Tranquil, unhurried mornings were somewhat of a rarity in the Voight household. If it wasn't Alexis' one-sided chatter rousing them from slumber, it was a cell phone buzzing incessantly on the nightstand drawing them away from the soft, sumptuous and ridiculously expensive Egyptian cotton that Kate insisted on purchasing.
Yet this morning she was awoken by thin strips of sunlight filtering through the gaps in the blind, bathing the room in a soothing golden glow. Her heavy, gritty eyes told her it was far too early to be awake but still she found herself unable to drift back off to sleep.
Shifting onto her side, her eyes settled on Hank's prone form, the corner of her mouth tugging upwards into a soft smile as she watched him sleep. As usual he was sprawled out on his stomach with his face almost completely obscured by the feather-down pillow, his body rising and falling slowly with each deep, even breath. Kate let her eyes roam over the broad expanse of his back, taking in the myriad of freckles, blemishes and scars that littered his tanned skin; a tapestry of stories from what felt like a lifetime ago. She often found herself wondering what her life would have been like if she had moved to Chicago sooner. Would they still have fallen in love? Would their paths have even crossed at all? Alvin had told her once that, until she came along, he wasn't sure if Hank would have ever moved on after Camille passed so perhaps the story was just the way it was always meant to be.
"Stop thinking so loud."
He looked like he was still asleep when she flicked her eyes back to his face, momentarily startled by his deep, gravelly request but he soon cracked open a bleary eye to cast her an accusatory glance.
"You can see through your eyelids now?" She asked with a grin, drawing her bottom lip between her teeth when his eyes fluttered closed and he rolled onto his back with a low groan, exposing his toned torso to her appreciative gaze.
"No. I could hear you thinking."
"You could not." She argued with a quiet laugh when he tugged the sheets back up over his body and shuffled towards her, hands blindly reaching to wrap around her waist beneath the sheets. "That's impossible."
Chuckling at his inaudible grumbled response, Kate allowed herself to be drawn into his arms, humming in blissful contentment as she nestled her face against the warm skin of his chest. For a few long minutes, Kate was lulled into a serene state of relaxation by the sound of his heart thrumming steadily in her ear but their few sacred moments of peace was abruptly halted by the sound of a cell phone vibrating against the wood of the bedside table.
Trying and failing to wriggle out of a disapproving Hank's embrace, she settled for turning in his arms to pluck her phone from the table, thumb swiping over the screen to connect the call just as he began to track a path of gentle kisses along the slope of her neck.
"Meadows."
"Kate, it's Elliot."
Hank's lips froze against her shoulder as he heard the muffled greeting from Elliot Stabler, his spine involuntarily stiffening at the increasingly familiar voice at the other end of the line. Seizing her opportunity to shift out of his arms, Kate propped herself up against the headboard, turning to meet Hank's eyes as he peered up at her now suddenly wide awake as he rolled onto his stomach, his weight balance on his elbows and forearms.
"Morning El. Everything okay?"
"Yeah, sorry it's so early. I, uh, couldn't sleep so I thought I'd dig around to see if I could find anything on your dad's case." He replied and Kate could faintly hear him shuffling some papers around on his desk, knowing they were likely stuck under a mug of cold coffee.
"Any joy?"
Pulling her phone away from her ear, she put the call on loudspeaker so that Hank could listen to whatever Elliot had managed to unearth in the NYPD archives.
"Well, your guy's contact was right, Organised Crime worked the case in 2010. They had reason to believe it was the same crew hitting gas stations all across the Tri-State area. That not in your file?"
"Hartford PD case file only has records from the local precinct that investigated at the time." Kate replied, her skin prickling with irritation that she had spent over two years working a case with only half of the information available. "I didn't even know NYPD had looked at it at all until recently."
"Well there's not much here, only that the case was marked cold by NYPD Chief of Police Roger Marsh in December of that same year."
It wasn't a name she was familiar with but, given that the case formally went cold five years before she even joined the NYPD, it wasn't much of a surprise. Regardless, she made a mental note of the name so that she could do some digging of her own later.
"I'll ask Jet to take a closer look, see if she can unearth anything in the archives."
"Thanks El, I really appreciate it...hey, uh, how're you doin'?" She said softly, casting a quick glance at Hank who gave her a withering look at the change of topic, clearly having little to no interest in finding out how Elliot Stabler was doing.
In the aftermath of Kathy Stabler's death, Elliot had been a man walking on a proverbial knife edge, barely toeing the line between being obsessively focused and arbitrarily reckless. She knew he wasn't the kind of man to turn to drink or drugs but, not unlike her, he would throw himself headlong into work in the hope that it would provide at least a few hours of distraction; hence why he was hip-deep in her dad's case file at four thirty in the morning. While the two detectives were no longer close, they shared a little too much history for her to be completely indifferent about his wellbeing.
"Well I got an empty nest for the first time." He said with a heavy sigh. "Eli's at college, Mama's with Kathleen until we can find an assisted living place. The dementia's slowly eatin' her up from the inside out."
"God El, I'm so sorry."
The handful of times Kate had met the Stabler matriarch, Bernie had gone out of her way to make the young detective feel at home.
'Ya know, both my husband and my son have been stupid enough to get in the way of a speeding bullet...I expected more from a smart thing like you.'
Elliot had scalded her with a hushed 'Mama' but Kate had simply smiled and watched she continued to shuffle around the kitchen before placing a steaming cup of tea and a slab of New York Cheesecake at Kate's elbow with a genial pat on the shoulder.
"Yeah...I took her on a job with me a few weeks back and it was like somebody turned the lights back on for a minute, ya know?" He said with a light chuckle, one more of wistful longing than true amusement. "Listen, I gotta go but I'll get Jet to give you a call if she finds anything, alright?"
"Thanks El. Please take care of yourself, okay?"
Kate killed the call after Elliot's quiet "you too" gave way to the monotonic beep signalling he had disconnected the line and lifted her eyes to meet Hank's questioning gaze.
Philip Meadows had been killed in 2008 and Hartford PD had dutifully worked the case for a few months until all viable leads had dried up and the case was moved to the bottom of the priority pile. But eighteen months later, NYPD Organised Crime picks it up and marks it cold after just two weeks of investigation.
What Hank couldn't quite work out was why OC didn't formally document their investigation into Philip Meadows' murder? When they marked the case as cold, they should have transferred their files over to Hartford PD so that all records pertaining to his murder could be logged but, from what he could tell, they didn't even let the original homicide detectives know they had reopened the case.
