Disclaimer: I don't own Psych or any of its related characters. This is just for my own enjoyment and the potential enjoyment of other Psych-Os like me, and no monetary gain was expected or received.
Rating: T
Spoilers: Not sure there are any, this is pretty much self-contained if not entirely AU, but just to be safe let's say "Through Santabarbaratown".
A/N: After that one-shot (see: Monkey Wash Donkey Rinse) I was left pretty much completely without inspiration (I desperately need new episodes), so I started rummaging through my library in hopes of sparking…something. I came upon my copy of Fool, by Christopher Moore, which led me to my copy of King Lear, by William Shakespeare, which led me to a quick perusal of the Complete Collected Plays of William Shakespeare, and Moore was right, there's always a bloody ghost. So I thought perhaps doing the Hamlet thing with Lassie might spark a thought or two percolating in the concretions of my brain, and this is what emerged. Will it go anywhere I want to go? Who knows.
Chapter One: Poor Sweet Ophelia
"Name of victim, Ophelia Marie King, age, nineteen. No criminal history. Shared the rent on this place with one Gena Giamatti, also age nineteen, also no criminal history, both of them sophomores at UC Santa Barbara. Giamatti came home at eight o'clock this morning after a long weekend with her parents back home in Monterey and found the vic. Morning, Detective Lassiter. Where's the better half?" the Sergeant wrapped up his briefing with a lopsided grin.
Lassiter scowled. "Detective O'Hara is working on the Appleton murder. We're spread kind of thin right now."
"That's the one that Psych is working on, right?" the Sergeant said, his grin becoming knowing. "They don't get to work together unsupervised very often. I bet they're enjoying the alone time."
Lassiter removed his Ray Bans, slowly and deliberately, and fixed the Sergeant with a cold blue stare in much the same way, and with much the same effect, as an amateur lepidopterist would pin a prime specimen of Morpho menelaus into a shadowbox. "Are you attempting to imply something unprofessional about my partner, Sergeant?" he said in his blandest, most disinterested tone - which none but the greenest rookie doubted meant he was on the verge of being really dangerous, as opposed to simply his usual grumpy.
The grin dropped off the Sergeant's face like an anvil dropped off a red stone cliff onto the head of an unsuspecting cartoon coyote. "No, sir."
"I didn't think so." He returned his focus to the task at hand. "First responding officer?"
"Patrolwoman Carter, sir. She's with the roommate, trying to get a coherent statement. Kid's pretty shook up."
"Not surprising. It's not every day you walk in on the scene of an execution," Lassiter muttered to himself. The ME hadn't yet arrived, but Lassiter was fairly certain he already knew the cause of death - a single clean shot to the back of the head at close range. Professional, clinical assassination of perhaps the least likely assassination victim he'd ever seen.
He looked at the series of muddy footprints on the white tile floor around the body and sighed. There had been a brief but violent rainstorm that morning, and he knew every ounce of mud had been tracked in by well-meaning but annoyingly superfluous paramedics and fire-rescue workers responding to the frantic 911 alert. This girl had been dead for days - emergency services were of no use to her, they only made it next to impossible to find sign of the killer's passage, including obliterating any tracks he (or she, he thought, to be fair) might have left outside. Although the storm alone had probably done that much.
A quick survey of the kitchen revealed a divot in the Formica countertop next to the sink, gouged out by the ricocheting bullet. Lassiter made a quick calculation of the angle and reached underneath the low-slung overhead cabinet and dug out the fragments of lead from the tiled wall with his penknife without having to bend down and look for it. "Thirty-eight caliber," he observed aloud, then called for an evidence bag. "I want the ME's report on that head wound as soon as he's got an accurate measure of the angle of shooting. And if Carter can get the roommate calmed down, I'd like to talk to her myself."
Lassiter dodged a crime scene photographer and gave himself a quick tour of the house. He avoided, for the moment, the little living room where he saw the female patrol officer consoling a sobbing young woman with red streaks in her blonde hair, and the bedroom whose décor suggested an occupant who would do something like that to her hair. The other bedroom was more promising, and he stopped to examine it, with an eye to finding out something about the young woman whose life had so abruptly ended.
After so many years working homicide cases, Lassiter had long since developed the ability to cover up any empathy he felt for the unfortunate victims. An effective veneer of heartlessness was an important part of the job, enabling him to eat, sleep, and maintain enough objectivity to bring justice to the offenders and some degree of peace to the families and friends. But it was just a veneer, and he had never learned to fully ignore that quick hot stab of pain, anger, and sadness he felt when he first laid eyes on a new "case," particularly when it involved a child (and his definition of "child" was growing increasingly broad as he got older, and now included young adults, particularly if they were female, probably the result of a paternal instinct his ex-wife wouldn't believe he possessed). He'd felt that pain when he first saw the girl laid out in a pool of dried blood on the kitchen floor, and he felt it again, stronger, when he took his first good look at her living quarters. Without stopping to fully assimilate the details of what he was seeing, he knew at a glance that what he was seeing were signs of nerdiness and a childish innocence.
He blinked hard, once - all he needed to fortify himself - and turned his attention to those details. Bookshelves lined the wall into which the door was set, from floor to ceiling, and stacked to capacity. The third shelf from the top was one-third books, one-third DVDs, and one-third VHS tapes. It was a neat collection but not quite Lassiter's idea of orderly - a paperback copy of The Canterbury Tales stood in between a paperback of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and a hardcover copy of The Cat Who Came to Breakfast by Lillian Jackson Braun, a DVD of Disney's The Little Mermaid stood cheek-and-jowl with a special deluxe edition of Black Hawk Down and a horror movie Lassiter recognized called The Ninth Gate, and the VHS copy of Blazing Saddles stood chummily in between Amadeus and My Fair Lady while Yellowbeard kept White Christmas and the inevitable A Christmas Story from making some small degree of sense out of the arrangement. Still, if her sense of organization appalled him, her taste was fairly admirable - between Ernest Scared Stupid and The Tigger Movie was a DVD copy of the Civil War miniseries Andersonville, a VHS of Gettysburg appeared between a copy of Fierce Creatures and Emmett Otter's Jug Band Christmas, and a well-thumbed paperback of Killer Angels sat on the nightstand at the head of the bed, a blue tassel indicating the marker about three-quarters of the way through. The bed was neatly if not perfectly made, and a floppy stuffed dog lay in the middle of the handmade quilt folded up at the foot of it. The bedstead itself was made up of six long dresser drawers stacked two high, three of which were unused. Two drawers held neatly folded blouses and jeans and the third was filled with rolled white socks and folded undergarments, more sensible than sexual in style. The wall above the bed was covered with framed photographs.
Lassiter paid close scrutiny to the pictures. In one, two teenaged girls stood cheek-to-cheek while Person Unknown snapped a quick picture of them on the way out the door to a Halloween party, by the look. The one dressed as Lady Gaga looked as though she probably had red streaks in her hair these days, while the smiling girl with the straight, untreated blonde hair appeared to be dressed as the world's nicest and least-judgmental Death Eater, complete with a very authentic-looking snake-headed Lucius Malfoy wand-in-a-walking stick that now lay across the front of one of the shelves of books. Another photo showed the Death Eater girl in bright sunshine, in simple jeans and a t-shirt, hair pulled up in a pert ponytail, mounted on the back of a handsome Appaloosa. Another showed her with her arms around the neck of what looked to Lassiter like the perfect specimen of big, dumb, indestructible, wonderful Black Lab. Another showed her at a picnic dinner, waving a wing of fried chicken at the camera while she laughed, seated cross-legged with dog, older brother, mother, and father. There were numerous pictures of her with both or either parent, and many more of her with her brother. If she had a boyfriend, there was nothing to suggest it here.
The TV stand was at the foot of the bed, equipped with just a small nineteen-inch Daewoo probably older than its former owner and a DVD-VCR combo player. Lassiter checked the angle of the screen against the bed and the office chair and suspected that it saw little use, except perhaps as background noise. On top of the television was a box containing a plastic model of the Holy Grail, and when he pressed the red jewel on the front a voice gravely informed him that his mother was a hamster and his father smelt of elderberries.
The third wall was set with a pair of tall metal stands with glass shelves, on which stood a collection of knickknacks including a gigantic fossil shark's tooth around which a small herd of My Little Ponies congregated, and a fairly extensive set of Breyer horses, among which Lassiter recognized a model of Secretariat. There was also a boxed set of VHS copies of the first six Star Trek movies and a set of graphic novels marked with the Marvel logo, three of which were X-Men titles and four of which were Doctor Strange. Two trade paperbacks titled Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne and Dragon Age: The Calling were also segregated on the collectibles shelves, and the lowest shelf of the second stand was loaded entirely with hardback copies of Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master manuals and a copy of Dragonology. The last wall featured an angled artist's table and a small desk, with just the one small, uncomfortable office chair to spread between them. Clipped to the artist's table was a large, unfinished colored pencil drawing of a creature with a dragon's body and a donkey's head - a dragon ass? Lassiter thought, with half a smile. On top of the desk was a foot-tall plaster model of a purple dragon, several chunks of amethyst geodes, and a pair of beautiful polished agate geode bookends. There was also a set of plastic human hands on a black plastic base, holding an unfinished wire of turquoise, onyx, and hematite chip beads stitched into a fairly intricate design that Lassiter took to be the start of a necklace, given the length and the onyx pendant stitched onto the middle of it. Behind that was a rhinestone-studded frame containing a picture of the girl with an elderly woman who was probably her grandmother. The long drawer contained a large Acer laptop computer, and the desk's other three drawers contained pads of drawing paper, boxes of beads, art supplies, and several My Little Pony coloring books, which took him aback somewhat in spite of everything. On the floor under the desk was a book bag containing several notebooks and a number of textbooks - a book on the history of modern art, another on British literature before the year 1600, an American history text and another on the history of the Greek and Roman empires.
He'd have one of the techies look at the computer and see if there was anything suggestive in there, but somehow he doubted it. A girl who appeared to have every Xanth novel ever published and somehow maintained an interest in the American Civil War and Fraggle Rock simultaneously seemed unlikely to inspire murderous hatred in anybody, and there was no evidence here that she was involved in anything shady. Hopefully there'd be some answers when he talked to her friends and family.
Carlton Lassiter might have the reputation of being too detached from humanity, but he also had a habit of taking certain cases and making them personal. This one was going to be one of those, without question. The girl may have been a D&D geek and an MLP freak, but overall the impression he got from the leftover trappings of her life was of a happy, brainy, pleasantly goofy kid with dreams who most definitely did not deserve to die.
He left the bedroom and met up with Patrol Officer Carter by the living room. "Did you get anything out of her?" he asked, with a nod to Red Streaks.
"Not much, sir," Carter said. "She gave me the number for the girl's family back home in Iowa, and the names of her teachers and some of her close acquaintances, though. She's calmed down a bit, now, if you want to talk to her."
"What's her name again?"
"Gena Giamatti."
"Got it."
He entered the living room. "Hello, Ms. Giamatti - I'm Detective Carlton Lassiter with the Santa Barbara police department, I'm leading the investigation of the murder of Ms. King. I know you're very upset right now, and doubtless very confused, but I was hoping I could ask you a few questions. I won't keep you long. Would that be all right?"
The girl turned a nightmare of a mascara-streaked face up to look at him. "O-okay," she said. Lassiter sat down on the edge of the chair across from her and pulled a notebook and pen out of the inner pocket of his jacket. "First off, I just wanted to ask you if you know what Ms. King's plans for this weekend were? Did she intend to have anyone over - a friend, perhaps a boyfriend?"
The girl shook her head. "Poppy doesn't have a boyfriend. She didn't say she was going to have anyone over. I…I invited her to Monterey with me - it was my mother's birthday - but she said she needed the weekend to finish an art history project."
Lassiter took special note of both the nickname and the use of the present tense. He hadn't put Red Streaks very high on his potential suspects list at the beginning, and already she was dropping on the Billboard charts. It wasn't real to her, yet, what had happened and what it meant.
"Do you know of anyone who might have had a reason to kill Poppy?" he asked.
"N-no!" she said, eyes wide. "Everybody loves Poppy. She's a little weird but she's nice to everybody."
Somebody didn't love Poppy, it would appear, Lassiter thought. He stood up and pulled a printed business card out of his jacket pocket. "I'm going to let you get out of here now - you have someplace to go, right? - but I want you to keep thinking of everyone you and Poppy knew, anything that might have been even a little bit off about anyone. If you think of anything, anything at all, Gena, call me, okay? Any time, day or night."
On the way out of the house he paused briefly and addressed Patrol Officer Carter. "You got that list of names she gave you? I want to get started tracking some of these people down and getting statements."
"Right here, sir. How are you going to notify the next-of-kin?"
Lassiter sighed. "Painfully, I suspect."
A/A/N: The victim's bedroom described herein is, more or less, my own, although the book currently sitting on my nightstand is not Killer Angels but Fluke; or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings, and my copy of Andersonville is actually in between a copy of Dances With Wolves and The Tigger Movie - Ernest Scared Stupid is just ahead of DWW. Even though I'm about ten years out of college I still have most of my textbooks, being one of those lucky sods who always ended up with the discontinued volumes that couldn't be sold back, so yes, the books in the book bag are mine, too, as are the MLP coloring books and D&D manuals. Before you start to make fun of me, though, I'll point out that I left out the extensive knife and gun collection. I wave my privates in the faces of your aunties, you secondhand electric donkey-bottom biters!