When she reaches the department, she's not quite sure what to expect. Definitely not the flurry of activity that she enters to find, small crowds here and there so dense she doesn't know who to focus on. She spots Ryan in the corner on the phone, jaw clenched, and makes her way over to him. He hangs up when he spots her, holding his hands out in a feeble attempt to… he doesn't know. He can't calm her, can't stop her. Nobody can, not now. "That was Tori," he explains instead, pocketing his cell. "His phone is off or dead and can't be traced. Nothing unusual popped in his records."
"Okay," she nods. "I expected that. What else? Do we have anything else?"
"I dunno, Boss; I was on phone records. Esposito went off to track down traffic reports and footage and Captain Gates is pressuring CS to put out the reports on the cars."
She purses her lips and blows, contemplating her next actions. "Okay. Thanks, Ryan."
"Of course. We're gonna get him, Kate. Only a matter of time."
"Yeah," she agrees half heartedly as Chief Brady appears next to her.
"Where's that scary lady friend of yours? I have the reports she's been demanding."
"The CS reports?" Kate brightens up considerably. "I'll take them." She rips them from his grasp before he can respond and turns on her heel, throwing them onto the nearest empty desk and planting herself behind it.
The first is the report on Castle's car. All signs point to arson as the cause of the fire, but there is a distinct lack of evidence that anybody other than Castle was ever in or near it. Traces of accelerant and identifying scorch marks are accompanied by a painful lack of foreign fingerprints or DNA.
She shuffles those pages aside and dives into the report on the torched SUV found the next town over. At first it seems like the same deal; accelerant and scorching patterns, no fingerprints or DNA. On the fourth page is where it gets interesting. The car had dealer plates, which traced back to a Ford dealership located in Milford, Connecticut. A teenager and her father had taken it for a test drive and when they didn't return, the car had been reported stolen.
Security screenshots show a short, skinny brunette next to a man of average height with a leather jacket and a baseball cap. Both of their faces are conveniently angled away from the camera at all times, a note on the back of the photo reports. "Hey Ryan," she calls out, looking up from the pages.
"What's up?" he asks, appearing behind her.
"Can you get in touch with Connecticut state troopers? I need to track this vehicle's path. Hopefully we can see if they made any stops before coming here and hopefully we can get an angle where we can see their faces enough to identify at least one of them."
"I'll see what I can do."
"Yo Boss," Esposito calls from a doorway across the floor. "We've got one solid image of the driver of the car just before it bypassed our witness: Caucasian male, looks to be anywhere from mid-twenties to forties, it's kind of hard to tell, baseball cap. Can't tell hair color but I don't recognize him. I've already sent it to Tori to run through recognition."
"It's just him in the car?"
"Unless he's got somebody laying down on the floor in the back, it's just him."
"Find out what happened to that girl," she orders, turning back to Ryan. "We need to speak to her."
"Girl?" Esposito asks, lost.
"Yeah, the SUV was stolen from a dealership in Connecticut," Ryan repeats. "By a man and a teenage girl."
"What the fuck," Kate whispers, taking the traffic photo from Esposito to stare the man down. Try as she might, she doesn't recognize him either. "Who are you, you bastard?"
She releases the photograph, letting it float down to the scuffed grey coating of the desk before her. Ryan has left to look into the teenager, Esposito watches her carefully from his doorway. Who knows where Gates has gone off to.
In reality, nobody is paying attention to her but it feels as though she's suffocating under the pressure of everybody's stares. She pushes back forcefully, stopping the chair from crashing onto the concrete floor just in time, and rushes from the room, coming to a stop on the front steps of the building. She pulls her phone out, crouching down and curling into herself, struggling to breathe as she dials.
She freezes when it rings, holding her breath when the click of a connection sounds out. "Hello?" A female voice crackles.
"Who is this?" Kate demands, practically jumping to her feet.
"Well, uh, my name's Lana. Do you know who's phone this is?"
"It's my fiancés," Kate replies, trying to keep her voice calm. "Why do you have it?"
"I found it at the edge of the beach this morning. It's got a pass code, so I couldn't call anybody, but I figured somebody would call it eventually."
"Where are you, Lana? I'll come and get it." She copies down the address and takes off, grabbing Esposito's keys from right out under his nose.
She knocks furiously on the patio doors, as per Lana's instruction, too frantic to even begin to take in the expansive mansion in front of her. It was at least twice the size of Castle's, an extra floor on top of two additional wings, the kind of home she'd only ever seen in movies before coming out here.
A teenager comes cautiously down the stairs, peeking through the glass. "Are you Lana?" Kate asks loudly. "I'm here for the phone."
"Oh," she sees the girl mouth before she hops down the steps to unlock the back door. "Sorry about that. No, I'm Jillian. Lana's my mother; she said you'd be coming by, but she had to run out. Let me go get it." She turns, leaving the door open for Kate to step in, and grabs it off of a shelf on the wall. "Your fiancés not a very popular guy, is he?" She laughs.
"What makes you say that?" Kate asks, grabbing the phone perhaps a little more forcefully than she needs too.
"We've had it all day, you're the only one that's tried to contact him."
"Well he's a little indisposed right now," Kate sighs, trying not to cry as she hits the home button, revealing a candid of herself in the window seat in his office, smiling out at the sunshine. She types in his pass code, 5283, and immediately opens the recent call log and his camera roll to see if anything is out of the ordinary, but she's his last incoming and outgoing calls and the last photos in line are a series of selfies of him in his tux. Dork.
"Whoa, your fiancé is Richard Castle?! I'm so sorry about my comment earlier – I saw his car on the news! I am so sorry."Of course the media had gotten wind of it. God forbid they have a few days without reporters offering their own speculations. All she could hope for now was that it would remain a Hampton's exclusive, at least for a few days.
"You didn't know, Hon. It's all right. Thank you, for holding on to the phone. And please thank your mother. Did she happen to tell you where she found it?"
"Of course I will," she agrees immediately. "I don't know where exactly, but she walks a few miles down that way almost every morning," she says, pointing the right way. "There's a stretch where there aren't any houses or beaches, but just the treeline separating the road? It was somewhere over there, by the trees."
"Thanks, Jill. That's actually really helpful."
"If there's anything else," she trails off as Kate turns to leave. "If you need somebody unknown? Y'know, undercover operations? I'm totally there."
"Thank you for the offer," Kate grins. "But that won't be necessary. Have a good day."
"Yeah, you too," the girl replies sadly. "Good luck."
She returns to Espo's car, locking the doors behind her and sitting back heavily. She stares at the phone for a minute, twisting it this way and that as though, in the right light, at the right angle, it will reveal everything that she is looking for. She unlocks it again, eyes sweeping across the folders on the home screen, before she double clicks the button to show her which apps he'd had open.
Pictures, phone, a recording app? She smashes her finger on the icon, sending it into full screen, and sees that the top audio file was saved barely minutes after they'd hung up with each other.
She stops breathing, choking before she can bring herself to begin again, and throws the engine into drive. She can't do this alone.
The first person she sees when she returns to the precinct is Espo, so she grabs him by the elbow and drags him to the first vacant room she can find, which happens to be the maintenance closet. The phone is thrust into his hand and she turns around to face the wall, hand over her mouth.
"What the hell is going on?" he demands.
"Unlock it," she whispers.
"Well what's the code?" he asks, exasperated, when he slides the bar over to find a code is requires.
"5283," she sighs quietly.
"Come again?"
"5283! It's my name," she makes it easier.
"What is this, Beckett?" he asks quietly, the menu and list of recordings displayed in front of him.
"Press play."
There's a sound of fumbling, at first. A muffled swear and a crack. When his voice is finally heard he sounds worried, almost. Frenzied, definitely. It's like he's being careful, but at the same time can't wait to run. "Beckett. Kate," he sighs reverently. "I… I'm alive. You deserve that, at the very least. Don't look for me; I'll be all right, not that you should care now. Just… Just know that I loved you," his words come more rushed, the sound of a car door slamming in the near-distance. "I know that after everything we've been through, all of our promises, it doesn't seem like much. But I loved you, Kate, so much, and I'm sorry that it wasn't enough." The beginnings of a shout are cut off as the audio cuts off.
"What does this mean?" he asks eventually.
"I dunno," she shrugs, throat tight. "Kind of sounds like he ditched," she admits. "But what were those noises in the beginning? And why would he rush through it so much? He should've had plenty of time. And at the end, who shouted? What were they saying, and why did he cut it off? No, I don't believe he ditched. I'll never accept that."
"I'll get the recording to tech," Esposito offers, hand on the doorknob. "I agree; this isn't right."