No Pets Allowed

Part One

Police sirens wailed as they drove down the posh, upper east side street. Detective Elliot Stabler and his partner, Detective Olivia Benson, pulled up alongside a parked cruiser and looked around the scene. Elliot cut the engine and opened his door. Getting out and spotting a homicide detective, he shouted, "hey, someone call us?" He looked to his partner over the top of the car and shut his door before walking around the front and stopping in front of the young Italian detective.

Olivia Benson shoved her hands into her long, black downe coat and walked around to join her partner with the detective. "What happened here?" She glanced around at the crowd that was now lining the small street, and then up to stare at the roped off building behind them. Her brown ponytail swung heavily and made a screeching sound on the back of her coat as she turned her head. She shivered in the cold and her ears rang with the frozen breeze that swept between them. It was too early to be called out to investigate a murder, especially in late October.

"Woman murdered in her fifth floor apartment. Landlord found her." Short black hair with a boyish face concealed his twelve years that he had been with the Homicide Unit. Detective Mark Voorhies stared at the two uniformed officers that stood on the steps to the building and compared gruesome notes of the scene. The thirty-seven year old blinked back to Benson and Stabler as they had begun to walk towards the police tape. His voice hadn't shook in ten years from looking at grueling discoveries, but this was certainly a reminder. Standing 5 foot 8 inches tall, he lead the way up the stairs and past the guards, answering small questions of the other detectives. "Apartment 1423. Such a shame that this had to happen to one of our upscale business women but, I guess murder doesn't have a preference."

Elliot followed Olivia and looked up as Voorhies was a few steps in front of Benson. "Why call us in? Homicide's your case."

Voorhies paused in front of the apartment door, to the left of the staircase. He turned and looked at Stabler with a grave expression before knocking on the door for entrance. "Homicide's one thing, what's inside and how she died is another." Stepping aside and letting the two SVU detectives through, Mark watched their reactions carefully. "Shocking isn't it?" Closing the door behind him, Voorhies took out his small flip pad and scanned his notes, reading the details aloud. "Tanya George, 34, on her way to becoming a very prominent juvenile court judge. She obviously had more than the law on her mind, after office hours." The detective walked up to stand beside Stabler and take in the scene for the third time since he had arrived.

Placing a hand over his mouth, Elliot felt sick. "Coroner declare time of death?" Without getting too close to the body, he looked closely at the details.

"Coroner isn't here yet. We're guessing she's been like that for a few hours. Blood settled in her fingertips, they've started to swell." Voorhies checked his notes and what time he had arrived on the scene. He had been there for the past four hours. "Crime Scene took lotsa pics, but we're waiting for her roommate to get home from vacation. We had an officer go and collect her from the airport."

Tanya had been wearing a black leather bondage outfit with a zippered crotch that was left open with the handle of a bullwhip firmly embedded in her anus and a dead 5 foot long bull snake hanging from her vagina. The head of the snake had been completely engorged in the vaginal cavity and Elliot found himself swallowing hard as he bent in for a closer look. Her mouth had been gagged with a small red ball and her wrists and ankles had been cuffed to each leg of the small butcher's block she was bent over. Long blonde hair had covered her face and a pool of blood collected below it from a deep cut on her throat.

"Whoever said sex wasn't kinky in leather." Olivia turned away and looked around the rest of the plush apartment. As the body had been displayed in the livingroom, Benson took in what was around them. "Sofa's set up like there was something to watch in this. And look," walking over to the far right side of the long white sofa that sat between them and the front door, she glanced at a crystal champagne glass, "someone else was here with her. Fluid inside looks kind of thick for milk. Perhaps Warner can tell us who this belonged to." Turning back to look at the body from another angle, she noticed something in Tanya's right hand. "Elliot, she's holding something. Might belong to the killer."

Stabler stepped forward, reaching into his jacket pocket to retireve a glove, and knelt down to pull the small material from the hand. Holding it up to his partner, he stared at it. "It's a dog collar. Name says 'Princess'. Did your men find and animal around here?" Elliot handed the collar and the latex glove he used to pick it up with to Olivia while he turned back to face Voorhies.

Laughing eerily at the question, Voorhies stopped and turned toward the kitchen, to the left of the front door. "More like several animals but we haven't found them. Four food and water dishes lined up along the partisian wall, each with animal names, yet nothing to suggest there's any kind of animal living here. No cat hair, no dog hair, no hampster hair....." His sentence trailed off as his eyes followed Stabler over to a locked door to the right of the spacious kitchen. "Her roommate, a Ms. Simone Harris, occupies that side of the house. Door's locked and the landlord doesn't have a key for the added padlock."

Lifting the heavy grey lock, Elliot listened to something sounding like hushed whimpers coming from behind the door. "Why do you suppose she would lock her door from the outside? Liv, sounds like voices." Waiting for his partner to join him, he listened closer. "Doesn't sound like animals to me, sounds more like people. Where's Ms. Harris now?" Something in the continued whines of the voices inside gave Elliot more than enough curiosity to not wait for the answer. Stepping back and kicking the door open, ripping the metal locking plate from the wood door, Elliot peered inside the sunlit room and flinched at the smell of human waste emitting from four big animal cages to the far left of the room. "Call the paramedics! Get those people out of the cages."

Olivia stepped into the room and over to one of the giant dog cages that housed a naked, collared young female. "It's alright, we're police officers. We're here to help you. Can you tell us who did this to you?" She knelt down and held the lock up for the officer who took wirecutters to it. "My name is Detective Benson. Can you tell me who you are?" Olivia's heart sank further in her chest as the young, doe-eyed woman in her early 20s only huddled in the back of her cage and stared at the detective from over her bare knees. Reaching a hand in, she calmly waited for the woman to take it. Looking to her left, Olivia called for blankets but returned her attention to the cage as a thin hand slipped into hers.
~*~*~*~

Four, young and naked adults stood wrapped in warm grey blankets while detectives Beson and Stabler took their statements. Two women and two men had each told what they heard from their cages. Both women had resisted the urge to fall to their knees when Elliot had appraoched them. All of them hadn't glanced up and had explained that they were put in the cages as punishment.

"Punishment for what?" Stabler was confused.

The four looked at each other and then to the first young woman who had taken Olivia's hand. "Mistress Tanya puts us in cages when we mess up at the auctions." Her long blonde hair fell into her eyes and looked like it hadn't been brushed through in days. Her blue eyes filled with tears and she took a frail and shaking hand to wipe at them.

Olivia placed a hand on the blanketed shoulder and asked in a softer tone, "what kind of auction? You mean like people auction?"

Mark stood in the bedroom doorway and waved Olivia over to him. He held a collar and leash in one hand and an envelope of money in the other. Even through the latex gloves, he felt dirty of the whole situation. "I think this is what they're referring to. I busted a few patrons of the 'Pet Auctions' last month. We found these in Tanya's bedside table. There's also a ledger in a cabinet that contains names, numbers, and 'Pets'. As if being a judge wasn't paying well enough."

Olivia swallowed shallowly as an icy chill ran down her spine. "How much longer until we have the roommate?"

"Half hour, tops." Mark handed the items off to a uniform to be placed in bags and marked.

"Good. The sooner we find out what's going on, the sooner we can sleep better at night." Turning back to the four still wrapped in blankets, Olivia blinked and thought about who the so-called "pets" were. "Any word on who these people are? Missing persons?"

Voorhies shook his head and glanced at the four Stabler was trying to talk to. "As far as I can tell, they're all more or less adults. If this is consensual, it makes it harder to press charges. Most likely, the judge forgot they were here before having company over and they didn't make a sound when their hostess was getting murdered. This sort of trading could put gambling out of the market, in a few short years."

Elliot had finished taking statements and had joined the other two detectives to share information. "So much for consensual. Each 'pet' has a collar and name like the one in the judge's hand. Turns out, they were sold to the judge and her roommate for 'obedience training'. The oldest male says he remembers 'Princess' from seven years ago. A young man by the name of Christopher Jakosa. Says he and Chris came here about the same time but Chris was sold a few years ago. Basically, the men are given kitty names and the women, dog names. Obvious pseudonyms for the kind of kink the judge and her friends were into."

Olivia looked past Voorhies to see the paramedics enter the apartment, and waved them over. "Get these people to the hospital and run the SAE kits. Leading the team of medics to the four and explaining to the people in blankets what was happening, Benson felt a pang of guilt as four sets of eyes gave her worried and panicked looks.

When the medics and the four 'pets' had left the apartment, Voorhies received a call on his phone that the officer with the judge's roommate was less than a block away from the scene. "Good. We'll meet the car downstairs." The homicide detective turned back to stare at Stabler and Benson before taking a deep breath and explaining what he had been told.

"I can hardly wait for this explanation." A small emotionless smile as Olivia followed Voorhies out to the front door and down the stairs.

TBC.