Disclaimer: I don't own Samurai Champloo or any of its affiliated characters, which belong to Manglobe/Shimoigusa Champloos; neither do I own Law & Order or any of its affiliated characters, which belong to Wolf Films and the National Broadcasting Company. And Jerry Orbach? Died much, much too young.
A/N: One shot, and not to be taken seriously. AU, PWP, undoubted OOC-ness, and crack like there's no tomorrow. Quick implied yuri, but you miss it if you blink. Why are you reading this, again?
Many thanks to big big truck. (Hee!) End of series spoilers for SC, but not so much for L&O.
Rock, Paper, Scissors, Crack
In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police, who investigate crime, and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders.
These are not their stories.
Detective Lennie Briscoe gave the sheet-covered body at his feet a cursory glance, then looked up at his partner. "Geez, Ed, I told you I didn't want anything for my birthday," he cracked. "Crap wrapping job, though. You should start watching Martha Stewart."
Green gave him a quick grin, lit by the flashing red lights of the squad parked outside the tiny cottage. "Body bag decoupage?"
"You know it. So what's the story on the stiff?"
"Prelim says killed with a long edged weapon — Profaci says something like a sword, but won't commit — vic is a Seizo Kasumi, age 40 according to his DL, had been living here with one employee."
"If you tell me the employee saw the crime and I can go home early, I think I'm gonna cry," Briscoe said, as a uniformed cop brushed past him, talking to one of the crime scene techs.
"Oh, get out your tissues, then," Green answered, chuckling. "I got him and three more. You're going to love this." He gestured at three — kids, really, Briscoe thought. The oldest looked like he might have been about twenty, sitting alongside another kid with wild hair, and a teenage girl with weirdly large eyes. The older one and the girl looked like extras from one of those Sunday afternoon samurai movies, and Wild Hair looked like — oh. Hey.
"Those are fake swords, right?" he mumbled to Green, who was grinning like an idiot.
Aw, crap —
Briscoe thought he might just cry anyway.
"Hey, kid. Hand over the sword."
"Hn?"
Mostly, Jack McCoy loved his job. He loved being able to go to work in shirts that had never seen an iron and ties that had seen the Reagan administration. He loved his desk, which was decorated in a style he referred to as "I know where everything is." and which his junior ADA referred to as "Jesus, Jack, I hope you've had your tetanus shot. Isn't that sandwich from that place that the health department closed down in March?" He loved the stack of files the clerk would bring him that were tall enough for him to pretend not to see Anita Van Buren over the top, and he loved the bourbon that lived in the bottom drawer of his desk. Oh, happy alcoholism! He loved that too.
He did not, however, love sharing these things; which was why he gave Lennie Briscoe a particularly pissy look when the detective burst into his office that afternoon and went straight for the bottom drawer.
"Funny," McCoy said. "I have one that looks just like that. And when did you start drinking again? Are we getting rid of Serena?"
Briscoe swallowed the rest, and replaced the cap neatly. "Sorry. You're going to need it, too." He looked up, as Serena Southerlyn, the junior ADA assigned to McCoy, kicked the door shut behind her.
"Hey, Lennie. You here about the sunflower case?" she said, dropping a case file on top of a container of takeout Chinese purchased during the year of the rat. "Oh, my God. Am I being written out of the show?"
The older man shook his head, managing somehow to look even more haggard. "No, it's those kids from the sunflower murder. The tall one has some kind of weird religious-type thing about swords — Green tried taking them away from him."
McCoy exchanged alarmed glances with the blonde ADA. "Is he all right?"she asked.
"Well, you know how people always say 'You could put your eye out doing that'?" They nodded. "Turns out it's true."
"Ew." Southerlyn made a grossed-out face, flipping open the file. "Let me know if you want to go in on some flowers,"she called after Briscoe's back as he left, not having advanced the plot whatsoever but providing comic relief.
"Sunflower murder?" McCoy looked at her, confused.
"Yeah. Seizo Kasumi, 40, Japanese national. Apparently some kind of religious figure — anyway, he was murdered in front of his daughter and an employee by a sword-wielding nutjob named Kagetoki Kariya, another Japanese national."
"Wait. Where did this happen?"
She ran her finger down the case notes, reading quickly. "Uh — place called Ikitsuki Island, just outside Nagasaki."
"Nagasaki? There's no Nagasaki in Manhattan!"
"Mm, nope, this is the one in Japan."
"How do we even have jurisdiction?"
She shrugged. "Willing suspension of disbelief?"
"That's literary! We can't take that into court!" God, he was going to have a coronary, and that piece of crap drank all of his bourbon.
"Anyway," she said, ignoring him. "Problem is that Kariya — who called himself the Hand of God, very nice — is dead. Rodgers has him in for autopsy now, but preliminary said he had a hole in him big enough to drive a Buick through."
"Actually, that doesn't sound like a problem to me. The victim is dead, but the killer — who is somehow our responsibility — is also dead. Unfortunate, but nothing we can do about it. Maybe the daughter can go back to Japan and try the civil courts there. Sounds like a religion-based hate crime to me, so maybe she'll get a nice damages award out of it." He brightened. "Hey, it's almost lunch anyway, there's this great bar — "
"Aha!" With the ease of long practice, Southerlyn blocked his escape route. "But the Hand of God had ties to the shogunate, according to the daughter — cute girl named Fuu, she's really sweet — who said Kariya told the vic he had orders to kill him."
"Wasn't the shogun replaced with a three branched system of national government, in which power primarily resides in the Diet, a bicameral legislature with unique ties to the emperor?"
"Shh. And before Kariya died, he was last seen alive with a frequent companion of the daughter's, kid named Jin with a longstanding grievance against the Hand of God, having — get this — a massive sword fight with him on a cliff. Hmm . . . not sure why that's in the notes, I don't see what that has to do with anything. Oh, and the daughter and her friends are apparently petty criminals as well. Nothing serious, though."
"There are no cliffs in Manhattan!" McCoy held his head in his clenched hands. "I don't even see the sunflower reference — fine. Whatever. What do you want?"
"It's obvious. We have an assassin that dies under mysterious, hate crime-related circumstances, which gives you the chance to make wry one-liners, and look impassioned yet rumpled in court as we discover who the actual culprit is from the telling surprise testimony. I've taken the liberty of putting the three kids in protective custody, and they'll be here shortly to tell us what happened."
"Do I have time to hit the liquor store?"
"Forty-five minutes, so make it quick."
"Okay. So let me get everyone's name," McCoy said. "You're Fuu Kasumi, right? And . . . okay . . . which one is Mugen?"
The kid with the shaggy hair and freaky sword held up his hand.
"And — huh. Gin?"
"Jin," the tall, skinny kid dressed like a Kurosawa extra corrected him.
Eyeing him, McCoy wondered just why he needed two swords, and decided not to ask. "It's okay. My parents drank a lot, too. Anyway, I need to ask some questions about a gentleman by the name of Kagetoki Kariya. Can you tell me what happened?"
The pink-wearing girl (who was carrying a knife in a scabbard decorated to match her outfit, McCoy saw; did these kids go anywhere unarmed?) looked at her companions. "Um, we went to Nagasaki to find my father after my mother died," she said. "I, uh, sorta ditched the guys in town before we got to my dad's, and ended up with these other guys . . . " She trailed off. McCoy wrote 'deadbeat dad' in his notes and nodded.
"But after she took off, we met this Kariya dude at the docks," the shaggy kid said. "And he was all, 'You're going to die here', and I'm like, 'Bring it like the FedEx truck, beeyotch', but he was doing all these weird-ass moves and then one of the guys with Fuu was there and all 'We got Fuu,' so Jin said he'd take care of Kariya."
"Your English is, uh, really good," Southerlyn said, looking at the pink girl with interest. "Almost like a native speaker's, but one who was trying really hard to be hip."
"Huh," Mugen remarked, looking away furtively. "Um. Anyway, so I left, and that was the last I saw of that Kariya dude."
McCoy scribbled 'Two swords threat Kariya?' on his notes, then looked up, noticing Van Buren lurking outside the open door, staring hungrily at the tall, skinny kid. "Okay. Gene?"
"Jin."
"Right. What happened then?"
"Uh, Jack — " Southerlyn interrupted. "I think Fuu needs the ladies' — ?" The pink girl gave her a speculative look and nodded, as she and the blonde left the room. McCoy shook his head. Women. Southerlyn was always escorting their attractive female witnesses to the bathroom, and completely missing out on the good stuff, it seemed.
The tall kid blinked. "Hn. Kariya informed me that he was going to kill me and then he talked a little about working for the shogun, and we fought. He knocked me off the dock into the water and left for the island."
Inexplicably, Liz Olivet had joined Van Buren. McCoy gave the two women an odd look, but decided to go on. "Okay. Then what?"
"I, uh, got to the island and saw he was carrying a bloody katana and had Fuu backed up on a cliff edge. We fought again, I stabbed him and he died."
McCoy stopped writing. "You did it?"
Jin looked down modestly and nodded.
"Huh," McCoy said, shocked. "Well, that was — surprisingly easy. I guess we just need to get someone to take your statement, and the death certificate — "
In a sudden plot twist, Dr. Rodgers, the medical examiner walked into the room. "Hello, Jack," she said.
Bewildered, McCoy asked, "But — what are you doing here? We only ever see you in court."
Rodgers tossed him a sheaf of papers without looking, her eyes undressing the tall ronin, who sidled closer to the wild haired kid. "My findings on your sunflower killer," she said. "Turns out he died of natural causes."
"What?"
"Um, yes. Heart failure, very tragic."
"The preliminary report said he had a hole the size of my fist in him!"
"Which is why you shouldn't trust them. Look at the death certificate." She opened her report and tapped the paper, McCoy's eyes following her finger.
"You have 'massive internal trauma, exsanguination and shock, caused by Masamune sword' crossed out with 'heart failure' written over the top! In crayon! And you drew little pink hearts on it!"
"Really, Jack. I don't see what the big deal is." Rodgers gave the tall kid a little wave and mouthed the words 'Call me' at him, as the young man rolled his eyes. "Weren't you complaining you didn't think this was a job for this office?"
"But — I — oh, dammit." McCoy leaned back in his chair. Irritably, he wondered just what the hell had happened to his junior ADA. How long could it take Southerlyn to show a girl where the bathroom was? "He confessed!"
Rodgers gave him a pitying look. "He doesn't speak English, Jack. Watch." She batted her eyelashes at the tall kid, to the accompaniment of angry hisses from the outer room; McCoy glanced back and saw a crowd of women giving the tall kid smouldering, heated looks. A couple of them, including his old assistant ADA Jamie Ross, even held panties ready to throw at him. "Hey, want to have dinner with me tonight?"
The kid looked at her blankly. "Nani?"
"See? Not a word."
"I could have dinner with you," the shaggy kid offered, as Southerlyn and the pink girl reentered the room. McCoy noted with interest that the junior ADA's blouse had been buttoned askew and her lipstick had been reapplied hurriedly. Sweet, he thought to himself gleefully. She's trying to get me to take an interest in her! The tall kid gave shaggy a furious glare.
"Meh — " The redheaded pathologist considered, giving the tall kid a last wistful look. "Don't think so. Anyway, the guy's just dead, Jack, kind of like your case," she quipped.
McCoy gave her a dirty look, but began to put away his notes as the women began to converge on the tall kid, except for loyal Southerlyn, who was whispering with the pink girl (about the case, he had no doubt); he knew when he was beaten.
Fortunately, he knew where Briscoe kept that bottle of vodka in his desk.
-fin-