She spends that night in front of the fire, Alexis at her side and Martha nowhere to be found. The two stare as the flames crackle and pop, licking up the brick and mortar of their enclosure. Neither woman can find something to say, out of hopeful words to offer the other, and the constant dance the flames take is their only comfort, inducing the calm lull they've both fallen into.
"Can I hear it?" Alexis finally asks, her voice devoid of inflection.
"What?" Kate asks quietly, turning her head to meet her eyes.
"The recording Dad left. Will you play it for me? Please?" she requests, shifting on the couch to face Kate more fully.
She sighs, sitting up properly and laying her hand on Alexis' knee. "Okay," she agrees, squeezing as she stands to go get her phone. "It won't be as clear as the original. His phone is in evidence and I just recorded the recording."
"It doesn't matter," Alexis decides, shaking her head. "I just need to hear it." She brings her knees to her chest and hugs them close as Kate sits back down next to her, pressing hip to hip. "I know it won't change anything and I know there's nothing I'll get from it that you didn't…. I just need to hear it."
Kate presses play on her own recording app and the audio plays out for the… she doesn't even know how many times anymore. Each time she listens to it, she thinks that maybe somehow it will be different. He'll make a joke, tell her he'll see her soon, leave a clue to where he's gone… but it plays exactly as it has all along; the fumbling sounds and swears and shouts, his pleas to not come after him, how he swears that he loved her but it wasn't enough... nothing changes.
"I don't understand," Alexis sniffs, looking up from the phone to Kate with a furrowed brow, eyes shiny and redder than her hair. "This isn't him. Nothing about that sounded like Dad. He couldn't… he wouldn't. He'd never. He loved you? Past tense? No way. And even if he didn't love you anymore, saying that loving you wasn't enough doesn't even make sense, unless loving you wasn't enough to keep loving you, and that doesn't make any sense and... None of this makes sense. Dad's a writer and he loved you more than anything. He'd never spit out this bullshit."
"I know, Kiddo," Kate sighs, wrapping and arm around her would-be stepdaughter's shoulders and laying her head on top of the girl's. "Nothing about this is right, and I told you: I'm doing everything I can to get him home to you. You are the thing that he loves more than anything in this world. You are his world, Alexis."
"We both are," she disagrees, wrapping her arms around Kate.
She falls asleep there, half on top of her stepmother, and Kate doesn't have the heart to wake her up so that she herself can go to bed. When she wakes up in the morning Alexis is gone, and she's too eager to learn what Reagan Ford will have to say to go in search of her.
By the time she arrives at the precinct, Ryan is already on his way back from Greenwich. "Ryan just got out of his meeting with Reagan Ford," Esposito informs her, reading off of his phone as soon as she enters the bullpen. "She doesn't know who the man in the fake is, so we're still at a standstill there, but she has an idea of how he got her ID number. He'll explain in detail when he gets back."
The two of them sit at an empty desk against the wall as they wait. Esposito gets in touch with the state troopers, who assure them that they are working diligently on tracing the stolen cars path and will send them everything they have put together as soon as they can.
When Ryan arrives back he comes right over to them, sitting on the desk in front with a file folder in hand. "Here's what I found out," Ryan begins. "There's not a lot I found suspicious about the woman herself, but she was recently pulled over under what she describes as and I agree are suspicious circumstances. On her way home from work a few weeks ago, a middle-aged Caucasian officer got her for going only six over, and let her off with a warning."
"I'm not seeing the suspicion," Kate says.
"I'm getting there. If a pullover for only six over isn't weird enough, the officer was in an unmarked car and was wearing blues and an NYPD badge."
"Okay, that's a little stranger, but I'm still missing it..."
"She doesn't work in the city. She was pulled over in the outskirts of Hartford."
"And there it is," Kate agrees. "A uniformed officer in an unmarked car pulled her over for a nonexistent traffic violation with a badge way out of that jurisdiction."
"Right. But he pulled her over in broad daylight, with plenty of witnesses, and only ran her license before letting her go so she didn't think too much of it after that. However," he said proudly, flipping open his folder, "a search through the records from that part of Connecticut and the city show that no such incident occurred."
"So our mystery "officer" stole her drivers license number."
"Almost definitely. She's agreed to go into the city this afternoon and meet with one of our sketch artists, see if we can't get something close to what the guy looked like."
"Perfect. Thanks Ryan," Kate smiles, squeezing his shoulder as she stands. "You guys are putting everything into this and I can't tell you how much it means to me."
"He's our friend, too, Kate. We'd do anything for Castle, just like we would for you."
"I know," she nods, reaching for Ryan's folder and retreating into the break room before she cries in front of them again.
A few hours later all of their phones ding, alerting them to a mass text containing the artist's rendering of the faux cop. At first glance, there's not much that's familiar about it. Regardless, she ensures it's been sent to businesses in the area of the incident to see if anyone else saw the faux cop and / or knew who he was, and made sure that Tori was on top of facial recognition.
As the program rolls back at home, Kate focuses in on the tiny sketch on her screen. There's nothing notable about it, not really. If she had been asked to describe your average white guy, this would be about it. But as her gaze comes to rest on the eyes, something clicks. "Hey," she stops one of the passing unis. "Do any of your computers happen to have photoshop on them?"
"Not here," he shakes his head, "but my daughter's got it on her laptop if that'll work?"
She hands the officer her phone, nodding gratefully. "Can you send her that photo and ask her to make the eyes brown?"
"Sure thing. She'll text it back to you whenever she's done."
"Thank you."
Luckily, his daughter is quick and on the mark, returning the edited portrait within half an hour. She emails it to herself and prints it out, slapping it up on their board with the other photo she'd printed out while waiting.
"Boss, what are you doing?" Ryan asks tentatively, eyeing her sadly as she looks between the two photos.
"It's the eyes, Ryan. Look at their eyes."
"A lot of people have brown eyes."
"Cold. Calculating. Brilliant. That's how Reagan described them."
"I think you might be taking this part a bit too far," Ryan cautions. "This is something Castle would suggest. Wait until the evidence points us to that."
"Thought you were the one that always saw the reason in his crazy theories," she jokes but nods anyway, pretending to agree until he walks away. As her eyes drift back, first to the rendering and then to their latest photo of Jerry Tyson, her heart clenches and her stomach twists. In her gut, she knows that he's involved. She'll keep it to herself from now on, at least until she has something more solid than an instinct, but she knows.
She wonders if she should mention it to Alexis, but when she arrives home to find that Martha is still MIA, her bed unruffled and her bag missing, she knows there's more important things to focus on. She finds Alexis sitting on the balcony of their bedroom, legs dangling through the rails over the edge, and takes a seat next to her.
"Have you seen your grandmother today?" she asks, sticking one leg through the rails and tucking the other underneath it. "I'm starting to get worried."
"She went back to the city last night. She called me a few hours ago, said she couldn't handle the despair that being in the house that was supposed to bring so much joy brought. She thought she'd come back today, but I guess one night wasn't enough. She said she's sorry for abandoning us, but she thinks it's time to get back to her school before this new reality sucks her dry," she quotes, her index and middle fingers bending in the air.
"We all cope in different ways," Kate says, upon noticing Alexis' offended expression. "Martha did what was best for her, and we can't fault her for that. There's no correct way to handle this."
"You're right, I know… it just hurts that she'd run off like that so soon after… I feel like she's treating this like he's never coming back. Like he's already… gone. But he's not. He's out there somewhere, and you're going to find him, and where will she be? What will he think when he gets home and his own mother has given up on him?"
"She's not giving up, Alexis. She's…. living. She's just trying to keep living like you and I."
"She's doing it wrong," Alexis sighs before changing the subject. "Look, I know it's weird, given that I'm basically an adult and I haven't always had the best attitude for you, but… do you think I could sleep in your room? Would that bother you? I just don't know how to be close to him when he's so far away, and sleeping in my room is starting to feel desolate. Especially now that Gram is gone, too."
"Of course, Alexis. For as long as you need to. The only way we're going to get through this is together."
Alexis lays her head against Kate's shoulder, one arm wrapped around herself and the other clutching Kate's, and the two look out at the sunset, the sky a colorful palette of purple and blue, orange and pink.
"He has to be okay, right?" Alexis's voice is barely there, wind escaping past a cave-in. "We'd know if he wasn't, wouldn't we? We'd have to."
Kate doesn't have an answer for her. She likes to think she'd know if part of her heart suddenly ceased to exist, but she'd known nothing when her mother had died. She hadn't had a fucking clue. "All I know is that, for the time being, the sky is still blue."
Oh, if you're hearing this
I must have made it through
Oh, when the clouds are burned
Open up my window
I see the sky's still blue
-Sky's Still Blue
Andrew Belle