When silence falls
That is when I feel lonely
When silence falls
If falls too heavily on my shoulders
And then I feel the absence of you
—Mads Langer, When Silence Falls
August 2016
"I thought I gave you a few days off?"
Kate looks up from her desk to see Freedman sipping a cup of coffee and eyeing her suspiciously.
"You did, sir," she says, straightening. Her shoulders tighten painfully, and she rolls them in a failed attempt to loosen her muscles. "But I just got word that Cooper fell through, and that was our last solid lead."
Freedman stares at her but says nothing.
"The Republican National Convention is in a week," she continues, feeling the need to fill the silence. "And the circumstantial evidence we have, despite the fact that it fills half a dozen file folders, isn't enough to stop the convention from nominating Bracken. I need something tangible. I have to find Stack's source."
"You can find Stack's source on Monday."
Kate grits her teeth, exhales through her nose to dispel the frustration. "With all due respect, sir, I've been trying to find him for nine months and haven't been successful. Why would Monday be any different?"
Freedman shrugs. "Why's tonight any different? Or tomorrow and Sunday?"
He's got her there. She wants to explain to him that she couldn't stop even if she wanted to. He's right; she probably won't find the source this weekend, and two days off would do her good, but she can't stop trying or she'll drive herself crazy. She can't keep hanging around the office either, though. She's kept her personal connection to this case to herself for nine months, and that can't change now. If he finds out the truth he'll take her off the case, give it to someone else who doesn't know it like she does, and then she'll really go insane.
She smiles, closes the file folder she was looking through. "Yeah. You're right."
Freedman smiles. "Go home. Your team will do the heavy lifting for a few days, and you can come back rested and ready on Monday."
She nods like she has complete confidence in her team. It's not that she doesn't. They're good at what they do, and Keller is in charge when she's gone, so everything will be run exactly the way she'd be running it if she were here. But they don't know what they're really dealing with. They're not invested like she is.
She stands, starts to go through the motions of gathering her things. "Thank you, sir."
Freedman smiles kindly and then turns away. Kate watches him go, waits until he's in his office, and then turns back to her computer. With a few clicks of the mouse, the files she was looking at are scanned and waiting in her inbox.
X-X-X-X-X
Three hours later, she's leaning heavily against the bar at Mulligan's. The bartender, a young kid in law school named Noah, is watching her as he wipes his hands on a towel.
"So you think I could tack on a murder charge?"
Kate holds out her hand, wiggles her fingers. Noah places a pen in her palm. "Did your professor specify what state the case is being tried in?" she asks.
"New York."
"That's your key," she says, pointing the pen at him. She goes back to signing her name on the receipt. "New York has precedent. Look up Hamilton vs. State. 1974. That precedent should let you argue for the murder charge."
She sets the pen on the bar with a flourish and grins. "If you do it right."
Noah laughs. "I'll do my best."
Kate starts to pull her blazer on, but fumbles to get her right arm through. Noah's out from behind the bar in a flash, holding the jacket out so that Kate can slide her arm in. She turns to face him with a smile.
"Thanks."
"You sure you don't want me to walk you home?"
Kate holds up two fingers. "Two things. One, I live right there." She points across the street to a pristine-looking apartment building. "Two, I have a gun." She pulls her blazer aside, reveals the gun on her hip.
"You can still shoot straight after drinking all that tequila?"
Kate pats him on the chest. "I always shoot straight."
She gives him a wicked smile and then heads for the door. She's definitely drunk. Her lips are numb, and her brain is fuzzy. Nowadays, it takes more and more tequila to make her fuzzy. If she had to guess, she's back to the tolerance level she had when she was in Vice, working clubs undercover and then going home to work on her mom's case. Not much has changed. She's in DC, she's an agent for the federal government, and the investigation she's doing isn't off the books, but everything else is the same. Same case. Same emptiness.
By the time she lets herself into her apartment, she feels it eating at her again. The need to do something. She kicks her heels off, makes a pit stop for a bottle of wine. She doesn't want the buzz to wear off. There's a smartboard in her office, courtesy of the exorbitant amount of money that the federal government pays her to pretend like this case isn't destroying her again. She taps it on, and the screen flickers to life.
It's all there. Her mother, Montgomery, Raglan, and McCallister, Gavin Hale and his girlfriend and neighbor. Stack. A schedule of Bracken's campaign stops. Graphs and a timeline and copies of phone records, bank statements, emails. A few more finger taps, and she's pulled up the file she was working on before Freedman sent her packing.
She takes a swig of wine straight from the bottle, settles back into the worn-in armchair sitting directly across from the smartboard. Time to rearrange the puzzle pieces.
X-X-X-X-X
When the plane touches down at JFK, Castle jolts awake. The stewardess is announcing the stifling summer temperatures, as well as an incoming storm that sounds like it might be nasty. Castle rubs his eyes, checks his watch. Nine o'clock PM. He pulls his cell phone out, switches airplane mode off. Sure enough, he has a voicemail.
"Hi, Dad," Alexis's voice greets him. "I know you're on the plane and that we hadn't planned to talk today, but I just wanted to call and say that I love you. Only two months until you come visit. Talk to you on Wednesday!"
The call ends, and Castle lowers his phone. Alexis graduated in May from Columbia. Summa cum laude, of course. She had offers from dozens of medical schools, but she didn't take any of them. Instead, she joined the Peace Corps. He was more than a little terrified when she told him, but he's adjusted now. They talk on the phone twice a week, which is way more often than he expected to hear from her since she was placed in Ghana in the middle of nowhere. He wishes he could talk to her every day, just as an assurance that she's healthy and safe and happy, but he'll take what he can get.
Deboarding takes forever. He finally finds his luggage and hails a cab. On the ride home he plays the new game he downloaded on his phone, but his heart isn't in it. He's tired and he made the new high score yesterday, so it's not much fun.
When he swings the door to his loft open, it's deadly silent. His mother still lives elsewhere. Alexis is in Ghana. He thought about getting a dog, but there'd be no point. He's never home.
He spends his days jetting all over the world. He hasn't published a book in over two years. His travels are under the guise of creating a new character, an international spy like Storm, but he never writes. Not fiction, anyway. He'll sit down somewhere public, jot down a description of what he sees, but the ink of his mind runs dry when he tries to write characters. Nobody is compelling enough. So he wanders, watches, peruses markets and sites and samples food. He prefers to be out in the world, moving and living even if he's frozen inside.
He pulls a new bottle of scotch out of the cupboard and takes it with him to his office. He leaves it on his desk, takes his suitcase into his bedroom and sets it on his bed. He unzips it, unpacks the souvenirs that are carefully wrapped inside. One for Martha and one for Alexis, of course. He leaves his mother's out, because she'll be by tomorrow. He puts Alexis's in a box on the chair by his bed. She's only been gone for two months, but the box is already surprisingly full. He pulls out three more wrapped parcels: one for Esposito, one for Ryan's daughter, one for Lanie. Tomorrow, he'll stop by the precinct to drop them off. It's a ritual he has; stopping by the precinct at least once a month, usually under the pretense of dropping off souvenirs that he just happened to come across. Nobody is fooled. They know why he comes.
She's doing well, he's heard. Closed a massive investigation about nine months ago and earned herself quite a bit of notoriety in the upper echelons of the government. She's been tight lipped about what she's been working on lately.
Or at least that's what the boys tell him.
He doesn't ask Lanie. He knows she talks to Lanie much more frequently then she talks to the boys, and he's afraid that Lanie will tell her that he asked. Sometimes he wonders if she asks Lanie about him. He knows she wouldn't, even if she was dying to know, but Lanie would tell her, even if she didn't ask. So he visits Lanie, and brings her souvenirs, and makes sure she knows that he's happy. He knows she wants him to be happy because that's who she is.
He pulls the last wrapped parcel out of his suitcase and stares at it. The silence of his empty apartment crescendos and then shatters with the sound of the paper being unwrapped. It sheds down onto the floor, unnoticed.
It's a gondola carved out of dark wood. There are strips of gold carved into the wood, a design on the side. It's small; it fits in the palm of his hand, and the wood is smooth against his skin. He closes a fist around the carving and carries it into his closet. He pulls a box down from the top shelf, opens the lid, and deposits the gondola. He stares at the contents of the box.
Dozens of trinkets from all over the world. Every one from a moment when he thought he saw her. This time in a passing gondola, a woman's long hair gleaming in the sun. He nearly tipped the boat over, rushing to stand up and crane his neck to see her. It wasn't her. It never is.
He doesn't have plans for the box. He isn't foolish enough to think she'll come sweeping back into his life someday, giving him the chance to present her with a box of memories and dashed hopes. The hardest thing about losing her is the way it ended, the knowledge that he could have made different decisions just like she could have. It would be easier to accept if she'd thoughtlessly broken his heart and he could hate her. But he can't. He still remembers the look on her face when they both realized it was over, and he'd be a fool to say she wasn't as heartbroken as he was. That memory haunts him, especially here. That's why he travels all over the world trying to avoid his loft; she's still alive here. In his sheets, and his shower, and his coffeemaker. She always had a way of making everything her own without any conscious effort on her part. He's no exception.
He puts the box away, makes his way back out into his office. He settles into a chair with his scotch. He doesn't write Nikki Heat anymore, but on nights when he misses her he goes through the last Nikki Heat novel he wrote. Not the published version on his bookshelf, but the draft. The one with her scrawled comments in the margins. On the title page, a note scribbled hastily in red pen and encased in a heart.
Always.
X-X-X-X-X
It's two in the morning. She's drunk and she's exhausted. The shadows on her apartment walls are haunting her.
She misses him.
She fumbles for her phone, scrolls through her contacts. His name appears. Her thumb hovers over the send button. She wishes she could say that this is a moment of weakness, but its not. It started as one, back on a frigid night in January, the first night she began reconstructing her home murder board. Now it's a weekly occurrence, a coping mechanism that gets her through an ever-growing hole of black. It's just the idea, maybe, that if she called he might pick up. She might hear his voice saying her name, and there'd be a little more light than there is now, even if he hung up right after.
She hovers for a while, entertaining the idea. Then she swipes back, finds a new number in her contacts. She presses send, puts the phone to her ear. It rings and rings, then voicemail picks up. After the beep, she straightens in her chair.
"I've got two days off," she says. "Call me."
She hangs up. Twenty minutes later she's asleep.