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lovemesomerafael · 5 years

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It’s Complicated Chapter 2: The Rest Of The Story

Source: @fortheloveofbarba

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The man in the box was a good candidate. He’d been arrested trying to fence items stolen from not one, but two of the victims. Not only that, but he was angry and uncooperative, and his interaction with Lieutenant Benson and Sergeant Dodds thus far in the interrogation was certainly nasty enough to be consistent with the guy Dr. Rojas had said they were looking for. However, he wouldn’t give them DNA, and he had alibis for the times of the rapes. Fin and Rollins were out at that moment checking them out.

Barba and Rojas stood on opposite sides of the one-way glass in Benson’s office, as far apart as they could, as they watched the interrogation, hoping for a break. Over the three weeks they’d been working together, things had not improved between them.

“Y’all trippin’,” sneered the skinny, tweaked-out kid. “You wastin’ your time. I told you where I was when them rapes went down. Just check it out.”

“We’re doing that,” Dodds said. “In the meantime, maybe you can tell us where you got the stuff you were trying to sell. Because it’s pretty suspicious that it belongs to two of the women who were raped.”

“I done told you that. Some dude gave it to me.”

Dodds sighed and moved closer to the suspect, whom Dodds dwarfed. “Describe the dude,” he said, slowly and distinctly.

“I don’t feel like it.”

Barba was scowling thoughtfully. “This kid knows a lot about this case that he’s not saying,” he muttered to himself.

Frankie cut her eyes to him. She’d just been thinking the same thing. “But he’s not our guy.”

“No. And we’re asking the wrong questions.”

“Have you noticed his weird affect? I can’t pin it down, but there’s something…”

As she looked at Barba while he stared thoughtfully into the interrogation room, Frankie noticed for the first time how well-cut his hair was. She knew an expensive haircut when she saw one. She wondered whether that was what Amanda had been talking about when she’d called him hot. He did have a nice profile, she supposed. To be fair, he wasn’t ugly by any stretch. And since Amanda had mentioned his green eyes, she had noticed those, too. But hot? Barba? Not with that personality.

Suddenly, it struck her what the witness’s behavior reminded her of. “You ever see a little kid try to keep a secret? How they’re just busting with it, dying to tell?”

Barba looked over at her, nodding. “Yes.” He looked back through the glass, still nodding. “Yes.”

As he watched the suspect, he had to admit that was a good description of his behavior. After just that brief look at Dr. Rojas, he also had to admit that she was wearing a very nice suit today, which fit her extremely well. He’d noticed that all her accessories, from the necklace that - though subtle - probably cost as much as his suit, to the chic shoes that elongated and accentuated her legs without drawing attention to themselves, showed excellent taste. Barba usually liked well-dressed women, but on her, the effect was ruined. Rather than appreciating her outfit, Barba found that it left a sour taste in his mouth. He knew that he would probably have admired her if he hadn’t known who Francisca Rojas was. But he did. He knew that she was one of them. She might be Latina, but she wasn’t one of his people.

Rafael Barba was insightful enough, at least, to recognize that he had a particular chip on his shoulder when it came to Dr. Rojas and the rest of her privileged class, to whom everything came entirely too easily. People who expected that, and believed it to be no more than their due, and who had very little regard for people like him and his family, who had to earn their achievements. Any display of unearned wealth disturbed him on a deep level wherever he saw it, and he was looking at it right now. Her father might be self-made, but she was not.

He had met far too many of her type in his life. His parents had sacrificed to send him to Catholic school so that he would get the best possible education, which meant all his friends from Jerome Avenue were together at public school while he was incarcerated with all the posh kids from the surrounding area. With the fierce cruelty of children to anyone who stands out, his classmates had made sure he understood his inferiority, mocking everything about him that set him apart, even the fact that he was smarter than any of them. It didn’t get better in college, it was just more well-concealed. And at Harvard… Well, Rafael had actually preferred Catholic school. At Harvard, the culture of overt prejudice against “scholarship kids” was not only blatant but encouraged, and highlighted by an irremediable difference of wealth and social class that no amount of achievement could touch. It was there that Rafael’s dislike of the trappings of wealth and social distinction was honed to a razor-sharp hatred.

Getting nothing further from the suspect, Benson and Dodds eventually had to end the questioning and arrest the suspect for nothing more than receiving stolen goods. None of them thought he was the rapist, and none of them thought he was going to give them anything that might lead them to the rapist. When Fin and Rollins returned, having confirmed his alibis for the times of the rapes, no one was surprised.

As the suspect was being led out of the box to be booked, Olivia signaled. “Rafa, Dr. Rojas, can we talk in my office?”

Hearing that, the suspect involuntarily flinched and turned to look at Frankie, lighting up with interest. Trouble was written plainly in his sudden wide smile as he gave her an insolent once-over. “You’re Frankie Rojas? I know someone who is looking for you.”

“Oh?” She asked, too surprised to hide her reaction.

“Yeah. Alan sends his best,” the skinny punk laughed as he was led from the squad room.

Frankie blanched and appeared to falter as she put a hand out to steady herself on the nearest desk. Barba and Olivia shared a look. What was that?

They headed into Olivia’s office and took positions around the small room, Olivia behind her desk, and Barba and Rojas on opposite sides of the couch. Mike Dodds started to close the door but was stopped by a tall, very good-looking man with dark hair whom no one had noticed enter the squad room.

“Hey, Porter,” Dodds said, holding the door open looking expectantly over at Lieutenant Benson.

She smiled regretfully. “Ten minutes, Dean. I’m sorry, we just need to have a short debrief.”

Frankie surprised everyone by standing up from the couch and saying, “No, I think he should come in. And I think he should stay.”

All eyes turned to her as she looked at Olivia’s live-in boyfriend, FBI Agent Dean Porter, who had come to take Olivia to lunch. Normally, that would have been cause for a fair amount of suggestive joking, since the relationship was fairly new and rumored to be very physical, but not today.

“He’s here,” Frankie said to Porter, the fear in her voice unmistakable. “Porter, Alan is here.”

“Fuck,” Porter said, and closed the door.

Olivia briefly scanned the faces in the room, paying extra attention to Rojas and Porter. She looked from one to the other, saying, “Is someone going to explain what’s going on?”

Porter held out a hand to Frankie, inviting her to speak. He and Dodds remained standing while she collapsed back into her seat. She took a deep breath and exhaled it forcefully before beginning.

“Everything you know about me is true. Porter and I did meet at Quantico and we did… work together. When you hear ‘we worked together’, that sounds like we were partners or on the same team or something, and we let that impression stand. We were both working Major Crimes, but that’s not… that’s not how we knew each other. We knew each other because I was a victim in one of his cases.” She sighed again. “There was a man – is a man named Alan Canady. Long story short, he wants to kill me.”

After dropping that grenade, Frankie simply waited for questions. None came. She looked around for help, but everyone in the room was too skilled an interrogator to think of interrupting.

So she continued. “We met in San Antonio, when I first started with the Bureau. He and I dated for about six months. It’s the textbook story we’ve all heard a million times. At first, he seemed entirely normal. But then, over time, he got progressively more possessive. It happened so slowly I didn’t realize it at first. Have I missed any of the clichés yet?”

Olivia muttered, “Stop it, Doc. We’re familiar with the pattern, yes. But we don’t judge our victims here. Just tell us what happened.”

Frankie smiled thinly in gratitude. It was one thing to be the one who got to say those things. It was another to believe them when they were said to you.

“One day, something happened. It was so small, just one of those little, stupid things that happen every day. I had to work late, and then my car wouldn’t start. By then, Alan had all these rules. I was supposed to call him any time I wasn’t going to be where I’d said I would, but we didn’t even have a date that night, and we didn’t live together or anything… And then when my car wouldn’t start, one of my coworkers was right there, and he gave me a ride home. I didn’t even think about it until we got to my house, and Alan was there. He was seething. He accused me of… well, this isn’t a very original story. You know the rest. It was the first time he hit me. And then it escalated, like it always does, until I ended up in the hospital. So I broke up with him. He went nuts, stalked me for a while, and was such a general pain in my ass that I decided to take a position in Virginia to get away from him. I thought that was the end of it, until he showed up there.”

“He followed you to Virginia?” Barba asked.

Frankie was having a hard enough time working around the shame of having to reveal this to her new colleagues. She simply couldn’t respond to Barba, of all people. She could only imagine what he would be like to work with now.

“He followed her and torched her house,” Porter answered for her. “With her asleep inside.”

“Shit,” Dodds hissed.

“I don’t think he was trying to kill me at that point. It was easy enough to get out once I woke up. He was just trying to scare me into taking him back.” Frankie pointedly did not look at anyone but Porter, who knew the whole story. “Anyway, that’s when I met Porter. Alan was always one step ahead of us. It doesn’t look like he moved to Virginia, which is part of why he was so hard to trace. He just visited enough to make my life miserable and keep me scared. But he escalated. That’s when Porter started to recommend that I leave town. In retrospect, I should have, but I fought it for a long time. I was so pissed! I didn’t want to have to start over in a new city, again.”

“So what happened?” Dodds asked.

“Porter came to New York to be with Olivia and the Bureau assigned a new Special Agent to the case. When she came on, she took one look and said I had to get out of Virginia. Alan was trying to kill me for real, and he was going to succeed one of these times. She said that Porter and I were like those frogs in the pot of water. You know that saying? You turn up the heat gradually enough and they’ll just get used to it until they’re boiled alive, not realizing how hot it is? She said it was too hot for me to stay at Quantico, and she went over my head to get me reassigned. She called Porter, who knew about this job because of Olivia, and here I am. You can read the file if you want. You probably should. Because now Alan’s here. Already.”

The room digested the new information.

“How do you know?” Porter asked. “How do you know he’s here?”

“We were questioning a suspect just now,” Dodds answered. “When he heard Liv call her ‘Dr. Rojas’, he recognized her name. He called her by her first name and he told her ‘Alan sends his best.’”

Porter looked concerned. “What was the suspect’s crime?”

“We’re charging him with receiving stolen goods, but we were questioning him because the stolen goods belonged to two victims of the rapist we’re calling Pattern 20,” Rafael answered. He was watching Dr. Rojas carefully. From the complex look on her face, she wasn’t thinking anything good.

“Is he good for the rapes?” Porter asked.

“We don’t think so,” Rafael responded. He thought Rojas was suddenly very quiet for someone who enjoyed sharing her opinions as freely as she did.

“How’s this tweaker kid know who Frankie is? How’s he make the connection between her and Alan Canady?” Porter mused, looking at Olivia but not particularly asking the question of her. Frankie looked at her, too, hoping she’d have an idea, because that was the question bothering Frankie, too.

“That’s what we’re going to ask him,” Olivia answered. “Let’s get lunch while he’s being booked.”

The group filed out of the office, with Dodds holding the door. Due to her position in the room, Frankie was the last one to reach the door.

“Doc, a word?” Dodds asked.

“Sure,” she said, hanging back while he re-closed the door.

“I’m sure the Lieu won’t mind if we borrow her office,” Dodds said, indicating the couch. They both sat.

“What’s on your mind?” She asked.

“That’s my question to you, actually. Guy tries to kill you multiple times, runs you out of two cities and chases you to a third… I’m guessing you have some thoughts about that.”

“You trying to shrink the shrink?” Frankie’s smile didn’t reach her eyes.

Mike simply replied, “Yes.”

Frankie stood, hugging her arms to her waist and looking out the window into the squad room. “I appreciate it, Sergeant. I do. And you’re right. I question what it was about me that this prick thought he could treat me the way he did. I feel like a damn imbecile, choosing him to date when I’m supposed to be an expert on this kind of stuff. But most of all, now I’m fucking scared again. And that pisses me off.”

She turned around to look at him again. “That about what you expected to hear?”

He shrugged. “Just about. You’re the psychiatrist, and you have more experience in this field than I do, but all that sounds pretty damn normal to me.”

“It is. But that doesn’t make me hate it any less.”

Dodds nodded but didn’t say anything, just giving her an opportunity to talk if she needed to.

“I appreciate the shoulder, Sergeant. But I’d appreciate an arrest more.”

“Understood. And one other thing.”

“Yes?”

“You’ve said ‘fucking’ in front of me now. That means you get to call me Mike.”

Frankie insisted upon being in the room when they questioned the tweaker kid again. When Barba refused to allow it, she initially tried to talk him around, but he refused even to consider it. The harder she pushed, the angrier he became, until the argument became so heated, Olivia insisted they go into one of the other interrogation rooms to work it out. She then had to stop Carisi and Rollins from using the speaker to eavesdrop. Even without the speaker, it was easy enough to hear Barba and Rojas shouting at one another in Spanish. Olivia knew just enough to recognize that some of the words they were using were not polite.

“This is my life, Barba! I am going to be there.”

“’This is my life?’ Really? Isn’t that what teenagers say when their parents won’t let them drop out of school to become beat poets?”

“Don’t you fucking patronize me! I have as much right to be in that room as you do, and you cannot keep me out.”

“In fact, you don’t, and I can. And I am.”

“This man has tried to kill me multiple times. He’s here to try again. I’m not playing games here.”

“Neither am I, Doctor. I’m doing my job. I’m making sure that your little tantrum doesn’t destroy three separate criminal cases. One of which, I might add, is yours.”

“My little tantrum…?”

“I realize you aren’t all that familiar with the word ‘no’, but I also realize you have a law degree and, although you’ve never practiced law, you should at least recognize the concept that having the victim do the interrogation is a bit of a conflict of interest.”

Frankie was too angry to form a coherent sentence. “You egotistical son of a… strutting around like a tin-pot dictator in your little fiefdom…”

“Calling names is not particularly refined discourse, Doctor. But if we were calling names, I’d call you a fresa[1] and suggest you go have your nails done and let the rest of us get to work.”

”A… A… you did not just call me a fresa to my face.”

“Nothing wrong with your grasp of the obvious. I’m going to…” He started moving toward the door, but she stepped in front of him, stopping with their faces very close together as they shouted.

“I am a fully-qualified Forensic Psychiatrist with all the credentials. I’m perfectly qualified to take part in questioning this suspect. I happen to be very good at interrogations, which you would know if you ever took your eyes off the mirror. I also know this case. That is why I should be in that room! Anything else you might think is utter bullshit.”

“Really. I can’t help but notice you’re quite unhappy about being one of the lowly victims we work so hard to protect. It’s lovely to play the lady bountiful in your pristine Elie Saab, but it must be terrible for you to have to rub elbows with the great unwashed…”

“Stop talking.” She growled.

“With pleasure. Get out of my way. I have an interrogation to attend.”

For a very, very long moment, they stood there, glaring at one another, their breath heaving in their anger. Rafael was furious and completely frustrated by her irrational, petulant refusal to see reason. He was also painfully hard. Before he lost control of his urge to bend her over the table in the middle of the room, he stepped around Frankie to the door and left without another word. Frankie knew she wanted to throw him to the ground at that moment. What she didn’t know was which she wanted to do first, fuck him or punch his lights out.

[1] Literally means “strawberry”, but is Mexican and Latin American slang meaning stuck up, fake, snob, one who thinks they’re better than everyone else because they were born rich, and are well-educated.

#rafael barba #raul esparza #law & order svu #law & order: special victims unit #mike dodds #olivia benson #law & order SVU Agent Dean Porter #sonny carisi #amanda rollins

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