Hey, thanks for the feedback! I don't crave it like some authors do, but I certainly appreciate the comments!
In return, I'll deliver another chapter just a little early.
Chapter 2: The Weatherman Is Always Right
48 Hours Earlier
Her mornings were a comforting routine.
It was a tiny bit of structure in her unpredictable life. She found comfort in that routine. It reminded her of the days when she would get up and get dressed eat breakfast at the kitchen table with her mother for a few minutes before she was shipped off to school. It reminded her of the way things were long before, the happy times, when she still thought her life would be a grand adventure.
She wasn't a pessimist, exactly, but life had dealt her an entirely different set of cards. She'd done what she could manage with them – she had a career she cared about and worked with great people, but it wasn't a desk job, and it wasn't easy. It was sleepless nights and danger and stress, and it would take a toll on anyone's state of mind.
Which was why, every morning, she would get up out of bed and walk to that bar in front of her bedroom door. She'd do a full set of reps before rolling out a yoga mat and properly, if briefly, greeting the sun. Then to the shower, where she would linger as long as she wanted to and let the warm water finish waking her up. She allowed herself to splurge on bath products, from the salon-brand shampoo to the artisan-crafted soap, specifically because her morning shower was the last guaranteed moment of peace in her day. After that, she would get dressed, slowly covering Kate up with layers of cotton and wool armor, transforming slowly into Detective Beckett piece by piece. She doesn't sit at the table and eat breakfast anymore – she hadn't since she was nineteen. Instead, she grabs a piece of fruit or a bagel and the last two pieces of her public persona – her badge and her gun – on the way out the door.
That morning was different. They'd closed their last case at 1:45am, when their perp had stupidly threatened someone else with the murder weapon he'd hidden away. Despite the break that moment of monumental idiocy had afforded her in the case, she'd gotten home at 3:52 – stupidity helped her find the bad guys, but it often created more paperwork. When her typical 6:30am wakeup trilled its cheerful greeting, she turned it off and went back to sleep.
The sun was coming up over the buildings, casting small slivers of light through her loft's many windows. This apartment was neither small nor large by New York standards, but the insurance payout from her previous residence – destroyed by "a freak explosion," – was enough to afford a place on the edge of Manhattan with a lot of windows and semi-decent views. The then-prospective new owner had toured the place on a bright day, and when the sun was out it lit the place up as if the place were made of golden sunbeams and glow. Typically, that alone was enough to wake her. She was dead to the world this time, having called a truce with it for a few blessed hours of sleep.
That changed at 7:02, when her Blackberry violated the treaty.
"Beckett."
Detective Kate Beckett's head emerged from her down cocoon, her face shifting from something resembling sleepy into a well-practiced stone mask. She listened to the voice on the other end of the line carefully.
"You're on your way?" She was out of bed, searching for something more appropriate and professional than an oversized t-shirt. She found black pants, high black boots, and a maroon shirt that was a still a little brighter than she felt.
"8th and 53rd? On my way. Yeah. Calling him now."
She ended the call as she walked into her bathroom and flipped on the light. Her mask was still in place, but under the harsher fluorescent lighting it was easier to tell she wasn't feeling up to this. There were dark circles under her sandpaper-lined eyes. Her naturally pale complexion was a leaning in unnatural's direction.
Her badge and her gun were in her nightstand. It was the last stop she made before she went to the door, plucked her black wool coat and a bright red scarf off the coat hangar, and left the rest of her morning routine behind.
The empty apartment really was quite beautiful in the warm glow of the sun, and it was the first sunny day in a long time. The weatherman promised several days just like it for the rest of the week.
The weatherman would be wrong.
There was one part of shadowing detectives that he hated.
He could deal with dead bodies – he'd never really been one to find much anything gross, except for maybe okra. He could deal with blood. But there was this awful smell of slightly rotten something that seemed to cling to a corpse whether it was an hour old or five days, and the more blood they found at the scene, the worse that smell got.
There was blood everywhere…literally, everywhere. There were splotches on the ceiling fan blades and smears on the broken tv. It was like this guy stumbled around on purpose to touch and break every surface just once before he died. He looked over to Lanie, who had been on the scene before anyone per usual, but as per usual she was too busy scribbling notes to do much more than grunt in greeting.
Esposito and Ryan were there, too, having arrived not two minutes prior. They were picking through the carnage of the destroyed loft while Lanie finished up.
"Castle." The voice, the oh-so-familiar, melodious, slightly bossy voice, came from behind him. He automatically held out his left hand, and she automatically snagged the proffered venti coffee cup.
"Good morning, Beckett! How did you sleep?" He glanced at her as she pulled up beside him, and immediately had his answer: she looked completely exhausted, and if the shadows around her eyes weren't enough, the way she sucked down the still very warm coffee was flying that warning flag high.
"Oookaay," he muttered under his breath. "It'll be an espresso shot kind of day."
She looked over at him for the first time and smirked. "Thanks for the coffee, Castle."
"Hey, anytime! Now…will someone fill me in?"
Lanie chose that moment to stop writing and flip her notebook shut. "Male, about 28, multiple abrasions all over his body, probable broken bones, possibly some stab wounds."
Castle took another look around. "Ya think?"
His gaze landed on Lanie's face, who was clearly not amused. He swallowed. "Shutting up."
But Kate, blessedly, agreed with him. "There's an awful lot of blood, Lanie. If those stab wounds are just probable, where did all the blood come from?"
She sighed, squatted down and picked up the man's limp arm. Castle grimaced when he watched it bend in three places, none of which were the elbow.
"Ouch."
"He's pretty beaten up," Lanie added.
"So's his apartment." Beckett looked back down at the body. "But that didn't kill him."
Castle watched Lanie narrow her eyes. "No. Someone snapped his neck."
He looked back down at the blood-soaked body. "Wow," he quipped, "that's overkill."
It was funny, or at least he thought it was funny. When he lifted his eyes again, though, both women were glaring at him.
"Shutting up," he said again.
"Mmm him," Lanie hummed, drawing her lips into a thin, annoyed-looking line. "Make it stick this time, Writer Boy."
He desperately started seeking out Ryan and Esposito. The girls were cranky. They mercifully came to the rescue with oh-so-important notes.
"Vic's name is George Landau. He's a lawyer at Smith, Waters & Prescott." Ryan looked a little less neat than he usually did. His tie wasn't quite straight and his light brown hair wasn't quite in place, and the rest of him looked a little like he rolled out of bed dressed from the day before and patted everything back down. "They don't start answering their phones until 9, according to the voicemail greeting. Address is just down the street."
"The building manager," Esposito nodded his head to a distraught-looking balding man in the corner, "says Landau moved in here last year. They've had a few noise complaints over parties and the neighbors don't like him much as a result, but he pays his rent on time." For his part, Esposito wasn't as rumpled, but there was definitely exhaustion on the man's face. His dark olive complexion was a little paler than usual, and he wore a slightly less intense set of bags under his eyes.
"Why don't the neighbors like him?" Beckett tried to stifle a yawn as she said it, and only half succeeded. She immediately took another sip of coffee.
"Maybe they didn't like being left out of the parties," Castle offered.
Lanie glared at him, but said nothing about his broken promise. "I'm going to collect the body and take him back to my lab," she said, turning away. "I'll call you if I find something."
"Thank you, Lanie!" Castle watched as she lifted a hand and waved an acknowledgement to him, then turned back to the worn-out group.
"Next of kin?"
"Still running it down. Haven't found anything here."
"Okay…we'll go to Smith, Waters & Prescott. You guys canvas the neighbors and see what you can find."
The boys flipped their notebooks closed and nodded. "You got it, Boss," Esposito said, heading for the door.
Castle took one last look at the place. It's wasn't huge, but it was nice enough for an up-and-coming lawyer. He'd amassed some modern-looking essential furniture, a new-looking (if broken) 50-inch brand-name LED tv with a PS3 attached to it, a well stocked bar…or what was a well-stocked bar…and—
"Oh, wow! Is that a framed Joe DiMaggio rookie card?"
The mantle over the fireplace hadn't escaped the chainsaw massacre gore. The hanging bats, criss-crossed on the wall and signed by Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle, now bore a permanent stain from their previous owner. Five baseballs, some on the floor and some still on the mantle, were all rolling around in the remnant mixture of their glass cases and their owner's blood. He caught the names Don Mattingly and Jackie Robinson and cringed.
But the rookie card, still hanging between the ruined bats, might have been the only thing in the entire apartment that hadn't been smashed.
"I bet he's from here," Castle said.
"Castle…"
"Hey, remember when we met Joe Torre?"
"Castle."
"I just want to…" he lifted an index finger toward the card, inching carefully toward the glass. He was stopped when Beckett reached out and grabbed the hand, then yanked it in her direction.
"We have some lawyers to question."
Castle looked back at the card longingly, but resigned himself to the new task. After all, how often did someone get to question a lawyer?
The offices were a lot like every other high-rise office she'd ever been in – overpriced mismatched artwork on the walls, an incoherently masculine scheme of green marble, dark wood and stainless steel, capped off with camel-colored leather seats that looked nice but hurt to sit in.
The receptionist looked like she'd never seen a cop before, although Beckett supposed that might actually be the case: the girl looked all of twenty one, and defense lawyers didn't invite the police over for friendly chats.
Castle squirmed in his seat for the hundredth time. She glanced over at him, amused by how miserable he looked.
"You okay over there?"
He squirmed again. "No. These seats are worse than my publisher's."
It wasn't long after that a tall, hawkish man in tailored Armani came out to greet them. He didn't smile as they shook his hand, just ushered them into the nearest boardroom.
It wasn't as fancy as the rest of the office. Truth be told, it looked a little like the interrogation room before the last repaint.
"So, Detective," the lawyer, Harvey Denton, sat across the table from them, back to the door. "This is about George, I understand? I hope there's nothing serious going on."
"Actually, Mr. Denton, he was found murdered in his apartment this morning. We're hoping you might be able to help us with the investigation."
Beckett watched the man carefully as the news set in. She was sure they were in this room, in this arrangement not because it was convenient, but because this was where the lawyers in the firm would meet with someone they needed something from…something they wouldn't give over easily. It was stark, but not so industrial that its purpose as a legal torture chamber was obvious, subtle enough that most people would never clue into the fact that they were being strongarmed into giving over what the firm needed. Beckett was pretty sure they put more thought into the room they were in than the décor everywhere else.
But when she told the man his junior lawyer was dead, she watched his expression and posture change. He was no longer threatening. He was suddenly just sad.
"I see," he replied. "What happened?"
"He was attacked in his apartment."
"Home invasion?"
Beckett paused. "We're exploring every option at the moment, which is why we're here. Was he working on anything that might have gotten him killed?"
The man shrugged. "He's – he was – working on a fairly high profile case, but I can't imagine why he would have been targeted."
"Was he working on anything that might have made someone angry? Did he have any enemies that you knew of?"
Denton shook his head. "No. Nothing that should have gotten him killed. But he was a lawyer, Detective. We generally make enemies about as quickly as police officers do."
She nodded. "Would you mind if we took a close look at the last few cases he's worked?"
The older man frowned. "The resolved ones, no. We'll send over the briefs. For the case he was working on, I can give you the discovery documents and any other court filings. I also suggest you speak to Audrey Millican, his paralegal. She's out running errands at the moment, but should be back around lunch."
"What about his personal life?" She leaned forward, her brow furrowed. "Who did he list as an emergency contact?"
The man frowned. "Actually, I believe his dad was listed, but he died about nine months ago. To my knowledge, that was his only living relative."
"Did he have any kind of significant other?"
Denton smirked a little. "Again, not that I know of. But then, I don't make it a habit to ask about the personal lives of everyone here. That's probably something else Audrey can help you with."
Beckett was getting the impression that asking anything else was going to be pointless with the man – professionally, he didn't seem to interact with him much beyond being his supervisor. Personally…well, the man seemed to care, but not enough that they were going to find anything useful.
"Thank you, Mr. Denton. When Ms. Millican returns, let us know. We'll send someone to pick her up."
They shook hands and exited the dreary little room, stopping off at the front desk for the case files they needed.
In the elevator, Castle broke his temporary silence.
"Something feels off about this case. Does something feel off to you?"
"You mean besides the fact that we have a massacred body and absolutely nothing to go on?"
"Well, yeah. It's just that, we usually have something to go on early. And who makes the kind of mess we found in Landau's apartment and fails to leave any evidence behind? It's too clean. Like it was meant to be that way."
"Castle," she said, exasperation creeping into her tone, "It's always meant to be that way. Most of the time, the bad guys just screw up."
He didn't have a response to that, but he didn't need to. Her gut was definitely churning.
He was right – there was something off about the case.
And it's not even noon yet.
/chapter 2
Notes: this particular chapter pairs well with Passacaglia by Bear McCreary. And maybe a little gorgonzola.
More coming soon.