Meredeth was awoken from her nice cozy sleep by the feel of hands on her belly. Since she'd hit twenty-nine weeks, she'd been able to find a little more comfort at night and her husband had learned to let her sleep, and only to wake her for a 'love-you-kiss-kiss' if he was called in the middle of the night. She groaned a little then peeled open a wary eyelid as she wondered why she was being disturbed at half-past five in the morning. The other flew open as she saw she was face to face with Dell Ryan and his tired blue eyes.

'Mo-nin, Merry,' he yawned, patting her tummy with one hand while he held onto his stuffed t-rex with the other. He was still in his painfully cute dino-footies and his blond curls were sticking out at right angles to his scalp. On the bed beside him was his t-rex, complete with an 'ouchie' band-aid still wrapped around his claw. 'Mo-nin baby.'

'Dell, what are you doing here so early?'

'Mommy work, Daddy work.' Dell grinned widely. 'I 'tay wit' you an' baby to-day.'

'Oh, he's a dead man,' Meredeth muttered, flopping back onto the pillow. 'No trial, no public pleading, straight to the gallows.'

Suited up and ready for the early morning rollout, Esposito came in the door with Ryan hovering at the entrance. He knew he would get a well-deserved ass-kicking from his bride when he got home but he also knew her tender heart wouldn't turn down the belly time Dell could clock if they had some one-on-one time together. He came around to her side of the bed, speaking cautiously though it was unlikely she'd cuss him out in front of a toddler who had a habit of picking up bad words already. 'Hey Mere, I know this is a total imposition and I will make it up to you but we got called early and Jenn's not off shift until ten this morning.'

'Will he go back to sleep?'

Esposito pointed and Meredeth saw the little guy was already half back in snooze-land with his rex tucked under his arm as he cuddled into one of the soft squishy pillows. 'Happy as an oyster.'

'He'll need his insulin after breakfast,' Ryan said. 'His syringes are in his bag by the dresser, he needs his first one around eight, eight-thirty.'

'Sounds good.'

Esposito smiled in gratitude as Meredeth nodded sleepily, and he set her bedside alarm for seven forty-five so she could feed Dell and give him his injection promptly. 'Thank you so much for this, Mere, I don't know what I'd do with out you. I gotta go, babe.'

'You got no lunch, baby.'

'It's okay, my love I'll find something. Gimme one for good luck.' Esposito tapped his chin under his lips and Meredeth gave him a kiss. 'I love you both.'

'We love you too.'

'I'll call when I can.'

'Okay.' Meredeth watched them go, heard Ryan's Crown Vic pull away from the curb a few minutes later, then nudged Dell in the stomach. 'Hey you.'

' 'Nooze-y,' he mumbled. 'No poke.'

'Do you want to watch cartoons?'

'Toons? What toons?'

'The Muppet Babies.'

'What a Mup-pet?'

'You'll find out.'

Tossing back the covers, Meredeth let him snooze in her bed while she went down to her shelves of DVDs and picked out a home-burned disc of season 1. She paused when she felt the baby give her an irritated kick in the gut.

'I know, sweetheart,' she reassured the baby as she massaged the spot where the foot abused her 'We're going back to bed.'

She took the stairs as swiftly as she could, given she was carrying quite a load and still half asleep. When she got back to her room, she smiled when she saw Dell resting peacefully on the bed and thought of the panic Honey-Milk must have gone through when she couldn't wake Dell after a nap like that at Hallowe'en. Moving carefully, she pulled her mini-DVD player out of her bedside table and popped the disc in, then settle into the pillows - thankfully Dell had taken one of her husband's goosedown pillows; she didn't like admitting it but she had no problem taking her own back if Dell had occupied one of them - as the menu flashed on. When the first episode started and she heard the theme-song start, Dell's eyes blinked open and he moved so he could see the action on the screen.

'Know t'at song,' he said.

'Well, when you were a little baby, like Kelley, you and I would watch this show together.'

'Rea-lly?'

'Yes.'

Dell thought about this, and sighed contentedly as he snuggled against her body and propped t-rex against her belly.

'Who t'ose ones?' he asked.

'That's Kermit, he's a frog, and there's Miss Piggy and there's Gonzo, he's my favourite.'

'What Don-zo?'

'We don't really know what he is. He says he's a weirdo.'

'Wee-do,' Dell attempted to repeat the word, then tapped the bump again. 'T'at Don-zo, baby,' he told her tummy. 'Don-zo funny.'

'Okay, shh. Baby needs to sleep,' Meredeth whispered, holding a finger to her lips, pleased when Dell nodded solemnly.

'Baby 'nooze?'

'Yeah, baby's snoozing.'

'I 'nooze too.'

Sure enough, they didn't even make it to the end of the first episode before Dell was out like a light.

'Are you gonna be really far in the doghouse on this one?' Ryan asked as they walked towards their crime scene on Avenue A. The end-of-February wind was teasing hints of warmer weather but there was still eighteen inches of wet sticky snow covering everything, making the tease even more torturous.

'Nah, I know Mere, and she'll be fine as long as I don't break my word and make it up to her.'

'And how are we doing that?'

'Hockey tickets. I scored some to the Islanders-Leafs game tomorrow night, in the heated clubhouse too.'

'Who did you trade that with?'

'Newman's cousin works in PR for the Garden, he hooked me up.' Esposito saw the pathologist hovering like a paper praying mantis around the body and swore ripely. 'Fuckin' ridiculous,' he muttered in Spanish so he wouldn't get in trouble for using profanity.

Ryan saw who they scored for the on-scene from the ME's office and shared his partner's sentiment. 'I didn't even think he was still alive.'

They'd drawn the short straw of ME's that morning and gotten stuck with Doctor Rudolph 'Wheezy' Winston who some guessed was as old as the technique of fingerprint analysis. Lanie was always their top choice followed closely by Weaver, and most would choose Perlmutter's acid grousing because at least they could snark back at him; he took it as well as he dished it. A morning spent with a dead body and Wheezy's mumbling was almost like dealing with two corpses.

'Detectives,' he rasped, in a voice rusted with age and disuse. 'Beverages should not be on this side of the yellow visual barricade.'

'It's not even six in the morning,' Ryan protested, sounding like a twelve-year-old, wondering why the old windbag couldn't just say 'tape'.

'I never drank coffee a day in my life. I'll be sixty-two next August.'

'And it shows,' Esposito muttered, passing his preciously home-brewed double latte to Geoffs who was standing guard on the other side of the tape and nipped Ryan's Java Loft take-away cup out of his hand before he gave Wheezy a caffeinated shower. Neither of them were chipper and cheerful before the crack of dawn and both were risking facing angry wives at home afterward and the first thing that went with Ryan was his ability to hold onto things; they always became airborne.

'What information do you have prepared for us, Doctor?' he asked dutifully, knowing that Wheezy wouldn't know easy working slang if it slapped his ass and called him 'Giggles'.

'The deceased is Irene Gaston, born August ten nineteen seventy-three. She appears to have suffered a blunt force trauma to the left zygomatic arch, temporal plane and mandible.'

'So someone bashed her skull in,' Ryan summed it up testily.

'Your lack of respect is appalling. The woman's family won't want to hear your glib answer.' Wheezy sniffed, turned his back on Ryan to face Esposito. 'I won't stand for such rudeness on my crime scene.'

Ryan thought the vein in his temple might burst. 'Your crime scene,' he started but was cut off when Esposito tugged his own left ear. It was their subtle signal to let it go or find a new task. 'I'm going to canvass the uniforms, see if they've got any witnesses.'

'You do that, Detective Ryan and report back here in fifteen minutes.'

'I'll be finished here in approximately ten.' Wheezy coughed, then sniffled wetly, making Esposito step away subtly. The last thing he wanted was to become infected with a cold and have to spend a night away from Meredeth.

'Fifteen minutes, Detective Ryan.'

Ryan jetted and Esposito took out his bamboo handkerchief - a treat in his Christmas stocking from Meredeth - and covered his mouth and nose while he spoke. 'Do we have an estimated time of death?'

'It is difficult to be conclusive so early, as many factors-'

'Okay, Doctor, I don't want to infringe on your sensibilities, but here's the deal.' Esposito changed his stance, he was all business now instead of just being a 'young upstart' which was how Wheezy referred to all the detectives not born in the Roaring Twenties. 'It's early, it's cold, I left my seven months pregnant wife in bed and Ryan left his son with her which means we're already on edge. Not trying to tell you how to do your job, sir, but being sticky with us like this doesn't promote a lot of co-operation, especially on the part of my partner.'

'Very well. I'll be in touch the moment I have something to report.'

Esposito nodded, watched the young assistants load the body into the wagon while he heard the unmistakable sound of Ryan's winter boots come up behind him. 'What you find, bro?'

'Geoffs gave me the last of his coffee.'

'I'll buy you a refill in the break-room.'

Irene Gaston, they discovered, was a landed citizen from Cayenne, French Guiana, and had lived in her modestly comfortable co-op with her boyfriend and her cat for about eleven years. She worked as a tour manager and translator for Caravan Limited which according to Ryan's Internet search was a cheap student travel bureau for those who wanted to see Europe and Africa on a flat-ass broke budget. She hadn't been reported missing and her boyfriend had assumed she'd spent the night sleeping off her girls' night out with a friend as the last time he'd heard from her she'd been 'way saoule' when she'd called and added a cheery 'je t'aime mon coeur' before they'd hung up.

The boyfriend had been co-operative and let them pull whatever records they needed in order to find who killed her, so Ryan and Esposito started with tracking down her girlfriends she'd partied with the previous night, asking them where they'd gone, who they'd talked to, any other problems they could think of her having. All of them, except for one, Denise, had been vehement that Irene was a sweetheart and it had to be either mistaken identity or a random act of violence.

Esposito decided to have a look at the friend who wasn't so reticent.

'Hey-o.'

'Hey Newman,' he replied without looking up from his screen. 'What do you have?'

'Credit card pop for Irene Gaston and the boyfriend Luke Pec-zeck-ee?'

'Peczecki, it's Polish I think,' Esposito assured him. 'What you find?'

'Nothing that jumped out in particular, although they each have a lot of airfare.'

'She worked as a tour guide and she'd take him along for the ride sometimes, according to Luke.'

'Right, but see, here's what I found. The dates don't match.'

Esposito sat up. 'Which ones?'

'A lot, going back about two months, just before New Years.' Newman handed over the sheets with his colour coding. 'Her charges are in pink and his are in green and the ones that popped on both accounts are in yellow.'

'Good work, man.'

Esposito culled through the report from Newman, then paused when he heard the elevator doors bing open. He could smell her before he even saw her through the mesh-wire walls of the bullpen. It was the Meredeth scent but there was something else there now, sweet and innocent. Setting the report aside, he glanced up, then got to his feet when he saw her carrying the cooler bag.

'Mere! What are you doing carrying that?'

'It's not that heavy.'

'Dell's gone home?' he asked, pulling over Ryan's empty chair for her to sit.

'Yeah, Jenny came and got him. After he left, the bump and I were in the kitchen cooking this morning and we brought chilli.'

'Chilli? The really good one?'

Meredeth nodded, shifting in her seat to try and get comfortable. She inhaled deeply when Esposito unzipped the insulated bag and the smells of home cooked food rose into the air. 'Taco chicken with black beans and sweet corn, and a small veggie-friendly batch for Ryan. And smoothies all around. Mango-banana, so you'll have something to stick with you.'

''I can't believe you did all this for us.'

'Yeah, well, I know the only thing that makes you crankier than having to roll out early is no food.

It was an eternal miracle to have a woman who loved him so much, Esposito marveled. 'I love you.'

'Love you too.' Meredeth smiled when he leaned in and gave her a small kiss, despite being surrounded by cops.

'Hey, get a room, we don't need to see how you made that little Espo that's going to be here soon,' Castle hollered as he walked up to Esposito's desk, gave the glowing mama-to-be a peck on the cheek. 'Were you cooking? Is that taco chicken chilli I smell?'

'I also have homemade corn-bread for dipping. And no I wasn't bending over the oven, Javi,' Meredeth added, anticipating her husband's sweet concern for her. She patted his hand before she squeezed it. 'Those I had in the freezer and warmed in the steamer.'

'Good call.'

'Where is it?'

The men and Meredeth glanced over to see Beckett strolling out of the captain's office, head swiveling to find the source of deliciousness. The move made Meredeth grin. 'Hungry, Detective Beckett?'

R&R&Enjoy!