Chapter Four

The phone weighted Olivia's hand down like an anchor, and she turned it over several times, trying to get up the nerve to make the phone call. The sun hung low in her window, causing her to squint where she sat stiffly on her couch, and Noah played quietly on the floor with a stack of blocks.

Her generic ringtone startled her, and she looked at the number of the caller. Unrecognizable, but she picked it up anyway. "Hello?"

"Liv?"

She didn't mean to make him wait in unbearable silence, but she couldn't get past the shock of him calling her when she had just been debating doing the same to him. "Elliot."

"Look, I'm sorry for calling you at home, but I have to talk to you."

"It's okay, El. I wanted to talk to you anyway. I just wanted to say, I'm sorry for earlier. I just—when I walked in and saw you—"

"You don't have to explain. It's fine."

She thought about explaining that she had gotten used to life without him, had finally adjusted to the enormous loss that his departure had instilled in her, and then his sudden reappearance had knocked her little world off-balance once more. But she kept her mouth shut, and he continued. "What I wanted to talk to you about is something . . . different. Something really important. Can you meet me somewhere private?"

Trying to keep the eagerness from her voice, she said, "Sure. There's a bar I know—"

"Alright, where is this place?"

It took Olivia a while to get there—she had to line up a babysitter, but the bar was in her own neighborhood, so she was pretty certain she didn't keep Elliot waiting long. Nerve endings fired up, muscles trembling, she walked in and scanned the bar until she saw him, sitting at a booth. His face perked up when he saw her, and she wondered if his feelings for her had evaporated after all these years, or if the chemistry between them had withstood the test of time.

She guessed there was no time like the present to find out.

Scooting onto the bench seat across from him, she resisted the temptation to reach out and grab his hands in hers. Instead, she tucked them safely beneath her legs.

He eyed her with a half-smile, then returned to his somber gaze and said, "I have some . . . news. You're not going to like it."

He stopped, and she could feel reluctance rolling off him. "Might as well give it to me," she said. "Can't be any worse than all the other shocking things I've heard so far."

He sighed. "I don't know about that. But, here goes. Our UC hooked us up with a prostitute who reluctantly agreed to talk to us about what she'd experienced."

"Underage?"

"Not this one, no. But she said she thought some of the stuff that had happened to her might constitute rape. And after hearing her story, I agree." He looked down at his hands, which held a tumbler of golden liquor. "She said one guy, who was definitely connected to the other perps you've been investigating—vice, Judge Wheeler, some of the ADA's—he took her into a bedroom and got rough right off the bat. She told him she wasn't into that, but her resistance got him going even more, and he tied her up, beat her with a riding crop on her bare skin, did atrocious things to her . . ."

Olivia had a hard time hearing anymore, and she sat back in her chair and turned her head to the side, shaking it in exasperation. "So did she ID this guy?"

"Yeah." Elliot's eyes beseeched her, and she couldn't understand what they were trying to tell her. "I showed him pictures of our suspects, mixed in with random pictures I downloaded, pictures of officers and detectives and ADA's and judges. And she picked out one in particular. Insisted she was positive it was the guy."

Elliot's stare made her squirm, and a sick free-fall feeling overtook her, like she had just jumped off the ledge of a deep pit to meet her fate in the blackness below.

"It's Tucker."

Before he even said the words, her head shook. "No, it's not—"

"Liv, Tucker's not only involved in this, he's—"

"No, I don't believe it—"

"He's the most evil player of them all."

"No."

She refused to look at him. Refused to participate in this blame game and give him the satisfaction of accusing his mortal enemy, her lover, of these horrific things that probably never happened.

At some point, her hand had slipped onto the table to clutch a drink napkin, and he grabbed that hand and clutched it tight. "Think about it, Liv. Put two and two together. He's been accused of knowing about the trafficking of young girls and ignoring it. And he's the only one besides the priests who knew where your witness, Kara, was staying when she received that fatal overdose."

She didn't say anything anymore, just continued to shake her head, sniffling back a tear. The hand that Elliot held was numb—any contact from his fingers couldn't penetrate her unfeeling skin.

"Liv, you have to listen to me. You may be in danger if you don't. He's dirty, that's a fact. This witness was untainted—"

"No!" She snatched her hand away from him and glared at him under lowered eyebrows. "You listen to me, Elliot. I know him. He's not dirty, he's being set up."

"Liv, please think about it. It makes sense."

"No, I'm done, Elliot." She stood abruptly, pushing the table toward him as she stood and turned to storm out the door. When she got outside, she let the wind cool her burning cheeks, taking deep gasps of air to steady her shaky legs. And then she turned in the direction of Ed's apartment, ignoring Elliot's desperate voice behind her crying out, "Olivia!"