about it, the basement looked exactly like Howie the library rat had designed it. Elliot was looking at books. Lots of books. Hundreds. Thousands. Probably millions. While he wasn't sure he'd know what a million of anything looked like, Elliot was pretty sure he was staring at millions upon millions of books.

They were stacked floor to ceiling, wall to wall, or so he assumed. There was only a narrow alley between the piles, piles which were so tall as to obscure anything behind them. Elliot followed the path, a maze winding around back under the stairs and into the corner. There, Elliot found a plush arm chair next to a reading lamp. A book lay open, face down, on the seat, as though Howie meant to return at any moment to continue reading.

He didn't even have the energy to scream. He'd expected to find Olivia bound, beaten, raped, desperate to see him, pissed as hell over the length of time it had taken to find her, maybe even dead. He didn't know what to do with a fucking reading nook, where Howie evidently walled himself up with all the books currently in print while he waited for the end time or the second coming or whatever it was he needed all those books for.

He didn't know how he'd keep going. He didn't honestly think he'd survive much longer. He didn't know how he could bear to listen to the perfunctory words of condolence from Munch and Fin and Cragen.

He turned around, somehow finding the strength to put one foot in front of the other, aiming for the stairs, thinking he could ask someone to shoot him and put him out of his misery. At the very least, he could simply tell them that he was acutely suicidal and have them lock him up someplace with the good drugs. The maze was harder to follow without a real desire to watch where he was going.

Rather than back at the foot of the stairs, he quickly realized there was another destination, another trail Howie had left for himself. He found himself in the laundry room, wondering with quite a lot of irritation if Howie really worried so much about what people thought of him as to do laundry. Elliot stared at the half empty box of Tide and the open, nearly full package of dryer sheets. Sure, he was familiar with them. Kathy had used them, swore by their ability to rid the universe of static. She even put them in the bottom of her drawers, telling him they kept everything smelling good.

But Elliot himself had never bought dryer sheets in his life. He hadn't even noticed anything lacking in his laundry since he'd moved out. He doubted most men cared about dryer sheets. It may have been a stupid thing for him to notice, but for whatever reason, the whole thought process made him stop to think for a moment, staring at the box, expecting it to explain itself.

And then he noticed the folded clothes next to the box. At first glance, it was nothing special. Something khaki, a color he was sure could accurately describe about half of the clothing manufactured in the history of the world. It wasn't even the khaki that caught his attention.

It was the small, slightly shiny green item sitting on top.

A stab of fear and hurt and recognition struck him. He'd seen them before.

Elliot had never really paid much attention to the colors of his clothes. But somewhere around twenty, Kathy had taken the tedious responsibility of shopping for his clothes from him. She'd bring him things, informing him that something was out of style or unflattering or just a good buy. Somewhere around twenty-five, he opened his closet and realized the vast majority of his shirts, be they dress shirts or t-shirts, were blue. He assumed it was her favorite color and thought he'd scored a hit when he bought her a blue sweater for her next birthday. She'd hated it, demanded that he exchange it for something else. So he'd questioned her and found out that she didn't like blue at all, except that she said it brought out his eyes and she loved seeing him in blue shirts.

When he'd first met Olivia, he hadn't paid much attention to her clothes. Noticing her clothes seemed like it might be a slippery slope into noticing what was under her clothes and so he just didn't think about it. On occasion, he'd see her in something particularly flattering and he'd remember it. There was a purple sweater she wore from time to time that fit her in such a way that he couldn't help but notice her. And there was a yellow tank top he'd caught her in once when they'd actually bumped into each other outside of work that she looked absolutely beautiful in. But a few years had gone by since he'd really noticed much of anything about what she wore until one day eight years into their partnership when Munch asked if they planned their clothing choices. It was then that he'd noticed over the years she'd taken to wearing blue all the time too. He'd never mentioned it, never dared draw attention to something he was sure was unconscious on her part, but he'd secretly adored the idea that she spent so much time with him that she started buying clothes that matched his.

And it had struck him in one single fraction of a second, when he had her pressed against the wall in the crib, as he was roughly yanking her pants down so that he could claim her body so harshly, when he saw the deep, forest green color of the panties he'd just pulled away from her, and realized that the color was absolutely striking against the tan of her skin. He wanted to tell her to wear it more often.

His hands reached out, forgetting entirely about the uselessness of his left, splinted hand, pulling the soft fabric through his fingers. The situation seemed terribly strange all of a sudden. The delicate feel of the fabric under his fingers, the various crashes and noise coming from the upper floors as the others continued searching the house, the eerie quiet of the dark basement. He started to wonder if he was dreaming. After a week of grasping at straws to find some tangible sign of his partner's whereabouts, just holding her panties in his hand felt unreal.

His eyes fell on the khaki item once again, finally recognizing it as the pair of pants Olivia was wearing the night she'd been taken. The memory of brutally ripping them off, shoving them down so he could force his way between her legs, came back even stronger. Even though he thought he'd come to grips with what had happened between them, he knew it would never really be settled, he would never really be settled, not until she told him that she was all right with it.

He remembered how she'd left him that night, furious at him for an imagined date with Dani, only a few minutes after he'd come inside her. He'd hurried her, forced her to get up, made her dress, demanded she follow him back to the office. He'd only meant for them to get out of there, away from work, so they could deal with what they'd done. But he hadn't given her any time, not to get herself together, not to clean up. The panties had been washed and dried, but a paranoid voice in his head convinced him that his semen might have survived, clinging to the fabric to give their physical relationship away when they were seized as evidence and examined.

He was doing it for Olivia, to protect her. That was what he repeated to himself as he shoved them deep into his pants pocket. He didn't want her reputation coming under fire because he hadn't been able to control himself. He refused to think about why Howie had chosen to wash her panties. He couldn't deal with the idea that Howie had pulled them from her unwilling body in the same manner as he had. He couldn't accept the idea that Howie might have gotten angry to discover recent evidence that she'd been with another man. He couldn't face the thought of the rape it appeared Olivia had faced.

Grabbing the pants with the idea that they were clean and wouldn't give anything away, he found his way back into the chaotic library. By the time he reached the stairs, Cragen and a few officers were spilling into the basement to search.

Nervous that his guilt regarding the piece of clothing in his pocket would show on his face, Elliot kept his eyes turned away from his boss. "Olivia was wearing these that night. She was here."

Cragen barely seemed to register the khakis in front of him as his face fell. "She was here? Meaning she's not here now?"

Elliot felt the air rush out of his lungs as suddenly as if he'd been sucker punched. He'd been so wrapped up in finding her clothes that he hadn't even stopped to realize she wasn't there. The hell of waiting to get through that door, suffering through the wait at the hospital, enduring the torture of the previous week – none of it had gotten him anywhere. If he'd known, if someone had told him that night when he'd realized she was gone, that seven days later would find him in some bastard's fire hazard of a bomb shelter with his only lead to her location being the freshly laundered pants in his hand, he wouldn't have bothered trying to survive. He wasn't sure he should keep trying. In fact, he was pretty sure he was going to ask Cragen to shoot him.

A loud, shrill ring sounded before Elliot had the chance to act on his idea. The unexpected sound caused him and almost everyone else in the basement to jump. Cragen's hands were clapped over his ears in a futile attempt to retroactively shield himself from the sound.

Elliot looked around at the baffled group. "What the fuck was that?"

Someone suggested that it was a broken doorbell. Someone else said that was ridiculous. Someone else pointed out that it wouldn't be hooked up in the basement. The first someone said it would be if the freak lived in his basement behind six inches of steel. Eventually Cragen sent one of them to check the doors.

As the officer was making his way back down the stairs, midway through his declaration that there was no one at the door, the sound came again. Longer. Then there was a pause, followed by another long shriek.

Elliot's mouth fell open as he looked up, looking between the interlocking pieces of wood supporting the ceiling, trying to locate the sound. It continued to come, at increasing intervals. By the time he found the box, by the time he started tracing the wire back from the box, by the time he'd declared it was obviously Olivia trying to get their attention, someone had found where the wire disappeared through the front wall of the house.

Cragen's disappointed sigh said it all, but he tried anyway. "We're going to find her, Elliot. He'll talk. We'll get him to tell us where she is."

Elliot shook his head, unable to accept disappointment, especially not a rapid succession of disappointments. He turned to Cragen, opening his mouth to insist that she was there despite all evidence to the contrary. But rather than the words he knew would fall on deaf ears, something else, something he hadn't even consciously thought of, fell out. "There are no windows down here."

"It's a bomb shelter, Elliot. Windows would defeat the purpose." Cragen was searching Elliot's face, looking for proof that he'd finally flipped his lid.

Elliot looked around, searching for some hint of natural light. "But there were windows – I saw basement windows-" He recalled seeing them when he and Fin had been peeking in them, hoping to catch sight of Olivia. "I saw them when I was coming in."

Luckily Cragen didn't seem to notice his hesitation. Unrolling the blueprints he'd been holding, he tried to find some sort of light to verify Elliot's words.

Elliot didn't wait for confirmation. He knew the windows were there. His eyes fixed on the front wall, right at the spot where the wire, the one responsible for the deafening noise that was almost constant, disappeared. It wasn't quite a foot from Howie's armchair. He grabbed the lamp and swung hard, as hard as he could with only one hand, bashing the base into the wall.

And to nearly everyone's surprise, a piece of the wall buckled.

Everyone started scrambling – some looking for something to break through the wall, some searching for the well concealed entrance. But Elliot didn't notice. He just kept swinging, adrenaline coursing through his veins and giving him all the strength he hadn't had in a week.

"Olivia!" He could feel the wood giving under his assault, but it wasn't folding fast enough. "Olivia! We're coming!" As they continued to break down the wall, Elliot barely noticed the buzzing had stopped.

He did notice, however, when the frenzied activity and the loud hum of voices abruptly stopped. He noticed the way the guys were looking at him. He noticed the way they'd backed up a bit. Beyond terrified at what he would see, he stepped forward, moving toward the wall, seeing the hole, unable to see through it. Taking a deep breath, he stepped through the hole they'd made, bent over at the waist so he could fit.

It took a second for his eyes to adjust to the dim light filtering through the dirty windows.

The first thing he saw was a metal ring, mortared right into the brick. And then he saw a pair of hands, dirty, bloodied, limp, handcuffed to the ring, inches away from what looked like a regular door bell button.

And then he realized he'd done it, he'd found her.

Right there, not ten feet away, gagged and crying and half naked with her eyes squeezed closed, was Olivia.

He turned back toward the opening, surprised at the steady sound of his own voice. "Call a bus."