Death of a Showrunner

Chapter 1

Kate was just waking up as Rick brushed a strand of hair from her face. "Are you going to the precinct today?" he asked.

"I'm on call." Kate told him.

Rick slipped a finger under the edge of her sleep shirt. "What if you turned off your phone?"

"Do you want to write a story for Captain Gates explaining why my phone was off?" Kate asked

"Oooh, that could be fun. How about if the loft is transported to an alternate dimension where they never developed cell technology and everyone uses rotary phones. We could..." Kate's look stilled Rick in mid-sentence. He tried again. "It's not ringing now."

Kate turned to him, running a finger down the new stubble on his jaw, "No, it's not."

With the possibility of having to stop at any time hanging over their heads, neither Rick nor Kate wanted to go slowly. Coming together was almost a crash of lips, bypassing the gentle sweetness of the first touch. Barriers were quickly pushed aside to reach rapidly heating skin. They used what love had taught them. Fully in tune, each touch, each caress, of places they both knew so well brought them closer. The pulses came from the center of two joined as one, with fingers of sensation reaching through them, and they clung together against the outward push of the waves.

The intuition of urgency had not been misplaced. Kate's breathing had not quite returned to normal when her phone pealed. She listened for a moment before telling Ryan that she and Castle would be right there. "It's right across the street," she said in answer to Rick's uplifted brow. They showered and dressed quickly, leaving the loft with Rick looking longingly over his shoulder at the unused coffee maker.

The body, a short man with a graying beard, lay slumped over a laptop. "I know this place," Castle said. "These are the writers I saw through the binoculars when my knee was broken and you pulled that epic scam on me. There's a woman living here too."

"There is a woman," Esposito confirmed as he approached Beckett. "She found the body. Our vic is Luke Spinelli. He's the showrunner for Next Chapter, that chick flick show that masquerades as a procedural. The woman is Greta Jorgensen, writing partner and wife. She's in the next room with Ryan and Anne Hastings. Hastings is trying to calm her down."

Perlmutter looked up from examining the body and nodded, "Detective Beckett, tag-along fiance Castle."

"Always nice to see you too, Perlmutter," Castle greeted him."

"What have you got?" Beckett asked.

"Someone came up behind Mr. Spinelli here and stabbed him in the back. The knife went right through the heart. His heart stopped instantly, so there wasn't that much blood. No signs of a struggle. No defensive wounds."

"So he was taken by surprise?" Castle asked.

"I believe that's what I just said, Mr. Castle," Perlmutter snorted.

"Time of death?" Beckett asked.

"Sometime last night," Perlmutter told her. "I'll know better when I get him back to the lab.

"No fingerprints on the murder weapon and no signs of a break in," Esposito added. "The lock has a key pad. Whoever did this knew or guessed the combination."

"Get CSU to sweep the place and have the weapon checked for DNA," Beckett said. "Maybe we got lucky and the perp cut himself. "

"Or herself," Castle added.

Beckett and Castle joined Ryan and Hastings with Greta in the bedroom. Greta sat on the bed. Her eyes were red rimmed and her face tear-stained. Hastings sat beside her. Beckett crouched down in front of Greta. "Ms. Jorgensen, I'm so sorry for your loss. I know it's rough, but we have to ask you questions now. The faster we get answers, the more likely it is that we can catch whoever did this."

"I understand," Greta told her. "I write murder mysteries. Police procedure is part of my research."

Castle started to open his mouth, but Ryan put a hand on his arm and shook his head. Beckett continued. "Who knows the code for your door?"

"Luke and I do and I have a daughter away at college who does, but someone could have figured it out. It's the badge number of one of the leads on our show. One of the writers got it wrong in one episode and it caused a mini-firestorm among the fans, so we used the right number as our code as a reminder.

"Can you tell me how you found you husband?" Beckett asked.

"I was coming home from a workshop I did in Texas for aspiring writers. I came home and I saw Luke. At first I thought he had fallen asleep writing. That happens to both of us, but then I saw the blood and the knife on the floor. I tried to wake him, but he was cold. Then I called 911."

"Ms Jorgensen," Beckett asked, "can you think of anyone who would want to harm your husband?"

"There has been something going on, Detective. First you have to understand that most of the fans of Next Chapter are great. They helped keep the show on the air the first couple of seasons and they support our charities. But a few of them are sick. Recently Luke and I gave a private seminar in which we showed a fifteen second clip that had been cut from a love scene. We cut stuff every day. There's more on the cutting room floor than goes into the shows. But some of the fans just went crazy! They demanded to see the scene. Luke and I started getting death threats. We turned them over to the FBI."

Beckett and Castle filled in the murder board at the 12th. "Yo!" Esposito called. "I checked out Greta's alibi. She was in Texas and she flew in early this morning. There's no way she could have done it. Spinelli and Jorgensen may have been into some strange stuff though. We found handcuffs and duct tape in the apartment."

"That's not so strange," Castle said. "They might just have been testing out what it was like to be handcuffed or taped to a chair. I had Alexis tape me to a chair to see how Nikki Heat could get out of it for one of my books."

"Dude!" Esposito told him. "that doesn't make it any less strange."

Beckett quickly smothered a smile. "I contacted the FBI about the death threats," she told Esposito. "They're supposed to be sending someone over to liaise."

"And they did," Will Sorenson said as he came to meet Beckett at the board.

Castle stiffened and unconsciously put an arm around Beckett. "Sorenson, I thought you were in Europe," he said.

"I came back," Sorenson said.

"Yeah, like a bad penny," Castle muttered under his breath.

'Hi, Kate," Sorenson continued with a smile. "Relax Castle. I read that you two are engaged. I don't hit on engaged women. Anyway," he said extending a hand for Castle to shake, "congratulations. I have no idea why she's marrying you, but congratulations."

Beckett cleared her throat loudly. "Tell me about the death threats."

"We checked them out," Will told her. "we were able to discount most of them, but there were a couple we were still working on. I brought you the file." Sorenson handed Beckett a USB drive.

Ryan yelled across the room. "Hey Beckett, got a prelim on the knife, no usable DNA."

"Yeah," Beckett said. "We couldn't have gotten that lucky. Ryan, you and Esposito look into the cast and crew from Next Chapter. Castle and I will look into the crazed fans."

Beckett took the USB drive to the tech room where she, Castle and Sorenson could all see it on a large screen. Many of the threats came from fans who were thousands of miles from New York. There were two, one from New Jersey and one from Connecticut, who had been caught trying to force their way into the studio. We're not going to be able to talk to them until tomorrow," Beckett said. "Let's knock off for the night."

"Beckett," Castle said on the way back to the loft. "We should watch some episodes of Next Chapter. We might see something useful."

"Fine, Castle,"Beckett agreed, "as long as by useful you don't mean staring at some actress' legs."

"Beckett," Castle said, "you wound me. You know the only legs I stare at are yours. Of course if you want to take your pants off before we watch, that wouldn't hurt."

Rick and Kate lounged on the couch in front of the screen with Kate's bare legs across Rick's lap and a large bowl of popcorn within easy reach. "Look at him," Rick said, pointing at the lead, Jean-Luc St. Jacques, "mugging at the camera, overacting, where did they get that guy? His hair is wiggling. He probably has a rug. I can't believe anyone would worry about 15 seconds of him with his shirt open."

"Oh I don't know," Kate mused. "I think he has a very expressive face. He's kind of sexy, the hair looks real to me and those eyes are incredible. But Tasha Olesky's character, she's completely unbelievable. They might as well give her a tiara and a magic lasso. No cop was ever like that."

Rick stared down at the legs rapidly raising his temperature and had no thoughts of Tasha Olesky. "So," he murmured, "how about if you give me a demonstration of how a real cop does things?"

"I think," Kate purred, pulling Rick's face toward her lips, "I think I can manage that."