Chapter Text
The offices at Hogan Place had been on edge all day. There was a spree killer on the loose, but that wasn’t Casey’s department. Alex had been running ragged all day and she could only watch on as she sprinted from her office, ranting about how SVU were making her look like an idiot already.
She didn’t read newspapers willingly. She had to keep across the Financial Times for her cases in white collar, but usually not paying rags like the New York Ledger any mind. But this morning she saw the headline, ‘NIGHT RIPPER’, and had to know. Stay informed, stay alive. The killings, four of them so far, were in lower Manhattan. She felt separated enough in their new apartment on the Upper West Side, but still wasn’t comfortable going out late, just in case. She wanted to look out for herself, but who was going to look out for him? What if he was involved? Where the hell is he?
Charlie stormed out again three days ago, and there was no way she could go through this at work. She sat at her desk with her head in her hands, raking her fingers through her hair. She had just worked out a plea deal on her latest case, a bank teller who’d been caught red-handed embezzling thousands of dollars to a mistress who’d been blackmailing him. A lesser sentence in exchange for his testimony against her and the escort agency he found her through, and the case was handed off to vice. She didn’t care for the rest of the details at the moment. She found herself with a free afternoon and headed home, remaining on call in case she was needed. She had to find him, and fast.
She was by the phone within minutes of getting home. No sign of him at the soup kitchen, or any of his friend’s apartments, except Billy’s the day before who, getting increasingly tired of him showing up unannounced and ranting about the machines, kicked him to the kerb after an hour, encouraging him to go home. Which he obviously didn’t.
‘Well next time, call me first!’
‘Look I’m sorry, but there won’t be a next time, Casey. I gotta wife an’ kid to think about, he scares ‘em now. I can’t be doin’ with this. Good luck, though.’
She slammed the receiver down for the fifth time in twenty minutes. Yeah, she was gonna need it. She had one more call to make before she knew it was time to worry. One more place he’s shown up before. It was a stretch, but it had been long enough. She picked up the receiver and punched in the numbers she knew by heart at this point.
‘Hi John, it’s Casey. Uh… Is Charlie with you…? No… Okay… Yeah he uh, ran off again a few days ago.’ She pinched the bridge of her nose. ‘I don’t know… I don’t know… Look I’m sorry, I uh… Yeah, I’ll let you know. Will you call me if he shows up…? Great, thanks.’ No sign of him at his parent’s in Boston. She was out of ideas. Then the phone rang again,
‘Hello?’ The hope was so evident in her voice that the woman on the other end could tell she was letting her down before she even spoke.
‘Novak? It’s Cabot, hope you don’t mind me calling you at home.’ It wasn’t uncommon for ADAs to contact each other if their cases crossed over, but she had nothing on the books right now that should remotely concern her colleague in Special Victims. Then she remembered the case Alex was working on at the moment and tensed.
‘That’s okay, uh, everything alright?’
‘I’m with the SVU down at the 1-6, all hands on deck down here, it’s mayhem…’ She could hear the muffles of multiple conversations and phones ringing off the hook in the background, ‘I wanted to give you a heads up, but it has to stay between us… Did your fiancé get home yet?’
‘Uh, no. Not yet.’ Oh god, have they found him? What does she know?
‘Look uh, again, this can’t get out, they’ve already got the press and 1PP breathing down their necks, we’re trying to avoid a mass panic here, but they got their profiler involved and if it was me I’d wanna know.’
‘Wanna know what?’
‘They’re looking for someone who’s… Mentally disturbed. Paranoid schizophrenic.’
Alex didn’t know the details, they weren’t that close. But she knew Charlie had issues. Severe enough issues that he was hurting her. Severe enough that could drive someone to do risky, dangerous things, if the right buttons were pushed at the right time.
Casey took it all in. ‘Okay. Thanks for the heads up.’ She put the phone down again, twisting the ring on her finger as it sparkled under the artificial light. Between here and work, she’d been working by a lamp for about 12 hours now and the strain in her eyes was giving her a headache. She headed to the bathroom cabinet, taking a couple of Tylenol before noticing again the bright orange pill bottles with his name on them, still very much full, unopened, laid out in a row across the shelf. They’re what caused their last fight:
‘N-n-n-n-n-no you can’t make me take them, they control my thoughts, they can hear them!’
‘Please, they’ll help you feel better—’
‘NO! No… Y-you’re one of ‘em, in y-y-your big government suit, sent to… Report back on me but I-I-I I know you, I know what your kind are… Capable of…’
‘No, Charlie, please… I love you—’ She didn’t have time to reason with him before he pushed her, throwing her full force into the wall behind her. Then a hand around her neck, pinning her until she saw stars.
She choked back the memory and closed the cabinet, her reflection in the door showing how that fight eventually ended. She’d been covering the cut on her lip with dark lipstick, the small, purple bruise in the outside corner of her eye with concealer. There wasn’t much she could do about the cut in her eyebrow above it, but it was small enough that it wasn’t noticeable from a distance. And anyone who could get close enough knew not to ask anymore. She couldn’t bear to look at herself without a scarf on just yet.
Surely he wasn't capable of the horrible things they described in the paper? There weren't any knives missing from the kitchen, she checked. She counted them every night before they went to bed, and every time he stormed out. Six. Not him, not her Charlie, surely... Then she looked at her reflection again, slowly pulling at her scarf with her finger until she caught a glimpse of purple and froze.
She had to get out of there, she needed some air. She needed to find him.
She tried to think back, places they went together that he might run back to. She remembered the last time they had a good day, when he was lucid enough for an impromptu long lunch in the park on a break between her court appearances, one afternoon about nine months ago. Washington Square Park. She only had the lunch she’d packed that morning: sandwiches, a granola bar and an apple, buying coffees and a hot dog for him from a cart. They sat in the sun and watched the world go by for a couple of hours. They even managed to ad-lib for a while, cracking jokes about strangers as they walked by. It was peaceful.
She suddenly didn’t care about the danger, grabbing her purse and leaving their apartment for the subway.
A rabble had formed by the time she got to the park, two or three people restraining another man on the ground, countless more wailing on him as he screamed in pain and a larger crowd gathered.
‘What the hell’s going on?’ She managed to grab the attention of another man in the crowd by grabbing the sleeve of his coat,
‘We got ‘im! We got the bastard, the Night Ripper!’ She froze, trying to get a look at him between kicks and thrashes. Oh god, was it him? She felt unwell thinking about her love lying underneath that chaos, she could almost feel every kick in her gut herself. Then, lights and sirens. A uniformed officer pulled the guy off the ground and ordered the crowd to disperse, but that didn’t stop an audience forming for the arrival of the detectives.
‘Special Victims! Police, coming through!’
‘Show’s over!’
Some of them began to move away, but she needed to know more, listening in as well as she could from the back of the rabble,
‘Bus is on the way, as well as the rest of our backup.’
‘What the hell happened here?’
‘Someone heard this guy accost a Pro over on 4th Street, spoutin’ somethin’ about Armageddon. Next thing a dozen people they chase him in here, they kick the crap outta ‘im.’
‘He’s not even close.’
She moved round to a break in the crowd. A bald man, now with a massive laceration on the side of his head, whimpering as the detectives reassured him. Not Charlie. But also not him.
‘Okay people, look at this…’ Another detective turned around, holding up a piece of paper she couldn’t quite see from where she was standing, ‘… This is our man. Beard and hair. This man has no beard and no hair.’
She watched them move the crowd back from the poor man.
‘These people have a serious problem.’
‘Yeah, they’re scared.’
She waited another few minutes, steeling herself, before approaching the two male detectives.
‘Excuse me…’
She instinctively reached for the badge in her pocket before she realised. She’s not here on a professional capacity, and this was way out of her purview. She was grateful she’d never had to resort to using it to help him, yet. She stuffed it back in her pocket before anyone noticed.
‘Can we help you?’ The older man replied. She gestured to the sketch in the other man’s hand,
‘Could I get a look at that?’ he handed it to her and she stared intently.
‘Ma’am, do you recognise this gentleman?’ He certainly had a beard and hair, with a disturbed, piercing stare she knew all too well. But it wasn’t Charlie. Where the hell is he?
‘No… Sorry.’ She handed it back, ‘Thanks.’
‘No problem,' the older detective paused, spotting the marks on her face and neck, 'and... ma'am?'
'Yes?'
He handed her his card, 'If you think of anything that might... Help... Call us.' He enunciated the word he thought she needed to hear.
She took the card, DETECTIVE JOHN MUNCH, SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT
'Uh, okay, thanks.'
'Get home safe.’
She threw the card into the nearest garbage can once they were out of sight.
She was reassured, but she still didn’t sleep well that night. He was still out there. She tossed and turned in their bed, the cold void next to her filling her with an anxious emptiness. She turned to face it, staring at the pillow and tracing patterns on it with her finger until the sun rose behind it, no shadow to block her from bathing in its glow. As was now routine on the mornings she woke up alone, after the time she found him sleeping in next door’s garbage, she threw some clothes over her pyjamas and made her way down to the street to quickly check he hadn’t made it back through the night, checking every hiding place at the front of the apartment building, walking halfway up the block each way, and then round the back to check the fire escapes. Still no sign of him this time. She went back upstairs and got ready for work.
Her head was pounding all day again. Between the mountain of paperwork, no sleep, endless coffee and worry, this was set to be one of those days where if she didn’t pull herself together soon, she was going to completely unravel. With her head in her hands again, there was a knock at the door to her office that afternoon,
‘Hey, you alright?’
‘Been better.’ She looked up to find Alex leaning in, one hand still on the doorknob, the other leaning against the frame.
‘I’m on my way to the 1-6. They got a suspect in custody, name’s Daniel Varney.’
‘Oh great, well, uh, good luck up there.’
‘Thanks… I take it you still haven’t heard from him?’
‘… No. Not yet.’
‘Well, uh, hopefully soon.’
‘Yeah, hopefully.’
Alex gave a curt nod and went to leave. The redhead picked up her pen before noticing Alex had turned back again,
‘Casey?’ She was surprised at her using her first name,
‘Yeah?’
‘I know it’s not my place, but uh… These guys, they’re pretty good at what they do. If you ever need them, will you let me know? I’m always here to talk.’
‘You’re right, Cabot. It’s not your place.’ She didn’t need anyone’s help, or god forbid, their sympathy. She knew what she was doing, she was the only one that could help him and she just wished for someone, anyone, to understand that without having to explain their life story, air their dirty laundry for the whole world to see. She returned to the notes in front of her and Alex left for real.
Casey lay on the sofa that night, watching the news on the TV. Blanket over her legs, glass of wine in hand to help her relax, but at this point she would’ve settled for the ground swallowing her whole.
‘This is New York One with your News at Nine. Our top story: A man has been arrested in connection with the murders of four people across the City in less than 48 hours. Daniel Varney is suspected of being the so-called Night Ripper, whose spree across lower Manhattan…’
She was becoming familiar with the loneliness now, even if it was still a little uncomfortable. But maybe, just maybe, that was the worry for him talking over her secret desire for solitude, for peace. She wouldn’t even entertain the thought right now. As long as he was still out there, she was responsible for him, wracked with guilt at the mere thought of leaving him.
A light knock on the door brought Casey back into the room. She put her glass down on the coffee table and walked to the door, opening it gently.
‘Case…’
He was drenched from the rain, he was dirty from god knows what, he had short, rough stubble like sandpaper that made him scratch his face, his eyes were dark and sunken. He was tired, he was home. He always came home. He needs her.
She pulled him in close, his head sinking onto her shoulder in sobs as she stroked his hair, her other arm wrapped around his waist, pulling him into a tight embrace. She wanted to ensure she never lost him again.
‘It’s okay… It’s okay…’ Their voices barely above whispers.
‘I wanna try…’
‘I know you do… It’s okay… I love you… I love you…’