This is a little overdue, but I figured I'd post it before the premiere makes me feel like this monstrosity is invalid. As always, you can blame Carto for this. Also, it's angsty. Sorry I'm not sorry.
I don't know what I've done
Or if I like what I've begun
But something told me to run
And honey, you know me
It's all or none
There were sounds in my head
Little voices whispering
That I should go
And this should end
Oh, and I found myself listening
I don't know who I am without you
All I know is that I should
—Missy Higgins, Where I Stood
December 2015
The bell above the door clangs.
"There she is," Joe announces, his arms flung wide.
Kate smiles as she closes the distance between them, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. Everyone in line looks at her curiously. She feels their eyes sweeping over her, some more inappropriate than others, but she doesn't care. The badge on her hip has taught her to adjust to being the subject of curiosity.
Kate heads for the far side of the counter, back where the baristas do most of their work. She's learned that people are less likely to bemoan the fact that she gets to cut the line if it's obvious that the owner is expecting her. Joes calls it her corner and teases her about her discomfort with cutting in line.
"Starting to think you forgot about me," Joe says over the hiss of the espresso machine.
"Never," Kate answers. "Just got tied up at work."
"Always saving the world," Joes says. "Yours got cold, let me make you a new one."
Kate nods her appreciation and then pulls out her phone. She scrolls through her email. Just when she thinks she's caught up, ten more emails hit her inbox. It's always the worst after she closes a big case. She taps out a quick answer to the deputy director in LA and has just hit send when Joe sets a tall cup in front of her.
"Thanks," she says. When she looks up, she sees him holding out a paper bag. "Joe," she starts.
He shakes his head sternly. "It's six o'clock, Agent Beckett. You eaten dinner?"
She tries to stifle a smile. "No."
"Then here's your dinner."
"I come here for coffee, not for food."
"You come here for me. The coffee is a bonus, and the food is a necessity. Federal agents should eat dinner."
A man nearby perks up at the mention of federal agent. Kate ignores him and takes the bag from Joe.
"How much?"
"It's Friday. You don't pay on Fridays."
"You don't let me pay on Mondays or Wednesdays either."
Joe grins. "My coffeehouse, my rules. See you tomorrow morning, Agent."
There's no point in arguing, so Kate doesn't bother. She just says thank you and heads for the door. The bell clangs overhead, and once she's on the sidewalk, shivering in the frigid air, she takes a peek in the bag. There's an entire meal carefully placed inside. She feels like a kid with a packed lunch, but she smiles.
She hunches her shoulders against the cold and heads for the street. A hand darts out of nowhere, fingers closing around her wrist. Her reaction is instantaneous. She grabs the hand, twists it hard, and turns.
"What?" she demands.
The man from the coffeehouse is grimacing. "Ow, okay. Uncle."
Kate doesn't let go. "What do you want?"
"You're a federal agent?"
Kate looks him up and down. Messenger bag, the corner of a Macbook Pro peeking out. Rumpled collared shirt beneath his North Face coat, large coffee in hand, and more-than-a-day-old stubble. She lets go of his hand.
"You're a reporter."
He nurses his hand and looks up at her. "How'd you know?"
"What do you want?"
"I'm working on this story—"
"No."
She turns on her heel and walks away. She takes a quick peek down the street, sees it's clear and starts across. The reporter follows her doggedly.
"Wait, wait, Agent…Agent Beckett? I just want a minute of your time."
"You already had a minute."
"Okay, yes, true, maybe another minute? I just want to run a theory by you and then—"
Kate stops in the middle of the street and rounds on him. He freezes, startled, and sloshes his coffee over his pants. Kate lifts an eyebrow at his now stained pants, and then looks up to meet his eyes.
"No. I don't do theories, or stories, or reporters."
A car whizzes past and the man jumps. He scuttles closer to Kate, eyeing her gun. "Well, I mean technically, I'm a blogger."
"You're a writer. And I don't do writers."
She leaves him stranded in the middle of the street with cars rushing past, his pants stained and a stunned look on his face. She doesn't look back.
X-X-X-X-X
At eight o'clock, the remnants of Joe's dinner are spread over Kate 's desk. She's elbow deep in paperwork, oblivious to the world around her until someone knocks on her desk.
She looks up. Agent Nathan Keller is leaning against her desk, giving her one of his megawatt grins that make the other women they work with swoon. She likes Keller. He's a good agent and a good man, and he's had her back on more than one occasion. She knows what he's going to say before he even says it. She lets him say it anyway.
"You coming?"
"Coming where?" she asks, leaning back in her chair. The other agents at the desks around hers are pulling their coats on.
"Deacon's. I'll buy you a drink."
"I've got work," she says flatly, motioning at her desk.
"We all do. Come drink with us."
"Rain check."
"You've been rain checking me for two years, Beckett."
She smiles. "Can't get the hint, huh?"
His eyes flash with amusement. "Funny and good looking. Lucky me. Glad our desks are so close together."
She nods at the elevator where a cluster of agents is milling around. "Your crew is waiting for you."
Keller looks over his shoulder and laughs. "Let them wait. When you going to let me buy you a drink, Beckett?"
Kate shrugs but says nothing.
Keller leans closer to her. "It's just a drink, you know. It's not like I'm asking you to marry me."
She goes still. Keller watches her, waiting for a response, but she doesn't have one. She just stares at her hands, at the empty fourth finger on her left hand, which is resting a few inches from her glistening federal badge.
"Maybe another time," she finally says.
"Okay," Keller says. His voice is softer, like somehow he can read her train of thought, though she knows he can't. "No pressure," he continues. "I just, you know, think we'd have fun."
She remembers, suddenly, a case she worked with Keller a few months ago. How kind he was to the victim's family. She smiles up at him. "I'm sure we would. Just not tonight. Deal?"
He grins, nods. "Deal."
She watches him go, wonders what Lanie would think of Keller.
"Shit," she mutters under her breath. She was supposed to call Lanie back. She reaches for her phone, guilt washing over her, but doesn't get to dial the numbers.
"Agent Beckett, I'm glad you're here. I thought I'd missed you."
Freedman, her boss, is leaning out of his office.
"I need to see you."
Kate rises obediently and heads toward his office.
"Close the door," he says as he makes his way around his desk. She does, and then sits in the chair across from him.
It's only once she's seated that Kate notices her boss looks a little frayed. He's immaculately put together, as always, but there are bags underneath his eyes. His shoulders are slumped, his expression worn. He sighs.
"I got some bad news this morning."
Kate wracks her brain, tries to determine what it might be. She comes up with nothing.
"We had an agent running an investigation into a triple homicide that included Gavin Hale. The name ring a bell?"
"He's a blogger based here in DC," Kate answers. "Wasn't he the one who exposed the former Secretary of State's illegal campaign contributions?"
"Yes. He was murdered, along with his live-in girlfriend and a neighbor about a month ago."
Kate frowns, a memory of a brief conversation with Stack surfacing in her mind. "That's Agent Stack's case, isn't it?"
Freedman bows his head. Dread sinks lows in Kate 's stomach. "Agent Stack is dead," he tells her.
The breath rushes out of Kate. She wasn't that close with Stack. They were colleagues; worked closely on a few cases, said hi to each other every morning. But he was the one who recruited her. He was the one who first planted the idea that she could be more, have more.
An image of her beautiful, but empty apartment flashes through her mind. Dinner packed by a stranger who owns a coffee shop across the street from her job. The silence of the cab ride home on late nights. Keller's unsurprised smile when she says no to her colleagues in exchange for more time at her desk, or a glass of wine and Coltrane alone in her living room.
"How?" she asks.
Freedman pulls his cell phone out, hits a few buttons, then holds it out over his desk. Kate leans forward. Stack's voice fills the office.
"Freedman. Stack here. The blogger, Gavin Hale. Much bigger than we thought. Cover-up big. I'm meeting a source. I'll be in touch."
The voicemail ends. Kate frowns. "That was the last time he called you?"
Freedman nods. "Last night. When he didn't check in this morning, I tracked his phone. Found him with a bullet in the back of his skull in a dumpster behind his apartment building."
The image sears through her brain, jutting up against the familiar picture of a woman slumped in an alley from knife wounds. "And we have no leads?"
"I worked the scene myself, and forensics just came back. We've got nothing."
Kate leans back in her chair. "You think it was a hit."
"I know it was a hit. His apartment was trashed. His laptop was gone. His phone was wiped clean. I've been in here for four hours trying to make sense of it. IT finally got back to me and I logged into his work email about an hour ago. He had one new message. "
He motions her behind his desk. On his computer screen is an email with the subject line reading Your Answer. There's nothing in the email except a link. Freedman clicks the link, and the website that pops up on screen sends Kate reeling.
Senator Bracken's face smiles at her from the screen. Bracken For President 2016 screams at her in bold-faced, red letters beneath his face. Kate sees Freedman watching her closely. She swallows, fixes a mask over her face. Her heart is pounding.
"What is this?" she asks.
"I have Stack's notes." Freedman hands Kate the file. "Gavin Hale's best friend told Stack that Hale was working on another government scandal. He said this one would be huge."
Kate skims the file. Sure enough, Stack has notes about Hale's investigation into an unnamed, high-ranking politician.
"Who's bigger than the favorite for the Republican Presidential nomination?" Freedman finishes.
Kate stares at Bracken's face on the screen. "Favorite?" she says incredulously. "Since when is Bracken…I thought Harrison Conrad was the Republican favorite?"
"He was, until a week ago. Scandal broke about a nine-year-old son he had with his nanny. Bracken plans to announce this weekend. With Conrad gone, he's the favorite."
The room spins. Kate grabs the back of Freedman's chair and holds on, tries to tell the contents of her dinner to stay down. Bracken. President.
This is a nightmare.
"You think this email came from Stack's source?"
"Most likely. And if I had to guess, I'd say the source was a reliable one since one of my agents is now dead."
Kate nods, but says nothing. What could she say that wouldn't make it obvious that she doesn't just have a feeling about who's behind Stack's death, she knows. Freedman knows nothing about her real past with Bracken. He doesn't even know her mother was murdered. She wants to keep it that way.
"Bracken is a New York senator, and his connections outside of DC are almost all in Manhattan. You see where I'm going with this?"
Ice claws at her insides. "I haven't been to New York in over two years, sir."
Freedman ignores her. "I pulled your file, just to see if you had anyone in common with him. I didn't realize you'd saved the senator's life when you were NYPD."
Kate shakes her head. "Just doing my job."
Freedman nods at the file in her hands. "Well, this is your new job. You're the best investigator I've got, and you've got New York connections that nobody else does. I know how much respect you had for Stack. I'm confident that you'll bring his killer to justice and figure out exactly how Senator Bracken fits in to all of this."
Panic sets in. She wants to tell him no, assign it to someone else, but what justification does she have without revealing her past?
"I know you prefer to work alone, but I want you to assemble a team. Stack's murder makes this our highest priority, and you'll need to delegate. You can choose who you want, but I want Keller on your team."
She's starting to get dizzy. Remnants of the rabbit hole are clouding her vision, reminding her of just how fast she gets in deep. She's got the might of the U.S. government behind her and a federal badge that gives her access to resources she couldn't even dream of as a homicide cop. She's just been given the go-ahead by her boss, which translates to a go-ahead from the Attorney General himself, to investigate the man she knows murdered her mother and Captain Montgomery. She should be elated.
So then why is she nauseous?
"Agent Beckett?" Freedman prompts. "Is something wrong?"
Kate realizes she's been standing, frozen, next to her boss's desk for at least a minute. She clears her throat.
"No, sir."