Lotsa Buffy, Lotsa Wes. AU-Spike and AU-Giles show up in this one.

Chapter 2: Chance Meetings

Buffy hefted the box of paperwork and stepped into the parking garage, looking for the car Sergeant Pryce had described. She had spent the morning filling out forms in triplicate, memorizing the instructions on other forms, and glancing longingly at the Rayne casefile. But first things first, the sergeant insisted. She fantasized about spilling white out over his way-too-expensive-for-a-cop shoes, but just when her teeth were on edge, he proposed taking a lunch break at the local pub. "Where all the real work gets done," he said, and she thought he was kidding, until he dropped the box into her arms and handed her his car keys.

Of course, she couldn't actually find his car. Wesley had stayed back to check out with the desk sergeant, and all these bland grey and black English vehicles looked the same. She hadn't really expected to ride around in a Cooper Mini with the Union Jack painted on the roof, but did Yorkshire police have to be so boring? She couldn't imagine any of the L.A. cops she knew being caught dead in these things.

Which led to thoughts of Liam and his convertible, and that last day at the reservoir, the wind in her hair, the smell of meat on the grill because whatever else you could say about the man, he made a great bloody burger. And the way they had both agreed that they needed space, that he was still a married man and needed to see what might happen with Kate, and Connor, and God knew her own father was in Spain with his stupid secretary, and Buffy didn't think she had it in her to be the other woman. . . but Liam, and his eyes and his arms and the way he was always trying to do the right thing, to make everybody happy but himself. Buffy, sometimes I think that if I was ever happy for a minute, the world would spin off its axis, and I've never met anyone who makes me happy the way you do, and I think that means we need to be apart. Liam and the way he could make her feel like a pathetic lost little girl, not by anything that was his fault, just by loving her, and why hadn't anybody ever told her that love was a curse as often as it was a blessing and. . .

A footfall sounded behind her. Bracing herself, she moved one hand to her nightstick and called, "Who's there?" Buffy had always hated carrying a gun, but for a moment she missed it. Another footstep echoed, this time seeming to come from the other direction, and then a haunting whistle rose into the air. She recognized the tune, "Rain – drops keep fall- ing on my head."

"Hello?" she demanded, and at the same time the name on the murder file rose into her mind. Rayne. "Who's there?" she repeated.

"If I'm not mistaken, it's the new American bird. Fresh blood." The accent was city. London, probably. Light years from the clipped BBC tones of her sergeant. She turned around, slowly, three-hundred-sixty degrees, trying to make out the source of the voice. "Fresh blood's missing her gun, I wager. I never did understand why this country refused to properly arm its policemen. Particularly its policewomen. Leaves them vulnerable to those would do them harm."

"I don't need any gun." She set the files on the floor and lifted the nightstick. "Don't like the things. Hardly ever helpful. This stick I know how to use. And I was the city police athletic league judo and karate champion two years running."

"They have a girls' division? How enlightened. Of course," he sighed. "Hands or arms, you can't hit the thing you can't see." Now the voice was clearly behind her, and she turned to see a man stepping out of the shadows. The glow of a cigarette lit his long menacing face, high cheekbones skeletal in the orange light. His long black coat moved with his stride as he approached her, stopping only to ash his cigarette on the roof of a car. "I've got a message for your boss, fresh blood." Buffy planted her feet and squared her shoulders forward. "Relax, love. I'm one of the good guys."

"That's open to question." Sergeant Pryce's voice rang from across the garage. "If you have a message, Harker, give it to me. Leave my men out of this."

"Men?" The stranger mouthed at Buffy, and raised an eyebrow. The brows were dark, but his hair was a rather extraordinary shade of bleach blonde, with dark roots growing in.

Harker, she thought. William the Bloody? She could imagine him as a cop-gone-bad easily enough. Although, she had come onto the LAPD long after the Ramparts scandal broke, she had met a few holdovers, officers who weren't quite deep enough in the morass to lose their jobs, but who had come out less than squeaky clean. Others who had gone so deep undercover they couldn't find their way up anymore. "You're Sergeant Harker?"

"Former," called Pryce, moving toward them.

Harker leaned toward Buffy and offered his hand. "Call me Spike."

"Please don't," Wesley interjected. "You'll just encourage him."

"Spike?" She looked into his piercing blue eyes and accepted his strong, long-fingered grip on her palm. "I'm Buffy. You're not on the force any more, so what' your interest here? Are you, like, a private investigator."

"You might say that." Spike tilted his head. Buffy had never realized that such a simple gesture could look so insolent.

Pryce moved to step between them, and he turned that cold look on Buffy. She was disregarding his wishes about Harker, but, well, that was his problem. She wanted to understand Harker's situation for herself, and her sergeant was clearly too emotionally involved to give an objective assessment. Besides, she had to calculate that this Spike might turn out to be a valuable ally. Perhaps moreso than Pryce, who seemed to be on the outs with the powers-that-were. It was her instinct to like Wesley, but she also knew that it could be a mistake to get too entrenched in one camp too early in her career.

At the moment, Pryce was saving most of his fuck-you looks for Spike Harker. "He's a lot like a private inquiry agent," Wesley said. "Except that to actually be a P.I., he would need a license that no agency in the United Kingdom would give to a man with his record."

"Oh what now, Wyndsley? Are you going to tell Daddy on me? You won't of course. Because you need to know the things that I can tell you."

"If you have a message for me, spit it out."

"Right then. Skip the foreplay." Spike nodded and spoke one word. "Rayne."

"It's autumn in Yorkshire," Wesley answered. "Rain hardly qualifies as news."

"Ethan Rayne," Spike answered. "Your corpse."

"I know. I just thought I'd waste some of your time in exchange for your persistence in wasting mine."

"I spent a lot of time with that case."

"Oh joy," Wesley rolled his eyes at the ceiling, then said to Buffy. "It's to be Chernobyl then." Looking back at Harker, he said, "Are you warning me off, or does your message actually involve information we can use?"

"Information that's up your alley," Spike answered. "Not that you deserve it but. . ." He cast his eyes at Buffy. "Might keep the lady entertained." Then as if she weren't there, he said. "I like this one, you know. She might be good for you. Help you get your rocks off, save you from mooning over Labcoat Barbie all the livelong day."

Buffy curled her lip at Spike, deciding Pryce might have a point about him. "You're gross."

Spike turned to her and did an uncanny imitation of a SoCal valley girl accent. "Gross. Oh my God. Like, gag me with a purple smurf." Then, looking at Wesley, he reverted to his regular voice and said, "Oh, yes, she'll do nicely."

"Message?" Wesley repeated, and now his voice was less 'Fuck you,' and more 'I'd like to kill you with a teaspoon and serve your severed head with crumpets.'

"Books. I hear old Ethan liked books. I understand you might want to pay a visit to your friend Ripper."

Wesley looked as though this meant something, but his eyes narrowed. "Harker, if I find out this is a wild goose, so help me. . ."

He spread his hands, and backed away, whistling the "raindrops" song again. Wesley rolled his eyes and turned to his car. The one, Buffy noticed, that Spike had ashed on. "Oh, Wyndsley!" Spike called. Pryce stiffened but didn't turn, which seemed enough encouragement. "Three more words. Dog. Sheep. Deer."

Wesley whirled. "What?"

"You heard me," Spike answered.

"And I say again, you had better not be wasting my time."

"I tremble before your idle threats. Truly, truly I do." He turned his back, dropped his cigarette, and called over his shoulder. "Ask your friend Ripper."

Wesley stared after Spike and, as soon he was gone, turned to the car, placed his hands on the roof, and kicked the tire ferociously three times. Then he smiled wanly at Buffy. "Sorry for that display."

"It's OK." She frowned after Spike. "I violently dislike that guy."

"I could tell," Pryce answered dryly, "By the way you were holding hands."

"I shook his hand," she said. "And among my people? The non-stuffy people of the world? That doesn't exactly mean we're engaged."

"But it does make me wonder what exactly compels you to act friendly with someone I've specifically instructed you to avoid."

"Maybe the same thing that makes you instruct me to avoid people I could understand better if I talked to them myself."

He sighed and started to open the driver's side door. Then, seeing the ash on the roof, he scowled, wiped it off with his hand, and kicked the tire again. "Any more questions?" he asked Buffy.

"Dog, sheep, deer?"

"Nothing," he said firmly. "Harker's crazy talk."

"So you mean questions you feel like answering. All right then. You have friends named Ripper?"

He looked up at her with an almost-real smile. "Now him, you can see for yourself."

The bell on the little door jingled, as Wesley entered, and Buffy squeezed after him. The must of mildew, old paper, and binding glue hit his nostrils as keenly as ever. Wesley often felt that he didn't have much understanding of the things he loved, or why he loved them, but he had no doubts about the readers' lust that ignited every time he walked into a bookshop. At university, he had toyed with a course of study in library science, or linguistics, before settling on the more practical criminology degree. This old-book smell always made him consider the virtues of the contemplative life he had rejected.

Even before he looked at Buffy, he knew her nose would be curled up like a rabbit's, and sure enough she sniffed and frowned, then whispered, "What does this guy rip, exactly?"

The front of the shop was empty, and it struck Wesley that it might be worthwhile to play this a little close to the chest. He placed a hand on Buffy's arm and said quietly. "For now, let's pretend you don't know me. We didn't walk in together, you're just browsing. Stay close enough to listen. Try to act like you belong here." His eyes wandered to her trousers. "Insofar as that's possible. See about something in khaki, do you think?"

She nodded. "New pants, check."

He almost choked. "Really, Summers, that's a private matter." Then he remembered that to an American pants were trousers, rather than underwear. Fortunately, before he had time to explain his confusion, Rupert Giles came from the back of the store with an armful of books stacked as high as his face. He nodded at Buffy, who immediately went to a bookshelf near the entrance and did a more or less convincing job of scanning the titles. Wesley approached Giles and put on as jovial a tone as he could muster. "Ripper, old boy, let me help you with those."

Lifting half the stack revealed Giles' genuine smile of delight. "Wesley, what a marvelous surprise. It's been much much too long."

"You know the life of a working man." Wesley felt a stab of guilt at playacting around someone he really thought of as a friend. Bugger policing in a small town, he thought, and wondered if Giles even recalled his profession. Most likely he did, but then, Giles sometimes seemed to live with his head in the clouds, and Wesley decided not to remind him right away. "Too many books, never enough time."

"Of course." Giles set his burden down on the counter, and Wesley put his beside them. "Now," Giles said, rubbing his hands together. "How is your charming American lady friend?"

"Sorry?" Wesley stammered, and almost blew his cover by looking at Buffy. She at least had the presence of mind to keep browsing, although he wished she would have noticed that the books she was looking at were in French. Well, maybe she reads French, he thought, and then, An American? Not bloody likely.

Fortunately, Giles was leafing through one of the volumes on the table, and didn't notice the gesture at all. "The lady professor from Texas, who used to come in with you?" he said. "Fran, was it? I was just thinking of her, because we received some lovely illustrated volumes on the history of dance. That was her interest, was it not?"

"Fred," Wesley corrected. "And, yes, she likes ballet." He was unable to suppress a smile at the image it gave him of Winifred Burkle's graceful form twirling under a spotlight. "Dance and theoretical physics and forensic science. And nineteenth century children's literature. Quite a nimble mind Fred has." Now Buffy was definitely looking at him, and he thought, Oh bugger, me and my mouth. He wondered how much he would be able to play off as a performance. Then it also occurred to him that if Buffy ended up going out for drinks with Fred, it couldn't hurt for her to have heard this. Finally it occurred to him that he was a thirty-five year old man investigating a homicide and not, in fact, a thirteen-year old boy with a juvenile crush, and that he really really needed to, as Buffy would doubtless phrase it, get a life.

Giles brightened. "I have quite a number of volumes on all of those subjects, actually." Leaning across the counter, man to man, he said in a confidential tone. "If there is any occasion for which a gift might be in order."

Wesley felt simultaneously better and worse. Better because he realized that a bookseller's gestures of friendship to a regular customer – a customer with very low sales resistance, and a trust-fund padded income -- inevitably had ulterior motives of their own. Worse for much the same reason. "Perhaps not today. Perhaps not ever, actually," he sighed, now trying to mask his own earlier uncertainty as romantic disappointment. Which, when it came to Fred Burkle, was not particularly difficult to fake. Confidentially, and rather hoping Buffy couldn't hear, he said, "Today she told me I reminded her of her cousin Cory from Oklahoma."

"Oh," said Giles sympathetically, "Well, they sometimes marry cousins in Oklahoma, correct?"

"And in the line of Wyndam-Pryce," Wesley said dryly. "But somehow I don't think she views Cory as a dark mysterious stranger type." And then, hoping he had established a sufficient level of intimacy to encourage confidence without having to delve any deeper into his own affairs, Wesley turned to the books on the counter and ran his finger over the spines. Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, all the volumes. A nice leather-bound edition but nothing remarkable. "So have you seen any interesting collections come through here in the past few months?"

"Interesting?" Giles removed his glasses and started to rub them with a pocket handkerchief. "Interesting in what way?"

"Just. . .interesting. The sort of thing that you know it when you see it?"

Giles' eyebrows went up as he replaced his glasses. "Well, yes," he said. "We do get a bit of that sort of thing. I hadn't imagined it would be up your alley, but. . .perhaps for the lady. Or. . .not for a lady, we have that as well."

"No." Wesley shook his head. "I didn't mean pornography. At least. . ." he paused. "I suppose it could be pornography, but. . ." Exactly when, he thought, did I get so bad at the detective part of detective work?

"This is an official inquiry, then," Giles said, stiffly. "I'm disappointed in you, Wesley. I thought we were friends. Why don't you just come out and ask me if I knew Ethan Rayne?"

"Did you?" Wesley prompted.

"Of course," Giles answered. "And I know who killed him."

TBC