Chapter Text
After the not-guilty verdict, after Barba was absolved of murder two by a jury of his peers, after the special prosecutor — who’d special-prosecuted him until he cried on the stand — scowled in defeat, Benson hugged Barba, drawing him to her. His trial, the worst month of his life, was over. They could move on. She’d finally take him up on that drink, or that celebratory steak, the one that was definitely intended as a date. Barba would explain himself. He’d apologize. She’d stop him before the groveling began. They would move on.
They’d just walked out of the courthouse and barely had time to look down the steps at the crowd of reporters when she heard two gunshots and a series of screams. Benson drew her own weapon as she reached out an arm to protect Barba, but he was already on the ground, bleeding from the bullet that had struck his ribcage.
She remembered whispering Stay with me, Rafa, stay with me as his eyes, desperate and sad, searched hers. She remembered two officers tackling Aaron Householder to the ground at the top of the steps. She remembered pressing her hand to the hole in Barba’s chest, and she remembered Householder, flat on his stomach, with the weapon an inch in front of his right hand, loudly declaring his own guilt, screaming about how he hoped Barba suffered.
She remembered an officer using a glove to pick up and bag the pistol.
And then, the next clear memory Benson had was the paramedic saying I don’t know how to tell you this, Lieutenant, but it doesn’t look good.
For six days, as the news about Rafael Barba’s critical condition cycled back and forth too quickly — one moment the doctors would say he was waking up, the next they’d be certain his heart would give out within hours — Benson worked, or tried to work, avoided news reporters, and wept into her pillow at night as she worried about Barba, wondering if he was in pain, if he was frightened. She struggled to figure out how she’d explain to Noah what had happened to the man he knew as Uncle Rafa.
Aaron Householder’s hands were clean.
The memory came in like a flash sometimes when she got into a rhythm at work.
But she’d been trying to keep pressure on Barba’s wound, her eyes and ears registering little more than the confusion of the scene around them.
From her probably-skewed perspective, Aaron Householder’s hands had looked clean.
Thirty years of experience, more shootouts and murders than most detectives ever encountered: Householder’s hands were cleaner than they should have been for a man who’d fired at least twice.
But she was in the middle of a traumatic situation. She was a bad witness. Her memory’s claims could not be trusted.
Householder had confessed three times: once at the scene, again with a can we just get this over with when he was brought directly to One Police Plaza, and a third time when his lawyer arrived.
Jack McCoy was waiting to see whether he’d have to charge Householder with murder, or with attempted murder.
Benson was a bad, traumatized witness and what she saw must have meant nothing. Householder confessed three times, none of them under duress, and during the most recent confession he had a defense attorney sitting next to him.
And then it didn’t matter, because Lucia Barba called and asked if she could help search her son’s apartment for a living will, and all Benson found there was a letter of resignation and a printed-out receipt for a plane ticket to Miami.
The discovery that Barba was planning to leave the DA’s office and New York City after his trial very nearly broke Benson.
And then he was awake again, and recovering, and jogging on a treadmill at a rehab hospital, then staying with her, in her bed, struggling with nightmares as the wound near his ribcage continued to heal, and she forgave him.
Come on, Liv, if it was anybody else, you’d have begged the DA’s office to see the fact that someone who wasn’t a family member or a doctor flipped the switch on Householder’s son as a mitigating circumstance. You’d have begged for leniency on his behalf.
Barba was right, but Benson was certain that the flash of memory — the image of Householder’s hands — was wrong, even if Householder had never had a gun registered to him in his life, even if his weapon of choice in the initial kidnapping case that had brought them to this point was a paintball gun, even If the way he’d held the paintball gun that afternoon suggested to her that he’d never fired its counterpart, and that even standing with a pistol ten feet away, he’d come awfully close to Barba’s heart for someone who —
But the attempted murder wasn’t her case, and the homicide detectives in charge surely had more details about Aaron Householder’s means and motive than she did. That’s what she told herself as she comforted the prosecutor who suffered nightmares as he slept next to her in the week following his release from the hospital.
—
“Sonny! You made it!” Bella Carisi stood up from her parents’ couch, where she’d been sitting with her husband and three-year-old son, throwing her arms around her brother before he could take off his coat. “We gotta talk,” she said into his ear, “now.”
“Can I at least say hi to Ma first?”
“No,” Bella said, linking her arm with his and leading him towards the staircase, up to the storage room that had once been his childhood bedroom. “We gotta talk now.”
“You okay? Tommy’s okay?”
“Everybody’s fine, except maybe our idiot sister, who’s introducing us to her fiancé tonight.”
Carisi cringed. “Please tell me you’re referring to Teresa.”
“I wish.”
“Gina’s divorce was only finalized, what, three months ago?”
“Yeah. Real lady’s man, this guy,” Bella said. “He’s a paralegal for her divorce attorney.”
“Does he know he’s fiancé number seven?”
“According to Gina, he’s technically only number two, on account of her being married once.”
“That makes a whole lot of sense,” Carisi said, rolling his eyes. “How long’ve they been engaged? How come she didn’t say anything on the group text?”
“‘Cause we also have a separate group text without you in it, the one where we don’t want our “I’m-a-cop-and-a-lawyer” brother on our cases about everything. Listen, we figured this one would blow over before it got to the point of Gina bringing him by the house, but … it didn’t.”
Carisi shrugged off his coat and threw it on top of a stack of plastic containers.
“What?” Bella asked.
“How bad?”
“Guy did eight years of a ten year sentence for murder.”
“Fuck,” Carisi said, rubbing his eyes. “You should have told me earlier.”
“Yeah? And what were you going to do? You and I, we’re not exactly on good terms with any parole officers’ unions.”
“So what do you expect me to do about it now?”
“I don’t know. She’s been head-over-heels with this asshole. Sonny, he shot a guy on the beach at close range and cut his balls off while dressed as a woman named Gabrielle who looked like the police detective he thought tanked his career.”
Carisi had investigated some bizarre cases during his time with SVU, but none of them held a candle to the story Bella had just told him.
“And again, you couldn’t have told me about this a month ago?”
“She kept it from me and Teresa. They’ve been together a year, since a couple months after she and Louie filed for divorce. Says she knew we wouldn’t like him.”
Carisi held out his hands. “Well.”
“I’m usually all for letting Gina make her own bad decisions, but, Sonny —”
“We’re sure this guy — did — what he was convicted of?”
“Uh-huh. Very open about it, too.”
“You met him?” Carisi asked, exasperated.
“Three weeks ago.” She reached over and touched her brother’s forearm, titling her head and screwing her face into an expression of sympathy. “A couple days after your ADA was shot.”
“You could have said something then, it would have been fine.”
“Sonny.”
“What?”
“I know you had some kind of long-simmering crush on —”
“Bella! I’m 38, I don’t talk in terms of “crushes,” and I’m never letting you get me drunk again.”
“You’re like the polar opposite of Gina or something. She gets engaged to every guy she meets, and you don’t pursue any leads. Whatever happened with Amanda?”
“Amanda is involved with someone.”
“Aww, Sonny.” She was clearly reading a lot into his statement. “You can’t catch a break, can you?”
“I don’t want to talk about me. Give me this guy’s name, I’ll make some calls.”
“Kevin Mulrooney. Former ADA himself. He got disbarred, obviously, but still likes to hang around lawyers for some reason.”
“Goddamnit, what is with ADAs and murder these days?”
“Well, what Barba did wasn’t really murder. Isn’t that what they were saying on the news back in February, that the DA should never have charged him the way they did? I felt bad for Barba. He went out of his way to help Tommy. He goes out of his way for people.”
“Rarely,” Carisi huffed.
“I thought he helped you get ready for the Bar.”
“He didn’t have consent from both custodial parents when he flipped that switch. I know the law. He could have easily helped Maggie Householder push the divorce and the court order through faster. I was worried about him, praying he’d pull through after he got shot, which he certainly didn’t deserve and Householder should rot for that, but, Bella, you don’t know how I looked up to him, how he was a role model for me, how much this decision let me down, threw me off.”
“I’m sorry.” Bella moved to hug him. “This was why Teresa and I didn’t let you in on what was happening with Gina. I said to Teresa, just trust me, Sonny’s hurting.”
“Like they say, no heroes.”
“You ever need to talk, you know you can always call me up. I swear I won’t leak anything to the backchannel group text.”
“So what do you need me to do?” Carisi asked. “You need me to punch this guy in the head?”
“We all know that’s Teresa’s job in this family.”
Carisi laughed. “I’ll look into this guy’s history, all right?”
“The story he told us is that his life went completely downhill after he fucked up one case, and he knew the guy on trial was guilty, he knew he’d murdered his first wife regardless of the verdict.”
“I didn’t go to law school for sixty years to shrug and say, “oh, he’s just a prosecutor getting himself some vigilante justice, la-de-da.” Barba doesn’t get off the hook with me for that, and this asshole Mulrooney, he absolutely doesn’t get off the hook.”
“I’m just telling you what he told me and Teresa.”
Carisi heard the doorbell ring, followed by a series of greetings and introductions downstairs. Bella breathed deep. “Here we go,” she said.
In the living room, they found Gina and Kevin Mulrooney handing Joanne Carisi their coats, and Dominick Carisi Sr. reaching out to shake Mulrooney’s hand.
Sonny Carisi had not slept much in the past month.
This ADA-turned-revenge-murderer was as pale as a sheet of paper, with shoepolish-colored hair that curled a bit where it should have been trimmed weeks ago, and there were dark circles beneath his eyes, but his resemblance to Rafael Barba was striking.
His teeth were bigger, broader somehow. His eyes didn’t bulge out of his head in quite the same way Barba’s did. He was maybe half an inch shorter, fifteen pounds thinner. But the resemblance seemed, to Carisi’s exhausted brain, more than coincidence.
Mulrooney’s affect was entirely different, Carisi noted, somehow simultaneously creepy and forlorn.
Halfway through dinner, he was explaining to the family how he’d let himself go unchecked for a long time after his prosecutorial downfall, and that his prison sentence had changed him.
“Yeah, sure,” Carisi said, “and the Verrazzano Bridge is made of cupcakes.”
“Sonny!” Gina snapped.
He turned to Bella and Teresa for support, but they simply shrugged in his direction.
“Leave me out here in the cold why don’t you,” he mumbled into his wine glass.
“I understand if you have your doubts,” Mulrooney said, clearing his throat, “and I’m not saying I’m innocent, or blameless, or —” He cut himself off, blinking what must have been a hundred times before excusing himself to go to the bathroom.
“You’re scaring the crap out of him, Sonny,” Gina said, before dramatically clinking her fork against her plate and rushing off to calm her agitated fiancé.
“Give the guy a chance, for God’s sake,” Joanne said. “He was trying to explain himself.”
“He cut off somebody’s balls,” Bella half-whispered.
“After he murdered the guy. I thought you were going to back me up.”
“Not like we see you bringing anybody home,” Joanne huffed in her son’s direction. “You could at least once in a while —”
“You want for Sonny and Theresa to bring home murderers too, Ma?” Bella interrupted.
Dominick Sr. hummed as he finished chewing. “We warmed up to Tommy eventually.”
“Oh, come on,” Bella said, patting her husband’s arm, “Tommy’s not a murderer.”
“Also never cut anybody’s balls off,” Tommy said, not looking up from his plate.
“I don’t know,” Teresa said, “the way he was talking before, I almost buy his story that he’s moved on.”
Carisi stabbed a meatball and let out a low grumble.
The fact that Kevin Mulrooney looked so much like Rafael Barba save for a few superficial differences bothered him more — for the moment — than the nature of Mulrooney’s criminal history.
Before dessert, Carisi put on his jacket and joined Teresa, Bella, and Tommy on the porch for a smoke. He didn’t smoke, but he was willing to endure the outdoor cloud for the sake of figuring out how to extract Kevin Mulrooney from their family. “I’m glad this family’s forgiven me my past mistakes, more than my own parents have,” Tommy said, “but addiction is a disease. Cutting off somebody’s balls after you shoot them at close range is not a disease.”
“Here here,” Bella said, raising an imaginary glass.
“You guys don’t think somebody can change?” Teresa asked.
Bella was incredulous. “From that?”
“Okay, look, Bella and Tommy, I’ve got a question for both of you,” Carisi said. “Who does Mulrooney look like?”
They shrugged, looked at each other, and shrugged again.
“You don’t see it at all?’
“No,” Bella said, confused.
“Rafael Barba?”
Bella laughed to herself.
“I could see it,” Tommy offered. “If you squint, yeah, there’s sort of a resemblance.”
“I see it without squinting,” Carisi told them.
“Sonny,” Bella said, walking over to embrace him, “you’ve had a rough couple of months, kiddo.”
The front door squeaked open, and Mulrooney himself emerged, his shoulders stiff, hands trembling, clearly nervous. “Hi,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper.
“Hi,” they all said loudly, in chorus.
Mulrooney flinched.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“You’ve got to do better than that,” Bella complained.
“What else can I —”
“Hey, Kevin,” Carisi said, circling the former ADA, “doesn’t it bother you that Gina’s been engaged six times before?”
“Who am I to criticize, right?” he said, an awkward laugh in his throat.
“Six times,” Carisi repeated.
“Are you trying to scare me off?”
“Maybe.”
“You should talk to your sister about the pressure she felt to get married growing up, about how your parents and aunts and uncles can’t sleep until everyone is married. Ask her how many of those six engagements were mistakes. She’ll tell you.”
The Carisi siblings looked at each other, and then back at Mulrooney. “Ask her what happened with Lou,” he continued. “Ask her about why all she wanted since she was a little girl was to get married. I promise you, I love her.”
“I’ll grant you that, buddy, I will,” Tommy said, “but that doesn’t change that you killed a guy, premeditated and all.”
“Gina and I understand each other,” was all Mulrooney could offer.
“Yeah,” Bella said, stretching out the single syllable, “let us sleep on it. We’ll decide in a couple weeks whether we’re going to let you into this family.”
Carisi caught a genuine sadness in Mulrooney’s eyes, and had to remind himself not to feel too much sympathy, given the nature of his crimes.
“Gina and I are going home,” Mulrooney said, shuffling back towards the door. “But, um, all of you, talk to your sister before you try to chase me away. Don’t treat her like a joke about a lady who’s been engaged seven times.”
“Goddamnit,” Bella said when Mulrooney was back inside. “He fucking actually loves her and understands her.”
“Not buying it,” Carisi said. “Now, listen —”
“He doesn’t look that much like Barba,” Bella interrupted.
“Will you please get over yourself?” Teresa complained.
Carisi looked down at his feet. “Regardless, all of us, we’ve got to keep an eye on Mulrooney.”
—
The unmistakeable sound of Rita Calhoun’s voice echoed outside of Benson’s office as she was preparing to leave on Thursday evening. “You can’t just walk in there and interview a police lieutenant,” Calhoun said accusingly. “You’re a partner at one of the state’s top ten law firms, Andy, I doubt you do your own legwork like this. Are you trying to intimidate her? She’s been through enough. Rafael has been through enough.”
There was a knock on the door in spite of Calhoun’s protest. “Lieutenant Benson,” a man’s voice said, “my name is —”
The door flew open, Calhoun’s hand firmly on the doorknob, and a dark-haired man of about 50, at least two inches above six feet, dressed in what must have been a designer gray wool suit, stumbled in. He glared at Calhoun as he smoothed out his jacket. “Lieutenant Benson,” he repeated, approaching her desk and setting his briefcase on a chair, “my name is André Carvalho, I’m with Rodrigo and Gardner in —”
“In upstate New York,” Calhoun interrupted. “This isn’t even his turf.”
“And I am representing Aaron Householder.”
“Okay,” Benson said, standing and holding out her hands, “what is going on here?”
“Andy is a friend of ours from Harvard and Mr. Householder has a wealthy aunt on the Upper East Side. And Mr. Householder withdrew his guilty plea this morning.” Calhoun turned to Carvalho. “This is outrageous. A betrayal.”
“What’s outrageous is that Aaron Householder has never fired anything more than a paintball gun and was diagnosed with osteoarthritis in his right hand a few months ago, a result of his having broken that hand in five places when he was hit by a bicycle, and that in spite of having all that factual information, Mr. Householder’s confession and guilty plea were accepted without question.”
“Take it up with homicide,” Benson said.
“You are defending the man who tried to kill Rafael, who almost succeeded at killing Rafael.”
“I could bring out a laundry list of the “upstanding citizens” you’ve represented over the years, Rita.”
“This is personal, and you know it.”
“Lieutenant Benson,” Carvalho said, “can you tell me what you saw immediately before and after Rafael Barba was shot?”
“Olivia, you don’t have to tell him anything,” Calhoun said before Benson could answer. “He has the statement you gave to homicide on the day of the shooting, he has the statements you gave when Householder was formally charged, and you should not speak to him without an NYPD representative present.”
“Do you stand by the statements you gave to the homicide detectives?” Carvalho asked.
“Yes, firmly,” Benson said, even though she could not get the probably-false memory of Householder’s clean hands out of her mind.
Witnesses, particularly witnesses in trials where the stakes were extraordinarily high, tended to misremember in the weeks and months following the event because of self-doubt, because of fear of an incorrect memory putting someone away for life. She was almost certain that was the reason she kept flashing back on Aaron Householder’s hands.
“He confessed, Andy,” Calhoun said, “three times. And he entered a guilty plea.”
“He took credit for the murder he wished he’d committed.”
“You and Rafael have been friends for more than twenty-five years. Does he know you’re representing Householder? Does he know you convinced him to withdraw the guilty plea?”
“I’m doing what’s right,” Carvalho said. “The investigation into the attempted murder of Rafael Barba needs to be reopened.”
“Bullshit,” was Calhoun’s response.
Benson replayed the events of that horrific February afternoon for herself: Householder had left almost immediately after the foreperson read the verdict, whereas Barba had hung back for a few minutes to talk to Dworkin and embrace Benson. They didn’t see Aaron Householder again until Barba was shot; Benson remembered this clearly because she’d seen Maggie in the hallway by herself.
Aaron told the detectives that he’d left the pistol in his car, parked on the street, and had gone to retrieve it as soon as the verdict came down. This gelled with what Benson had seen immediately after the trial ended.
She couldn’t help but wonder, though, what the chances of Householder finding street parking so close to his destination were.
But surely the officers on the scene, or at least the homicide detectives who’d followed up, had towed the car to an NYPD garage and noted where it was parked.
She didn’t have access to any of the records related to the shooting, because she was a witness, and because she was whispering I love you, I love you to the victim as he was taken away on a stretcher.
But they must have followed up on Aaron’s confession. At SVU, Benson had seen many cases where a parent confessed on behalf of a child, a few where a child confessed to protect a parent, a spouse confessing to a crime committed by the person they’d sworn to love for better or worse, and, a handful of times, a legally-innocent person taking credit for a crime they hadn’t committed. So of course homicide had seen similar incidents, and of course they hadn’t taken Aaron’s confession at face value.
Even Maggie, who Benson was one hundred and one percent sure she’d seen in the hall before Barba was shot — looking relieved, perhaps, that Barba was not going to prison for charges that she never wanted pressed in the first place — claimed she saw her estranged husband pointing a pistol at Barba.
But Maggie’s account was problematic too: she was furious at Aaron for going along with Jack McCoy’s plan to charge Barba with murder. She couldn’t believe that the kind prosecutor who’d helped her out on the worst day of her life was facing anything more than a fine, a suspended sentence, and a rebuke from the bar association.
Why would she make a statement that would lead to Aaron being unfairly charged with murder, then?
Ethics weren’t perfect. Memory wasn’t perfect, Benson reminded herself.
“Mr. Carvalho,” Benson said, “you’re going to work with my statements to the homicide detectives investigating the case, and you will stick solely to those until I’m on the stand. And please keep in mind that Rafael has been home for less than a week, after seven days unconscious and 19 days total in the hospital, so you might want to consider how taking on Householder’s defense is going to affect your alleged friend of 25 years.”
“I do what’s right,” Carvalho said, picking up his briefcase.