Sharpe slides the barred door closed with a loud metallic clank and clips her keys to her handcuffs back onto her beltloop. "You'll be transferred tomorrow."
Rick looks over his shoulder as he slowly paces deeper into the holding cell. "Can't wait to get on that paperwork, I bet." He smirks and spins around with a flourish.
"Just so you know," Sharpe says in her scratchy voice, taking a step forward and boring her eyes into him, "she wasn't the best." Rick lets her comment roll over him. It's in an attempt to lift herself up more than it is an attempt to push her down, a petty attempt at that to blame her shortcomings on the accomplishments of another. "You want to know why?"
"I'm sorry, Detective Sharpe," he says with a smirk and sits down with a breath of relief once he's off his feet and leans back against the wall, "but the position of my muse has already been filled." He says with a smile and crosses his arms. "But I appreciate your interest."
"It's because she quit." Samantha hisses through the bars at him. "That's why she'll never be the best."
He let's the detective turn and march for the hallway into holding before speaking up in a loud enough tone to catch her attention. "You read Shakespeare, Detective?" Sharpe skids her heel into the linoleum just as she turns outside the entryway into holding and looks back over to him. "Truth is a dog we must to kennel. It must be whipped out, while Lady Brach may sit by the fire and stink."
Samantha, angry and tired of his mind games, shrugs her shoulders and tosses her hands out as she turns back to him. "What's that supposed to mean?"
Rick grins to himself. He was hoping she's be smart enough to see the symbolism, even as she's glaring at him while he's behind bars. Maybe she does. Honesty isn't an admired virtue, after all. "King Lear... you should give it a read sometime, Detective."
Without another sound, Samantha turns back down the hallway and marches back toward her desk, reaching behind her back to put her handcuffs back into their holster. Her new fellow detectives are already at her desk, standing in front of the white board, waiting for her. They take orders, but she knows it will take time for them to adjust. She knows they can smell the fed on her from her old life.
"Well?" Esposito asks her as she moves around the other side of her desk and opens a drawer to pull out a form.
Sharpe shrugs her shoulders as she's pulling herself up to her desk. "Well what?" She asks, not looking for an answer as she reaches into her black square pencil cup to grab a pen. "He's in holding, isn't he?"
"Did he confess? What did he say?" Ryan pushes her and comes to a stop in front of her desk.
Sharpe doesn't look up from the form she's filling out. She knew this case would cause internal strife. He's not a cop, so she didn't think they'd treat him as one of their own as much as they have been. She's surprised. "He said all the usual things murderers say. That he didn't commit the murder, that he doesn't know how the evidence got there, that he's never seen the guy before. What more do you want?"
Esposito moves slowly around her desk to stand next to Ryan and leans over, pressing his knuckles into her desk. She moves her eyes up to look at where his hand is, but not up to him. "Richard Castle," Esposito starts in a low tone, "is not a murderer. Now, get that-" Esposito's hand raises up off her desk and knocks the small toy over that sits next to her monitor and she feels her already weakened restrained break, "through your thick skull!"
Sharpe's hand quickly grabs the small rubber doll and jumps to her feet, staring coldly up at both of them. "He shot a man three times in cold blood, Esposito." Sharpe says in her underwhelming, scratchy voice, trying to control the inferno igniting in her system as she clamps down onto the doll in her hand, her shoulders back and her back straight. "That makes him a murderer. He'll be transferred tomorrow and I'd like to get back to filling out the paperwork I need to request him be labeled as a flight risk so please, step away from my desk."
It's the first thing Kate hears and her already wrenched heart is squeezed again. "You want him kept behind bars until a trail?!"
All eyes in the bullpen swing around to the women standing behind the barricade between the bullpen and the elevator. She's still in her outfit she wore on her date with him, a night that will be with her forever in a way she never wanted. She can see the same detective that arrested him stand at her old desk, looking over her shoulder to her with a straight back and rolled shoulders, in creased slacks and a pale blue, long-sleeved dress shirt with her blonde ponytail hung low.
"Beckett," Ryan says as he starts around Sharpe's desk to meet her halfway through the bullpen.
"Where is he?" Kate orders.
"Beckett, come on," Esposito tries to calm her down as he comes to stand next to Ryan.
"Where is he, Espo? I want to see him."
Kate can feel her replacements eyes bore into her from her right but pays the glare no mind as she hears the distinct squeal of the wheels from her old chair scrape across the linoleum floor. "Beckett, you know we can't let you do that." Esposito says.
"Why didn't you guys call me earlier?" Kate asks angrily. "You arrested my partner for murder, so you must have been investigating him. Why didn't you call us?"
"Beckett," Ryan says and gets her direct attention by taking a small step forward. "Believe me, we wanted to call you the instant we got the hit back on our victim, but Gates put us under orders to keep it internal and she's been breathing down our necks all day."
"What the hell are you talking about, Ryan?" Kate asks him angrily, raising her voice over Ryan's cautious and hushed tone.
"Hey," Esposito says in a soft voice and turns, "come on." Esposito taps her arm and nods his head over to the open door of the conference room.
Kate lets out a shaky breath and moves to follow Esposito into the conference room. Chancing a glance, maybe to catch a glimpse of him somewhere, she looks over her shoulder to the other side of the precinct and over to the door that leads to holding. Ryan reaches over and takes the file from Sharpe's desk and then into the conference room, closing the door shut behind him.
"Now, what the hell is going on here, guys?" Kate orders, putting a hand on the back of her waist and pacing through the conference room as Ryan and Esposito take seats on opposite sides of the table that's strewn with evidence bags and photos, leaving a seat open at the head of the table for her that she's not interested in taking.
"Beckett," Esposito tries, leaning forward on the table, "come on, sit down."
She would argue with him, order him to just tell her, be her old bossy self ordering her junior detectives to follow her marching orders as she was allowed to what seems like a whole lifetime ago, but in reality was just a few days ago. But when she turns to do so, she catches a look in their eyes; a solemn, heavy look. With a breath matching their expressions, she yanks the chair at the head of the table out and sits down. "What?"
Ryan looks over to Espo for a moment before he opens the file in front of him. "This morning, we caught a case in midtown." He starts, organizing the papers in the file to find the picture of Maddox's body. "Male, mid-thirties, three gunshot wounds to the chest and head."
Ryan slides a picture in front of her and the first thing Kate notices about the body is the attire. They're not normal street clothes. The man is wearing all black, cargo, almost paramilitary attire. Combat boots, dark cargo pants, a wool shirt, and a black cargo jacket. She knows everyday military surplus and high-end government issue when she sees it.
"First thing I noticed," Espo starts and leans over the table to point at the body in the photo, "were the gunshots." Kate looks at him for clarification. "A perfectly executed Mozambique drill." Kate pinches her brow in confusion and looks back down to the picture. "Double tap to the torso and one to the head. It's a well-known drill used by paramilitary to fully take down a target."
"So, the killer's military." Kate says, shrugging her shoulders.
"Or..." Ryan hesitates, "he just knows the move and is a very good shot." Kate's voice cracks as she shakes her head. Derrick Storm used that move in Storm Season at the end of the book. "But what set off alarm bells," Ryan continues, "was this."
Ryan takes a smaller evidence bag from the case file in front of him and slowly slides it in front of her. The small, very worn, wallet-sized picture of her, spattered with droplets of blood drains all life from her body. She even knows where he took this picture. "This was found on the body." Esposito says.
Her heart comes back, frantic and wild in the knot of her throat. "Wha... it..."
"Do you recognize this?" Ryan asks her.
"U-umm..." She tries, attempting her hardest to shore up her emotional defenses, "Westlake... Damien Westlake. After Castle had him arrested, we went for a walk to make sure he was alright. H-he... um... he saw this piece of graffiti that looked like some cartoon bear so he pulled out his phone and took a picture of it. We bantered for a bit and that's when he took... when he took this." She says, tapping her weak, numb fingers down against the evidence bag.
With a shaky breath, Ryan nods sadly. "We wanted to say it was some weird coincidence but... when Lanie got back to us on the victim's DNA..."
When Ryan doesn't continue and lets the words fall, Kate looks up from the picture of her. "What?"
"Beckett," Espo starts and Kate looks over, "the DNA was a match to the DNA we pulled off the rifle that shot you three months ago."
Everything in her stops in that moment, falling away and her entire self becomes a numb shell. The only thing she can physically feel are her scars, making themselves known by burning just as they started to the night before when she was in his arms. She wants him back. She wants him to hold her. "You're saying that..." She starts quietly.
Ryan nods at her. "The victim was the same guy that shot you."
"And... you think that... that Castle..."
"Beckett, we would have called you in on this the moment we found out." Esposito says. "But the prints from the picture came back too soon. And once Castle was at the top of the suspect list, Gates nailed out feet to the floor. Kept us here all day trying to ID the victim while she sent Sharpe out to search Castle's car."
"That's where she found this," Ryan starts and pulls out a larger bag from the box sitting on the table and sets it in front of her. It's a beige, cloth covered book. It's open and she can see that the pages have been hollowed out. "It was in his trunk and she found this," Ryan says, pulling out another bag that holds a small Walther pistol, "inside."
Kate looks to the gun and can't believe her eyes. She can't believe her heart, her mind, her thoughts, her emotions. She can't believe anything. This can't be him. "A Walther PPK, that's..." she starts, tugging at the corner of the evidence bag that holds the gun with her weak hand, "that's the gun Derrick Storm used in Storm Season."
"Ballistics match, Beckett." Espo confirms.
The breath is pulled out of her and she can't breathe. The man she loves wouldn't do this. The man she loves, the man that won her heart, the man that she took to bed the night before wouldn't do this. She didn't feel the hands of a killer on her last night. She didn't look into the eyes of a killer as she danced with him in the flickering candle light just hours earlier.
She hears Ryan turn some more pages before he starts again. "Lanie placed the time of death between four and six AM and... uh..."
"Beckett, you know we hate to do this but... we have to know." Espo says for him.
"Were you with him at the time?" Ryan finally asks.
"Umm..." Kate tries, not wanting to tell them the truth. "We were asleep in bed but... h-he..." She tries her hardest to get the words out.
She hears Esposito let out a hard sigh and adjust himself in his chair. "Listen, Beckett, I'm sorry, but... you're gonna have to tell us everything."
Ryan is coming behind him to justify it. "You know we wouldn't ask if there was any other way. But if you can give us a solid alibi for him, we can have him walk out of here with you."
Kate shakes her head, not even wanting to admit it to herself. "Last night, around eleven thirty... I couldn't sleep so I went down to Castle's bedroom to sleep down there. He was awake so we talked for a bit and..." she really doesn't want to tell them, to taint the memory with all of this. The didn't want to poison the most memorable night of her life with the present any more than it already was by the past. "I took us to bed and we..." she's out of breath, but the words still fall out of her mouth, "we made love."
Her eyes quickly turn down to the table.
"And we fell asleep just before two o'clock."
Ryan is looking up from his notepad in surprise. "Two hours?"
The table jumps and raddles suddenly and Ryan's face is distorting in pain as he leans over the table and reaches down. Esposito doesn't look at his partner and silently takes his foot back, sliding it back to his side of the table, letting her continue.
She doesn't want to know this is true. She doesn't want this to be true. "When I woke up, it was just after eight o'clock and he was gone. He'd left a note saying he had an errand to run and he got back to the loft around nine thirty."
"Did he say anything out of the ordinary?" Espo asks. "Was he acting strange the night before?"
"He was acting a little more seriously than he normally is but... when he got back he was... he was his normal self, not worried about anything. He even made a joke."
"We pushed as hard as we could, Beckett," Ryan says and takes another paper out of the file and shows it to her, "but when the lab report came back and found Castle's DNA at the scene... Gates ordered the arrest."
Kate feels so weak. She didn't even feel this weak and useless, this paralyzed, when she was still in the hospital recovering. She didn't feel this paralysed since before she heard Sherlock's voicebox for the first time. This is just so much worse than any of it. "Did you talk to him?"
"Sharpe got the lead on this, so Gates gave her the interrogation." Ryan says. "According to her, he's maintaining his innocence."
Kate nods and lets out a shuttering breath. "I want to talk to him."
"Beckett-" Espo tries.
"I want to talk to him, Javi!" She cries softly, tears burning in her eyes. "He'll tell me the truth. If he really did this, he'll tell me." Kate argues, looking down from Esposito and to the picture of her in front of her, spattered with blood. "If my partner really did this," She says, her vision of the picture blurred by tears, "I'm the only one that can get him to tell the truth."
He's closed his eyes and is simply waiting for now. There's nothing more he can do about the situation as it is. He knows who's behind it and if his instincts are right, he'll be making an appearance before he's transferred out of here tomorrow. All he can do now is wait.
"Hi," a soft, angelic voice calls from the other side of the bars.
His eyes pop open and sees her standing there, the same disposition of fear and anxiety that pulled at her features the night before. "Kate!" He says in an illuminated tone and strides to his feet, rushing to the bars. "You're here."
She nods and looks away from him. "Are you okay?" She says in a tightly-wound tone. She looks like she's been crying. It kills the joy that lit up his system when he saw her.
He nods and decides on an approach that will break the tension forming. "Kate, I have a terrible confession to make." He says seriously, earning her scared, tear-laden eyes. "I've seen Forbidden Planet before."
That earns him a small chuckle despite herself as she cranes her neck, a smile wanting to force its way onto her face as she hides behind her hair. "I know already, Alexis told me." She tells him, looking back up to him as he grabs onto the bars.
"Well, can you ground her for me then?"
She breathes tightly and looks away from him. "I talked to the boys." She says finally, her heart stabbing her. His features harden at her new shift in tone. "They showed me everything."
Rick nods and cranes his neck, letting out a long sigh. "And you believed it." She doesn't want to say yes, but she can't say no. "And now, you're here for a real confession... because lord knows the blondie out there couldn't get one out of me."
"Rick," she starts painfully, looking up to him again with her eyes burning. "I don't want a confession. I want the truth." Rick looks through the bars, her hands pressing into the steal wanting to reach for her. "Look me in the eye and tell me you didn't do this, Rick."
Rick feels his chest tighten and the image of that man flashes in his mind for the first time. "Kate..." he starts in a low hush, sliding his hands down the bars. His eyes turn down away from her as he tries to check his anger. But he's looking back up, straight into her eyes before he can. "That man put a bullet through the heart of the woman I love."
Her heart shutters violently in her chest and a sob wracks at the bottom of her throat. Her eyes flood over with tears as his face darkens. But it's not from the first of his words. Even through her burning tear, she keeps looking him straight in the eye.
"He got far better than he deserved. I'm not about to waste any of my energy pretending that I'm sorry he's dead just for some poor imitation of the detective I fell for." Kate shakes her head in a small motion of denial, his three words of feeling still all she can think about. Rick looks away from her for only a second before looking back up to her with a softness in his expression. "But I only got to have you for one night." He says, his shoulders sagging low. "Which is about a million less than what I was aiming for."
Kate lets the hot tears run down her face as she shuffles forward toward the bars, never breaking eye contact.
"Why the hell... would I risk all that for something as petty as revenge?" He asks her, looking her straight in her teary hazel eyes. She feels a smile lift the edges of her lips as she takes another shuffling step toward the bars, now close enough to reach up and grab onto his hands holding onto them. "I'm too selfish with you to settle for only getting to have you on conjugal visits day."
"Did..." she says softly, looking as deeply into his eyes as she can, "did you just say you love me?"
Rick cranes his neck and resigns to his fate. He didn't want this to be the place to tell her. "You wanted to know what happened when you got shot?" Kate's tears turn large as they hang from her lashes. "Well... now you know."
Kate has to swallow a sob as she pulls at the bars, wanting them to come apart. "You told me you loved me that day?" She pets the back of his fingers with her thumb as she looks him in the eye. "You didn't do this." Rick smiles and opens his hands, taking her hands in his over the bars. "What's going on here, Rick?" She asks, her voice soiled with emotion. "Why are they coming after you?"
Rick sighs heavily. "There's something I forgot to mention about the missing branch of my family tree."
Kate's brow pinches. "You mean your dad?"
"He's the one that gave me the book they found the gun in, Kate. He's the one that was with me the last time I had that picture of you. Those things went missing from my bag before I left with you from Ireland. I didn't pay any attention to it because I had you back." He says, petting the back of her hand with his fingers. "He could have easily planted my DNA from any number of things from my luggage."
"Rick, how could he know who to go after?" Kate asks.
"Kate, I told him everything." He says seriously. "He met with me for four days and I told him everything about us. I thought he was getting me to talk because he cared about me, but now-"
"He just wanted to see what you knew." Kate finishes for him.
"Kate," Rick calls for her and squeezes her hands, "you can't investigate this."
"Rick, I can't just sit here and do nothing!" She softly cries, pulling herself closer to the bars.
"That's the best thing you can do right now, Kate. If this man is making himself involved in that case, it's about to get way too dangerous and I can't jump in front of any bullets for you from behind these stupid bars." Kate wants to wrap her arms around his neck, she wants to fling herself at him like she did on that hill in Doolin, she wants to kiss him hard like she did the night before. "Promise me you'll go to the loft and stay there."
Kate cranes her neck and draws in a congested breath. "You want me to just go home while the man I love is going to jail for a murder he didn't commit?"
Rick's hands tighten around bars angrily, hating them for being here. "I'll be fine."
"How can you have hope at a time like this, Rick?" Kate asks, shaking her head sadly.
Rick smiles and reaches through the bars, petting her cheek. "I don't need hope, Kate."