August 17, 2021
"I'm not involved in any current cases that would merit this kind of action," the Captain said tersely. She was pacing inside the mobile command unit, a hefty feat, Myers thought, given how tight quarters were inside the van. It seemed Benson couldn't bear to sit still, and he couldn't blame her; if it was his kid taken, he'd be on his feet, too. And Benson, she was a force to be reckoned with, bold, loud, commanding, fucking pissed off. There was an anger in the woman, radiating out from her pretty eyes, her soft mouth, a rage that seemed barely controlled, a rage that scared him, just a little. Rage made people unpredictable, especially where their kids were concerned, and this rage-filled mother had a 9 mil strapped to one hip and a gold Captain's shield clipped to the other; there were no limits, he thought, to the damage she could do.
"We're going over the case files with your people," he said slowly. Not for nothing, but he'd been promoted to Lieutenant for a reason. Myers knew what he was doing. "What about closed cases, though? You could make that work a lot faster for us."
"I can't think of anybody who isn't dead or in jail," she said with some heat, frustrated, it seemed, by her inability to come up with a name. He understood that, too; it would be so much easier if only there was an obvious suspect, someone they could focus their attention on instead of spinning their wheels, each passing second drawing them closer to calamity for little Mia Benson.
"Being in jail wouldn't stop somebody, if he really wanted to get to you. Anybody you can think of who'd want to target your kid? You separate anyone from their kids recently?"
She shot him a dark look; she been SVU for damn near a quarter of a century, and that meant she'd probably seen more family separations than anyone else alive.
"I'm the Captain," she said. "I'm not running point on any of our current cases. If anybody's pissed off, they'd go after my detectives, not me."
"What about that guy Stabler was talking about? Wheatley?"
For the very first time, Myers saw something in her eyes besides anger. What he saw now was fear, and it filled his heart with dread.
"Look I work for the fucking DA," the guy grumbled, kicking at the dirt with the toe of his shoe, his eyes drifting back over to the school, to the building where the SVU Sergeant had taken the guy's son. "No one gives a shit about me."
How the fuck Loughlin had gotten saddled with the Captain's grim-faced ex he wasn't entirely sure, but he'd drawn the short damn straw, and he wasn't too happy about it. Cassidy was a real piece of work, moody and uncooperative, and that was frustrating as all hell under the circumstances. Loughlin and the team from missing persons were just trying to help the guy, for fuck's sake.
"You used to be on the job, though, right?" Loughlin pointed out. "Anybody there that sticks out?"
"More than a few," Cassidy allowed. "I worked Narcotics for a while and then I was UC. Busted some sex traffickers, a few dirty cops. That's all ancient history though, man, that's all before Mia was even born."
"Ok, we can pull your cases, too-"
"Don't fucking bother," Cassidy said, his tone sharp and dripping with a resentment Loughlin didn't understand. "I told you, no one gives a shit about me. Hell, plenty of people don't even know Mia's mine. This is gonna be about Liv, man. Someone's trying to hurt her."
It must have been hard for a man like Cassidy, Loughlin thought, a man who was proud, despite how far he seemed to have fallen in the world, to be bound to such a woman. A beautiful woman, a powerful woman, a woman who had wanted him once and did no longer, a woman who didn't need him. The questions had all been asked and answered, though; Cassidy had been indignant when Loughlin danced around the prospect of his involvement, and Benson had been adamant her man had nothing to do with it. Missing Persons was dumping both their phones just to cover the bases, but Cassidy didn't seem the type to take his own kid. Why would he, when he knew Benson would come down on him like the hammer of God? What would he even do with little Mia, anyway, with a sick kid who desperately needed treatment, treatment Cassidy could hardly afford on his own?
"What do you think about Stabler's guy? Wheatley? You know anything about that?"
Cassidy's face went if possible even darker, and Loughlin actually took a step back, alarmed by what he saw reflected there.
"I guess I'm just a little confused," Briggs said, scratching behind his ear, in the spot that always itched when he felt uncomfortable. "Why would someone go after her to get to you?"
Stabler glared at him, all ice-blue eyes and hard-set mouth, his hulking bulk intimidating to Briggs, who had only barley passed his most recent physical and was thinking about early retirement.
"She's my partner," Stabler said.
Bullshit, Briggs thought. Benson had been a Captain for years, a Lieutenant before that, a Sergeant before that; that woman hadn't had a partner in a decade. Not since before her kid was born. Whatever was between Benson and Stabler, it damn sure wasn't just a partnership.
"We were on the job together thirteen years," Stabler explained, perhaps seeing some of Briggs's incredulity in his face, rushing to defend himself. "We were close. I was away for a few years but I came back on the job a few months ago. She's been helping me since…"
As Stabler's voice trailed off it clicked in Briggs's head. From the second the guy had come running up Briggs had been thinking the fucker looked familiar, but he'd been on the force too long and had seen too many faces and was damned if he could place Stabler. He could now, though. It all came together, the way Stabler's eyes shifted away, the cloud that seemed to fall over him. Yeah, Briggs knew who this guy was.
"Since your wife died," he said.
"Yeah."
Jesus. Everybody knew about Stabler's wife, the cop's wife killed in the car bomb back in early spring; everybody had been antsy as fuck about it. Everybody said the guy had kids. And while Stabler was grieving for his wife and comforting his kids, the prettiest goddamn Captain on the job - not that that was a high bar to clear, though Benson cleared it by a mile - had been there to help him.
They're fucking, Briggs thought. Or they want to be.
"Where does Wheatley factor in?"
"He killed my wife," Stabler said grimly. "Retaliation, for me looking into his organized crime racket in Italy. I guess he thought it would take me out of the picture, but I'm still investigating him, and he knows it. He wants to hurt me. He knows Liv is a good way to do that."
"You've got kids, though, right? Why take her kid, and not one of yours?"
Stabler spread his hands helplessly.
"Wheatley is clever, but he's theatrical. He wants to make a scene, cause a fuss. He can't go after Liv directly, he tried that once and fumbled it. He knows she's watching her back, and she's armed, and her apartment building is like Fort fucking Knox. He can't touch her, but he can hurt her, and if something happens to Mia…I think he's hoping Liv will blame me for it. He wants to tear us apart."
Yeah, Briggs thought. Definitely fucking.
"All because you're investigating him?"
Oddly, Stabler looked a little guilty as he hung his head, refused to meet Briggs's eye.
"Well," he said. "And there's this thing with his wife."
"Look," Cassidy said, "I don't know shit about Stabler's operation. But if he says Wheatley knows about Liv, it's worth looking into."
"You trust him?" Loughlin asked.
"I used to work with him," Cassidy said. "Both of them. Stabler's good people. And he'd kill for Liv. And Wheatley killed his wife. Wheatley's already taken out one of Stabler's women, I wouldn't put it past him to go after the other."
The fuck does that mean?
"They're close, then? Captain Benson and Detective Stabler?"
"Close?" Cassidy snorted. "You fucking kidding me? She used to scream his name at night in her sleep, begging him to come save her from her fucking nightmares. Close. They're a hell of a lot more than close. And if Wheatley knows, Liv's in danger."
It must have hurt, Loughlin thought, for Cassidy to know that even though he'd had two children with the woman, it was someone else's name she called when she was afraid.
"I'm just trying to connect the dots," Myers said tightly. He could feel a tension headache coming on behind his eyeballs, and Benson wasn't helping.
"Wheatley already tried to come after me once," she said.
That was surprising. Benson hadn't mentioned that when he'd asked about ongoing cases; had she been threatened with death so often that she had trouble keeping track, that Wheatley's attempt had slipped her mind?
"In May," she explained. "He sent somebody to run my car off the road. Scared me, but I remembered my evasive driving training and all they managed to do was wreck my car and my ankle. After that I upped my personal security and he hasn't tried again. I didn't think he would. I thought he just wanted to scare me."
"Why would he do that?"
"Wheatley killed Detective Stabler's wife," Benson said, and it chilled Myers to the bone, the casual way she delivered the news. "I took charge of the investigation initially, it was my people who found the kid Wheatley used to plant the car bomb."
Memories of the news stories came back to Myers now, and it shocked him, just a little, the realization that the broad-shouldered man who'd embraced Captain Benson so fiercely was the same guy whose wife had exploded back in March. The guy's having a hell of a year, he thought.
"Sergeant Bell said something out there," Myers mused, half to Benson and half to himself. "She said Wheatley knows. What does he know?"
The angle of Benson's pacing carried her away from him; the woman turned her back on him, let him watch the sway of her ponytail above the gold lettered NYPD on the back of her navy windbreaker. She was a formidable woman, was Benson, and she painted a picture of self-assured strength in that jacket, with that shield, those heavy boots, but she was a woman, still. A person, just like any other, with weaknesses and needs and dreams and desires. A woman who needed someone to hold her, a woman with two children and a pig-headed ex Myers had been all too happy to foist off on Loughlin. A woman with secrets.
"Detective Stabler is very important to me," she said finally. "And I'm important to him. I care about him and his kids and he cares about me and mine. I don't know why Wheatley would pick me over Stabler's family, but…we are family, in a way. We always will be."
Over the years Myers had had a few partners. Maybe a half dozen in all. Maybe a few more. Some hadn't stayed with him long, and some had stayed for years, and he'd go to war for any of them, even now. Benson and Stabler, they'd worked together a lot more than a few years, and they were all enmeshed in each other's lives so many years after they'd last sat across their desks from one another. When she said always, it sounded to him like she meant it. Maybe they were fucking, but he didn't think so, and he wasn't gonna bother asking. It didn't matter, really, whether they were fucking each other or not. They loved each other, and that was the part that mattered.
"Ok," he said. "Here's what we're gonna do."
