Detective David Tyler was sure that he was heading toward one of the longest days of his life. The first sign of trouble was when his partner met him at the perimeter of the crime scene with coffee. "Terry?" Tyler exclaimed, stunned at the sight of the man in front of him. "You? Bringing me coffee? Either the world is ending or my career is about to..."

Terrence O'Halloran, 19 year veteran of the NYPD, handed his partner the drink he had been holding for him. He clamped a leading hand on his junior partner's shoulder as they walked toward central locations of the crime scene. "Kid, the world's not ending yet. As for your career...it probably depends on whether or not you can handle what you see on the other side of those doors."

"Jesus," Tyler stopped in his tracks, breathing out the word in exclamation. "That bad, huh?"

O'Halloran's eyes had a look that Tyler could only describe as...haunted. "Kid...I've seen some bad ones in my time. This one...this one is up there..."

Tyler handed the rest of his coffee to a nearby patrolman. "Can you get rid of this for me, please?" The uniform nodded and left to dispose of the drink. When Tyler noticed his partner's surprised reaction, he grimly commented, "I can't handle bad *anything* on a stomach full of acid."

O'Halloran nodded, understanding the sentiment. "Let's go, kid."

The two men approached the outside of the apartment building, Tyler noticing immediately how many techs were working the nearby alleyway. He frowned as he took in the floodlight-lit scene. "I thought the vic was killed in her apartment?" asked Tyler.

"The first vic was," O'Halloran replied. "Uniforms followed a trail of blood coming from the victim's apartment to find a second victim in the back alley."

Tyler's eyebrows shot up with the news. "So this is a double?"

O'Halloran shrugged. "Looks like it."

Tyler went over to the site of the second victim's demise, surprised to find a blond-haired woman he didn't recognize talking to a pretty but young red-headed intern. He went over to the woman he thought was in charge and shook her hand. "I don't believe we've met before...I'm Detective David Tyler."

"Dr. Megan Andrews," the blond responded, "I'm just covering for a friend who had a family emergency."

"So what do we got here, doc?" asked O'Halloran.

Andrews returned to her spot kneeling down next to the victim. "It looks like this poor guy might just have ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time."

"How'd he die?" asked Tyler, kneeling down next to Andrews.

"Strangled," Andrews replied. "I'm pretty sure he was killed for his clothes."

Tyler blinked, shaking his head slightly in surprise at the doctor's definitive pronouncement. "Really?" he asked, "How do you think?"

Andrews pointed to a tech a few feet away from Tyler who was bagging up a pile of clothes caked with drying blood. "I know people talk a lot about how oblivious New Yorkers can be to the things around them, but I have a feeling even our killer might have thought himself pretty conspicuous in clothes that looked like that."

Tyler let out a low whistle, surprised by just how large the blood stains were on the clothes the CSU techs were bagging. "Did the killer get injured when our victim fought back?"

O'Halloran let out a bitter snort. "I doubt it. C'mon kid, let's head upstairs."

Tyler thanked the medical examiner for her time, then followed his partner, taking care to avoid the techs who were carefully marking evidence along the path he was following. "Is...is all of this *blood*?!" Tyler exclaimed, dumbfounded.

"Yeah," O'Halloran nodded grimly. "Looks like our guy tracked it through the hallway on his way out of the building."

"Looks like," Tyler added, nodding quietly as he watched the amount of blood increase incrementally as they went up the stairs. He stopped just short of the first victim's front door, quietly taking in the scene before him. "My God..." he breathed out quietly.

Doctor Sidney Perlmutter stood up from his position in the doorway to the apartment when he heard the two detectives come up from behind him. "Gentlemen," he announced to the detectives, "I'm afraid I've got some bad news for you."

Tyler's eyes widened. "Worse than this?"

Perlmutter pointed to the victim's wrist. "Do you see the 3 carved into the victim's wrist?"

Tyler nodded. "What about it?"

"12th Precinct Homicide is working a serial case where the killer is carving a message into the wrists of his victims. I'm 90% certain that your victims were killed by the guy they're chasing. And since they're working their case with the Feds..."

O'Halloran knew the drill. "We've got to turn this case over to them..." He let out a quiet string of curses, expressing his frustration at having such a gruesome crime scene burned into his memory and being rendered powerless to do anything about it.

The veteran detective aggressively flipped open his old cell phone, and had two numbers already punched into his phone when he was stopped by his partner. "I'll call them, Terry," Tyler told his partner quietly. "I've worked with them before."

Javier Esposito was the picture of barely controlled frustration as he met up with Beckett and Castle at the crime scene. Beckett was the first one to notice the younger detective's foul mood. "Something wrong, Esposito?"

"Why are we *here*? 48th and 9th Avenue is Midtown South. Why are we getting called to a crime scene in Hell's Freakin' Kitch..."

"We are here," insisted Agent Shaw, coming up the stairs from behind them, "because Dr. Perlmutter believes our friend Mr. Tyson paid this place a visit."

"So we have another victim?" asked Castle.

Shaw nodded. "Apparently there's something different about this one."

The three detectives dutifully followed behind the agent as she crossed the hallway to the first victim's apartment in the back of the building. When Dr. Perlmutter met them halfway down the hallway with paper booties, the group looked to him in confusion. His response was simple and somber. "Put them on. You'll see why in a minute."

The smell hit Beckett long before any of them got close enough to see what was going on. Castle noticed her discomfort immediately. What is it?

Blood, she replied, a lot more than there should be with a strangulation. Something else, too...I just can't quite place it yet...

It was only a matter of moments before they all got a picture of why they needed to investigate this crime scene. "Jesus..." Esposito exclaimed. "There's only one victim here, Perlmutter?"

The medical examiner nodded. "Cause of death was...no surprise here...severe blood loss. She was stabbed in the jugular, causing a massive arterial spray. Bled out in under two minutes."

"And you think Tyson did this?" asked Esposito. "Why?"

Perlmutter knelt down in the middle of the blood staining the carpet underneath their feet to turn over the victim's left wrist, clearly revealing the deep red marks of a hastily carved 3. Beckett's eyes widened, making the connection immediately. "So she's our fourth victim?" Perlmutter nodded.

Beckett had finally filtered out the smell of the enormous amounts of blood. She was immediately able to determine what the other smell behind it was. Castle, she projected through their mind-link, that other smell...it's sweat...Tyson's sweat, and a lot more than I picked up at the other scenes. "She fought him...hard. She almost got away, but he caught up to her and stabbed her."

"Why the change?" asked Castle. "Do you think he's switching up his MO?"

Shaw walked slowly around the rest of the apartment, trying to take in as much information as she could process. "I don't think so," she mused out loud, "Tyson's been so neat, organized...this place is anything *but*. That's a hell of a change to his MO, and one that would have driven him crazy."

"Unless something else did," Esposito chimed in. The three Guardians shared knowing glances at each other, not needing a full mind-link to know that they were all thinking of the same 'something'.

Shaw watched the looks passed between the other three members of her current 'team'. "Anyway, we know that this was an exception to Tyson's MO because he strangled the second victim for his clothes."

The Guardians were all startled by Shaw's quick pop of unexpected information.

"*His* clothes?" asked Beckett.

"Second victim?" Castle asked at the same time.

"A homeless man in the alley behind the building," chimed in Tyler. "He was found next to a pile of bloody clothing."

The group turned their attention to the detective that the group had ignored to that point. "Detective Tyler," Castle greeted him, "long time no see. How are things in Mid South?"

"Busy," Tyler replied casually, his voice just barely betraying how much the crime scene was disturbing him. "I'm mostly here to make sure all the information our team collected gets properly handed off. Ms. Jacobsen over there deserves that much."

"So what did you find?" asked Beckett.

Tyler pulled out his notebook. "Isabella Jacobsen, age 26. She was a junior accountant at Bryce, Smith and Watson downtown, some big accounting firm. A neighbor went downstairs to take out her trash around 10 o'clock tonight and found the homeless guy in the alleyway. She then followed the blood trail back up the stairs to Ms. Jacobsen's front door and called 911."

"Doctor Perlmutter, what's your estimate on Ms. Jacobsen's time of death?" asked Beckett.

"Sometime between 6 and 8 pm," replied Perlmutter.

Castle started to walk the crime scene, building his own movie of how he pictured the crime in his head. "She gets home, kicks off her shoes..." He noticed a couple of odd splinters in the doors of the hallway. "Somewhere between the living room and the bedroom, he attacks her, probably strangling her like he usually does...but then something startled him and he loosened his grip just enough for her to try to get away."

Beckett picked up the narrative. "He knew he couldn't let her get away, because any connection she has to him could lead us to him. So he stabs her in the neck to make sure she dies quickly..."

"But he doesn't realize how big a mess her blood was going to make and he gets it all over himself," added Castle. "Then realizing that you can't walk around covered in blood, even in New York City, he strangles the guy downstairs to take his clothes."

"This murder's the odd sock," Shaw concluded. "If we figure out what disturbed Tyson about *this* murder in particular, we can use that information to end this mess once and for all."

Beckett, though, had other ideas. It seems like we have a pretty good idea of what...or rather, who, disturbed Tyson. The real question is, why hasn't he woken up yet?

All comments welcome!