Chapter 9

"So, Writer Boy's back," Lanie drawled as her friend entered the morgue.

Kate rolled her eyes. She was already annoyed at having to interrupt her giant stack of paperwork to come all the way down here, but Ryan and Esposito were in New Jersey running down a lead and unis were finishing up with the crime scene and canvassing.

"Can we talk about something else?"

Lanie sighed. "As I suspected, she was shot once in the chest and once in the stomach with a 9mm. I was able to retrieve the bullets, ballistics is running them now."

Kate nodded. "Anything else?"

The ME picked up a ziploc bag containing a piece of paper and extended it in Kate's direction. "This was in the vic's pocket. Cab receipt dated the day she died."

Kate took her time examining the slip of paper. The black ink was faded from being in the young woman's pocket, the paper creased and wrinkled as though it'd been shoved there haphazardly.

"Alright, I'll talk to the taxi company, see if we can figure out where she might've been going."

"Anyone else you wanna talk to?" Lanie challenged.

"Lanie…"

"So you're really just gonna give him the silent treatment."

"I'm not…giving him the silent treatment," Kate protested, silently cursing Ryan and Esposito for gossiping. "I just don't have anything to say. He knows what he did was wrong."

"And maybe that's true, but he cares about you, Kate," Lanie told her friend. "Everyone can see that."

She shrugged. "Maybe."

Well, that was a lie if Lanie had ever heard one.

"Whaddya mean, maybe?"

"I just think you're reading too much into this," Kate hedged.

Lanie folded her arms across her chest. "And I think there's something you're not telling me."

"Lanie…"

"Did something happen?"

"No." Kate sighed. "Fine, yes. Sort of."

Lanie fixed her friend with a stern gaze.

"He, uh, might have mentioned his feelings for me." She gritted the words out.

"Today?"

Kate shook her head. "A while ago." At her friend's continued stare, she added, "The day he got shot."

"That was almost a year ago!" Lanie exclaimed.

Kate shrugged.

"What did you say?"

"I was a little more concerned with trying to save his life."

"Why do I get the feeling there's more to this story?"

Dammit, why did Lanie always have to be so observant?

"He, uh, might have told me he loved me."

Lanie's mouth fell open on a gasp. "He did? Kate…"

"It's not like he really meant it," the captain answered, cutting off her friend's surefire excitement. "He thought he was dying."

"Or you're scared to admit that he did mean it."

"He'd known me for all of three days."

"So?"

"So he wasn't in love with me. For all I know, he thought he was talking to his mother or his daughter."

"You and I both know that wasn't the case."

"Lanie, can we just…" Kate huffed a sigh.

This conversation needed to stop. Now. She'd been doing an excellent job of suppressing her feelings and ignoring those three little words that he clearly hadn't meant, and she wasn't about to let everything come bubbling up to the surface. Not after what he'd done.

The ME held up her hands in surrender. "Fine. But I think you need to stop being so hard on the guy and give him a chance to explain."

"There's nothing to explain," Kate insisted. "He dug into my life without my permission."

"I admit, maybe he went about it the wrong way," Lanie conceded. "But his heart was in the right place."

"That doesn't make it okay."

Lanie sighed, shook her head. Clearly she wasn't going to win this one.

"Anything else on our vic?" Kate asked in a deliberate change of subject.

"Not yet. Tox results haven't come in. I'll let you know if anything pops during the autopsy."

"Alright, thanks Lane."

"Mmhmm," the ME answered. "If there's anything else you wanna talk about…"

"Unlikely," Kate tossed over her shoulder as she strode out of the morgue.

Castle was only here long enough to finish up this stupid magazine interview. That was it.

After that, he was going home.

Back at the precinct, the magazine reporter had finally obtained all the information she needed, the half-naked women and camera crew had cleared out, and Castle had at least taken off his sunglasses.

He hadn't left, though. Not that Kate was surprised. If she'd learned anything about the man in the last year, it was that he was irritatingly relentless and stubborn.

"So, your first magazine article," Castle began.

Kate ignored him.

"This time next week, you'll be all over the newsstands of New York."

She turned to him, arms folded over her chest. "Has it occurred to you that maybe I don't want to be 'all over newsstands?'" she demanded, curling her fingers into air quotes before re-crossing her arms. "That maybe I just want to do my job and not have the whole world know about it?"

"Why not?" Castle asked. She was such an extraordinary woman. He couldn't understand why she didn't want her story to be told.

"You know, you seem to forget that I didn't ask you to write Nikki Heat."

"You could be a little more flattered that you inspired an entire character," Castle retorted.

Her eyes narrowed. "And you could have a little more respect for my privacy."

Castle sighed. "You're still mad at me." It wasn't a question.

"Can you give me one good reason why I shouldn't be?"

"I was just trying to help," he protested.

"Yes, well, it wasn't something I needed help with," Kate replied. She turned back to her work, effectively dismissing him. "Now, we had a deal. You were here for the photo shoot only, and that's over."

"You know, I didn't come here to fight with you," Castle stated.

"Castle…"

"One more thing."

Kate whirled around. "What?" Her glare was icy and he took two hasty steps backwards. Clearly he'd pushed her to the limit.

"The book release party for Heat Wave is in two weeks. There's food, an open bar. You, Ryan, Esposito, and Lanie are all invited."

He paused to see how she was taking his invitation. Her expression hadn't softened. Okay then.

"I'd really like it if you could be there."

And then he was gone.

She really shouldn't be doing this.

She shouldn't, and she knew it. It'd taken all she had to put this behind her, to accept that her mother's murder was destined to remain unsolved. She couldn't afford to go down that road again. Couldn't lose any more of her life to trying to solve the case.

Except...

Kate's eyes fell upon an unfamiliar piece of paper. She knew this file inside and out and this was something she'd never seen before. She extracted it from the pile, smoothed down the creased corners.

It was a document, hand-written in blue ink, the letters short and slanted. She skimmed the page, and from what she could gather, it was pathology related.

As her eyes flitted back and forth across the page, certain words jumped out at her.

Stabbing. Knife. Twisted. Fatal.

Maybe this was it. Maybe this was the breakthrough she'd always needed.

Kate read the document carefully, extracting the autopsy photos and inspecting them according to this new report. She could see so clearly now what the mysterious pathologist described.

One of the knife wounds was wider, deeper, and at an upward angle, as though the blade had been shoved in hard and twisted.

It almost looked familiar, and not because she'd looked over photos of her mother's crime scene so many times. No, Kate had seen this before. This exact method of killing. She still remembered the case clearly, because they'd screwed it up. They'd been dealing with a contract killer, and the man who hired him had cut a deal and walked away with full immunity.

Except the killer never showed and they'd never been able to track him down.

The next morning found Kate down in the archives digging out the case file of Jack Coonan, the victim of the case she'd worked nearly five years ago.

After comparing the pathology photos, she knew. Without a doubt. The man who killed Jack Coonan was the same man who murdered her mother.

Kate's head was spinning, her heart racing. This changed everything. If her mom was killed by a hired gun, that meant planning. Premeditation. Not a random act of violence.

And according to the report, her mother and Jack Coonan weren't the only ones. There were three other names listed.

A quick search turned up the other three cases and information about the victims. Two of them had worked at the same law office as her mother, and a third had been a document clerk down at the courthouse.

All three cases remained unsolved.

Kate left the precinct that evening with a stack of files.

Thoughts?