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Chapter Seven: Ron Weasley and the Unlikely Coincidence
Ron was pretty skeptical during the first several cases they worked with the muggle police. He respected them, and they were capable and professional at what they did in their own world. It had just seemed obvious to him they would have a tough time working around not having magic. Now, however, they've all worked enough cases he was really starting to understand how far behind wizards were about some things. Harry and Hermione had tried before to explain how a lack of magic had lead muggles to progress a lot more than wizards did. Mostly he'd just humored them, figuring at best the muggles were breaking even, and not really understanding until recently that wizards just never changed if they could help it. Even when the change might be a good thing.
So when somebody starts coming after those trying to help make their world move forward in a good way, Ron hates it. The muggles working with the aurors are trying to make wizards safer by helping to solve more crimes, and they don't deserve to die for it. Not that they would anyway, but to be targeted for helping makes it that much worse. Of course, Ron's not sure it makes things any better when it starts to seem like the killer was just trying to use anti-muggle sentiment to cover up the real reason Summers was killed.
All he can do to fix it is his part of the investigation, so he does. It takes way more research than he'd like, but eventually, he and Hermione along with Beckett and Castle go back to interview Summers' family and talk to more than his girlfriend, which allows them to unearth a close connection to a second cousin once removed who is a wizard. Strangely enough, it's a man Beckett had already talked to briefly, but at the time she'd had no idea he wasn't a muggle. It clearly frustrates the detective she'd missed such an important lead, but Ron doesn't see how she'd have known if she told the bloke she was calling as a homicide detective.
Even in the additional interviews, they might not have found the connection if they hadn't gotten some weird comments from Summers' family that rang as vaguely familiar to Ron. Most of the family just knew they weren't close to that side and claimed it was some forgotten and uncomfortable estrangement they didn't know the details of, while his mother said something about them just always having been a little odd. It reminds Ron of his own family and how no one really talks about his mother's second cousin who went off to become an accountant, which makes him suspicious enough to ask more questions.
Alfred Gerard was an elementary school teacher as Summers' girlfriend had told Beckett - he just worked as an instructor at one of the smaller local wizarding schools. He responded promptly enough to the floo call Harry had made asking him to come in to the office and talk to them. The first thing Ron noticed about the man when he stepped through the fire was his unfortunate resemblance to a mangy giraffe. His second, more useful observation, was that for an official at a wizarding school who should have some experience dealing with authority figures, the man was overly nervous. They'd led him into the room they'd been using for questioning and left him there to observe his demeanor, and he'd tried to play it cool. The way he kept running a hand through his floppy hair and playing with the buttons on the cuffs of his robes when he forgot to try and look bored were fairly telling, however.
Ron opts to stay outside while Hermione goes in, along with Beckett and Castle. Harry stays outside with him, not just to keep from crowding the guy, but also because Gerard had been doing that staring-at-the-scar thing that still drove his friend mad some days. Harry's gotten better at hiding his annoyance, and it certainly happens less over here in the States, but he avoids having to deal with it when possible. With the man already clearly so nervous, it's probably better to take Harry out of the equation.
"Thanks for coming in today, Mr. Gerard," Hermione began. "We need to ask you a few questions about Todd Summers."
"I don't know what about. I mean, of course he's dead. I know that, but I don't know anything about it. Other than that he's dead," the man spluttered out. His fidgeting only became more pronounced, as he looked between all the others in the room and then away again.
"How well did you two know each other?" Hermione asked.
"Well, you know we're related. You said so yourselves when you flooed."
"Look, we just want to find out who killed Todd. So it'd be best if you were honest with us up front."
Gerard shifts heavily in his seat and the swallows hard before looking up to meet Hermione's eyes. "I didn't think it would be that big of a deal, you know? But when he got killed like that, and so soon after, I just ..."
"Why don't you start at the beginning?" Castle suggests, sympathetically.
He takes a deep breath. "Todd and me, back when we were kids we were friends. I mean, my family, well it's pretty embarrassing but we've always run high on squibs."
"I'm sorry, did you say squids?" Castle asked, incredulous.
"Squibs," Hermione cuts in to clarify, "are non-magical kids born to magical families. They're usually pretty rare."
"But not in your family?" Beckett prompts, turning the focus back to Gerard.
"Right. So when the nearest kid in age to me was one of the lines that had gone all-Muggle, well, my parents figured best to make sure I had one foot in either world just in case. Once I got my letter, we lost touch." He shrugs.
Ron thinks briefly of his mum's second cousin, the accountant they never speak of again. It was just what happened, most of the time, once somebody chose one world or the other.
"You got back in touch though, clearly," Castle says, impatient for the man to get to the meaty part of his story. Ron can't entirely blame him, because he's pretty curious where this is all leading, too.
"Yeah, yeah. He put it together. We lost touch when I went off to wizard school, I said, but he figured it out somehow – not sure how, exactly, he never did say. Just gave me that look and told me if I wasn't as clever as he was why should he reveal his secrets? Made a stupid crack about magicians and wizards, every time." Gerard shakes his head in remembrance. "Anyway. He called me one day – we have a phone installed at the school for the muggleborn kid's parent's, right? Anyway, he called and kept putting out little hints. Finally told me he knew a nice little place on Lumos Avenue and did I want to get a drink. Well, I knew he didn't have any magic, so of course I was curious enough to go."
He fidgets again, clearly stalling before he gets to the part of the story they're all waiting to hear - that he doesn't seem particularly eager to tell them. "Well, that was the first time we met up, but it wasn't the last by far. He told me about the work he was doing with the Ministry, and he had a bunch of questions about the magical world. Like, he was asking the aurors he was working with about the job, but didn't want to be distracting them with other things he was just curious about. It was good for a while, nice to reconnect, you know? I should have just left it alone."
He pauses then, and it's at the point where Ron is ready to prompt him to go on, when he clears his throat and takes the initiative himself. "See, I kept thinking about how he was working in the Ministry. How the Department of Records was just down the hall. Like I said, my family, we throw a lot of squibs." He looks up and meets their eyes, one by one, "and I've got a daughter. Cutest little thing ever, my Lisa. Light of my eye and all, I just – I want to know. You've gotta know what the muggle world is like for kids now, right?" He turns his attention to Castle, who is nodding, "you have to get your kid into the right preschool or they won't get into the right gradeschool, high school, then getting into a good college – it's right out."
"It wasn't – it wasn't like those old purebloods who think they're too good and dump their kids! Or worse! I know it's illegal – but I - I love my daughter, and that's why I want to know what she's gonna need, now. Too many kids that turn out to not be magic, they just end up barely making due, stuck somewhere in between both worlds, never having a real chance in either. So I asked him to take a look for me. At the magical rolls, you know, the ones that record magical births, see if she was there."
They exchanged a look between them. The man seemed sincere enough. Ron didn't know much about muggle schools and kids, but from the way Castle had been sympathetically nodding along, he figured there was some truth to what Gerard was saying. Skipping past the question of whether or not he was telling the truth for the moment – they'd have to find some way to rule him in or out more thoroughly later – this still didn't tell them what they needed to know about the murder.
"So he agreed to look for you?" Castle asked him.
"Not at first. Like I said though, we got a lot closer, spending all that time. He met Lisa and I met his kids and he got it, you know? I didn't mean to push, but I figured what was the real harm, right?"
"Well, he did it, he looked, and she's on there," Gerard smiles briefly, genuinely, before his face falls again. "Except I figured that he'd be as pleased as I was, or at least pleased for me. He wasn't. He was, well, he was weird after that. He didn't want to talk anymore about it, was real firm about me keeping it to myself, but when I asked him what he was so spooked about, he said it was nothing."
"What about the money?" Castle asks.
Gerard shakes his head, his face scrunched in puzzlement, "What money?"
"Someone started making deposits into his bank account right after he made that trip into Records for you. You're know nothing about it?" Beckett responds, her tone skeptical.
"No. He never said anything to me." If he wasn't actually surprised by the story of someone putting deposits in Summer's account, he played it very well. Much more convincingly than he'd acted when he'd been pretending ignorance at the start of the interview, Ron thought.
Hermione asks him for a few additional details about when and where he met up with Summers. They don't need to check his alibi for the time of death, they already confirmed he was at his job the morning of the murder, but confirming his story about his meetings with Summers and getting an idea of the timeline will hopefully put these details in perspective. After they've allowed him to leave, Beckett heads straight to her white board to add that Summers had told Gerard about Lisa's status on the rolls one week before the first deposit had been made into his account. A short conference between them makes it clear Ron isn't the only one that felt Gerard was genuine saying he didn't know about the money, but the timing is suspicious enough Beckett insists they can't rule him out as being involved somehow.
As Beckett is writing the last of the details down, Esposito and Ryan, who had been doing their own separate work related to the case, rejoin them. It turns out they haven't been the only ones to have made some new progress. Even better, there was still some hope Ryan and Esposito's lead would actually give them a direct suspect, since they'd found a connection between the money deposited into Summer's account and someone in the Ministry who would be perfectly capable of losing that report of Summers' unauthorized access to the Department of Records.
