September 12, 2015

They drove to Nebraska.

The drive took more than twenty hours, split across three days. The math didn't make any goddamn sense; there was no way three days' worth of gas and hotel rooms and shitty fast food for three people and one grumpy toddler was cheaper than flying. The Marshals said they did it to save a buck, but Olivia knew better. It was safer, this way. Chartering a private flight would've cost too much, and flying commercial was too risky. Her new name on the manifest, all those eyes in the airports, the cameras; sure airport security was tight, but there was too much room for human intervention. The world wasn't safe for her, not now; she had to disappear, and what better way to do that than in the backseat of a rusty Buick, vanishing into the night?

There was no other way to do it, not really. No other choice. That didn't mean she was happy about it.

Her back was aching from being stuck in the backseat of the Buick for days on end, and Noah was fussing, as displeased with the situation as she was, and her heart was screaming.

How did it come to this? That's what she kept wondering. Olivia had faced her fair share of demons and she had the scars to prove it, but she always got her man, in the end. Others had tried before to kill her, and they had failed, and their names were written on tombstones or in the ledgers of the state prisons, never to be seen or heard from again. This time, though her luck had run out; this time she'd played the game, and lost.

It started in May, just a week or two after Noah's adoption was finalized. Johnny D had been put down like a dog and Nick had moved on but the squad was making it work. For the first time since Lewis, her life was steady. Happy, even, now that she was running SVU, now that Noah was hers, and no one could take him from her. That should've been her first clue, she thought, the first sign that disaster was coming for her; nothing good ever came from her being happy.

At first it was just another rape case, but as they dug deeper the truth came out. Their vic, Daniela, was a pro, but she was also fourteen, and her story was devastating. She grew up in Mexico but was orphaned in a shootout between various factions in the drug trade. One of the cartels took her captive, trafficked her to the city, pimped her out, starved her, beat her. All Olivia wanted was justice for that little girl, but the next thing she knew she was looking at a dozen girls just like Daniela, and the DEA was honing in on, hoping to use her trafficking case to bust the cartel completely. The head of the cartel's New York operation set his sights on her; he tried twice to kill her before he drew too much attention to himself and disappeared. Olivia thought that would be the end of it, but the cartel boss in Mexico took up the cause for himself, and put a bullet through her shoulder for her trouble. The Feds were still trying to make their case but they had no jurisdiction in Mexico, no way to find him, to stop him. The only thing they could do was put her in WitSec, change her name and give her a new life; the only thing she could do was fade into obscurity and wait, hoping that one day the bastard would die or the Feds would catch him. If he was stupid enough to set foot in the US the Feds would need her testimony to put him away, and that made her valuable to them, made her worth saving, and she was grateful for it, really she was, but she was also fucking pissed.

It wasn't like she hadn't seen it before; her story wasn't so different from Alex's, not really, and Alex got to come back. WitSec hadn't been spelled the end of Alex's self-determination; she'd done her time and come through the other side and made a life for herself.

Maybe we can, too, Olivia thought, looking at Noah sleeping next to her in his car seat, a permanent pout etched on his sweet face.

She could've turned them down. Could've told the Feds the hell with that, and carried on, but she had more than her own safety to worry about, now. The day she was shot Noah had been in the goddamn car with her; this mess, her mess, had come too close to him, and she wasn't willing to trade his life for her freedom. The only way she could keep him safe was to disappear, so she did.

But did it have to be Nebraska? Of all the places the Marshals could've sent her they'd picked Omaha. Couldn't it have been somewhere warm, she wondered; wouldn't it have been easier for her to disappear in Chicago, or Los Angeles? The Marshals said no. The Marshals said the cartel had operations in most major US cities, said the safest place to be was the last place anyone would look. They sent Alex to Wisconsin, she remembered. Was that better or worse than Omaha? Maybe it didn't matter. Omaha was the place the Marshals had chosen, the place where she was going to start over. New house, new job, new name.

Lindsey, that was her name now. Lindsey Duncan.

Christ, what a nightmare.

"I just don't understand what you were thinking," Kathy grumbled.

Neither do I, Elliot thought.

They were standing together in a new house in one of those cookie-cutter subdivisions where every house looks the same, little boxes neatly arranged along tree-lined streets where no one ever seemed to be driving. The entire contents of their lives were packed in cardboard boxes, scattered all around them, and Kathy was looking at him like she hated him, just a little.

"It was this or the Italy job," he reminded her. "Did you really want to pack Eli up and move him to another country?"

"We might as well have," Kathy snapped.

She had a point about that. So far Omaha was about as different from New York as it was possible to get; he felt a little bit like they'd stepped onto another planet. But they were here, now, and here was where they were going to stay.

"It'll be a fresh start," he said.

"What makes you think we needed a fresh start?" The accusation was plain; Kathy thought things were going fine back home, Kathy didn't understand what was wrong with him, Kathy thought he was being dramatic. They'd had this fight a hundred times before.

Maybe she didn't need a fresh start, but Elliot sure as hell did. It was four years, now, since he'd left SVU, and in that time he'd wandered aimlessly from day to day, lost and adrift and questioning himself at every turn. He had to do something for work and an old buddy from the Marines got him hooked up with a private contracting gig, working more or less as a mercenary, bouncing around from war zone to war zone, protecting politicians, risking his life and spending more time away from home than in it, and maybe that was fine for Kathy - hell, maybe she liked it that way, his paycheck in her account and his body nowhere near her bed - but it wasn't working for Elliot. In the early days he'd thrown himself into the work, not really caring if he died, maybe kind of wanting to, but time had scabbed over the wounds of his departure from the force and he was ready to be Eli's goddamn dad again, and the US Marshals offered him a chance to do that. Eli would be safer out here, Elliot though, and Elliot would be around more, and he could take his son fishing, and camping, build snowmen with him in the winter, and maybe Elliot and Kathy would remember how to love each other in a new city, a city where he didn't see Liv's face on every street corner.

"It's gonna be ok," he said. "It's just the stress of the move. You'll see. But I gotta get going, Kath."

"I thought the whole point of you taking the job with the Marshals was so you'd be around more. You want me to unpack the whole house by myself?"

He didn't understand why she was so mad about that; he'd just get in her way if he tried to help. Kathy had always run the house herself, and she was particular about where she wanted her things, and there was no way he'd get it right, and then they'd just be fighting again. No, better to give her some space.

She'll come around, he thought. Christ, he hoped she'd come around.

"Today's a one-off," he said. "Training. I'll be back by dinner, you'll see."

"Fine," she said, and then she walked away without so much as a good-bye.

Maybe she wouldn't come around. Maybe his marriage was ending for the second time. So much for a fresh start.

Part of him wanted to stay and hash this shit out with her and see if maybe they just needed a good fuck to ease the tension, but he had work to do. His new partner was sitting in a Buick in the driveway, and he didn't want to keep her waiting, so he grabbed his badge and gun from the counter and went out to meet her.

"I was afraid I was gonna have to come in after you," Jackie said as he slumped into the passenger's seat. "Everything ok?"

"Where we going?"

Elliot had only just met Jackie for the first time the day before yesterday, and he didn't know enough about her to trust her yet. She had a dry sense of humor and almost always had a toothpick hanging out of her mouth, but that was about the extent of it; everything else about her life remained a question mark, and he wasn't about to confess the troubled state of his marriage to a near stranger.

"Eager beaver," Jackie said mildly as she backed the car out of the driveway. "What did you tell her when she asked where you were going?"

"Training," he answered shortly. The Marshals had made it plain that he was not to tell anyone, even his wife, the truth about his work. If anyone asked he was supposed to tell them he worked at the courthouse. Discretion was the name of the game; the witnesses' lives depended on his ability to lie convincingly to his wife. Good thing he had some practice in that department

"Good man," Jackie said. "Our new witness just crossed the city limits, she'll be at the house in about twenty. We're going to meet her there, take over from the team that drove her here."

So this is WitSec, Elliot thought. Everybody dumps their problems in our lap and runs.

"What's her story?"

"She was a cop," Jackie said with a shrug. "Got on the wrong side of some drug cartel and they shot her for her trouble. Feds can't get their hands on the guy who wants her dead, so she's our problem until they catch him and she can testify."

"What are the chances of that, do you think?"

"I'll bet you twenty dollars right now she lives the rest of her life here and gets buried under a tombstone with the wrong name on it."

That wasn't a bet Elliot was gonna take; he was pretty sure Jackie was right. She'd know; she'd been working WitSec for years.

"She got a name?"

"Sure she does," Jackie said. "But right now the only name you need to know is the name the US government gave her. We're going to meet our new friend Lindsey Duncan."

Lindsey. It wasn't a bad name, Elliot thought. Not unusual, but not as plain as Jane. No one would look twice at Lindsey; Lindsey wouldn't raise any eyebrows. Whoever she was, she was scared, and it would be Elliot's job to protect her, to help her get her acclimated to her new life. It had to be lonesome for her, he thought; the total isolation of vanishing without a trace, no way to contact her old friends and family, alone in a strange place with no real hope of ever going back. Elliot kinda knew how that felt; he'd just walked away from his home, from everyone and everything he'd ever known, in a desperate attempt to become someone else. At least they'd have each other, he thought. He'd be a friend to Lindsey, if he could, and taking care of her and the other witnesses would give him purpose, and maybe, just maybe, they'd all be all right.

Christ, he hoped they'd be all right.