The Detective, & the Bat

Chapter One: The Mysterious Case of Johanna Beckett's Murder

It was still early in the evening when the Batman left Kate Beckett's apartment. He had several stops to make before returning to the hotel. The first stop was Richard Castle's loft. Oracle supplied the address. He'd visit the Montgomery home later that night, when everyone should be asleep, & he'd slip into the 12th Precinct & pull the police files on Johanna Beckett's murder around 2 a.m., when it was likely to be somewhat quieter, with many of the cops distracted by their concern for their wounded comrade.

Judging by the reactions he'd seen from Castle, & his family at the funeral, he imagined that they would likely be at the hospital with Beckett for the time being. The building had a doorman, but there wasn't a lot in the way of security normally. There was a car idling at the curb, just up the street. The man inside was sipping occasionally from a Styrofoam cup, his eyes scanning the area, but especially paying close attention to the building. His years of experience told the Batman that this was a cop, probably sent over by someone in the 12th to keep an eye on the Castles, just in case the sniper from the funeral intended more harm.

It was child's play for the Dark Knight to slip past the man and into the alley between Castle's building & the one just north of it. He fired a grapnel line, the sound muffled by his newest advanced technology. The hook shot off into the darkness, securing itself to the roof of the building. A press of another button and the masked man rocketed skyward as the bat-line was drawn back into the device.

While the security on Castle's loft was far more impressive than the building security in general, & it looked to have been fairly recently installed, or at least upgraded, it took the Batman less than forty seconds to find himself inside, the alarm circuits bypassed, unaware of his intrusion.

He conducted a fairly quick, yet thorough search. The most interesting room was Castle's office, clearly the place where he did most of his writing. The smart board in the corner was a bit of a surprise. However, he found little that told him anything Beckett's at-home murder board hadn't about the case. He did confirm his suspicions about Castle's feelings for Beckett. It had been fairly obvious anyway, but a small, leather-bound notebook hidden away in one of the room's two safes, a rather interesting read, had confirmed it.

The man behind the mask couldn't help but to smile just a bit when he found an old yearbook from Springdale Academy, one of the many Finer Institutions of Learning in New York that Castle had attended at one time or another. He found the page with Richard's picture, page 71, but the name read Richard Rodgers. He flipped to page 74 and looked at the photo of a much younger Bruce Wayne. That was why Castle had looked familiar to him at the cemetery.

He'd known from Oracle's background info that Castle had changed his name from Rodgers, but he hadn't even thought of his Springdale days in so long, & the two of them hadn't been at all close during the year they both spent there. In fact, they'd barely interacted at all. Rodgers had been a wild child, the school bad boy, until he'd been sent packing, while Bruce had spent more than half his time with his nose buried in one book or another about science, detection, forensics, engineering, or anything else that he thought might help him down the road.

It was an in, a way he might be able to use, down the road, to gain more information directly from the source. Taking great care to replace everything exactly as he'd found it, he continued his search of the loft, finding little else of use, before exiting & re-setting the security systems.

The rest of his night was spent bugging the apartments of the various team members, & the home of Roy Montgomery, with all the bugs being set up was several hours of recording, after being activated by sound, followed by a satellite burst transmission, which would feed all the recorded data to Oracle & the computer in the cave for analysis.

A search of Montgomery's place yielded one interesting tidbit. The man had tried to cover his tracks by erasing the info from his hard-drive, but he'd printed out a few things from the police database, They appeared to be addendums to previously requested files. It didn't take long to locate his wall safe & crack it, but there was nothing there. His desk also turned up nothing. It was clear that he'd moved the files elsewhere, for safe-keeping, but to where. It was a question that he would work on later. He set Oracle to searching bank records for a possible safe deposit box & compiling a list of trusted associates, excluding Beckett's team.

It was every bit as easy as he'd expected it to be, getting into the precinct. He'd simply snuck in, found the main phone-line junction box, & tapped directly into the extensions for Beckett's teams' desks, & also for the line in Montgomery's office. Getting their cell phones would be a bit more difficult, but Oracle would have them all by dawn, he was sure. Slipping back out of the precinct unseen was child's play.

On his way back to the Waldorf, he took the opportunity to show a New York mugger the error of his ways, by knocking out three of his teeth & breaking the his right wrist while relieving the man of his knife. Of course, the woman that he'd rescued fared little better, fainting dead away at the very sight of him dropping down out of the night sky and beating the masked mugger to a pulp. It still happened in Gotham sometimes as well.

It was almost 4 am when the Batman snuck back in through the window of the Penthouse apartment on the top floor of the Waldorf. Bruce stripped down out of the Bat-suit, carefully tucking it back into the hidden compartment of his large suitcase & locking the mechanism before stepping into a very hot shower, washing away the grime from his nightly exertions. Less than a minute after he slipped between the soft sheets of his rather large bed, he was asleep.