Title: Who killed Skittles the clown? (1/?)
Author: Alecca
e-mail: alecca4you@netscape.net
Summary: A clown is murdered. And the last people who saw him are none other then the scoobies. It's up to a Sunnydale PD detective to interrogate and figure out what/how happened. Sort of a silly fic :)
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: I own nothing Btvs.
Feedback: Begging helps. So please, pretty please?
Author's note: A friend told me I should write something looser after 'Emerald Dynasty' and its deep/serious plot, so this is the result.
Who Killed Skittles The Clown?
Part 1:
The interrogation of Dawn Summers
The name's Ronald. Ronald Thrump. My friends call me Ron, never Ronnie.
I've seen a lot of strange cases since I've had the misfortune to land a job as a detective in the crime department of the Sunnydale P.D, but none of them as weird as this one. Sunnydale has given me my share of nightmares, but this, this had to be the sickest. This is the story of a clown. A clown named Skittles, that messed with the wrong people and wound up getting sent up the river. Not literally of course. The body was found in the park, two shovel blows, one to the head, one to the back. His bright red nose burned, his right hand bandaged with a colorful handkerchief and his cheerful clothes slimed forever. Found in a freshly dug hole . They hadn't had time to bury the body, we were too quick for them. Cause of death? He'd choked on an olive. Obvious diagnosis: Murder.
The clown's phone bill said that Skittles had got an anonymous phone call, right after midnight, from the payphone outside the Bronze. From this I deduced that the person who'd called him was the one who suggested he go to the park. A note in the clown's handwriting had been left on his dresser; 'Gone to the park. Won't be too long. Skittles'. Sadly, he had been wrong. He would be quite a while. Forever in fact.
Skittles had believed he had no enemies, but I knew better.
Her name was Summers, first name Dawn. Your regular sixteen year old. Long hair, medium height. Pink shirt, leather jacket, lip gloss. She walked into my office with that blank, careless look teenagers have. When she sat down in front of me and arranged her hair, I could tell she was a trouble maker. Her face had guilt written all over it.
"You don't think I really had to do anything with it, do you?"
Her tone was confident. I figured she would be a hard witness to crack.
"He was last seen at your birthday party. And you didn't seem very happy about it,"
She shrugged.
"Wouldn't you be? My sweet 16 and a clown shows up. It was the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to me."
The spark of anger in her eyes told me everything. She had the motive inside her, but had she followed it? Was she capable of...murder?
"Witnesses say that you..." I picked up one of the reports. " 'Started screaming hysterically, and threatened to kill somebody. Again.' "
"Yeah, my sister," she rolled her eyes.
She was acting cocky. I guessed her alibi must be a good one.
"You tried to kill your sister in the past?" I asked her, curiously.
"No, it was a..." she hesitated, looking around the office. "Private joke. She almost drowned once,"
She was lying. I can smell a lie a mile off. Yeah, she smelled like a ton of lies and, well...strawberries.
"Where were you between midnight and 2 am?"
I asked her the question straight out.
"I was at the Bronze with my friends. I had to get them to forget about the clown. Although I don't know if they ever will. They kept making clown puns all night." she shook her head in exasperation.
"That must've made you pretty mad. Mad enough to maybe...leave the Bronze around midnight and call Skittles to meet you?"
I formulated my theory,
"You could've conveniently slipped out in the crowd. Made it to the park in time to meet Skittles, and then knock him unconscious with a shovel. You dug a hole, hit him in the head again and started to bury him, before looking at your watch. You saw it was late. Your friends would be looking for you. So you left the body in the hole and ran back to the Bronze."
"Geez Mister, you have a sick imagination! Besides, I wasn't mad at the clown, I was mad with my sister."
The girl looked at me defiantly. That was her excuse, her sister. There had to be something behind it.
"Yeah, you were. But maybe you thought that if the clown was dead, your friends would stop making jokes?"
"Right, I'm gonna go kill someone 'cause my friends are acting like a bunch of teenage morons? As if! If I thought like that, a lot more people would be dead. What am I, a psychotic lunatic? "
She was exasperated. Maybe I overreacted, but I knew she knew something, and I knew she had to have been there. The evidence was obvious.
"I know you were gone from the Bronze, Dawn. And I know you were in the graveyard that night. I also know you were in the park."
I smiled winningly, and the surprise was all over on her face. I'd got her!
"How could you?" she asked, confused.
She'd obviously thought that she'd covered her tracks pretty well. I knew she had to be the murderer, it was that look in her eyes.
"Simple," I said. "I analyzed your shoe."
I pulled out the evidence bag that held it.
"The lab report is clear. You were in the park and you were at the cemetery."
"And how do you know it's not from another night?" she asked, still not giving in. Dumb kid. She didn't know who she was trying to mess with.
"Because these are the shoes your sister bought you for your birthday. Your friend Janice told us. And you were gone from the Bronze for a while. You told Laurie you were going to the bathroom, but she said she didn't see you for an hour."
I stood up and pointed an accusatory finger at her.
"You went to the park, didn't you? And then you grabbed the shovel!"
"No! No, I didn't!!!"
A-ha! She was beginning to lose her temper.
"Yes, you did and you..."
I started to elaborate, but she interrupted.
"Give me a break! And where did I get the shovel? After midnight? I guess I knocked off a seven-eleven too, huh? Or what, I brought the shovel earlier that day? When I didn't even know the freaking clown, what ever his name was? I just had a feeling I would need a shovel later? Oh, or better, someone left a shovel just lying around and I happened to find it!"
She was being sarcastic. Becoming impatient. I was sure that pretty soon she would break.
"Maybe it was there. Maybe it wasn't planned out like that. What did you want to do to the clown? Maybe burn him? Like you burnt his nose? Or choke him, huh?" I accused her.
"No!"
She fidgeted in her seat.
"So if you weren't in the park, where were you for an hour? Did you take a walk outside? Maybe you made that phone call, but never made it to the park. Maybe someone did Skittles in for you? Was it like that?"
As I said that I leaned over the desk to get a better look at her. If she had flinched even slightly, I would've seen it.
"Oh, geez! Look...my sister came to the Bronze. She wanted to apologize so we took a walk, okay? We went to the park. It was after midnight, but we didn't see or kill any clown,"
Ah, I had a confession!
"So your sister is in it too! She was the one who brought the shovel, wasn't she?"
I realized that this would drastically alter my theory.
"But why would my sister want to kill a clown?"
That was always going to be the question. There had to be something. Something I had yet to discover, obviously.
"So what did you do in the park?" I asked her, trying to put all the pieces together.
"We talked," she said leaning back in the chair, more relieved now.
"And what about the graveyard? Why did you go to the graveyard?"
I remembered the shoe had mud from the graveyard too.
"Is that where you got the shovel from?"
"Would you quit it?! There was no shovel!"
She was getting annoyed again. Perfect. Uncontrolled anger often leads to a confession.
"There is a shovel, this shovel."
I pulled the shovel from under my desk. She stared at the deformed metal.
"That doesn't look like a shovel,"
"Of course it doesn't. Someone burnt it. No fingerprints you see."
It was her, it had to be her. I looked at her, working out how she must have done it. She'd killed Skittles and set her sister up as her alibi. Then she'd burned the shovel to erase the evidence, and thrown the body in the hole. But how had Skittle's nose been burnt, and what about the burn on his right hand, the one that was bandaged? And how could a helpless teenager like her have carried a body as big as Skittles'? She had to have had some help. The sister perhaps? Nah, she was a skinny little thing, even smaller then this one.
"Great, so you have something that kinda looks like a shovel. But it's just...some weird metal." she was still looking at it, frowning. "Could be anything."
"It had a wooden handle, but it turned to ash. I still have it." I said, picking up yet another evidence bag. She shrugged, finally giving in.
"Okay, so it was a shovel. So what?"
"So...are you going to tell me what you were doing in the graveyard?" I asked, returning to my initial idea.
"How do you know I was in the graveyard? What, did you like take samples of mud from everywhere in the city so you could find out where I was?"
She always answered with a question. She was defending herself. This was good.
"Actually the coroner recognized it. That graveyard dirt has some mineral thing about it." She shrugged again, crossing her arms.
"I went to see a friend..." she stopped herself in the middle of the sentence. "A dead friend."
"You went to the grave of a friend...on your birthday?"
This was getting too strange.
"A good friend." she jumped in. "It doesn't depress me to see him, even if he is dead."
"Okay..."
I was beginning to think maybe a psychological examination would be in order.
"Do you have many dead friends you visit?"
"Hello! This is Sunnydale? I have tons of dead friends..."
She realized how strange her words sounded, and attempted to cover herself by bursting into an explanation.
"Friends who... are in graves, not walking around, or that I talk to or anything. Dead friends...that are...sad. I mean...that...it's sad. That they're dead."
"So why did you go to see your friend's grave, if it makes you sad?" I asked her. I was close, I could feel it.
"It wasn't...I didn't go see a friend's grave."
I knew it!
"I went to my mom's grave."
"So why didn't you say that in the first place? Why did you say a friend?" I asked her. I was sure she'd said 'he' before. That meant she was lying, again.
"My mom was my friend," she said.
I smiled despite myself. That was actually pretty sweet. Obviously her Mom, wasn't at all like my mother. She'd sent me to military school when I was twelve.
"All right, Miss Summers, that's all for now," I told her.
It was useless to push it now. And what can I say? The mother bit had gotten to me.
"Okay, hope you catch your...clown killing criminal." she said, standing up. "Bye!"
She left the office, lifting that strawberry scent into the air again. It had to be her. Sure my first theory was pretty much going to pieces, but now I had a new theory! Dawn had left the Bronze, made the phone call, and then waited for her sister to show up. They'd taken a walk, conveniently towards the park, leaving enough time to get there on time and meet Skittles.
Once there, they'd had a talk, twenty minutes tops, then she'd sent her sister home, saying that she was going back to the Bronze. But instead she'd gone to the other side of the park to meet Skittles. She'd hit him twice with the shovel. Then she'd dug a hole, rolled his body into it, and then set fire to the shovel, which accidentally fell on Skittles - burning his nose. Then, as she was about to bury him, she saw it was getting late, left the body and went back to the club.
But where had the shovel come from?
Was it just a coincidence? Or had the shovel given her the idea to kill him? Why had she burned the shovel before trying to cover Skittles with earth? And if the shovel had fallen on top of Skittles, how had she gotten it out of the hole without burning herself?
And what about Skittles's bandaged wound? Was that something to throw us off track? And how did the graveyard fit into all of this? And the olive...and the slime?
There was more to this. There had to be. And I had to find out what.
End Part 1
Author: Alecca
e-mail: alecca4you@netscape.net
Summary: A clown is murdered. And the last people who saw him are none other then the scoobies. It's up to a Sunnydale PD detective to interrogate and figure out what/how happened. Sort of a silly fic :)
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: I own nothing Btvs.
Feedback: Begging helps. So please, pretty please?
Author's note: A friend told me I should write something looser after 'Emerald Dynasty' and its deep/serious plot, so this is the result.
Who Killed Skittles The Clown?
Part 1:
The interrogation of Dawn Summers
The name's Ronald. Ronald Thrump. My friends call me Ron, never Ronnie.
I've seen a lot of strange cases since I've had the misfortune to land a job as a detective in the crime department of the Sunnydale P.D, but none of them as weird as this one. Sunnydale has given me my share of nightmares, but this, this had to be the sickest. This is the story of a clown. A clown named Skittles, that messed with the wrong people and wound up getting sent up the river. Not literally of course. The body was found in the park, two shovel blows, one to the head, one to the back. His bright red nose burned, his right hand bandaged with a colorful handkerchief and his cheerful clothes slimed forever. Found in a freshly dug hole . They hadn't had time to bury the body, we were too quick for them. Cause of death? He'd choked on an olive. Obvious diagnosis: Murder.
The clown's phone bill said that Skittles had got an anonymous phone call, right after midnight, from the payphone outside the Bronze. From this I deduced that the person who'd called him was the one who suggested he go to the park. A note in the clown's handwriting had been left on his dresser; 'Gone to the park. Won't be too long. Skittles'. Sadly, he had been wrong. He would be quite a while. Forever in fact.
Skittles had believed he had no enemies, but I knew better.
Her name was Summers, first name Dawn. Your regular sixteen year old. Long hair, medium height. Pink shirt, leather jacket, lip gloss. She walked into my office with that blank, careless look teenagers have. When she sat down in front of me and arranged her hair, I could tell she was a trouble maker. Her face had guilt written all over it.
"You don't think I really had to do anything with it, do you?"
Her tone was confident. I figured she would be a hard witness to crack.
"He was last seen at your birthday party. And you didn't seem very happy about it,"
She shrugged.
"Wouldn't you be? My sweet 16 and a clown shows up. It was the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to me."
The spark of anger in her eyes told me everything. She had the motive inside her, but had she followed it? Was she capable of...murder?
"Witnesses say that you..." I picked up one of the reports. " 'Started screaming hysterically, and threatened to kill somebody. Again.' "
"Yeah, my sister," she rolled her eyes.
She was acting cocky. I guessed her alibi must be a good one.
"You tried to kill your sister in the past?" I asked her, curiously.
"No, it was a..." she hesitated, looking around the office. "Private joke. She almost drowned once,"
She was lying. I can smell a lie a mile off. Yeah, she smelled like a ton of lies and, well...strawberries.
"Where were you between midnight and 2 am?"
I asked her the question straight out.
"I was at the Bronze with my friends. I had to get them to forget about the clown. Although I don't know if they ever will. They kept making clown puns all night." she shook her head in exasperation.
"That must've made you pretty mad. Mad enough to maybe...leave the Bronze around midnight and call Skittles to meet you?"
I formulated my theory,
"You could've conveniently slipped out in the crowd. Made it to the park in time to meet Skittles, and then knock him unconscious with a shovel. You dug a hole, hit him in the head again and started to bury him, before looking at your watch. You saw it was late. Your friends would be looking for you. So you left the body in the hole and ran back to the Bronze."
"Geez Mister, you have a sick imagination! Besides, I wasn't mad at the clown, I was mad with my sister."
The girl looked at me defiantly. That was her excuse, her sister. There had to be something behind it.
"Yeah, you were. But maybe you thought that if the clown was dead, your friends would stop making jokes?"
"Right, I'm gonna go kill someone 'cause my friends are acting like a bunch of teenage morons? As if! If I thought like that, a lot more people would be dead. What am I, a psychotic lunatic? "
She was exasperated. Maybe I overreacted, but I knew she knew something, and I knew she had to have been there. The evidence was obvious.
"I know you were gone from the Bronze, Dawn. And I know you were in the graveyard that night. I also know you were in the park."
I smiled winningly, and the surprise was all over on her face. I'd got her!
"How could you?" she asked, confused.
She'd obviously thought that she'd covered her tracks pretty well. I knew she had to be the murderer, it was that look in her eyes.
"Simple," I said. "I analyzed your shoe."
I pulled out the evidence bag that held it.
"The lab report is clear. You were in the park and you were at the cemetery."
"And how do you know it's not from another night?" she asked, still not giving in. Dumb kid. She didn't know who she was trying to mess with.
"Because these are the shoes your sister bought you for your birthday. Your friend Janice told us. And you were gone from the Bronze for a while. You told Laurie you were going to the bathroom, but she said she didn't see you for an hour."
I stood up and pointed an accusatory finger at her.
"You went to the park, didn't you? And then you grabbed the shovel!"
"No! No, I didn't!!!"
A-ha! She was beginning to lose her temper.
"Yes, you did and you..."
I started to elaborate, but she interrupted.
"Give me a break! And where did I get the shovel? After midnight? I guess I knocked off a seven-eleven too, huh? Or what, I brought the shovel earlier that day? When I didn't even know the freaking clown, what ever his name was? I just had a feeling I would need a shovel later? Oh, or better, someone left a shovel just lying around and I happened to find it!"
She was being sarcastic. Becoming impatient. I was sure that pretty soon she would break.
"Maybe it was there. Maybe it wasn't planned out like that. What did you want to do to the clown? Maybe burn him? Like you burnt his nose? Or choke him, huh?" I accused her.
"No!"
She fidgeted in her seat.
"So if you weren't in the park, where were you for an hour? Did you take a walk outside? Maybe you made that phone call, but never made it to the park. Maybe someone did Skittles in for you? Was it like that?"
As I said that I leaned over the desk to get a better look at her. If she had flinched even slightly, I would've seen it.
"Oh, geez! Look...my sister came to the Bronze. She wanted to apologize so we took a walk, okay? We went to the park. It was after midnight, but we didn't see or kill any clown,"
Ah, I had a confession!
"So your sister is in it too! She was the one who brought the shovel, wasn't she?"
I realized that this would drastically alter my theory.
"But why would my sister want to kill a clown?"
That was always going to be the question. There had to be something. Something I had yet to discover, obviously.
"So what did you do in the park?" I asked her, trying to put all the pieces together.
"We talked," she said leaning back in the chair, more relieved now.
"And what about the graveyard? Why did you go to the graveyard?"
I remembered the shoe had mud from the graveyard too.
"Is that where you got the shovel from?"
"Would you quit it?! There was no shovel!"
She was getting annoyed again. Perfect. Uncontrolled anger often leads to a confession.
"There is a shovel, this shovel."
I pulled the shovel from under my desk. She stared at the deformed metal.
"That doesn't look like a shovel,"
"Of course it doesn't. Someone burnt it. No fingerprints you see."
It was her, it had to be her. I looked at her, working out how she must have done it. She'd killed Skittles and set her sister up as her alibi. Then she'd burned the shovel to erase the evidence, and thrown the body in the hole. But how had Skittle's nose been burnt, and what about the burn on his right hand, the one that was bandaged? And how could a helpless teenager like her have carried a body as big as Skittles'? She had to have had some help. The sister perhaps? Nah, she was a skinny little thing, even smaller then this one.
"Great, so you have something that kinda looks like a shovel. But it's just...some weird metal." she was still looking at it, frowning. "Could be anything."
"It had a wooden handle, but it turned to ash. I still have it." I said, picking up yet another evidence bag. She shrugged, finally giving in.
"Okay, so it was a shovel. So what?"
"So...are you going to tell me what you were doing in the graveyard?" I asked, returning to my initial idea.
"How do you know I was in the graveyard? What, did you like take samples of mud from everywhere in the city so you could find out where I was?"
She always answered with a question. She was defending herself. This was good.
"Actually the coroner recognized it. That graveyard dirt has some mineral thing about it." She shrugged again, crossing her arms.
"I went to see a friend..." she stopped herself in the middle of the sentence. "A dead friend."
"You went to the grave of a friend...on your birthday?"
This was getting too strange.
"A good friend." she jumped in. "It doesn't depress me to see him, even if he is dead."
"Okay..."
I was beginning to think maybe a psychological examination would be in order.
"Do you have many dead friends you visit?"
"Hello! This is Sunnydale? I have tons of dead friends..."
She realized how strange her words sounded, and attempted to cover herself by bursting into an explanation.
"Friends who... are in graves, not walking around, or that I talk to or anything. Dead friends...that are...sad. I mean...that...it's sad. That they're dead."
"So why did you go to see your friend's grave, if it makes you sad?" I asked her. I was close, I could feel it.
"It wasn't...I didn't go see a friend's grave."
I knew it!
"I went to my mom's grave."
"So why didn't you say that in the first place? Why did you say a friend?" I asked her. I was sure she'd said 'he' before. That meant she was lying, again.
"My mom was my friend," she said.
I smiled despite myself. That was actually pretty sweet. Obviously her Mom, wasn't at all like my mother. She'd sent me to military school when I was twelve.
"All right, Miss Summers, that's all for now," I told her.
It was useless to push it now. And what can I say? The mother bit had gotten to me.
"Okay, hope you catch your...clown killing criminal." she said, standing up. "Bye!"
She left the office, lifting that strawberry scent into the air again. It had to be her. Sure my first theory was pretty much going to pieces, but now I had a new theory! Dawn had left the Bronze, made the phone call, and then waited for her sister to show up. They'd taken a walk, conveniently towards the park, leaving enough time to get there on time and meet Skittles.
Once there, they'd had a talk, twenty minutes tops, then she'd sent her sister home, saying that she was going back to the Bronze. But instead she'd gone to the other side of the park to meet Skittles. She'd hit him twice with the shovel. Then she'd dug a hole, rolled his body into it, and then set fire to the shovel, which accidentally fell on Skittles - burning his nose. Then, as she was about to bury him, she saw it was getting late, left the body and went back to the club.
But where had the shovel come from?
Was it just a coincidence? Or had the shovel given her the idea to kill him? Why had she burned the shovel before trying to cover Skittles with earth? And if the shovel had fallen on top of Skittles, how had she gotten it out of the hole without burning herself?
And what about Skittles's bandaged wound? Was that something to throw us off track? And how did the graveyard fit into all of this? And the olive...and the slime?
There was more to this. There had to be. And I had to find out what.
End Part 1