A/N: I did promise not to keep you waiting six weeks again, didn't I? :p Although I have to issue a warning for the next update… I got the Hunger Games books yesterday and I'm going to hole up with them over the weekend, so the next chapter might take a bit. But I'll try to keep it under six weeks, hehe :p.
It's not a question, but a lesson learned in time
Castle showed up at the precinct at nine a.m. the next morning, carrying four instead of the regular two cups of coffee. His first glance into the bullpen revealed Beckett's vacated desk, and when he rounded the corner he saw Ryan and Esposito hunched over their desks busying themselves very obviously with paperwork.
He sidled up to them, shaking them with a low "Good morning!" out of their concentration. Ryan jumped a little–"Jeez, Castle!"–while Esposito just looked up and fixed the writer with a stare before nodding curtly.
"Coffee?" Castle asked, placing two cups in front of the detectives without waiting for their responses.
Esposito glared again while Ryan just gave Castle an irritated look with both eyebrows raised, but then both men shrugged and grabbed the paper cups, taking long drinks.
Ryan sighed when he put down his cup. "Gotta hand it to him," he said to his partner, "you just can't stay mad at someone if he brings you this kind of coffee as a peace offering."
The Latino narrowed his eyes as if in irritation, but then broke out into a grin. "Yeah, right… Unless it would make him bring you more of that stuff."
Castle heaved a relieved sigh when he realized that the two had only been messing with him. He leaned on the edge of their joined desks and asked in a whisper, "So, what's going on? Any news? And where's Beckett?"
"Nothing new," Ryan told him, sharing a frustrated glance with his partner. "We're running his name through everything we've got, but that's taking a while. Criminal record's the same as you already found out, and DMV came up empty."
"Beckett's at the morgue talking to Lanie," Esposito added, "to see if there's a hit on his DNA, or if she could narrow down the TOD. Beckett hasn't called though, so I don't think there's any news on that front. She should be back soon."
"And Gates?" Castle asked, glancing to the captain's office.
"Hasn't come in yet," said Ryan, "which is kind of unusual for her. Usually she's here at eight-thirty."
"You won't hear me complaining," Castle quipped.
Just then the elevator opened and the three held their breaths, Esposito shooting the other two a glare for jinxing their good–captainless–fortune. Castle peeked over his shoulder, relaxing when he recognized Beckett striding into the bullpen.
"Hey," he said, pushing away from the desks to join her at hers, the remaining two coffees in his hands. She'd already shed her coat when he reached her, coffee extended in his left hand.
"Thanks," she mumbled, not looking at him but still taking the offered cup from his hand and bringing it immediately to her lips, tilting her head back to take a long drink.
"So," he said, drawing out the sound, "did Lanie have anything interesting to say?"
"Nope."
"Nothing?"
"Nada."
She sat down and flipped her computer screen on, then looked up at him still standing in front of her desk. "You gonna sit down?" she asked, tilting her head towards his chair.
"Yeah, right," he responded, walking around the desk to sit down next to her. He watched her, saw her glance at the boys and, following her eyes, caught Esposito lightly shake his head. Seemingly unsatisfied, but still looking like she'd expected that response, she turned her eyes to her screen and began scrolling through something.
He waited patiently for about five minutes, until his latent anxiety got the better of him. Having no task to take care of and with Beckett obviously not communicating with him on her own, he felt, simply spoken, useless. So he inched closer to her, leaning on her desk. "What are you doing?"
She grunted in response, prompting an irritated look from him. "Beckett?"
She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them again, clicked a few places on the screen before switching it off again, turned to him and got up from her chair. In one smooth motion she grabbed her paper cup from the desk and took off the plastic cap, downing the contents in one gulp, then binned the empty cup.
"Let's get coffee," she said as she walked past him.
Castle was out of his chair and hot on her heels in the blink of an eye. He followed her into the break room, closing the door behind him as he watched her cross the room and mirror his action with the other door. Then she walked to the counter and started the espresso machine.
"Under wraps, Castle, you remember?" she almost hissed at him.
He was taken aback by the tone of her voice, but wrote it off as the stress that was going to get to them all, sooner or later. It was only natural that in this case it hit her sooner than the boys or him. Still his voice was a little defensive when he replied, "Of course I do."
"Then don't ask me what I'm doing!" she snapped. "We're lucky that practically no one's here yet or else we'd have to look over our shoulders every five seconds to make sure nobody catches us."
"It's not like what we're doing is illegal. It's police work, isn't it?"
"Yeah, but if Gates sees it, she'll be able to tell that we have more than we told her and she'll want to know what it is and why we haven't told her. And she's too smart to try and play a game of half truths with."
Her handling of the machine became more violent, and she slammed a cup under the valve so hard that Castle winced at the clattering sound.
One look at her face showed him precisely how stressed she was; he had become pretty good at reading her expressions and gauging her moods over the last three years, and the level of tension that was practically radiating from her posture told him that he didn't really want to know the amount that she kept inside.
He knew that he was playing with fire, and was very likely to get burned, but he reached out anyway, placing a gentle hand on her shoulder while he extracted the cup from her hand with the other. Surprisingly though, she didn't snap and didn't shake his hand off–she just stood there, stock still and tense, eyes clamped shut. The short relief at his small victory was washed away quickly as her breathing became labored.
"Kate?" he prompted. "What is it?"
He could see the effort she took to try and calm her breathing, and it took every ounce of his willpower not to wrap his arms around her. Knowing her, she wouldn't have allowed that if he had tried, no matter how low she was at the moment. Not here, not in her territory. Though he wasn't sure if, right now, there were any circumstances under which she'd allow him to hug her. The thought made him cringe.
She shook very lightly, but seemed to get a hold of herself. Her breathing evened out and she opened her eyes, though she didn't look at him when she responded.
"The man who murdered my mother is probably responsible for another death right under my nose, and I have to find and stop him before he kills anyone else or finds out that I so much as glanced at this case and–" her voice caught and she swallowed once. "And we have nothing to go on and every second that we lose waiting is one more where he could find out, and… I've lost too many people to this case, Castle. I can't lose anyone else."
He was quiet for a minute, letting her words sink in. She wasn't great at sharing and although she had opened up a lot to him, admissions, confessions as raw and emotional as this one were a real rarity. And, more often than not, tied to this case. Or one of their infamous brushes with death.
"This isn't about your mom, Kate."
"Castle–" She tried to interrupt him, but he just went on.
"Not anymore, it isn't. It's not about revenge for Montgomery either. This is about you, Kate. About your life." He squeezed her shoulder. "And you don't have to stop him. Not you alone. I'm with you all the way and they," he nodded towards the bullpen, "are too."
She shrugged her shoulders lightly and he let his hand slip away reluctantly. A sigh preceded her words. "I know."
If the topic hadn't been so serious, he would've laughed. "No, you don't. You think you know, but you act like you don't."
Apparently she didn't have a response to that since she kept quiet and just stared at the wall. He huffed out a breath and moved around her, replacing the cup he'd taken from her in the machine and, with a few practiced motions, filling it with her favorite. He turned and handed her the cup with the words, "You're not alone, Kate," before he left the room.
He sat down in his chair and busied himself halfheartedly with his phone, continuing even when Beckett returned from the break room a few minutes later and switched her screen back on, no trace of their previous conversation left on her face that instead displayed only grim determination. Thinking that prompting her again would be pushing his luck, he tried to focus on his current game of Angry Birds, hoping against hope that it'd distract him from the tense atmosphere.
Almost an hour passed before the boys came over to them. Gates had arrived in the meantime, thankfully saving the 'motivating speech' for another time. Ryan stood next to Castle, his back to the captain's office, while Esposito walked around and sat on the desk beside Beckett.
Ryan drew in a breath, waiting for a uniform to pass behind him, before he started, "The guy is practically a ghost. There's no DMV record, he's had no insurance since 1995 and he hasn't payed any taxes since then either."
"Plus," Esposito added, "there are no bank accounts registered to him. Which doesn't have to mean anything, but it fits into the picture."
"Are you suggesting–" All three interrupted Castle with glares, causing him to lower his voice to a whisper. "Are you suggesting that someone made him invisible to the system?"
"Looks like," Beckett replied, "I mean, he couldn't have managed that all by himself. Unless of course he wanted to live in the forests or something. Which, by the looks of it, he never did."
"Yeah, he didn't look like the camping type," Castle piped in.
Beckett shot him a look. "So we know that he lived in the city once… Did you guys check with the hotels?"
"Yeah, all negative. There was no guest going by his name or his face," reported Ryan.
"We did those things separately, by the way," interjected Esposito. "Nobody can exactly associate his picture with the name."
"But that doesn't mean he didn't still live here," Castle said. "I mean, we know that people can just use a different name and make up a convincing back story and nobody ever suspects them being someone else."
"No, but nobody thought that he was dead when he vanished," whispered Ryan, "Makes it a lot harder to stay in the same city. Chances are he went somewhere else."
"In that case, did you check the airports? Flight lists?" asked Castle.
"Of course. Again, his name is not on the lists, and nobody matching his description has landed in the last few days," came Esposito's response.
Beckett opened her mouth but was cut short by her phone ringing. She picked up the receiver. "Beckett. … Lanie, what … Really? And that's … I see … Thanks, Lanie. Bye."
She put the receiver down and looked up at three expectant pairs of eyes. "Lanie's narrowed down the time of death to 24 hours before his body was found."
"That's…"
"Better than what we had before," Esposito said, interrupting Castle. He grabbed a whiteboard marker and took the two steps to the murder board to update the information. He had not even begun to write when Gates' head poked out of her office. "Do we have new information, Detectives?"
Beckett, well hidden by Ryan's back, sighed once before she got up and spoke, "The ME narrowed down the time of death to about 24 hours before the body was found. She said with the cold and everything that was the best she could do. Also," she added as an afterthought, "she confirmed that he's been killed where we found him."
"And what do you plan to do with that information, Detective?"
"Now that we have a definite time frame, I think we should resume screening those surveillance tapes, and we should talk to the neighbors again. Maybe they'll remember something if we give them a more concrete time."
"That's your plan?"
"It's not like we have a wealth of information to go on, sir."
"Alright. Keep me posted."
"Yes, sir."
Beckett rolled her eyes as Gates turned her back on the team. "'kay. Espo, let's go."
Three pairs of eyes turned on her, all equally confused. "Where?" asked the addressed detective.
"To talk to the 'neighbors' again," Beckett replied, the airquotes that she'd left out for the captain's benefit now clearly audible. When Esposito's questiong look didn't vanish, she glanced at the other two and only then seemed to notice their confusion. She sighed. "Look, it's either talk to the people or screen tapes, and I really can't sit around here any longer. And Esposito has been there before, he knows the people."
While those were certainly logical reasons to go out and to take Esposito along instead of him, it still felt wrong to Castle. Like he'd been banned for doing something wrong. He had thought the previous night that things were going relatively well between them, given the circumstances. Yet this move didn't help to alleviate the insecurity he felt about all he'd done, which had been there from the minute he had received the call. He was still positive that he had made the right choice then, but he started to question if he should've come clean sooner.
That Beckett didn't look at him while she donned her coat and grabbed her things didn't help either.
"Good luck," he called after them when they'd reached the elevator.
Esposito turned back and nodded. "You too."
Castle yawned. Ryan and he had spent almost two hours flat screening traffic camera footage at high speed, and they hadn't made the slightest bit of progress. Not that they'd expected to make any, no. But in the absence of anything else to do…
Since they didn't know what they were looking for, they'd started taking down license plates–or rather fragments thereof–along with a guess at make, model and color (which was either light or dark, given that they only had black-and-white footage). In one word, it was frustrating.
He shifted in his chair and pushed his shoulders back, eliciting a series of pops from his vertebrae. He groaned and massaged his neck, then got up.
"I'm gonna get fresh coffee," he said, grabbing the pot from the tabletop.
Ryan just nodded absentmindedly and Castle left the room, ambling over to the break room and his target, the coffee maker. Going through the motions of getting the coffee started, he was surprised to notice that his mind was, at least for a moment, completely blank. The welcome respite was over too quickly though, as the case crashed back down on him and he was literally lost in the mass of thoughts that all seemed to start at the same instant.
Taking deep breaths to try and calm his abruptly spiked heart rate, he began to push back the thoughts one by one. He briefly wondered if this was anything like what Beckett had felt like during the sniper case, or if it had been much worse for her. He couldn't imagine how it could be any worse though, and he knew that he had to be grateful for that. He dismissed the thought and jammed it back with the others.
When Castle had managed to contain his anxiety attack after what felt like an eternity for him, he noticed the light on the coffee maker going out, signaling that the coffee was ready. Sighing, the writer removed the pot from the machine and returned to the other room.
Fifteen minutes later another bunch of vehicles had joined their list, but nothing had sprung out at them. Ryan had just refilled his mug when Castle's cell phone went off. He pulled it from his pocket and pressed the green 'accept' button without looking at the caller ID.
"Richard Castle? … Jake! Hi. … Yeah … That would be great. … Yes. … Thank you. See you in ten."
Ryan had paused the video and looked over at Castle with his eyebrows raised.
"That was my guy in… you know," Castle said, almost whispering. "I'm gonna meet him for lunch and… explain… the situation."
"You're going for lunch… to do that?" Ryan seemed skeptical, but then shrugged. "Well, good luck then. I've got this."
"Thanks, man," Castle replied, downing the rest of his coffee and then hurried out.
Talking to a whole block of people who hadn't seen a thing was flat out frustrating. Beckett wanted to hit something, but the only two options were Esposito or the elevator wall, so instead she opted for throwing her head back and expelling an angry breath.
"It sucks, I know," her coworker said beside her. "Why can't these guys invite witnesses when they're going to murder someone?"
She rolled her eyes at the joke, but had to fight the cynical chuckle that wanted to escape her lips. "I don't know, Espo, maybe it's because being witness to a murder is something that rather scares people off," she shot back.
"Yeah, maybe."
They fell silent again, waiting for the elevator to complete the ride from eighteenth to ground floor. It seemed to take an eternity for every inch of the way.
If only the people had been uncooperative, then she could've blamed it on them. But no, most of them had been beyond polite, offering them coffee, tee, cookies or even a piece of cake; yet none of them could offer the one thing she wanted, needed: information. They just hadn't seen a thing.
Realistically, she hadn't expected anything else, but deep down she had hoped that one of them might have provided them with the crucial break, the few words to describe their killer or maybe tell them that they'd seen a car come down the road from the crime scene late at night… But she'd been disappointed.
She held no illusions about Ryan and Castle finding anything on the tapes either. Really. They didn't even know what they were looking for. Yet a small part of her placed hope in her partner's sometimes uncanny ability to notice things that were just a tiny bit out of place.
Her partner. Thinking about him almost sent her thoughts back into last night's (and this morning's) tumbling chaos. She wasn't sure how she felt about him, or what he'd done. She was hurt that he'd kept this huge secret from her when he knew too well how she felt about it. Damn his reasons, he'd all but lied to her, and she had trusted him. That the annoying little voice in her head told her that she too held a secret, one that could–and not too unlikely would–hurt him just the same as she'd been hurt by his, only served to push her further into her defensive mode, ready to lash out at anyone or anything that dared to challenge her.
Her secret. It wasn't like she'd held out on him on purpose. She wasn't ready yet, though she'd made amazing progress at putting herself back together. She just wasn't quite there yet. And she'd told him that she needed time. That she needed to close this… this case. He knew, and he'd chosen to stay. And it had been good. They had been good. And then he had to go and mess it all up.
She swallowed, sensing that she was teetering too close to the edge. Not now. Not here. Not… Keep it together, Beckett.
The elevator pinged, notifying its two passengers that they had arrived at their final destination. As they got out and walked through the lobby, Beckett was grateful that Esposito just kept quiet. She didn't know if she could handle anyone's concern at the moment.
The ride back to the precinct was about as uneventful as the countless conversations they'd had within the past three hours. It was closing on two p.m. when she pulled into her customary spot in front of the building. The wind had picked up a little strength, and she dimly remembered that the forecast had predicted flurries for the evening and the next day.
The precinct lobby was warm though, and the elevator–old as it may have been–went up to homicide considerably faster than the one in the apartment building had. When they exited on their floor and walked into the bullpen, her eyes searched for Castle all on their own. She spotted Ryan sitting in the conference room in front of the screen, an empty coffee pot and two mugs sitting on the table along with several sheets of paper. Without thinking she altered her course and walked straight towards the room.
"Hey, Ryan," she said upon opening the door. "Anything?"
"As if," the other detective replied wearily.
"Yo, bro," came Esposito's voice from behind Beckett.
Prompted by Beckett's raised eyebrows, Ryan continued, "So far I've noted about 200 different cars between ten and ten thirty p.m. on Sunday night. All with scraps of their plate numbers, as far as I've been able to decipher them."
"Then you've got more than we do," Beckett said and leaned forward, resting her hands on the back of a chair. "Where's Castle?"
Ryan gave her a look. "He went home. Had a lunch meeting with–" he lowered his voice–"his guy. Called me an hour ago and said that he'd go home because he had some things to prepare. Said we shouldn't wait for him." When she just stared at him, he added, "Didn't he tell you?"
"No," she said, frowning. That wasn't like Castle. He'd always called her to let her know he'd gone home or anywhere else… At least Ryan had talked to him so they knew that he was alright. She felt the urge to take out her phone and call him herself, but reigned herself back in remembering that she still wasn't sure how she felt towards him. Shaking the thought out of her head, she resumed, "You need any help here?"
"Since we aren't exactly looking for anything specific, I don't think it makes a lot of sense for all of us to stare at one screen, but there's still footage from another traffic camera and from the subway station…"
Beckett and Esposito sighed simultaneously. "Alright. Esposito, could you check out the other traffic camera? Just do the same as Ryan."
"You really think that makes sense?"
"It's not really like we have anything."
"True." A sigh. "I'll get to it."
"Thanks."
"What about you?" Ryan interjected.
"I'll go and stare at the board for a bit. I have a feeling we missed something."
Ryan shrugged and turned back to the screen. "Good luck."
Beckett and Esposito left the room and split up, heading off to their respective desks. Beckett removed her coat and draped it over the back of her chair, then walked around to sit on the side of the desk while she looked at the murder board.
Information was few and far between, almost lost among the white of the board. The victim's reconstructed photo with a big red question mark underneath, the bank clerk who had found him listed as a 'person of interest', complete with picture, a blue time line extending to fourty-eight hours before the body had been found with the second twenty-four hours marked in red as kill zone.
They had nothing. Everything on the board amounted to nothing that was even remotely helpful for finding out who had killed Weston.
She replayed the information she'd received from Castle and subsequently from the police and associated databases, which they had been unable to write down anywhere it could have been seen.
Business lawyer. Mob ties. Prison. Money laundering. Indirect connections to Raglan and McCallister during the time the dragon came along and blackmailed the dirty cops. Fallen off the grid in 1995. Never resurfaced. DMV negative.
DMV negative. She almost smacked herself on the forehead. Although he hadn't been listed as owner of any bank account nor for paying taxes or insurance fees, clearly nobody had made any effort to clear up his past. Not if Castle had been able to find the connection all by himself.
So no entry in the DMV meant naturally that the man never had a driver's license before 1995, and it wasn't very likely that he'd gotten one after he'd vanished. This meant that he couldn't have taken a car to where he'd been killed, so…
She turned towards Esposito and called, "Hey Esposito, could you check with the major cab companies if anyone dropped off our victim in the vicinity of the crime scene on Sunday?"
His concentration disturbed, the man looked up from his computer screen and blinked slowly, then frowned. "Damn, why didn't we think of that sooner?"
"No idea, really," she replied, eyebrows raised. "We had everything covered, but not the cabs… Whatever. You do that, and I'll see if I can coax anything else out of the board."
She turned back, not waiting for her colleagues confirming nod, and attempted to lose herself in the tangled web of information on the board. Except there wasn't one. Usually the board was almost full after the first day, and there was really a tangled mess to make sense of. Often enough she found something they'd overlooked, some piece that had been missing from the big picture, just by staring at the board for long enough.
But now the board was fairly empty, devoid of anything to untangle. Beckett found herself in the rather uncharacteristic role of looking for what wasn't there instead of what was hiding beneath the rest. True, she'd done that before, and successfully too, but this time she found that she just couldn't concentrate on the facts before her and what was missing.
Instead her thoughts drifted toward her absent partner every time she let up for as much as a second. She shook them off the first few times, but realized after the tenth slip that she wouldn't be able to concentrate on her job if her subconscious was acting up like this. So she allowed the thoughts to enter her mind, trying to sort through them.
Dr Burke had demonstrated that talking about her worries, and her thoughts in general, he'd said, forced her to really think about them. When she said she was worried about something, he'd ask why. She'd learned quickly that he wouldn't let her off the hook with an "I don't know." He'd probe and prod her until he'd get to the core of her problem; and, more importantly even, until she got to that problem's core.
He wasn't just taking what she said and putting on a great show of deduction, describing exactly what her problem was. She was sure that he had a good idea of it, and often enough he'd drop hints to keep her on track, but what he really did was encourage her to think about the problem. While she had hated that in the beginning, after a couple of sessions she'd become more used to it, and now a good part of her progress was based on successful introspection.
Talking about it wasn't an option though. She couldn't run out in the middle of the case, and she didn't want to talk about it with another cop, least of all her fellow detectives. It wasn't that she didn't trust them–she did–but that they knew Castle too, and they had no business being involved in her relationship with him in this way. Talking to her therapist was a different thing, he stood outside of it all, wasn't invested in the situation.
One word flashed through her mind. Writing. Burke had told her that writing down her thoughts would work like talking about them, if not better. She remembered him saying something about structuring thoughts, and since she couldn't start whispering to herself, writing seemed to be her best shot to bring some order to the chaos inside her head.
She pushed herself off of the desk and sat down in her chair, pulling a few sheets of blank paper from a drawer, and uncapped a pen. She smirked lightly at the irony of the situation: here she was, attempting to solve her problems with a writer by writing about them.
Her thoughts were still a jumble, so she spent a minute to identify and pick one that she thought was most important. Secrets. Him keeping his rogue investigation from her until he couldn't possibly put off telling her.
She stopped, looking at the words on the paper before her. She hadn't even noticed writing them, but apparently she had. Then she frowned, imagining a session with Dr Burke, her just having spoken the thought out loud.
Why?, she wrote next to her first thought, then added, Why am I upset about it?
She thought about the question for a moment, and the longer she took the less her thoughts were tumbling over each other. She remembered the previous evening, remembered the hurt and… Hurt. Why had it hurt her?
He lied to me, joined the other words on the paper. He told me that I had to step back because I had nothing to go on, and all the while he did, and he worked on it.
Burke's part. Why did he do that?
Because he was told that I'd be killed if I got near the case, she wrote, recalling his explanations.
So he was protecting you. Was that wrong?
Was it? Of course. I'm the cop, I have the gun. I have to protect him, not the other way around.
Yes, but he's saved your life before, you've told me that. He even tried to get to you when you were shot, tackled you to the ground. What makes this time different, what makes it wrong?
If she hadn't been chewing on the question as intently as she was, she would've noticed how strangely accurate the parts she made up for her therapist actually were.
Because– Because what? She dug deeper into her thoughts. Because he had risked his life? She'd thrown that at him after he'd told her, but was it really the reason it was wrong?
She slowly shook her head. No, it wasn't. He'd risked his life to save hers before, staying in town despite the threat of a dirty bomb, or taking out Lockwood in the middle of a heated gunfight serving as just two examples. So if it wasn't that he'd risked his life, then what?
She tossed the question around in her mind a few times, comparing all the times he'd saved her life before with this one. In the end, she only came up with two answers. Two answers that she realized, once she wrote them, were actually one and the same.
Because he did it behind my back, without my knowledge. And because I wasn't there to have his back, in case he'd needed me.
She swallowed. The first part stung, and her feeling of having been betrayed was rooted in it, but she realized that it was only the smaller part of her emotions. The far bigger part sat in the second answer.
Every time that he'd saved her life before, they'd gone into the situation together, as cop and shadow at first, as partners later on. Every time she'd known at least as much about the danger they were walking in as he. Every time he'd been walking into danger for her she'd known about it, and she'd been there to get him out again.
But this time she hadn't, and she realized that it hurt far worse than the feeling of betrayal. Worrying about what might have happened to him while he was trying to protect her, imagining scenarios where she tried to explain to a devastated Alexis that her father had died trying to protect her, Kate, and she hadn't even known about it until it had been too late… She shivered at the cold crawling up her spine. Not that road.
This was the core of the problem. She underlined the second answer, then added, Now what?
She had options, a lot probably, but which ones could she realistically consider? She might've identified the core of the problem, but in her experience that didn't just make the problem disappear. No, she had to work on it, find a way to solve it.
Esposito's voice ungently yanked her out of her thoughts. "Yo, Beckett!"
"Yeah?" she responded, looking up to see him walking towards her desk.
"Any luck with the board?" he asked, gesturing to the papers in front of her with the folder in his hand.
"No, just some notes," she replied quickly, leaning forward to cover her mental discussion with her forearms. "What've you got?"
"Just heard back from the cab companies." She raised a brow in question. "Nobody matching our vic's description has been dropped off anywhere in three blocks around the crime scene. I asked them to check with all their drivers for the whole of Sunday, but that's gonna take time."
"Of course," she said.
"I'll just write it down," Esposito said. After a moment of scribbling he added, "Why are we even checking the traffic cameras? We know he didn't have a license, and he didn't take a cab there, so…"
"We're looking for anything out of the ordinary. Anything that might be suspicious. I don't like it either, but we really don't have a lot of options here."
"No, we don't," he agreed glumly and returned to his desk and computer.
Beckett tried to get back onto her previous train of thoughts. How to solve the problem? She bounced the question a few times in her head before she came to the conclusion that what had happened had happened and couldn't be changed anymore. However much she didn't like what he'd done, nothing was gained by worrying about "what if"s. She had to move forward. She had to talk to him. It concerned him as much as her, and she owed it to him as much as herself to try and work through this together. As partners. After all, that was what they were best at, right? If it's other people's problems, she thought almost cynically.
She looked at her watch and was surprised to see that it was closing on five p.m. It had been just about two when Esposito and she had come back, and she hadn't done much except looking at the board for a while and then sorting out her thoughts. Surely that couldn't have taken three hours? Obviously it has, she scolded herself.
Beckett got up and quickly donned her coat, making sure that her cell phone and car keys were still in her pockets. Then she noticed Esposito frowning at her across the room.
"I'm gonna go check in on Castle," she said, "You two shouldn't stay too long either, I don't think anything will come out of staring at those tapes for the rest of today. Maybe we can go at it tomorrow with a fresh mind."
His frown relaxed slightly and he shrugged. "Sure, I've just been waiting for an excuse to drop these tapes into the bin."
She smirked a little at his joking comeback, then turned around and walked to the elevator. She was going to talk to him. And she wouldn't hold back.
She never would've suspected that a single motion could require so much effort. No matter how clearly she pictured her hand rising from where it hung limply beside her to ring the doorbell, it just wouldn't move. She let out a breath, trying to clear her mind. She'd been through this. She'd thought it through, she'd made up her mind, now all she needed to do was raise her damn hand and ring the bell. Why couldn't she do that?
Her phone's vibration startled her out of her thoughts. Please let this be a break, she thought, plucking it from her pocket–a motion against which her hand did not protest, strangely enough–and answering it without so much as glancing at the screen.
"Beckett."
"Beckett?" came Castle's voice from the other end. Oh great. "Are you still at the precinct?"
"No, I'm actually–" right outside your door. Damn honesty reflex.
She saw a shadow approach the door, then heard the lock being released. Had she just said that?
The door opened to a man in black pants and a black T-shirt. A large man. He looked her up and down, then called over his shoulder, "Rick! Detective Beckett is here."
Footsteps approached and within seconds, the man stepped aside to make room for Castle, who still held his phone to his ear. She lowered her own and tapped the red button to end the call. Then she looked at him, aware of the uncertainty written all over her face. A long second passed before she could muster up the courage to say something. But he had called her, so she could do this. She wanted to do this. Do this right.
"Hey, Castle." Now that wasn't so bad.
"Hey," he replied automatically. Traces of his usual grin tugged at his lips. Was he happy to see her? "Come in. This," he gestured to the man who'd opened the door, "is Jake Mansfield. He's gonna keep watch here."
"Nice to meet you, Mr Mansfield."
"Detective."
"You know…" Castle started, but then interrupted himself. "Why are you here?"
"I, er… just… to… catch you up on the case." Great. Keep digging your own hole.
To her relief, he only shrugged in response. "That's actually what I was calling you about. See, I've got a theory, and I need to know something… Shall we sit down?" He motioned towards the couch.
She followed him, sitting in one of the armchairs. "Yes?"
"Now that we have an approximate time of death, have you checked with the cab companies if our victim–"
"–has taken a cab to the crime scene? Yes, we have, and no, he hasn't. According to the companies, twenty-six people have been dropped off within a three block radius on Sunday. None of them matches his description."
Castle seemed to have expected this, since he didn't show any sign of disappointment. "Obviously that wasn't your theory," she stated.
"No, actually that was confirmation for it," he replied. Lowering his voice, he continued, "See, DMV came up blank, which means he can't have driven there. I doubt that he walked, and since he didn't take a cab, that means…"
She up looked into his eyes, seeing the spark dancing there, and then understanding flashed through her. "He took the subway," they said in unison, tentative smiles forming on both their faces.