"So, we're bringing her in to ask how the heck she afforded such an upgrade in housing? Can't we just check her financial records?" Neal asked Kate as she sifted through her manila folder, looking for the contact information of the dead man's widow.
"Espositio's already onto that, but I want to talk to her about her previous robbery, too. Then, of course, there's that guy." Kate gestured towards the unknown man in the lobby surveillance still image.
"Oh, well. Yeah. What about the service entrance? The stairwells?" Neal decided that he liked poking holes in Beckett's theories, not least because she took it with better grace than Peter did.
"Well, that's a consideration. The CSU team is still at the scene."
"Where is Mrs Peterson? She wasn't at the scene, this morning?" Peter asked. He and Neal had arrived a good hour after Beckett and her team; there was a strong possibility that Kate had already spoken to her earlier that day.
"No, damn. From the looks of the report from the uniform who attended the scene first… she called her lawyer before she even called the police after she found her husband dead in their dining room. Brooks, Anderson and James beat us to the scene, even. They barely let her tell us her name before they whipped her away to their offices. Damn, this is going to be harder than I thought."
"That's…" Peter wasn't sure how to categorize that action.
"Odd, yes, but not totally unusual for someone with this much at stake. Realistically, she's our prime suspect."
"So, we'll have to go to her?" Neal lit up at this prospect. He knew that Brooks, Anderson and James' main office was somewhere in Tribeca, and he hadn't been outside the Financial District in what felt like years.
"Detective Beckett and I will be going to speak with her while Diana has a look at the case files from her last fine art robbery. You are going down to help the CSU team decide exactly who it was that forged the painting Mr Peterson was found dead under."
"Castle, you're with Ryan, you two are checking out our case file of the last robbery, and if there's nothing useful there, then you're heading over to the White Collar unit to take a look at what Diana can dig up.
"Oh, come on, can't I ride along and help interview the wife?"
"Castle, a homicide detective and an FBI agent will be intimidating enough. Stick with Ryan, today, okay?"
"Yeah, sure. We're still on for lunch, though."
"Yeah, yeah." Kate dismissed him with a wave of her hand and after a few seconds Rick left the murder board and joined Ryan at the elevator, heading for the records room.
Neal still hadn't left Peter's elbow, and for good reason.
"Can I get a ride to the CSU office?"
"What?" Peter was distracted looking at the murder board.
"Well, if you're heading for Tribeca, you'll have to go right past One Police Plaza to get there."
"Yeah, sure."
"Well? Are we taking the Taurus or what?" Neal had noticed that Peter wasn't quite as prickly as usual; perhaps it was Detective Beckett's calming influence?
"I'll take him, Peter, you take Diana back to the Federal Building so she can find the case notes about that Warhol theft back when Mrs Peterson was still Miss Guillermo." Kate volunteered, and Neal brightened up.
Maybe Detective Beckett wasn't as violently objectionable towards criminals as she made out… she was used to dealing with cold-blooded killers. Perhaps he could convince her that white-collar criminals were easier on the conscience.
"Come on, Caffrey, I want to see how long it takes Lanie to pull you down a peg or two."
Neal picked up his hat and deposited the pens and stapler he had been messing with onto Kate's blotter, caught the toolbox Diana had delivered to him from the FBI office and followed the detective towards the elevator.
They had just stepped into the underground parking garage when Kate's phone began to ring, and Neal tactfully stepped away, giving her the illusion of privacy as she answered the call.
"Prints matched? In the stairwell? Whose? Oh, yeah, you can disregard those… no, he's a CI with the Feds, helping with the case, actually. Yes, I promise. Look, Lanie, I'll be there in half an hour with the man himself, he can explain how his prints got onto the emergency exit door-handle. You met him this morning, the guy with the hat? Yeah, him. No, Lanie, just… no. See you in half an hour."
"Anything I should know?"
"Just that Lanie thinks you contaminated the crime scene. The emergency exit door-handle had been totally wiped clean, except for an almost-perfect set of prints belonging to one Neal Caffrey, an ex-con who spent four years in prison."
"Well, I did take the stairs when I left…"
"Get in the car." Kate told him, feeling the all-too-familiar exasperation of working with an untrained partner. Admittedly, Castle was better at not touching things than Caffrey apparently was, but for this case, at least, it seemed that a man who specialized in forging artworks would be more useful than a fiction writer.
"Which one?" Neal turned to face the long row of nondescript black Crown Vics, and Kate pressed the unlock button on her keys.
"The one with the flashing lights."
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"So you're the one who contaminated my crime scene?" Lanie demanded as Kate let Neal into the lab.
"Unintentionally, I promise. But I'm here to make up for it, I even bought my own tools." He hefted his box of tricks and Lanie pointed behind her to where the painting was leaning against the wall, still wrapped in its' evidence bag.
"You'll have to stay with him, Kate, chain of evidence and all that, I've got to get down to Autopsy."
"What? I'm supposed to meet Agent Burke in Tribeca."
"I'm serious, there was an investigator from that law firm, Brooks and something? Down here before, sniffing around. I'd rather get the autopsy done as quickly as possible, I still have no idea how he even got down here without a badge. I need you to keep everything on the up and up so they don't get anything over on us."
"Sounds like a typical P.I., conning his way into somewhere off-limits and looking for loopholes. I better call Peter."
"I thought it was C.I.'s who did that?" Neal asked, having moved away from the ladies to take a closer look at the painting.
Beckett rolled her eyes at Lanie, who just shot her friend a suggestive smile before high-tailing it out of the lab she'd ushered them into.
Kate made a quick phone call to Peter, who understood the situation and told Kate he'd head back to the Bureau with Diana until she was free, it would be better if they interviewed the widow together, so that she was only questioned once. When she was done, Kate turned to see what Neal was up to, and found him looking at the painting, stretching the plastic to try and get a better view, but not taking it out of the evidence bag. At least he had some respect for the chain of evidence, Kate thought, as she approached him.
"Okay, so, what do you need, Neal?"
"More light, for a start. Why are all evidence rooms and labs so badly lit?"
"Something to do with being in basements. Hang on." Kate found the lighting controls and began to adjust them, turning the fluorescents up until the room almost looked naturally lit.
"Okay, that's great. Now, Lanie, was it? She mentioned something about chain of evidence. I'm guessing that you'll have to sign the sticker and supervise me while I'm checking it over?"
"That's the drill, come over here and help me get it out of the bag, I'll fill in my details while you start doing your thing."
"Okay." She pulled her purple crime-scene gloves out of their pocket on her belt and snapped them on as Neal slid his long fingers into a pair made of white cotton and helped her heft the artwork away from the wall.
The pair of them extracted the metre-wide landscape from its' plastic packaging, setting it down on the steel table in the center of the space. Neal opened up his tool box, pulling out a few magnifying glasses of various strengths, a scalpel and some specimen jars, and a multi-setting flash-light that was capable of projecting waves from ultraviolet to infrared. He also extracted a pair of goggles with interchangeable lenses, from polarized clear glass to different colored lenses to allow a different viewpoint of the artwork.
"Can we flip it over? I want to get it out of the frame. Depending on how much the canvas was stretched, there might be evidence on the edges."
"Sure." Kate helped him, they flipped the painting and he handed her a pair of pliers.
"We're pulling it to pieces? Seriously?"
"Well, the CSU dusted for prints already, yeah?" Neal pointed to the smattering of black and grey dust that was now infiltrating his suit, settling on the table around the edges of the painting.
"Oh, okay, I guess."
"You can dust the edges of the canvas once we get the frame off, if you like. But I doubt that anyone with skills like this would have touched the canvas with bare hands at any point."
"I'm still checking it."
"I know." They began extracting the nails from the backing board, removing it from the back of the frame. Neal set the backing board aside and Kate stepped over to the store cupboard, pulling out a pair of dusting brushes and two pots of powder.
"Let's get to it."
Two hours later they had finished a thorough examination of the painting, under different light conditions, through different lenses and Neal had taken samples of the paint, canvas and even managed to extract a couple of brush hairs from the center of the work. Kate had labeled the specimen jars and put them into an evidence bag to be taken to the FBI's lab for analysis, while Neal took high-resolution photos of the piece, printing a couple for the evidence team and keeping one for himself, to give to Mozzie. Maybe the forgeries were being painted on commission, and the forger himself had nothing to do with the killings or robberies.
"Are we done?" Beckett asked, snapping her gloves off and tossing them into the bin in the corner.
"Looks like it."
"Alright, can you call Peter and ask him to meet us at the FBI lab? We need to go and speak to Mrs Peterson."