They exist restlessly on extended blinks of sleep, collapsed over the hard edge of their desks or folded up in turn on the break-room couch. They fill up stolen whiteboards and wall themselves in. Her mother's, drawn up by crisp memory and another, filled up with all the things that burst and ran dry; Raglan, McAllister, Coonan, Lockwood. She re-writes third cop above a question mark that sits heavy in all the spaces that scream with their fallen Captain. Nobody mentions it; his name or the spaces he left behind, and Esposito wheels in a third board that shutters the rest of the bullpen away. Richard Castle. They move despondently around the mostly emptiness beneath his name as the blurred edges of each day bleed slowly into the next.
She doesn't know what day it is when Josh stumbles into their desperate space and whispers her name. He says she wasn't home, she hasn't answered her phone and she sighs, too weary to fight, but he shakes his head, tells her he just thought… and holds out a duffel bag, clothes and all the small things she didn't know, he knew, she needs. Grateful, tired tears rush up behind her eyes and he tugs her up into him. He wraps her tight and her aching body goes slack against him, seeks comfort that feels dirty like guilt as he presses an apology she can't remember if she deserves into her hair. She shakes her head. No, no she says and whispers her own choking apology into his shirt but he softens her, tells her it's okay, Kate, it's okay and she's too heavy, too exhausted and shattered to shake her head and tell him it's not. Nothing's okay.
Lanie and Jenny come and go, with food and love and worried, tired eyes. They run their hands over their boys and sigh. Lanie crouches down and spins Kate's chair to face her. "I can't, Lanie," is all Kate says and Lanie nods, she brushes the hair away from Kate's face and presses a kiss to her temple before she goes.
The three of them teeter there, dangerously close to the edge of delirium and none of them really know how many times the sky turns itself over outside their white-board walls before the first new road opens up.
She presses her thumb and forefinger to the bridge of her nose, clenches her eyes against all the things that circle and circle and never meet. His absence weighs her down as she pushes all her energy into convincing herself that his inane yapping is not the thing she is desperately aching for.
Her eyes burn with the realisation that she doesn't really remember how to do this without him, how to crack open her blindfold without his insanity. She huffs and considers it then, all the outlandish nonsense that would irritate her and make him beam. CIA operations and aliens, time travellers, mob wars, sinister butlers, Sasquatch, invisible thieves.
"Ryan, what if he wasn't gone, what if we just didn't see him!" She blurts too loudly.
Ryan jerks and spins in his chair, sleepy befuddlement spilling out of him and making his jaw hang open, "Huh?"
"The place was swarming with cops; the sniper can't have just gone. So what if he didn't? Go, I mean. What if he was there and we just didn't see him?" She explains, tries to explain, voice filling out with the first fluttering of new hope.
"You think it was a cop? Someone from the funeral?" He asks, eyes narrowing with the stinging possibility of yet another betrayal from the inside.
"Oh, I didn't think… I thought…"
"The grounds-keeper," Esposito supplies, growling as he turns to face them, but Ryan shakes his head.
"No, he was interviewed. Yeah, I – here," he says, frantically scrabbling through papers and passing a single sheet to Beckett, "Karpowski interviewed him, didn't get much. She said he was shaken but cooperative."
Esposito pushes up and crowds over her shoulder, skims the short interview report. "Yeah," he grouses, "but all the cops, their DNA would be in the system and nothing matched what was on the weapon. Besides, somebody would have noticed a uniform on a face nobody's seen before, right? The guy couldn't have been posing as a cop without somebody noticing, not that day."
"Right, but the grounds-keeper…" Ryan's voice fades away as realisation and desperate, delusional hope settles heavily over them.
"Let's go!" Beckett growls but they're already up and going. Tugging on coats and staunching through a bullpen that stutters with the sudden movement of them.
The three of them burst out into falling daylight, creaking and finally moving with purpose.
[x]
She thought somehow that all this would be familiar, the smell of green and the harsh crunch and bounce of tyres over gravel, the gates and the calm stillness of this place. She'd thought she would know the elements of it as it all licked back to her senses, but memory is a strange thing, insane in the way it lifts up and dusts of fragments of time, chubby pattering feet on floor boards and her mother's soft curls coming in and out of focus, Katie, don't run, and quite sane in the way it leaves behind long tracks of irretrievable nothingness. It feels completely foreign, the cemetery, clouding in under a falling sun.
There's nothing of him here. Castle. A broken piece of police tape wisps up and snaps taut in the wind, there are patches of unsettled grass, flattened or kicked up, but everyone is gone, the markers and lights and crush of an active crime scene has all faded away and he's not here. The place is foreign and everything filters in slowly, brand new.
He's short, round and balding, with sweet eyes and rosy cheeks. The grounds-keeper. He smells of cigarettes and coffee when he speaks it's in a voice roughened by years, "I'm sorry, Detectives, I've never heard of him. I called in sick that day - food poisoning, the doctor said - but he's not… I don't know that name, Detectives. He definitely doesn't work here."
She expects it, but still, it rips through her and leaves her breathless. Every hour they spent running on hamster-wheels, chasing after some elusive dragon and this, this is where they fell. Deception and the cheapest kind at that. It's a careless and gut-wrenching thing. It twists tight in her stomach and leaches the blood from her face.
She vaguely registers the rest of the murmured exchange and the way Ryan and Esposito step in front of her, literally take her out of the equation and move along with the stiffness of protection. It all filters in and out but it's hazy and she knows, as the door clicks into place behind her, that it is just another thing that memory will kindly turn to black.
[x]
The bullpen has already slowed to a quiet shuffle, the dullness of late evening creeping in behind them and sending people home.
"Karpowski, now!" Esposito hollers as they step out of the elevator and the air falls still, a cold chill racing through the room as Karpowski shoots up from her chair.
She matches pace with them, follows along on the other side of the grilled wall and steps into the secluded, holed up area around their desks. She turns this way and that, takes in Ryan, shrunken away in too big clothes with bloodshot eyes and pursed lips and then Beckett, cold eyes staring back at her, pale and hollow. She tears her gaze away and looks back at Esposito, shoulders squared away and nostrils flaring as he huffs out a rough breath.
"We need you to do a sketch of the grounds-keeper. Every member of your team, everyone who might have seen him that day, needs to do a sketch. We need everything we can get on this guy. Now!" He barks at her and she jolts.
Karpowski's eyes widen in sudden, awful comprehension. "Detective Beckett, I - " she starts, turning to Kate with her eyes bowed in remorse, but Kate shakes her head, teeth grinding and fists clenched.
"Don't!" She growls and stalks away.
[x]
Kate's hand trembles, ceramic rattling against metal as steam hisses and rushes up fast around her. She waves a frustrated hand through the fog and scowls at the complexity of his simple things.
"Detective Beckett?"
The intrusion startles her; she jumps, slams the mug down on the counter and smacks the machine into silence.
"What?" She snaps as she turns and falters, words tangling up and falling in a heap. "Alexis! Oh, sorry, I'm sorry. What are you doing here? Your dad! What's wrong?"