Saturday afternoon

"So Werkowski has a motive to kill Bankery," Castle said late that afternoon (in New York) from Copenhagen (in the middle of the night).

"But not for Wainwright or Corcoran."

"You could go back and try to find another corpse and prove coincidence. Maybe the city should sponsor a 'dead body drop-off center.' It's not fair to the archaeologists to have to take them all."

"How much would the city be able to charge? Would it take up parking spaces?"

"Would it be city-wide or just by borough?"

"This isn't helping," Kate said firmly.

"The city needs all the revenue it can get."

"Not alone in that, either."

"So..." said Rick after a minute, "Who gets Aunt Alice's money? Or Corcoran's, for that matter? Would McElroy kill the goose who laid the golden refrigeration unit?"

"We've called Maisie and asked about that. She didn't know, promised to get us in touch with the lawyer. By the way, your mother should go into business as some kind of grief counselor. Maisie couldn't stop saying how much help she was."

"Mom does love running people's lives. Nice to see her channelling it for good rather than, well, me. By the way, do you want anything with the statue of the Little Mermaid on it?"

"More of a Beauty and the Beast girl, here."

"That's not Anderson. I'll look for something Ugly Duckling. Karpowski come up with anything from those book-notes? Was there something going on at Light of Christ someone didn't want published?"

"The pastor says he has nothing to hide. So Ryan and a couple of uniforms are looking as we speak. I have to take another call, Castle. Later?" Kate put the cell phone aside. She listened to the other phone and said, "Send her up."

"Mrs. McAllister called me and told me to cooperate," said Aunt Alice's lawyer, handing Beckett a sheaf of paper. "She is the executrix and primary legatee. I handled Mrs. Corcoran's affairs, as well, but I think you'll be more interested in Ms. Wainwright's bequest of three million dollars to the Light of Christ Baptist Fellowship Mission non-profit corporation."

"Some might consider that a motive," said Ryan.

The lawyer shook her head. "I have been on the board of the mission for the past two years, and I have never had any reason to doubt their probity. They are not in financial trouble now. I'm sure the treasurer would be happy to show you the books."

"Did Ms. Wainwright ever speak to you about establishing a foundation of her own?" Esposito asked. "The notes for her book seem to show she was thinking of something less kinda faith-based."

"You're good," the lawyer said. "We had been discussing it, yes. We had an appointment for this week, in fact. She wanted me to meet a social worker she had been considering to help set it up."

"His name might have been Joseph Bankery?" asked Beckett.

"She didn't say, but it was someone from New York College."

"Oh, yes, I remember her," said the barista. "She and that guy had coffee here a few times. I sort of thought she was his grandmother, except he was a lot darker than she was, you know?"

"Can you remember the last time you saw them, Ms. Gomez?" asked Beckett.

The barista made one of those 'Mmm, thinking very hard' faces, with the accompanying whistling noise. "Okay. It was before we had the Columbus Day special, I know that. She had all these ideas for a 'Colonialism Special.' I remember before that she was trying to come up with 'something wobbly' for Labor Day. I didn't see the connection but she's nice and a good tipper. It must have been a couple of weeks ago I last saw her."

"Have you seen Bankery since then?"

"Once. He was waiting for her but she didn't show. He called her his 'fairy godmother.'"

"I wonder if I should have told Candace to watch her back," said Beckett. "She's shaping up as an important witness."

"I'd like something a little stronger to tie Wainwright and Bankery together," said Esposito. "Have we gone through all the papers in both apartments? Anything at his place in turquoise ink?"

"We haven't found his cell phone, and she didn't have one," said Beckett. "We have a request in to her phone company now. But she was planning to leave three million dollars to the place he was working, for sure, and we think maybe she was going to change some plans and leave a substantial sum to some other place. I wonder if McElroy knew about that?"

"That she was leaving his church money, or that she planned to give some to someone else? We don't know that she was planning to take anything away from the bequest to the mission. She had eight mil and change, remember," said Esposito

"If he knew either of those things, it would be a motive. I want to go back to Light of Christ with some of those notes you found, Esposito, and see if we could identify some of the people Wainwright was interviewing. Subpoena the non-profit's records, and get a look at his bank account. I'm going to go and join Ryan, see if anything's shaken loose."

Saturday night outside the Light of Christ Mission was a happening place. Well-off tourists and suburbanites; homeless and weird; homeless and sad; and among the rest, the normal New Yorkers trying to walk around and past everyone else as quickly as possible. The night crew at the shelter was dealing with a crowd as the season's bitterest cold blew in. Beckett and Ryan tried to interview them in pockets of downtime, but Wainwright's colorless old-lady persona had left little impression behind. "She was good at undercover," Ryan said. They had left the shelter area and were in the pastor's office.

"She must have been, indeed," Pastor McElroy agreed. "But then we aren't usually expecting millionaires in disguise. So trite." He shook his head. "I talked to her at least a few minutes a couple of times a year at our benefits. She suggested Diana Webber – you've met the lawyer?- for our board. That's one bright woman. Hate to have her on the other side."

Kate nodded. "Did you know Ms. Wainwright had remembered you in her will?"

"No, but I can't say as I'm surprised. She's been a good friend to us while she was alive." There was a knock on the office door. Mark Billings came inside. He looked surprised to see the detectives, though there was a uniformed officer behind him.

"Jim, did you really tell the police they were welcome to go through everyone's apartments?"

"I had more in mind the public spaces, but I did say the whole building. You have anything to hide, Mark?"

The associate pastor pursed his lips. "No more than anyone else, but I wish you had warned me."

"Of course you aren't obliged to let us search, Reverend Billings." Kate hoped she sounded more threatening than she had any right to. "We don't have probable cause for a warrant."

"Good. I have to question your authority to do this, Jim, our clients have rights."

"I don't see 'em being strip-searched, do you? Have you been roughing up our visitors?" the pastor asked the uniformed man.

"No, sir, we haven't. Detective Beckett just asked us to look around all the rooms and storage areas to see if there was anything that seemed out of place."

"Was there anything, Demaris?" Beckett asked.

"Not really, sir, no blood stains. An awful lot of garbage bags in the back alley."

"I knew it," said McElroy. "I told you to tell Roger not to take that wall out till we got a Dumpster. Renovations on the top floor, Detective."

"We're putting out one bag every garbage pickup," said Billings.

"You could be ticketted for improper disposal of building debris," said Ryan. "No bodies in the bags?"

"You might want to get Housman and have a look," Kate said to the uniform. He looked mutely horrified and left. Ryan glanced at Beckett for permission and went along with him. "Sometimes people try to get rid of problems in someone else's trash."

"Any problem with that, Mark?" McElroy asked. Billings shrugged, started to leave. "Did you know Miss Alice Wainwright was leaving us money?"

"I think she mentioned it, yes," muttered Billings.

"Really? Do you remember when?" Beckett asked. He shrugged again. Beckett continued,"I wish you had told us you'd seen her around, looking like one of your homeless people."

"She liked her privacy," said Billings. Beckett wondered if McElroy knew he'd been conned; Billings had just changed his story from seeing Wainwright 'last year at a fundraiser.'

"You could have told me, too," said the pastor. "Did you have any idea what she was up to? Kind of a crazy thing to do, pretend to be a bag lady."

"'The Lord is near to the broken-hearted.' I just assumed she wanted to know more about the unfortunates she was helping."

"Any of our other patrons does that, you'll let me know, all right?" asked his employer. Billings nodded.

"So when did you last see her?" prodded Beckett.

"A week or two ago, I'm not sure."

"Did anyone else know she was around?"

"I doubt it."

"So you didn't see her talking to anyone in particular? Anyone on the staff? I was wondering about Joe Bankery."

"Really, Detective, I wasn't trying to keep an eye on her."

"I'm surprised, given how protective you are of your clientele."

"She was hardly a threat to anyone! I'm sorry, Miss Beckett, but I haven't always known the police to be as concerned for our homeless as you would like us to think you are."

"Then you didn't know she was writing a book about them? Down and Out and Too Old to Die? I'm told the notes are very good."

It seemed to be a surprise to both men. McElroy looked pleased, perhaps indulgent; Billings looked furious. "An abuse of our confidence!"

"I don't know, Mark, she was backing us. If she'd asked me, I'd've hoped she protected individuals' privacy, but a nice book by a socialite? Could have done a lot of good." McElroy turned to Beckett. "Can we see it?"

"The notes belong to her heirs," Kate said. "When Mrs. McAllister has had time to adjust to her loss, I'm sure you can ask." If we ever get done with it. "I haven't seen any of it, myself. I'm just surprised she didn't ask any of the staff for their input."

Ryan put his head into the office, raised his eyebrows at her.

"Excuse me, gentlemen." Beckett followed Ryan through a maze of hallways to a back door, where, as she had been told, there were an awful lot of tied black garbage sacks. Perhaps a third of them were to one side, opened, exhaling plaster dust. "This would have taken them a year of get rid of."

"Nine and a half months, we thought, with two pickups a week," said Ryan. "Would you look at this?"

"At what?"

"There's something sticky all over a lot of them," said Demaris. Ryan held up his handkerchief, a brownish smudge over half of it.

"Don't tell me you put it in your mouth."

"Hey," said Ryan. "You yelled at me enough that one time. But I don't like the way it smells."

Beckett took the handkerchief and sniffed.

"It could be blood. Get a CSI over here." She might not have a life, but she was out late Saturday night at the happening place. Whatever it was had happened, when, to whom, with what…..

Sunday, October 24

"It's blood, it's human, it's Joe Bankery's type. Anything more will take longer," Lanie said. She sounded excited through the telephone. Kate fought down her own rising hopes.

"Long way to go."

"But you can get a warrant now."

"Oh yes. On that already. Thank you so much, Lanie." Kate hadn't had enough sleep by any standard other than a cop's, but the game was afoot. Instead of lying comatose, like a body in a spoil heap. She could stop kicking it. She hurried to the precinct and found that Karpowski had apparently worked through the night. A neat pile of printout lay on Kate's desk with a note: "I've e-mailed you the transcription, which is still pretty rough – ought to have formatted it in turquoise – like having SNL-version Julia Child in my head – what you want is here on top – I should be in by noon. Karpowski."

Kate picked up the pages and skimmed the first few. It was a business plan, or a non-profit plan, with goals – 'to serve the elderly homeless or those at risk of homelessness by providing dignified, secular, medical, clothing, food, and housing assistance' as well as a social center for the better-off and bored older men and women of New York. The idea was to network those who still had 'pull' with those who did not- and a list of people Wainwright intended to contact as she formed a board and an actual staff. Joseph Bankery's name was on the list.

Esposito came in, also with a pile of paper: Bankery's comments about Wainwright's plans, with bibliographic references. "I wonder if he was going to submit this for a grade?"

"Well, now there's more than Candace Gomez to tie them together, but still, why kill either of them? Let alone Corcoran? Have they ID'd any interesting fingerprints from the apartment-ideally the bookend?"

"I'll find out," Esposito promised. "Ryan is over at the mission with the warrant and a bunch more guys."

"If you're going to Forensics, would you take these?" Beckett handed him the manila folder with the pictures of Wainwright she had shown around at the mission. "I labelled whose prints should be on which sheet-protector."

"You really think McElroy did it?"

"He doesn't set off my creep detector, but we know it's not infallible. I'd just like to rule him out. I'd like to rule anyone out."

Karpowski came in, yawning. "Wainwright's apartment super called and wants to know when he can rent their apartment."

"Less than a week since we found blood all over it... Ask him if he thinks people would prefer it haunted or not," Beckett suggested.

"Ooh, ghosts of unavenged victims?"

"If you want, Karpowski, but I was thinking of ghoulish profiteers. Is CSI finished over there?"

"I'm going back over there with them now and make sure I found all the notebooks."

"Seems like you squeezed the ones you had pretty dry."

Karpowski wrinkled her nose. "I think I'm having an EID moment. I really want her shelter to get off the ground. When's Castle coming back?"

Kate tried to recall. "Wednesday, I think. EID?"

"'Emotionally-Involved Detective,' my friend at the Second Precinct said. Let me know if Ryan or anyone comes up with something?"

"Believe me, I will." Alone for a moment, Beckett studied her whiteboard. Victim 1) Joe Bankery, of the New York College School of Social Work, knew Victim 2) Alice Wainwright, of Old Money; they had the Light of Christ Mission in common, and the unrealized elders' shelter. And Josh Werkowski's pile of back dirt. ('Had the professor been sleeping with Wainwright as well as the student?' she heard Castle asking. Awful man. No. Beckett couldn't tell if this was her famed detective-y instincts at work or just a sense that Wainwright was too good as well as too old for Werkowski.) It seemed most likely that their murders were connected through their interest in the homeless. Wainwright was killed before Bankery. So was Anna Corcoran, the housekeeper out in a corner of the whiteboard by herself. Appeared to be a victim of circumstance. Killed for being in Wainwright's apartment? Killed before or after her employer? 'Could it be a coincidence?' asked the devil's advocate. Nonsense. The apartment had not been robbed. Apart from the mess in the kitchen caused by Corcoran and the murderer struggling, nothing had been wrong.

Except the computer had been stomped. Who keeps a computer in the kitchen? The cook. Kitchen was a common space but not a formal one; a computer would have looked out of place in the living room. It looked as though the housekeeper and the socialite watched TV together. Had they shared the computer? Kate called IT. They reported that it seemed to be mainly Corcoran who had used it, keeping in close touch with her children and grandchildren and IMDB. Maisie McAllister had said she thought her aunt was about as technical as she was herself, which was several years behind Martha Rodgers. Somewhere around Windows 98. So whoever tried (ineffectively) to silence the hard drive had been on the wrong track. Which made the stack of notebooks in turquoise ink the likely target, and led back to the homeless shelter. Shelters.

Someone knew Corcoran well enough to be let into the apartment? Someone got into the apartment with Wainwright's key? Had they found Wainwright's key? Nope. The staticky mess on the security tapes had yielded one unidentified figure leaving in the early evening on the day Lainie said was likely the day of the murders. A figure of average height wearing a hooded sweatshirt (it appeared to say NYPD on it, a piece of irony Castle might have enjoyed more than Kate did). Check McElroy's alibi for that time period, assuming anyone remembered almost two weeks earlier. McElroy was too beefy for that figure. Who else had motive? Billings? He was very protective of the mission. He was not too tall or wide. Ask Ryan to find out if he owned a hooded sweatshirt. Check Billing's alibi. Check their shoes for distinctive archaeological dirt, if any. Why the hell didn't the victims leave a detailed explanation of their movements and motives with someone before they were killed? Why stick two of them in a back-dirt pile? Because there was no Dumpster handy at the mission? Neither of the victims had been very heavy; Wainwright might have weighed ninety pounds soaking wet and Bankery had been slightly built and well under six feet tall. How strong was Billings?

Beckett stared at the whiteboard for a while and looked outside. It was still light, not raining.

When she parked outside the dig, she could see it was in full operation, seven bundled-up people in the pit either trowelling or taking pictures; one pushing a wheelbarrow up the side of the spoil heap.

"Hey," said Wanyyta, having dumped the wheelbarrow. "Anything I can do, Detective?"

"Did you move that thing again?" asked Kate, waving at the pile of dirt.

"Not all of it," said Wanyyta. "But we had your guys with the shovels and they seemed to want to be useful after your ME went after them, so we moved it farther from the edge. If nothing else, no one paying attention will think it's a good place to hide a corpse, not for very long. Do you want to come in, see some of our bodies?"

"Only if they died peacefully," Kate said, but she came in and admired the current grave. Inside the site hut, Wanyyta showed her a case of paper bags- tough ones, like lawn-and-leaf- ("Plastic keeps the moisture in, makes the bones deteriorate. Paper helps them stay a little more stable.") filled with the carefully documented bones recovered in the past few days.

"This one here, we think he died of an infection he got after he broke his leg. It was pretty easy to tell even though he hasn't been cleaned up."

"Nasty."

"It must have been. This job is making us all big fans of antibiotics."

"What happens to them next?" Kate asked.

"They go back to a lab, they get cleaned, photographed, measured, sampled, and maybe by Black History Month in a year or two they get re-interred. How about yours?"

"Pretty much the same, except ours have names and they'll probably be released for burial in another week. And we have soft-tissue evidence, but no grave goods."

"Still no idea who killed them?"

"Idea, yes; evidence, not yet. You mentioned people paying attention; do you get many spectators?"

"Well, we have the tours on Saturday mornings and Monday afternoons, if people show up. And we do get people just watching us on their way past. More when we were working closer to the fence, of course."

"Any regulars you would recognize?'

"Oh, yes, of course. Hat Man comes by around ten a.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays, a couple of others. There's a stockbroker who brings coffee on Friday afternoons."

Kate pulled out a sheaf of pictures, a kind of a portable lineup. Not all of them were involved in this case. "Any of these people look familiar?" She and Wanyyta walked around with the photos to each of the archaeologists, but no one picked any of the faces out.

"Sorry, Detective. "

"Better than making things up," Kate said. "Next time I'll bring doughnuts. Or maybe pizza?"

"They'd perjure themselves for pizza," said Wanyyta. "Come anytime."

Kate proceeded to the Light of Christ Mission, where Ryan and five other officers were looking systematically for anything. "Nothing," Ryan reported. "Although one of the older homeless guys has a nice stash of pot in his sleeping bag. Claims it's for his glaucoma." Kate caught part of a Sunday service. She felt she was an ominous figure, standing at the back of the big room being used as a chapel. It was not to her taste and she left again, turned to go back to her precinct.

"You want coffee, Detective?" It was one of the women Kate had met working in the kitchen.

"Mrs. Garfield? Sure, thanks, if you're offering."

They sat in a little room, off the kitchen where the dishwashers were running flat out and something steamed from a big pot. Twila kept an eye on it from her chair. "Second dinner's coming up in an hour, I get a chance to sit down."

"It looks like a big responsibility."

"It's not too bad, when we have enough help... So do you you anything, some good clues? to go on, Detective?"

"Some ideas," said Kate. "What do you think?"

"Ah," Twila shook her head. "I'm afraid it was somebody here."

"You are?"

"There isn't much in the paper, which I know Jim McElroy is grateful for. But even we can see the mission is all that Joey and Alice Wainwright had in common. She was worth an awful lot of money. And he wasn't."

"Do you think Joey might have had something to do with Ms. Wainwright's death? And someone else killed him for it?"

"You have a great imagination, Detective. Actually, I thought maybe it was the other way around. More likely Joey found out something about Alice Wainwright's death and mentioned it to the wrong person."

"Blackmail?" Kate fished.

"No! If you had ever met him-"

"I'm sorry," said Kate. "Do you have any ideas at all who might fit into that scheme?"

Twila hesitated. "Not really. No. But it hasn't been right, here. There's something tense in the air."

"You have a bunch of police officers going through your building and asking intrusive questions, of course there's tension. And blood all over the back yard."

"They were here measuring all the knives, too. I hope you find something soon."

Sunday afternoon

"I'll be back the day after tomorrow," Castle said from Poland.

"I wish I thought it would be over by then." Kate was back at her office. "We turned that place over and found nothing."

"Blood all over those garbage bags-"

"And nothing in them. They got rid of the knife someplace else, and it's been raining."

"Whoever killed Bankery must have had blood all over his clothes."

"And whoever killed the cook. But it's been over a week; how many incinerators, how many Dumpsters have been emptied? It really hurts when you don't have a crime scene."

"You have one. A fairly nasty one, if my mother is any judge."

"And we're going over it again. And again. Karpowski was taking the garbage apart the last time I spoke to her." Beckett sighed.

"Well, tell me again. The only motive you have is Wainwright's money going to the Light of Christ Mission."

"Right. But why kill her now? They're not in trouble; they just could have waited. And that doesn't explain Bankery."

"Joe Bankery knew Wainwright was thinking of setting up another shelter. Would he kill Wainwright to keep the money going to Light of Christ?"

"Not according to anyone who knew him," said Kate. "Besides, he would not have killed her if he and she were about to set up another shelter with a job for him, right?"

"So maybe they were both killed by someone who wanted to protect Light of Christ's interests?"

"Which would be McElroy, but I doubt it, or Billings."

"You don't like Billings," said Castle.

"I don't think anyone likes Billings. It doesn't make him a murderer. Although he could possibly be the unidentified figure in Wainwright's apartment building tapes, which McElroy could not."

"They could both be in on it."

"True. Or more likely, neither of them. Everything I can come up with is possible, circumstantial. I can't see even trying to indict him."

"Damn," said Castle. There was a minute of expensive satellite silence. "I hate stories like this."

"I hate cases like this."

"I bet it's the archaeologists."

"Least likely suspects? No motive? No known acquaintance with the dead woman? Very protective of their spoil heap?"

"Take them pizza; maybe someone will confess."

She was not in the mood to take the damp archaeologists pizza. The white board obstinately refused to light up, or swim over with letters of gold forming a clever acrostic that revealed the culprit. Wainwright's three faces – in 1952, late 2004, and last week –looked at her reproachfully. In Corcoran's picture, the housekeeper sat with a grandchild on each knee. Bankery, in a picture taken the day he received his BA, looked like he was barely out of high school. Kate looked back at them. Kind faces. Lively faces, as they had not been when she saw them. "I'm working on it," Kate told them. "I wish you'd all talked more to your friends."

Kate went over to the Wainwright/Corcoran apartment. There were two CSI people there, and Karpowski. She and a tech had spread a plastic sheet on the kitchen floor, and they were dissecting the kitchen garbage-can contents.

"Garbology? I should have brought one of the archaeologists," Kate muttered.

"Look for a rim, would you? White bone china with a gold stripe. Jannie here got me started putting the china back together."

"There was one saucer on the table, and a cup and a saucer broken on the floor," explained Jannie the tech. "Someone threw the pieces of the cup away. I swear to God, they wiped them for prints. I think somebody went over the table and chair, too. We found the knife we think Corcoran was stabbed with washed and in the drainer. Cool sonofabitch."

"No prints on the bookend?" Karpowski asked. "How about the dishwashing liquid?"

"Nice," said Jannie. "But no, and not on the spray cleaner, either. Or the sink. Some of the victim's blood on the dishtowel."

"And you've gone through this, garbage, coffee grinds? Former lettuce? how many times, looking for your missing piece?" Kate asked.

"Maybe three," said Karpowski.

"Five," said the tech.

"You think maybe it's not here?" asked Karpowski. " 'Cause I am not sure I can deal with going through this stuff again."

"I take it you've looked everywhere else?" Kate asked.

"Not more than a couple of times."

"Be my guest," said Jannie.

Kate looked at the small, somewhat old-fashioned kitchen. "Can we move the refrigerator?"

"Already did, but it's worth a try," said Jannie. The refrigerator was one of very few Kate had ever encountered with working wheels, and it gimballed along easily. There was a patch of dusty floor where it had stood, but no china. Kate got down and looked underneath with a penlight.

"Can we tilt it? No, I guess I mean the other way?"

"Harrison? Can you come in here?" the CSI tech called her colleague. "We want the fridge on its back. Or its front."

Harrison was built not unlike the refrigerator. They tipped it – it had been emptied already – into his arms and he lowered it gently onto its face. A piece of curved white china glistened in the undercarriage.

"Damn," said Karpowski. "Evidence bag? Powder?" Jannie dusted it carefully, blew away the excess powder. Whorls and loops lay revealed.

"Fingerprint," said Jannie, as they looked with great satisfaction.

"I'll buy," said Karpowski.

"Conviction, or just arrest?" asked the tech.

"Arrest should do it," said Kate. "You would have found it eventually."

"Sweet of you to say," Jannie answered.

"Am I Martha Stewart? Am I Sherlock Holmes?" caroled Karpowski as she danced out of the elevator.

"Are you?" asked Esposito.

"We got a fingerprint!"

"Where? Whose?"

"Broken tea cup in the kitchen. Someone who said he was never there."

"The Reverend Mark Billings," said Kate. She called Ryan, still at the mission. "Bring him in."

Billings did not come quietly; he made enough noise to frighten the older and crazier in the shelter. McElroy seemed to lose twenty pounds and gained twenty years as Ryan watched him.

"Like when you tell someone someone's died," Ryan said. "He told Billings to quiet down and remember the mission, but Billings just shouted he wasn't going to put up with this intimidation. He wanted a lawyer." Ryan and the other uniforms had brought Billings back to the station; McElroy came with him.

"I'm sorry," Beckett found herself telling the pastor. She gave him coffee while they waited for the lawyer. A good lawyer, a friend of the mission. He would have his work cut out.

"I hope he's not guilty," McElroy said. "I hope you're wrong, Detective, sorry to make your life harder."

"Innocent until proven otherwise," Kate said. "But the evidence is not in his favor."

"We worked pretty well together, years ago. Less easy these days. I think he was burning out, but I didn't want to tell him to either take a break or leave. A very proud man."

"I miss everything," Castle complained. "I would have loved to see that." He called Monday afternoon, after Beckett had told his mother and daughter all of the news.

"Karpowski would happy-dance for you. She wants you to get Aunt Alice's shelter up and running. Get her book published."

"I have a lot of money, but I don't have that kind of money. But I imagine between my mother and her friends and some of mine, and maybe some of Alexis's, we might be able to do something."

"I think Maisie McAllister will do most of the heavy lifting. She's feeling really guilty she didn't know her aunt better. Karpowski has a crush on the vic and keeps telling McAllister how Wainwright was like Mother Teresa with a journalism degree."

"And radically different finances. How are they taking it at the mission?" Castle asked.

"I haven't been down there, but Ryan says they seem remarkably okay with it. I don't think Billings was as kind to his colleagues as he was to his clients."

"Is Billings still claiming he barely knew Wainwright?"

"That fingerprint made it a lot harder to deny he knew her better than he had said. It turned out he had visited her apartment a couple of times, seeing her home once he realized they had a benefactor among the bag ladies. He was aware she wanted to get a secular shelter started. He's still trying to say she stumbled one night when he was seeing her home. He tried to catch her and strangled her 'by accident.' But I think he realized she would be redirecting some of her generosity away from his church, and he didn't like it."

"And buried her on the archaeological site 'by accident?'"

"He says he panicked. Carried the vic to his car and put her in the spoil heap before he even knew what he was doing. He said the gate was open, but I think getting the body under the fence caused some of the post-mortem injuries."

"Weirdest 'fight-or-flight' response I ever heard of."

"He really, really doesn't trust cops. He thought we would make it it look worse than it was. And of course we did. But he couldn't explain why, after he hid Wainwright's body, he ended up at her apartment. Something about talking to her housekeeper. He swears Corcoran attacked him when she realized Wainwright wasn't coming back, but he's kind of vague on why she might have done that."

"Kamikaze Housekeeper Syndrome."

"After that," Beckett continued, "he was really a mess. He found some old sweats of Corcoran's, dumped his clothes in the apartment incinerator and took off. He said Bankery noticed him arriving back at the shelter and became suspicious because Billings was not a hoodie-wearing kind of guy. When Wainwright didn't respond to his phone calls, Billings said Bankery tried to blackmail him. Billings was trying to deal with this as 'discreetly' – his word- as he could, but he says Bankery kept threatening him. Oh, and there were no withdrawals from Billings' bank account to pay off these alleged demands."

"And then finally Billings stabbed him, by accident?" Castle asked.

"Right. Outside, in the rain, late at night, and getting rid of those clothes, too. " Kate thought she could see the expression that Castle must have had on his face.

"Has he switched his plea to insanity yet?"

"Not yet. I think McElroy and the lawyer are trying to suggest it to him." Kate shook her head. "I don't know if insanity will fly. He was very careful, cleaning up after himself."

"You were even more careful. Nice job. I'm sorry I missed it."

"There will be others. It wasn't really weird enough for you," Kate said. She wondered why she was bothering to try to cheer him up.

"With bodies dumped in a historic graveyard? With the fairy godmother disguised a bag lady?"

"And found by an innocent little-red haired girl."

"Of course. All us Castles are innocent. What's that choking sound?"

"I don't think you were ever innocent.'

"Hey."

"Besides, you were on an important mission, bringing her back chocolate from beyond the sea."

"I'm bringing back enough chocolate for ten people, my publisher here said. And some weird lollipops for Esposito and Ryan."

"TEN? Who are these people? How do you keep track?"

"Well, my publisher here is a guy. I figure if Alexis and my mother and you eat about three times as much chocolate as any normal male, I should be all right."

"Oh. Me? I'm not sure I want you to class me with your mother and your daughter."

"It's in my interest to keep you full of phenethylamine," Castle told her. "For some reason when you get abusive I seem to be a target."

"So you think I can be bought?"

"Appeased is a much nicer word. Pre-emptive appeasement. Because, as you keep telling me, you have a gun, and I don't."

"And why do you think I'm likely to be abusing you sometime soon?"

"Any more than usual? We have an interview on public-access cable next week together, talking about crime detection in fiction and real life. Didn't Montgomery tell you?"

Kate made a small noise.

"Lily Moskowitz is better than most interviewers," Castle assured her. "You'll have fun."

She freighted her words with as much menace as she could manage. "There had better be caramel."

"And cherries, and nougat. And almond paste."

"I'll let you know, Castle. I'm not easy."

"I have never thought that, no matter how much I might have -"

"What?"

"Nothing," Castle told her. "Until tomorrow, Detective."

##############