"Captain Benson, I hope you're taking good care of my property. She needs a lot of discipline, I hope she isn't too much for you to handle. From what I hear, you are very experienced in handling stressful submissives. How long did Alex struggle before she died?" Sarah greeted coldly when Olivia entered the interrogation room.
Olivia struggled not to react to Sarah's baiting as she put the file in her hand on the table and sat down. Obviously, Sarah knew a lot of information that she shouldn't, and although Olivia wasn't sure how Sarah had learned about Alex's illness and death, Olivia was more than happy to let Sarah hang herself.
"Oh, I'm not here to talk about me, Sarah. I'm here to talk about you, you've got quite a story to tell. Orphaned at seven, sent to nine different foster homes. You aged out of the system, and then you seem to just drop off the face of the Earth. There's no record of you anywhere until six years ago when Grace became your submissive. Where were you between age eighteen and six years ago?"
"Oh, you know, here and there. I don't like to stay in one place for too long, I like to travel."
Alarm bells started to go off in Olivia's mind, but her face remained carefully neutral.
"I see. When you found Grace and I outside of Mercy hospital, you mentioned that you have a friend who works here. Now, I have a lot of friends here; I like to say that I have the biggest gang in the city. It's likely that we may know some of the same people."
"Likely." Sarah agreed.
"So why don't you make this easy on yourself and tell me who I know that you know." Olivia suggested.
Sarah said nothing, she simply gave Olivia a smug look. Olivia opened the file on the table and spread out a variety of pictures of Grace's battered body when she was first taken to Mercy hospital, including a picture of her purple hands and deep bruising on her wrists.
"None of those marks were on my property the last time I saw her. You must have done it yourself." Sarah said simply.
"No, I didn't. See?" Olivia pointed out the timestamps on the photos, proving that Grace had her injuries before going to live with Olivia. "And Grace's last known address was yours, so any jury in the world would find it reasonable to say that you are the one who abused Grace."
"My property won't testify against me. You think she will, but she won't. She knows the truth, she knows that she wanted everything I did to her."
"I don't know anybody in their right mind who would want their hands and genitals to look like this." Olivia pointed to the pictures.
"She isn't in her right mind. Never has been."
"Then why would you take her on as a submissive if she isn't in her right mind?"
"She's pretty, and I love playing with pretty things. You know as well as I do that so much of what we do in the lifestyle is mental, and I love stretching the mind and seeing how far it can go before a person teeters on the edge of their sanity. None of the activities I partake in are illegal."
"The whip marks on Grace's back prove otherwise. It is illegal to beat a submissive as punishment."
"Oh, that wasn't punishment. Grace asked me to do that while we were playing, and she loved every second of it. If she told you otherwise, she's lying. I have the recordings to prove it."
"Recordings?"
"We recorded all of our sessions on video so we could cherish the memories."
"I see. I think we're done here." Olivia got up and left the interrogation room.
"I thought you said she was going to hang herself?" Churlish asked in confusion as the detectives followed their Captain down the hall, all of them having watched the exchange from behind the two-way mirror.
"She just did. Someone put Sarah's name into every database you can think of, she said she likes to travel and doesn't like to stay in one place for too long, so we need to find out if she's lived in other states before now. And someone get Carisi on the phone and get a search warrant for Sarah's house."
"If she's lived in other states, we'll have to get the Feds involved." Fin pointed out.
"So do it." Olivia ordered, and all of her detectives scattered to obey.
"Sarah McPherson. Sarah with an 'h'. M-c-P-h-e-r-s-o-n." Kat spoke into the phone and rolled her eyes, "I'm on hold with the Feds."
"Captain, we have a major problem, we definitely need the Feds." Amanda walked over and pulled something up on the screen in front of them. "Sarah McPherson isn't Sarah McPherson."
"What do you mean she isn't Sarah McPherson?" Elliot asked in confusion.
"According to every database we were able to access, in the years since aging out of foster care, Sarah has lived in twelve different states, each one under a different name. In Utah, she was Nadia Lennon. In California, she was April Coals. In Texas, she was Jamie Henderson. Carisi is trying to get his hands on her original birth certificate with her real name. But look at this; in each state, she had at least one submissive. In six states, these submissives filed complaints against her. In three cases, the complaints were dropped just days later; in two cases, the submissive died before the hearing, and in one case, Sarah disappeared before the hearing."
"And, of course, since there is no national database and no federal law requiring Dominants to register, her records didn't follow her from state to state. I hate loopholes." Olivia rolled her eyes, "All right, we've got a lot of work to do, let's try to track down as many of these submissives as we can and pray they'll talk to us."
Olivia went into her office, sat down at her desk, retrieved her cell phone, and dialed a familiar number. Grace looked at her phone and beamed when she saw that her Mistress was calling her.
"Hello, Ma'am!" Grace spoke happily into the phone pressed to her ear.
"Hey, my baby. I'm just letting you know that I may be late tonight, probably after midnight. There's leftover lasagna in the fridge when you get hungry, and I want you in bed at ten, and no internet after nine thirty. If you're still awake when I get home you'll go over my knee."
"Yes, Ma'am." Grace replied obediently. This was nothing new; Olivia sometimes worked all hours of the night, and when she did, she always gave Grace these same rules to obey.
"That's my good girl. While I have you on the phone, can you tell me how you originally met Sarah McPherson?"
"I was at the BDSM club down on fourteenth street. I didn't have a Mistress at the time, I just wanted to go and hang out in the atmosphere and watch people play. I was sitting on a couch watching a wax scene when Sarah approached me. We hit it off right away and I went home with her that night. The next morning when I tried to leave, Sarah wouldn't let me. She knocked me out with chloroform and I woke up naked and tied up in the dungeon in her basement. It was about a year or a little more than a year before she let me go outside. All of my family is dead, so there was no one to look for me or even realize I was missing. I don't know what happened to my old apartment." Grace explained, blinking back tears at the memory.
"What was your old address?" Olivia inquired, picking up a pen.
"721 Sycamore Lane, apartment C."
"Yeah, I know her. Nice kid, she rented from me for years. One day I come by to collect the rent and she's gone. Never came back. If you see her, you can tell her that I had to do a lot of paperwork to be able to rent out her apartment again." the landlord said.
"And you never thought to file a missing person report?" Elliot asked.
"At first I assumed she went on a vacation. By the time I realized she wasn't coming back, I assumed she skipped out on me, she's not the first person to do that."
"The landlord is a piece of work, but he says that Grace just disappeared one day and never came back." Elliot announced as he walked into the precinct carrying coffee for everyone.
"That fits with what Grace told me on the phone." Olivia said.
"Captain, Don Cragen is on line one for you." Churlish said from where she sat on her desk.
Olivia went into her office, picked up the phone on her desk, and pressed a series of buttons.
"Hey, Daddy." Olivia spoke into the phone as she sat down at her desk.
"Hey, baby, I have some information for you. It's not much, but I hope it helps." Don's voice came over the line.
"We'll take any help you can give us."
"As we know, Sarah never filed Grace's contract with an attorney, so of course as a result we had no record of Grace being Sarah's submissive. It appears that Sarah has never filed any contract with a submissive in any state, but I did some digging and I found some interesting information. You more than likely have a murderer on your hands. Those two submissives who mysteriously passed away before they could have their day in court? They were poisoned. My guess is that Sarah made some kind of threat to scare each submissive into dropping the charges, but these two didn't back down. Now, they're dead, so obviously you can't interview them, but maybe you can find a next of kin. According to their autopsies, one was named Kelli Ming and the other was Laura Bryce."
Olivia wrote down the information.
"Thanks, Daddy, that's helpful. Are we still on for dinner Sunday?"
"Of course. I've missed my daughter, I'm looking forward to seeing you. And I'm looking forward to officially meeting Grace." Don replied.
At twelve forty five that night, Olivia quietly let herself into the apartment and put her things away. She smiled when she found Grace sound asleep on the couch with her phone in her hand and Candy Crush was still on the screen, indicating that Grace had not gone to bed when she was told to. Olivia shook her head and lovingly stroked Grace's sweet face to rouse her.
"Grace. I'm home, my baby, wake up. Let me see those pretty eyes." Olivia coaxed.
Grace tiredly opened her eyes.
"There's my baby. Let's get you to bed, little one, it's very late."
"Y'sma." Grace mumbled sleepily as Olivia guided her up from the couch, and Olivia chuckled at Grace's sleepy attempt to say 'yes Ma'am'. Olivia made certain that Grace was comfortable in her spot at the end of the bed and rubbed Grace's naughty bottom until Grace fell asleep again. Olivia went to take a shower before crawling in bed and falling asleep herself.
The next morning, Grace woke up and didn't remember how she got in bed. Then she remembered staying up past the time she was allowed, playing on her phone and realized that Olivia must have come home and found her sleeping on the couch. Grace looked over and saw that Olivia was gone from the bed, and she smelled coffee brewing. Realizing that she had overslept, Grace crawled out of bed, went to the bathroom, and then went to the kitchen with a hesitant look on her pretty face.
"Good morning, sleeping beauty. Coffee's hot. I already had my breakfast, but there's oatmeal if you want some." Olivia pointed to the oatmeal on the stove from where she was sitting at the table with a cup of coffee and the newspaper spread out in front of her. Grace knelt at Olivia's feet and assumed the apology position.
"What are you sorry for, little one?" Olivia inquired, taking another sip of coffee.
"I didn't go to bed at ten last night, Ma'am, and I was on my phone past nine thirty." Grace admitted.
"I figured as much when I came home and found you on the couch. What time did you go to sleep?" Olivia inquired.
"The last time I looked at the clock before I fell asleep, it was eleven thirty." Grace decided that being honest was in her best interest.
"So you decided to disobey me and stay up past the time you were supposed to be in bed, and use your phone past the time you were allowed to." Olivia concluded.
"Yes, Ma'am." Grace whimpered with tears filling her big blue eyes.
"Last time, I let you off with only three days of no internet. This time, it's one week." Olivia decided.
"Yes, Ma'am."
"Do you remember what I said I would do if you weren't in bed when I told you to be in bed?"
"You said you would spank me, Ma'am." Grace's lower lip trembled.
"Bring me the wooden spoon and come here." Olivia patted her lap.
Grace hesitated for only a split second before she obediently retrieved the spoon from the kitchen drawer and draped herself over Olivia's lap there in the kitchen with her hands on the floor in front of her and her feet on the floor behind her. Grace gasped when she felt Olivia put one of her legs over her own legs, pinning her in place over her lap. She felt Olivia rubbing her bottom and breathed a sigh of relief when she realized that Olivia was planning to spank her over her panties instead of her bare bottom, at least to start with.
Grace burst into shocked laughter when Olivia's fingernails began to tickle her sides.