Neal sauntered through the elevator doors of the 12th Precinct, his hat half-covering one eye, and looked around for a moment before picking which desk was Kate's, making a beeline for it while keeping a lookout for Detective Ryan.

Neal had been sent to the precinct ahead of the rest of the FBI team after he'd been attempting to 'help' pack up some computers and equipment and had stood on Diana's foot, prompting a string of cursing from Diana and a few choice words from Peter when she dropped the box she had been carrying and it landed with an unpleasant 'crunch', indicating that whatever was inside may have been at least partially destroyed.

Peter had shouted at Neal to get the hell out of the office because he was being nothing but a nuisance, and told him to go and annoy the NYPD.

Neal took him at his word and caught a cab to the station-house, stepping out of it and making his way up to Homicide by doing what he did best- hiding in plain sight and looking like he was exactly where he was supposed to be.

Arriving at Detective Beckett's desk Neal considered his options before choosing to sit in the spinning desk chair, clearly Kate's, settling in to wait for the rest of the team to arrive and killing some time by practicing sleight-of-hand moves with one of Kate's pens.

"Caffrey! What the hell are you doing?" Beckett had approached Neal from the break-room and he spun in the chair when she spoke, making the pen vanish with a flourish and grinning up at her.

"Peter sent me over."

"Alone?" Kate raised an eyebrow at him, knowing that the precinct office was well outside the two-mile radius Neal had been allowed from his home on Riverside Drive.

"Hey, I'm in a police station, how much trouble can I get into. Besides-" He lifted his left foot to rest on the chair Castle had installed next to Beckett's desk, tugging at his pants leg to reveal his tracking anklet. "-he can see exactly where I've been, anyway."

Kate rolled her eyes and nudged his foot off the chair, taking a seat and slapping a case file onto the desk, flicking it open to show Neal some photographs of previous crime scenes that, after Neal's revelation of the multiple forgeries in the apartment that morning, were now suspected to be linked.

When Castle arrived half an hour later bearing two lattes, the case file was sitting, closed, on Kate's desk. Instead, Neal and Kate were standing not far from the desk, heads bent together over Neal's phone as he showed her something on the small screen. Rick walked towards them, frowning, and as he set the coffee down on Beckett's desk the frown deepened - Kate had just laughed at something Neal said... and it was a laugh that Rick had only heard once before.

"What's so funny?" He asked, butting in, deliberately putting himself into their space, trying to get a look at the screen.

Neal looked up at Kate and she shook her head. "Don't show him, he wouldn't get it. He'd probably just get mad."

"Okay." Neal snapped the phone shut and dropped it into his pocket before Rick could object, and stepped around the writer to sit on Castle's chair, lifting one of the latte's out of the cupholder and popping the lid off.

"Hey!" Castle objected - that was his coffee!

"How come you only got two?" Neal asked, taking a sip.

"One for me, one for Beckett." Castle told him, eyes narrowed. "And that one was supposed to be mine."

"Oops. Still want it?" Neal held the coffee out but Rick pulled a face and turned around, searching for Ryan and Esposito, determined to get rid of Neal before the end of the day - who the hell did that guy think he was, wearing that stupid hat, stealing Rick's coffee, making Beckett laugh like that...

Castle didn't even stop to think for a moment about his ex-wife-current-girlfriend and how she might react if she knew just how jealous Rick was of Kate laughing with another (younger) man and he certainly wasn't self-aware enough to recognise that he was jealous... he was convinced that he was just annoyed at Neal for taking his seat and his coffee.

Kate took her seat with a smile, watching Castle storm away towards the break room where the boys were messing around with the espresso machine, wondering what they'd say when Castle told them Neal had stolen his coffee.

She picked up her own latte and reopened the manila folder with the photos from the other murder scenes and began flicking through them, showing Neal the suspected forgeries and making notes as he looked at the artworks with a trained eye, unable to stop grinning as he separated possible forgeries from most-likely genuine artworks by looking at sometimes-grainy crime scene photos that more often than not didn't even capture the entire artwork.

When Peter arrived the photos had again been abandoned, this time spread out on the edge of Kate's desk, some of them separated into two piles (maybe fake and likely real) and the rest sort of scattered over the wooden surface. Neal and Kate were at the other end of the bullpen, standing behind Esposito while Castle and Ryan were a few feet away looking mutinous. They were all watching Javier's computer screen as Peter approached.

"Break in the case?" Peter asked, rounding the desk to see what was on the monitor.

"Security footage from the lobby of today's apartment building. We might have a lead." Esposito explained, pausing the footage on a man exiting the elevator at twenty minutes past midnight- Lanie had narrowed down the time-of-death window to sometime between ten and midnight, so far only four people had exited the building in that window. Three had been identified as other tenants, but the man on the screen was an unknown.

"Great. Where can we set up?" Peter directed the question at Kate and she grinned at him before leading him into an unoccupied office that was being used as a storage space.

"We can clear out these boxes if you need more room-"

"It'll be fine, Kate, we won't take up too much space. Send Caffrey in here, can you?"

"Sure thing." Kate went back to Esposito's desk to find Neal standing a little way apart from the other guys, messing with his phone while the three of them talked among themselves. Beckett couldn't entirely hide her smile when she saw the dark looks being thrown at Neal by first Ryan then Castle, and took a strange kind of pleasure in stepping over to Neal and making sure to address him in a low voice so that the boys couldn't hear her.

She rolled her eyes as they strained to try and listen without appearing too intrusive, and went back to her desk, contemplating just how easy it was to wind them all up.

Neal walked into the makeshift office space with a grin, which soon vanished when Peter glared at him.

"What?" Neal decided that being offended was probably his best defence. To his knowledge he hadn't done anything to warrant a glare like that one... at least, not in the last 48 hours.

"Go apologise to Detective Ryan."

"What?"

"Do it. We have to work together, you two need to play nice."

"Oh, come on, what are we, twelve?"

"Apparently he's still sore about the whole stealing his girlfriend thing. Go apologise and make him feel better about it. Tell him she cheated on you, too."

Neal scoffed at that. "Yeah, right."

"Well make something up and be friends. You and Sara get along okay, now, and she once pointed a loaded gun at you because she thought you were coming to kill her."

Neal had to concede that he had come back into a persons' good graces after doing many things much worse than stealing their girlfriend, so made up his mind to be, perhaps not best buddies, but definitely no longer an enemy of Kevin's by the end of the day.