It had been about six weeks since Beckett had left the loft to finally end the saga of her mother's death by finding and destroying LOKSAT. In hindsight she had not considered all the ramifications or the emotional toll it would take on her.

At first she had concentrated on the basics and was lucky to find a furnished sublet near the precinct with a doorman that gave her some sense of privacy and security. Her initial roller board of clothes and toiletries was abruptly put together and she knew another trip to the loft would be necessary because her new quest had no time limit attached.

With Beckett's promotion, Ryan and Espo became co-leaders with a new team member named Sarah Wiggins. At first she was very excited to be training with one of the best homicide teams in the city, but soon learned that there was a lot of boring, repetitive chores like endless canvassing, hours of film to scan, and countless records to check that were the essence of good police work.

Meanwhile, Beckett was finding her new job not all that difficult. Gates had done a good job creating an exemplary team of supervisors, and her main task was dealing with the continuing avalanche of paperwork from 1PP and the ever watchful public and press.

Her other main focus was finding a way through the NYPD bureaucracy to hire Vikram in the IT Department at the 12th. Because of his unique knowledge about the case and his excellent IT skills, she knew he really was the ideal person to help her pursue her side investigation. The problem was he could not be nearly as useful without access to law enforcement databases, and this job was the perfect cover to do just that.

Although Vikram had great credentials from his prior work with the A/G's office, it was hard to ignore all the internal candidates trying to move up into the slot once filled by Torrie. The critical need was to make sure that none of the required NYPD background checks got into too great detail about his past team who had all been mysteriously killed. In an effort to stifle that line of inquiry, she called some of her counterparts at the A/G office and explained that Vikram was really just looking for a much needed change after the shock of the tragedy that befell his team. She played that card beautifully, and soon realized they too were very reluctant to provide any background about the loss of an entire team in what was still an unsolved case.

In the end, the precinct was forced by central HR to interview 2 internal candidates and Vikram. That was an acceptable scenario because she was able to carefully coach him about the right answers and who might need special attention in the interview process. The interviews went great, and surprisingly, the only holdout was Ryan. He correctly surmised that there was an unseen ulterior motive in play, but couldn't find anything to justify his reluctance. Going a bit off topic, Assistant Chief Gates casually brought up her proposed hiring during one of her regular liaison meetings with Beckett. Gates listened intently to the same yarn she had carefully crafted for the A/G office and apparently decided, then and there, to ratify her decision.

This all worked out well for Vikram. He had quit his A/G job within 2 weeks of making that fateful call to Becket. In subsequent discussions, she found a soul mate in the need for a secret investigation to uncover what really happened to the rest of the team and how that led back to the murder of Johanna Beckett.

After a brief discussion of the logistics, he put most of his belongings in a storage locker in DC and took 2 large duffel bags with him to New York. He arrived into the Port Authority Bus Terminal in the early evening and immediately made a beeline for a diner where Becket would be waiting. He thought he arrived early only to find Becket entering just minutes behind him. She explained her tardiness by admitting she had followed him from his first steps in New York. They needed to be very careful going forward, and this seemed like a prudent first step.

After ordering, they engaged in a very blunt discussion about their shared commitment to the task at hand. Vikram was in because of the abrupt loss of his friends, while she wanted to understand how her simple query about her mother's murder fit into the larger picture. Could it be that Bracken may not be who she thought he was after all? With that settled, she brought him back to sublet and let him crash on the foldout couch.

The next morning she was dressed and starting her Castle inspired coffee routine when Vikram finally awoke. The beans were from Castle's favorite shop, and the delicious smell permeated the whole living/kitchen area. Over stale muffins, they set up the immediate logistics of their partnership. While she was at work, he would start visiting a host of internet cafes and begin any and all queries he could think of to narrow their focus. When she came home, they would go through the results and strategize about his future tasks. Every query needed tedious preparation to insure that none could lead back to them. Immediate communication would only occur over burner phones that she would have one of the precinct's snitches buy at a shady place far from Manhattan. If things worked as planned, the buyer's memory would get very hazy after the next high was injected from the bribe she paid him.

At this stage being unemployed was really a good thing because any work schedule would have drastically affected his initial efforts. The problem with this arrangement was really twofold. First, he needed access to government servers that were almost impenetrable from the outside. The second was their lifestyles did not mix well. He was a natural male slob, and she was increasingly annoyed that all men were not like Castle when it came to home-and-hearth.

When the job opening was finally posted, both were relieved about the prospect of them living apart. Once he was employed, they celebrated at a small diner in the neighborhood, and he began what she hoped would be a short search for a place of his own. Luckily, that fell into place relatively soon, and now all the pieces of their off-the-books investigation were finally in place.