Chapter XIV
12th Precinct, NYC
Later
Javier Esposito made the trip from the post office to the precinct in just over ten minutes and Castle arrived shortly after he did.
"What's going on?" Castle demanded as he sat down at Ryan's desk. Javier acknowledged him with a nod. The guy looked terrible. Like he hadn't slept in days. Or shaved. Judging from the five-day-or-so stubble on his face.
"Grab a coffee," Esposito told him. He had feeling they'd be here for a while and Castle looked like he needed one.
"I didn't come here for coffee. What's going on? What did you find out that's so important?"
"I don't know yet." Esposito held up the package so that the sender's name was clearly visible for Castle to read.
"What the hell?"
"It's dated the day before he was killed."
Castle's tired face turned a few notches paler. "Where did you get that?"
"Post office. It's been sitting there for about a month. I thought it was a care package from my aunt in Texas. She's the only person who ever mails me anything." Esposito could hear the guilt dripping from his own voice.
He grabbed a pair of scissors and cut through the thick cardboard only to find another plastic wrap inside the package. A post-it note with hand-written words was stuck on the plastic wrap.
Can't be good news if you got this far. Too lazy to write. Open the bag and watch the video on the USB stick
-V
Javier slowly cut open the plastic wrapping. When it was open wide enough for him to spot the contents, he saw that there were only two items inside, the USB stick that Vikram mentioned and what looked like a portable hard drive.
The elevator door pinged at the end of the room and both Castle and Esposito saw Ryan stepping out of it, hurriedly making his way towards them.
Esposito thought about going into Beckett's office to do this, because it would give them more privacy. But there was hardly anyone in the bullpen. A handful of officers here and there, some of them about to go on patrol for the night shift. A detective sitting at his desk in the corner, doing paperwork.
"I hope you know that Jenny's ready to kill me," Ryan told him breathless, pulling up a chair and plopping himself down on it. "This better be good."
"I think it is," Castle mumbled.
Javier took both items into his hands and stood up. "Let's watch this in the IT room."
"So is anyone going to tell me what this is about?" Ryan grumbled to both of them on the way there.
Once they'd stepped inside Vikram's old work space, Javier closed the door, plugged the USB stick into the first running computer he saw and clicked on the only file that was on it. "Stop whining and watch this," he told Ryan.
Vikram's face popped up on the computer screen.
"So, uh..." Vikram's eyes focused on the camera in the shaky video, a morbid smile playing on his lips. Everything about the first few seconds of it suggested it was done hastily.
"Not sure where to start. I haven't really given it any thought. Okay...lemme just spit it out. I'm making this video because I've had this really bad feeling the last couple of days. Only time I ever felt this before was a few days before my sister died. That's why it scares the shit out of me. If you're watching this, Espo, it probably means I'm in trouble. Big trouble.
Might even mean I'm not around anymore.
I'm sending it to you, 'cause you always have Beckett's back and I'm not sure I trust Castle's place to not be under surveillance.
I've had my suspicions that someone's hacked into my system. It shouldn't be possible, 'cause, and this is probably gonna sound cocky, but I'm really good at what I do and I couldn't verify it and trust me, that's a good thing. If I had, I'd have done more than just make a video and a back up of all my data. I'd probably be running off to Canada or Mexico right now so I can go into hiding for the rest of my life.
But I trust my instincts and what they're telling me isn't good.
Beckett would tell me I'm an idiot. She doesn't believe in premonitions and stuff like that. But I know better than to ignore it and she's one of the main reasons I'm making this video and sending you the hard drive.
I dragged her into the mess. She's investigating this because I literally called her begging for help. I got her shot and now she's staying at my place so we can spend every free minute trying to bring down LokSat. Because she really wants this thing to be over with so she can go back home. She's missing her husband so much it's starting to drive me crazy."
Esposito caught Castle's eyes watering and he turned away, back to the video, pretending he didn't see.
"Beckett tells me I do a crap job of protecting myself, so I wanted to do something that would protect us both, 'cause I'm not exactly Rambo when it comes to guns and martial arts. She's right about that. So I'm gonna protect us in the only way I know how; by using technology.
Long story short, I installed a hidden camera at my apartment. If anything happens to me or Beckett at our place, it'll be on a digital feed camera. It's located in the ceiling above the entrance door. Second tile over the door. Most scanners won't detect it, so you'd never find it unless you were looking for it. It covers the living room." Vikram paused a moment and chuckled. "If something happens to us in the bedrooms, we're SOL I guess. But if Beckett ever found out I put a camera in her bedroom, well, then she'd kill me. So that would kind of defeat the purpose. She'd probably kill me as it is but I trust what I'm feeling and if nothing happens in the next few days I think we're good. For now.
I really hope I'm wrong and that no one's ever gonna watch this. That you're gonna hand me this package at the precinct and I'll just put it in a safe deposit box. I'll take it with me when I leave the place and the only time I'll open it is when I'm ninety or something, telling my great-grand kids the crazy story of how me and Beckett single-handedly brought down this massive drug ring. Yeah...I really hope that's how this story ends."
The video ended with that and suddenly they were all looking at a grey computer screen.
Esposito was speechless and Ryan's hand was covering his mouth. "Holy shit."
Castle stared at them both. "Did you hear that? There's a camera in his place. A camera that could have recorded his murder." He was breathless. "You know what that means right? If it did...it'll clear Beckett."
"What if it's on some sort of auto-loop?" Esposito pointed out. "It's been over a month." It nauseated him, the thought that the evidence might be erased because he couldn't get his ass to the post office on time.
"It's been forty-four days," Ryan told them. Esposito had no idea how he did that. Calculated stuff instantly that would take him ages to figure out.
"We have to get that camera out of Vikram's place," Castle told him. "Now."
Esposito stuck the USB stick into his pocket and gave the portable hard drive to Ryan. "Castle and I will get it. Call in Tory to have a look at this. This has to be a back up of everything that they were investigating."
"Okay," Ryan agreed but then changed his mind. "No, wait. Let me figure out how to disable the camera with Castle. I'm better at this tech stuff. We can't risk messing it up."
Esposito reluctantly took back the hard drive. He wasn't a sit-back-and-sift-through-evidence kind of guy, but Ryan was right. Of the two of them, Ryan was the tech geek. Javier didn't take any offense at the suggestion that he wasn't. Whatever was on that video camera was way too valuable for them to risk ruining its contents in any way. Beckett's future might depend on it.
"Okay, you two go," he told Ryan and Castle. "But call me as soon as you have it!"
Later
Castle's hands were sweaty after he got back into Ryan's car. He pressed the button to lower the passenger side window and let in the cold, early November air but his index finger slid right off it.
Because they knew where the hidden camera was, it hadn't taken Ryan long to find it and now Castle held it in his lap on their way back to the precinct, where Tory and Esposito were waiting for them.
"You know who needs to see this with us?"
"Who?" Castle wasn't sure it was even a good idea to bring Tory, their IT expert, into this, but Ryan was terrified they might do some damage uploading the film onto a computer without her expertise on hand.
"Gates."
Castle clenched his lips, not the least bit convinced that it was a good idea. The former captain had never been his biggest fan and his most recent memory of her grilling Beckett in the interrogation room still left a bitter taste in his mouth. "Seriously?" he questioned. "Gates?"
"She's not the enemy," Ryan reminded him. "I know you hate what she did to Beckett after the arrest, but Gates was just doing her job. Beckett would be the first person to agree."
Castle bit his tongue. Right now it was hard to see it that way.
"We need someone above us who's on our side. Someone who knows us and someone who's impartial."
"You think Gates is that someone?"
"Got a better idea?"
Ryan had a point. "Okay," he agreed.
Ryan called her and told her that they'd uncovered potentially explosive new video evidence that she needed to see and surprisingly, in spite of the late hour, it took very little coaxing.
"She's coming to meet us at the Twelfth," Ryan told him. "All she asked is that we hold off watching it until she's there."
Castle exhaled. "Alright."
"Look, if Beckett didn't do this then the video will prove..."
"If?" Castle glared at him.
Ryan's cheeks flushed. "Not what I meant, man. Sorry."
Castle didn't say anything. Afraid of what he might say if he did.
If her own former partners questioned her innocence, what the hell kind of chance did Beckett stand in front of a jury?
"Castle." Ryan repeated, meeting his glare with a pair of tired eyes in the rear view mirror. "You know I didn't mean it. It was a slip 'cause I'm running on fumes."
"Okay," he answered, tight lipped.
Castle still didn't believe him.
Later
Gates wore jogging pants and a hoodie by the time she joined them at the precinct nearly forty-five minutes later. By then Tory had already uploaded the film digitally and Castle was ready to jump out of his skin if they didn't play right this second.
He kept pacing the room, with a cup of decaf coffee in his hand.
Gates gave them all a nod when she entered the room, her expression all business in spite of her casual attire. "Detectives, Tory, Mr. Castle...show me what you have."
Esposito took a moment to explain to a serious looking Gates how they got the package. Took a minute to show her Vikram's video before giving Tory the go ahead to proceed with the camera footage.
Castle didn't notice that he was destroying his empty paper coffee cup. Tearing at it as they fast forwarded through endless hours of footage near the beginning of the tape. An empty room. Vikram eating fast food on the couch. Him and Beckett going over something on his lap top. Beckett staying up several hours later than him, pouring over a pile of file folders, nodding off in the middle of the night, still dressed in her work suit.
Castle swallowed. The fleeting scenes filled him with regret and anger. That he wasn't there, doing this with her. He should've pushed harder. Should've put his wounded pride aside and realized that she was doing something like this. That this was the only reason she'd ever push him away; to protect him. Not because she had marital issues to work out or because he somehow wasn't enough for her. How could he have been foolish enough to think it?
I should have known. Shouldn't have let her go and shouldn't have given in so easily.
Suddenly they were within an hour of the presumed time of death on the camera footage and Tory slowed it down. Five pairs of eyes were fixated on the silent screen and they would have heard a pin drop.
Vikram was on the couch, eating take out for the second night in a row and suddenly his head jerked towards the door, the terror on his face instantly apparent.
Whoever had come through had to be pointing a gun at him because Vikram froze and he made no move to grab the gun that was sitting at the other end of the coffee table.
Suddenly four armed figures came into view. All dressed in black. Plants pants, black wool sweaters and black face masks. Clearly male, judging from their size and physique. Three of them holding a gun and the fourth a knife. The knife. The one with Beckett's prints on it.
Castle's heart stood still.
Vikram made no move until the man with the knife was within arms reach of him and then he started to fight as if he was aware of what would happen next.
The footage that played next was so gruesome it made Castle's stomach churn.
Vikram's fighting skills were no match for the man in black. The man's first point of contact was a deep stab to the abdomen. Then another into Vikram's thigh.
Tory turned around, unable to keep watching. Her face was whiter than a hospital bed sheet.
Castle closed his eyes for just a moment when he heard Gates gasp and that's when he saw Vikram ripping the man's face mask off his head just before getting stabbed again, in the chest. His movements were so clumsy and lethargic now it was as though the tape was running in slow motion. Blood ran everywhere, down Vikram's torso and into the creases of the sofa.
He'd unmasked the man with his very last breath. Did it so they'd have a face. A Slavic face with high cheek bones and a military-style brush cut. A face that was unmistakeably young, male and unmistakeably not Kate Beckett.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Castle closed his eyes again, unable to continue watching as that man kept brutally stabbing at a now lifeless Vikram Singh. Not bothering to put his mask back on. Blood poured out of him. He flopped back onto the couch and jerked around like a fish out of water, nerve endings gone wild in a final moment of awareness, and then all his movements ceased.
Castle saw that Tory's eyes were back on the computer screen and this time she put a trembling hand over her mouth before dashing out of the room.
Gates was the one who stepped up to the computer and stopped the footage, while both Esposito's and Ryan's sombre faces were still glued to it. Even the usually unflappable Deputy Chief looked profoundly shaken.
"I think we've seen enough," she announced, her voice hollow. Then she turned to Castle. "The DA needs to see this. So we can get your wife out of Rikers."
Riker's Island, NYC
Later
Kate Beckett stared at the ceiling above her bunk bed.
She was so tired, her eyes were dry and heavy and grainy. Closing her lids was like running them over sand-paper. She closed them every few minutes, pressed them shut for a handful of seconds and then open them again to resume staring at the ceiling.
It was too quiet in her cell.
She didn't trust the quiet and was true even long before her murderous cell mate tried to strangle her last night. Quiet nights here were always a precursor to something horrible. An inmate being dragged, kicking and screaming, into solitary. An alarm going off and ringing for the rest of the night. The sound of a skull being smashed into a wall during a fight. One of her cellmates groaning in pain or misery.
Beckett would wait until she heard snoring. Or at least the deep, heaving breathing of sleep coming from the bunk below hers before she'd allow herself to fall asleep for an hour or so. It was never longer than that, because something always inevitably woke her up. A cellmate getting up, snoring too loud, noise from the other cells down the hall, the damp cold that made her shiver or the nightmares that were really starting to plague her now. Without Castle around to help her keep them at bay, they were steadily gaining ground on her.
Something always woke her up.
Kate pressed a palm against her forehead in the darkness. She was sore too. Everything hurt. Her ribs ached from the unexpected shove into the wall last week. It hurt her throat to swallow. There was a constant dull throb behind her eyes from the stress of trying to stay alert all the time. From the concussion she still hadn't fully healed from. All of it compounded by a lack of sleep and lack of coffee. Because that diluted, barely-caffeinated, lukewarm brown water they had here certainly couldn't be called coffee.
The sound of footsteps in the corridor made her tense.
It could mean a lot of things. None of them good. A correctional officer stopping by in the middle of the night never was.
The footsteps stopped in front of her cell and Beckett jerked in her bunk when she heard the electronic door slide open. This definitely wasn't good. One of them was getting yanked out of this cell tonight for god knows what reason.
"Beckett!"
The CO didn't turn on the light and she could barely make out his silhouette.
She sat up in the bunk bed. "Sir?"
"Get down."
She did as he asked, not understanding what this was about but knowing better than to ask, or worse, resist. She let the officer cuff her and then yank her onto her feet before he led her out of the cell and down the hallway. Through two more electronic doors and another two long hallways, further and further away from the cells, towards the administrative area.
"Where are you taking me?" She needed to know. This wasn't normal. There were rampant rumours here of COs raping female inmates. The thought sent goose-bumps up her arms. She'd fight him. Even if she was handcuffed, he'd have a hell of a time trying.
"You've been released."
"What?"
Beckett didn't understand. Prisoners weren't released in the middle of the night. None of this made sense.
Yet, here she was, going through the motions.
An officer handed her a box containing the same blue dress and heels she'd worn when she arrived. Then he gave her a sealed plastic bag containing her wedding ring and her father's watch. Another officer gave her a half dozen forms to sign after she'd changed out of the grey jump suit and into the dress.
She was dreaming. That had to be it. No matter how real it felt, she was dreaming. Delirious finally from a lack of sleep.
But if she was, she didn't want to wake up. It was the first good dream she had here.
She'd keep going then, Beckett decided. She'd walk out the doors the same way she'd walked in. Not as a number on a jumpsuit, but as Kate Beckett, Captain of the 12th Precinct.
What she didn't expect to after leaving the discharge area was Castle.
Her husband was sitting on a cheap plastic chair, in a pair of jeans. One of her favourite wool coats was draped over his arms. Her Castle, with a smile and a scruffy, five-day beard that Beckett thought was the sexiest thing she'd seen in a long time. She wanted to run her fingers over it. But she didn't dare.
Beckett stood still and stared at him. Not wanting to move an inch because she didn't want to wake up. Didn't want this to end. It felt too good and too real. All of it.
"Kate?" Castle was the one who got up and walked towards her. He put his arms around her the moment he was close enough. Pulled her into his space and kissed her cheek. When she still didn't react he took a step back and tenderly cupped her face in his hands. "Kate, sweetheart, are you okay?"
His hands, they smelled like him. Felt like him. Like real-Castle, not dream-Castle. Warm and familiar and so very, very alive and real.
"Kate, babe, look at me."
"Castle, what is this?" she whispered. "What's happening? Am I going crazy?"
"Didn't the officer tell you?"
"Tell me what?"
"That you've been released."
"No." Yes. He did. But this wasn't possible. Prisoners didn't get released at night. Not possible.
"Sweetheart, you're scaring me."
She licked her lips and stared into his face. "People don't get released at night. That doesn't happen. Don't mess with me. Castle, it's not funny. I feel like I'm losing my mind."
"Hey," Castle's thumb trailed her jaw, lifted it up. "Look at me. Nothing of the sort. Gates pulled some strings. A lot of strings actually."
"Gates pulled some strings?" she repeated the words after him, like an echoing fool.
"Yeah. She thought she owed you one."
Kate hadn't realized that she was crying until she felt Castle wipe away her tears. "This is real?"
He kissed her again. On the lips this time and that jarred her senses. "It's real. I'm taking you home."
"Home?"
"That's right."
"I'm really out?"
"You're out."
The tears were falling hopelessly now and she had to wipe them away because they were clouding her vision. "Out." Beckett took a deep breath and then exhaled. "Oh-." It didn't make sense and once she stopped crying she'd ask him to explain. She needed an explanation.
Castle held up her coat and helped her slide her arms through the sleeves when her clumsy first attempt failed because she couldn't see through her tears.
He tied the belt for her too and made eye contact once more. "Ready?'
Beckett nodded and let him wrap an arm around her waist before they slowly walked out together.
A/N: I'm planning to go on the road for a bit and taking a short posting hiatus with this story. Big thanks to those leaving kind feedback and thanks for your patience. :)