Title: Death of An Intern Chapter 4
Author: Ramos
Disclaimer:
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After Castle's departure, Kate spent the next hour or so staring at the murder board and pacing. She checked her phone for messages at least ten times, but it remained silent and she was running out of resistance against the urge to call him. Finally she gave up and wandered down to find a sympathetic, female ear. One that would listen to her without wondering when she'd turned into a girl.
Pushing her way through the morgue's swinging doors, she found Lanie Parish back in her scrubs, safety glasses pushed up on her dark hair and going over papers on the desk safely tucked away in a separate office, away from the more noxious and spatter-prone aspects of her job.
"Hey," she said in greeting, leaning in through the door.
"Hey, girl. Where's Castle?"
"He left," Kate told her bluntly.
"He's not doing so well, is he?" Her best friend may have spent most of her time with dead bodies, but she could tell Kate's matter-of-fact tones were just masking her worries.
"No. Not really," she admitted.
Lanie pulled together several pieces of the flotsam covering her desk. "Maybe this will help."
A large photo was placed in front of Beckett, and she found herself picking it up, dispassionately evaluating a close-up of a woman's neck. Several large, dark bruises covered the slender throat, and her practiced eye noted the slight distortion of the crushed larynx.
"Karen Randall's official cause of death was asphyxiation due to strangulation. Estimated TOD is between 2 and 3 am."
Another photo was put into Kate's hands, one of the woman's face. "This photo here shows a number of bruises on her face, especially the cheek bones. Notice that most of the bruises are on the left cheek. Classic backhand pattern on the underside of the cheekbone, indicating a rising blow."
Kate's heart froze, remembering the bruise on Castle's right hand.
"This girl was raped, violently, and she got smacked around several times, but the interesting part is that she was strangled more than once."
"What?"
"My guess is that she had a fight with someone, maybe got hit a few times. Then, she was choked, but not that hard. Probably just enough to subdue her. There are well developed bruises around her neck, down low, and they had time to turn nice and dark before she died. This probably happened after she was hit in the face."
"And then she was raped," Kate added to the timeline.
"Exactly. And after it was all over, her assailant choked her again, but this time with the intent to kill her. We have a second set of bruises around her neck, higher this time, which is why her hyoid bone was broken. This ring of bruising has a full set of all ten fingers."
Lanie rose from her desk and flipped a switch, lighting up several x-rays that hung in the clips over the box light. "Now, let's put those pictures against these."
"What's this?" Kate asked, looking at the almost identical films.
"Castle's hand," Lanie explained. "This one I took several weeks ago, when a certain highly trained contract killer kidnapped two of NYPD's finest," she reminded her friend. "The killer in question was tackled and subdued by your writer boy, who proceeded to beat the living bejesus out of him just moments before he pulled the trigger on you."
"He hurt his hand," Kate remembered aloud. "The EMT wrapped it up…" She herself had helped him re-wrap the bandage as they sat in the back of the ambulance. They'd been talking softly and making jokes to deflect the overwhelming flood of emotions in the aftermath of several truly terrifying days.
Looking closer, she could just make out the line that ran diagonally across the metacarpal of the ring finger. "He broke his hand?"
Lanie shrugged. "Hairline fracture, not really bad. It was bothering him, and he asked if I could check it out. I told him he should at least go to his doctor and have a cast put on, but he claimed it would cramp his autographing style."
Beckett smiled wryly.
The other film was tapped by a short, neatly sculpted fingernail, where the jagged line was much more pronounced. "This one I took the minute I saw the bruising on his hand this morning. He may have hit something that night, but when he did, he re-broke that bone. And whatever he did hit, it was pretty damned hard and it was only once, or else these broken pieces would have had some pretty spectacular dislocation."
Beckett frowned as she put it together. "So he couldn't have hit her – he couldn't have strangled her and make these marks!"
"It would have hurt like a mother when he re-broke that bone," Lanie confirmed. Even if he was drugged out of his mind, which he was, there's no way he could have ignored the pain in his hand to beat on her, let alone strangle her the second time."
Putting her hand on the picture of the woman's face, Lanie continued. "Now, don't forget that a backhand is a cross-blow – so the marks on the left side of the woman's face would have been caused by the assailant's left hand. Castle's left hand hasn't got a mark on it, I checked."
Her friend wasn't finished yet, though. "Now – she fought her attacker, rather violently. She had two jagged, broken fingernails."
"It was a big party," she replied, feeling the same rush she got when pieces of a puzzle came together. "There's no way she went there with bad nails."
"Now, you put those broken fingernails together with the fact that there are absolutely no marks on our boy, no scratches…"
"It means she wasn't fighting Castle. Wait – nails – did they get any DNA?"
"Yep. DNA isn't back yet, but the blood type doesn't match with Castle either."
Kate grinned. This was getting better and better.
"And the kicker on this case?" Lanie pulled out a picture of a man's cotton boxers displayed within a clear plastic baggie, complete with evidence sticker.
"What is this?"
"Castle's boxers. Now that we've answered that important question, we go on to what isn't there. There were absolutely no signs of any semen or a spermicidal compound from a condom – not on his boxers, not on his legs, not on his pants. And, CSU never found a used condom in that entire apartment. It probably got flushed down the toilet, which, by the way, had NO fingerprints on it, not even the victim's. There was a smudged partial on one of the unopened condom packages, but nothing useful."
"So how does a man, who's so trashed he can't even pull up his pants, manage to clean up after himself, flush a toilet, and remember to wipe off his fingerprints?" Kate couldn't keep the triumph out of her voice.
"He doesn't. He just lays there, unconscious."
"He didn't do it."
He didn't do it," Lanie agreed.
Kate closed her eyes, overwhelmed with relief. Not that Rick Castle was innocent – but that she could prove that he was innocent.