Eyes Wide Open

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

Chapter 11: Put a Name to the Crime

"What's this?" Nick asked as he and the rest of the SVU team walked into the conference room to see Goren sitting with a box and several stacks of files in front of him.

"These are all the files the Army gave us," the former detective explained. "The ones in the box are the ones we've ruled out over the past two weeks. All this," he added, gesturing at the stacks, "is what's left."

"So," Rollins asked, "what are we looking for?"

"To start with, a history of violent incidents. Obviously we're not going to find anything anywhere near the level of the Sebastian murders, but the amount of rage and brutality in these murders doesn't just spring up out of nowhere. Beyond that -" he shrugged. "Trust your instincts. Profiling isn't an exact science. You've all been doing this awhile; you know when something or someone just doesn't feel right. We see what that leaves us with and then we start tracking those people down."

"That's a lot of ground to cover," Nick said skeptically, "and we're down to six weeks on the timeline. What happens if -"

"We're not there yet," Goren said firmly. "That's six weeks we have to track this guy down. If we get down under two weeks, we can start panicking." This was met with smiles. "In the meantime, let's get to work."

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"Whoa."

Goren and Fin immediately looked up at Rollins, who was staring at a file. Her partner was the one to ask the obvious question. "What is it?"

She handed the file across the table to him. "It almost seems too obvious, but -"

Goren leaned over at a bizarre angle to look over Fin's shoulder, causing Olivia, who had just walked into the room, to burst out laughing, drawing the attention of the other three.

"I'm sorry," she said through her laughter, "it's just - the first time I met Alex, we were working a suspect together and she did that exact maneuver. I remember wondering what the hell she was trying to do. About ten seconds later, the subject, who up to that point had been lying through her teeth when she bothered to speak at all, opened up and told us everything."

"I wouldn't give the posture all the credit," Goren said a little distractedly, his eyes still fixed on the file.

"Oh, no," Olivia agreed. "She knew exactly what to ask and how to ask it. But something about that lean changed the way they were interacting. I asked her about it later and she said she'd learned it from you."

Goren nodded, acknowledging that he'd heard her, but now his attention was almost completely focused on the file, which he slipped out of Fin's hand. "Grab Amaro and Murphy," he said seriously. "I think we have something."

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"William Johnson," Goren said, tacking pages from the file up on the board. "He's even got a name nobody would notice."

"There are a lot of files in those stacks," Amaro pointed out. "What makes you think this is our guy?"

"Rollins caught the first clue." Goren nodded towards the blonde detective. "He's got a conviction for manslaughter related to a kidnapping."

"And he's not in the system?" Murphy interrupted incredulously.

"In Germany," Goren finished. "He had just been relocated to a US base in Germany three months earlier - it wasn't considered a deployment because it wasn't an active war zone, so his DNA wasn't collected. I don't have the details here, but she was found dead in the trunk of his car. No characteristic mutilation, but -"

"You think she would've been Sebastian victim number thirteen," Olivia surmised. "But isn't that kind of a stretch? There are thousands of kidnappings worldwide every year."

"I know. But there's more. The day he was caught was five months to the day after the body of the last Sebastian victim from the original spree was discovered, which fits the timeline. And the charge - that says to me that she died from something he did, but not something he did intentionally - he wasn't trying to kill her right then, maybe he didn't get a chance to do what he wanted to her. Look, I know it could all be one big coincidence, but it's too similar to write it off as that without investigating more."

"Agreed," Murphy said, and the others were nodding. "I'll talk to upstairs, see about getting in contact with the German consulate -"

But Goren was shaking his head. "It'll be faster if I do the contact. The base where Johnson was posted is also one of the bases I served at. I got to know a lot of the local cops; I think a few of them are still there, and I think they'll talk to me."

Murphy nodded. "Do it."

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"You know, when he said he was going to make the call, I guess I assumed the officers in Germany must speak English."

Olivia glanced over at her partner before turning back to Goren where he sat, speaking rapid-fire German into the phone in his right hand, then pausing to listen while scribbling on a notepad with his left. "For all we know, maybe they do."

Nick smiled, but the conversation was cut short when Goren said something that sounded like an expression of thanks and hung up. "They're faxing us the file," he told the detectives.

"That was easy," Benson commented. "Easier than the FBI, that's for sure."

Goren nodded. "It's not just because of my connections. I was able to get through to the officers who actually worked the case. I have a feeling that for them, it's one of those cases that haunts them when they can't sleep at night."

As if on cue, the fax machine beeped. Goren began gathering up the papers it was spitting out while Olivia gathered up the rest of the team. By the time they were all assembled, Goren was deep into the file, nodding his head every so often.

He stood finally, tacking a photo of a young blonde woman onto the board. "Brigitte Kaufman. Sebastian victim number thirteen. According to the report William Johnson was driving down the road when his car blew a tire and spun out, hitting a telephone pole. Cops arrived on scene almost immediately and while they were working through the wreckage, they found Brigitte's body in the trunk. She'd been abducted earlier that day; no one had even realized she was missing. Johnson was arrested on the spot."

"She died in the crash?" Amaro asked.

Goren shook his head. "The coroner thought she was probably dead before the accident. Johnson hit her over the head to incapacitate her, same as all the other Sebastian victims. Only in Brigitte's case, she had a clotting disorder and the head trauma caused a massive brain hemorrhage. The only comfort, such as it is, is that it's pretty much a certainty that she never woke up, never had any idea she'd even been kidnapped, and didn't feel any pain."

"At least that's something," Olivia mumbled. She couldn't help but remember what Alex had told her about the woman in the basement screaming as she was tortured, couldn't help but think of Lisa Moore's mutilated body.

Goren nodded in agreement before turning back to the file. "Brigitte's family was wealthy, so the theory at the time was that it was a ransom kidnapping. Johnson refused to speak about motive; he didn't deny it but he didn't confirm it either. The army dishonorably discharged him and handed him over to the local authorities. In 1993, he was sentenced to twenty years in the German prison system."

"So he was released last year," Fin surmised.

Goren nodded. "Released and then held pending deportation. He arrived back in the United States two months before Lisa Moore was killed."

"What did the local cops have to say?" Rollins queried.

"The guy I talked to, he was never entirely convinced that ransom was all it was. There was no actual evidence to suggest it was anything else, but he said the guy just didn't seem right. He was right there when they pulled the body out of his trunk and he barely blinked. They said it seemed like the only thing that affected him at all was the fact that he'd been caught."

"Which doesn't make sense for a ransom kidnap," Olivia finished, saying what they were all thinking, "but makes perfect sense for someone who's killed before, who's even enjoyed it."

"There's more," Goren added. "Once I got the rundown on the Brigitte Kaufman murder, I asked a few other questions on kind of a hunch. Turns out, about four years after Brigitte died, some contractors got a job to renovate an abandoned building and they found something that looked like a torture chamber - the officer's words, not mine - in the basement. It was clearly years abandoned and they were never able to get any leads. I asked the officer if the path that Johnson was driving could have taken him to that building, and he said yes, but they'd never had reason to suspect one was connected to the other." He looked around at the assembled officers. "Look, I know that right now all of this is a bunch of circumstantial evidence held together by theory and extrapolation, but every fiber of my being says that this is our guy."

Olivia was nodding. "It may be circumstantial but there's a lot of it. It's hard to buy all of this as a coincidence. Not to mention, all we need is enough to pick him up and get his DNA. That'll convict him - or clear him," she added belatedly, as sure as Goren was that it would be the former case. "And if we need another nail in the coffin, Alex seemed sure that she could make a voice ID."

"Call the ADA," Murphy instructed Olivia. "Get a warrant for him. I'll start working on an APB."

The rest of his sentence didn't need to be said. The words hung so heavily in the air that it was almost tangible. And let's hope we find him in time.

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A ringing phone cut through the silence, and both occupants of the room's large bed stirred at the sound. A hand reached out towards the bedside table, reaching for something, only to come up empty. "Have you seen my phone?"

Olivia sat up slowly, blinking the sleep out of her eyes as she smiled at her husband. "It's my phone, El. You're not on the job anymore, remember?"

"Oh...yeah," he mumbled, waking up a little bit more.

She grabbed her phone, sliding her finger across it to answer. "Benson. What? Are you - never mind, of course you're sure. Are they sure? Okay. I'm on my way."

"Middle of the night?" Elliot commented, now fully awake. "That's rarely a good sign."

"This time, it might be," she replied, already out of bed and starting to dress. "Unis just arrested someone who matches the description of a suspect on a big case."

"It must be a big case, if they're waking you up at four in the morning over an arrest." He smiled gently, making it clear he had no hard feelings over this. He'd been on the other end enough times.

Olivia nodded, leaning over to kiss him. "I should be home at the usual time. If I'm stuck there late, I'll call you."

"Understood. Go get him, Liv."

Despite the weight of the situation, she couldn't help but smile as she walked out the door.

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"Nice work today," Olivia said to the two officers as they stood beside their car, looking past them and through the window to where their suspect sat handcuffed in the backseat.

"Nice timing is more like it," the senior officer replied, looking faintly embarrassed by the praise. "We just stopped for a cup of coffee. It was Hanson's turn to buy," here he gestured to his partner, "so he walks into the bodega and there he is, just looking over the bread selection. We all saw that aged-up photo you sent around, and it's kind of scary how accurate it is. He didn't look armed, so Hanson called me in, and we arrested him. Found his ID when we searched him." He handed the item in question to the Sergeant. "Same name, same DOB. Either we've got one hell of a coincidence, or this is the guy."

"Like I said, nice work. Let's get him down to our station."

With a quick "yes, ma'am" from the younger officer and a "right away" from the other, they climbed back into their cruiser and drove off.

"Wow." Olivia turned at the sound of her partner's voice. "And not a moment too soon." It had been a week and a half since they'd identified Johnson as a likely suspect in the Sebastian murders, and they'd all become increasingly nervous as the days ticked away, bringing them closer and closer to the time when the serial killer was likely to take his next victim.

"Yeah," she agreed. "Good thing these two were paying attention when that picture went around."

"Think we should call Goren now?" Nick asked as he climbed into the SUV. "Or should we wait until it's a reasonable hour?"

Olivia pursed her lips for a long moment. "Normally, I'd say call him, no matter that it's now -" she glanced at the dashboard clock "five o'clock in the morning. He's a former cop, he's not going to get in our way. What worries me is that I'd lay odds he's with Alex right now. We're already walking a tightrope having him help investigate the man who raped his girlfriend. We still need Alex to make a voice ID to cement our case. The last thing anyone wants is for that ID to get tossed because some defense attorney makes it look like we gave her some kind of heads-up." She thought for a second. "We'll just hold him for now. I can't imagine an interrogation would give us much anyway; when he was arrested in Germany, they grilled him for days and he never so much as cracked. What's going to hang him is the DNA and the voice ID. We'll let Goren in on it before we make the next move; it'll only be a few hours anyway. Meanwhile, we'll wake up Barba and get him working on a DNA warrant."

Nick nodded. "Copy that."

So...yeah. A lot of ground covered, but it doesn't feel like it's going too fast, at least not to me. Sebastian is now in custody, but this story is far from over, so stay tuned!

This chapter references the SVU episode Acceptable Loss.

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