"Detectives, you are wearing my patience thin." Gates hisses from behind her desk, her three detectives in her office.
Ryan in front leans over Gates' desk with his knuckles on the surface, Esposito by his side and leaning back confidently. Samantha Sharpe, the newest addition to the team, is behind the three at a military-esque at ease position with her hands clasped behind her back and her feet planted shoulder-width apart.
"Sir, with all due respect," Ryan says in a hurried voice, "you can not send Sharpe in there."
Captain Gates cold look cuts straight into Ryan as he becomes the focus of her silent rage, quickly boiling over. "And why is that?" She demands, crossing her arms, shifting her weight onto one foot and narrowing her eyes angrily.
"Sir," Espo chimes in with a calm, more collected tone than his partner, "to put it plainly, she doesn't know Castle."
Sharpe looks upon the two of them with the same, unchanging, cold exterior, withholding showing them judgment and maintaining her serious posture, waiting for either her orders or the correct place to insert herself.
Ryan starts behind his partner just as the words finish from his mouth. "Castle has been with Beckett on dozens of interrogations."
Espo calmly continues for Ryan, having his back. "He's smart, he knows how the game is played, Sir."
"You send her in there," Ryan agitates Gates, only making the situation worse, "and I'm telling you, he's going to run circles around her!"
"And just what," Gates snaps loudly at Ryan, leaning over her desk to send her detective back a few steps, "do you propose I do then, Detective Ryan?"
"Send us in there." Esposito says for him.
Gates sends a shocked brow up at Esposito and a slack jaw, flabbergasted. "Completely out of the question."
"Sir, Castle's our friend." Ryan continues. "He trusts us."
"We know what Beckett means to him, Sir. If he really did this, we're the only ones that can get him to tell us."
"I can do it." Samantha says in a quiet but confident tone, making herself known for the first time since she was ordered into the captain's office. She doesn't flinch as all eyes swing over and bore into her. "With all due respect to my colleagues, Sir," Sharpe says and takes a large step forward to stand next to Ryan, unclasping her hands from behind her back, "I grew up around people like him. My mother was a live-in maid for a wealthy family just outside of Boston. I know how people like him operate."
"Hey, you don't know Castle!" Esposito snaps, turning toward her and pointing his arm at her but is blocked by Ryan pushing him back.
"That's enough!" Gates yells, bringing the three of them to a dead silence.
Sharpe just moves her eyes down to the floor as Esposito takes a few slow paces away in the opposite direction, leaving Ryan to stand still and put a hand on his hip and look down shamefully.
"Detective Sharpe, you're on interrogation, room A." Gates orders, her eyes remaining on Ryan and Esposito as Sharpe gives her captain a single nod and quickly turns toward the door and moves in long, quick strides. "Sharpe."
"Yes, Sir?" Samantha stops on a heel.
"Get a confession if you can. The evidence is solid enough but I'd rather not have to take this to court."
"Understood, Sir." She responds and quickly moves out the door.
The captain waits until the newest detective grabs the case file from her desk and is moving to the other side of the bullpen before she lets out an impatient sigh. Ryan and Esposito are simply looking down to the floor, anywhere but at their boss, waiting to get lectured. They both know it's coming. "I was very hesitant to let you two on this investigation when the victim's DNA came back in our system and right now, you two are showing me I was right."
Ryan tries in a soft voice, "Captain, we-"
"Not," Gates stops him, "another word, Detective Ryan." Ryan complies and shuts his mouth, clasping his hands in front of him and feeling his partner shuffle closer to him, still having his back. "I understand this is a personal case for both of you, on more than one level. But here's the bottom line. Someone was murdered on our watch and our job is to bring the murderer to justice." Gates raises her brow up high and leans over her desk, pressing her knuckles deep into the wood. "I don't care who it is. We don't get to bend the rules just because they become hard to enforce, do you understand me?"
"Yes, Sir." Ryan says quietly.
"Understood, Sir." Espo replies with his partner.
"Now," Gates continues, putting her glasses back on, hanging from the bridge of her nose and sits down, "since you two are so worried about questioning one of your friends, you can bring in Ms. Beckett for questioning." Gates ends the conversation by flipping open a file on her desk and grabbing a pen. "Go."
Tapping his index fingers together in a slow tempo, the only thing he's mindful of is his breathing. He's glad he actually took the time to read that book his father gave him before it disappeared. If he hadn't taken it to heart, he might be in a far worse place. But sitting here in handcuffs, in a very familiar interrogation room, in a very familiar chair, he's calm. He has to be.
He knows he didn't kill anyone. At this point, there's not much more he can do about the situation.
The doorknob turning and the door flinging open isn't enough to make him shift his attention, but the tall, slender blonde, now stripped of her jacket and wearing very little in the way of makeup, draws his eyes, but not a smile. "Mr. Castle."
He perks a small nihilistic smirk her way as she makes for the chair across from him. "You're going to have to forgive me if I'm not as cordial as you might have heard."
The detective slides the case file to the center of the table and sits down, leaning forward and folding her hands together. "Word around the precinct is you're quite the charmer." She says in a soft, almost scratchy voice. It's an underwhelming voice and he can't tell if she's using this tone on purpose or not.
"I can be," he starts, lifting only one side of his brow to her, "but I'm just used to being in the room with a brunette, that's all."
Sharpe shrugs her shoulders and throws herself back in her chair while crossing her arms. "You don't like blondes?"
"Out of all the questions you're going to be asking me," Rick starts calmly, "trust me, detective, that's the one you don't want me to answer honestly."
The detective confident purse of her lips fades and she leans forward again, flipping the file open. "Where were you between four and six AM this morning?"
Rick flares his smirk at one side of his lips. "I see you've already picked up on the fact that building a rapport with me will be useless, seeing as you're jumping straight to establishing an alibi. You must not be new at this."
"Answer the question, Mr. Castle." Sharpe says pointedly, her voice still soft and underwhelming, but with an undertone of confidence and seriousness.
"I was asleep, in bed." Rick answers honestly.
"Can anyone confirm that?" Sharpe asks, pinching her brow.
"Yes, but I doubt you'll get anything out of her." He says with a faraway smirk. "Believe me, she's never been one to kiss and tell. Now," Rick says and takes a pause, moving to sit up straight in his chair, "why don't we just skip on ahead to the dead body?"
Sharpe stares at him with a pinched brow of frustration and nods once at him. She grabs the first photo from the file and flips it over to his side of the table. "A man named Cole Maddox was found in the stairwell of a parking garage in midtown this morning." Sharpe flicks the photo over to him and Rick looks it over. The man is younger, maybe around mid-thirties, healthy, dressed in all black with a single small bullet hole to the head and two bullet holes to the chest. The body is positioned to sit upright on the floor next to the doorway.
Rick takes only a few seconds before speaking. "This is usually the point in the interrogation where the suspect says something like... I've never seen this man before in my life, or something contrived like that."
"He was shot three times with a small caliber round, twice in the chest with a grouping of less than an inch and a half and once in the head... perfectly between the eyes." Sharpe says, pointing her nail to man's head in the photo. Sharpe moves her head down to catch Rick's eyes and Rick gives them to her, dead. "From what I hear, you're a pretty good shot."
Rick chuckles softly. "You're around me long enough, you'll learn one thing. Never attribute to skill what you can attribute to luck."
"And I suppose," Sharpe says, taking the photo back and putting a DNA report in front of him, "that it was luck that the DNA of Cole Maddox was already flagged in the system three months ago."
Rick's heart skips a beat, but he retains it all underneath, showing very little in the way of wavering emotion.
"The DNA was pulled off of a rifle left at the scene of a shooting that almost took the life of a former homicide detective." Sharpe continues in her underwhelming, scratchy voice. After a pause, letting him stew, she grabs a small evidence bag from the file and slides the bag forward. What's inside drains his blood of life. Splattered with droplets of blood and creased in the top left-hand corner, is his wallet-sized picture of her. "Your partner, Kate Beckett."
His eyes can't leave the picture. The last time he saw this picture, he was stuffing it back into his pocket after Jack had... Jack.
Rick tenses his jaw and shuts off his brain of thought.
"This picture," Sharpe continues after another long pause, tapping her finger down against the evidence bag, "was left on the body... with your fingerprints on it."
Rick looks up to Sharpe with a calm smirk. He can tell exactly what Jack meant now. He didn't get any of what he's tapping into from his mother. "Of course, it has my fingerprints on it. It's my picture." He tells the truth.
"Then maybe you could explain how it ended up on a dead body." Sharpe says, keeping her finger pressed down to the evidence bag.
"Not sure. It's sort of like sunglasses, you know what I mean? You always seem to lose the ones you like the most." He shrugs his shoulders in a small motion.
"Then maybe," she takes the picture of his partner back and puts another photo in front of him, "you could explain this." She says, pointing at a familiar looking beige cloth-covered book, laying in the bottom of the trunk of a car. He knows the cover of that book.
He looks back up to her, still unchanging from his calm smirk. "Marcus Aurelius, you should give it a read sometime."
"So, it is yours." Sharpe only half asks.
"Sort of." Rick says honestly. "I got it as a gift when I was in Rome."
"Then why was it purchased," Sharpe says, putting down another piece of paper in front of him over the picture of the book, "with a credit card in your name from a bookstore in Brooklyn three months ago?"
Rick takes another pause, thinking up the best explanation. He should have known better. "Practical joke, I guess."
"Funny practical joke, Mr. Castle." Sharpe says, pulling out another file from the file and slapping it down in front of him. The picture is of the book, now with the cover opened. The book shows it's been hollowed out and inside, sits a small handgun. "Especially since it was found in the trunk of your car, with your fingerprints all over it, and it's an exact match to the gun used on our victim."
Rick focuses all his energy on chilling his heart, relaxing his pulse, disciplining his thoughts and emotions.
"Or maybe," Sharpe continues after another pause, just as Beckett would take in this situation, and slides another piece of paper in front of him, "you can explain why your DNA was found on at the crime scene?"
Rick decides the best thing, for now, is to stay silent and look glassy-eyed over at the detective. Her mind is made up. There's nothing he can about it except wait for his chance to put a seed of doubt in her mind.
"Now," Sharpe says while flipping the file closed and refolding her hands in front of her, "what I think happened... is once you knew your partner was safe and on the road to recovery, you decided to get some help from one of those weird connections of yours I keep hearing about. You go traveling for a few months, looking for a way to tie the pieces together, and once you have what you need, you hop back on a plane to New York and you go after the man who shot your partner... and you kill him in cold blood."
"See?" Rick starts with an open smile appearing on his face. "Now that's why Beckett always let me be the storyteller."
Sharpe pinches her brow, purses her lips, and crosses her arms again. "Usually, an innocent person gets pretty angry when they're accused of something they didn't do."
"Is that what you're after?" Rick asks with a grin. "You want me to fly into a blind rage, saying I didn't kill anyone so you can go up in front of a judge and say I have some sort of anger issue? But ask yourself, Detective Sharpe, why would I get angry when I know I didn't kill anyone? Because you say so? I don't know you, Detective Sharpe."
"Angry or not, Mr. Castle," Sharpe tries, uncrossing her arms and pointing to the slew of papers and photos laid out in front of him, "the evidence points to you."
"Here's the reality of the situation, Detective." Castle says calmly and leans forward on his forearms. "You're new here, so I'll break my usual flair for the dramatic and tell it to you straight." He says and takes the smirk off his face, looking the blonde-haired detective straight in the eye. "Your predecessor is the best homicide detective this precinct will ever see."
Rick can see the twinge in the confident air that the detective carried with her.
"Now," Rick continues, drawing a long breath in and looking out the window, out into the bullpen, "the captain probably sent you in here to, I don't know, get under my skin maybe. Throw me for a loop? But the truth is, she would have been better off sending in Ryan and Esposito." He tells her, pointing his handcuffed hands toward the bullpen. "Because them, I trust. They're my friends, they're supposed to have my best interests at heart. So them accusing me of this murder, yes, would have gotten me a bit angry because they're supposed to know me better than that. But you... I don't know. Why would I care if you think I'm a murderer or not? For all I know, Detective, you could have planted all this evidence."
At this point, Sharpe is void of expression and is simply staring at him with a knot in her brow and her stomach. It's a foreign feeling to her.
"And I'm guessing at this point, you can feel just how loose those shoes you're having to fill are on you, so I'll save you the trouble of digging any deeper. If you're waiting for me to say that I'm sorry this man," he says and lifts up the picture of the dead body to her, "is dead, I suggest you get a cushion for that chair. They can get kind of hard on the back. But something tells me you're after a closed case more than you are the truth." Rick says in a low voice and leans back slowly in his chair. "That's what made your predecessor the best."
In a flash, Samantha jumps to her feet, wrenching all the papers and photos from the table and stuffing them into the case file. "You're a real prick, you know that?" She says as she's moving for the door.
Rick grins, "Get to know me a bit more, Detective Sharpe." He says as she reaches the door and pulls it open. Rick looks over his shoulder with a grin. "You'll find I'm actually a lot worse."
Wordlessly, Sharpe turns on her heel, her tight ponytail hitting against the door jam just before she's slamming the door shut.
A/N: Beckett will be in the next chapter. To those concerned over the twist, it's probably not what you think it is. If it is, oh well. C: