Chapter Four: Northdown C


The morgue was a chilly little island of clean, sloping tile and a thousand whirring fans. All was white and steel and shiny, everything just so, her exam room a tidy fortress whose visitors rarely stayed for long – whether they came in on their own two feet or were pushed in on wheels. Assistant MEs scurried around, barely talking, armored from the outside world by their clipboards and ill-fitting scrubs. Today there were four of them in the room, split between her and another, older ME – Lloyd Kroll, MD, PhD. Lanie Parish could still recall the day she'd first met him, when he'd blatantly broken every OSHA code in the book by bringing his half-eaten sandwich into the morgue to declare his pleasure at finally seeing another woman in the building who was both younger and better preserved than the Queen of England.

She'd shut down the interest six seconds into their working relationship, but even over ten years and a marriage later, he still sometimes made a pass, if only a joking one. Today there wasn't any such teasing as they'd transferred the dead cops to the table and cut off their uniforms. The sight of the bloodied NYPD patches on the shirts had been enough to weaken her steel-hardened stomach, and she'd been silently wishing for him to say something, anything, to lighten the mood as they'd stripped off badges and holsters, though he hadn't. She'd worked only four cop killings in her time as a medical examiner, and these two had been the first since she'd ridden the gurney with her friend, staring at a uniform that was much the same at these, trying desperately to stem that hot tide of red as it had lapped and flowed over her fingertips.

As she stared down at the naked boy on her table, she was amazed again by how easy it was to get caught on a little spark of light, to be transported back a few years without having willed it, to be back upstairs, watching helplessly as the wheel left its long, red trail in its wake. The sharp, sharp scent of blood, so different from the meat-locker smell she'd grown more or less used to over the years, so acrid it had clung to the inside of her nose and the roof of her mouth for days, burning every time she'd inhaled.

She remembered her terror that her friend would end up exiting the back doors; that she'd end up riding the elevator down...

Lanie swallowed, stripping off her gloves, then remembered the recorder was still going. She hit the button and tossed the pink polyisoprene in the nearest waste bin, then turned to glance back down at the cop on her table. Mathew Reyes had been 24 when either Scott Dunn or his accomplice had pressed the barrel of a mid-sized pistol to the back of his head and pulled the trigger. The bullet had come out of his skull through the eye socket near the nasal bone, taking with it a large portion of his face. She knew he would end up getting a funeral with a flag draped over his coffin, just as she knew that it would end up being closed-casket. She'd seen a skilled mortician work magic, but nothing could be done for this poor boy's face. Most of the skin had sloughed off as she'd been teasing the skin off the skull to have at the braincase, sending a shower of red bone to the table and the floor. She'd ended up having to relocate them to a small evidence bag, which she'd tucked just under his chin. As she stared at his body, she thought it might be more merciful to just boil him down.

She considered again what she was going to say the family when they got here, how she was going to explain to them that they couldn't see their son's body. Sometimes people just accepted it, but she knew that for others death wasn't truly real until they'd touched it with their own hands, until it had been carved into a slab of granite. And for cops it was always harder. She'd already been visited by several officers from the 5, some of them rookies, others detectives and higher-ups, some of whom she'd known for a long time. Captain Jeff Otis had visited yesterday with Victoria Gates in tow, and he had been one to insist that he see the bodies himself. That had been tough, standing there with the two captains, all three of them struggling to understand how and why any of this was happening. Death was their trade, something they worked through every day, but it was always different with cops.

Now more than ever, she thought glumly.

And while she was on the subject...

She turned from the boy and the exam room, knowing she should call Beckett, though neither she nor Lloyd had found anything of even the slightest use to give her. She'd already called her twice before, once just to say morning, and once to say she'd sent the bullets off to Ballistics. Both times Beckett had conveyed a "thanks for your concern" that didn't quite reach her voice, but then again the detective had never been one for the touchy-feely, not unless she was really upset or really drunk – and one tended to precede the other. If anything, it was comforting to hear how normal she'd sounded, as if it was just a normal day, as if she hadn't spent four solid hours yesterday standing on the exam room floor so still and blank she'd looked like she'd been carved there, watching silently as Lanie had done all the things to Jane Doe's corpse that would usually have made her wince.

She briefly considered if she should bother asking how she was feeling as she pulled out her phone, moving to a space in the morgue that wasn't a dead zone. She remembered just as she was dialing that Castle had once made that 'dead zone' pun, back within that first month of knowing him, and that she and Beckett had exchanged such an eye roll that he had burst out laughing at them. The sound had seemed so unnatural and so inappropriate given the setting that she had laughed too, and even her friend had cracked a smile, though she'd denied it the second he noticed it.

She smiled herself at the memory, but it faded quickly as she brought the phone to her ear and listened to it ring. "Hey," was the answer on the third ring. Beckett's voice was slightly garbled, though she sounded as exhausted as before.

"Hey yourself," she replied, then listened as something that sounded vaguely like Castle hit the receiver in a short crackle of feedback. "It's Lanie," she could just make out Beckett say, and then her voice came on again more clearly, as she spoke into the phone, "Have you got anything?"

Her friend didn't exactly sound hopeful, but Lanie still felt crappy about admitting to her that she didn't. There was silence on the other end of the call for a few seconds when she stopped talking, and she filled it with her voice again: her pal Jordan Shaw, FBI, had come down an hour ago, the morgue apparently her last stop in her sweep to all the labs. She had offered Quantico and the use of a couple sci-fi gadgets, to be specially shipped from Virginia, and she'd looked frustrated when Lanie had said thank you but there simply wasn't anything to find.

Beckett didn't ask for details, so Lanie moved on to her questions. "You find anything at Sing Sing?"

"No," she replied shortly, in a way that said she had but that it wasn't anything useful.

"You alright?" she asked. She knew from experience that the third time couldn't charm, but sometimes fifteenth had results.

"Yeah."

Apparently not. She sighed, directing her breath directly into the phone so Beckett could catch the hint. She wondered if she'd be getting different answers if Castle wasn't listening in. "Well, call me if you want to talk."

"I will." The lie was so quick and smooth it almost sounded natural, though Lanie had long since stopped feeling hurt over this sort of thing. She was gearing up for goodbye when her friend added, in a voice with half the confidence and the volume, "Thank you."

She paused then. In her experience, when Kate Beckett started to show the stress, it was time to run screaming for safe haven. "It's my job," she replied, keeping her voice light.

"Well, I appreciate it." She paused for a second, and Lanie said nothing, hoping to bait her into talking, but instead all she eventually said was, "Bye."

"Bye, sweetie," she said, then dropped her hand when she heard the line click. She stared at the little plastic rectangle, remembering all the other times she'd heard that particular tone in her friend's voice. Every memory was a bad one.

"Hey," Lloyd's voice suddenly broke through her thoughts. "We've got that crash in 3. You finished with Reyes?"

She looked at him, blinking, then cleared her throat. "Uh, yes. I'll be in in a few minutes."

"Right-o," he replied, and then he walked past her, to room 3. Lanie sighed and shoved her phone into her pocket, then moved in the opposite direction he had gone, her thoughts on the break room, its styrofoam cups, and its water cooler. As she grabbed a cup and pulled the bright, blue tab, all she could wonder was how bad things were, and how much worse they could possibly get.


It was absolutely pissing it down as Beckett coasted down FDR. From 278, Manhattan had seemed a distant, white-ish grey smudge, the skyline reduced to a few broken teeth jutting from the mass. Only now could she truly make out the towering structures of the East Side, Midtown, and beyond, chalky and discordant on the horizon. Bare trees and other cars blurred by, their forms as gauzy and indistinct as running paint. Some part of her considered murderers and hurricanes as she tapped the gas.

"Take the next exit," Castle said for the hundredth time. Or maybe just the sixth.

Beckett glanced at him, waiting for the follow-up.

He didn't disappoint. "I'm hungry," he said, "and so are you. We passed by many a fine establishment in the Bronx, and even as I speak we're passing more."

"This is New York, Castle," she replied. "You can't swing a dead cat without hitting a deli and a pizza."

"All the more reason to stop."

She could feel his gaze boring a hole into the side of her head, just as her stomach groaned with another hollow sort of ache. The truth was, aside from yesterday's doughnut, she couldn't remember if she'd eaten anything in the last two days, but the thought of stopping to get anything stabbed at her with a sharp prick of guilt. She just wanted to get back to the precinct, even if she wasn't entirely sure what she could do once she got there.

(he wants to shoot you to cut you open to die die begging burning)

"Beckett, the exit."

She blinked. This time his voice lacked the softness and the cajoling, and she glanced at him, brows dipping, trying to shut away the horrible little demon in her ear.

"Please," he added.

Her stomach chose that moment to let out another strangled gargle as something that felt like a bubble popped inside. It was so loud she could hear it over the heater and the engine, and she knew he'd heard it too. Feeling betrayed by her own body, she flicked the turn signal and got into the right lane, to wait for the next exit.

"Thanks," he said.

She grunted in acknowledgment, hating that he was right, hating that she almost felt relieved.

When she turned onto East 96th, she just drove straight, asking him with as little irritation as she could manage to direct her to the nearest "fine establishment." On a different day, they might've discussed menus, and she would've been capable of having an opinion, but today that seemed as achievable as conjuring a lead from thin air. He didn't end up saying anything until they'd hit the park, and she turned onto Museum Mile as his direction. They were somewhere near the Guggenheim when he told her to try to find somewhere to park, and she ended up turning sharply onto 90th when she spotted brake lights.

"The gods smile on us," Castle remarked wryly as she claimed the spot that had been vacated less than a second before. Someone honked as they passed, and the noise sounded distorted in the rain.

Beckett didn't reply, despite the small, vaguely teenage flush of pride she felt in both in her luck and her tight, flawless parking. Her mom had taught her well.

She groped blindly in the back for an umbrella and her coat as Castle got out of the car. Once she found them, she opened the door and stepped out herself, flipping the umbrella up. She shrugged into her coat as she headed to the sidewalk, and Castle quickly moved to join her under her shelter, his hair already wet and sticking to his face.

"Where are we going?" she asked.

"That way." He pointed southwest. "Three blocks."

"Okay," she said, falling into step beside him. Rain beat steadily against the umbrella, cars passed on neighboring streets. Nearby, some fifteen thousand people from a hundred different countries were milling around one art museum or another, gazing at anything from to Sophie Calle to Egyptian combs to Jackson Pollock. Under the shadows of the highrises, it was almost easy to feel small.

(Kate will burn Kate will die will bleed)

They walked by other pedestrians, other couples, passed gratefully under the shelter of some scaffolding for half a block, where they skirted a guy selling umbrellas from a shoulder bag. By the time Castle stopped, Beckett was feeling cold and hungry, and for once she didn't make a move to be first at the door. The sound of the outside world receded when they walked inside, and she recognized Django Reinhardt over the hum of a group of seven people talking against the far, right wall. She recalled the sign etched into the glass, translating the French on autopilot as she slipped her umbrella into one of the plastic bags provided at the door: Tout va bein, All goes well.

She wondered if Castle was trying to tell her something through his choice as a waiter made eye contact with them and walked over. He was mid-20s, lean, goatee neatly trimmed; attractive in the bland sort of way half the men his age in the city seemed to be. He told them to pick a seat, and Beckett took one against the left wall, under a large mirror. The walls were faux adobe, the décor white on dark on dark, and white candles in little white bowls flickered on all the tables. Everything felt warm and clean and quiet. It wasn't really the sort of place Beckett would've chosen for lunch, but, then again, she wasn't one to pay 20 bucks for a salad on a whim. Still, there was something oddly comforting about the spotless, white table linen and the fresh tea candle in its bowl, as if it all was inviting her to believe that the world truly could be simple and tidy and bloodless.

She draped her coat over the chair back and sat down, tucking her baggied umbrella into a pocket. The waiter appeared to drop off two goblets and a carafe of water. Thinly sliced lemon floated in suspension between the ice cubes. She took a drink after he poured her a glass, then watched as he refilled it. His badge identified him as Erin.

"Bread?" he asked pleasantly.

"Yes," Castle said, even though he'd directed the question to her. "Please."

"Anything to drink?"

They both refused, and he nodded before walking away, to disappear behind a set of swinging doors.

"Looks nice," Beckett said.

"Yeah," Castle replied. "I think it's been here since 2005 or something."

She nodded, then picked at her menu, hungry but feeling no real desire to eat. "Anything good?"

He shrugged, "I like the fish. We could do prix fixe though."

She glanced at the price and had to physically check the impulse to wince. "No, that's alright." She still hadn't gotten quite used to having meals that cost more in one sitting than she'd normally spend in a week, especially when the laws of pride and decency saw it her turn to cover the bill. Though even ignoring the cost, everything in the price fix sounded far, far too rich.

After going back and forth on the menu for a few minutes, she settled on a salmon salad, while Castle opted for something involving chicken and cheese. Once Erin came back with their bread, they gave him their orders, and it was exactly at that moment that the easy part ended.

Castle reached for bread and dipped it in the oil and vinegar, then left it suspended over the plate for a second as he looked at her.

"You alright?" he asked the question he'd managed to keep on hold for the last hour.

"Yeah," she said automatically, reaching for the bread. He caught her hand, and she looked up at him, knowing that this time he wasn't going to just let it go.

"Beckett," he said gently.

"Okay," she said after a moment's strained silence. He released her, and she let her hand fall back to her lap, bread-less. "What do you want to hear?"

He looked slightly wounded. "I just want you to talk to me."

She'd already known that, but that didn't make it any easier.

"It's just..." he lowered his voice, glancing around. The group of seven in the corner looked like lawyers or businessmen or bankers or something, talking about mergers and quarterly projections no doubt. They paid no attention to the two tired souls under the mirror. "Seidman," he continued. "The things he said..." he let his voice fall away.

Beckett looked at him, something in her lower back creeping at the memory, like a spider with feathery legs was crawling up her spine.

(kill you fuck you burn and cut and bleed and bury and die)

"I know," she said.

"I don't know how after all these years I can still be so amazed by your strength." He looked down at the bread in his hand, as if unable to remember how he had come to hold it, or why. " You're the strongest person I've ever met."

Heat prickled her face, and she glanced down, swallowing. Strength was a shield she'd lived behind so long she'd forgotten how to lower it, how to live without it, but days like today it was all she had.

"I just wish..." he trailed off, then finished after a beat, "you didn't have to be."

She knew when she looked at him again that he expected a response, and she cleared her throat quietly. "Yeah," she said, reaching for the bread again. "Yeah, I do too." She tore a piece off the loaf, and it was hot in her fingers as she retracted her elbow. "But it's not really a choice." She ate it without bothering with the oil.

He studied her for a long moment, as if grappling with the next thing he wanted to say. Any of the simple pleasure she may have gleamed from eating dissipated.

"What?" she asked.

"Nothing."

"I know the look," she caught his eyes and held them, aware somewhere in the back of her head that that was exactly the sort of thing she'd do to a suspect in the box. "You wanted to talk, so talk."

"It's just..." He seemed to regret ever having started the train down whatever track it was heading. There was a long pause, then, "I keep thinking about summer."

And there it was.

If Beckett had been hot before, now she felt like someone was holding a flame to her face. Something sickly lapped at the pit of her stomach. "I'm not having this discussion."

"Why not?" he looked at her almost angrily. "I feel like it's relevant at this point."

"It isn't," she said, feeling the flash heat cooling rapidly to something like ice.

"How isn't it?"

"Because it isn't, Castle."

He stared at her in open frustration, and Beckett glared back at him, wishing he hadn't gone there. After a beat she dropped her tone, softened, wanting to assuage the situation. "Look," she said. "The time we spent was good for us— it was wonderful —but we had to come home eventually. It's not who we are. It's not who I am."

He sighed, then hesitantly reached out for her. She allowed him to take one of her hands, and he squeezed it. "It's just that...in the four years we've known each other, while we were away I don't think I've ever seen you happier," he said. "And you changed the second we got Stateside again."

She didn't reply for a long moment. It was true what he was saying, or parts of it were. They'd spent a month and a half traipsing around Europe during her unpaid suspension, revisiting a hundred old haunts, a thousand memories. On her suggestion, they'd even returned to Kiev, where she'd taught him half a dozen swear words and the proper way to navigate a rynok. She'd found them rosolnyk and borscht, syrniki and torte, took them to a few of the nightclubs she'd frequented way back when, many of which had long since turned into something else, a few of which had not.

And it was true she had felt like a different person, if only a little, most nights. No gun, no badge, no corpses, her days an endless blur of food and music and sex and colors. But sometimes she had rolled from bed at 2AM in whatever local time zone they happened to be in, crept out to the balcony that would almost inevitably accompany their five star suite, and she would stare blankly at the street or the beach or the buildings, lost in dark thoughts. She would remember Bracken and the smell of his fear as she'd pistol-whipped him, remember dangling off that rooftop, remember Maddox and Lockwood and Coonan and her mom and Montgomery and the podium and the hospital that had taken a full month of her life from her, and sometimes she wouldn't sleep.

She'd never told Castle about those nights.

She looked at him as he rubbed her hand, and it seemed as if he wasn't even doing it consciously. The contact felt safe and reassuring, but at the same time she knew there was a desperation to it, the same way there had been when they'd kissed this morning.

She still wasn't going to tell him about those nights.

"This is my life," she reminded him gently. She knew she'd said something like that to him before, but she couldn't remember when or why. "I chose it. It's dangerous, but I knew the risks when I first clipped on the badge, and I'm reminded of them every time I look in the mirror." She felt her face flush at the admission, overly aware of her pulse. "And I do love what I do, even if sometimes that might be hard to see."

He looked at her miserably, "I just want you to be happy."

His words hit her like a blade. Over the years she'd gotten used to being in relationships with standoffish men, very few of whom had ever wanted to discuss her past or her work life except to attack her for it. None had wanted to save her from herself, or, at least, none had ever tried.

Castle's concerns were as touching as they were frightening. She found herself half-wishing she could pull away.

"Hey, I am happy," she told him, catching his eye as she gave his fingers a squeeze. "Truly. Not at this particular moment, but," she cracked the best smile she could manage, which she could only hope didn't look as lame as it felt, "in general."

He didn't seem reassured, but she didn't know what else to say. She couldn't leave her job, couldn't let go of all the hurts and the worries and the fears, no matter how far away from them he took her. The reality was that her ghosts lacked provenance, and they'd just follow her anyway.

Especially given some of them weren't even dead.

"What're you going to do about Dunn?"

His words pulled her back to the now, and she stiffened. All at once the sound of the rain and the city and the gypsy violin slammed back into her.

"What?" she asked, pulling away, though she knew perfectly well what he'd said.

"I want to know how this is going to end," he said. "If this goes anything like last time, we both know he's not gonna surface until he goes after you again."

She wasn't surprised to find he'd come to the same conclusion she had.

"He won't kill me, Castle," she said with a hard sort of certainty— because at this point she wasn't entertaining the alternative.

"It's not just that I worry about."

It was a full second before she got his meaning. She felt herself retract, felt the shield lift. She didn't reply.

"Kate," he was looking at her intensely now, as if trying to x-ray her thoughts.

But she had slid into cop mode. "I don't know what I'll do," she said.

"You don't?"

She felt anger curl in her gut at his tone, and she narrowed her eyes. "No."

He studied her silently. She knew he didn't believe her, but if there was a truth to tell, she had yet to even admit it to herself. The thought of Dunn, the thought of the conversations he'd had with Seidman, the thought of the two dead cops and Jane Doe and her muffled whimpers from inside that ice box unzipped something black in her heart. Over the years she'd become accustomed to the ugliness, kept it caged and locked down tight, but Bracken and Montgomery and the bullet had rusted the bars.

The truth was that she didn't know what she was going to do to Dunn, and that scared her more than he did.

But that was yet another thing she couldn't tell Castle.

She hoped he could forgive her for it.

"Isn't there anything else to talk about?" she asked, dropping her head. She closed her eyes and ran her fingers through her hair, allowing the sleeplessness and the hunger to crash over her.

When she looked up at him again, the expression on his face hadn't shifted, but after a pause a suggestion of a smile twitched at the corner of his lip, and he laughed in a short, helpless sort of way. It reminded her of the reaction some families of murder victims had, just before the dam broke. "It's a Barnum and Bailey world," he murmured.

She felt her brow buck, but before she could even contemplate a reply, she spotted Erin the waiter walking to their table, that vague, customer-service smile plastered across his face.

"You guys good on bread?" he asked.

"Yes, thank you," she said softly.

"Alright. I'll go check on your order then."

"There's no rush." Just as softly, light and worry-free, like they were normal people.

He nodded, still smiling, then walked away.

She watched him go, for whatever reason thinking back to that year she'd spent table-waiting in California. Life had felt so crushing then, though she couldn't remember why. At least then she'd still been able to count her losses. Nowadays they seemed to be stacked in rows all around, drowning her in their shadows.

"I ever tell you I used to do that?" she asked, not really thinking about the question.

"What?" Castle asked, following her gaze for a second before looking back at her. "Waitress?"

She nodded, reaching for the bread again. He handed her the basket, and she unwrapped the linen.

"No," he said. "When was this?"

"Back in college— Stanford," she replied, ripping off a piece, then offering the basket back to him. He took it. "Before I transferred to NYU. Even with the aid it was hard to make ends meet."

He took a piece of bread himself, though he stared at it as if it was something foreign. She ate her own, barely tasting it. She thought about that little two-bed back West, of her roommate and that bizarre collection of porcelain figures that always had seemed vaguely unsettling to her, like the part of her that was still six years old was afraid they were going to come alive in the night and climb into her bed.

She hadn't spoken to her old roommate in almost fifteen years, since her life had gone to hell.

"I can't picture you waiting tables." Castle had looked up from his bread.

She smiled, slightly. "I did."

"I could never hold a normal guy job, even when I was a kid."

The smile felt a little less tight. "You say that like you ever grew up," she teased.

"Touché."

They stared at each other for a long moment. She wished there wasn't a table between them, wished they could just grab her car and go somewhere, get off the island and away from the city. But just as much she wished they could just sit there forever, listening to the rain and the cars and the gypsy violin, just a few feet of air and a single, white candle flickering between them. No death, no past, no immediate, pressing future.

"We'll catch him, Castle," she said eventually.

"I believe you," he replied.

The waiter showed up before she could ask why. She decided as he was setting the plates in front of them that she didn't really want to know.

They didn't say much after that.


Running a task force was a consistent, if intimately familiar, pain in her ass. This time around, DC hadn't outfitted her with a squadron of interns or agents, given the office was stretched thin with sixteen thousand and three other things, and given, she suspected, the feds wanted to distance themselves from the prison break as much as possible, so she was coming to accept her dependency on the NYPD.

Special Agent Jordan Shaw leaned back in her chair in the conference room she and Avery had taken over. Her partner had meandered off in search of an overpriced smoothie some twenty minutes ago, in accordance with the wheatgrass obsession he'd picked up from his Californian relatives a few years ago, so for the moment she was left alone to wait. For what? Well, that was the question of the day.

News of Dunn's escape and subsequent murders had hit the news this morning, along with a photograph of Jane Doe. With both had come a flood of calls, and through the open doors she'd been listening to officers fielding them for hours. Past experience told her 99.69 percent of the tips would be crank, and for the thousandth time in her life she found herself giving thanks that she was no longer working in the scut, sifting through an endless, ever-growing pile of rocks in the hopes of finding a single speck of copper. She had little hope that the calls would produce anything that would help lead to Dunn, though she was remaining tentatively optimistic about an eventual ID for Doe.

She'd been hanging more faith on Kate and her team to turn something up at Sing Sing, but when the detective had called an hour ago she'd had nothing. The prisoners didn't know anything, and Zehner hadn't matched his memory with a picture anymore concretely than two "possibles." All she'd needed to hear was the tone of that "possibles" to know that they were empty leads.

So that was bust.

She fingered her scar, realized she was doing it, dropped her hand.

Sitting aimless wasn't her usual MO. Generally she'd have files, a notepad thrown open on the table, several documents open on her computer. She'd be profiling, theorizing, adjusting. But none of that was necessary right now. She knew Scott Dunn. She'd spent a day with the bastard.

Words flitted through her head.

Malevolence. Narcissism. Sociopathy. Sadism. DPD.

Others.

Rage. Envy. Hubris. Grandiose delusions. Intense violence.

And others.

I read your report on Jack Whitaker. Brilliant stuff. What brilliant deductions have you made about me?

She remembered the satisfying crack of his nose under her elbow. A temporary pleasure, killed as he'd slammed the butt of his gun into her face and shoved her into a car that had smelled vaguely like stale fast food.

She realized her fingers were tense on the sheet of phone records she'd subpoenaed from Dunn's last foster parents. Uncurled them. Looked down at the sheet again. No calls from a New York area code or anywhere near it.

The revelation hadn't been a surprising one, but at this point they were just treading water.

And for as little as they had on Dunn, they had less on the partner. He was a ghost. She agreed with Dt. Beckett's theory that he'd probably been in contact with Dunn as some sort of pen pal, but it wasn't something they'd have any luck proving. Sing Sing staff only skimmed personal letters for red flags before sending them on their merry way, making no records, keeping no photocopies. Even with them, she doubted they'd be much use. She'd bet Avery's salary that they'd used some form of invisible ink in their correspondence. Prison phone logs were useless. Dunn had no friends or family.

All they had were a few strands of rootless, coarse hair from a seatback from the van. If DNA could be found, it would be days, jurisdictional bulldogging or not.

She flipped through a fresh fax. Ballistics had taken a few pages to tell her that Officer Brad Falk of the NYPD had been killed with his own service weapon, a Glock 19 9mm. His partner, Mathew Reyes, had died by the same gun used on victim zero, the prison guard David Sharp. The mystery gun was a .38, and it wasn't in any system.

The morgue had nothing.

Trace had yet to get back to her. She'd flagged her case as priority, but, then again, in New York there could be seven agents pushing their cases on any given day. As far as she knew, the warehouse hadn't even been fully processed yet.

Bust, bust, and bust.

She glanced at the dead woman in the photograph again. Pant suit, snowy white blouse dusted with dried blood, fingernails raked and torn against the ice. Kate had relayed last night's events dispassionately, but she could see the younger woman was spooked.

Shaw flipped a photo off the file, looked again at the name carved into the ice box. Kate. The box had been moved to Trace, where she'd seen it in person. If she were to hazard a guess, she'd say the letters had been scraped in with the rough end of a crowbar.

She wondered idly if Jane Doe had heard him scrape the message from her prison.

When she closed her eyes, she could see Dunn doing it, in the very room he'd once held her tied and gagged, where she'd listened to him spout a near endless stream of psychotic diatribes. He was going to make her watch the building blow. He was going to drag her through the ruined mess of the building after it blew, and he was going to blow her head off in front of her dead agents.

Rage washed up her throat. She swallowed it.

"Anything?"

She opened her eyes.

Avery had found his puke green smoothie. He set it on the table as he walked in, then slid out the nearest chair and sat. The tall, plastic cup was half empty already.

"Nope," she said. "Why do I have a feeling you spent more on that than I would for lunch?"

His eyebrows pinched, "Your lunch was a muffin you stole from in there." He jabbed a thumb behind him, toward the break room.

"Guilty." She flipped the folder with its color photos shut.

He leaned back with his smoothie-o'-yuk, bright pink straw hovering a few inches from his mouth. "7.59," he said after a beat.

"What?" she asked.

"That's how much this was."

She eyed it the same way she'd been eying his drinks for awhile now, like there was a slight possibility it was going to come alive or glow or start reciting verses from King Leer. But she said nothing. Changed the subject.

"Have any thoughts on your walk?" she asked.

"You mean besides 'Why am I going on a walk in the rain?' "

"Yeah, besides that."

He shook his head, took a sip.

Silence fell between them, and they stared off in two different directions.

A few yards away, phones continued to ring. When she craned her neck she could see that the lead investigators' desks were still empty. Gates had disappeared into her office, no doubt fielding calls from half the state. Shaw suspected that her relatively low profile at the moment was the only thing saving her from a similar fate. Unless Chuck Baranowsky was taking care of everything from his high seat down in Washington.

"There'll be another body tonight," she said quietly, and not entirely intentionally.

Avery looked at her, brows and gross-ass drink dropping. He didn't reply.

She couldn't blame him.

Sighing, she looked back at her computer, at the word document and its flashing cursor. It was trailing her profile of Scott Dunn, last edited nearly three years ago, a few minutes before she'd walked out into the court room to face him again.

She thought back to the way he'd smiled at her from his table, smug in his orange onesie and his belt of chains. And she'd smiled back, imagining blowing his head all over the first three rows behind him.

Not for the first time today, she almost wished she had.


Brooklyn glittered like a collection of humming fireflies from across the East River. Just at his back, the buildings of Wall Street loomed like so many gargoyles.

Of course, he remembered as he stood there listening to the water lap against the pier, the East River wasn't a true river. It's a tidal strait, its water as salty as the ocean's, though at its deepest it's barely over a hundred feet to the bottom.

He stood there with arms crossed around his waist, listening to the water, feeling the wind whip his collar in six different directions.

He hated this place. Hated the people, hated the smells, the constant roar of traffic and subways and buses and cabs. Everything was expensive; no one paid attention to anything; bums littered the streets, lit their spoons under the shelter of a flight of stairs, a tunnel, whatever they could find. Filthy above and below ground; the detritus of eight million people piling up in any and every free space it could fill.

Any other circumstance, he never would've come here. But just as in the movies and the songs, a woman had drawn him here, and it was for that same woman he stood there now, a lonely shadow on the pier.

He kicked at a cigarette butt. Watched an old-style sail-boat drift by, made to look like some 19th century galleon. Even from here he could hear the voices of drunk people blending seamlessly with the roll of kick loops. He found himself wishing it would spring a leak, sink to the bottom of the East non-River, bringing them all screaming with it.

But it drifted by. And he watched it go.

Sighing, he squatted, tested the chain. It had finally gone taut.

He smiled, rocked to his feet. The cell was cold in his hands, chilled from the air and the wind. He tapped the number slowly, savored each ring.

"Beckett."

Brusque. All-business. He felt his heart skip a beat.

"Hello again, Kate."

He heard her breath catch. He could just see her frozen there, hanging on his words, a slender fish caught on a jagged hook.

"I was disappointed to see you failed to save her. That poor girl died, and you did nothing."

"What was her name, Dunn?"

He snorted into the phone. "I don't know."

He pictured her face the way he'd used to catch it through the slats, from the window of the office building across the street. Her beautiful face, twisted in rage.

He imagined cutting into it, imagined watching the blood stream down those gaunt cheeks.

"Tonight's your second chance, Kate," he said.

"Where are you?" she spat. He could hear her breath hit the phone.

"You're asking the wrong question," he went silent for a moment, then set the phone down, just on top of one of the poles jutting from the dock, face down.

Then he walked away from it, followed the concrete toward the bike road. The path was deserted as he followed it up. Somewhere around here it would lead back to a street.

A white light came out of the dark without warning, hit his face, and he froze.

"Bit chilly for a walk," a uniformed cop said, washing the beam over him, his body a pit of shadow.

He relaxed then, that brief, insane thought that she'd somehow already made it here already gone and passed.

"I was looking for Pier 17," he said.

The cop eyed him for a second, but in the dark his expression was unreadable. He resisted the urge to reach for the gun in the small of his back.

"Five minutes that way," he said finally, pointing north.

"Thanks," he said, flashing his best pleasant smile.

And then Scott Dunn continued on his way, melted into the dark.