"Law and Disorder"


STANDARD DISCLAIMER: See: Chapter 1.


Chapter 3


By the time they delivered Doctor Newton's TARDIS and the warrant to search it to the 27th Precinct, it was already dark outside. The detectives decided to call it a day.
"That was a terribly mean thing to do to that district attorney," the Doctor said from the back seat of Briscoe's car. He grinned at the two detectives. "That poor man didn't know what hit him!"
"He'll get over it," Green assured him, glancing into the rearview mirror to return the Doctor's grin.
"Hey, Doc, you and Jack have a lot in common," Briscoe said.
"How so?" the Time Lord asked.
"He sleeps with his assistants too!"
"Very funny," the Doctor said flatly.
"Here we are," Briscoe said, easing into a parking space near Washington Square Park. The Doctor got out of the car and leaned over into the driver's side window.
"Is there anything else I can do for you gentlemen tonight?" he asked. Briscoe frowned, a thought suddenly occurring to him.
"One more question. There aren't any more of these TARDISes lying around the city, are there?" The Doctor shook his head.
"No, my scanner would have picked them up," he replied.
"Your TARDIS doesn't work right," Green reminded him. "You said so yourself."
"The chameleon circuit's shot, but the scanner works just fine."
"So if another Time Lord killed her, where's his TARDIS?" Briscoe asked. He made a face. "Listen to what I just said. I can't believe I'm asking questions like this."
"Now that's an excellent question, Detective," the Doctor said thoughtfully, appearing not to have heard Briscoe's lament. "I shall have to give it some very serious thought."
"You do that," Briscoe said. "And tell us what you come up with."
"Absolutely," the Doctor agreed. "Until tomorrow, then," he said, turning towards the path that led to his TARDIS. When he reached the police box, he saw that someone had decorated it with a sticker advertising a local death metal band. He peeled it off with a sigh, counting himself lucky that no one had spray painted obscenities on it as well. He entered the console room and began setting coordinates for Angelina's apartment, and then stopped, realizing that Tegan was sure to pounce on him the moment he arrived, and he needed time to organize his thoughts before dealing with her. Instead, he went into the main corridor and headed for his rooms, where he planned to take a long soak in a hot bath. As he walked, he pulled off his velvet jacket and sniffed cautiously at himself, making a face. "You could use a good bath anyway!" he said out loud.


Tegan was lying on the living room sofa, deeply engrossed in Memoirs of a Geisha when the TARDIS materialized in its usual corner. She didn't even look up when the doors opened and the Doctor stepped out, wearing tan trousers and a white shirt open at the neck. His hair was still damp from the bath, and he looked refreshed and relaxed.
"Hello, Tegan," he said cautiously, walking over to where she lay. Without otherwise acknowledging his presence, she moved her legs aside to make room for him to sit. "Ah, yes, the old silent treatment," the Time Lord mused. "That was never really your style though, was it? You always had too much to say to keep it up for long." She looked up from her book to glare at him, and then quickly returned her attention to its pages. "I suppose we all change with age," he continued, wondering vaguely why he was deliberately trying to goad her into a fight. I must need to have my head examined, he thought wryly. Perhaps I should speak with Doctor Olivet. "So, would you like to hear about my day, Tegan?" That got a response.
"No, I would not," she spat. "I can guess what your day was like," she continued, sitting up and placing the book on the coffee table in front of the sofa. "It was just like all your other days, wasn't it? You've gotten yourself into some kind of mess and you'll end up being chased by dangerous people or horrible monsters who want to kill you!"
"Now, Tegan – " he began in a reasonable tone.
"Don't you understand anything, you stupid git?" she fumed, leaning towards him as her anger built. "This sort of thing is why I left you in the first place! I didn't want our child dragged into your dangerous life, and what did you do? You showed up twenty years later and dragged her in anyway!"
"That's not really fair," he protested. "I never even – "
"You've gotten her involved in a murder investigation!" she reminded him. The Doctor leaned close to her, using his index finger to punctuate his words as he spoke.
"She is hardly involved in the – " he began.
"There are homicide detectives coming to her apartment, Doctor! I'd say that's getting her involved, wouldn't you?"
"Are you going to let me finish a single sen– "
"I didn't want this kind of life for her, Doctor. Your kind of life. You may take things like this in stride, but I don't anymore and she never did!"
"You're overprotective!" he accused, and immediately knew it had been the wrong thing to say.
"Overprotective!" she practically screamed in his face. "Overprotective! Do you have any idea at all what these past twenty years have been like for me? Always looking over my shoulder for the Master or a Dalek or a Terileptil or God only knows what? Always worried that one of your old enemies might figure out who Angelina is to you and decide to use her to settle old scores?"
"Ah, yes, you were so worried about it that you let her become an international celebrity!" the Doctor countered sarcastically.
"Why do you think she doesn't use her last name and doesn't talk about her family to the press? I couldn't lock her in her bedroom for the rest of her life, Doctor! She's got to live her life!"
"Exactly!" he said, his finger right in her face. "And that makes taking risks!"
"There's a difference between taking reasonable risks in life and actually choosing to go around with an irresponsible Time Lord who's Trouble's best friend!" she countered hotly. "And don't you point your bloody finger at me!" she yelled, grabbing his hand. Their eyes met and held. They were almost nose-to-nose; the sound of their angry breathing seemed unnaturally loud in the otherwise empty apartment.
Neither of them was certain how the kiss started, but once their lips touched, they were both lost. The Doctor's arms went around her and she clung to him like a drowning woman, her hands twisting in his soft brown hair as she made incoherent little sounds of pleasure. Though his appearance had changed, his body chemistry had not; the scent of his body and the taste of his mouth were both exactly as she remembered. With her eyes closed, she could almost imagine that she was kissing the man she thought of as her Doctor, the blond cricketer, Angelina's father.
"Just the same," the Doctor murmured against her lips, echoing her thoughts. "Oh God. Tegan." His hands fumbled at the buttons of her blouse, and she shifted slightly to give him better access, her own hands moving to unbutton his shirt. She pulled his shirt off his shoulders, and then moved her arms to allow him to strip her blouse off and throw it on the floor to join his shirt. They managed to accomplish all of this without breaking their kiss, as though both of them were worried that doing so would break the spell they seemed to have fallen under. The Doctor fumbled with her bra clasp and finally managed to get that garment off as well, and Tegan was working on his zipper when –
"Oh my God!" Angelina exclaimed in a voice that managed to sound astounded, appalled, and utterly revolted all at the same time.
"Angelina!" the Doctor exclaimed in surprise. "And Detective Munch!" he continued, grabbing his shirt from the floor and throwing it over the mortified Tegan, who had crossed her arms over her bare chest. There was a very long silence.
"I thought you said they fight all the time," Munch said in a dry voice. "At least they're not fighting." Angelina put a hand over her eyes.
"I don't believe this," she muttered, stalking off towards the kitchen. In the living room, there was another awkward silence.
"Nice to see you again, Doctor," Munch finally said.
"Yes, you too, Detective," the Doctor replied in an odd voice, running a hand through his tangled hair.
"And, uh, nice to meet you, Miss Jovanka," Munch continued awkwardly.
"Likewise," Tegan mumbled. "I hope you'll forgive me if I don't shake hands." He nodded, not looking at her. Angelina returned to the living room carrying an open bottle of wine and some wine glasses. She set the wine down on the coffee table and very pointedly held up two glasses for her parents to see.
"I think we're being told to clear off," Tegan told the Doctor, rising and clutching his shirt around her.
"You're not going to leave her alone with him, are you?" the Doctor protested.
"I am twenty years old," Angelina told him in a frosty voice. "I was told you knew how to count. And I don't think you really have any room to say much at the moment, have you? A girl would be safer with Munch than with you, obviously!"
"Come on, Doctor," Tegan said quietly. "Let's go. Trust me, the mood she's in now, you don't want to wind her up any further!" Sighing, he rose and headed for his TARDIS.
"Oh no you don't!" Angelina said immediately.
'What?" the Doctor asked innocently.
"You're not going in that blue box so you can sit in there and watch us on the viewscreen! I wasn't born yesterday, you know." The Doctor's eyes widened in surprise; clearly Angelina had accurately worked out his intentions. Tegan hid a smile behind her hand. "If you two want to carry on like randy teenagers," Angelina continued, pointing at the hallway "you have my mother's room and two guest bedrooms to choose from. Go in there and do it behind closed doors where no one can see you, and for God's sake, don't tell me about it later, because I don't want to know!" Sheepishly, Tegan and the Doctor headed for the hallway, with Angelina's voice following them as they left. "Honestly, you are the ones who are supposed to walk in on scenes like the one I just witnessed, not the other way around!" She paused for a moment, and Munch saw her eyes widen as what was obviously a horrifying thought suddenly occurred to her. She hurried partway up the hall towards the bedrooms where Munch heard her yell, "And for the love of God, use a bloody condom, would you?"
"I'm surprised you didn't ground them for a week, too," Munch said dryly when she returned.
"I probably should've, yeah?" Angelina replied, laughing. She moved to sit on the sofa and motioned him over to join her. As he sat down next to her, she poured the wine and handed him a glass. She shifted slightly on the sofa, and her foot encountered something on the floor. She used her foot to lift it off the floor and into view. It was her mother's bra. "Bloody hell!" she swore, kicking it across the room. Munch laughed.
"We never want to think of our parents that way, do we?" he asked, taking a sip of the strong red wine.
"Too right!" she agreed, rubbing a hand across her forehead, her eyes wide. "I'm scarred for life by what I saw tonight!"
"Try not to think about it," he advised.
"You're right," she said briskly, taking a sip of wine and leaning back against the sofa. "I'm going to put it right out of my mind." She gave him her dazzling supermodel smile. "Perhaps you could help." Munch looked down at his wineglass.
"You don't think I'm too old for you?" She shook her head. He raised his head and looked her in the eye. "And your parents don't think I'm too old for you?" he pressed. She snorted.
"Listen, my mother is forty-three. My father is over eleven hundred years old. If either of them say one single word about you, I shall have plenty to say in return."
"Well, when you put it that way…" Munch said, taking her wineglass and setting it down on the coffee table with his own.
Her lips were cool and soft and tasted like wine.


"Hey Lennie!" Green called, racing to catch up with his partner. Briscoe stopped walking and turned. "Did you see this?" Green asked, holding up the morning's Post. On the cover was a picture of the supermodel Angelina grasping a man's arm as they tried to duck out of a restaurant without being photographed. The headline read Angelina's New Mystery Man.
"That's Munch!" Lennie crowed with a huge grin. When they entered the squad room, they immediately saw that someone had posted the cover picture on the bulletin board. Some wag had crossed out the words " mystery man" in the headline and substituted "Munch" in red marker so that the headline now read Angelina's New Munch. A uniformed officer approached the two detectives.
"They're getting ready to start the search on your filing cabinet over there," the uniform said, pointing at Doctor Newton's TARDIS, which the Doctor had materialized in a convenient corner the previous night. "A guy came by lookin' for youse guys," he continued. "I told him you weren't here yet. He unlocked the filing cabinet for us so's we could begin the search, but he took something out. Now it's all dark in there." Briscoe and Green exchanged a frown.
"What'd this guy look like?" Briscoe asked.
"Kinda wild brown hair. He was wearin' this velvet coat, too. Looked pretty weird. Oh yeah, he said he'd be across the street at Dunkin' Donuts, and you should join him when you get here. And he left you his calling card," the uniform concluded with a smirk to indicate what he thought of guys with snooty accents who dressed like they'd stepped out of a Dickens novel and left calling cards. He dug around in his pocket and finally produced the card, which he handed to Green. "And that's all I know."
"Thanks," Briscoe said. "Up for some coffee?" he asked his partner. Green nodded absently, studying the card the uniform had given him. "You're buyin'," Briscoe informed him, clapping him on the shoulder.
"Lennie, look at this," he said, handing the card to Briscoe. It was about the size of a business card, made of thick white paper that was obviously high quality. It was blank except for two familiar Greek letters printed in black in the very middle.


The Doctor sat at a table in Dunkin' Donuts, nursing his cup of tea and doing the New York Times crossword puzzle in pen. He was aware of people around him reading the New York Post with the picture of his daughter and her "mystery man" on the front cover, and smiled to himself.
He had woken early that morning (alone, in one of the guest rooms) and padded out to the living room bare-footed and bare-chested (Tegan had still had his shirt) to find Angelina and Munch sitting on the sofa together, absorbed in a lively discussion about some obscure German art film that he had never heard of; evidently Munch was quite the foreign film connoisseur. There had been an empty wine bottle and two half-filled wine glasses on the coffee table in front of them, and he'd noted with some relief that they were both fully clothed; obviously the night had been spent in conversational rather than carnal pursuits. He had greeted them, receiving a rather frigid reception from Angelina (who still hadn't forgiven him for embarrassing her the night before) and padded into his TARDIS to prepare for the day ahead.
"What's this?" Briscoe's voice asked, breaking his reverie. He looked down at his crossword to see that the detective had tossed his calling card down on the middle of it. He looked up to see Briscoe and Green standing over him.
"Good morning, Detectives. Lovely day, isn't it?" Briscoe and Green remained on their feet, staring down at him with what he recognized as the police look. He picked up his calling card and held it up. "This is my calling card. I left it for you at the station." He leaned back in his seat and waited to see if any explanation for their abrupt change in behavior was forthcoming.
"What do those letters mean?" Green asked. The Doctor blinked.
"They're Greek letters – " he began.
"Yeah, a theta and a sigma," Briscoe said, pronouncing it thayta. "We looked it up. It's not a word. What's it mean?"
"Oh, do have a seat," the Doctor said, sounding annoyed. "You're making me nervous, standing over me like that. Although I suppose that's the idea. All right. Theta Sigma is one of my names."
"Theeta?" Green tried out. "Theeta Sigma? That's your name?"
"One of them," he agreed. The detectives exchanged a look. Briscoe removed a diary from his pocket, opened it to the last entry, and put it down on the table in front of the Doctor, who blinked in surprise as Briscoe's finger pointed at the "theta sigma" with the emphatic red circle around it. "Well, now I see what's got you so upset," he murmured. He looked up at them. "Eva's diary, I take it?" They nodded.
"Any idea why your name's circled in red right after her last entry?" Briscoe asked. The Doctor shook his head.
"None at all. I'd have to read it."
"The brains in linguistics haven't been able to do anything with it," Green told him.
"I wouldn't think they could," the Doctor replied. "It's in Gallifreyan."
"And you can read it?" Briscoe asked.
"Of course!" Briscoe and Green finally sat.
"Start reading," Green said. "Out loud. In English." The Doctor gave them a cold look. When he finally spoke, it was in a voice they'd never heard from him before: the icy tones of an angry Time Lord of Gallifrey.
"I shall swallow my indignation at being suspected of murdering an old friend, gentlemen, and instead remind you that I have an alibi for the time she was killed. I was at a fashion show, as Angelina, Tegan, and quite a few other people could tell you." The Doctor's eyes had changed, becoming cold and hard and utterly alien. Green forced himself to say what had just occurred to him.
"You have a time machine – " he began.
" – and I could have popped back and murdered her after the fashion show. Is that what you were going to say, Detective Green?" His icy blue gaze settled on Green, and the detective suddenly found himself wanting the Doctor to go back to being their smiling, cheerful, seemingly all-knowing companion from the day before, the man who'd explained the inexplicable and opened their eyes to a whole new incredible universe. "I suppose I could have," the Time Lord continued. "Except that it would have broken at least four or five Laws of Time."
"Murderers usually don't care about breaking other laws, Doctor Sigma," Briscoe reminded him. Now it was his turn to be fixed with that icy alien stare; as hardened as he was by the awful things that he'd seen and the terrible people that he'd met as a homicide detective, Briscoe only just managed not to squirm in his seat.
"Even the Master, the greatest criminal our race has ever produced, was bound by and obeyed the Laws of Time. Yes, he tried to steal the Eye to alter the course of history, but without it to guide him, he obeyed the Laws. To do otherwise is to court disaster." Briscoe let out a heavy sigh.
"Sorry, Doc," the older detective said. "It's our job to be suspicious." The Time Lord's icy demeanor melted away as quickly as it had appeared.
"I understand," he said wearily. "I haven't exactly been forthcoming with information, and I'm sure that I would be exactly the same if I were in your position. Now, let's see what Eva had to say about me, shall we?"
"Maybe she had a secret crush," Briscoe cracked. The Doctor's eyebrows went up. The detective shrugged. "Well, it's a diary, right?"
"Someone's torn out some pages," the Doctor noted as he flipped through the diary.
"Yeah, we saw that," Green said. The Doctor turned to the first page and began to read. "I'll get us some coffee," the detective said, standing. "Would you like another cup of tea?" he asked the Doctor.
"Yes, please," he replied absently, turning the page. Green headed for the counter to order their drinks, and Briscoe picked up the Doctor's newspaper and began to read. By the time Green returned to the table with a tray laden with drinks and doughnuts, the Doctor was closing the diary and setting it aside, a thoughtful look on his face.
"You read fast," Green said, putting the tray down. He sat down next to Briscoe, removed the lid from one of the coffees, and took a sip.
"Most of us do," the Doctor replied, reaching for his tea. "No mention of the Eye," he said with a sigh. "And I'm not certain why my name was brought into this. In the last entry, she mentioned wanting to contact the High Council, but there wasn't any reference to me in there at all… not there or in the rest of the diary.
"Maybe she was just doodling while thinking about an old school chum," Briscoe suggested.
"Perhaps."
"Or you got a mention in the torn out pages," Green added. The Doctor shrugged.
"Possibly. Speculation is useless. By the way, who's Andrew Parker?"
"One of Newton's coworkers," Green replied. "He was at the crime scene yesterday, remember Lennie?" Briscoe nodded, his mouth full of doughnut. "Why?"
"What was he like?" the Doctor asked.
"A typical museum nerd," Briscoe answered, taking a sip of coffee. "He seemed really upset about her death."
"I'd think he would be," the Doctor said. "Evidently they were having an affair." Briscoe choked on his coffee.
"Parker and Newton?" he asked, shaking his head. "Well, I guess it's not as weird as your daughter and Munch. The women of your species must not pick 'em based on looks!"
"Hey Lennie, maybe you should go to Gallifrey… you might actually stand a chance there!" Green said. Briscoe crumpled up a napkin and threw it at his partner.
"No, no, the women of my species don't 'pick 'em' at all, Detective," the Doctor was saying.
"Arranged marriage?" Green asked. The Doctor shook his head.
"No marriage. Time Lords reproduce asexually… well, most do," he amended wryly.
"I dunno, Doc… reproduction without sex… that sounds a lot like marriage to me!" Briscoe cracked.
"I'm telling you, Lennie," Green said, "you'd fit right in on Gallifrey. No marriage, no sex…" Briscoe threw another napkin at him.
"We do have the technology to slow the aging process…" the Doctor added with a grin, earning a napkin of his own right between the eyes. "…and it was even developed expressly for a human!"
"Who said he's a human?" Green asked curiously.
"If you morons are done fooling around, I think we have a time-traveling filing cabinet to search," Briscoe said, coming to his feet and pitching his empty coffee cup in the trash.
"You know, he just called you a moron," Green informed the Doctor, as though the Time Lord hadn't heard.
"I've been called worse," he replied with a shrug. "Come on," he said, standing. "Detective Briscoe is right; we have a TARDIS to search."
"And then we'd better drop by the museum and have another chat with Studley," Briscoe added dryly, picking up Newton's diary and stuffing it in his pocket.
"Another action-packed day," Green mused, finishing his coffee and rising to follow.


Continued in Chapter 4