Chapter 4

As I've already said, my mother was a lawyer, a civil rights lawyer and a damned good one, too. She was passionate about it; it drove her and to a great extent it made her the person she was.

On 9th January 1999, the day before I was due to head back to Stanford after the Christmas break, we'd arranged to have a family meal. Mom was working but she planned to meet dad and me at the restaurant. We got there early and waited for her to arrive only she was late. The longer we waited, the angrier I became; it was my last night at home, our last family meal and she was putting her work first. Dad and I ordered our food and ate it pretty much in silence; he never did know how deal with my surly teenage self. We finished and there was still no sign of mom. I could tell dad was worried but I was far too self-centred at that age to take much notice of his concern. We headed home and then my world fell apart.

There was a police officer waiting for us, a detective, Detective John Raglan. He told us that my mom was dead. She'd been stabbed and left in an alley in a seemingly random attack. He asked us all the usual questions and took off as quickly as he possibly could, leaving dad and I alone, stunned; there are just too many words I could use to describe our feelings right then. My mom was gone and all my last thoughts of her had been in anger. I'd thought she had put her work before me and all the time she'd been lying dead in some alley so as well as being totally devastated I also had to deal with a massive feeling of guilt.

Dad and I made it through to the funeral relatively unscathed. After the service and the burial we even left the funeral party and headed out to Coney Island where we wandered for miles up and down the shore, reliving all the wonderful memories we had of mom. It was later that everything began to disintegrate.

Naturally I hadn't gone back to Stanford before the funeral but as things turned out I never returned. My dad hit the bottle. As normally happens, it started out with him staying too long at a bar and drinking a bit too much once or twice. Then it progressed to becoming a regular occurrence and I was the one called out in the early hours of the morning because he'd passed out. As the local bartenders began to realise what was happening and started to refuse to serve him, he began to stay home and drink himself into oblivion on his own. When it got to the stage that I had to call an ambulance for him because he'd drunk himself into a coma, he promised right there in the hospital when he finally came round, that he'd give up.

He'd stay sober for a few months then something would set him off and he'd be back to square one again. This continued for over five years until finally he stopped for good and I got my dad back. I'd lost my mom and for those five years it felt as though I'd virtually lost my dad as well. It's amazing to think now that I had doubted that he would ever live beyond his mid-fifties and yet, here he is, over thirty years later and he's as healthy as he's ever been in his life.

"Mom, are sure Grandpa's going to be okay with all that coming out?" RJ asked because he'd become quite alarmed by the amount of information his mother was actually giving.

"Don't worry about it. I spoke to him last night and he wants me to tell the whole story. He's long since accepted what happened to him and wants to put it all out there in case it can offer some sort of help and hope to anyone who may be suffering like he did, anyone suffering that crippling sense of loss."

Kate was so proud of the way her father had eventually overcome his addiction, she hoped that some of that pride would also be evident in her son's article.

"Shall we carry on?"

As I said before, I never returned to Stanford but later transferred to NYU. All thoughts of becoming a lawyer were gone, now all I wanted to do was to become a cop because I was just naive enough to believe that, although no-one had been caught and charged over my mom's death, I would be the one to solve the case and bring the killer to justice and until I could do that, I would satisfy myself by bringing justice to other families. I suppose it could be said that I started out on a crusade of sorts and I guess, to a certain extent, that crusade for justice has always been a driving force throughout my career.

Her murder was finally put down to random gang violence; she'd simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. The case went cold and the files were buried away in the depths of the records room. The time I spent pouring over those files took their toll on me and I finally had to accept that I needed help to move forward with my life and escape from the rabbit hole I'd fallen into. It took a while and no small amount of therapy but eventually I managed to put it behind me or so I thought. Then Richard Castle appeared on the scene.

It took him all of about five minutes in my company to realise that there was a story behind my well established facade and, oh boy, did he get close to the truth at the very first attempt. He wanted to know why I was a cop and not a lawyer or some similar profession and figured it was because something had happened in my past, not to me but to someone I cared about, that I'd lost someone close to me. As I said, it was a pretty good initial attempt.

During the first few months we worked together he managed to get the whole story from me; he always did have that ability to draw more information from me than I would ever normally disclose to anyone. Sadly, curiosity got the better of him, not for the only time I might add, and he pushed too far. He managed to persuade Esposito to get my mom's file so that he could see if there was anything he could do to help. I only found that it was Espo who gave him the file many years later but, although I would probably have killed him at the time had I known, by the time I did find out, I was grateful for his intervention.

Anyway Castle showed the file to a friend of his who was able to establish that the ME at the time had done a less than stellar job with the autopsy and that my mom had actually been killed outright by the first stab wound, one executed with expert precision, and that the remaining wounds were merely a smokescreen, intended to simulate a random stabbing. My mom had in fact been the victim of a cold blooded, expert killer.

However, I wasn't prepared to go back down the rabbit hole and instead I threw Castle out of my life but, as you will be very well aware, he didn't stay away for long. It was less than a year before the case reared its head again. This time it was no-one's fault; I didn't go searching for it; it just fell into my lap during a regular murder investigation.

I'd met ME Lanie Parish very early in my career and we'd become firm friends. I'd shown her my mom's file just to see if she could spot anything that might have been missed but she hadn't at that time. However, when the body of Jack Coonan ended up on her autopsy table, she recognised the pattern of stab wounds immediately and called in an expert to confirm her findings. That expert was Castle's friend who agreed with Lanie's conclusion that Coonan had indeed been killed by the same person who had murdered my mother. That person turned out to be Jack Coonan's brother.

Dick Coonan was a killer for hire and a renowned expert in his field but before I had a chance to interrogate him about who he was working for when he killed my mom, I had to put a bullet in him. There was a stand-off at the precinct and he was about to shoot Castle and at that range he'd have killed him for sure. I had no choice. I tried to keep him alive on that precinct floor, hands covered in his blood but all to no avail. He was dead and any chance I had to find out who had ordered the hit on my mother had died with him. It looked like the end of the road but twelve months later, the whole conspiracy began to unravel and I started finally to be able to put the pieces together.

"Do you want a break, mom?"

RJ had noticed that Kate's voice had become much quieter the further she got into the story and he was worried that recalling these events, even though they had happened so long ago now, was taking its toll. But Kate was actually on a roll and was not ready to stop,

"No, I'm fine. Don't worry about me. Maybe I am still emotional about the whole thing but I want to get through it. Then perhaps we can get to the fun stuff," she added with a grin,

"I have had plenty of fun in my life as well, you know."

RJ laughed,

"Yeah, I know and why do I think dad might have a lot to do with that?"

"Ah, you know us too well, son, you know us too well. Come on, let me get back to it before I change my mind."