Chapter Four: Demons
Author's Note: As I write this paragraph, I am about five minutes after turning off "Chosen". The Fall of Sunnydale music is still playing in my head. I do not want to be writing Beckett and Castle right now. I am torn between wanting to write the Scoobies and knowing that my writing will never live up to Joss Whedon's. (Or I could jump up and down. Don't try and tell me you didn't, off "Chosen".) He writes, among other things, the best arguments. Ever. But hey, if you're reading this, you're a Buffy fan. So you know this already. (Also, I'm so high on adrenaline I'm mistyping about one word in four. That's not good.) This is something like my eighth time watching that last sequence of five episodes. Still amazing.
On an unrelated note, how wonderful is the episode title "An Embarrassment of Bitches"? Who came up with that, and can I shake their hand?
ON WITH THE SHOW!
At the Ving Tsun martial arts studio where Steph Amador had worked, Ryan and Esposito had found any number of people who recognized her, but frustratingly few who actually knew anything about her life.
"Yeah, I knew her," at least six people in white karate-style outfits had agreed when shown her photo, even though it was the death shot of her corpse, taken in the morgue. However, they all then proceeded to contradict themselves by replying "No", "Not really", or "Sorry" to the detectives' arrays of questions, which had included:
"Did you ever talk to her about her personal life?"
"Did you ever see her outside of this gym?"
"Was there anything unusual about her behavior recently?"
and "Did she ever seem upset or worried?"
By far the most helpful character witness had been the dojo's manager, a fox-faced woman named Anita Parkin, who had hired her in the first place.
"She came here to work out starting, oh, a few years ago," Parkin told Esposito as Ryan played phone tag at the manager's desk, working through the list of 5:30 class students that they'd extracted from Parkin after much persuasion and assurances that they weren't trying to arrest anyone on it. "She'd never trained in the style before, but she was so graceful I noticed her right away—most people who are just learning stumble or look awkward, but Steph…of course, I learned later that she had been trained, just not in a formal school."
"And where was that?" Esposito prompted.
"England, I think Steph said," Parkin replied instantly, "Although I never would have guessed, because you just don't associate little English towns with the combat training she had. My God, she was good—so coordinated, and so strong! I never would have imagined she would be murdered…"
There was apparently no end to the things Mrs. Parkin wouldn't have thought, guessed, or imagined, and they had gone down this road before, so Esposito moved the interview on, beginning to wish that he'd taken the phone calls and gotten Ryan to talk to Steph's former boss. "Mrs. Parkin, I know you already answered this over the phone, but since then have you remembered if Steph ever had any trouble with anyone; a student, a gym member, another employee? Any rivalries or grudges?"
She put her head on one side as she thought. "I want to say 'no', of course, but there were some little things that people didn't like about her. Some things went missing from lockers and for a while it looked like she had taken them, although what she could have wanted with a couple of water bottles and a cheap watch I don't know. And anyway we found the watch, a week later, under one of the mats that had been folded up and pushed to the back of the room. Oh, and she was late for class sometimes and one of the other teachers would have to start her group with warm-ups. At some point she'd roll in and just take over."
Esposito couldn't imagine killing anyone over being late to work now and again, or a missing water bottle. "What about her students?"
"Oh, everyone loved Steph," Parkin suddenly denied fervently. "She was so good at what she did."
"But?" he prodded.
Reluctantly, she admitted, "There was one man, a few months ago now. He had some training in another martial arts school, and he challenged her to a duel after class. His style against hers, that sort of thing. She should have said no! If I had been there when it started I would have forbidden it, but I was on the phone and I only knew about it when I heard the cheering from the workout room."
"What happened?"
"Well," she related anxiously, "I hung up at once—it was my husband calling—and went to see what was going on. There were a lot of people here that day, and they had an audience all round them, calling and laughing and clapping, just like it was going to be a great joke. I remember thinking how unbalanced it seemed—he must have been a foot taller than her, and a good sixty pounds heavier. But, of course, she was stronger than she looked—but she was always careful not to hurt anyone!"
This, to Esposito, sounded like a statement that was going to be contradicted almost immediately, and it was. "He was outclassed and we could all see that—he should have seen that. She did and she backed off after a minute or two of sparring. She gave him the chance to call it a draw, end the bout. He wouldn't take it; just went at her, shouting. And a few moments later there he was on the floor with his wrist broken, howling. Mostly at her—I won't repeat the words he used—but some at the rest of us just for being there and watching."
Now that sounded like a grudge that could fester and turn violent. "Did he threaten her?"
Narrow eyes widened as much as possible. "I suppose he did. Said she was unnatural—that she didn't belong on this earth."
Esposito clicked open his pen. "Ma'am, I'm going to need a name, and an address if possible."
The guys actually came away from the Ving Tsun dojo with three names that bore following up: Brian Walton, the man she'd humiliated in front of an audience of at least twenty-five people three months ago, and two former students, Francis Rester and Tim Dämas. Upon finishing calling the list of her currently enrolled students, Ryan had thought to compare the current list with a month-older one, finding several names that had vanished from the roster. He'd called the discrepancies while Esposito unproductively interviewed more of the downtown dojo's patrons.
Most of them had simply found that their daily schedules conflicted with the class time, but two had said unpleasant things about Steph before Ryan had told them that firstly he was a homicide detective, and secondly he was investigating her homicide. They'd both been so thrown that they hadn't objected (coherently) when Ryan informed them that he would be tracking them down to interview them in more depth later.
"The instructor was a stuck-up bitch," Francis Rester had complained. "She told me I wouldn't get any better if I didn't work at it, even though I was doing the best I could. I don't care what sort of super ninja woman she thought she was, some of us are just human, okay? And you could tell her that for me, but I already did."
The second resentful dropout was a high school senior who had gone to the gym and signed up for classes with his girlfriend. He'd broken up with her two weeks later, but kept attending because it was "kind of fun, you know? And I don't have anything else to do until baseball season starts back up. Anyway, the teacher was kind of cute, but seriously rude. I told her she had nice hair and she totally shut me down. Gave me this utterly creepy death glare. Really freaky. I stopped going 'cause she was ignoring me, wouldn't help me even if I needed it." Ryan had inferred from this that Tim Dämas had tried to hit on Steph and been rejected. As motives went, it was a start. Castle would probably turn it into a story of obsession, lust, betrayal, and violence.
Esposito put in a call to the 12th to get the addresses and any criminal histories of their three new potential suspects, while Ryan checked in with Beckett and Castle to update them on their progress.
Fifteen minutes before Ryan called, Beckett and Castle were just pulling into the vicinity of a small downtown coffee shop called Krimsonn, where Steph had bought coffee only a few hours before her murder. Neither had ever heard of it before, or seen any other branches around town. It looked like a relatively new, single-location establishment, and was wedged into the bottom floor of an office block along with an array of other small shops selling everything from fabrics to live fish.
At least one of them—or the offices above—must have been doing well, because Beckett had been trying to find a place to park the police-issued car for almost five minutes already. She wasn't having much luck, and was getting frustrated. Castle was trying to distract her by quizzing her about the circumstances in which she had met Steph in the first place, but all he'd succeeded in doing was shifting her irritation from the parking crunch to him.
"I'm a homicide detective, Castle, what do you think I met them over?" she snapped as another parking space that had looked empty from a distance turned out to be half-full of miniature electric car. "I picked up the case of a man who looked like he had been attacked by wild animals. I thought, maybe a pack of stray dogs, in which case Animal Control needed to be on the case, not me."
Castle pointed hopefully at a space that looked empty. When they got closer, it had two motorcycles in it. "So was it dogs?"
"No. Bite pattern was wrong and witnesses saw three or maybe four men—depending on who I asked—who had followed the victim into an alleyway he never walked out of. A couple of other witnesses said he'd gone out there with a girl, but no one ever found her. About a week of dead ends later, I tracked down a man who matched one of the descriptions at a bar. One of my witnesses said he'd seen the guy there before, so I guess it was a hangout."
"You guess? You didn't catch him?" and a moment later, "There! There's a spot!"
The parking space was a few blocks' walk away from Krimsonn, but it was a nice afternoon for walking. As they reoriented themselves from the car to the coffee shop, Beckett continued her story in a better mood.
"It wasn't for lack of running, Castle—chased him all the way down the street. The minute he saw me, he just took off. Anyway, I'm running after my suspect, right, but just as he hits the corner this girl steps out of nowhere and punches him straight off. Knocked him flying, right up against the opposite wall."
Castle winced, pausing at a street corner to let traffic go by. "They're really that strong?"
"Definitely. Actually, it might help if you stopped asking that question for a while. Just assume the answer is 'yes' until someone tells you otherwise."
"Oh."
"The minute she showed up, it was like I didn't exist as a threat anymore. One minute he's running away from me—and I'm shouting stop and threatening to shoot—the next this girl's doing her best to beat my suspect black and blue." She paused. "Actually, I didn't really think it was strange until she stabbed him and he disappeared."
"No way!" Castle yelped. "You're not messing with me again, are you?"
She wasn't. "Turned to dust, right before my eyes. So as I didn't have the suspect I'd been looking for, I made Steph stop and talk to me instead."
"Made her?"
"Well," Beckett had to admit, "she didn't seem particularly threatened by me either. She explained some of the things she believed in, and told me about what she was, although I never would have believed her if there wasn't a little pile of dust blowing in the wind where my runaway suspect had been. The next day she called me, wanted to meet. She introduced me to Leesha and Perrin, and asked to see the case file on my victim."
Castle loved this story. "And you gave it to them?" he asked incredulously as they approached Krimsonn, weaving their way through the New York crowds.
"The case was going cold, Castle, and I didn't give them everything. I let them look at pictures of the suspects. Between the three of them, they agreed that they had 'dusted'—that was their word—two of the faces in the files, and offered to hunt down the others. They also tried to persuade me that I wasn't going to solve that case in a way that would satisfy a court of law."
He held Krimsonn's door open for her, joining a population of seven or eight customers either waiting on or nursing generally oversized plastic cups of coffee. "Did you, in the end?"
"No," she said, a slight edge of resentment slipping into her voice. "Steph called me again a few days later and said now she was sure I wasn't going to find anyone in those files—not in one piece, anyway. Animal Control decided that it was their case after all—I had contacted them before meeting Steph—and that was it for that case. I hated not solving it, but getting to know the Slayers made up for it."
"This is the coolest case ever," Castle muttered as Beckett found an employee to interview, placing it on a pedestal with, at last count, the alien abduction case (that wasn't), the spies (that weren't) case, the vampire case (that wasn't), and the steampunk case (which hadn't actually involved time-travelling shooters of antique bullets, but the steampunk had been amazingly cool). This case actually involved vampire and demons and warrior Slayer women—and Beckett was not only admitting their existence, but allowing them as possible lines of investigation.
This was definitely the coolest case ever, and he was never going to let her forget it.
The Krimsonn employee Beckett first talked to hadn't been on shift the night before, nor had the second girl who had come over to find out to whom the first girl was talking. They both directed her to their supervisor, who cooperatively looked into their scheduling book and found that two people who had worked last night were scheduled to start another shift in only a few minutes. He then invited them both to have some coffee and a pastry while they waited. After a brief exchange in which neither party wished to impose on the other, Castle and Beckett ended up sitting at a back table with small cups of coffee, splitting a really rather good bear claw between the two of them shred by shred.
Ryan called while they were waiting. "While you're at it," Beckett added once he had told her about the potential suspects, "see if you can find any surveillance videos for her apartment, the dojo, and a coffee shop called Krimsonn." She spelled it for him, and gave him the address. "I can see at least one traffic cam from here, so we might be able to get a sense of where she went after she left."
She paused, listening. "Okay. Getting warrants in this case might be difficult, so make sure that whatever you find is solid."
As she spoke, two men emerged behind the counter and were corralled by the supervisor, who pointed them at Beckett. "Let me know what you come up with," she said hurriedly. "Witnesses just walked in, gotta go."
The two guys, one stocky and dark-skinned and the other a skinny young man with a scraggly beard and mustache, joined Castle and Beckett at their table. She introduced herself and Castle, and got their names. The former was Kevin Goss; the latter, Martin Bulis. Taking note of this, she showed them the death shot of Steph.
"Did either of you see her last night? We have records that say she bought coffee here around 11 PM."
Both reacted strongly. "She's dead?" the darker man exclaimed. "But she was just here last night!" He stopped. "I suppose you said that. Um—yes, she was here. She came in a lot, usually right before closing. I work that shift a lot, so I guess you could say I knew her. Her name's Steph. She was always very friendly."
His friend took the picture from him to look at it more closely. His hands were shaking slightly. "Oh my god," he said softly. "I liked her—Kevin's right, she was a great person to have around. She'd hang around sometimes if there wasn't anyone waiting in line. There usually isn't, that late. What happened to her?"
"We think she was poisoned," Beckett told them, not specifying what kind of poison, and continued, generalizing, with "Someone cut her throat. She bled to death."
"Oh my god," said Bulis again, and "Oh my god." Dropping the picture on the table, he pressed one hand against his mouth. He looked like he was going to be sick.
"Hey," Goss said nervously, "you okay, man?"
Bulis shook his head rapidly, which only made things worse. He pushed back his chair and made a sudden rush for the bathrooms.
As the door swung closed behind him, Goss made his apologies. "Steph was sort of a friend, I guess. We looked forward to seeing her come in—always ordered the same thing, usually spent time chatting with us before heading back out. I think Martin had a bit of a crush on her, come to think of it, but I don't think he ever worked up the nerve to ask her out."
"Headed out where?" Castle asked, wondering how much he knew about Steph.
Goss thought about it, glancing at the photograph still on the table, then away. "I don't know exactly. She made jokes about hunting monsters, but I'm not sure what she meant by that."
"She wasn't joking." Bulis rejoined them, still looking queasy. "I believed her. Sometimes she'd have bruises on her face or arms, sometimes cuts. And you hear stories, you know? People vanishing, being attacked after dark… She had this bag she carried around sometimes. One time I took a look at it while she was in the bathroom—it had a crossbow in it. And I don't think there are any archery clubs that meet at 11 at night."
Beckett put the picture back in her folder. "She was your friend?"
"Uh huh. Sorry about the—you know." He gulped. "She was cute…but tough. That's why I believed her about the monsters."
"That and the crossbow," Castle couldn't help adding.
"Yeah. That too. When she was joking, you knew it—I could always tell, and she wasn't joking then. And this one time? There was a guy that wandered in here, he must have thought it was a liquor store? I think this space—" He gestured at the room. "—used to be one, before Krimsonn. He was doubly pissed: drunk and mad."
"What happened?"
"I remember that," Goss cut in. "It was about a month ago. I tried to tell him we didn't have any booze, but the dude just wasn't buying it. He finally got fed up and took a good swing at me. Man, my jaw hurt for days!"
Bulis took up the story. "I was there too, and a woman who told the manager she won't work night shifts anymore, because of that incident. Steph stepped in and totally threw the guy out on his ass. If she'd done it any harder he would have bounced. He shouted at us for a while from outside until Steph told him to get lost or she'd kick his ass some more, but he kept shouting at her until she actually made for the door like she was going for him. Then he left."
"Did anyone call the cops?" Beckett wanted to know.
Both men shook their heads. "She handled it. And he never came back."
"Do you think you could describe him to a sketch artist? We're looking for people who might have held grudges against Steph."
"I don't know," Goss said tentatively. "It was a month ago, and I've seen a lot of people since then. Besides, I was seeing mostly stars for a while there."
Bulis had been thinking it over while his friend spoke, and he looked up suddenly, inspiration temporarily overwhelming illness on his face. "There's a camera in here, on the registers. When we reported the incident to management the next day, I think they pulled the footage and stored it so it wouldn't be overwritten, just in case he came back and we needed to press charges. It won't have his name, but—would that help?"
"That would be perfect," Beckett agreed. "Who do I need to talk to in order to get that recording?"
Both men pointed at the supervisor who had sent them over to talk to Beckett in the first place. As she got up from her chair to talk to him, one more thing occurred to her. "Just for the record, where were both of you between 1:30 AM and 3:30 AM this morning?"
They exchanged glances. "Well, we locked the doors at 11 PM—that's closing time. We cleaned up until about…11:30…and then I went to the Angelica to see a midnight showing of Gamer," said Bulis. "I reserved a ticket, and I picked it up at the register. You can check. I was there until about three."
"Gamer's not that long," Castle pointed out. "I watched that on Netflix just last week." It was also not that good, at least in his opinion, but he refrained from saying so, because if he turned Beckett's interview into a discussion of the pros and cons of modern science fiction, Beckett might twist his ear again.
"I know. I had a giant Slurpee and they were serving breakfast tacos, so I spent some time…um, in the bathroom." He shifted embarrassedly. "Seriously—I don't know where they got those tacos, but they shouldn't go back there. And then I went home."
"And where is that?" Beckett asked. She copied down the address of his apartment building and a phone number and then turned to Goss.
"I just went home. Got back around midnight, stayed in."
"Any witnesses?"
"My girlfriend. Do you need her number too?" She did, and he gave it to her reluctantly along with his address and phone number. "Am I a suspect?"
Beckett gave him a reassuring smile. "We don't have a suspect yet, sir. We're still gathering information."
"And to that end, we should get that film," Castle reminded her.
"I hadn't forgotten, Castle," she scolded him mildly. "Thank you, gentlemen—that will be all for now."
Back at the 12th Precinct, the grainy, month-old surveillance footage from Krimsonn's had gathered quite an audience.
"Wow," Esposito commented as Steph-on-film blocked a punch from the aggressive drunk, then laughed appreciatively as she frog-marched the unlucky guy out of the frame. "Attagirl!"
"If she'd done that to me, I'd be pretty pissed off too," Ryan agreed. "Especially if I was drunk."
"Dude, you have never been that drunk," Esposito teased him, taking the computer mouse from Castle and using it to wind back the recording. On the screen, the guy waved his arms and mouthed soundlessly. He was pretty smashed, it was true.
"Ugh, is he drooling?" Castle wondered, peering more closely at the footage. "You know, I like a drink with my buddies now and then—" He paused to exchange their trademark not-so-secret handshake with the guys while Beckett rolled her eyes, grinning. "But once you're that far gone, it's not fun anymore, you know?"
"Yeah, I know that now," Ryan agreed. "Wish someone had told me that back in college."
Beckett pinned a frame of the man's face taken from the video onto the murderboard. "All right, we have a face but no name, and three names and addresses with no faces. Where are we with the people from the gym?"
Esposito reported, "Contacted two of them, arranged to interview them both tomorrow. No luck with the third guy, the one whose wrist she broke in a duel."
"Wouldn't it be interesting if they were one and the same?" Castle asked. When the other three gave him confused looks, he added, "Our drunk and your duelist? What if he didn't stumble into that coffee shop by accident? What if he went out, got drunk, and went looking for her? We already know that she was a regular at Krimsonn's; maybe she mentioned it during a class and he knew he could find her there?"
Wheeling his chair over to his desk, Ryan tapped at his keyboard and pulled up a DMV photo of Brian Walton, the man who'd deliberately gotten into a fight with a Slayer. "I dunno, man…" Ryan mused, squinting at the screen and wheeling the chair back. "It might be. He'd have to have put on some weight."
"Woman at the dojo said Walton was maybe sixty pounds heavier than Steph," Esposito recalled.
"Pretty big weight gain, but not impossible. Ryan, see if you can find a more current photograph of Walton," Beckett ordered. Under her breath, she added, "Hopefully we can solve this without having to resort to Slayers adding pictures of demons to the board."
Castle heard, but for once refrained from saying anything.
By the time the detectives from the 12th had called it a day, the Slayers of New York City and their Scoobies were just starting theirs. Leesha had met with her people after leaving the 12th earlier that day, and had arranged for them to patrol her regular territory while she moved into Steph's usual circles, on the assumption that anyone who knew anything would be local. Remembering that Beckett had found a Post-it note in Steph's apartment referring to Jeffries' Bar, she headed there first.
Jeffries' had probably been a legitimate human establishment early in its existence, but when the city had foreclosed on it and no one had bought it, the building had fallen into disrepair. Nowhere near any of the big Manhattan streets and with surroundings ominously lit and littered with back-alley rubbish, any human that wandered in there was probably not coming out. As far as Leesha knew, no one ever had. She'd been there before, usually with Steph. As it wasn't hooked up to the city's electric services, it existed quite literally off the grid. She didn't want to speculate about the state of the plumbing.
Running her thumb along the rubber grip of the switchblade in her jacket pocket, she stepped through the half-open door quietly and glanced around, trying not to draw attention to herself until she had gotten her bearings. With no electricity, it was dimly lit by an array of candles and smoldering oil lamps. They produced scents never produced by any bath oil company, anywhere, and more smoke than light. Most demons, Leesha knew, had better night sight than any human, even a Slayer. Not for the first time, she resented this.
Only a few seconds after she'd entered, Leesha could already hear a rumbling and feel bodies shifting around her in the gloom. She tensed, threatened, and flicked open the switchblade, but kept it down at her side.
"Get lost, Slayer bitch," something snarled, safely out of view. Leesha shot a look in its general direction, but didn't respond. Something calls you 'bitch', you're doing things right, a voice in the back of her head whispered to her—a memory from Stockbridge. Be flattered.
More snarls, growls, and movement. As her eyes adjusted, she could pick out battered tables and bar stools, many of them occupied. Feeling a little outnumbered, the little Slayer began to resign herself to trashing the place before she got any information.
"What do you want here?" something else grumbled. From the trouble the unseen speaker was having with some of the sounds, she was willing to bet it wasn't humanoid, and probably had some interesting teeth she didn't want to inspect too closely. "Little far off your turf, aren't 'cha?"
"Steph," Leesha called into the smoke.
All around her, laughter erupted. It was not a sound she particularly wanted to hear, and she gritted her teeth angrily.
"Gonna bust this place up," she announced, which shut the laughter down pretty quickly. "Gonna break lots of heads and burn some stuff. Gonna find out who did this, and kill it and anything else that gets in my way. Or doesn't tell me what I need to know. Your call."
She let that hang in the reeking air, feeling more than seeing bodies shift, and hearing mutters in languages she didn't understand and words she couldn't make out. Leesha was beginning to think she should have brought a bigger knife. Not for the first time, she wished New York was the kind of place where you could get away with carrying a couple of swords around in a golf bag. She knew some places like that.
"Piss off," the darkness said, and "yeah", "yeah", "get out".
Leesha shifted, trying to expose less of her back to things she couldn't see, and instantly regretted the movement, because she'd shown how nervous she was to a most unfriendly crowd. "She was here, not long ago," she snarled back at them. "What did she want? Tell me and I'll go."
She braced herself for the fight she was sure was coming, but was pleasantly surprised.
"Tracking some black-market stuff," something said from relatively close by. Peering through the smoke, she could just about make out the distorted humanoid features of a vampire.
"What kind of stuff?" she asked him.
"Dunno," he shrugged. "Bad stuff—demon summoning crap. Dunno why she wanted it—maybe she got tired of being all noble savior, huh?" His buddies in the darkness burst into more laughter.
"Guy didn't have it, anyway," the vampire added before Leesha could take the few steps needed to punch him out. "Already sold it to some guy."
Well, that was vague—nameless sister, Leesha swore silently, calling on the memory of the long-ago First Slayer, who sometimes appeared to Slayers of the Second Age in dreams. She hated vampires. "What guy? And who bought it?"
Apparently she'd gotten all she could out of the creature, because it invited her to do something anatomically difficult and expire painfully over a protracted period of time. Then he and his gang vanished into the back of the bar. She wasn't going to follow them.
Rather than push her luck, Leesha backed up the stairs leading out of the bar and emerged unscathed but unenlightened into the much better-smelling atmosphere of backstreet Dumpsters.
Making her way out of the half-familiar alley, she replaced her tightly gripped switchblade with a cell phone, calling up her Scoobies and putting them to work on the trade in demon-summoning paraphernalia. What the hell had Steph been up to? Was she hunting the supplies or the seller? Or the buyer?
What had gotten her killed?
Next Chapter: Lots of phone calls. Maybe some shouting.
