It's both torture and bliss to have him talking to her again on the way back.

He's asking for tidbits on the case here and there, and she's either tricking him into at least being her friend again by giving them to him with a light-hearted tone, or is making herself look like a complete idiot. They cross back over the bridge when he brings up the partial print. "A partial print was enough to sway a jury?" He asks her, with his phone in his hand.

She shrugs her shoulders, her arms flopping slightly with casualness. "It was enough to put him with Michael Garret and enough to prove that he lied in interrogation about never having touched him."

Castle nods his head slightly with a purse of his lips. "Make him out to be dishonest, makes the jury question what else he lied about." He thinks out loud. And it's then that she notices out of the corner of her eye that he's texting someone.

She's had to remind him, borderline scold him, for talking about open investigations before. "Castle, who are you texting?" She asks him, her voice seeping with impatience and anger.

But Castle, he stops typing out his message and looks ahead, a deadpan stare falling over his features. He knows all too well what she really means. How many times do I have to remind you, why do you have to always be so childish, why can't you just behave? He knows that he acts childish when she gets too serious. It's a conscious effort on his part, an effort to get her to lighten up and start taking things with a bit of a smile instead of judging it to see whether it's worthy of smiling for or not.

He's in the last mood that would end this peacefully, but not in the mood it would take to have it out with her. "A professor at NYU, Detective." He over enunciates her title.

She does a quick double take between him and the traffic in front of her. He's not looking at her, not even to send her a glare that says 'back off'. The car is thickly silent for an agonizing moment before his thumb starts moving again.

"I worked with him back when I was starting out Derrick Storm. He's a fingerprint expert, I'm hoping he can end this quickly and say that the print really does belong Ned Williams."

His words send a violent lump to clog her throat. Maybe she shouldn't have asked for his help. If he's being like this, making it clear that this is the last place he wants to be, it just isn't worth the heartache he's making her cope with. There's a small part of her that's telling her to just thrust herself at him, to turn off the road and reach over and grab his face, yank him over the center console and kiss him until he's happy with her again. It's been a small, whispering part of her for some time, growing louder and gaining traction in the internal debate over the past year.

Now, it's just another voice in her head.

But she never listens to it. Out of cowardice or pride, she never can tell.

She swallows past the lump in her throat again and tightens the sweaty grip on the hot plastic of the steering wheel. "Thanks."

Luckily, he receives a reply quickly. "He says he's on board. I'll have Ryan fax over the prints and he should have something for us pretty soon."

She lets him continue working on his phone as she creeps through traffic back to the precinct. And for Castle, his ability to focus his mind on one thing is coming in handy. He uses it a lot when he's writing. The only thing that could ever break him out of that trance was the cry of Alexis. Luckily, back in the day, Meredith was only needy for attention and he could handle that. But a good mystery to solve, a nice case to put his mind to, now that he thinks about it, is probably just what he needs. The only thing he needs to get around is Beckett.

He knows how she is, and this case is meaningful to her. She's going to be consumed by it, so she'll probably be too distracted to even think about them once they get really started on things. And with this thought juggling around inside his head for a second, he can't help but chuckle bitterly to himself as he types out his text message to Ryan. It's her getting consumed by cases that has kept him from getting any closer to her in the first place. Her case is the most important thing to her. He knows that.

It's one of the reasons he never told her. One of the more selfish reasons, anyway.

As they pull into the carpool and step out, Castle tags behind her a bit as he pushes his phone back down into his pocket. After a long elevator ride, a stop to let some people on from robbery, they step off and make their way into the bullpen where they find Esposito waving them into the conference room, seeing him and Ryan already have everything set up, with a murder board already put up. Beckett sets her black, leather-bound folder down on the corner of the table as they enter the room and Castle wastes no time in rushing toward the board to study the details.

"So, Williams' story didn't change. Espo, do you have the tapes from the original interrogation?" Beckett starts in her barking of orders.

"Right here," he answers as he pulls out a set of tapes from the bottom of one of the evidence boxes.

"Okay, go over them and see if we can't nail him from a different angle. He claims that the third couple came into the bar on his shift, he gave them a round on the house for their engagement, they got rowdy, and he told them to settle down and they left. But if I remember right, he originally claimed that he told them to leave."

"Did you ever question the bar owner?" Castle asks out of nowhere, still skimming over the details on the murder board.

Beckett stops herself and looks over to him, standing straight-shouldered in front of the board, not even looking back at her. "Why?"

"Well, as the owner of a bar, I can tell you that you don't kick people out for just being rowdy. Especially if it was a Friday night. And if they did start to act up and Willaims asked them to settle down, why did they leave? From my experience, the night's just starting when I get asked to settle down."

Beckett feels her teeth wanting to grind. As if she didn't already ask all these questions before. "We questioned the staff that was present at that night, Castle. So no, we didn't question the owner. Unless you're at the Old Haunt every single Friday night."

"I interview all of my bartenders and consider them all pretty good friends, Beckett." He tells her sternly, finally looking at her over his shoulder. And after a few seconds of glaring at her, his finger jabs into the whiteboard. "I'm familiar with this bar and I know the owner. He helped me in taking over the Old Haunt and he would know if one of his bartenders would get physical with one of his customers. If he would, then that means he most likely lied about what happened that night between him and Michael Garret."

After staring her down for another few seconds, feeling both Ryan and Espo's eyes shift between the two of them, Castle turns back to the murder board.

"If not, then we should probably look for a new suspect."

Once his words stop reverberating off the walls of her chest and she looks back down to the table filled with evidence bags and case files, Ryan takes the silence as his cue and knocks his partner in the arm with the back of his hand. "Uhh..." he stumbles, "we're gonna go... look over these tapes." He and Espo quickly march out of the room, Ryan tugging on the knob on his way out to have the door slide closed, stopping just before the latch clicks.

He takes three long, slow breathes, feeling in the air that she has something to say. And he's right, she does. But he has to prod it out of her, as per the usual. "If you really needed my help, Beckett, then why are you so adamant about not accepting it?"

Her teeth clamp down on the inside of her lip at his question. And for him, it's time she pry just an ounce of honesty out of herself. "When Willaims' lawyer called me a... hot-headed rookie detective with a chip on her shoulder," she painfully recalls Vernon's words spat in her face in the courtroom just that morning, and it earns her Castle's eyes. She ends the thought with a short sigh and a crane of her neck, looking down to the floor.

Something about this is difficult for her to say. And Vernon, finding out that he said that about her, something about imagining him saying it makes him want to take her in his arms and tell her that he was wrong. And when she looks back up at him after a long few seconds, he sees the tremble in her eyes and he knows that it's a rare moment of baring her soul to him.

"I built my entire career on this case, Castle. When I put Williams behind bars, they..." she looks away to keep her eyes from letting the tears fall, "they called me a hero, for putting the honeymoon killer away. They started saying I was going to 'go down in history'... as the detective who put away a violent serial killer on her first try. And if..." she has to stop, looking back down and hiding her face behind her hair, "if it's true and Willaims really is innocent... then my whole life was built on putting an innocent man in prison."

When she finally works up the nerve to flip her hair back, she finds a blurry vision of him facing her, standing at the corner of the table just a few feet away from her. Frustrated with her emotions, she digs the heel of her palm into her eye and clears her eye, not caring if it should smear her makeup.

And it's a hard sight to see. It's easier to be angry with her when he thinks she'll just shrug it all off until later as she always does. But seeing her in pain, teetering on the edge of her own willpower, it's enough to test his resolve, that's for sure. And it's enough to soften him up to her. So, with a sigh, he relaxes his shoulders and shuffles forward.

"Beckett," he sighs, "I have a lot of criticisms I can make about you right now, knowing the situation we're in."

Her throat shakes and shutters at his words, that edge of anger still very present, always reminding her of all the mistakes she's made. And when he takes his pause, the feeling of just wanting to curl up in a ball and cry her eyes out comes back full force. She can't do that, because the only thing that would make her regain her usual strength and resiliency is standing four feet away from her criticizing her.

"But one thing I could never say," he starts again, his tone shifting into soft seriousness, "is that you weren't meant to do this."

With that, her emotions are enough to make his simple statement the most meaningful thing he's said to her since that humid early spring day, lying in the dry grass with his hand holding her head.

"If Williams is guilty, we'll prove it and keep him in prison. If not, we'll find out who the real killer is." He states simply and starts toward the door.

Beckett's heart is aching, too painful to let it go. And as he passes her, she's turning with him, hurting to keep him here with her to let him in on the rest of her mistakes. "Rick..."

But he's pulling open the door and rushing out before she can continue, and she can tell by the sound of the blinds on the door clattering against the window that he didn't hear her. When she regains a bit of her senses, she sees him extending his hand out to a short, bald, bearded man with thick glasses and a brown, wool suit jacket. Beckett closes her eyes for a moment, imagining all the tender moments she's played over in her head when she's alone in her apartment, when they're to the point when it's just 'Rick' and 'Kate'.

Out in the bullpen, Castle is happy to get his mind on something else as he greets his friend. "Thanks for coming so quickly Professor Weatherill." He says with a smile, shaking the man's hand firmly.

Peter smiles in return, shaking Castle's hand vigorously. "Any time, Rick, any time."

With a quick look over his shoulder, Castle sees Beckett slowly coming out of the conference room and motions toward the professor. "Beckett, this is Professor Peter Weatherill. He's the leading fingerprints expert in New York."

Feeling empty, Beckett extends a weak hand and greets him. "Nice to meet you."

"You too, Detective Beckett."

"So, what can you tell us, Professor?" Castle asks as he turns to face the man again. "I know partial prints can sometimes give false positives."

With a set of papers in his hand, Peter motions towards Beckett's desk. "May I?" He asks, and after receiving silent permission from Beckett, he sits down, adjusts his glasses and takes out a pen. "Well, Rick, you're right. Partial prints are sometimes unreliable and do gives false positives, but in this case, I'm quite certain that this print does indeed belong to your suspect."

"How can you be certain?" Beckett asks, crossing her arms and coming to stand behind the professor, while Castle stands in front of her desk.

"Well, because of this," he answers and points the tip of his pen to the center of the large print out of the fingerprint, the pen pointing to a small set of ridges in the print itself. "From the partial print found on your victim, it's clear that your killer has a very rare type of fingerprint we call an Accidental Whorl."

"And Williams has one of these?" Castle asks.

With another sheet of paper set on top of the other, the professor puts his pen on the outline of Williams' full print. "He certainly does. Right index."

"Professor," Beckett starts and waits until he's looking up at her, "just how rare is this type of fingerprint, exactly?"

The professor chuckles slightly and pushes the chair out, leaning back. "Well, from the statistics, there would only be a handful of people in New York who would have this fingerprint."

"And," Castle begins, chancing a quick glance over to her before leaning down on his fists, "just how big is a handful, Professor Weatherill?"

The professor puckers his lips and lets out a breath. "A few hundred, maybe?"

Another dead end, Beckett thinks to herself as she slowly turns away from him and paces her way back toward the conference room. "Thank you for your time, professor. Poker next Friday?"

The professor stands up and shakes Castle's hand again. "I'll be there, Rick."

Once he's left, Castle shoves his hands back into his pockets and starts to follow her. "A rare fingerprint type could point to it being Williams."

"And it could point to it being any of the other few hundred people with that type of fingerprint, Castle." She mutters to him and pushes the conference room door open.

"Well, if Williams is guilty, we should figure out if he could be responsible for the other two couples' murder. Start checking his history and see if it lines up somehow."

Beckett is slowly pacing around to the other side of the table when he's making his way back up to the murder board again and starting to look over the details. "Castle," She calls, picking up a case file from the table to make it a distraction while he looks over to her again. Once she feels his eyes on her, she tells him. "Thank you."

Her tone is soft, softer than usual when she says it in passing. She's in a weird place right now, she probably just needs a level head around. "We should get started."


A/N: Didn't plan it this way, but it's my birthday today. You can get me a cool gift by letting me know what you think. I had intended to make this chapter end later in the story, but it ran much longer than I thought it would. Next chapter will have an important scene in it, though. :)