When Kate showed up in the coffee shop on Wednesday, she wasn't surprised to see Hot Lips Parker already there, sitting alone at a table in the corner. Kate waited until she'd gotten her drink, and then she went and joined her.

"You were right," Kate said.

Parker grunted.

"Why are you still here?" Kate asked.

There was a long pause before she said, "Why was she killed?"

"My mom? I don't know. Just before she died, she was looking into something—I found her notes later—but I never made any sense of them. All I know is that some bad cops went to a lot of trouble to cover it up."

Parker frowned.

"Why?" Kate asked. "Did you have another theory?"

Parker drummed her fingers on the table. "No."

Kate fished for something to continue the conversation. "Why was your mother killed?"

"She wanted to move some kids out of a bad situation. She may have been working with someone from outside the—someone from outside. I don't know."

"And you think she was working with my mom?"

"I'd thought about it, but it seems a bit far-fetched."

Kate shook her head. "When I was little, my mom talked about having a couple of boys—foster kids—stay with us. I remember being so excited to have brothers, even if they were only foster brothers, and then one day, she just stopped talking about it. I asked, but she wouldn't say anything."

"When was this?" asked Parker, leaning forward in her intrigue.

Kate thought for a while. "It was in kindergarten. I was five or six. It ended just before school got out. I spent most of the summer moping and complaining about being an only child."

"April 1985?" Parker guessed.

Kate nodded. "Something like that. Why?"

"That's when my mother was killed."

Kate sat at her desk in the precinct, trying to catch up on paperwork between cases and having little success. She'd gotten a total of three forms filled out, and the stack in her inbox was getting taller and taller.

The boys were tossing paper footballs around, and Kate was sure there was something else they could be doing. Didn't they have paperwork, too?

By the time Castle walked in at five, her inbox looked pretty much the same as it had when she'd come in that morning. She'd discovered that her mother was not, in fact, killed for the reasons she'd thought, and now the key to finding her mother's killer lay with a woman who constantly rubbed Kate the wrong way.

"Hey. You ready?" Castle asked.

Kate sighed and pushed her chair back, dropping her pen back in the cup. "Yeah." She avoided his gaze as she shrugged on her coat and wrapped her scarf around her neck. When she turned to leave, shouldering her purse, Castle put his hands on her shoulders.

"Whoa, hey… are you okay?"

Kate nodded. "Just, uh, had a lot of paperwork," she said weakly.

Castle glanced at her still-full inbox, but didn't push the issue. "Come on. Dinner should be there by the time we get there."

"Um, thanks, but… I think I'm going to go home, actually."

Castle blinked. "Oh, okay. Share a cab?"

"Sure," Kate said. She offered no other information.

Castle frowned, and they lapsed into silence. Kate wasn't in the mood to restart the conversation and, it seemed, neither was Castle. They caught a cab in front of the precinct, and he held the door for her as he always did. When the driver pulled over in front of Kate's building, she and Castle exchanged short good-byes and then the cab pulled away, leaving Kate to go up to her apartment alone.

She locked the door behind her, put away her gun and her badge, and reached into her pocket for the small card she'd been carrying around all day. She stared at the card for a minute or so before pulling out her phone and dialing the number.

Parker's phone rang. It was only six—much too early for Jarod to call, and he'd called last night anyway—so she answered with a short "Parker."

"It's Kate." The voice on the other line was strained.

A corner of Parker's mouth curled up in a smug little half-grin. "Hello, Kate." She paused, savoring her little victory.

"I need your help."

"You need my help?" Parker asked.

Parker could almost feel Kate's seething glare through the phone. "Yes. I need your help. I need to know who killed my mom."

"Well, I've got a bit of news." Broots had called earlier with an interesting piece of information.

"You could have called me," Kate said sharply.

"I figured you'd call when you were ready to hear it."

"Well?"

"Tomorrow morning at the coffee shop? It's something you'll need to see."

"Yes, fine," Kate sounded irritated and desperate—exactly what Parker had been aiming for. People were so much easier to manipulate when they were hanging at the ends of their ropes. "I'll be there."

Parker looked at the red folder sitting on the dresser and grinned. "Great." She hung up and saw herself in the mirror. She realized that, with that particular mischievous grin, she looked like Lyle. Resisting the urge to hurl her phone at the mirror—or her dinner into the nearest available toilet—Parker picked up the red file and read the contents again.

Kate went to the coffee shop early the next morning. She'd barely slept the previous night, tossing and turning. What sleep she did get was plagued with uneasy dreams about her mother's case, and she woke feeling more tired than when she'd gone to bed.

She ordered an extra shot of espresso in her drink and found Parker sitting at the same corner table as the day before.

"I'm here," Kate said.

Parker tapped the red folder on the table with a finger. "I found some letters that my mother received from a colleague. None of them are signed, but they are dated. These letters were written shortly before she died."

Kate reached for the folder, but Parker pulled it away.

"You can't keep them. I'm not even supposed to have them."

"Fine," Kate said, and Parker pushed the folder toward her. Inside were photocopies of letters, many of them only a few sentences long, dated from November 1984 up to the first week of April 1985. Kate recognized the handwriting, too, from so many hours spent trying to decipher notes. "These are all in my mom's handwriting."

Parker nodded. "There's something else about those letters."

Kate looked up from the folder. "Besides that they're only half of the correspondence between my mom and yours?"

Parker gave Kate a look that clearly stated that she was not a dullard. "I found those letters in a database. Every entry is stamped with the date of entry into the database. These letters were fed into the archives in January of 1999."

Kate blanched. "When?"

"The tenth."

Kate breathed slowly, trying very hard not to vomit. In the world of crime and murder, a world Kate was intimately familiar with, coincidences simply didn't exist. "Who—?"

Parker shrugged. "I don't know."

"And it's not, uh, not possible that it's just because the database was new when the letters were put in?"

Parker shook her head. "The database has been collecting information since before I was born."

Kate was not one to faint, or vomit in public, or any of those other embarrassing things people did on TV, but right now, she felt like she might vomit and faint.

"Excuse me," Kate said, and walked out of the coffee shop. She held on to her coffee cup because it was warm, and it was only seven-thirty in the morning. There was no way she was going to be able to focus on paperwork today.

Kate Beckett had never faked a sick day in her life, but today, she called the precinct and told Gates she was sick.