Little Girl Lost

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

Chapter 9: Coming Home

Zach carried Andrea into the house, careful not to let her bandaged feet come into contact with the doorframe. The doctors had told him that the injuries to her feet had likely been caused by stepping on something sharp as she ran barefoot through the streets of New York, and that it would likely be painful for her to walk for a few days. All Zach knew was that he would gladly carry her everywhere if it would spare her one second of further pain.

Andrea began to cry again as soon as they stepped through the front door, burying her head in his shoulder. He wrapped her up even tighter in his arms. "What's wrong, baby?"

"I thought I'd never be back here again," she whispered. "I thought I would live in the basement forever."

Tears pricked at his own eyes. "I never stopped looking for you, Andrea, and I never would have. I would have looked and looked until I found you, in the basement or anywhere else." He ran his fingers through her long hair. "Now, what do you want to do first? Are you hungry?"

"Yes," she whispered. "And - and I want to take a bath. If that's okay?"

"Of course it's okay." It would mean redoing the bandages on her hands and feet, but he couldn't think of anything he cared less about in that moment than the prospect of having to repeat a simple task. "How about I get you set up, and then while you're taking a bath I make us something to eat?"

She was silent for a moment, and he could see her biting her lip. "Can you...?" she began finally.

"Can I what?" he prompted gently.

"Can you stay with me?" she blurted out finally.

"Oh, sweetheart, of course." Poor baby, she's terrified. "Of course I'll stay, if that's what you want."

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"Nick." A hand came to rest on his shoulder. "Earth to Amaro."

He looked up at Rollins, smiling slightly. "Sorry, Amanda. I guess I zoned out for a minute there. What's up?"

"We've got a problem," she said bluntly. "I'm going over the files from when Andrea was first abducted, looking for clues - Nick, she told you her mother took her?"

"That's right." Almost immediately, he realized what she was saying, the pieces finally coming together. "You're right. Liv and I cleared Linda Marquez. She had an alibi. Damn, how did I miss that?"

"Sounds like it was a pretty emotional interview," she replied compassionately. "That's what tapes and notes are for, Nick. So we can go back and catch anything we missed."

He was still scowling at the file. "Everything in me says that little girl told us the truth. But Linda's story was corroborated. This doesn't make sense."

"Who was her alibi witness?" Rollins asked, mirroring Amaro's expression.

"Her boss," he said after thinking for a moment. "Not the kind of relationship that usually includes fabricated alibis."

"Not usually." Fin spoke up from his desk. "But I don't think this situation is usual."

Rollins and Amaro immediately turned to face him. "What have you got?" she asked.

"Linda Marquez has a record. Technically, she was only charged with fraud, but I get a sense that's just the tip of the iceberg. She has a dropped child abuse charge, filed at the same time as the fraud complaint."

"Which was when?"

Three pairs of eyes turned to their Sergeant; they hadn't even realized she'd come out her office until she spoke. Fin glanced back to his computer for the answer to her question. "May 09. And wait till you hear who the lead detective was."

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"John!"

The gray-haired DA's investigator stopped for a moment, looking around. Surely they don't mean me? His first name was certainly common enough. And yet, there was something about the voice...

"John!" the voice called out again. It was closer this time, not echoing so much, and that allowed him to recognize it. He turned to see two members of his former unit running towards him.

"Hey, Liv. Hey, Nick," he called out as they approached. "It's awfully early for a visit."

"You're getting soft, old man," Nick teased. "Forgetting what it's like when you work a case so long that late becomes early."

He laughed. "So, what can I do for two of New York's finest Finest?"

"We need to pick your brain about an old case," Olivia explained. "Is there somewhere we can sit down for a bit? This could take awhile, it's a complicated situation."

"Tell you what," he said with a warm smile. "Let's hit the coffee shop across the street and I'll buy you each a cup. If you've been up all night, you need one, and I know well what SVU coffee tastes like."

In minutes, they were set up at a small table, steaming cups in front of each of them. Munch took a drink of his before he brought them back around to the matter at hand. "So, this case."

"Right." Olivia took a long sip of her own coffee, relishing the taste before she had to revisit the horrors of the past few hours. "Do you remember a woman named Linda Marquez?"

"Linda?" he repeated in surprise. "Damn straight I remember her. One of the most frustrated cases I've ever had to deal with. What's she done now?"

"You don't want to know," Nick replied, suppressing a shudder at the memory of Andrea's horrific story. "What did she do five years ago?"

The older man's face became uncharacteristically hard. "She walked into a domestic violence shelter carrying her bruised and bleeding four-year-old daughter. She said her fiance threw the girl down a flight of stairs, she was trying to get away from him, she didn't have any resources - you get the picture. Then a second employee walks in and recognizes her. The employee had transferred to that shelter from one in New Jersey, and Linda had come to the Jersey shelter with a similar story the year before."

"So...she went back to him?" Olivia asked. "That's bad judgement, but it's not a crime."

"Except the two stories didn't match at all. Linda claimed she'd been with this guy for a year, and the other shelter had records of her still being in one of their housing units up until eight months before she showed up at the shelter here. After that, it all kind of came apart. She'd pulled that scam over a dozen times at different shelters in the tri-state area. It turned out she was the one abusing her daughter, beating her until she bled just so the story would be convincing. She picked shelters that gave grants to help women get back on their feet; she'd take the grant money, pretend to be doing great, and then fall off the shelter's radar so slowly that they wouldn't suspect anything. She was arrested for fraud and child abuse."

"But the child abuse charges were dropped, according to the file." Nick was frowning. "It sounds like the case was solid. What happened?"

"Linda happened," he all but growled. "Her and her high-priced mouthpiece. The girl wasn't considered swearable, and the ADA was concerned that her testimony wouldn't hold up under cross because she'd repeated her mother's lies to the shelter workers. That left us without a witness to the actual commission of the abuse. The defense attorney poked just enough holes in the testimony that Linda was able to take the stand and argue that she was the victim. A couple of the jurors bought it, and she got a hung jury. They retried her, and the same thing happened, so the ADA let her plead to fraud just to make the case go away. All the prosecution witnesses were furious," he added as an afterthought. "It was me, a doctor, and the shelter workers, and we wanted her locked in a dark cage for a long time."

"And the ADA didn't?" Nick asked. "Who did you have?"

"Some wet-behind-the-ears rookie," he said disgustedly. "Cabot was our primary but she had her hands full between a serial killer up for trial and that messy case with the stalker who turned out to be the judge's son - you remember, Liv." She nodded, and he continued. "Apparently, the DA thought it would be an open-and-shut case and so he assigned a junior ADA to handle it. Big mistake, she was no match for Linda. Whatever this woman's done now, that mess in the DA's office is the reason she's free to cause trouble."

"Let me ask you something," Olivia interrupted, sensing a need to head off one of her old colleague's rants. "Right now, we've got accounts that put her in two places at once. Do you think she'd be able to fake an alibi?"

Munch frowned. "Who alibied her?"

"Her boss," Nick supplied. "Not exactly the kind of relationship where you'd expect the guy to put his ass on the line for her."

"Unless he has something bigger to lose if he doesn't." He leaned forward slightly, drawing the other two in with him. "I always suspected there was more going on than the shelter scam. When we tossed her place, we found evidence suggesting that she was blackmailing married men with a paternity scam - telling them all that they were the father of her baby and threatening to take them to court unless they paid up under the table. But the evidence wasn't conclusive, and if there's one thing all blackmail victims have in common, it's that they have something to hide. No one was coming forward, so charges were never filed because we wouldn't have been able to prove anything. If her boss gives her an alibi but your evidence says she was somewhere else, I'd bet serious money that she blackmailed him into it."

"Thanks, John," Olivia said sincerely, standing and reaching out her hand to shake his.

He stood and took it, but only to pull her into a hug. "Anytime, Liv."

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"There you go," Zach said soothingly as he finished brushing out Andrea's damp hair. "Do you feel better now, baby?"

"Yes," she whispered, leaning into his chest.

"I know you're hungry," he continued. He'd been able to tell from carrying her that she'd lost weight, but when she'd undressed for her bath, he'd realized she was nearly skeletal. "What do you want to eat?"

"I, um...whatever you want," she mumbled. He didn't have to see her face to know she was scared again.

"Andrea, sweetheart," he soothed, "you're home now. You remember how things work here, don't you? I want you to have what you want. I won't ever hurt or punish you for asking for that." He rocked her gently. "What's something you've wanted to eat for a long time?"

"Strawberry pancakes," she said finally. "With whipped cream and chocolate chips."

"Of course." He should have guessed that, he realized; that was one of Andrea's favorite foods, and the one she always wanted when she was upset. "Let's see what we can do about that, hmm?"

Much as he'd felt the need to leave her room as it had been, he'd been likewise compelled to leave all of the foods she had enjoyed, the ones that he'd kept around specifically for her, exactly where they had been in the cupboard and the fridge. The strawberry pancake mix was right where he remembered it being, and he quickly whipped up a batch. As soon as the first pancakes were fully cooked, he set them down in front of Andrea, placing the bag of chocolate chips and the can of whipped cream in front of her. "There you go, baby. Eat as much as you want."

She devoured almost two-thirds of the recipe's yield, and he sat across from her, nibbling at his own pancakes. He liked them well enough, though not nearly as much as she did, but right then all he wanted to do was watch her eat. Irrational though it was, he couldn't shake the feeling that if he stopped watching her, she would be gone again.

Her eyes were slipping shut by the time she'd finished her food, and he gathered her up in his arms. "You ready to go to bed?"

She nodded, nearly falling asleep against his chest as he carried her up the stairs. "Here," he said as he laid her on the bed. "See, your room is exactly like you left it, just waiting for you to come home." He pulled the blankets over her, running his hand over her back and hair. "Rest, baby. You're safe now, you can rest. Just go to sleep. I'll take care of you."

It was only when she was asleep that he allowed his tears to fall for the third time in less than a day.

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"Detective Tutuola, Detective Rollins." The senior detective pointed first at himself and then his partner. "SVU."

"SVU?" an officer repeated, stepping out of the apartment. "Martin Russo, out of the 2-5."

"What have we got?" Rollins asked him.

"Probably not a case for sex crimes," the man replied wryly. "Frankly, I don't think it's a case period. Super called it in because the fire escape window was broken, but it was broken from inside the apartment. This guy was high as a kite, trashed his apartment and passed out cold - that's where we found him, face-down in the living room. So why does SVU even get called in on, at most, a smash-and-grab?"

"We think it was a little more than that," Rollins said grimly. "We need to cordon the entire apartment off as a crime scene ASAP."

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"You lied to us."

The man shrank back into his chair under the fierce gazes of the two detectives. "I -"

"Please don't bother to deny it," Olivia continued. "We know Linda Marquez wasn't here when you said she was. We have ironclad evidence that places her somewhere else." It was a bit of a stretch, but she was banking on him not knowing that. "She convinced you to to lie for her. What did she say?"

The fight went out of the man, his head slumping forward. "It only happened once," he whispered. "I got drunk at a company Thanksgiving party, and we ended up - you know. I tried to forget about it, but then she came to me a few weeks later after work and showed me pictures she'd taken. She said that if anyone asked, I had to tell them she was in the office that afternoon or she was going to show the pictures to my wife."

"And you didn't ask," Nick said harshly.

"She said I didn't need to know, I didn't press the issue. She was holding my marriage over my head, for God's sake. What was I supposed to do?"

"Be a little less selfish," Nick grumbled.

"Hey! You're not going to tell my wife, are you?"

"That is the least of your problems," Olivia informed him. "You're an accessory to kidnapping and human trafficking. A lot more than your marriage hangs in the balance now."

"Human trafficking?" he sputtered. "I told one lie!"

"You covered for Linda." Olivia punched every word. "That makes you an accessory after the fact to everything she did during the time you provided her with an alibi."

"Cooperate," Nick said, "and we can talk to the DA about knocking the charges down to simple obstruction. It's the best offer you're going to get. Your wife is going to find out either way."

"Okay," he said finally. "Okay, what do you want to know?"

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"Nice catch on the apartment, you two."

"Hey," Fin objected. "It's not us two. Credit goes to Amanda. She's the one who thought of scanning the crime reports in the area."

The blonde shrugged. "I just thought, if the window was broken, someone might have seen and called it in. And the girl said the music was blasting, so I thought there might have been noise complaints. I guessed at about how far she could have walked and then had TARU set the system to cross-check reports in that radius against what we know - the apartment number, the fact that the broken window was on the fire escape, you get the idea. Sure enough, this guy's apartment flagged. CSU's there now, and he's in holding. We're waiting for him to sober up before we question him."

"Good," Olivia said approvingly. "Meanwhile, we need to have our next steps in place. This scumbag is just the tip of the iceberg."

"You want to go after these guys." Nick's tone made it clear he was in full agreement with this idea. "The whole ring."

"Yes," the Sergeant confirmed. "Beginning with the house. Andrea may be safe at home, but we know from her statement that the traffickers are holding other girls. Our first priority has to be to try and save them. You three keep chasing down the leads we have so far. I'm calling the Commissioner to put together a task force. We need more people on this thing. A lot more."

So, as you may notice from this chapter, this story will have two somewhat parallel parts for the next few chapters, though they'll cross occasionally. One, of course, is Andrea and Zach, and the other is the investigation and attempt to bring down the traffickers.

And yes, I always intended for Linda to be the kidnapper. I just knew I had to have the detectives clear her or it would make them look incompetent. Since Linda's an established blackmailer (see A New Reality), it didn't seem inconceivable that she'd blackmail someone for an alibi.

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