Disclaimer: Confession time: I own nothing. It all belongs to Dick Wolf.

So I started a new story! Yay? This takes place either right after or toward the end of Conviction. It happened, but I took some (read: a lot) of liberties here. Enjoy!

"Hey, Liv. Have you seen this?" asked Elliot, dropping a newspaper on my desk along with the morning cup of coffee he'd picked up for me.

"Mm." I looked up from the DD-5 I was filling out. "What is it?"

"B3," he said in response.

I raised my eyebrows and flipped the newspaper pages until I found what I was looking for. "Alex got married?"

"Moreover, she didn't invite us to the wedding – or even tell us about it," remarked Elliot.

I shook my head in disbelief. "Okay, I know she hasn't returned any of our calls, but she's been out of Witness Protection for almost a year now, and we used to be her best friends!"

Elliot shrugged. "Think there's any point in running a background check on this Robert Durham guy?"

I sighed. "I'm sure she's already done that. She's very careful about these things."

Elliot quirked an eyebrow. "When was the last time she dealt with any of 'these things'? I've never known her to date anyone before."

"She dated Trevor," I pointed out.

He rolled his eyes. "For one night. It ended prematurely. Your fault, I think."

I took it personally. "Hey, it wasn't my fault we needed our ADA on the one night out of the entire year she had a date."

"Of course not."

"Liv, Elliot," called Captain Cragen from behind us, coming out of his office. "We caught a case. Vic was raped, sodomized, beaten pretty badly. Found in a dumpster on 52nd Street."

Elliot and I exchanged glances. "Okay," I said, reluctantly dropping the newspaper. I made a mental note to get back to it later. I tossed Elliot the car keys. "You can drive," I said sweetly.

He raised his eyebrows. "Wow. What's gotten into you?"

I grinned. "Don't get used to it."

The victim was a thirty-year-old blonde, five feet six inches tall, who was strangled after being beaten, raped, and sodomized a few hours before her death, according to Melinda. According to the ID in her wallet, her name was Lenia Walsh. She'd been tortured – aside from being beaten and sexually assaulted, she'd been electrically shocked and she had at least a hundred different cuts and bruises marring her fair skin – Melinda had stopped counting after that.

In her purse, Elliot and I had found a cell phone and a wallet with Lenia's address on it. We made the notification to Lenia's parents, because Lenia wasn't married and we hadn't yet tracked down the boyfriend, if there was one.

Lenia worked at a bank on Wall Street, and the first thing we did was go to interview her colleagues. They all had the same story: she was well-liked, hardworking, and didn't have much of a personal life.

"Well, we struck out there," said Elliot dryly when we finished.

"Miserably," I added. "So what's next?"

"Pull the luds on her phone," he decided. "We'll see who she called last and go from there."

I shrugged. "Might as well."

The call log on Lenia Walsh's phone showed that the last call she'd made was to a guy named Robert Durham. He'd called her back approximately two hours before her death. "He works with her, apparently," said Elliot. "Remember, he's her boss, but he was out sick today."

I nodded. "Right. We should talk to him."

"Hey," he said, holding up his hand to stop me. "They played telephone tag for the week before her death – no, make that three months before her death."

I took the papers from him and flipped through them, furrowing my brow. "Hmm, that's a lot of phone calls. Affair, you think?"

"Probably."

Then something occurred to me and I scrunched up my face. "El, that name, Robert Durham. It sounds familiar somehow. Where have I heard it before?"

"I'll pull his record," he offered. "Maybe he's got priors."

I nodded, but Elliot did a background check and came up with nothing. No prior arrests or convictions, and he was the boss at a prestigious bank on Wall Street.

Then I remembered. "El!" I exclaimed as it hit me. "That's Alex's husband!"

Hmm . . . so should I continue with this? Review if you think I should.