Name of the Game

Two
Ben

Alexa moved back in with Gretchen in the Village, leaving Amelia's Gramercy Park place standing empty. She knew that by now Amelia's family had been made aware of her arrest, but she decided not to find out if Amelia ever told them about her sister. Instead, she avoided thinking about the family that had never been hers, really, and which was now probably lost to her forever, and picked back up with her band, playing around town locally, and on off nights, dancing, trying to avoid thinking about what all this meant. She had a sister -- and had been used by her -- so that that sister could get away with killing people. Or so Ben Stone said. Oddly, she felt ouside the situation, as if Amelia's glass pane had fallen over her eyes, and she was watching the Pages like anyone else who read the Times over those few weeks did...dispassionately, unemotionally. The more she threw herself into her singing and club-hopping, the less she had to think about what really mattered. Gretchen, Tweak, Perry...none of them read the papers, and they didn't care in any case. To them, Alexa had never left the fold, and nothing was wrong. That was how she liked it. It was easier to be with them, in their ignorance.
Most of the time, in any case. Her cool exterior came down when she was with Mike; she gave herself emotionally to him, and that left very little room for considering what the events of the last weeks could mean to her, but she was in love and felt blindsided in his presence. They fell into an easy routine -- something that felt almost too easy -- over the next few weeks. Mike, when work didn't keep him until ten at night, came along to see her play or to go dancing. On his earlier nights, he phoned her to say where he'd be after the last call of the day, and they would pick a nearby restaurant and meet there. After that, they might go dancing, or back to his place, but they usually ended up sleeping together. Now that Alexa felt comfortable with him, she was learning, and learning to experiment. While Mike's expertise was a little unsettling to her, she also knew she was learning the right way.
He was one of the very few who knew about Amelia, and how Amelia had used the fact of her twin to avoid arrest for so long, but he wouldn't discuss it with her. She had tried, over dinner one night, to see how Mike felt about what was going on. He blew it away with a wave of his fork and told her he shoudn't be discussing police business with her. She knew it was a flimsy excuse, and it needled her, but she wasn't ready to make it into a full-fledged argument, and let it lapse. But a few days later, thinking about Amelia surfaced in her mind again and she began to wonder if she wasn't letting her love life steer her away from what was right here. Maybe Amelia had just been playing around. Maybe she wasn't guilty. Was Alexa letting herself be blinkered twice? Lying awake that night, she turned to Mike and said, "Mike...I can't help thinking about Amelia."
He sighed. "Alexa, come on now, you know I can't discuss this with you."
"Can't or won't, Mike?"
It was the first time she had challenged him in a while and he heard her sister in her voice. "What kind of question is that? You don't think she did it or something? Or is this some kind of sister thing?"
She swung her legs over the side of the bed and stared at the carpet. "You're making fun of me."
He ran his hand up and down her back. "Come on, don't get so huffy over it. Alexa, it makes me really, really uncomfortable to talk about this with you. Bad enough we have to book someone with your face. I have to keep this stuff separate."
"I went to visit her," she said, looking over her shoulder at his reaction.
Mike sat up in bed. "Why in the world would you do that?"
"She wouldn't talk to me," Alexa said, not responding, staring at the television set, which wasn't turned on. The fact that it was Thursday night flashed through her mind. "She just came out to her chair, sat back, and stared at me. My throat felt all sore, and I just got up and left after fifteen minutes. I didn't know what to say to her. She was...me, my face, but a total stranger."
"I can't believe you went to see her," Mike said, rubbing his face. "That's all I need."
She whirled around. "That's all you need, Detective? Why is this about you?"
He stared at her and raised his hands, as if trying to grasp something from the air, and finally groaned. "You're walking a very fine line here," he told her. "Very fine. There's twelve million different ways I could get in trouble for this, for just being with you, since you're directly related to her. The closer you are to her, the worse trouble I could get in. I just can't be your sounding board, here, Alexa. And if you have to do crazy stuff like go and see her, maybe we should just forget the whole deal."
She flinched at the thought that he might just leave. "Do you want that, Mike? Do you want out?"
Mike picked up her hand and kneaded it. "No, Alexa, I don't want out. I don't want to leave. We've got something really good here. Don't make me leave."
And she understood. No more Amelia, not with Mike. "Okay," she said. "I don't want you to leave either. I won't bring it up again."
"That's my girl," he told her and pulled her to him.
But the irritant didn't just go away because Mike wouldn't acknowledge its being there. At the Cantina one night, while Mike was off getting drinks, Alexa had waved over Tweak. "What do you have?" she shouted over the crowd, not even fully thinking through what she was doing or why.
"Why, A, my girl," he said winking. "Whatchoo need?"
"I need," she said suddenly, "not to care."
"No-care medicine!" he crowed. "Indeed. Lessee what the doctor has for you!"
She pulled some money from her pocket and they made the trade as Mike strode back over to them with the rum and cokes. She dropped the pill back in her pocket, ready to use it at any time, hoping if she really needed it, or felt some weird urge to talk to Mike about Amelia again she could just blank out. But that night, just having it was enough, like a talisman, and she didn't take it. She merely liked the comfort having it meant -- Tweak hadn't even said what it was, entirely. And there it sat, hard and blue in her pocket.
A few days after Amelia's arraignment, however, Alexa was itching to talk with someone, anyone about Amelia. Seeing her sister in court for the arraignment -- for of course Alexa had gone, wearing a floppy hat and sunglasses -- had taken the wind from her, and she had run up to Claire after bail was declared and arranged for the four of them -- including Mike and Ben -- to have lunch together soon, as a kind of thank you acknowledgement for pushing so hard to keep Amelia in her cell. Claire had smiled at Alexa's costume and said she'd see what she could do.
In the end, Claire had been unable to make it, so the three of them had ordered in Chinese and sat in Ben's office one chilly October lunch hour. Alexa put on a forced cheeriness she did not quite feel, wanting to talk to someone, feeling the need to blank out, the specter of Amelia hanging over the whole lunch. Still, hearing Ben call her "Alexa" finally -- instead of "Ms. Page" -- was an incredible relief, and that made her feel better, like less of a case element and more of a real person. She had begun to respect Ben Stone quite a lot over the past weeks, knowing he had kept her identity a low-profile item, knowing he had orchestrated the interrogation room revelations cannily, and she had begun to look on him as someone she could trust. And then, as she dug into her fried rice, she realized there might be an end to her having no one to talk to.
Mike left after he finished his food, obviously not entirely comfortable in Stone's presence, preferring to be out of the wood-paneled room and out on the street, on his own turf, as soon as possible. He gave her a quick kiss on the cheek and told her he'd be calling about later that night, and she told him she'd be home around five or so and would wait for him. When the door closed behind him, she felt almost awkward being left with Stone. He knew so much about her, and what she had gone through...but he probably had a lot of work to do and didn't need her hanging around. "I suppose I should get moving, too," she said, half-rising.
"No real rush," he told her, shrugging, and peered over his desk into her rice. "You hardly ate anything."
She shrugged and stood. "Well, you know, not hungry. I don't eat much, normally."
"Is everything all right, Ms. Page?" he asked her, then corrected himself. "Alexa."
Somehow, hearing him saying her name changed everything, and she sunk back in her chair. "I'm sorry....Ben," she said hesitantly. "I'm just jumpy. I'm afraid I've done something terrible."
"Terrible?"
She nodded. "Like a mistake."
"Do you need to talk?" he put down his food and walked around to the table where she sat.
She took in a deep breath. "Probably. Definitely. But you're busy. I don't want to...."
He fixed his eyes on her like had when trying to pull the story from her just a few days before. "It's about your sister, isn't it," he said calmly.
Alexa's eyes widened. "How can you tell?"
"I have to say I was wondering when you'd stop pretending to be in such a good mood. You don't hide it very well," he told her.
She stared at him.
"Is what's troubling you having to do with your hanging out in the DA's office with the detective who arrested her and the person who's going to prosecute her? That'd make me worried, if I were you."
For a moment she sat stunned at his interpretation, which of course was exactly right, then burst out, "How do you know she did it, Ben? Are you certain? What if you're wrong? What if I'm on the wrong team? Shouldn't I be out there supporting my family?"
"I think," he said, "that's something you're going to have to figure out on your own. I know I'm right, I know we've got the right woman here. But as to what you should do, Alexa...that's something you're going to have to decide. I know if my sister -- or my brother -- had done this kind of thing I wouldn't like his being arrested, but I'd sleep better at night knowing he was in jail for it. And those Pages...are you a Page, or a Radin, Alexa?"
"I don't know," she said softly. "I just feel my insides pulling at me. I know she did it. But what if I'm wrong?"
He nodded slowly. "As I said, something you're going to have to decide for yourself. Surely you feel one way or the other."
"I suppose I do," she said, "but I just need to hear it again. And there's no one to talk to. No one really knows what happened, except you, and Mike, and Claire...and she doesn't really know everything. And Mike...he won't discuss it."
Ben felt touched that she had felt comfortable enough to talk to him at all. Despite his general policy of not getting to know people on the job, he felt a kind of pull toward Alexa and the uniquness of her situation. Other than the Page case, things weren't too hectic, and he had no problem with letting her use him as a sounding board. "Well, Alexa, if you need to talk, you can come here. Unless I'm in with someone else, I think I can make some time."
She smiled at him and he was momentarily dazzled. "Thanks, Ben," she told him, standing and shouldering her small backpack. "You may regret that but...thanks." And she reached into her pocket and pulled out what looked like a blue aspirin, leaving it alone on the table.
"Does this mean something?" he asked her.
"The beginning and the end of my drug habit," she said. "I...got it the other night. It's a terrible thing to think nobody wants to listen to you." She eyed it. "I don't even know what the hell it is, it was just supposed to make me not care. I was going to take it after lunch and see what happened."
Ben picked it up between his fingers and walked around the table, leaning up against it and holding the pill a few inches away from both of their faces. Then he let it slip into his fist. "You're always supposed to care, Alexa. It's when you stop caring that you're really in trouble. If you can't talk to Detective Logan, come to me before you take one of these, okay?"
"Yes. Thanks, Ben."
"Are you going to be all right now? I do have to be in Judge Rosenfelt's chambers in just a few more minutes, but I want to know you're okay."
"For now," she said, having an ally making the weight on her heart already feel lighter.
And so she came to a kind of resolution. When she felt troubled, she stopped bothering Mike, letting him think the whole Amelia concern had been just a passing phase. Instead, she took to dropping by Ben's office, unburdening herself to him, listening to him dispense some thoughtful advice -- which he seemed pleased to do regardless of how often she came by -- and gradually she began to come to terms with Amelia, the Pages, and finally, Mike. Everything was rolling along smoothly. Yet something in her was waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It did, about three weeks after the arraignment.
Being late, Alexa had learned, for Mike, wasn't just an occurrence, it was an art form. He would call her, saying "Hey, Rock Chick," (after seeing her play with her band just once he'd started with the nickname, which she thought was hilarious and obnoxious at the same time, but let him get away with it since she'd started the whole thing with 'Detective Mike'), he'd announce, "I'm uptown at 126th Street, we're about to talk to some guy about how his revolver got missing. Meet me at the Greek place on 9th in a half?"
Quickly, she learned there was no way he'd make it in 30 minutes, so she started giving him forty-five when asked for a half. And then, he'd still be late. Traffic, or a report, or Briscoe shooting the shit, something would delay him. And he'd be delayed just until her patience had worn out and she'd be standing, putting on her coat, when he'd come busting into the restaurant, the flaps of his leather coat flying behind him. "Hey, great," he'd come over and give her one of his trademark afghan hugs, where he wrapped his arms all the way around her and absorbed her into his jacket, "you just got here."
She never decided it was worth clueing him in to the truth. "Fancy that," she'd say back. "Ready for food?"
And they would eat.
So when he asked for a half and said "Meet me at DoJo's in the Village, I'm only over on Broadway, there's some kind of thing in an abandoned building on East 19th" she was ready to wait at least fifteen minutes after the forty-five she'd allow him on a normal night. 'Some kind of thing,' in Logan-ese often translated into a corpse, and that took a lot longer than he ever estimated. But the forty-five turned into an hour, and the hour into an hour fifteen, and she even made great ceremony of standing up and shouldering her coat. The door opened just then and without even thinking she smiled at the patron coming in -- but it hadn't been Mike. And she slumped back into her seat and wondered if his timing was off that night.

They were in the area, so it made sense to check out the place. Briscoe's beeper had gone off and they'd made a call from a payphone at midtown Broadway. "They say," Briscoe told Logan, "there was a gunshot in this building on 19th, they think somebody's up there being dead."
"Nineteenth?" Logan wondered aloud. "Don't they have people in the buildings down there? Nobody call for help? What kind of excuse is that to send us over there?"
Briscoe shrugged. "Apparently it's some empty co-op waiting for renovation. Somebody reported a gunshot, then saw some guy run out of the building. They're sending over a car but we're closest, so we're supposed to go check it out. Pretty good chance there's someone waiting for us up there."
"Okay," Logan told him and checked his watch. "Gimme a minute."
"Calling the wife again, Mike?" Briscoe smirked.
Logan made an obscene gesture and listened as the phone connected, then told Alexa where she should meet him for dinner. "Yeah, right. Gimme a half. Yeah. Love you too." And he returned the phone to the cradle.
"You are such the nice boy, Mike Logan," Briscoe told him as they climbed into their unmarked car.
Dispatch had one thing right: the building was empty. Not in wretched condition; it wasn't that bad a part of town, but it was empty, so empty that the place echoed eerily around them. The door had been pried open already, and left standing wide when they arrived. "I don't like this," Briscoe told Logan. "Just not right."
"You wanna wait?" Logan asked him, bringing his hand around to reassure himself of his gun.
Briscoe smirked. "Nah. Let's not make you later than usual for dinner."
Logan cracked a grin. "You know, she never says anything about it, too, it's like she pretends she just got there when I get in, when I know she's been waiting ages."
Briscoe nodded. "Yeah, it's love all right." Which seemed to break the initial instinctive tension, and they cautiously wandered around the first floor, opening doors, peering in, finding nothing.
"You think upstairs?" Logan looked at Briscoe.
"Must be. Only four floors, you take third, I'll take second how about."
They split off, Mike finding his breath coming a little faster as he scaled the winding Victorian staircase to the third floor, and swore for the thousandth time that he would try to avoid lunching on so many hot dogs in the future. He paused near the top of the steps, scouting around, picking up some stray papers on the floor. Downstairs he could hear Briscoe opening doors, calling out, hearing only his own voice echo back. He's right, thought Logan, it is spooky in here.
Most of the apartments on the third floor wouldn't open. Logan rattled a few doorknobs, but nothing moved, then tried kicking in the ones that were locked, but they wouldn't budge. After trying three or four that way, down the hall he could have sworn he heard a sound. "Hey, Lennie," he called down but didn't hear a reply. "There's a noise in 315. Going to check."
It felt stupid doing it, knowing the building was empty, but he knocked first. "Anybody in there? Open up, it's the police." There was no response, so Logan rattled the handle, and suddenly it slipped free, the door swinging open to reveal an empty room. He'd just taken a step in to survey the place when the fat end of a rifle butt smacked hard into his face. There was a second of searing awareness of black pain, and he fell to the floor, unconscious.
Briscoe looked up the stairwell, hearing the second noise right after Logan's voice. "Hey, Mike, you see anything?" When there was no response he took out his gun and leaped up the stairs. Logan was crumpled where he'd stood, half in and half out of 315, and without thinking Briscoe ran over to him. As he crouched over his partner, he barely saw the boot come out of the room and kick him square in the chin, and he definitely never noticed the rifle butt come down against his head.

The car was unmarked, but not to Alexa, who had seen the ugly blue thing more times than she could count over the past few weeks. After an hour and a half she'd progressed from being frustrated to angry to concerned to frantic back to angry again, and they'd finally kicked her out of her table at DoJo's for not ordering more than a soda. Pissed off, she decided to find where Mike had said he'd last be, and based on his somewhat vague directions she had a pretty good sense of where to look. Finding the car cinched their location. The building looked abandoned, the car sat outside, and without thinking, she just strode in. "Detective Mike, if you're still here I'm going to be really cheesed off," she called to the empty building. "Where are you?"
She found Briscoe flat out on the third floor, a small wound at the top of his head beginning to crust over with blood. Checking for his pulse, which felt regular, she tried to gently slap him awake, but he wouldn't move. Then, her fears for Mike overwhelming concern for Briscoe, she stood and walked carefully over to the one open door on the floor, room 315. A small pool of clear blood lay just inside the doorway, but there was no sign of Mike in the empty room. And then -- she saw it -- the room wasn't empty. Neatly folded, sitting all alone in the center of the room, was Mike's old leather jacket. She picked it up and started to cry. Something had gone terribly, terribly wrong.
She put on the jacket, pulling it tight, and walked outside in a daze. At the first payphone she came to, she called Ben Stone's office.
Stone took care of everything; once he'd calmed Alexa down to where she said she'd wait outside the building he had Captain Cragen send over a squad car and an ambulance. And though it was eight in the evening, he took a cab over from his office to look into how Alexa was handing things. As he arrived, the formerly quiet street was chaotic, full of flashing colored lights, yellow tape, and people rushing around. He saw Briscoe sitting up in the back of the ambulance, a white bandage glowing from the side of his gray head, sipping something from a paper cup. "You okay, Len?" he said by way of greeting.
"Stone," said Briscoe, a little weakly, and flinched. "What a headache. Holy shit. What the hell are you doing out here? Isn't it past your working hours?"
"Is your head all right? Looks like you got pretty beat up."
Briscoe shook his head slowly. "Just two good hits, a boot in the chops, a gun to the head. Doesn't take much to make me go flat."
Ben nodded. "Know where Ms. Page is?"
Briscoe looked a little bemused. "Yeah, they said she found us. Found me, that is. She call you?"
"She was scared."
Briscoe nodded. "I was scared. She's over by the car, I think."
Ben found her hugging her knees on a rise by the sidewalk, and he sat down next to her. "How're you doing, Alexa?"
She turned to him, eyes wide, forehead a mass of furroughs. "Ben, you came."
"Just wanted to make sure you were all right. Anybody ask you what happened?"
"No," she said quietly. "I'm sure they will. I'm just...waiting."
"Did they find Detective Logan yet?"
Fresh tears started running down her cheeks. "No, Ben, he's not in the building. They can't find him. The only thing I found was this jacket of his, folded up in the middle of the room. Like we were meant to find it."
"You should have let them dust it for fingerprints."
She hugged the coat closer. "They can have it when they ask."
Not that a coat would do much good, Ben reasoned. There were probably a thousand prints on that coat from all the years Logan had worn it. It wasn't his style, but he felt suddenly protective of her and put an arm around her shoulders. "Don't worry," he told her. "They'll find him."
"I know they will." She stared at him a moment. "But Ben, I'm scared they might not find him alive."

Confronted with minutiae, even the worst horrors take on a lesser terror. Each day Logan was missing Alexa found herself asked about more detail, for more information. First they took the coat but, as Ben suspected, there were no useful prints and they gave it back to her when she insisted. They took her statement about finding Briscoe and the jacket. Briscoe told her how he'd run up the stairs and seen Mike on the ground just before he'd gotten hit. It turned out there was no dead body in the apartment building at all, and no traces that anyone other than the detectives had been there. There was no shell casing from the supposed gunshot that brought them to the building. It was looking more and more like a deliberate setup.
"Yeah, but for what?" as Briscoe asked Cragen a day or two later, when he came back to work. "The Logan family jewels? Who kidnaps a cop?"
Cragen rubbed the back of his neck. "We don't even know it is a kidnapping. There's no note, no nothing." He paused. "Maybe not the Logan jewels. What about his girlfriend's money?"
Briscoe waved it away. "She doesn't have anything. She's on the outs with them. Remember?"
Cragen nodded. "Check it out anyway."
Alexa came to visit Ben after that particular question and answer session with Briscoe, distraught and frayed. She was coming to depend on Stone as the only friend in the offices who really knew what was going on, and to his surprise, Ben found he didn't mind the role she'd imposed on him. He gave her time whenever his assistant said she was in. "Ben, they think he was kidnapped," she told him, pacing his office.
"That's not such a stretch," he reminded her, leaning over his desk.
"They asked me if I thought the kidnappers had taken him to get to my money," she stared at him. "That's what Briscoe asked me. My money. As if I had any."
Ben shook his head. "The abductors certainly wouldn't know that."
She stopped and looked his way. "You think that's the reason?"
Ben shrugged, though not indifferently. "There could be a million reasons. Another could be that Detective Logan got hit, got up, has lost his memory and is wandering the streets, not knowing where he got hit or why."
"Ben, you're a shit sometimes," she glared at him.
He tilted his head and folded his hands. "All part of the job, Ms. Page. The point is, nobody knows. They're only doing their job. Let them do it."
Ben didn't hear from her for nearly a week after that meeting, and was beginning to think he should check up on her again when he got a late-afternoon call. The background was noisy, and she said she couldn't talk just that moment, but would he meet her at the Supper Club on 47th at 9:00? She had found something she thought he should look at.
"Me and not the police, Alexa?"
The noise in the background overwhelmed her. "I can't really hear you, Ben," she shouted. "Will you come?"
"All right."
"Great. And Ben --"
"Yes?"
"You might want to bring earplugs."

He heard Alexa long before he saw her, arriving at the Supper Club to find it was not actually a cozy oak-paneled dining room but a packed, buzzing rock club. He gave his name at the door and they let him in, the music pouring out of the main room growing louder and louder. In fact, it wasn't so much that the music was loud and blasting, but that the volume was cranked up high. Standing around in his tie and suit, overcoat hanging over his hands he felt twice his age, but his concerns became irrelevant when he caught Alexa singing onstage.
This complete alter-ego switcharound caught Ben off guard. He knew she played in a band, because during her initial statement she'd mentioned it briefly, but he had no idea what kind of music, and certainly never thought she sang. And she did that quite well, not caterwauling or showing off, just a simple, pleasant way of singing. On stage she came off glowing, electric, not the frightened young woman who had waited for him a little over a week ago. He wondered briefly if either version of Alexa was an act, and decided that based on her Amelia impersonation, and now this rock star persona that she did have the ability to wear more than one glamour at once. It was unsettling.
After her band's part of the show ended she found him downstairs and grabbed his arm, leading him out towards Times Square. "Gee, Ben, you look a little shell-shocked."
He nodded. "You never cease to amaze me, Alexa Radin."
She squeezed his arm, still pumped on adrenaline from the show, and tightly packed together they pushed through the night crowds. "Where can we sit down and get something to eat? I'm always starved after a show."
"You can just walk out when you're done like that? No crazed fans, no equipment to stow?"
She waved it off. "The guys are taking care of that tonight. I told them I had to meet my lawyer."
"And that's me?"
She grinned at him. "No, you're my assistant district attorney."
Perversely, he decided to take her to the Rainbow Room, where, on off nights he had a little pull, thanks to his boss, so they walked down to Rockefeller Center and soon found themselves sliding into a booth. "Are you eating?" she asked him.
"May as well," he told her. "Not like I got any dinner with the caseload we had to sift through tonight."
"Well, at least it's over until tomorrow morning. Shall we order wine, Mr. Stone?"
He stared at her for a moment or two. "You're a little more upbeat than I think I expected to find you."
She literally sat on her hands for a second and ran her eyes around the room, watching the dancers, smiling, biting her lip. "Sorry," she said, visibly trying to hyper-down. "Some of it's post-show. I get like that. The rest...." she waved her hand. "But I want a glass of wine first."
They ordered some for the table and he let her have about half of a glass before he spoke again. "Are you all right, Alexa? I feel like I'm always asking you that."
She nodded and reached around into her tiny backpack/purse and withdrew two business cards. One read:

Castle Demolition and Restoration
No object too worthless, no project too small
Samuel Wells
(212) 574-3976

and the other:

Myron's Pawnbrokers
"Good prices for your valuables"
14th Street, Brooklyn
(718) 777-2995

Ben scanned them and handed them back. "They don't say much to me. What are they for?"
"I found them. In Mike's inside jacket pocket."
Ben sat up straighter. "I'd assumed the coat had already checked out."
"They must have overlooked the inside pocket...it's just a little sliver of an opening, really. I...was wearing it and put something in the pocket tonight and felt them in there."
"And as far as you know, Detective Logan wasn't renovating any buildings or selling off any old TVs?"
She shook her head. "I found them...and I just knew they weren't his. Mike's not a business card guy. And I thought, well, maybe he found them at the apartment building. Or that they were put there....after."
"Did you call these places?"
She finished her glass of wine. "I was going to. But I only found them a few hours ago. And I decided this time to let the police do their job. Besides, there's nothing we can do about the cards tonight, is there?" she asked him, and he thought about it for a few minutes, staring first at the cards, then at her, then at his plate.
They could, of course, do the obvious, which was to call the numbers on the cards. He had admonished her to sit still and let the police do their work before, and not to stand in their way, but right now that was a flimsy excuse. She could call the numbers at any time. He could, too...the Rainbow Room had phones just downstairs, and for the price of a dime -- or was it a quarter these days? Ben couldn't remember -- the chase could begin, if in fact there was a chase to be derived from the cards. Surely she knew this. Yet she had asked him, which meant she was either afraid to find out, willing to wait another night, or didn't really believe the cards were real clues. He stared at her again, watching as her bright eyes scanned the dancers -- why in the hell had he decided to bring them to the Rainbow Room? It was far and beyond his budget -- and had a revelation. She didn't want to know, not tonight. She had called him in a rush to underscore the importance of her find, but then pulled back on it, suddenly patient. Wasn't she concered with Logan's safety? Of course she was. But there was that fear, perhaps, of coming so close to a break and not having it work -- she wasn't willing to have her heart broken again in so short of a time. Let the possibility infuse them tonight, the thrill of possiblity make anything possible. And she had let him decide for them both. So he paused, and the mere fact of his pausing surprised him. If anything, Ben Stone knew where duty lay. He knew what he was supposed to do right now, he always knew what he was supposed to do, a moral compass that often had made him the butt of jokes. And he nearly said, "Let's go phone them ourselves and see what comes of it," nearly ended their dinner by choosing the right thing.
But she didn't want to know. Not yet.
So he paused. And said, "We'll let the police do their job in the morning."
She turned to him then -- was that surprise in her eyes that he read? -- and smiled broadly. "I thought that was the only thing we could do. I'm glad you agreed with me."
And he buried the compass down for now, ignoring the pointer for once, and abandoned himself to enjoying the company of Alexa for the evening. He pointed out the best choices on the menu, and they ordered -- and consumed -- two bottles of wine on their own. When the steaks had been downed, she sat contentedly against the back of their shared curved booth, and closed her eyes a moment. "Whooh," she said, and giggled, putting her hand to her face. "Thanks, Ben. That was quite a meal."
"I've never seen someone your size put away that much beef at one sitting."
"I haven't had an appetite since...it happened. And suddenly, I was ravenous. I think I made up for the past week." She put a hand on her belly and closed her eyes. "I'll regret this later."
He looked at her. "Sometimes, you just have to do the things you'll regret anyway."
She cracked open one eye at him. "That doesn't sound a bit like you, Ben Stone."
She was right. The wine was getting to him; he felt lifted, and fearless, as if he were watching himself acting out a story. "Then how about this one -- want to dance?"
Alexa sat up straight. "Oh, lord, Ben, I can't dance. Not this kind of dancing. My kind, yes, but this kind...."
"Just follow my lead," he said, standing already. She offered her hand, and he pulled her from the booth. Somewhere he could hear the band playing some old Sinatra tune.
"People tell me I lead," she giggled at him. "You're right, you're going to regret this."
For all her humility, she wasn't bad, though she was right -- she tended to lead. But when he got her to forget about concentrating so hard on the music, when he got her to look at him and not the floor, she relaxed and they were able to dance in short, swaying steps. "You aren't terrible," he told her, turning around, seeing the other dancers, the other patrons in the fuzzy distance, but only really seeing Alexa.
She winked. "I'm not so good, either. You'll have to come to disco night, now."
"Not if you paid me," he told her. "Not in a thousand lifetimes."
She was quiet a moment, thinking. "You did look a little out of place at the Supper Club tonight. But I thought you did a great job pretending you belonged there anyway."
"Well, as your assistant district attorney I have to blend into multiple situations."
She laughed. "Not in that suit, I'd imagine."
"You take issue with my suits?"
The song slowed, and they began to drag their feet more, and stood closer, but far enough apart to talk. She shook her head, no longer lighthearted. "No, Ben. Seeing you in my world, though, and not in the offices, or in the courtroom, or at the precinct....I have to admit it rattled me a little. I think I wasn't sure you existed, until that moment I found you there."
"That's not very flattering," he teased.
She shook her head. "I guess what I really mean is....I didn't know people like you existed anywhere. I've never met anybody like you, Ben...it's like a feeling I got after a really short time of talking to you. You're -- god, this sounds stupid...." she looked off to the side, then shot back. "You're good, you're real, you're truthful. You're the kind of person I think I used to believe in before I grew up and realized most people were only out for themselves. But you've always been there for me, and I've listened to how you think, and how you do things, and I can't think of anyone I have more respect, or admiration for. I feel really lucky to know you, Ben. I think this way I can finally figure out how to act, how I'd like to act." She stared at the floor, suddenly quiet. "I think I'm drunk. I can't figure out why else I'd be telling you this."
He pulled her to him so they wouldn't have to meet each others' eyes, and he stared out over her shoulder, with no idea how to respond, feeling her pressed against him, and tried to focus on something else, anything else. His head was spinning, and he knew he was just as tipsy as she was, and he knew if he acted now he would regret it later. But his heart was bursting. He'd known he had feelings for her, and known there was no use in entertaining them, not with her still very much attached to Logan, but he also was beginning to realize that she might have equally sublimated feelings for him, feelings she was disguising in a mentor/parental shield -- genuine but nonetheless a guard. For what good would it do them to be involved? Indeed, who did he think he was, anyway? She was only a few years older than his daughter. Why was it not possible to just remain....friends?
The song ended, and he pulled from her, trying to clear his head. "You don't do yourself justice."
She looked at him quizzically.
"Methinks the lady doth protest to much," he told her, and led her from the dance floor to the table, where he picked up his coat. "Your dancing is superb. But I think we should probably be going."
She did not speak to him, just continued looking at him oddly, until they were outside in the cool of the evening. A strong breeze whipped against them, making his overcoat flap and her hair detach from the loose braid she had concocted earlier. Ben stepped into the street to hail a cab.
"Did I say something wrong?" she finally asked, watching him stand in the empty street. When no cabs came at first, she followed him out to the edge of the tar. "I didn't think I said anything offensive, Ben...I'm sorry...I...."
He suddenly stepped up to her and roughly grabbed her arms, staring directly into her face, his eyes burning with the alcohol, and another kind of intensity. "You can be so incredibly naive. I don't think we should talk any more about this, Alexa," he told her. "I don't think we should get to know each other any better."
At his grasp she had clenched up and when he finished, releasing her arms, she held the frozen position for an extra moment. This time, as Ben waved, a cab pulled over at his outstretched arm. Quietly, she climbed in, leaning part way out as he tried to close the door. "Ben, please don't abandon me. I need a friend right now."
He leaned in and in his measured, courtroom tones, told her, "What you need is Detective Logan. You don't need me. I have enough friends." And he closed the door before she could say anything more, staring in the opposite direction as it drove away, but not moving for another ten minutes.

But he didn't go home. Heading back to the deadly empty house he'd been allowed to keep after the divorce would have been shattering, and he didn't think he'd be able to sleep if he went home just then, even if it was nearly eleven and he had work the next day. Instead, he headed to Barney Hoskyns' flat uptown. Barney, an incurable insomniac, now, he'd be up. And he always let Ben in, no matter what the hour. Law school friends were the only kind of friends who understood late nights.
The apartment was cozy and warm, and for a short time Ben felt he had stepped back into the nineteenth century. Barney had lit a large fire and was obviously reading the paper by it when Ben had rung the bell. No television, low lamplight, the warm fire, and without even asking suddenly Ben had a glass of brandy in his fist. He shrugged off his overcoat and sat on a small loveseat by the fire, realizing Barney was watching him.
"Up for some chess, Ben?"
He shook his head. "Mind's too foggy, Barney. Can't think clear enough to make much of an opponent."
"That's why it's the perfect game, Ben. Get you cleared up in no time. Better than sinus medicine." Barney stood, lifting the heavy chess set and clearing a small table before the fire. Slowly, but not all that reluctantly, Ben joined him on the other side of the board and took first move. They'd advanced three pieces before Ben spoke.
"Would you like to know what brings me here, Barney?"
Barney thought a moment, his heavy moustache nearly covering his index finger as he ran it across his lips. "Naturally, Ben. Just didn't sense you were in a talking kind of mood."
Ben took some more of his brandy. "Don't know if I am. Just couldn't.....go home."
Barney took his pawn. "Think, man. That was a terrible move you just executed. Think."
Ben thought.
"I wouldn't have placed you for love troubles, Ben, it's not like you. You're like a woman after the change...a few hot flashes but nothing serious. No more...troubles."
"I'm not sure I like the allusion, there, Barney, but I have to say you're pretty astute for an insomniac."
"Nothing in it, my friend. What else could it be with you? You can't go home? What nonsense is that, anyway, unless you're going to feel how empty it is. And your timing...well...seems to me you had a big date, and something happened. But you ended up here, 11:30. I'm not practicing, Ben, but I can use judicial logic if I want to."
Ben moved his rook. "Indeed. I did have a date, of sorts."
"Let me guess. You tried to jump her in the alley."
Ben frowned at him.
"Hmm..." Barney took another piece. "Hmm...still not thinking, much, Ben. And hmm....to your reaction, too. It must be serious or you'd have laughed at that one."
"I don't want it to be serious, Barney, I want it to go away."
Barney paused with his knight in mid-air. "You want her to go away, or you want... 'it' to go away?"
Ben looked at his hands and finished his glass. "I want.... what I feel to go away."
"What do you feel?"
He stared at the fire, and was silent, and Barney waited. Then, "I feel...a pain I haven't felt since Janice and I first met. And I thought it had died when I got older, and here it is again, rearing an atrophied head at me."
"So why is that so horrendous?" Barney rose and brought the carafe of brandy over, refilling Ben's glass. "She's married, isn't she."
Ben took a sip absently, beginning to feel the combined weight of brandy and wine in his system, and he knew he wouldn't make it home that night. How was it that when men met Alexa they never quite made it home that night? Logan....she made him late to work too, that first night. "No. Not married. But taken. Quite taken."
"So she can't be un-taken?"
Ben looked at his friend. "Not right now. I can't imagine it. And...until tonight I thought it was just me, that I could be her protector and shield, that I was being like...a parent. But she made me feel tonight that there might be more there, and at first I ran with it but then....." he sighed.
"How old is she, Ben?"
He laughed brutally, shortly. "She's in her twenties. How's that for a kick? I may as well put a sign around my neck: 'man in midlife crisis, ignore and it will go away.'"
"Will it go away?"
"I want it to. I want to ignore her, and I can't. We're working on a case together."
"Not your assistant....what's her name, Kincaid?"
Ben shook his head. "No, no, not her...just someone else."
Barney sat back, realizing the chess game was over. "Well, Ben, you have two choices: go through with it all the way, or wonder for the rest of your life. To my mind, at our age, not going for it seems to be more of a crime than ever before. How much longer will we have to have young women treat us like men, and not their fathers? You already have a daughter, Ben. Stop being this one's father, and try something else. Maybe friend. Maybe lover. But it'd be a sin not to try at all. Or worse, to lose her completely."
Ben felt himself fading from the conversation, and Barney's voice began to come to him as if in a dream. "Mind if I stay here tonight?"
His friend waved his arm up the staircase. "I won't be using my bedroom. You take it. You've got work tomorrow. But Ben....consider it."
Ben stood and trudged to the staircase. "I already am, Barney."

A day or two after Ben handed over the cards to Briscoe, he called Alexa to his office. She came hesitantly, not certain what to expect from the meeting or from Ben, who had bemused her entirely, but Briscoe and Claire were already there when she arrived and the mood was fairly formal. "Is this official, Mr. Stone?" she asked him. "Did you ask me here for questioning?"
"Have a seat, Ms. Page," he told her. "Detective Briscoe just brought some more information in and I was wondering if you had any thoughts on the subject."
She gave him a suspicious look but quickly transferred her attention to Briscoe, and sat. "Hello, Detective. Is your head better?"
He smiled a little at her and touched where the bandage had been. "All the time. Thanks, I never told you that." There was a pause, and then he pulled out his notebook. "We didn't think of this until we got your cards. But do you know who owns the building where I got laid out?"
She shook her head.
"The building is owned by one Glenn Page and Company. Your father." He let that sink in, and then continued. "The renovation firm run by Sam Wells -- that doesn't exist. When you call the number, this is the message you get." And he reached over and switched on his pocket tape recorder, and a drawn out male voice began speaking.
"Good afternoon. Castle Renovation and Demolition is currently closed. We have many valuable items we are working on renovating, in particular a 38 year old Irish crystal sculpture of Boston's International Airport. We are currently looking for one particular piece, a book about a falsely accused New York lady, and we suspect it is currently being held on a nearby New York island. We will be happy to trade one for the other. All inquiries, please leave a message at the tone. But time is short. It would be a shame to have to trade renovation...for demolition." The tape player beeped and Briscoe shut it off.
"Pretty silly I-spy stuff," Briscoe told her, "but I think we get the message here."
"It's your ransom note," Alexa whispered. "What are you going to do?"
"We traced the call," Briscoe told Stone. "Empty office room with an answering machine plugged in. Landlord said the place hadn't been rented in a year, so he had no idea how the player got in there. He's a dead end."
"It doesn't make any sense," said Claire. "What they want, obviously, is to have the charges against Amelia Page dropped in exchange for Detective Logan's release. But even if they let him go, we can always have her picked up again. There's no double jeopardy in arresting someone."
Ben contemplated that, and then spoke. "I suspect," he began softly, "that were we to pick up Ms. Amelia Page again -- before she flew the country, that is -- that we would find ourselves in the same boat after a short time. And if not Detective Logan, perhaps another officer would be missing." He looked at Alexa. "Your people certainly have a very long reach."
Alexa flared at him. "They're not my people, Ben Stone, and I think you know that's a crappy thing to say."
He nodded, for some reason satisfied by her outburst. "You realize we can't give in," he told Alexa.
She flushed. "So what, you're going to let them just ---"
Briscoe turned to her. "We're not going to just anything, Alexa. We're going to find him before they know what's hit them. But we can't just go letting your sister out of jail. We'd have every two-bit criminal's friend kidnapping the rest of the police around the city to get their own personal murderer out of jail."
"So what are you going to do next, then?"
Briscoe held up the other card. "I was thinking I'd start here. This place is in the yellow pages. And I want you along, to look over this little pawn place for any of Mike's stuff that you might recognize. Clothes, shoes, whatever. Let's see if they're that dumb."

Myron's pawn shop was a pack rat's dream. Half pawn shop, half garage sale, tagged items sat piled against the walls, reaching high to the ceiling, obscuring almost any indication that walls sat behind them. Bookshelves stacked with old, dusty tomes blocked whole sections of the store off, sofas sat side by side in the center of the room, plates, cups, silverware, old radios, televisions, pillows, games, puzzles, children's toys, records, knick-knacks -- all manner of leftover junk filled the small store space, and Myron promised there was even more in some of the back rooms. The odor was pervasive, an old, musty, chilling smell of unwanted possessions. Alexa immediately felt on edge as she, Briscoe, and Briscoe's temporary new partner Stegner walked in.
Briscoe approached the man -- Myron, perhaps -- sitting in the back behind a wire mesh cage, reading a magazine with the TV turned up high. Alexa, coached earlier, started walking around the store, inspecting clothing or anything that might have once been Mike's. In one case she saw a watch that looked familiar, but Mike's watch was generic enough that she didn't consider it. She poked her head in the back rooms, also jammed to the ceiling with items, and she was amazed no one ever seemed to come back to claim their junk. Nothing looked familiar; at least nothing looked like something Mike might have had on him, everything looked like it hadn't been moved in ten or fifteen years at best. She could hear Briscoe talking to Myron from across the room, listening to him question about the abandoned building, about the Pages, about how his card would have ended up in that building. And she could hear Myron's impassioned denials of it all.
Alexa stopped at one of the bookshelves in the back of the main room and plucked down an old version of Little Women, thumbing through it as Myron continued to whine. "Do you sell pawned guns here?" Briscoe demanded.
"Never done as a rule," said Myron. "Don't want no trouble. Used guns are illegal, ain't they?"
"You won't mind if I take a look, hey, pal?"
"If you got a search warrant I don't mind nothing."
"We could come in here and turn everything upside down."
"Like that would change anything," Myron said sarcastically.
Alexa slid the book back on the shelf, hearing the hollow thump as it fell back in pace amongst the dust and other books, and headed back to where Briscoe was standing. He gave her a look and she shrugged. Stegner seemed intent on the ground, tracing areas with the toe of his shoe, then stepping back, like he was taking inventory. Once, he walked by her and spent a few minutes glaring at the linoleum, then moved on. After about ten minutes, they left.
It was, all in all, a fairly useless trip.

Except.

Ben Stone asked her to dinner the beginning of the following week. Logan had been missing half a month now, Amelia's trial was nearing, a creeping feeling of despair was coming over his office, and he knew Briscoe and Stegner were no closer to a lead. They'd pulled Myron in for questioning and failed to find a link to him and Amelia -- maybe Mike had had something in hock all along. They'd pulled in Glenn Page about his building, and his lawyer effectively shut off any real dialogue there, no matter how hard they pushed. He'd put a lock on the building; it wasn't his fault if some nosy cops got whacked in it. They'd called in the woman they were sure was somehow behind it, Amelia, who sat in the Rikers interrogation room looking self-contained as usual, if a little rough around the edges, looking more like Alexa all the time, and she hadn't budged an inch.
"What would I care," she'd sniffed, "that you lost that cop? Sounds like he was bad news all around." She'd paused and smiled coldly. "Though I have to wonder, I mean, without him do you really even have a case?" She'd leaned over to her lawyer then, and the meeting had concluded. Stone had begun to wonder just that point himself. Without Logan, what else did they have? Alexa's statement? The meeting had been unnerving enough, seeing the person he pictured in his head as Alexa smirking over him in Rikers, with her unwavering holier-than-thou attitude. Stone figured he could make the charges stick, Logan or no, but....
"Sorry I'm late." Alexa slid into the seat next to him at the table, and he half-rose from his chair at her approach. She'd decided to pretend as if nothing had happened between them before, but she'd also promised herself not to be so forward, or to drink so much wine with him this time. Obviously, she'd made a fool of herself.
He shrugged and sat. "Not too late. How have you been?"
"Oh, great, no problems. Just great." It came out in a rush, and then she sighed, looking down at her lap. She hadn't even put her purse on the floor yet. "No, I'm lousy, Ben. I'm forcing myself to keep busy, doing a lot of shows, staying out really late, just moving. I can't go dancing any more, I keep thinking about....you know. I just try really hard not to think about it." Her head looked up and he noticed her eyes were teary, like the day she had come in to his office for her statement.
Without thinking, Ben lay his hand over hers. "We'll find him, Alexa. I have more faith in the system than what you've seen so far. Everything will be fine."
She nodded. "Have you found anything new?"
He sat back in his seat. "Nothing. Nobody saw anything out there -- the anonymous call to dispatch that sent them to the building in the first place we figured was a prank all along, and nobody's come forward to talk about that, Briscoe and Stegner haven't found a thing out, and the pawnshop turned into a dead end. I assumed if anyone would hear anything, it would be you."
She shook her head. "Let's try to eat and not talk about it," she said. "Unless you want to watch me cry."
"That's the last thing I'd want to do. As you wish."
About halfway through the meal, though, Alexa slowed down, started picking absently at her food. Something Ben had said had gotten her thinking. The pawnshop was a dead end. She thought of her book, Little Women, how it had bumped into the back of that bookcase, and rung -- hollow.
"Are you done, Ben?" she looked up at him suddenly and her eyes were bright.
"No," he told her, his fork poised. "What's up?"
"I want to go back to Myron's."
He tilted his head. "Whatever for?"
"Indulge me. Please, Ben, can we go?"
Ben looked at his watch. "It's ten o'clock at night. He won't even be open."
She widened her eyes. "I don't want to be rude, Ben, but if you don't come with me I'm going by myself."
That clinched it; his paternal instincts with her took over. "Forget it. Let me pay the bill, and we'll go together."

The street Myron's was on wasn't just dark, it was desolate and neither Stone nor Alexa saw a car for blocks. They approached the store which, to their surprise, was still open, the door unlocked and dim bulbs illuminating the piles and piles of stuff in the corners. The man behind the cage wasn't the same one from when Alexa had been there before; they just nodded at him and started making their way around the shop.
"What are we doing here?" Ben whispered at her as she walked to the back.
"Just look," she pointed. "See this stuff all around the walls. Just pushed right up against it. Now, come here." And she took his wrist, leading him to the bookcase where she had glanced at Little Women. Crouching just in front of it, she pulled out a small penlight. "This is what Stegner saw on the floor, only he didn't know what to make of it." She pointed the light at a black smudge that traced its way from the corner of the large bookcase and arced several feet out on the floor. "This bookcase has been moved, dragged. See?" She stood, and picked a handful of books from the shelf and laid them aside. "Ben, if there was a wall behind this bookcase, how would it sound when books hit the back of the case?"
He just gazed at her quizzically. "Solid, I guess, just books on wood on wall."
She rapped the back of the bookcase carefully, trying not to arouse attention. "Listen." Again came the hollow, echoey sound. "There's something behind this bookcase."
"Like what?"
She grabbed his hand. "Like a room, Ben, like a room."
There was a shuffling behind them, and they looked up together to find the attendant behind the counter staring at them intently. Alexa snatched up Ben's hand, her palm warm and moist with the excitement of their sleuthing, and nearly dragged him out of the eerily dim store, on to the streets. "He's watching us," she whispered, then took off at a run down the street for two full blocks. Ben followed until the wind in his chest burned and his legs felt wobbly.
"Stop," he gasped, "hold on, I can't do it..."
She stopped running and sagged against the side of the nearest building, gasping for breath but giggling at the same time, exhilarated and ecstatic. Ben put a hand over his heart, feeling it thump away, feeling all of his years at once, and doubled over a moment. At her giggles he lifted his head, wondering if she was having a laugh at his expense, but at once it was obvious she was not. Her arms clutched around her waist as if she were hugging herself, and she smiled benevolently down at him.
Ben stood fully, his heart still thudding behind his ribs, but less from the running now. Standing in the shadow of the street, illuminated only by the half moon she looked magical, sprite-like, something from a book that had pulled him from his cozy office seat to a place of danger and wonder and before he thought twice about it he stepped close to her and leaned in, placing his lips on hers. Not demanding, not overzealous, but a test to see what she would do about it. And to his great and eternal surprise, Alexa kissed him back. She snaked her arms over his shoulders as he crossed his own behind her back and pulled her to him, a soft gasp of surprise coming from her mouth, and then he kissed her again. She tasted like the dinner and wine and a soft flowery muskiness from the brief run. And then he pulled back, just far enough so they could see one another's faces.
But it was too soon. He knew that right away. Not that she looked reproachful or sorry for what had just happened, but he knew, instinctively, that her mind was not with him. The kiss had been a kind of celebration over their discovery, and nothing more. At least, nothing more right then. But he had been right all along. Ben knew he should trust his instincts both in and out of court, but real life was so much more problematic...he had known all along that she might feel something for him. And now he knew she did. But for now...that was all he would allow himself to consider -- that she felt something. "We should," he told her softly, "find a cab. I think tomorrow will be a long day."
She nodded, never averting her eyes from him, and ran a hand down his face. "Okay," she said, barely audible. They both had a lot to think about, and though he accompanied her in her cab back to her place, neither of them said a word until she was getting out of the car.
"Come by around nine-thirty," he told her. "Come to the office."
And she nodded again, then walked slowly, deliberately, into her apartment building.

The next morning, Alexa stuck her head in Ben's office before striding in. "I brought breakfast," she offered quietly, and walked over to where Claire and Ben were hovering over the blueprints of the pawnshop.
"Morning," Ben told her shortly, then turned back to Claire. "This," he said, pointing to the plans," was the room we were in. And you can go in here," he pointed to an adjoining room, "and here," another, "and this is the wire cage. When you're in the shop, that's all you see."
"But there --" Alexa put the bagels down on Ben's desk and pointed, her finger shaking a little, "it's blocked off in the shop. It's covered by a bookcase."
"A stairwell?" Claire asked quietly. "They've put a bookcase across a stairwell that leads down to the basement."
The discovery from the night before hadn't been enough evidence to just go barging in there and start tearing up the place. There was no reason to think that because Mike Logan had a pawn shop business card in his pocket that he was there. A bookcase blocking a doorway that Briscoe had never asked to check out was hardly suspicious. And even with the blueprints, they had needed more. Ben stood, thinking, lost for a moment in his own head. They knew Amelia was in on it; she was the one with the most to gain, and lose. They knew she was a control freak.
"Check Amelia Page's phone records from prison," he had told Briscoe over the phone.
In a very short time, Briscoe came charging into Stone's office, as excited as Ben could ever remember seeing him. "You hit it, Stone, you got it right on the head."
"She called the pawnshop?"
Briscoe nodded. "Once a day since Mike's been gone."
A few hours later, backed by two squad cars and an ambulance, they descended upon Myron's. There was yet a third different attendant behind the wire mesh this time, and Briscoe threw the search warrant at him. Ben hadn't had any real intention of coming along to execute a search warrant but Alexa had insisted she was going, and he knew Briscoe would be too occupied with other things in the shop to watch out for her, so he told Claire to watch the phone, or the media, and that he'd be back soon.
Rubber-gloved cops yanked the bookcase away from the wall and it nearly toppled over on them; Little Women tumbled out and Alexa watched it slide on the ground. She took a step forward when the wall behind the bookcase revealed itself as a closed panel door, locked. "Give me the freakin' keys," Briscoe demanded of the shopkeeper, who shrugged.
"I ain't got no keys," he cried. "I never seen that room before in my life! I don't touch nothin'!"
Briscoe shook his head and the ambulance workers brought in an ax, which in three wide swings peeled the door from its hinges.
"You'd better be right, Ms. Page," Ben whispered, and snatched her hand to keep her from running into the newly opened door.
She looked at him, eyes wide, scared and hopeful at the same time. "Ben, you know I am."
He nodded at her.
It was about then that the odor hit them, as they waited by the sofas. A musty, wet smell, not quite mildew but getting there, a cold dampness and smell of age wafted out, and Alexa staggered a bit against Ben. Two policemen flicked on their flashlights and scanned the dark downstairs, taking the steps one at a time, slow, and careful. It was like descending into a pit. "Did you hear something?" one of them asked the other.
The other didn't answer, just pointed with his flashlight. "Look," he said, after a pause. "There."
They dashed back up the stairs after a frozen moment and in a flurry of action pointed at the ambulance crew. "Come on, down here," and they raced down the stairs. Alexa could hear a scuffle of activity and caught Briscoe's gaze, then they both turned to look back at the hole in the wall. Muffled noises in the basement, sounds of voices, then slowly, feet on the staircase as the ambulance workers hoisted their stretcher, leather straps criss-crossing the bundle on it to prevent it from tumbling off. Under the blankets and straps was Logan.

He watched her from behind the glass window, watched her sitting next to the bed, resting her head against the cold steel of the bed partition, holding Mike's hand in her own, just watching him. Ben had been standing there ten minutes, and she'd never moved, never taken her eyes from him or the machines next to the bed, blipping and beeping in their way, secure and safe like a clock. "Has she been in there long?" Ben leaned over to the ICU attending nurse, who looked up briefly.
"'Bout twenty minutes, I think. They only get a half hour at a time. I got to get her out of there soon."
"Even if the patient isn't conscious, you can only visit a half hour?"
The nurse nodded. "Policy. It's draining on them, up or asleep."
Ben sat down to wait the remaining ten minutes for Alexa to finish her vigil. He hadn't let her watch as they pulled Logan up out of that musty pit the day before; as soon as he'd caught a glimpse of the detective he'd always known he knew he wasn't about to let her have that image branded in her head, so he'd covered her eyes until they'd put Logan in the ambulance. Under his hand she struggled a moment, then gave in and he felt her tears of relief -- and fear -- against his palm. "Tell me, Ben, tell me," she'd whispered insistently.
"He's alive," he'd murmured back, and then she had relaxed. It was good enough for then.
They hadn't shot him, or ever actively even tried to kill him, as things turned out. Whoever had done the kidnapping on Mike Logan really just hadn't given a shit, and after whacking him in the head dragged him to Myron's -- how they got him from point a to point b was Briscoe's new action item -- and dumped him in the windowless basement. According to Briscoe, who went down with the evidence team later, the place was a true pit. A sink ran brackish water in one corner, a single 45 watt light bulb burned in the middle of the room with no visible means of shutting it on or off. A mattress with one ratty blanket sat in the corner of the basement, old books stood packed along the walls. When they moved a large stack, rats scurried out from a hole in the wall that had recently been plugged up -- badly -- with damp, wadded pages from a book. "He had to have tried," Briscoe told Stone later, "to keep them coming out. And all he had was that shitty blanket and the books, so he used the books. Not that it helped." Briscoe's voice had audibly weakened with his last statement, and neither man had said anything. Stone had nodded slowly, picturing it in his mind. The final corner of the room held a case of food, mostly canned items, beans and variations on a Chef Boyardee theme, and in one of the boxes they found a used can opener. As near as they could tell by the contents of the once-full case, only four cans had ever been opened. The floor -- that was the mystery. It was a basement, and an old one, but the floor had been covered in at least a half inch of standing water, foul and cold. There was no leak they could find, so it remained a mystery.
All of which went a long way to explain Logan's appearance as they pulled him from the basement. Shrunken, diminished, and jaundiced, his hair lay greasy against his scalp, his closed eyes sunken in his head. Even from where Stone had been standing in the pawnshop he could see the sickly orange-yellow cast to his skin, and he felt a furious rage boil in his chest. He held his hand even more tightly over Alexa's face. "Ben," she whispered to him, and he came out of his trance. "You're hurting me." He had no idea why he'd said Logan was alive to Alexa; it was probably just a gut reaction since the sheet wasn't actually pulled over his head. But that was the only reason. For all intents and purposes, the detective had looked long dead.
At the hospital, however, they proved he wasn't, though he didn't wake up. He was in second-stage pneumonia, exacerbated by his malnourished state, and they sensed he'd been unconscious like this for at least a day. Had they waited more than another day or two to find him, he would have dehydrated. Externally he had suffered multiple rat bites and was being treated for rabies, though delicately. And nothing had woken him up yet. Ben had tried not to let his mind wonder about whether the bites were made before or after Logan fell into his semi-coma.
"Ben," Alexa was suddenly standing before him, out of the intensive care room. He stood and gave her a hug, then pulled back and brushed a loose piece of hair from her face.
"How are you doing?"
She laughed shortly, though hollowly. "You are always asking me that."
He smiled a little. "When can you go back in?"
She stared at the floor. "Technically, I'm not really supposed to be in at all. Only family. So I told them I'm his wife."
"They believed you?"
"I had the backing of Detective Briscoe. It'll hold until his real family gets here."
He glanced at her a minute, thinking, admiring. She was totally disheveled, hair falling from a loosely made braid, a sloppy sweater covering her jeans, looking more like a harried housewife than someone he had come to respect for being so strong through all the recent hell she'd experienced. "You never cease to amaze me, Alexa Radin," he told her again.
"Alexa Logan, for the nurses here," she smiled wanly. "I keep changing last names, have you noticed? But I can't go back for a while. Will you come for a walk with me?"

The early-evening sky was pink around the edges and a deep fire burned red towards the center, far off in the distance, mostly obscured by the tall gotham buildings it covered. As they strolled down the street, quickly emptying as people found restaurants and homes to place themselves in, Alexa could hear light jazz floating from an upper window, and she took a deep breath. "I can feel it," she told Ben. "Summer's done. But I do love the fall. The leaves, the snow...makes me sad but safe. When it gets colder out I can sip cocoa and cozy up in my big blanket, my....afghan." She trailed off and folded her arms, staring down as they continued to walk.
"Are you a skiier?"
She snapped her head up. "Oh? No, I've never gone. Always wanted to, just never....got around to it. You?"
He laughed. "Nah. Never actually wanted to. I like sports that don't send me plummeting down a hill at forty miles an hour. Or more."
She didn't respond, just turned to the ground again.
"Not much for small talk tonight, are you?" he asked after a minute.
She shook her head, further pieces falling from the braid, and wiped something from her eye. "Sorry, Ben. I'm not the best company right now. You should probably get home."
He pushed his hands in the pockets of his overcoat. "He will get better, Alexa."
She nodded in big sweeps. "That's what they've said: 'He should live,' they said. I know. Big doctors, big prognosis. Lucky him. Nobody knows how he'll live, of course."
"I'm not sure I follow you," he said, though in his gut he did know what she was aiming at.
Alexa sighed. "Come on, Ben, they -- they locked him in a dark room for two weeks. A dark, wet room. Know what they did find out, that nobody's come to mention to me yet? That I had to ask about on my own?" When Ben shook his head she continued, her voice rising with each sentence. "When they found him his clothes were damp, his hair was oily and wet. And if he'd been unconscious, flat out on a bed for a day solid there's no reason why that would be. So I asked Detective Briscoe if they'd found anything unusual in the shop after going through it. And he didn't want to tell me, but finally he did -- the fire hose in the back, you know, the ones old buildings have instead of extinguishers -- that had been used recently. They found it dribbling, half out of its case in the back, and when they measured they realized the hose reached all the way down the stairs. And that's how they figured out where all the standing water had come from in the basement. Nobody knows why, maybe they'd done it to keep him quiet, or under control or something, but they'd doused him, probably more than once, with the fire hose. And left him down there to dry out, even though that really couldn't happen. Ben, if he wakes up --" she caught herself, "when he wakes up, I'm scared I won't know what to do for him. He won't be the same person. I don't know if I can handle that."
He opened his mouth, then shut it, and took her hand instead, and squeezed it. "Don't sell yourself short, Alexa Radin," he told her after a moment. "I think you can handle most anything."
They stopped walking a moment, and she stood on her toes and kissed him on the cheek. "You are a prince, Ben Stone. A real prince. I don't know what you think's so great about me, but I'm glad you think it."
Ben looked at her a long while, longer than he should have, and decided against it. In the end, he knew where her real loyalties were. And he knew what she would do for her loyalty. So he just squeezed her hand again and said, "Let's go get something to eat, and I'll take you back to the hospital after. You like Thai?"
"I was thinking Chinese."

After about seven o'clock at night, if the phone rang in Ben Stone's office, it usually wasn't worth picking up. When most everyone had gone home for the day, a relaxed hush fell over the offices and down the hall all he could hear was the hum of the copy machine, the occasional overnight printout ejecting paper after paper, sometimes footfalls. Ben liked it this way; he could get more done after hours, when there was less chance of something -- or someone, a scrubby lawyer for instance -- barging in and demanding attention. The silence let him meditate on the law, and he absorbed more.
Not so tonight. He had been finding it hard to completely erase the image of Alexa and her vigil at Logan's bedside a day or two ago, or of Logan's silent, still face against the sheets. It wasn't the first time he'd seen a cop in the hospital, or even a grieving girlfriend alongside him, though truth be told, it wasn't something he saw often. There wasn't much overt violence in the D.A.'s office; by the time it reached him violence had become words on paper, or silent, staring, overdressed clients. No, Ben was still coming to terms with his own new feelings for her, and had consciously attempted to think less about her and concentrate on preparing the case against her sister, which had now gone into overtime as the police attempted to strengthen the connection between her and Logan's kidnapping. But his own feelings aside, putting her out of his mind became more and more impossible with each day -- the case loomed, and with it everything that had gone by over the past few months. The same cast of characters starred in both arenas, inseparable and unignorable. Amelia was currently being charged with three stabbing murders of prominent politicians' sons and now was being investigated for snatching and hiding a cop for two weeks, engineered while she was behind bars. They'd posted a guard outside Logan's room in the ICU after a day or two, realizing that if she'd managed to organize what she'd done while at Rikers, getting to him in the hospital would be easy. It was all brightly unnerving, and subsequently, Stone found even the quiet of the office unsoothing at night lately.
The loud ring of the phone startled him from gazing at his bookshelves, caught in recollection. He almost didn't answer it; it could only mean more work for the night, but after two rings he snatched the receiver from the cradle. "Ben Stone."
"Ben, it's me."
Despite himself, he smiled. "Alexa. Just thinking about you."
"You're working on the case, aren't you."
"Don't have a choice. Where are you?"
"At the hospital. Ben, the family arrived today."
"So you got to meet the infamous Logan clan?"
She sighed. "I left before they actually got to the room, but I saw them through the window. I didn't think I should introduce myself."
"Why not?"
"I've heard enough family horror stories to last a lifetime. The fact that it took them three days to get here from across the river was enough to get me ticked off again."
"How's he doing."
"'Resting comfortably,'" she imitated the doctors. "No change."
"Would you like to meet for some coffee or something? Recharge your batteries?"
There was a long silence, and Ben grew uncomfortable. Something other than Logan's family arriving had her upset. "I don't think so, Ben." Another pause. "I'm going away for a little while."
He was so surprised he stood up. "What do you mean, going away?"
"I'm going on the road with my band, up and down the East coast, for a few weeks. I -- I don't think I'm really needed here any more. I need....I need to take a few steps back."
He didn't know what to say, and was afraid if he did speak he'd say something terrible.
"Ben?"
"You've got me at a loss, Alexa. This isn't like you. Logan needs you."
"He's got his family now."
"That's a half-baked excuse and you know it. How do you think he'll feel if he wakes up and you aren't there?"
"I will come back, Ben. It's not forever."
"It's a cowardly thing to do, Alexa, and it's not worthy of you." Ben felt himself getting up a good head of steam. When she didn't answer, he grabbed for her throat. "Particularly since you could be considered partially to blame for what happened to him."
Her silence gave him a moment to regret that last statement, which he didn't really believe. To blame Alexa for what had happened to Mike was like trying to blame the Mets' losing record on the bat boy. But he didn't retract it.
Finally, she said, "You really are a piece of shit sometimes, Ben Stone," and hung up the phone on him.

As they sped down the turnpike out of Manhattan, the traffic jams behind them and the sunset pink and rosy ahead of them, Ben could not help but feel as though he had won a kind of victory, and had made off with the spoils. Taking his eyes from the road for a moment and staring at his passenger, noting the evening light playing on her features, he smiled slightly. Getting Alexa to not run away and come back to stay with him had been a desperate attempt at making sure she didn't leave town, and ensured that he would know exactly where she was. It would be safe, and routine, and Ben was sure that she would be better off. He felt like he had cheated a bit, though, in getting her there, and maybe that was where the victory had come in -- it was the kind of euphoria he experienced after winning a particularly tricky case and realizing the jury had been with him all the time.
She'd said she was leaving, she was running away, and Ben couldn't have that. There was too much to think about, from the trial in a few weeks to Mike, the near-coma patient, to all of the other briefs and cases he was trying to wrap up, to bring the nagging, unignorable element of Alexa into the picture. She stuck with him, in him, around him, like an itch he couldn't quite get to, and if she just took off he would have found concentrating on anything impossible. So he had appeared at her Village apartment and assumed all control of the situation.
It had been much easier than he had expected. When he arrived, her roommate let him in, saying, "Ever since she got off the phone she's just been in there staring at the wall. I tried to get her to come out, but she don't move." Ben found Alexa sitting on the floor of her room, a suitcase half-packed in front of her, clothes dripping out like liquid frozen in stasis, and she was just gazing, glassy-eyed, at the phone. Ben wondered if the phone conversation her roommate had been referring to was the one he had recently had with her, and decided it probably was. He stepped into the room and closed the door behind him, then lowered himself onto the rug next to Alexa and placed a hand over hers.
"Alexa," he had said. She turned to look at him, still glazed over, the corners of her mouth turned down. A slight flush highlighted her cheeks, like a fever. Ben felt his heart clutch, and waited for a moment, until it passed. "Alexa, I'm here."
"Ben," she said slowly, coming out of her daze. She stared at the suitcase for a moment. "I have to get going," she said, and pulled her hand from under his. "I'm going to be late."
"Where do you plan to go?"
She looked up at him, as if for the first time. "South. We've got bookings down there. After that, I don't know."
"I don't want you to run away." From the start, Ben took his cross-examining tone of voice, and decided he was not going to let her slip out from under him.
"I'm not running away. I'm just taking some time. Didn't we have this talk already?"
"I want you to come stay with me."
She stopped picking clothes from the floor and he stood while she stayed silent.
"I have several extra rooms, I'm out of the city. You can pretend you're running away. But you'll just be out of Manhattan. You can do whatever you like, I'll be gone all day, and late some nights. The house can be yours."
"Ben, that's crazy."
"No, it isn't." He put his hands in his pockets. "It's absolutely sane. You need some time by yourself. You need some peace and quiet. If you like, I can drive you into the city when I come in every day, you can go to the hospital, you can do whatever you like. I won't bother you." He paused, and looked at her. "Unless, you want me to."
She was silent for a long time, then said, "I don't know what to say, Ben."
He strode over to her and took her hands in his. "He might be out of commission for a long time, Alexa. I think you're going to need some support. Give it a try."
Alexa stared at him for a long few minutes, then nodded. "All right."

Ben lived by himself in a small, two-story house that had more backyard and lawn than the inside had square footage. He had an enclosed porch with a swing, and a fenced-in yard that held several large oak trees and met, at the far end, a pine tree forest. The suburban development he lived in was about a half century old, built in the Eisenhower boom, and was filled mostly with small families who planned on moving into something bigger in a few years, or else older families, moving down from the larger homes where they had raised their kids. Ben had kept it after his divorce, when Janice had moved south. It was empty, and quiet, and Ben rarely saw most of the rooms any more, letting work take up his evenings, so that most of the time he would come home at night and head straight for his bed. Weekends, he took walks, sat on the porch, read the paper, went shopping. It wasn't much of a home, really, just a place one step up from a hotel. But now, with Alexa arriving, he was suddenly proud he had it to offer. He showed her up to her room, which was where his daughter had once lived. He had kept it in a time warp until she had graduated college, then one weekend she and he had taken everything down, and boxed the posters, the books, the knick-knacks of a childhood, and carted them off to the basement, then came up and painted over the pink. Now, slightly redesigned it served as a guest room for when she came to visit, which wasn't often, a pink-walled, simple, small room. Ben set Alexa's bags on the floor and reached in a nearby drawer, taking a key out and pressing it into her palm.
"There you go," he told her. "Your own key. You can stay as long as you want." And without a word, he closed the door behind her and headed downstairs to his study. On the rare off night when he got home before ten he usually spent time there, reading or working on briefs. That night, he couldn't concentrate on anything, and he even found himself blanking in front of the television, so at eleven he headed upstairs, peeking in on Alexa for a second. She had stretched out on the bed fully clothed, never unpacked, and had gone straight to sleep, and he watched her with the moon painting her face for a moment or two, then closed the door behind him and went to bed himself.

She woke in a strange house with a strange ceiling in her clothes from yesterday and felt utterly rested. Sitting up and yawning widely, she stared out her window a moment or two, listening to the silence of the streets outside, watching the light stream in her window, gazing at a cardinal that hopped from branch to branch of the tree outside. And gradually, a sense of calm, safety, and peace wrapped itself around her. She glanced at the clock next to her bed and realized she'd slept until early afternoon, and wondered what to do next. She really wanted a shower; sleeping in her clothes had made her feel itchy, and cloying, but she wanted to see what this place looked like in the daylight. Imagine, she thought to herself, Ben does exist outside Manhattan. He has a place where he lives, where he is all himself, and not anyone's assistant district attorney. And this is it.
She found a note downstairs saying he planned on being home sometime after seven, to not forget the key if she went out, and to take anything she liked barring the silver in the cabinet. Alexa smiled at that, at a Ben attempt at making a joke. He was so serious, so often, she wondered if he ever smiled. She knew he needed someone to make him smile more often, but it did not occur to her -- then -- that she might be the best one suited for that job. She found a carton of milk in the refrigerator that had gone off sometime during the summer, so she dumped it down the drain, and realized there was nearly no food at all in the entire refrigerator beyond that and a few Chinese food cartons. "I have to get some food in this house," she told no one in particular, and was not surprised to find the pantry in similar straits -- a few boxes of stale cereal and spices, a bag of potato chips, and some cans of soup. "This will not do," she said to no one in particular again, and realized that talking out loud was going to get her in trouble. But it was almost as if she couldn't help it -- the house called out for a loving touch, a hand to get it alive and functioning. When she found the fireplace she nearly clapped her hands with joy, but the flue was jammed and she was coated with ash before she realized that was something else that required attention. The living room was dusty, the carpets barely used, and Ben's front yard really needed someone to rake up the leaves that were already falling from the trees. Instinctively, she went right to work.
After a shower (Alexa feared that Ben's bathroom would be as bad as...Mike's...and when she went in and saw the similar grime and whisker hair in the sink she had a small cry, then added it to the list of things to do) she sat downstairs with the yellow pages and started to make phone calls. Chimney sweeps were hard to find but apparently eager for the work; one promised to come over by two-thirty and she wondered if Dick Van Dyke would be there to sing Mary Poppins songs. Dusting and vacuuming she figured she could do for herself, but without a car and with no idea how to get to the nearest grocery she called around until she found a place that delivered, then ordered about a hundred dollars worth of food to get started. When the children came back to the neighborhood laughing and carrying on after school, she cornered a few of the older ones and asked if they wanted to make a fast twenty dollars raking leaves, and even though a few gave her some contemptuous "yeah, right" glances, most thought twenty was pretty overwhelming and she got two for the job -- one for the front, one for the back. "Bag the ones in the front," she instructed, "but leave the others in the back in one big pile under the tree in the middle of the yard." They were done by dinnertime, and she rooted in her purse until she found her separate cache of dollars, which was winding down quick. The Sweeps (who did not include Van Dyke) said they'd bill her, and a credit card dispatched the grocery, but she was running out of money and was hoping Ben wouldn't mind too much helping along. And while all of that went on, Alexa went ahead with manual labor as a form of therapy. There was too much to do, from cleaning to sweeping to dusting to wiping down to scraping off for her to think of anything that might be bothering her, and she found the therapy to be soothing, relaxing, and tiring. She slid into her hausfrau mode almost like another skin, the same way she slid into being Amelia all that time ago, and thus encased, felt safe again.
The boys who had raked her yard pointed out where she could get some wood for the fireplace, and she bought half a cord, stacking it on the front porch (swept otherwise clean) out of the way of the swing, then threw a few logs on the cleaned fireplace for lighting up later, now that the flue was unjammed. Then she needed a second shower, changed, and finally collapsed in the well-lit, cleaned-out living room, dozing on the sofa, feeling she had certainly earned her keep.
Just before her eyes closed and she fell into unconsciousness, she realized she had not thought of Mike more than once that entire day.

Part Two, continued