Interrogation of a Vampire
Chapter Four
By UCSBdad
Disclaimer: In addition to not owning Castle, I own no vampires, either. Rating: M, is places. Time: After season eight, before children.
"Captain Castle?" The tall uniform stuck his head in through her office door.
"Yes, LT?"
"We have another of the so-called vampire killings." The personnel of the 12th Precinct had learned not to refer to the deaths as "vampire killings" around Captain Castle.
"Where?"
"A loft in Tribeca."
Kate felt her stomach knot up. "Where in Tribeca."
"About six blocks from your home." He handed her a slip of paper. "Here's the address and what we have so far."
Kate nodded and called Rick. "Lover, we have another vampire copy cat killing. Ryan and Espo have been working day and night closing the Webber case, so I sent them home. Karpowski has a triple homicide right now and all I have left is Detective Hastings and her partner and they're awfully inexperienced. I thought I should…."
"Give me the address. I'll meet you there."
Kate smiled. "I love you."
The loft was far smaller and far less luxurious than Rick and Kate's. From the half finished paintings throughout the loft, it was clear that the victim had been an artist.
Lanie was just finishing up when Kate and Rick arrived. She went to Detective Hastings and her partner, Detective Alicia Windsor. Rick and Kate joined the three.
"The vic has two small puncture wounds on the left side of the neck, the same as the last victim. Cause of death is exsanguination. She was killed here and whoever did it took her blood with him."
"Him?" Hastings asked.
"Or her." Lanie added.
"Have we IDed the vic?" Kate asked Hastings.
She took out a notebook. "A neighbor, Mr. Redl," Hastings pointed to a man who looked to be in his seventies still taking to a uniform, "he thought he heard a scream and came to look. He had to find his glasses and put on his robe, so it took him perhaps three to five minutes to find her. Door was unlocked. He didn't see anyone else. She's Joan Leuthen, age 20, an art student at Hudson. Has lived here for eighteen months or so. Quiet, didn't go out much, a workaholic, at least according to Mr. Redl."
"Detectives?" Said a uniform from the doorway to the loft. "We may have something. We knocked on the door to the loft across the way. No answer, but I thought I heard something move inside."
The officers stacked up outside the door of the other loft. One of them knocked loudly. "NYPD! Open up or we'll open the door for you."
There was some noise from inside and then a crash. "He's making a run for it." Kate yelled.
The officer looked at the heavy steel door and tried to doorknob. The door swung open. The room was brightly lit. The first thing everyone saw was a form sprawled on the floor face down. "Check and see if he's still alive." Hastings shouted. The rest of the officers spread out through the loft. Castle could hear them yelling "Clear!" as they went through each room.
"Is he alive?" Hastings asked.
"Oh, yeah. He's alive all right. Inhale deeply."
On cue, everyone inhaled. "Pot!" Hastings, Windsor, and Kate said at once.
"I wouldn't know." Castle said as innocently as he could manage.
"I don't think he'll be awake and functional for a while. How much pot does he have?"
"He's down to seeds and stems, Captain. I doubt if he has enough for a single joint here. Not enough to bother busting him on." One of the officers commented.
Hastings nodded. "Take him to the nearest ER. When he wakes up, we'll talk to him."
Kate looked around. "Hastings, have CSU do a sweep. We'll try to find a next of kin and check with Hudson tomorrow to see what they can tell us. Rick and I are going home."
Joan Leuthen's parents lived in an upscale condo overlooking Central Park. It was larger than the Castle's loft and Rick felt the interior decorator had probably been told to decorate it so everyone would know the Leuthen's were wealthy. Mr. Leuthen was tall, portly and had a full head of salt and pepper hair. He looked grim. Mrs. Leuthen was chubby and had obviously been crying. Both were lawyers at Rysak, Fellowes and Darwin, a firm that handled people in the entertainment industry. Rick thought that Martha may have used their services once.
"We're very sorry for your loss." Kate said softly.
Mr. Leuthen just barely nodded and Mrs. Leuthen began to cry again. "Thank you." She muttered.
"Your daughter was an art student at Hudson?"
Mr. Leuthen nodded. "I didn't want her to do that. Her older brother and sister are both lawyers. We wanted her to go to law school. Maybe I pushed her too hard. Or not hard enough. But, she wanted to be a painter. I should have stopped her."
"Mr. Leuthen, don't blame yourself. You are not to blame. The person who did this is to blame, and no one else." Kate said firmly. Mr. Leuthen nodded, but Kate doubted he'd manage not to blame himself somehow. "Do you know if she had any boyfriends? Anyone at Hudson she was close to? Anyone she felt threatened by?"
"No. It wouldn't surprise me if one of them did it. I know them. I know their kind."
"What do you mean?" Kate asked, somewhat at a loss as to what he meant.
"I know I don't look it, but thirty five years or so ago, I followed the Grateful Dead around for a year, selling tee shirts, bongs, all sorts of stuff. It was a big joke to me then, but now…."
"Do you know of anyone now that might have wanted to hurt your daughter?"
Mrs. Leuthen spoke. "No. She was such a sweet girl. Who would want to kill her?"
"I notice you're both lawyers." Rick said. "There was a similar killing not long ago. The victim was a lawyer. Do you have any connection with the firm of Grace and Vollmer?"
The man thought for several minutes. "I've heard the name, of course. But we're entertainment lawyers at Rysak, Fellowes and Darwin, and they're corporate lawyers. Their clients are mostly financial companies. Very big companies. I'm sure I've never dealt with them professionally. I may have met a lawyer from there socially at some point, but I don't remember doing so."
Kate asked a few more questions, but it was clear that the Leuthens had no information to give them.
"Hudson U.?" Rick asked as the left the Leuthens.
"That's our best bet."
Professor Monderley was pleasant, balding, bearded and wore a three piece suit. He didn't look to Rick anything like an art professor, or the head of the art department. "Ms. Leuthen was such a lovely girl. This is such a shame. Such a loss."
"Ms. Leuthen was a talented artist then?" Kate asked.
The professor looked away suddenly. "Talented?"
"Yes. I'd assume she was talented. You said what a loss."
"She worked very, very hard, you'll understand."
"But she wasn't talented." Rick finally asked.
"She was not untalented." The Professor said vaguely.
"I'm conducting a murder investigation. I'd appreciate it if you'd be a bit clearer." Kate said.
Monderley looked pained. "She wasn't very talented. She'd never have made it as a painter in my opinion. Although some horribly talentless people have made fortunes. Joan wanted to be an artist because she didn't want to be a lawyer. I suppose she thought art was as far from the law as you could get. She could have ended up as, say, a commercial artist. One of my former students paints album covers for rock bands. Horrible, gaudy, cheap things, but the musicians seem to love them."
"Did her lack of talent cause any problems with the other students? Did they object to having someone with little talent taking up space in the art school?"
Monderley looked pained again. "They had a rather mercenary attitude about her, I'd say."
"Mercenary? In what way?"
"They felt that an artist with little talent wouldn't be a threat to their careers. If she'd been a magnificent painter, they would have hated her."
"Can you tell us who night have known her?"
"You should see Mr. Rodderick. He's her advisor. He's working on his doctorate."
"She was a Park Avenue hippy." Rodderick said.
"Pardon?" Kate asked.
"We get a few every year. They come in wanting to reject all of Daddy's materialistic, conservative ways and they decide to paint, or sculpt, write the great revolutionary novel or maybe produce some indie flic about Something Important. Then they get out in the real world and find out how hard it is to get by without Daddy's money and they give up. Leuthen was one of those."
"Can you think of anyone who hated her enough to kill her? Any disputes with anyone? Any problems at all?"
"Her problem was she had no talent. But, no. Painting is a pretty solitary art form. Not like plays or music. People pretty much ignored her and she ignored them."
Kate frowned. This is isn't getting any easier. "Can I have her schedule so I can check with her classmates?"
Of all her classmates, Sandra Miesner was the only one who knew Joan at all.
"Yeah, my dad is this dentist who does dental work for people who have more money than brains. You have no idea how many people get their teeth whitened professionally. That's about half of Dad's business. We kind of bonded over that. But…." Sandra stopped.
"But?" Kate asked.
"She was kind of a hack. Let me show you." She gathered a few paintings from the back of the classroom they were in. "This was a project. Do a still life of fruit in water colors. This is Joan's." It was a nice enough watercolor of a bowl of fruit. "This is mine." It was the same fruit bowl but the colors were far brighter than anything in real fruit. Metallic almost. "And this is Jeff Rhymer's." Jeff's fruit was rotting and ugly.
"Do you know anyone that might have wanted to hurt her? Or anyone she was close to?"
Sandra smiled. "She did use Ben Carlton as a nude model. She painted three or four portraits of him."
"Do you think there was anything going on between them?" Castle asked.
Sandra laughed. "Ben is an absolute gorgeous hunk. Tall, muscular, gorgeous smile, I don't care if it is fake, curly golden hair and this cute laugh. But he's the gayest guy in New York."
"We'll still need to check him out." Kate said and blushed as Sandra giggled.
'He's a bartender at the Ponderosa, a leather bar in the Village."
Ben Carlton was everything that Rick and Kate had been told. He also had solid alibis. He had been working the nights of both murders, a fact confirmed by both his manager and a dozen or more rowdy bar patrons.
"Back to the precinct?" Castle asked.
Kate just nodded.
Once back, Ryan called them into the video room. "I was going over the videos from surveillance cameras in the area and traffic cams to see if anyone interesting showed up. I got nothing from before the murder, but I caught something interesting outside while we were inside." Ryan ran the video.
The video showed a young woman walking back and forth across the street from the second crime scene. "Now look at this." Ryan said. He got a close up. The woman was wearing a pair of large sunglasses, a baseball cap and a scarf around her neck that rode up to cover the lower part of her face.
"That late at night she's wearing sunglasses? She's trying to avoid the cameras. She's afraid of facial recognition." Kate said.
"Doesn't mean she's involved in our murder." Castle warned. "She could be a hooker, or maybe she's casing someplace. Or maybe it's just the latest fashion trend."
"Do we have any other shots of her?"
Ryan shook his head. "There's a traffic cam a block away, but it shows us nothing more. She stayed across the street for maybe fifteen minutes, then walked away. She went away from the traffic cam and we lost her."
Kate frowned. "Check footage from both crime scenes going back a couple of days and check after the murder on the first killing. Maybe she's one of those ghouls who check police radios for deaths and then break in and rob the place." Kate checked her watch. "Damn! I have a meeting at One PP." She put her hand on Rick's arm. "See you at home, lover?"
"Sure, but I'll stay here with Ryan and see if we get anything. I'll text you if we find anything."
"And I'll call you when I get out of the meeting." She kissed him quickly, then grabbed her things and headed for the elevator.
"Chinese takeout tonight, remember?"
She just waved to him.
Watching traffic cam and security footage was more boring than doing paperwork as far as Castle was concerned. The only thing that made it bearable was that he was able to make up little stories about the people he was watching. Hannah Stark, crack secret agent, is skillfully pretending to be a lost tourist in New York City. She approaches a friendly local. He gives her the prearranged coded message. "Get lost, bitch. I'm busy." Skillfully concealing her elation, Hannah walks off, now knowing where Hamid al Muhammed's secret lair is. "Now I have you, murderous terrorist scum." Hannah thinks as…
"Hey, we may have something." Ryan interrupted.
"What?" Castle switched gears in his mind.
"Look at her. The light pantsuit. Again, a baseball cap, shades and a scarf. This can't be a coincidence, Castle. That's the same woman, I'm sure of it."
"Can we track her?"
Ryan smiled. "I can sure as hell try."
Working through all the various surveillance cameras he could find, Ryan tracked the woman to a subway station and followed her route. Then they got lucky. Someone running to get his train barreled into the woman and knocked her hat and sunglasses off. They got some twelve seconds of her face before she put the hat and glasses back on.
Ryan got an extreme close-up. "We can send this for facial recognition and….Oh, shit!"
"Ryan, what is it?"
Kate was concerned when she got back to the precinct and saw her husband and Ryan in her office. "What was so important that you couldn't tell me about it on the phone?"
"We got a shot of that woman without her hat or sunglasses. "Ryan explained. "We sent it through facial recognition. We got a one hundred percent match."
"So, who is it?"
Castle handed her the photo. "It's you. Captain Kate Castle, 12th Precinct, NYPD."
Kate stared at the photo for a long time. "Her hair is shorter than mine. And it's darker." She looked again." And curlier than when I wore my hair this short."
"But it's your face." Castle said, worriedly.
"But it isn't me!"
"I know. We've checked the date/time stamps on all the surveillance footage. They haven't been altered and you were with me or someone else the whole time. Why, the half the precinct saw you at the second crime scene."
"3XK." Kate said, her voice conveying the shock she felt.
"Kate, he's dead and Kelly Neiman is dead, too."
"Are they? He stole all of his records, except those held by the prison. And who was his doctor at the prison? Neiman! She made copies of Lanie and Espo to fool us. They could have made copies of themselves, too. And copies of us."
Rick shook his head. "No, Tyson wanted to kill me himself. He'd have never let someone else do that. And Neiman had you kidnapped so she could kill you. They're dead."
"Are you willing to bet your life on that? Are you willing to bet my life?" Seeing the worried look on Rick's face, she went on. "Look, maybe it isn't Tyson and Neiman. Maybe they are dead. But maybe they made copies of me and others. Think. Captain Castle stalking the scene of a murder? Maybe who ever this woman is wants to set me, or us, up for these murders." She turned to Ryan. "Get more help. Check every security cam you can find. We need to catch this woman."