Eyes Wide Open

Disclaimer: If you recognize it, it's not mine. This story is on an AU track.

Chapter 7: The Missing Piece

"Bobby!"

Goren stepped back, keeping a distance between himself and his former mentor. "I need your help," he said flatly.

"Yes, yes," Gage said excitedly. "I heard Sebastian had resurfaced. She told me." He nodded towards Olivia, who was hanging back near the door. "So they brought you in on it? I guess it's the next best thing if I can't be there."

"Declan," he interrupted forcefully, "what happened to Rebecca?"

That seemed to bring him up short. "Why do you want to know about my wife?"

"You know why," Goren parried easily.

"Sebastian," Gage replied. "So you know."

"I can guess. But tell me anyway. I need the details"

"She came home one day, two months after the third Sebastian victim, bruised and bloody and crying. As soon as I smelled the Pierre LaRitz on her, I knew he had to be involved. I thought at first that she'd somehow managed to get away from him, but no. She told me clearly that he let her go."

"You didn't report it?" Goren asked, and Olivia could hear the anger just below the calm surface of his words. "You didn't even put it in the file?"

"Rebecca said she wouldn't cooperate with an investigation. What was the point anyway? I knew who we were looking for."

"It's an anomaly in the pattern," Goren objected. "You taught me that those are sometimes the most important data points."

"It is, it is!" Gage said excitedly. "But I knew about it, and I was the one doing the profiling. I could question Rebecca myself, get all the information I needed."

"You questioned her?" he said incredulously.

"Of course!" Gage seemed surprised that the younger man would even ask. "As you said, her attack was a vital part of the profile."

Goren exchanged a look with Olivia, who looked as horrified as he felt, before turning back to Gage. "What did she tell you?" He had to get the details before he worried about Gage's personal failings.

"She was taking a shortcut through an alley when she was hit from behind and knocked down. He shoved her face in the dirt, climbed on top of her, and raped her." Just the nonchalant way in which Gage described his wife's assault confirmed Goren's low opinion of him. How had he missed all of this? "Then he told her that he could have killed or kidnapped her, but he wanted her to give me a message."

Again, Goren glanced at Olivia, who nodded, flipping her notebook open. He turned back to Gage. "The message?"

"'You can't trap a man between the pages of a book. I was trained by the best; your husband thinks he knows everything about a world he's too busy reading to see.' Then he got up and left her lying there."

"What happened to your wife?" Olivia asked softly. She hadn't intended to be part of this conversation, but it was clear that Rebecca Gage had probably never recieved the support she needed. Even if hearing it from her wouldn't make much of a difference in the investigation, Olivia wanted to get her help, even if it would come years too late.

"She's dead," Gage said rather indifferently. "Killed herself six months later." He shook his head. "It was embarrassing, really. She just couldn't handle it." He looked at his former protegee. "Okay, I admit, that's part of the reason I never told you. I didn't want the world to know she just went to pieces over a little thing like that."

Olivia noticed the shift in Goren's posture and knew that Gage had just pushed the younger man past his tipping point. "You son of a bitch," he whispered coldly. "You have no idea what you've done, keeping this from me. If you'd done it to - to protect her, I'd understand - I'd be angry, but I'd understand. But being embarrassed that your wife wasn't bouncing back from being raped...that's not the way it works, Declan! And as for Rebecca's suicide - you can't just blame her for that. You can't even put all the blame on Sebastian. It was you too, Declan. Maybe she would've been able to get through it if you'd supported her instead of treating her like a point on a data chart." He looked back to Olivia. "Come on, Detective. Let's get out of here."

"Bobby -" Gage called after him.

"No," he said without turning around. "When you went in here, I never wanted to see you again. I wouldn't have come now if I hadn't needed that information. I won't be coming back."

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"Wow," Olivia said softly as she and Bobby got back into the car. "I'm usually reluctant to blame anyone besides a rapist for a victim's suicide, but in this case, I have to agree with you. There's no way his attitude didn't have some kind of impact on his wife after the rape."

"I missed it when I worked with him," Bobby said softly. "He's a textbook sociopath - zero empathy, no ability to care for anyone but himself. I guess I was sort of an exception, but even then, I think it was more that he wanted to create a disciple than that he actually cared about me. Do you - do you know what he was arrested for?"

"He - he solicited a serial killer to murder someone and then murdered the serial killer, right? Rollins looked up his file when we first caught this case."

"That's the - the abridged version, yes. What you wouldn't have had a reason to notice then, since you didn't know me yet, was that both of the victims were connected to me. The first victim, the one whose murder he solicited, was my older brother."

"My God, I'm sorry. Why -"

"Because he doesn't get it. My brother was - my brother was always in and out of trouble, I'm not denying that. But losing him devastated me all the same. Gage didn't get it. Everything to him is a cost-benefit analysis. As far as he could see it, Frank was dead weight and I could be more productive without him. The idea that I could love him in spite of everything just didn't compute."

"And the serial killer? Nicole Wallace, right?"

"Yes. She and I had sparred on more than one occasion - she not only evaded the justice system, she managed to squirm out several times after she was caught, even got a walk from a jury once. Gage talked her into killing Frank by framing it as revenge against me - at least that motive makes sense from the average point of view, killing my brother to spite me. Then he cornered and killed her." He sighed loudly. "I'm - I'm not denying that humanity is probably better off for not having Nicole Wallace at large, but I wanted to do it the legal way. I might've thought a few times that I wanted her dead, but I never wanted blood on my hands, not even the blood of someone like her. Another thing Gage wasn't able to understand. When I got him in the box, he eventually confessed, and he told me I was - I was free. Even when I was staring him in the face, he couldn't see how much he'd hurt me."

"I'm sorry about your brother," Olivia offered after a few moments of silence. "I - I kind of know where you're coming from, I think. Simon - my own brother - he isn't as bad as it sounds like your brother was, but he's got his problems; more than once, he's gotten in over his head and then run to me to try and get him out of trouble. But even after all that, I can't imagine losing him."

Bobby was nodding. "I was constantly frustrated with Frank - mad at him - we fought the day before he died - but that doesn't mean I didn't still care. I think - I think most people would be able to get that on some level, in the same way most people would realize that a woman who'd been violently raped would need support from her husband." He couldn't keep his voice from cracking.

"How is Alex?" Olivia asked gently. It didn't take a massive leap of logic to figure out where his mind had gone.

"She's - she's trying to be okay, if that makes any sense."

Olivia nodded. "I've been doing this a long time. I know what you mean."

"I'm worried about her. I've known her a long time, and I know she's not as okay as she'd like me to think. She's barely eaten anything since it happened, which would be bad enough under normal circumstances, but with the pregnancy on top of everything -" he stopped abruptly. "Damn it, I should've known he'd try something!"

"How could you?" Olivia replied gently. "This isn't your fault. How could you have known?"

"It was there the whole time," he ground out, frustration in every syllable. "Rebecca's rape - that was the piece that's been just out of reach for me since I first picked up the file on this case."

"What?" Olivia asked, momentarily startled. "How?"

"Like I thought, it was in the copycat case that led you to me. What isn't in the file is Jo's motive for copycatting Sebastian."

"I think I can guess," Olivia said wryly. "Dr. Gage was as bad a father as he was a husband?"

"In a nutshell. He never really paid attention to her, and after Rebecca's suicide, she didn't even have a second parent to balance that out. Add to that him thinking it was okay to expose a teenage girl to the kind of violent imagery he ran across in his work - anyway, she heard he was in town for a conference, and so she decided to bring Sebastian back and make her roommate one of the victims so that he would pay attention to her. It almost worked."

"Almost?" Olivia queried.

"It might've, if it hadn't happened to be Major Case who caught the murder. Remember, Gage was my mentor, back before I realized what kind of person he really was. As soon as I was in the picture, she got shoved to the back burner all over again. So she decided to break us apart the only way she knew how. She kidnapped Alex and framed him." He shuddered a little, remembering that day.

"Alex mentioned something about that to me once," Olivia commented.

"Really?" He sounded surprised now. "She must really trust you. It's not something she talks about with just anyone."

"You don't watch the news much, do you?"

"If there's one thing I've learned in my years on the force, it's that the news skews absolutely everything for the most sensational story possible. So no, I don't usually watch the news."

She didn't volunteer more details, and he didn't push, instead turning back to the earlier path of the conversation. "At the time, it was all kind of a blur. I remember going to Declan, asking for his help. I remember when we found her phone on him - I'll give Jo this much, the frame job worked. Alex was one of the most important people in my life, even then, and I think part of me knew by that point that Declan didn't operate on the same rules as the rest of us. But in hindsight, he wasn't surprised for a second. Even though Eames' kidnapping didn't fit Sebastian's usual mode of snatching his victims, he wasn't even surprised, and he didn't see that as a possible clue that we weren't dealing with the real thing."

"Because of Rebecca," Olivia surmised. "He knew Sebastian had a habit of targeting the women who were close to the primaries on his case."

"I should've realized -"

"That's a big leap of logic, Bobby," she said gently. "It all makes sense in hindsight because we have all the pieces now, but the clues were pretty thin before yesterday."

"Maybe if I'd been paying more attention to the clues, yesterday wouldn't have happened!" he all but shouted, but Olivia could hear the pain just under the surface. "And Gage - damn it, it's bad enough that he treats what happened to Rebecca like the family embarrassment, but he had to know when you told him that Sebastian was back that the same thing could happen again. Even if he didn't know I was working this one, Sebastian could've targeted someone connected to anyone on the case. Gage put dozens of people in danger by withholding this information, and he still doesn't see it."

"I'll agree with you on the second part," she replied, "but based on the information you had, you couldn't have been expected to figure this out on your own. Like I said, it's a big leap of logic based on what we had, and we both know that if you had known, you would've moved heaven and earth to protect her - to protect anyone who Sebastian could conceivably have targeted. This isn't your fault."

"But if I -"

"Don't," she interrupted. "The world is full of what-ifs, and twice as much after a crisis like this." Even though no one would have ever said it in front of her, she knew that everyone around her had been wondering the same things after her ordeal with William Lewis, thinking of everything they could have done differently. "It doesn't help."

He nodded a little, more in acknowledgment of hearing her statement than agreement with it. They rode the rest of the way back to the squad room in silence.

xxxxxxxxx

"Goren," Fin offered, "you don't have to be here for this."

The former detective looked up slowly, his face hard with determination. "Yes," he replied, "I do. I appreciate your concern, but this is what I do. I catch perps by studying them down to the last detail. If I'm going to catch this - this piece of garbage, I need it all. No matter how much it hurts," he added so softly they had to strain to hear him.

"So we have a pretty detailed account of what went down yesterday," Nick said, thankfully diverting the focus away from Bobby. "I take it we don't have that on Rebecca Gage?"

"No." Olivia shook her head. "Not even close. Just some very basic details."

"Then I think we should go through the details from Eames' statement - sorry," he added to Goren, who just shook his head, silently telling Nick not to worry about it. "Run that down, compare that with anything we know or can guess from what we know about Rebecca. See what that gives us."

"Right." Goren nodded.

"Okay," Nick said, drawing a line down the middle of the board and writing 1987 on one side and 2014 on the other, "so Eames was ambushed in a parking garage, Rebecca -"

"An alley," Olivia supplied. "Both isolated locations. But there's something else. The ambush itself was different. With Rebecca, he just knocked her down and climbed on top of her. But Eames -"

"He used the door to hit her, pulled her into the stairwell, threw her up against the wall," Rollins supplied. "You're right. It's different."

"Think the son of a bitch is escalating?" Fin asked grimly.

"Not escalating," Goren said quietly. "Adapting. Rebecca Gage was a housewife. She might've tried to fight him off, but she wouldn't have had any training in self-defense or anything like that. Knocking her down and getting on top of her was all he needed to do."

"But Eames is a cop," Nick said, catching on. "She's armed and has years of training, including self-defense training. If he'd tried to take her down the way he did Rebecca, she would have fought him, and there's a decent chance she would've won. He had to change his MO to give himself the upper hand. He hits her with the door, that's enough to disorient her for a second. He wraps his arms around her, that limits her range of motion. He keeps her upright because it limits her options - if she was on the ground, she could try to crawl or roll away."

"And when he - when he hit her head against the wall," Goren added, struggling to keep his voice level, "it was the same thing. He needed both hands to keep her under control most of the time, but he needed at least one hand to -" He couldn't force the end of that sentence through his lips, so he let it just fall into silence. "He hit her head against the wall to stun her so she couldn't take advantage when he took one of his hands away."

"The one thing I don't quite get is why he went to all the trouble," Rollins said softly. "By Eames' statement, he got her service piece pretty early in the struggle. That's a powerful tool to have against a victim." She couldn't stop the shiver that ran through her body; being raped at gunpoint was one thing she'd never be able to forget. "But instead, he throws it away and keeps fighting her hand-to-hand."

Nick stepped away from the board for a moment to squeeze her shoulder as Goren considered this. "Too easy," the large man said finally. "He didn't want her compliant, not even compliant by force. He wanted her to struggle against him."

"And throwing her down the stairs?" Fin asked. "If Rebecca was in an alley, there wasn't even a flight of stairs to push her down."

"Same thing," Goren confirmed tightly, visibly on the edge of losing his control. "He wanted her to live, just like he wanted Rebecca to live, but if he'd been following Alex, he had to know how tough she is. There's a chance she could've stopped him somehow, or called for backup fast enough to catch him. Not to mention there's no question she would've used the chance to get a look at him so she could identify him later. By pushing her down the stairs, he bought himself a clean getaway."

"He wanted her to live to give you a message," Nick said softly, trying not to upset Goren any more than he already was. He of all people knew the pain and rage that had to be running through the former detective. "Did he give Rebecca one too?"

"Yes." Olivia flipped her notebook open, sparing Goren the need to answer. "'You can't trap a man between the pages of a book. I was trained by the best; your husband thinks he knows everything about a world he's too busy reading to see.'"

Nick quickly wrote that on the board. "And the message to Eames was what?"

"'He was trained by the best, but that was decades ago. I wonder, does he retain enough skills to catch me now? Or has he gotten soft in the years gone by?" Fin supplied. "She said it was pretty clear that Sebastian was talking about Goren."

Nick stared at the statements for a few moments. "Look at this," he said finally. "This phrase: trained by the best. It has to mean something. If we could figure out what, maybe it could give us some kind of direction."

"Academic snobbery?" Fin suggested. "A school he went to, maybe?"

Nick was shaking his head. "I don't think so. Look at the way he talks about Gage's books; he doesn't seem to value academics or formal education at all."

"Besides," Goren added, "that doesn't fit. These statements - he sees a connection between me and him, something Gage doesn't have. If it were academics, it would be the other way around. I never even went to college. Gage has multiple post-graduate degrees."

"So who's he talking about?" Rollins asked. "The police department?"

"Or the military," Nick said suddenly. "The only way to qualify for the NYPD without going to college is to serve in the US Armed Forces, so -"

"Yeah." Goren nodded. "I signed up the day I turned eighteen, served ten years before I joined the department."

"Which puts you leaving the service - when?" Olivia asked.

"Eighty-nine. Which Sebastian could describe as 'decades ago'."

"So we're saying this guy is military," Nick said slowly. "But then his DNA should be in the system. We ran the Sebastian DNA against every database we have."

"Then he's ex-military," Goren said suddenly, the look in his eyes suggesting that he was finally fitting the pieces together. "The army started taking DNA in 1991, but they didn't take it from everyone immediately. They took it from members when they enlisted, re-enlisted, or were deployed. Now, in 2014, that means that everyone who's in the service has their DNA on file, but there were a few years in there where someone who was enlisted before 91 and serving stateside wouldn't have had their DNA taken yet. That's where we need to start looking. The military."

"That's a wide net," Olivia said a little skeptically. "How do we even start to look for a single suspect in a database that big?"

"We find things we can use to narrow it down. Can I?" He pointed to the board, and everyone in the room nodded. Nick handed him the marker and stepped aside. "Okay, so what do we know about Sebastian, or what can we reasonably infer, that might start ruling people out?"

"His DNA's not in the system," Rollins offered. "That rules out anyone whose DNA was collected."

"Good." Goren wrote DNA not collected on the board. "We also know he was in the army by 1987, based on what he told Rebecca." He wrote this in under the first fact. "Probably had already completed training by the time Rebecca was raped in September of 1987, but that's not definitive." He wrote Training completed before 9/87? before turning back to the room.

"Considering how much time he had between victims, I doubt he was picking them at random," Olivia added. "It's pretty clear he stalked Alex and Rebecca; he probably hunted for his victims, picked specific women to target, and then stalked them to learn their routines. He had to be hunting close to home, otherwise someone would've noticed him constantly disappearing, especially considering he was in the service. So he had to be stationed no more than a few hours from each of the kill sites at the times the victims were murdered. Same for the assault on Rebecca."

Goren was nodding now. "So now we need to contact the military, convince them to work with us. They need to run all of this through their database and get us a list of anyone who fits all of these points, including flagging anyone with any sort of violent record."

"You make it sound so easy," Olivia said wryly. "Getting the US Army to play ball is a lot easier said than done."

"Let me give it a shot," Nick offered. "Maria - my ex-wife - is still working for them."

"You think your ex-wife's going to help you?" Fin said wryly.

"We can still talk to each other," he replied evenly. "Anyway, I'm not asking her to go against protocol, just to expedite this so that we can get the information before Sebastian's due to strike again. I know Maria; she'll help us once I explain what's at stake."

"Do it," Olivia said quickly. "I'll loop Murphy in when he gets back from his meeting. In the meantime, we'll keep catching cases on the normal rotation until we get those records."

Okay, well, this took longer than I expected, but this chapter involved a lot of research (what's required to join the NYPD, when the military started collecting DNA and what the procedure was) that slowed things down considerably. The flip side is, you know that all of that is true to real life.

The idea about Rebecca Gage (whose first name I made up, if anyone was wondering) really did come from a couple of lines at the end of Blind Spot, where Goren asks Jo "how old were you when your mother -?" and Jo replies "Killed herself? Seven." If the suicide was in 1987 or early 1988, that would make Jo twenty-six at the time of Blind Spot, which seemed plausible. I just got this idea in my head that somehow the mother's suicide was related to Sebastian, and that ended up shaping a large portion of this story.

This chapter references the Criminal Intent episode Frame and the SVU episodes Florida and Child's Welfare, as well as the general William Lewis arc. As I've mentioned before, I'm deliberately disregarding the last few minutes of Thought Criminal, including the part where Maria mentions moving to California (since that really only existed in the episode as a trigger for Nick's beating of the cameraman, which didn't happen in this series' timeline).

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