Chapter Three
Comes the Inquisitor
"The city was drowning in decay, chaos, immorality.
A message needed to be sent, etched in blood, for all the world to see..."
Sebastian (aka Jack the Ripper) Babylon 5 episode "Comes the Inquisitor" (1995)
Previously
"Whether it's her or not, we will get to the bottom of this Kate. You've got this."
"Okay." Kate whispered, not sure if she believed him yet. But he seemed to have enough faith for the both of them. She would trust that, like she trusted him. See this case through to the end. Her posture straightened as she rose to her full height for the first time since walking into that alley. The fire inside her was finally flaring fully to life, giving her the drive to get to the bottom of this. She was filled with righteous anger at the injustice of it all. Nobody, not even a street prostitute, had deserved to die like this. Mary Anne Nichols' life had been savagely taken from her. Kate owed her this much. Prostitute or not, the woman deserved the same justice she had found for her mother.
Kate kissed Rick firmly on the lips before stepping out of his embrace, a silent thank you for propping her up when she'd needed it; a promise of more later. Until then she would put her game face on and get to work.
"You coming, Castle?" she said over her shoulder, smiling sweetly at him before walking to the car, confident he was following close behind.
Neither of them noticed the dark figure behind them in the alley, hidden in the shadows.
He'd been waiting...and watching. Drawn to the chaos he'd created like a moth to a flame. The game had only just begun. He would let this Detective Beckett scurry in ignorance for a little while yet. Let her flush the other woman out for him first. They would all know his name soon. Her and that Russian bitch who'd gotten in his way before. When he'd made this corrupt cesspool of a city tremble in fear of the dark, his great, great, grandfather's name would be written in blood for all to see.
Jack.
Kate had not been prepared for the applause that broke out when she and Rick walked into the 12th Precinct. She had been in and out of the precinct for weeks, mostly to sit at her desk and chafe at the restrictions placed upon her. She had received all of the post-wedding hazing from the cops who had not been invited to the wedding. She had forgotten that Rick had not been to the precinct yet.
Between his physical therapy sessions and visits with Dr. Burke, (which she knew from personal experience COULD both be tiring and draining, each in their own way) he had not once set foot in the precinct. He took her for coffee each morning and dropped her at work. The rest of the time he spent writing at The Old Haunt. From what Rick shared with her, Burke thought it was great how he worked his personal demons out in his writing. The man hadn't been able to talk her into writing a journal, or even so much as a letter of her own when she had seen him before.
She was certain that Carter Burke found it refreshing to have a referral from the NYPD who had actually seemed to respect the therapy process.
Their married life during her two weeks of enforced desk-duty had settled into a quiet domesticity (between bouts of earth-shattering, bed-rocking, toe-curling monkey-sex) that Kate found oddly refreshing to come home to every night. They had both mostly recovered from their aborted first wedding attempt.
Their conjugal bliss had prompted another change in living arrangements, one not wholly unexpected, at least not to Kate. Alexis had moved back to the dorms the week before, citing that her father and stepmother's nightly activities returning to "normal" had made her decide to "move back before she required extensive therapy." The last part stated with one terra cotta brow raised and her forehead crinkled in mock exasperation...laced with enough humor to let Kate know that it was more about giving them their privacy than about her feeling pushed out. She'd left enough of her things in her room to assure her father she'd be back often.
Now that Rick had returned to the precinct things were starting to come back to normal. Kate was almost glad in a way that they had kept her off active rotation until he came back. She was a competent detective in her own right, had been long before Rick came along, but Captain Montgomery had been right, she wasn't having any fun before. It made the job lighter, easier to manage somehow.
Rick had barely reached her desk to watch her write what they had so far on the murder board, when she heard the door to Captain Gates' office open.
"Detective Beckett, can I see you in my office for a moment?"
Castle sat down heavily in his chair, sensing that he was not going be invited to participate in this discussion. Kate's reaction to the nature of the crime scene had obviously not gone as unnoticed as either of them would have liked. Though Rick was making a very good show of looking at the murder board, trying to come up with a theory...any theory...his eyes repeatedly found themselves pointed at the drawn blinds of the captain's now closed office door. A dead giveaway to where his heart really was...or wanted to be.
Ryan noticed.
He had been watching Castle since he first came in with Beckett after viewing the crime scene. Between himself and Javi, he had spent the most time studying Rick over the years. The two of them had a lot in common, even before they shared the burden of Jerry Tyson's escape from custody and the murders he had committed since then.
Ryan knew the reason behind the gloves the writer now wore everywhere. Knew that beneath them were the scarred hands of a man who had clawed his way out of a burning car and then up a steep ravine, slowly bleeding out the whole way to get to Kate last May. He knew Castle was worried about her, they all were. This style killing, in that alley, with that wound pattern had stirred things up in Kate this morning that everybody, including her, had hoped had been put to rest after the arrest of William Bracken.
But here was Kate's husband, her partner in more ways than one, seated in his chair looking like a lost puppy. Trying desperately to look productive like the rest of the team, while in truth, wanting nothing more than to be in that office with her, and knowing why he couldn't be. Kate had to prove that she could stand up for herself. That she could convince "Iron Gates" that she can work this case and not lose perspective like she had every single other time the ghost of her mother's case had come back to bite her on the ass.
"Detective, are you sure you should be working this case?" Gates asked point blank as soon as she was seated at her desk and Kate had closed the door.
"Yes sir, I can handle it. Seeing the victim, in the alley where my mother was...found...was just a shock, nothing more." Kate replied.
"From what I hear you know the victim." Gates responded, intentionally laying down the gauntlet, "Are you sure this won't be a conflict of interest?"
Indignation flared in Kate's eyes for a moment, she had recognized the trap that Gates had laid out. She forced the anger down with no small amount of effort and took a deep breath before responding almost casually.
"I spoke to her for less than five minutes in the compound where I was being held last spring. I borrowed her cell phone to call Esposito, that didn't make us besties."
"And if your killer does turn out to be this...Elena Markov?" Gates shot back, her glasses lying perilously close to the tip of her nose as she looked over them at Kate.
"Then I will bring her in and put her in a cage just like I did her employer...provided she chooses to come along quietly," Kate stated without malice, though she knew it was entirely likely that Markov would most definitely not come quietly.
"Fair enough, Detective. I'll let you work this for now. But I will be keeping an eye on you. If I think you're losing perspective I will pull you off and assign somebody else."
"Understood, sir." Kate replied.
"Get back to work, detective, before your partner sprains something trying not to look in here."
Gates pushed her glasses back in place and and waved her off as she looked back down at her COMPSTAT reports, hiding an amused grin with the paperwork that had become the bane of her existence, amused at having used Castle to have the last word.
"How did those two ever think they could have hidden their relationship from me." Gates muttered to herself.
Had anyone told her three years ago that the dilettante writer playing cop she had thrown out of her precinct after she had arrived would actually grow on her, she would have had them committed. She'd known ever since that day on the roof, after Beckett had been pulled to safety, there was more than a partnership between those two. She was far from blind, nor was she stupid.
Kate walked back into the squad room and back to her desk, brushing a reassuring hand across Castle's shoulder as she lowered herself into her chair. She had meant to offer her husband a more substantial show of support when Ryan cleared his throat, interrupting their moment of non-verbal intimacy. Kate closed her eyes for a moment and counted to ten before she turned her chair to address him.
"What have you got Ryan?" she stated tersely, managing to keep most of the irritation at his interruption out of her voice.
"More information about our vic." Ryan supplied, mildly chastened for having broken the moment. "Her prints were in the system."
"Lay it out for me Ryan." Kate said with a sigh, in her head trying to tally up how many times either Ryan or Esposito had interfered in a moment the two of them were having. The Boylen Place bombing being the one that still rankled her the most, leaving her still wondering to this day how things might have been different had they had that conversation they were on the verge of at the time. Had she been able to make her feelings clear to him before the interrogation she only recently learned had set them back for months.
Tentatively, Ryan gave her the short version of Mary Anne Nichols criminal record.
"Mary Anne Nichols, born Mary Anne Walker August 26 1980, was two years into college at NYU when both parents were killed in a car accident in 1998. Obviously her tuition money ran out and she ended up on the street. Had her first arrest for solicitation in 1999."
Kate nodded, and waved for Ryan to continue, though Esposito who took up where his partner left off.
"Two more arrests for criminal possession of a controlled substance since then and two more for solicitation. Seems she had kicked the habit on her second turn in jail, but couldn't quite get out of the life. I imagine given her level of education that made her a shoe in for that thing Simmons had going on."
Esposito flinched a little when Kate closed her eyes at the mention of the man who had tortured her that night. They had all seen the vat of water in the room where she had been water-boarded. Traces of her blood had still been in the water. Castle's reaction nearly matched hers.
"It would seem that you had met her before your abduction, Beckett." Ryan stated, eyeing his partner and giving him a look that said, "nice going moron" along with an elbow in the ribs, before completing the thought, "According to this the collar for her second arrest in 2006 was credited to Officer K. Beckett, 12th Precinct."
Kate had wondered how the woman could have "accidentally" stumbled into the locked room where she had been held just in time to loan her her cell phone. Obviously it had not been nearly so serendipitous after all. The woman had recognized her and hadn't ratted her out, since she had lasted as "Elena" for several more hours after that. She owed Mary Anne Nichols her life.
The only thing she could do now to repay the woman was find the dirtbag who killed her.
Kate had barely placed all of the pertinent information on the murder board, including her photo from the crime scene and the very thin time-line for her last movements. Under suspects, a booking photo for Elena Markov, taken when she had been trying to resemble Kate Beckett enough to get Fowler to enlist her in the sting, was tacked to the board under the suspect heading.
Anne's pimp, William "Crazy Billy" Traynor, also could not be ruled out. He was known by vice to have a violent disposition. According to the canvas, he had stated he was out at the nightclub he co-owned all that night. So she sent Ryan and Esposito out to run down his alibi for the previous night between two-thirty and four o'clock AM, their window for her murder.
No sooner had Kate finished her work on the whiteboard, written everything that had thus far been collected and settled into her office chair, the phone on her desk rang.
"Beckett." she spoke into the receiver, her face softening at the sound of the voice on the other end.
"Yes Lanie I'm still on the case, no...I'm fine...Okay, Castle and I will be down shortly."
Rick perked up a little that they would be able to get out of the now seemingly oppressive confines of the precinct. He was beginning to understand why he had avoided the place during Kate's desk duty when there would have been nothing for him to do. Since the car wreck, he had found himself not overly fond of enclosed or crowded spaces.
When there was nothing for him to do, nothing for him to wrap his mind around, those last moments before the airbag on the Mercedes popped...when he knew he wasn't getting control of the car back...watching in terror as he went over the embankment...played on infinite repeat whenever he closed his eyes.
Going outside, even if it was just the artificial canyons of Manhattan, was the only thing that soothed him. Getting out and being active was the only thing that kept those images at bay.
"Come on Castle, Lanie has something for us down at the morgue."
Rick was up before she finished the sentence, holding her jacket for her. Hoping he didn't seem too eager for the excursion.
Elena Markov knew she was being hunted. Not just by the police, that was to be expected, she killed people for a living. Interpol had been hunting for her for years. Police had rules that they were required to follow, they had to have evidence before they could come after her.
More evidence than the shaky recollections of a detective who had been barely conscious at the time. They didn't even have proof that she had killed her guard at the hospital. She had little to fear from the police, the worst they could do was send her to prison. Anyone who had ever seen the inside of a Russian woman's prison, which she had, would laugh at how soft American prisons were.
Prison might not be so unattractive an option, given her circumstances, but it was still one of last resort.
What was hunting her was no cop. He was a shadow in darkened alleyways, one she kept seeing even when she knew nobody was there. This was no mere man she was being hunted by, somebody who hunted people for money or ideology. Those she understood. She was part of that world, had been since she was twelve years old and been rejected as a ballet dancer when someone thought the fluidity of her movements could be set to a different purpose.
What was hunting her was something else entirely, someone evil and twisted. She had gotten in his way, placed herself on his radar and now she was prey. She knew it was only a matter of time before he came for her.
When that moment arrived, she would have to be ready for the fight of her life.
*Author's note* The thing I had Castle doing, recalling over and over the last seconds before his crash. The need to get out and be active, because the walls would begin to close in...that happened to me. For quite a while after I wrecked a car, I found myself not enjoying being inside much, even though it was winter time. I still have a distinct distaste for small emclosed spaces. I can deal, but if I feel stuck there, it isn't pretty. A little dose of reality to go with my fiction.
Mark
