The Woman in the Yellow Dress
By
UCSBdad
Disclaimer: I own neither Castle nor a yellow dress. Rating: K Time: Early season five. Others know Kate and Rick are a couple, but not Gates.
"Marina Gorham of Humanity First. Never met a protest she didn't like. Started off in high school demonstrating against the fascist teachings of the school. She's been at it ever since. Her demonstrations get rowdy and there's some pushing and shoving, but nothing worse. At least nothing worse where anyone can see something. The targets of her revolutionary wrath have reported a lot of vandalism to both businesses and homes, but there's nothing that ties her to the attacks."
"Anyone in the organization ever get…more revolutionary?"
"Just one. A Jason Brewer got all coked up and assaulted a news reporter that was covering a demonstration. The reporter got her nose broken, and suffered damage to her eyes. Poor Marina didn't know what to protest: the brutal prison that Brewer was sent to or an attack on a woman. In the end, she pretty much ignored the whole thing."
"Do you have an address?" Kate asked.
Espo held up a post-it.
"Her home and her office."
Marina Gorham was waiting for them at her office.
"I expected you to be here a lot earlier. I'm sure that someone who fights for the peoples' rights would be the first suspect our fascist police would come for. Are you going to arrest me now? If you are, I should introduce you to my lawyer, Johnathan Nabors, Esquire."
Nabors looked like an aging hippie who'd gotten dressed in his best clothing for some occasion. He had on battered ankle boots, bell bottomed jeans, a Che Guevara t shirt and a tweed sport coat with leather patches on the elbows. His long hair was frizzy and his hairline was receding.
"On behalf of Ms. Gorham I can tell you that she was here at her office until approximately ten o'clock in the evening prior to the murder. There are six people who are witnesses to that. Here's their contact information. She left here and walked back to her apartment, arriving about ten fifteen. She went to bed, alone, and saw no one and communicated with no one. She arose at a little after six AM, prepared for the day and walked back to her office, arriving just before seven."
"Thank you…" Kate began.
"Ms. Gorham is exercising her right to say no more. So, unless you have a warrant of some sort, I'll have to ask you to leave. Now."
"Thank you for your cooperation." Kate said with false sincerity.
"Not at all cooperative." Kate said, once they were back in her cruiser. "I get suspicious of people who lawyer up at once."
Castle shrugged.
"In her world view, she's the brave heroine fighting for justice and you're…the Gestapo."
"Perhaps I should round up the usual suspects." Kate said with a grin.
"That would make you Captain Renault of the Vichy police in Casablanca."
"Perhaps she has relatives in the old country?" Kate said with a fair German accent.
"That's more like Major Strasser of the Third Reich."
Captain Gates wasn't happy with the results of the investigation, but Kate hadn't expected her to be.
"That's all you got, Detective? Another person who was allegedly asleep at the time of the murder. That's not at all acceptable."
"Yes, Captain, but I don't think beating a confession out of her with her lawyer standing there would have held up in court."
Gates looked like she was going to say something, but turned to some reports on her desk. Kate left.
"Anything?" She asked Ryan and Espo who were sitting by her desk with Castle.
"We checked on Carolyn Brown and George Gordon and both are squeaky clean. Brown is getting her tuition paid by Hobbes and got a small allowance from her mom. No obvious financial motive for killing her mom."
"Everyone says she got along great with her mom and apparently her mom really was happy she was marrying Gordon." Ryan added.
"Gordon did well in the Navy and is on the GI Bill for tuition now. No red flags there. He's going to be in debt from student loans by the time he's an MD, but he's already got a couple of nibbles from research institutes that'd like to hire him. He's studying to be an oncologist and cancer docs make good money."
Kate thought about Josh.
"Any chance he'd join Doctors Without Borders or something similar? They don't make the big bucks."
Espo shook his head.
"He was deployed to Afghanistan. According to his friends, he never wanted to go anyplace that lacked indoor plumbing or fast food outlets after that."
"What do we have on Lisa Kopanski, our last suspect?"
"No record. She owns her own hi tech company based in a campus out in Long Island. She's rich. Not Jack Hobbes rich. More like Rick Castle rich." Ryan said, then added. "She has an apartment in her office complex."
"I just hope everyone was having a wild, all night party." Kate said. "I'm tired of all the people who claim to have been sound asleep during the murder."
"Does Gates know your doing work on our case and not the murder of "The Axe"?" Castle asked.
"No, but all we're doing now is sitting here hoping someone recognizes a guy that looks like maybe a million guys in New York."
They called and made an appointment to interview Ms. Kopanksi the next day. Since Kate had two days off and his Hamptons place wasn't too far away, Rick suggested they stay there for two days.
The headquarters of K Squared, Lisa Kopanski's company was based in a large open loft, surrounded on three sides by floor to ceiling windows, with desks, tables and chairs scattered around seemingly randomly. There were posters on the wall covering everything from Grumpy Cat to a copy of Picasso's Guernica. Ms. Kopanski met them at the door.
She was short and slender, with short brown hair and little or no makeup. Castle thought at best she might be called cute.
"Hi. I'm Lisa Kopanski. I suggest we go into my office. I don't use it that much since I prefer to be out here on the floor with my people."
As they walked to her office, both Rick and Kate noticed that the twenty or so people there were all women.
"Do you know what my problem is, Detective Beckett?" Kopanski asked once they were in her office.
Kate liked to control the questioning, but sometimes people slipped up and made damaging admissions if you just let them talk enough.
"No. What is your problem, Ms. Kopanski?"
"I don't have a cock."
That surprised Kate, and Rick.
"I beg your pardon?"
"A cock. That thing between your partner's legs. I'm not trying to imply that you know anything about his cock in particular, but you know what I'm talking about."
"I do. What does this have to do with anything?"
Neither Kate or Rick had any idea where this conversation was headed.
"The whole hi tech industry is run by PWCs. People with cocks. A bunch of male chauvinist pigs whose social development ended when they couldn't get laid in college. Some people refer to them as over aged frat boys, but most of them couldn't get into a college fraternity except those filled with nerds and geeks."
"I still don't see…" Kate began.
"I'm smart. Very smart. My IQ tests between 170 and 180. I'm well educated. My bachelors and masters degrees are from MIT and my PhD is from Cal Tech. I did post doctoral work at both NASA and the Jet Propulsion Lab. I own a company that does over three hundred million dollars in business every year."
"I'm also very interested in space and putting a research station on the Moon. I suggested to Jack Hobbes that I could be of great help in his project. Larry Singh, his chief engineer for the project giggled and said, "A chick?" Hobbes didn't giggle, but he made it clear that space, the final frontier, would be explored by PWCs and not by chicks. I've run across that crap since I was in middle school and a teacher suggested that I shouldn't take part in the school science fair since I'd just be disappointed. I entered and I won and all the boys hated me."
She stared at Kate for a moment.
"I'm sure you've run across the same thing, Detective. You're beautiful so I imagine a lot of people tried to take advantage of you and attributed anything you did to your sex appeal."
Kate nodded.
"That's correct, but I've also had a number of men help me because they saw I had talent and they made sure that anyone who thought I got ahead because I was sleeping with anyone got corrected at once. Not everyone is like the men you spoke about."
"But enough of them are." Kopanski added.
"Can you tell us where you were on Tuesday morning between say four AM and six?"
"Right here. And about dozen of my people can vouch for that, as well as the people I was talking with online."
"You were up that early?" Castle asked.
"It's not early everywhere, Mr. Castle. I have decided that space won't be explored solely by PWCs. I plan to land a two ton automated research station near the Moon's south pole in three years. We're working on the station here, but we need a launch vehicle. I've been dealing with both the Japanese Space Agency and the European Space Agency. I was talking to the Japanese. The time difference between here and Tokyo is thirteen hours. When it's four AM here, it's five PM in Tokyo. I got on the phone at two AM here and got off at about seven AM. You can check with my people and with the Japanese. I have their number."
Kate checked with the staff and they all corroborated Lisa Kopanski's story.
"Tell you what. Why don't we drive out to the place and we can use my satellite phone to call the Japanese? I see she gave us a satellite phone number. And we can have lunch."
"Castle, its one in the afternoon here so it'll be two in the morning in Tokyo. I don't think some hardworking Japanese scientist will appreciate getting up that early for a phone call."
"Okay, just lunch then. It'll be quicker."
Kate agreed.
Once at the Hamptons house, Castle went to the refrigerator.
"How about some handmade by Richard Castle tuna salad sandwiches, with some nice chocolate covered potato chips and some freshly squeezed lemonade?"
"Sounds good." Kate said, then walked to the back of the kitchen and looked out at the water.
"Is something wrong?" Rick asked.
"No. Not really. It's just that this is kind of overwhelming. I'm staying for two days at a mansion in the Hamptons, if I need to run into town for something I'll borrow your top of the line Mercedes, and if you don't try to buy me some diamond jewelry, you'll find something to splurge on for me."
"Like a gourmet tuna salad sandwich?"
Kate grinned.
"Rick, I've always paid my own way. I'm just not used to being pampered like this. It just feels…odd."
"Okay, so you pay your own way. Consider this. Your mother was murdered when you were nineteen, you dropped out of Stanford to become a cop and your dad was drunk for some five years until he finally got sober. In the meantime, you work as a cop, one of the most stressful jobs there is, and then you become a homicide detective, which is even more stressful. Oh, and you get shot, tossed off a roof and almost blown up a couple of times. Do you know what that is?"
"Bad luck?"
"Bad karma. And now you get good karma for all you've had to put up with. Call what happened to you since you were nineteen paying your dues. Now you get the reward for all that. And, speaking of rewards, here's your lunch. And I intend to wear you down, Detective Beckett. One day when I hand you your gourmet tuna salad sandwich, you'll glare at me and say, "Why did it take so long to make?"
Kate laughed and took the plate with her lunch on it.
They had just finished lunch when Kate's phone rang.
TBC