A/N: As always, a huge thanks to all my readers and a special welcome to those of you who just caught up with all 25 chapters. :D
Chapter Twenty-Six
Something was off.
Beckett noticed it the moment she stepped off the small elevator and into the hallway teeming with uniforms and forensic personnel. She wasn't sure what it was; there was nothing about the apartment building itself that triggered any alarms. No shadowed niches where somebody could be hiding in an ambush; no rodents scurrying along the floor and not even the offensive stench of death.
If anything, it felt a little too normal, too wholesome for the usual places she had to visit as a Vice cop.
She caught sight of Montgomery just inside the doorway to apartment number 407, so she headed toward him first.
"Sir, what's going on?"
Montgomery, to his credit, didn't even blink at the fact that her dress barely poked out from underneath her zipped-up windbreaker. A uniform walking by with an evidence bag in hand didn't have the captain's poise, and he almost stumbled into a wall as he stared at Beckett's hemline. He was met with her challenging frown when he finally deigned to look up, his face flushing red as he scurried away.
Ugh, men.
If the captain noticed the exchange, he didn't let on, and not for the first time, Beckett marveled at Montgomery's poise. He saw everything and yet nothing seemed to ever shake him.
"Jeffrey Baker." Montgomery handed her a silver picture frame with a photo of the boy, his beaming smile so wide, his eyes squeezed shut against the bright summer sun. He was kneeling in the sand next to a crudely made sandcastle, a mop of floppy brown hair capping his head. "Five years old. He was kidnapped earlier today."
Her heart thumped hard, a flash of pale skin and vacant eyes haunting her with a sudden chill. "A kidnapping, sir? That's kinda out of my purview, isn't it?"
"The Feds requested you specifically to be on the task force."
"Feds?" Castle asked, looking over her shoulder at the picture of Jeffrey. He stiffened beside her when he caught sight of the boy, and her stomach lurched with sympathy. It was never easy dealing with children, and it must be so much worse with Alexis so close in age to the kidnapped boy.
"Child abduction. The FBI have jurisdiction," Beckett explained, as much as to distract him as to fill him in to the situation.
Castle didn't get it. "Then why call me?"
The corner of Montgomery's mouth twitched. "'Cause I like pissing off the FBI. And because you think outside the box, something the Feebs rarely do."
That wasn't all, Beckett sensed. "Who's the agent in charge, sir?"
"That would be Agent Sorensen." The captain raised an eyebrow and gave her a look that sliced right through the silent panic rising up within her. "Is that a problem, detective?"
Yes. "No. No, of course not, sir."
"For what it's worth, detective, that mother there doesn't care about your personal issues. All she cares about is getting her little boy back. Is that clear?"
"Crystal. Where's Agent Sorensen?"
"In the other room. Talking with the mother."
Kate's eyes followed Montgomery's gesture, and she took a deep, fortifying breath.
Damn, today was going to be hell.
…
Castle didn't much like Agent Square-jaw Sorensen.
Tall, dark, and judgmental, there was just something aggravatingly condescending about the man that rubbed Castle in all the wrong ways.
From the stilted greeting Beckett and Sorensen exchanged, it was apparent that they had a history.
"Kate."
"Hello, Will. How long have you been back?"
"A couple months."
"Something wrong with Boston?"
"Fresh lobster gets old fast. You look good."
"I feel good."
Blah, blah, blah.
And no, he wasn't jealous.
That would be petty and immature.
Still, he couldn't dampen the expectant silence that hummed through the elevator when they headed back to the precinct, his hands linked behind his back as he bore holes in the back of Beckett's head with his eyes.
"Will you stop thinking so loudly?" she finally snapped.
"I can't help it that I'm a Jedi like that."
"Not that it's any of your business, but we dated for six months."
The elevator stopped off on Vice and they stepped out, Castle nipping at her heels like usual.
"How'd you meet?"
"Kidnapping. A six-year-old boy."
"How'd it end?"
Beckett clenched her jaw, and Castle was fascinated by how the tendons in her neck stood out in such stark relief. He wanted to trace his fingertips up and down the enticing valleys and hills, and so enraptured by the sight was he that he almost missed the shortness of her response.
"We got the guy."
...
For all that Castle had written some dark characters and even darker situations, the reality of working a child abduction case was much, much worse. Castle dealt with death on a daily basis, but this agony of helplessness that threatened to take him under a wave of despair was unlike anything he'd ever experienced or imagined.
He couldn't tear his eyes away from little Jeffrey's smile, the boy's radiant joy incongruous with the stark white of a murder board still far too empty of black lines and information that could help bring him back alive.
Even more chilling was the fact that Jeffrey had been abducted right at the doorsteps of his own home. The nanny was going to take Jeffrey to the park, but she'd gotten caught up with a friend in the hall. The conversation took maybe ten, fifteen minutes, but when she looked around for Jeff, he was gone.
At first they thought that he'd run off by himself, but then there was the jacket. A blue, puffy down jacket that Mrs. Baker confirmed as Jeffrey's had been hung neatly on the railing in the stairwell. In the pocket had been a printed note with two words: find me.
No fingerprints and nothing special about the paper or the ink. Just the unnerving realization that Jeffrey had been taken.
Castle glanced at Beckett methodically calling, checking, and cross-checking a list of babysitters and friends that the Bakers may have used to look after their son and if any of them might have had a previously unknown penchant for kidnapping children. So far, she had nothing.
A furrow dug its way between her brows, a cute little quirk that he would have drawn attention to in any other circumstance. But right now, despite the fire of urgency that burned barely banked in every tense muscle of her body, she looked weary—the bone deep kind of exhaustion that shadowed her eyes and burdened her shoulders.
He wanted to take the darkness away from her.
"This was a calculated abduction."
Castle startled at Beckett's sudden statement and he followed the wave of her hand to the evidence photo of Jeffrey's jacket.
Beckett stood and paced in front of the murder board, her theory gaining momentum with every step. "Nobody noticed a commotion, so that means the kidnapper could have gotten away without a trace if he'd wanted to. But instead, he left behind that jacket. Why?"
A phantom hand brushed its fingers across Castle's neck as he caught her meaning. "He's taunting us."
"Exactly. The kidnapper had to have observed the Bakers for a while to know Jeffrey's schedule of going to the park with the nanny at that hour. And maybe even to know that the nanny would get held up by that particular friend. First thing in the morning, I'll send out uniforms to canvas the neighborhood around the apartment and the park. If we're lucky, we'll catch some witnesses who've noticed something suspicious. We'll also need to screen any surveillance videos we can find for the area."
"And what do we do tonight?"
"You need to go home." He opened his mouth to protest, but she cut him off. "Castle, go home. Alexis is waiting for you."
Oh, low blow, Katherine Beckett. Low blow.
But now that Castle's mind was on Alexis—something he'd been actively avoiding since he'd seen Jeffrey's smiling photo—he couldn't suppress the yearning to see his little girl safe and sound.
Martha was watching her tonight, and while his mother could be trusted—mostly—not to burn the loft down, she could sometimes be…well…careless. Still, even though neither of them ever said anything, Castle knew that his mother was curbing her more egregious instincts for the sake of Alexis. Martha had never been a neglectful mother, per se, always having a hug and kiss ready for the rambunctious boy Castle had been, but there were also several times when she hadn't been altogether there. Neither of them would ever say it out loud, but they both knew this was her attempt at making up for his less than savory childhood.
His chest ached with want, the need to check up on Alexis overwhelming, but he couldn't help poking at Beckett just a little to see if she would give. "And what are you going to be doing?"
She narrowed her eyes at him—those dark pools so very incisive—and he had the uncanny feeling that she saw right through him. With a dismissive flick of her eyes, she turned back to her paperwork. "Making out with my ex in the break room, duh."
"Very funny."
"Mm. I thought it was." When he didn't move his gaze from her, she set down her pen down with a sigh. "Castle, I'm serious. You need to go home. There's nothing you can do right now anyway."
He studied the rigid lines of her spine and the dark shadows under her eyes. He wished she would just let him share this burden with her.
But he also knew that her pride and her stubbornness wouldn't let her bend, not in front of him and certainly not in front of her ex-boyfriend. He swallowed the thick ball of helplessness and gave a little quirk of his lips instead. "Okay. But if you need me, call. Even if it's just to talk."
…
She was fixing herself a cup of terrible coffee in the break room when Will finally showed up.
She'd been expecting this sooner or later, though she'd been hoping it'd be later. A lot later.
"Amber alert is out. We have a warrant out to collect all the surveillance videos around, but we probably won't get it until morning. No luck with creepy-crawlers among friends and family, either."
Beckett huffed out a frustrated breath. "It'd be too easy, right?"
"Or over easy. Get it?" He grinned, that stern façade of his lighting up in boyish delight.
She laughed even as she shook her head. "That's like something Castle would say."
Will's smile faded slightly at the corners. "You like him."
She avoided his gaze, choosing instead to study the eons-old coffee stain spread across one corner of the laminate counter. "No, I just…I don't know. I think he's interesting."
"So you're not...?"
"Together? No…" She cringed when the end of the word drifted upwards in an unsure question mark.
"You don't sound very sure."
"It's…complicated."
Will raised a skeptical brow at that, but even if she wanted to explain, she couldn't find the words. Castle confused her, and she didn't doubt that she was also confusing the hell out of him with her bold come-ons and lingering glances. She didn't mean to be a tease, but it was so much easier burying the well of tender emotions he elicited from her behind an implacable wall of sensuality. He made her feel too much that she just wasn't ready for yet.
"I meant to call. Must've picked up the phone a dozen times."
Really? He was going to do this now? "Yeah, I know. You meant to do a lot of things. That's why you left, remember?"
"Boston was a great opportunity."
"I'm not saying it wasn't. I'm just saying it was a choice. That didn't include me."
"You could've come."
She scoffed. "And then done what? Join the Boston PD, and then you have to move to Phoenix, and then Cleveland. And then you're back here. I mean, we both know what that life is about."
"Didn't stop me from missing you. Missing us. Sundays in the park. Those ridiculous neon skates at Rockefeller Center."
"I will have you know that those skates are awesome."
A smile passed over Kate's face when she remembered Alexis' reaction to them when she'd first seen them. Those skates had gone a long way to helping get the girl comfortable enough to venture out onto the ice.
The smile died when Will drew closer.
"It wasn't the skates."
The beat of her pulse thundered in her ears, memories of how good it'd been between them once upon a time flooding her mind and twisting her stomach with nostalgia. Will had been good for her; he'd brought her out of the morass of her father's struggle with alcoholism and taught her not to lose herself in the darkness of her cases. He'd given her laughter and brought out to play the little core of silliness that she'd buried for so long.
He moved in closer and she caught a whiff of his familiar scent, dark and musty and just a little dangerous, and her eyes fluttered shut in reflexive memory. She wondered what it might've been like if Will hadn't left—if they'd be married by now, well on their way to the two-point-five kids and the white picket fence.
She turned away just before his lips met hers.
She rested a hand on his chest and for just a moment, she contemplated pulling him closer, but instead, she pushed him away lightly.
"No, Will."
He stepped back without resistance, and when she dared to look him in the face, his expression was one of resignation.
He tucked a lock of hair behind her ear, his touch lingering as if to memorize the feel of her skin beneath his fingers. Her heart ached, knowing that this was the closure she'd been missing all these months. When he went to kiss her on the crown of her head, she didn't stop him, knowing it was a goodbye.
"They always tell you to live with no regrets. I wish you weren't my greatest one."
And then he was gone.