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“Do it, England,
For like the hectic in my blood he rages,
And thou must cure me.” - Act IV, Scene III
After Roz left, Hutch sat for several seconds he didn’t really have, replaying the conversation in his mind and considering just what it might mean for him.
It had been a while since he had gone out with anyone more than a few times. Between Gillian and Abby, he had had his heart broken fairly badly over the last year. He wasn’t particularly eager to jump back into a relationship, preferring instead to casually date his usual series of flight attendants, with the occasional fellow music-lover he met at the local clubs thrown in to make life interesting. He hadn’t thought of Roz in quite this way, but he had been telling her the truth when he’d said he found her attractive; not just her looks, but her talent and her intelligence.
Maybe...
Glancing at his watch, however, he was reminded why he was here and what he should be doing at this moment.
Mind on your work, Hutchinson, remember?
He unzipped the bag he had brought with him and changed quickly into the sweats he wore for his preshow warmup, then sprinted up the stairs to the wings for his stage weapon. On his way to the combat room, however, he paused; then took a detour to the phone booth in the green room. He wanted to call Starsky and tell him Roz was all right, and get an update if his partner had one.
“Starsky,” a crisp voice said at the other end.
“Me,” Hutch responded, and Starsky’s voice became less formal.
“Hey...what’s doin’?”
“Roz is safe.”
“Okay...at least that’s somethin’ for the good guys.”
“Anything at your end?”
“Yeah, a lot of diggin’ through places we’ve already been,” Starsky said with a sigh, contemplating the stacks of paper in front of him. “Having some trouble tracking down the original Ophelia...she seems to have disappeared off the face of the planet.”
“Well, don’t get too wrapped up in that, buddy,” Hutch reminded him. “You’re supposed to be here in an hour.”
“Yes, sir, Detective Hutchinson, sir,” Starsky said, and Hutch swore he could hear him salute over the phone. “You know I don’t know how to tell time, so what would I do without you to remind me of these things?”
“Asshole,” Hutch said, and somehow managed to make the word a statement of great affection. “Let me know what you find out, all right? I should be back in my dressing room by the time you get here.”
“Will do,” Starsky assured him. “Now go do your sword thing.”
“Yeah. See you later.”
Hutch hung up, and Starsky dropped his receiver to its cradle, shaking his head - and not for the first time - at his partner’s habit of over-checking every detail. Still, he had to admit that there were things to be nervous about, so perhaps Hutch’s compulsion for control was not so misguided.
He leaned back in his chair and rubbed his stomach absently, squinting at the ceiling to give his eyes a break from the unending sea of paperwork, then got to his feet to pour himself a cup of coffee, wincing as his stomach gurgled in protest at the movement. Boy, that café where he and Hutch had gone for lunch had really had done a number on him; he hadn’t had this kind of indigestion in months.
He glanced at his watch. As usual, his punctual partner was right on the dot...Starsky had precisely an hour before he had to be at the theatre. He debated leaving this bit of investigation until tomorrow, but something was telling him to keep at it...
Possibly, he realized, the churning in his gut, which may be less a sign of his disrupted digestion and more a signal from his instincts that something was very, very wrong.
A thought struck him, and he set the coffee cup down, digging purposefully through the pile of paper until he came up with the program from the original Bay City production. Flipping through the pages until he came to the cast list, he immediately found the name of the actor who had played Hamlet...and something cryptic noted beside it in Hutch’s scrawl. Frowning, and cursing his partner’s nearly illegible handwriting, he mouthed possibilities: “Ron...Farther? Run Further?” He brought the page close to his eyes, and finally deciphered it: “‘Roz’s father.’”
Who had been a founding member of the company.
The chaos in his stomach intensified.
He snatched his jacket from the back of his chair, and started toward the door, feeling a sense of urgency he had learned not to ignore. As he did, his phone began to ring...and he stood, torn between the alarms going off in his insides, and his understanding that the more information he had, the better.
Screw it. He shrugged into the jacket and took two more steps toward the door.
“Starsky,” one of the other detectives called, having picked up the line and had a preliminary conversation with the person on the other end. “Henderson from the local paper? Something about a woman you were trying to track down?”
Starsky wavered between the door and the phone...then decided explaining would cost him more time than answering the damn phone. He strode back to his phone, punching the blinking button and sweeping it to his ear simultaneously. “Starsky,” he said, “Make it fast, okay Henderson?”
His eyes narrowed as he listened to the brief news from the man at the other end, and his heart began to provide percussion for the symphony of his gut. When the other man stopped speaking, he merely said tersely, “Thanks,” then fairly threw the phone down and was out the squad room door in seconds.
Hutch, meanwhile, had finally made his way to the combat room. He ran through the conversation with Roz, and the phone call to Starsky, and the nagging loose ends of this seemingly interminable case, in his head as he warmed up with the stretches and flexibility exercises that were part of his preshow routine. When he found himself standing in the middle of the room, sword dangling from his limp fingers, however, he shook himself. Later, Hutchinson, he told himself sternly. This is your job right now...you can think about the case later. Firmly and purposefully, he put the investigation to a mental back burner and began walking through the choreography of his first fencing duel, soon losing himself in the rhythm of the moves, and the pleasure of their grace and athleticism.
He had been through the steps once, and was just preparing to repeat them “up to speed,” when the lights went out.
What the...
Before he could even finish the thought, something solid and heavy struck him. Pain flashed through his head, a hot white light, followed by oblivion.
The blond detective dropped to the floor without a sound. Seconds later, the lights blazed back on, and a figure moved cautiously back toward the prone body. Dressed all in white, a fencing mask hiding his features, the figure shifted the position of the sword in his hand from a crude bludgeon to its intended purpose. With a grunt, he nudged the unconscious form at his feet, rolling Hutch onto his back. For a moment, his unseen eyes rested on Hutch’s face, then he flourished the sword and brought its deadly point toward the exposed throat.
“Hold it.”
The figure whirled, the sword whistling up to a defensive posture.
At the door of the combat room stood a man he had not seen in weeks.
“What are you doing here?” he hissed, taking a step forward.
“You’ve overstepped your bounds, my boy,” the second man said coldly. “I told you...you could kill all the rest of them...but Hamlet is mine.” His eyes flicked briefly to Hutch, still out cold, and he gave a dramatic sigh. “Pity it has to be symbolic...but at least we also eliminate _this_ untidy loose end.”
His hands slipped discreetly behind him. Lips twitched into a macabre grin.
Startled, trying to recover from his error, the first man didn’t notice the movement. “Fine,” he said with forced casualness, lowering the sword. “Go ahead...have your fun. I should go back to my dressing room anyway, so I can look properly shocked and saddened when they find Roz and...this..._cop_.” He removed the mask; large expressive eyes widened, and a pool of tears shimmered in their dark depths. “It might just be the greatest acting job I’ve ever done.”
He turned back toward Hutch, tucking the sword under his arm and running a gloved hand through his dark hair. “Try not to get too much blood on the costume, all right?” he said sardonically. “I want it to be spotless when I take my place in this role...the one that should have been mine to begin w - “
His voice choked off abruptly. Noiselessly, as swift and deadly as a hunting lion, the second man had leapt behind him and encircled his throat with something slender and inescapable. A voice hissed in his ear, “Not to worry, my boy...somehow I don’t think you’ll be needing it.”
Clawing at his throat proved futile. There was a tightening, a cutting into his flesh, and suddenly, with tremendous strength, the man behind him yanked the ends of the piano wire that had been whipped around his neck.
Mercifully, death was swift. With barely a gurgle of surprise and betrayal, the dark-haired figure sank to his knees, then pitched forward onto the mat as Richard Caldwell released the ends of the deadly wire.
His face blank but his eyes glittering with malevolence, Caldwell reached down with one sheathed hand and touched the man’s neck, assuring himself that his work had been successful. Then, with a twisted smile, he wrenched the fencing mask from the lifeless fingers. “You sad...stupid...boy,” he spat contemptuously.
He bent down, and without apparent effort, lifted the dead man into his arms and carried him to a corner of the room, where he dumped him unceremoniously to the floor. For a moment, he stood there, staring down at the limp form, then his face changed, to something mad and deadly and completely impenetrable. He knelt down, and arranged the body into a burial pose, with the flaccid hands crossed across the still chest. Then he reached up to brush back the heavy dark hair. “I’m so sorry, my dear boy...but it’s as the Bard said.”
He leaned down and kissed the cooling forehead with insane tenderness and then whispered, as if to a child...
Or a lover...
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, then are dreamt of in your philosophy.”