Ryan was still shaken as he quietly opened the door to his apartment. It was just a dream, wasn't it? Esposito was the one who had weird psychic dreams, not him. But the detail...the fact that he just *knew* where the body was and the state it was going to be in before ever seeing it. And the way he felt as he was dreaming...it made him queasy to even *remember* that part.

He had loved it.

He had loved every single minute of it.

And that fact alone terrified him more than anything else.

What the hell is happening to me?

"Honey?" A gentle voice called out to him in the darkness of the apartment. "What are you doing here?"

Ryan's entire demeanor softened when he heard the voice of his wife. She was his anchor; the one person who could ground him in reality when his world spun off in the twilight zone. Still, it was only 5 in the morning..."Hi Jen," Ryan greeted his wife shyly, "what are you doing up?"

"Your daughter decided now was a good time for her karate class," Jenny replied with a grunt, "and since there's no arguing with her at this point..." Ryan shook his head even as he smiled; apparently their unborn child was already *his* daughter when she was at odds with her mother. Jenny, though, still wanted an answer to her question. "What are you doing here? When I woke up I figured you got a call..."

"I did," Ryan admitted. "I, uh...I got sick at the crime scene..." Jenny raised a skeptical eyebrow at her husband's statement.

"Really? You don't get sick at crime scenes..." When her husband refused to look her in the eye, Jenny pushed further. "Hey...we made a deal, remember? I can't read your mind, so you promised to be completely honest with me."

"Yeah, I did." Ryan drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly to steady his nerves. He then described the dream and what happened at the crime scene.

Jenny sipped her herbal tea, listening patiently to her husband's story...as hard to swallow as it was. "Wow," she exclaimed, "do you really think you might have killed that woman?"

"I don't know," Ryan shrugged. "I honestly don't know. As far as I can tell, I was asleep when the murder took place. But that dream...every detail about it was correct. Every one! How do you explain that?"

"How do you explain half the stuff you guys can do?" countered Jenny. She set down her drink and leaned forward to take her husband's hands in her own. "Look, I have no idea what that dream means. But I know *you*. And the man I love - the man I married - could not *possibly* have done this." Jenny cupped Ryan's face in her hands, pulling him in to meet him with a gentle kiss. "Go to work. Figure out who did this. When you know who killed her, you'll probably understand why this happened."

Ryan's face broke into a sad, small smile. He decided to put faith in his wife's faith in him...even when he was having trouble believing in himself. "Thank you," he told her quietly, indulging in just one more quick kiss.

"You're welcome," Jenny responded with a trusting smile as her husband pulled away. When she took a deep breath with her husband sitting so close to her, though, Jenny quickly realized she needed to tell her man one more thing. "Uh, honey..."

"Yeah?" asked Ryan.

"Take a shower before you go back to the precinct. You *reek*."

Detective Kate Beckett forced herself to put the odd encounter with her two fellow detectives out of her mind. It was clear that there was a story beyond the evidence she was going to find at the crime scene; of that much she was sure. But it was also essential that she listen to the story that the evidence was trying to tell her, because then, and only then, somewhere between the two stories, would she be able to find the truth.

Beckett turned to Esposito with an 'all business' stance, determined to get the other detective to focus on the crime scene instead of whatever was going on with his partner. "What do we have, Esposito?"

"Our vic's name is Madeline Strimp, age 27. After there was a small fire called in in another apartment on this floor, the firefighters broke in when the next door neighbor insisted that our vic was home. They found her in the bathtub, submerged under the water."

Beckett wanted to get in to look at the body, but the small, cramped space in the bathroom didn't allow for more than two people by the tub at any one time. Which meant she needed to get permission for a certain medical examiner to temporarily give up his assistant. "Any chance I can join you in there sometime soon, Perlmutter?" she asked the man kneeling beside the bathtub.

"Give me about a minute or so, detective," the medical examiner replied, "and your pet writer is *not* allowed to come in with you."

Beckett moved to console her partner's anticipated disappointment, only to find him unmoved by Perlmutter's gruff demands. It's all right, Castle told her through their mind-link, I have other ways of examining the evidence...

The detective gave a quick, small smile in response as she squeezed her boyfriend's shoulder. Yeah, well, don't think too loudly, okay? she teased. I have to be able to concentrate.

I will do my very best to restrain my Jedi abilities, Castle teased with mock solemnity.

A loud throat-clearing cough snapped both Castle and Beckett out of their telepathic conversation. Beckett looked into the bathroom to find Perlmutter waiting for her with only the barest showing of patience...and his assistant long gone. "If you two don't mind," Perlmutter complained, "I have a body bloating here while the two of you make goo-goo eyes at each other. Can we get on with it?"

Beckett snapped on a pair of evidence collection gloves as she entered the room. "What do you have for me, doctor?"

"On first glance," Perlmutter began, "it might be easy to pass this off as a suicide."

"Get in the bathtub, slit your wrists and fall asleep from the blood loss until you either bleed out or drown," added Beckett, completing the doctor's hypothetical story. "But that's not the case here, is it?"

Perlmutter shook his head. "For one thing, it's kind of hard to make this kind of a cut when you're doing it to yourself," he said, pointing to the long knife cut across the woman's neck. As he moved down to the victim's wrists, Perlmutter continued, "and she would have had to have had one hell of a grudge against cops to have left this as her final message."

Beckett's eyes widened just slightly as she examined the NY and PD cut into the victim's wrists. "It's a fair bet these knife wounds were made post-mortem," she thought out loud, "since they're too detailed to be self-inflicted. But then how did she die if not from the blood loss?" It was then that Beckett noticed a tiny bend in the victim's nose, one that looked odd in comparison to the rest of her face. "May I?" she asked, motioning her intention to cross in front of Perlmutter in the small space.

"Let's switch," announced Perlmutter, volunteering to change places with the detective.

One the two people settled into their new locations next to the body, Beckett felt around the victim's mouth and nose. Only a few seconds passed before the detective made the connection between what she was feeling and what it meant to the investigation. "She was suffocated...and I think the guy did it by hand."

"How can you tell?" asked Perlmutter.

"The skin around her nose and mouth is...squishier than the rest of her face," Beckett replied quietly. "I'm pretty sure bruises are inevitable. Plus, the tip of her nose is just a hair off, like it's been fractured."

Perlmutter shook his head in amazement, knowing that he would have labeled anyone else as Castle-level crazy if they tried to pass off an explanation like that. But with detective Beckett...he was tempted to wish he had had his recorder with him, his mind furiously trying to memorize everything the woman had just told him. "Next you'll tell me you've figured out her time of death..."

"Can't help you there, doc," said Beckett, tilting her head to the side just slightly, "but I'm pretty sure she's been in this water at least four hours."

When Perlmutter raised a curious eyebrow at her offhand comment, Beckett quietly explained, "Underneath all the blood, it smells a little like when Castle's left a dish soaking in the sink too long. Standing water bacteria."

Perlmutter chuckled, his expression registering his ever-growing amazement for the unusual team that he was slowly starting to consider his friends. "You still need me to verify all of this information though, right, detective?"

"Always," replied Beckett with a smile of her own as Perlmutter stepped aside to let her out of the bathroom. Beckett navigated the maze of techs surrounding the bathroom area until she met up with Castle and Esposito in the small living area. "Ms. Strimp was definitely murdered," she announced to the group. "So the question now is, who did it and how?"

"And why," added Esposito. "According to the next door neighbor, our vic was the quiet, shy, lonely bookworm type. What free time she had off work she volunteered delivering hot meals and reading books to the elderly."

"Any luck with Forensics?" asked Castle.

"Negative," Esposito replied, shaking his head. "Can't tell if our perp forced his way in because the firemen had to force the door open. Other than that the place has been wiped clean."

Castle was already starting to build the story in his mind. "He overpowered his victim, which means he's pretty physically strong...meticulous about the details...a strangulation-type kill...she's blond...and he *clearly* has a thing about cops. Does this sound like anyone we know?"

Beckett rolled her eyes, annoyed that she was going to have to pull *that* particular argument out of mothballs. "Castle, how many times did you *insist* every organized crime scene you saw was one of his? Ten? Twenty?"

"Ruth Bender *did* fit his profile," insisted Castle quietly.

"Castle, it *can't* be him. You shot him. Heck, *I* shot him. Even if he survived that..."

Esposito stopped his fellow Guardians from re-starting the old argument. "Uh, guys...there's a few things you need to know about why Ryan ran off..."

Comments *strongly* encouraged. C'mon guys, I want to hear what you think!