Chapter Text
Chapter One
The day started out normally. It was Valentine's Day, but neither Starsky nor Hutch were conscious of anything out of the ordinary as they made their way into the squad room. Hutch walked in front of his partner and he spotted an unusual item lying on Starsky's desk.
"Hey! Starsk, I thought you and Sally had broken up?"
"We have."
"Well someone has the hots for you, Buddy."
Starsky lifted his head from the file he was reading and looked at his desk. A huge bouquet of red roses lay on top of the clutter. Starsky threw the file down and picked up the flowers. Underneath them lay a gaudy, heart-shaped box of candy. He pushed aside some of the green foliage and fished out a small card. Hutch reached for the candy as Starsky read the greeting. "Greetings from Simone."
Starsky shouted. "Hutch! No. Don't touch them."
Starsky's shout provided immediate results. Hutch's hand recoiled from the box and the squad room went quiet. Dobey's head emerged from his office doorway and the shout of "Starsky, Hutchinson, my office" was left unfinished.
"Captain, Marcus has left me a present." Starsky's voice seemed loud in the room. Dobey reacted quickly.
"Everybody evacuate the floor. Hutch, get the bomb squad down here now." In two strides the Captain was at Starsky's desk. "Come on, Starsky, I said everybody out and that includes you."
It was only later, when his partner had been gone two days that Hutch realized that they had acted exactly the way Marcus had anticipated. Dobey's evacuation of the building had been the perfect decoy for Starsky's abduction. The flowers and candy had been real. No bombs, no trick jack-in-the-box; for a few glorious minutes Hutch had believed the gifts were a sick joke. Then he had turned to share his relief with Starsky, but his partner was not at his side. They had searched the building and Hutch had watched with a sick sense of déjà vu.
Once again Hutch was back in the Court Room building seeing his partner's name smeared in blood on a mirror. This time the scene of Starsky's abduction was an infrequently used men's room on the ground floor. Pungent smells of bleach and urine competed against the coppery aroma of the viscous letters scrawled on the white tiles. It was difficult to make out the final Y in Starsky as if the precious liquid was not as abundant as the bull's blood that had been used before. The explanation for this occurrence came with the preliminary lab results which showed the blood used was human and most worryingly of all it was the same type as Starsky's. Haste then was the reason for the feint "y": Marcus's goons needed to spirit Starsky away as quickly as possible so they had, it was assumed, subdued the detective, cut him then quickly smeared the tiles with some of his blood and somehow spirited their hostage out of the building.
A week passed. God had created the world in seven days and Ken Hutchinson had pulled Bay City apart in the same amount of time, but still his partner remained a missing person.