A/N: sorry about the super late update! Enjoy! There are a lot of mysteries that will come to light in this chapter. Soon, y'all are gonna find out that everyone is connected in this tangled web. Oh, and there are a couple EO hints :D

"Melinda," Olivia called down the hallway. The ME had just come out of the room and was playing with a loose string on her lab coat when the detectives approached her. She had the rape kit in one hand and Rachel Wall's file in the other.

Melinda looked up and shook her head. "I can tell you right now that we've got an assault case on our hands without even testing anything."

Olivia sighed, her heart breaking. She hated hearing about how bad a victim's case was. She really felt for them, especially when they were so young.

"She awake?" Elliot asked.

Melinda nodded. "She's alert. Still quiet, not saying anything, just looking around with wide eyes. You guys planning on waiting till tomorrow to bring them down to the 1-6, or are you taking now?"

Olivia and Elliot looked at each other, communicating silently. "I think it's be best if we brought them down now," Elliot spoke for the both of them. Olivia had to hold back her sigh of relief. They both didn't want to go home.

"Yeah, since we don't know exactly what happened and have no idea who did it, it wouldn't be the safest idea to let them loose. We still have to get the sister's alibi. El, find out if she has a husband, we need to get his too."

Elliot nodded and headed towards the waiting room, where Holly was sitting in anticipation. Olivia hated asking the victim's close family for their alibis; they were already so distraught at what had happened to their loved one, that Olivia was sure the last thing they needed was to have to prove that they weren't the perpetrators.

All of the sudden, Olivia remembered something that the girl had said when she found her behind the dumpster. "Please don't call my parents!"

Which was odd, because Holly was her legal guardian. Olivia had assumed that the parents were out of the picture.

Unless they weren't...

"Olivia?" Melinda asked, and the detective shook herself after her thoughts.

"Yes?"

"Are you alright?" the ME asked. "You seem really spacey tonight. You stared at Elliot the whole time he was walking down the hallway just now."

Olivia blinked hard. "Ugh, sorry. It's pretty late, I didn't get enough sleep last night."

Melinda shook her head, smiling. "I'm gonna go run this at the lab; I'll be at the station in about an hour to drop it off. Take care of yourself, Liv."

Olivia smiled with no answer and watched Melinda walk down the same hallway Elliot had just been down. She hadn't had a genuine smile since earlier that evening, when Calvin and Elliot were playing rock paper scissors.

Moments before he was pried away from her.

Stop, Olivia scolded herself. Stop thinking about it. Think about your case. That's all your allowed to think about.

However, when she tried to distract herself with the case, something odd happened. She had distracted herself, all right, but the Wall case was not what her mind was all of the sudden preoccupied with.

Instead, a certain handsome detective that she had been talking to minutes before was all she could think of.

She tried to act surprised, pretend that she had no idea why. But even she knew that she was lying to herself.

All of the sudden, Detective Benson shook herself out of her thoughts. She had to get to the precinct. She had to interview Rachel Wall. She couldn't be preoccupied with other things.

Detective Stabler closed the door to one of the interview rooms at the precinct and sat down at a table directly across from the distressed Holly Michaels.

"This is going to be real fast, Holly," he promised the redhead young woman. "I just have to ask you a few questions, and once I get your answers you can go."

"What about Rachel?" she asked, her voice fragile.

"Olivia's in another room with her at this very moment, trying to get some details about what happened. As soon as we have enough to start investigating, you two can go home. Your husband's on his way?"

Holly nodded quickly. "Yeah, Mark's coming. He should be here soon."

"What do you do for a living, Holly?"

"I'm a hair stylist. I work at the salon on 37th. I got promoted to assistant manager a couple months ago, partly because my boss wanted to help me out. He knew how stressed we were, trying to make ends meet with Rachel living with us."

Elliot scribbled notes. "Uh huh. How long have you been Rachel's legal guardian?" he asked, not looking up.

"About eight months. Our parents...they got into some bad stuff to try and pay their debt and mortgages. They had three or four houses back in Tennessee."

"Oh, you're from down south originally?"

Holly nodded. Under the single fluorescent light, Elliot could see the bags under her eyes clearer than he had at the hospital. "I moved here as soon as I graduated. My dream had always been to be a hairstylist for some famous model or movie star, and I thought the Big Apple was the place to do it."

Now that he concentrated, Elliot could catch a hint of a Southern accent as Holly spoke. He wrote down all of the information she gave him so willingly.

"I guess I was little too ambitious and a little too naïve, huh? Anyways, I met Mark and we got married two years ago."

"To your knowledge, where was Rachel tonight? Well, I guess it'd be last night."

Holly sighed and put her left hand to her forehead. "This is all my fault, Detective. Oh my God, it's all my fault."

"Calm down, Holly," Stabler assured her. "Just stay calm and tell me where Rachel was tonight."

He could see a tear running down the stressed young adult's face. "I made her go to her school's JV football game," she sobbed. "She didn't want to, but I made her. She doesn't really have any friends, Detective, and it's been eight months. She keeps to herself all the time. She had so many friends back in Tennessee, I just wanted her to make some here, is all."

"It isn't your fault, Holly," Elliot said quietly to the upset woman. "You were just being a concerned older sister. You didn't mean any harm. Now, what school does she go to?"

"Kennedy Prep. My husband's father is the dean there, so he was able to get her in for a discount, and we also got a substantial amount of money after I got custody of my sister. My parents weren't exactly broke."

Elliot opened his eyes wider. "Well, doggone, two of my kids go there. Anyways, what were Rachel's friends like back at home? Does she have any friends at all, had a boyfriend?"

Holly smiled. "Back in Tennessee, she was actually pretty popular. She had a lot of friends from volleyball and at school. Her best friends were on her team, probably because they spent every living second together at practices and things. She hasn't had a boyfriend since last year; they broke up a couple months before the incident with our parents blew up."

As Stabler scribbled down notes, he glanced over at the two-way mirror to his left. He looked awful, and his eyes looked crazed just to keep from falling asleep.

"I know this room's a bit childish, but we find that kids and teen victims are more comfortable in here than in the regular interview rooms," Olivia explained, shutting the door behind her. She turned to the two way mirror and, although she could only see herself, mouthed, "Don't fall asleep," knowing that Dr. Huang's eyes were probably drooping. It was about three in the morning, and they were all exhausted. She felt bad for being selfish and deciding to interview right away so that she couldn't go home, but her apartment just was not an option at this point.

Rachel Wall examined the baby blue room, with friendly alphabet picture hanging on the walls and a toy box overflowing with stuffed animals in the corner. She reluctantly took a seat on a small cushioned chair, wrapping her arms around her knees and staring at the ground. Her expression was solemn.

Olivia pulled an identical chair up and sat next to the sixteen year old. It was an instinct that had been there since she'd gone to SVU training classes forever ago. Victims felt safer and less intimidated when you sat beside them rather than square in front of them.

A few silent moments passed before Olivia breathed in. "Do you want to tell me what happened?"

The tired teenager shrugged, pulling her legs up and resting her chin on her knees.

"Sweetie, I know that this was very traumatic for you. But I'm here to help, and the only way I can do that is if I know what happened."

A few seconds of silence passed. It felt like a lifetime to Olivia before Rachel finally spoke.

"Holly made me go to the football game at school. I didn't want to."

"Why not? I thought kids loved football games," Olivia asked, smiling.

"Yeah, if you have friends," Rachel said sharply. "I've been here eight months and haven't made any. I'm lame. So I don't go to football games."

"Okay. Have you always been this...introverted? Or is it something recent?"

"No. I liked Tennessee. I had friends there. I was cool. I was the star of the volleyball team. I had a purpose. I'm, like, nobody here," she said quietly in short, choppy sentences.

"We can talk more about that later," Olivia said. She absentmindedly put her hand on the teenager's back, stroking her ponytail gently for reassurance. "Now, I know this is going to be hard, but can you tell me what happened once you got to the football game?"

Rachel drew out a shaky breath. "It wasn't like football games back in Tennessee. Probably because I went to a prep school where everyone knew each other. I felt like...like I was being judged, or something. 'Cause I was standing alone. I tried to talk with people in some of my classes, but they didn't answer me."

The girl was talking in a tone barely over a whisper. She sounded like she had a sore throat.

"Do you need some water?" Olivia asked.

The girl shook her head. "No thanks."

Detective Benson let her recollect herself before encouraging her to go on. "I finally just gave up trying to have a conversation with someone and went to the bathroom. I tried to hide out there for the rest of the game."

"When did you come out?"

The teenager sighed. "Too early. I just decided to walk home after that; it was only the third quarter and I didn't feel like being socially awkward for another half hour."

Olivia looked down knowing where this was going. She'd been in the field for quite a while now, after all. "Go on," she said, sighing.

The detective noticed Rachel's hands start to tremble a little bit. She continued to rub her back in soothing circles.

"I-I got to the sidewalk and was walking home. My house wasn't too far away. Some guy put his hand on my shoulder. He had, um, I think he had, like, three friends with him. They basically started trying to sweet talk me into going back to one of their houses."

"And then?" Olivia asked after Rachel ceased talking.

The teenager, looked away from Olivia. The detective could see a tear glistening on her face as it rolled down.

"They didn't leave me alone and-and I finally tried to make a run for it, at least till I got around the block," she continued, her words blurring together from the sobs she was holding back in her throat. "Then they did it and dumped me off behind that dumpster and told me not to bother to show up for school again."

Olivia let the girl calm down for a few minutes, the silence of the room slowly numbing all feelings. Finally, she sat up and turned her chair slightly to face Rachel.

"Thank you for telling me, sweetie, I can't imagine how hard it is to relive it all. Can you just tell me one more thing before I let you get some rest?"

The girl nodded subtly, still not looking at Olivia.

"How did you get the gash on your leg?"

All of the sudden, her face turned white and she started breathing heavily. "I don't want to talk about that ri-right now."

Olivia nodded understandingly. "Okay. You can try and tell me tomorrow."

It was four thirty in the morning by the time Detective Stabler arrived at his spacious apartment. He turned the doorknob slowly and quietly, hoping the turning doorknob would not make any creaks. Exhausted, he threw the case file onto the kitchen table and hung his coat on the kitchen chair. He tried to be as quiet as possible, not wanting to have to deal with his wife this early in the morning.

"Dad?"

Elliot flinched and whipped around. "Hey, Lizzie," he breathed in relief. His fifteen year old daughter rubbed her eyes and yawned. "What are you doing up, do you have any idea what time it is?"

"Gotta wake up in an hour anyways, might as well stay up," she slurred tiredly, sitting on the couch.

Elliot looked at his youngest daughter and then walked over to sit next to her. "Hey, Liz, can I ask you a question?"

His daughter nodded and made a gun with her fingers, telling him to shoot away.

"Do you know a girl named Rachel Wall?"

Lizzie registered what her father had said for a couple of seconds and then nodded, sniffing. "Yeah. She's in my Spanish class."

Elliot nodded nonchalantly. "Hm. Are you two friends?"

Lizzie scoffed. "God, no. She's weird."

"How so?"

"She's pretty enough to be popular. Like, all the guys would hit on her and all the popular girls would try and invite her to stuff last year when she moved here, but she always said no or ignored them, and at lunch she just sits at the corner of the table and if someone tries to be nice to her she walks away and sits somewhere else. It's like she thinks she's above everyone."

Elliot resisted the urge to inform his daughter of what had happened. "Well, not everybody is what they seem."

Lizzie shrugged. "Whatever. Night, Dad."

As she walked out of the room, Elliot marveled at what a coincidence this was. Little did he know that he would soon find out how connected to this case he really was.

And maybe, had he made Olivia stay at the station after the social workers had taken Calvin away, certain secrets would stay in the shadows.

A/N: review, pretty please! I really wanna know what y'all think. Thanks!