The Marlowe Prep Murder
Chapter 26
Rick drops into his chair next to Beckett's desk. "Is that the information my father sent?"
"Uh-huh," Kate replies, scanning what is readable between large blocks of blacked-out text. "He wasn't kidding when he said it would be heavily redacted. There's just enough here to pin Namon's murder on the late agent known as 'Cousin Igor.' This copy has an official-looking stamp, though. The department should accept it. I guess all I have to do now is write up the report."
"And think up a plausible reason why the Agency would be helping you with a murder case," Rick points out.
Kate shakes her head and winks. "No, we're allowed, even encouraged, to cultivate sources outside the department. Montgomery won't push back on that."
"Then, do you need some help coming up with some dazzling prose?" Rick offers. "That is, after all, my profession, as a call from Black Pawn pointedly reminded me this morning."
"Are you behind on submitting chapters?" Kate asks.
"A little," Rick confesses. "This morning's rebuke was merely an admonition. The firm hasn't offered any threats yet."
"Still, you should catch up. My report doesn't need to dazzle, just inform, as boring as that may seem to you. I'll include as much information as possible without giving your father and the agency away, and I can meet you at home later. You should be there when Alexis comes home from her first day at her forensics program."
"She'll be more interested in talking to you about it than me," Rick guesses. "But either way, we can have a lively discussion over a family dinner. Pasta primavera?"
"Sounds good."
Vonda walks the property she'd only seen online. It has some strange spots like the now empty aviary where the owners kept exotic birds. While the metal mesh could hold the winged pets, with a little effort, a human could kick through it. No help there. The playground has possibilities. An adult climber could fall off the monkey bars or come down the slide the wrong way, but a simultaneous double accident would be difficult to stage.
The gazebo near the house looks ordinary — too ordinary for the eccentric owners. Vonda climbs the steps to check it out and spies a control panel. With the electricity kept on for showings, she has no problem using it. At her press of a button, a panel slides back in the redwood flooring. She explores the other functions of the device. Excellent! Now all she has to do is make sure what she needs is warmed up and arrange some remote control activation. The double funeral will probably be closed casket; she won't be able to admire her handiwork. Well, nothing is truly perfect, but this job will be pretty damn close.
Ideas flood Castle's mind as he sits in front of his laptop. That's the problem. He has too many of them. He's had enough adventures with Kate to fill a shelf full of books. His problem is what to exclude. One thing he refuses to leave out is the love between him and Kate, as portrayed by their avatars, Rook and Heat. For mainstream publication, he'll have to censor some of the best parts of their intimate adventures. Still, he can say enough for his readers to fill in the gaps with their imaginings. That's if the scenes he writes meet with Kate's approval. For such a creative partner, she can get downright prudish at times about what he puts on paper. Better to get her blessing in advance than have to cope with her ire later. Much better.
Much as he enjoys writing them, he can skip the love scenes for now, and settle on fleshing out — oops, bad choice of words — his plot and the characters of the 23rd Precinct. He has Riley and Ochoa down, but McNulty, Malcolm, Reynolds, and the rest need some work. Once he puts Heat in charge of a conference in the bullpen, the little touches that make the various cops intriguing to the reader will pop. He starts with Heat giving orders, something at which Kate excels. Smiling to himself, he brings the idiosyncrasies of the various detectives to life.
The alarm on Rick's computer tightens the spigot on the flow of his creative juices. He checks the display at the bottom of his screen—time to begin meal prep. Typically, with that many vegetables to cut up, he'd ask Alexis to be his sous chef — or maybe he'd be hers. But when she bounded through the door, she was so excited to get to work on her first assignment that he isn't about to disturb her. He's not a slouch with a knife, and he's stowed an extra box of band-aids in the kitchen just in case.
After adding the final copy of her report to the bat'leth murder box, Kate applies a 'Closed" label and turns it in to the cop staffing the desk at the archives. Montgomery's eyebrows rose a bit at the intelligence document she appended to her write-up, but he didn't throw too many questions at her. Over the time she's known him, he's been pretty closed-mouthed about some of his contacts. He can't object too much to her reticence to reveal hers.
The Marlowe Prep murder looms even more significant now, as Kate and Rick wait to hear from Vonda. She can't afford to underestimate the killer, and she's not sure what kind of help she can get from Jack. He's been right on the mark before, but with opponents not even close to his skill level. Even he admits that Vonda is tops in her field. Is contract killer a field or a psychosis? It doesn't matter. The effect is the same. Kate will have to be on her game, doubly so because Rick's life will be on the line too. She checks the timestamp on her receipt for the evidence box. Six o'clock. Rick probably has the water on for pasta.
"Kate, my teacher, Ms. Fairchild, is incredible!" Alexis bubbles over a forkful of vegetables. "She explained how a mass spectrometer works. She also showed us pictures of the labs you see on T.V. and pointed out what's wrong with them. The dressing of some of those sets is pretty unrealistic. Why would someone put a poster of the Ebola virus on the wall of a chemistry lab and use only brightly colored chemicals?"
"I think I heard Carl say something like that once," Kate recalls.
"Ooh! Is that Carl Osnitz, the Chief Tech at the N.Y.P.D. forensics lab?" Alexis queries.
"That's Carl," Kate confirms. "Did Ms. Fairchild say something about him?"
Alexis shakes her head. "No, but the syllabus did. The top students in the course are going to get a chance to work with him in the CSU lab. Isn't that amazing? I'm going to make sure that I qualify. I can't wait to analyze the evidence of a real case." The exuberant teen shovels in the last bite on her plate. "I'm going upstairs again to study some more."
A moment after Alexis leaves the table, Rick's cellphone emits an ominous chord. "That's a text from Vonda Covici." He checks out the screen. "She has a property she'd like to show us tomorrow evening."
Kate pushes her plate away as her stomach tightens. "We're really into it now."