Chapter Text
Olivia Benson had no idea that the horrendously cold February afternoon when Rafael Barba forehead-kissed her goodbye and wouldn’t let her say I love you wasn’t yet the worst of it, wasn’t yet the worst of Rafael Barba.
In July, when humidity thickened New York City’s air and the courts were strangely quiet, Benson learned that Jack McCoy had filed murder charges against a man who’d flipped a life support switch on an infant dying of Tay Sachs disease. The child’s parents were now divorcing following a months-long right-to-die battle. The man who’d flipped the switch was a longtime family friend. This second murder charge unsettled Benson.
It unsettled the governor and state Attorney General too. By August, they were demanding an investigation into why McCoy had filed murder charges twice in five months when there was no precedent.
Jack McCoy stepped down a week before the Attorney General revealed that the Manhattan DA’s office and McCoy’s most recent re-election campaign had been receiving donations from Not My Decision, an organization seeking to take end-of-life decision-making out of the hands of everyone other than a supernatural higher power. McCoy and the smug ADA that SVU had been stuck with after Barba’s departure had both been corrupted by money, and maybe also by the sense of power someone might acquire from denying rights to their own constituents.
The man who’d flipped the life support switch was working with Not My Decision, and McCoy and the SVU ADA had promised to protect him from harsh sentencing if he was found guilty.. Not My Decision would pay him handsomely when he got out of prison after a year, as long as the charges stuck, as long as they were able to set a precedent that they could carry all the way up to the Supreme Court someday.
In the moments before Benson fully registered the implications of McCoy’s downfall, she was relieved that ADA “That’s Not Rape” was out of their hair at last.
And then it hit her like a punch to the stomach: if the man who’d flipped the switch on his family friend’s infant was a willing participant in Not My Decision’s attempts to force justice’s hands, then so was Barba.
Probably.
Or maybe not.
She’d known Barba for years, they’d been best friends, essentially, platonic soulmates who sometimes indulged in brief too-meaningful flared-eye glances, but they knew each other, and until February, generally trusted each other.
A few days after the Attorney General’s revelations, Benson learned that Barba had been disbarred and was facing corruption charges himself. He’d bene approached by Not My Decision months before SVU ever encountered the Householders, before the baby was born. They’d asked him to be a part of their plan to change the laws in New York City, and after that, the whole country.
Barba admitted to everything. Rita Calhoun was working on a plea deal on his behalf.
Benson was terrified that he’d be killed on the inside, after he’d taken on the corrections officers who’d rallied around the rapist, domestic abuser, and murderer Gary Munson a few years back.
Perhaps miraculously, Barba survived his 90-day sentence.
Benson was almost certain that Barba had been blackmailed or threatened, because he didn’t believe in any of what Not My Decision was selling, not their ideology, and certainly not their methods of working the courts. Unless she’d spectacularly misjudged him; that possibility was of course on the table as well.
She saw him one winter afternoon when she was in the state courthouse after testifying on a case that had started in Manhattan. Barba was gaunt, his skin sallow, his torso sunk in to a now-oversized sweater vest, white dress shirt and gray sportcoat. He shivered in spite of all the layers.
A small part of her wanted to comfort him, but every other inch of her skin and bones and soul knew it was wiser not to.
“Liv,” he said, “have dinner with me tonight. I’ll explain.”
She looked directly into his darkened eyes and answered “no.”
“That’s fair.”
“Good.” She nodded, matter-of-factly, and started back down the hall, immediately noticing that he was tentatively trailing her. “Stop,” she ordered. “Let me walk away.”
He did.
Later that night, well after Noah’s bedtime but long before sunrise, she curled up under the covers and sobbed like she hadn’t sobbed in years. She suppressed the sounds in her throat, clutching fiercely at the comforter, knowing she had so, so little to hold on to anymore.
—
“It was funny,” Rollins would tell her after Carisi’s going-away-but-not-going-away party, “Carisi told me he still practices Barba’s summations in the mirror.”
“Who?” Benson said, raising an eyebrow.
Rollins flattened her lips. “He’s in Miami, working for the Innocence Collective down there.”
“He was corrupt.”
“You don’t know the whole story,” Rollins said.
“Tell me something, Amanda,” Benson said, turning to face the detective, “if I knew the whole story, would it change the fact that Barba willingly participated in a corruption scheme paid for by Not My Decision?”
Rollins thought about that for a moment. “Probably not.”
“You don’t think I know about the Masuccis?” Benson said softly. “You think a commanding officer would be that out of the loop? Barba owed the Masuccis. His father —”
“— who was a real bastard —”
“—left all his money to his secret family in the will. All he’d made from holding down the ports in the Bronx. I’ve been a detective for a long time. So I also know that Barba made bad choices, however desperate they might have been.”
“Well.”
The single syllable conveyed a decade of Rollins’s own bad choices.
“It’s different,” Benson insisted.
“He and his mother lived in an apartment in a row house in the South Bronx where the two houses on either side of them were burned out, set on fire by the owners for insurance money who didn’t care about the safety of anybody who lived next door. Meanwhile his dad was raking in money from the mob, keeping his secret family comfortable and warm in a house on Long Island.”
“I know all of this, and it doesn’t change the fact that Barba went to the Masuccis for help.”
“Because he and his mother deserved that money after all his father put them through.”
“But he didn’t come to me when the Masuccis came to collect on their favor,” Benson said, gritting her teeth in agitation. “He went through with it. He used my unit to pay back the mob.”
“He had no —”
“Yes he did. He could have come to me.”
“And what would you have done?”
“I have connections to the feds. I’d have helped him.”
Rollins shrugged. “You’d have saved him.”
“Amanda,” Benson said, sighing shallowly, “I know I’m no one’s savior.”
—
A week before Christmas, when SVU was understaffed as always, and Rollins had just returned to work after she’d been kidnapped by a retired officer whose desperation for justice had sent him spiraling off the rails, Rollins and Fin were investigating the scene of an attempted child abduction near the Manhattan side of the 59th Street Bridge.
The dark circles under Rollins’s eyes extended almost all the way down to her chin.
“Parents had a bad divorce, custodial assholery is statistically the most likely explanation,” Rollins said, peering over the rail and looking at the East River beneath her. “It’s really unlikely —”
She cut herself off when she noticed a figure beneath the water, slowly rising up with the tide.
A body. A man’s body, blue and green and swollen.
“Floater,” Rollins said flatly.
“I’ll call it in,” Fin told her.
“So this means we’ll be here all afternoon.”
“Probably has nothing to do with our case.”
“Even so.” Rollins rubbed her eyes. “I might have to testify about where I found the body.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself.”
“Can’t help it. My therapist said that after you’ve actually seen the worst case scenario, experienced it, especially more than once, your brain rewires, your mind catastrophizes.”
“So, don’t get ahead of yourself.”
A homicide detective from the 27th Precinct showed up within the hour, but they had to wait another two hours for a dive team and hope the current wouldn’t carry their floater away.
“You need us for anything?” Fin started to say as the divers laid the body on the ground in front of the homicide detective and a medical examiner. But when he looked down, he drew in a breath, almost a gasp, and cursed to himself.
“I used to work with this guy,” Fin said.
“Shot in the chest, probably at close range,” the ME observed. “Might have been tossed into the river while he was taking his last breaths.”
“Who is he?” the detective asked Fin.
“Elliot Stabler. Former SVU detective, retired about nine years ago.”
Rollins covered her mouth with one hand. She’d never met Stabler — he’d suddenly taken leave about a month before she arrived in New York, and officially retired after her first major case — but knew enough to understand that this would devastate Benson.
Fin looked sideways at Rollins. “I’ve got to get back to the precinct,” he said. “Got to break this to Liv before anybody else does.”
—
“We’re not doing this in an interview room,” Lieutenant Kevin Bernard said when Benson arrived at the 27th Precinct three days after Stabler’s body was found floating in the East River.
For the last 65 hours or so, Benson had been shivering a lot, staring, but not crying. Her eyes were, in fact, dryer than usual.
Bernard led her to his office at the back of the precinct and shut the door.
He was known as one of the smartest homicide detectives in the city, now commanding officer for one of the top homicide units, and Benson was certain that the reason she was there was that Bernard had unearthed Benson and Stabler’s brief affair nineteen years ago, when she was grieving and he was selfish.
“I understand that you need to work all angles,” Benson told Bernard as she settled into a chair opposite his desk.
“It’s too bad. Stabler was a good detective way back when. Seems like he was less discerning about who he worked for as a private investigator.”
“What?” Benson asked.
“Obviously being a good detective yourself, you knew.”
She had no idea what Bernard was talking about, but recognized the technique: he was expecting her to fill in details and admit to complicity in something related to Stabler’s murder.
“Lieutenant,” she said, laying both hands flat on his desk, “I have not heard from Elliot in more than eight years. Kathy sent me Christmas cards for the first few years after Elliot left, and then she stopped. I think they’re divorced, but I don’t even know that much. What is it you think —”
“Stabler was working for Not My Decision.”
Benson let out another “What?” followed by a shaking breath and thirty seconds of silence.
“Lieutenant,” she said, “I had no idea. I will sign a sworn affidavit for you. I have not spoken to Elliot Stabler in more than eight years, and I have not spoken to Rafael Barba in almost three, except for once around last year at this time when I ran into him in court.”
“And what did Mr. Barba have to say then?”
Nausea rose up into Benson’s throat. The two-seven hadn’t called her in for questioning because of her connection to, or her brief affair with, Stabler; they’d called her in because Stabler had been working for Not My Decision, the shady advocacy group that had allegedly used Masucci connections to sacrifice an ADA in service of their ideological cause.
They’d called her in because Stabler’s murder may have been related to the PI work he’d done for Not My Decision, and Not My Decision was responsible for Barba’s downfall.
They’d called her in because some 72 hours into their investigation, their primary suspect was — must have been — Rafael Barba.
“What did he have to say when you last saw him?” Bernard prompted.
“Nothing,” Benson told him, swallowing hard, willing her voice not to break. “He wanted to explain himself. I walked away.”