Interviewing witnesses is always time-consuming and frustrating, as any officer of the law can tell you. The stories you hear often bear little relation to reality, but you don't dare blow off any detail given. How much more frustrating is it then, to try to interview crime scene witnesses who are hysterical and constantly changing their story; or who want to check what they saw against what their twin thinks they saw; or who ask you if you've ever been on "COPS"?
"Are *all* Jerry's guests total flakes?"
Tracy Vetter grimaced at her partner's frustrated expression, and flipped her notebook shut. "Kinda looks that way, doesn't it?" She sighed, glancing back over to where Alexander Lucard sat in the studio audience. It still seemed almost unbelievable that someone as tacky as Jerry could have an exact double who was so... classy.
Nick was still talking. "A dark figure, possibly a man, with a," he checked his notes, "quote, 'definite air of menace', unquote, crossed the catwalk, picked up that lamp, threw it down toward the stage, then exited in the other direction and disappeared. Great. Some witnesses!"
"Uh-hmmmm." Jerry Tate had proven to be a womanizer and a shallow boor, and after Tracy and Nick had arrested Charly, his former producer, for committing a string of jealousy-motivated murders, the talk-show host had actually had the nerve to proposition her. The urge to say "as if!" had been very, very strong, but Tracy had settled for telling him she had a boyfriend (okay, Vachon wasn't a boyfriend, he was a friend. A vampire friend. So what? It still put him several yards in front of Jerry Tate in the Singles Stakes).
Funny how Mr. Lucard was so like him, and yet so very different.
"Tracy, will you quit drooling over the billionaire."
"What?"
Nick's annoyed expression was verging on the genuinely perturbed. "You've been looking over at him once every thirty seconds for the last hour. Didn't you learn your lesson with Jerry?"
"He's nothing like Jerry. And what is it with you and Mr. Lucard? You acted like you knew each other." The best defense is a good offense, Tracy could hear her father saying in the back of her mind.
"I've never met him before." Nick was clenching his jaw, always a bad sign. Tracy was sure that her partner was the kind of guy who ground his teeth in his sleep. He probably had ridges on his bicuspids from all that stress.
"But you don't like him."
"I'm not the issue here! You are! Don't you have any sense of self- preservation?" Knight was glaring *and* clenching his jaw now, and adding the kind of look he usually gave witnesses under interrogation who were claiming to be home watching TV on the night of the 18th, instead of carving up their boyfriends with butcher knives.
"You are NOT my father, my older brother, my boyfriend, or my boss! And where does my sense of self-preservation enter into this discussion?"
Timing is everything. Whatever answer Nick could have made to his partner's extremely reasonable question was permanently shelved by the reverberating conversation broadcast over the station's PA system two seconds later.
"Mwah mwah, Mwah mwah MWAHMWAHmwah," rumbled over the intercom.
"What the...?" Nick and Tracy looked up and around, like the rest of the people present in the auditorium, even though all of them knew that no one was above them, it was just the PA system. Sort of like penguins after the Air Force jet has already buzzed them.
"You have no idea how frustrating it is." Alexander Lucard's ringing tones, rich with irony and depression, came through loud and clear. "Of all the people in the world who could look like me, that it should be that crass, sensationalistic, arrogant buffoon---" Nick slowly turned, his gaze going to the financier sitting like a statue in the audience, his steepled fingers rigid with shock. After the garbled mush of the preceding voice, Lucard's statement was hideously audible. More gibberish answered his taped sentiments.
"mwah, mwah mwah... MWAH" and after a pause, "I've spent too long building my financial empire to risk it by killing someone who is only an annoyance. However, if I thought I could get away with it..." More gargling, and then Lucard's voice saying, "...the capability to buy and sell a thousand men like him. But because of his notoriety, killing the little insect directly is out of the question...." Lucard's eyes slowly closed, then opened again, seeming darker than before.
On stage, Jerry Tate's face was aghast. "You think I'm an insect?"
Alexander Lucard stood, adjusting the lapels of his Armani, smiling coolly at the approaching homicide detectives. He waited until they were only a few feet away, then declaimed, "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?" At Tracy's gaze of incomprehension, he commented, "Henry II. 'A Lion in Winter.' Act IV."
"'Beckett.' Act V." Nick corrected him, arms crossed over his chest, eyes narrowed as he studied Lucard.
An expression of nausea replaced the confidence that had been on the other man's face a second before. "What?"
"It's from 'Beckett'. Not 'A Lion in Winter'. Same playwright, though." Nick was smiling. It was not a nice smile. Not at all.
"Are you sure?" Lucard abruptly sat down, staring at Nick the whole time. "Pardon me... I just had the most awful feeling of deja vu..." Not only does he *look* terrifyingly like Klaus, now he's pulling the same game of quotation one-upmanship! Lucard thought, swallowing hard. Noooo. It can't be a coincidence; appearance is one thing, but this reaction is another! They're in it together, both of them are trying to frame me! He didn't usually think in exclamation points, but recent events had left the financier off-balance and more than a little paranoid.
Detective Knight was still speaking. "And you may be right, that wanting Jerry Tate dead doesn't mean you did it, but I'd say it looks downright suspi---"
BANG!!
Tracy hit the floor, as did Nick, Lucard, and everyone else who could, to the accompaniment of screams, shouts, glass breaking, and someone yelling "911!"
BANG!!!
"Metro Homicide! Drop your weapon!" Nick was up and running toward the back of the auditorium, without asking her to cover him, Tracy thought in exasperation, gun out, voice deep and macho, like it was every time he pulled this stunt. The shots were coming from the back of the balcony above the auditorium, where it was too dark to see the shooter.
BANG!
zzzing!
BANG!
"OW!" Jerry Tate clutched at his arm - the unburned, un-bruised one - in disbelief, and stared down at shirt and the little hole that was oozing blood. His eyes rolled up in his head, and he toppled to the floor as the various sets of twins had hysterics for the second time in three hours.
Tracy was following her partner---maybe not the smartest thing in the world to do, but she didn't have any better ideas---when she met him coming back in. "Damnit, damnit, damnit, BLOODY HELL, damnit," he was swearing, and then he added something in French that Tracy didn't think was anatomically possible.
"I didn't know you knew French," she commented dryly, holstering her weapon as they went back down to the milling frenzy.
Nick blinked and looked abashed, reminding Tracy briefly of Vachon.
"Well, now you see, detective, that I couldn't possibly have done this," Lucard said as they approached him.
"Anyone with as much money as you have could have hired someone." Knight said stubbornly. "At the very least, someone wants to frame you. Someone who overheard your conversation with---?"
"An old, old, friend," Lucard responded, his eyes gleaming wickedly at Nick. By now Tracy was sure of it, they DID know each other. There were too many cross-currents going on for them not to. Lucard's attitude wasn't doing much to calm her less-than-cool partner, either.
Nick was almost snarling in frustration. "Fine. An old friend. You can tell us all about it down at the precinct."
Up above the stage, Klaus stifled a giggle by pushing a fist into his mouth as far as it would go.
Wasn't *this* an interesting development?
Now, how could he turn it to his advantage...