January 2010
"Are you here to work another case with us?" Esposito smirked as Kate made her way through the bullpen, and she grinned back, pulling Ryan's chair over to his desk to perch on it, her gaze drawn toward the murder board.
"No. Unless you need my help?" she teased as she drank in the details before her, and the detective chuckled. "I'm just waiting for Rick. I told him I'd meet him here after I took Ramona to daycare."
"He and Ryan are just processing someone now." Esposito shrugged. "Well, Ryan is. I don't know what your boy's doing. I don't think they'll be much longer."
Kate laughed. "A person of interest in this case?" she asked, jabbing her thumb in the direction of the board, and Espo nodded.
"Uh-huh. Brother of the vic."
"And you're processing him? Not…"
"Not gently sitting him down and telling him his brother is dead? No. We did that yesterday. Today, the evidence led us back to him." Esposito shrugged, turning from the board to face Kate. "But we're cutting him loose. We interviewed him, and nothing's sticking."
"Why would he kill his own brother?" Kate stared at the victim's photograph, front and center on the board. "What did Jack Coonan do that made his own brother take his life?"
"Nothing, far as we can tell. Because he didn't. But we can link the brother to drugs." Esposito sighed. "We hoped Dick Coonan could shed a little more light, but we don't have the evidence for the drug trafficking right now." Kate nodded. Not every case could be tied up in a neat bow. "But hey, if you wanna go make yourself a coffee while you wait for Castle, you know where the break room is."
"Thanks." She stood up, casting a last look at the white board. What had Jack Coonan been into?
Kate walked into the break room; caffeine right about now would be perfect. Much as Rick usually claimed the precinct's coffee was the stuff ulcers were made of, she would take her chances. She pulled a clean cup from one of the shelves, picking up the pot and pouring the liquid in. But this wasn't the rich aromatic beverage that her machine delivered, and okay, maybe Rick had a point. Creamer and sugar aside, there was a severe lack of the flavorings she'd come to love, and she took a hesitant sip, wrinkling her nose before holding the cup away from herself and pouring it down the sink. No, thank you.
"I might skip it," she called to Esposito as she exited the break room. New plan. Coffee from the cafe across the road. She could bring one up for Rick. "If Castle finishes up, tell him I'll be back in a minute."
"Uh-huh." Esposito's attention was back on his desktop, and she grinned, waving at Captain Montgomery as she passed his office on the way back to the elevator.
"Kate!"
"Rick! Hey!" She turned around, beaming as she came face to face with her boyfriend and Ryan, and whomever they were escorting to the elevator. Oh. Their person of interest. Dick Coonan.
"Well, well, well," Coonan said, looking her up and down, a knowing grin on his face. Ryan pressed the call button, and the doors slid open. "I know you." He stepped inside the elevator. "I should have known little Katherine Beckett would become a cop. Avenging your mom's murder, I suppose, one bad guy at a time."
The doors closed, and Kate was left staring after him as Rick rounded in on her, his hand clutching at her arm. "Kate? Do you know him?"
She shook her head, her eyes still glued on the metal doors. "I've never seen him before in my life."
"As far as I know my mom's murderer is in jail," Kate said, and Esposito nodded, swinging his chair around to his computer and tapping at the keyboard.
"Yeah. That's what the file said," Rick interjected, and Kate nodded, remembering. He'd seen it, back when he'd started doing research here. Huh. She'd almost forgotten that.
"Okay," Esposito started. "Your mom's case is here. Every precinct holds some records, and your mom's is in the basement. Are you good with me going downstairs and getting it? We can all look through it?"
"Sure." Kate nodded, her gaze fixed on Rick. What the hell had Coonan meant?
"We'll figure this out," he said, his hand resting on her thigh, and she shook her head. Her vision blurred as tears welled in her eyes and she brought her thumb to her mouth, biting down on her nail as she tried to hold the floodgates back. A lone tear escaped though, starting its slow descent down her cheek and she wiped it away with the back of her hand before it could get any further.
"I'll, um…" Ryan looked around, avoiding her eyes, and Rick nodded at him.
"Coffee?" he suggested, and Ryan bobbed his head up and down.
"Yeah. Coffee. I'll get coffee. Meet you back here, when Espo gets back with the file."
"Skim latte, two pumps sugar free vanilla," Rick directed, and Ryan wrinkled his nose.
"Right. That. Okay. Back soon." He leaped up, rushing to the elevator, and Rick raised his eyebrows after him.
"Real cop like," Rick commented, and Kate let out a sigh of laughter as her heart thudded in her chest.
"Yeah, well. He probably didn't expect me to have a meltdown."
"Yeah, maybe. But if this is a meltdown…" Rick shrugged, scrubbing a hand over his face. "Do you want to go hole up in a conference room? We can close the blinds?"
Kate let him take her hand and lead her into the closest room, the door shutting with a soft snick behind them, before she let the tears fall at last, the fat drops spilling from her eyes down her face. "I thought this was… over…" she said, fighting for words. Fighting for air. "They caught the guy."
"Hey. Maybe they did. Maybe Coonan was just talking shit. You don't know," Rick said, wrapping his arms around her, and she let herself sink into his strong frame, taking in a shaky breath.
"Maybe… but he knew me, Rick. He knew about my mom. He recognized me right away."
"Oh. Right."
"Alright. I pulled the files," Esposito announced as he opened the door, and Kate turned to see Lanie behind him.
"And I was on my way up anyway. Javi asked me to come and look over the M.E.'s report," she said, casting a sympathetic smile Kate's way. "How you holding up, Sweetie?"
"Right. Skim latte with vanilla for you-" Ryan bustled through the door, tray held close to his chest, handing the first cup to Kate. "Regular person coffee for the rest of us. Except- Lanie. I didn't know you were going to be here."
Lanie stared at Ryan, and he shuffled backwards, his eyes darting to the door before falling back on the M.E.
"I mean. I can go back downstairs and-"
"Forget about it," Lanie said. "I don't drink it anyway."
"Alright." Ryan raised his eyebrows at Lanie before shrugging and turning to Kate. "So. Beckett. Tell us what you know?"
Rick pulled a chair out for her, and she sank into it gratefully, wrapping her hands around the cup Ryan had just handed her. She took a deep breath, closing her eyes and shuddering at the onslaught of unwelcoming images imprinted on her eyelids. The way Detective Raglan had looked so apologetic as he'd told her and her dad the news. The way her mom had looked laid out in the funeral home, the make-up they'd put on her jarring with her usual soft look. The way her dad had looked at her, all fury and loss, as she'd pried the scotch from his hands the first time she'd found him truly drunk.
She opened her eyes, raising the cup to her lips and taking a sip. The shock of the confrontation was wearing off, and the surge of anger pulsing through her veins was giving her the strength to begin the story. Beside her, Castle rested his hand on her knee, the touch comforting.
"Okay. So we - my dad and I - were supposed to meet my mom, for dinner, at one of our favorite restaurants. She never showed…" Kate swallowed, trying to dissect it as clinically as possible. "We made it home, and there was a detective waiting for us. She… she was in an alley. She'd been stabbed to death."
Esposito nodded, continuing from the notes in the file. "Yep. That's all here. So, from the start, it was written off as random gang violence. No one really looked at any other avenues." He shook his head in disgust. "And then," he flipped a few pages further in the report, "they charged a guy. Someone confessed. More or less walked into the precinct, three months after the fact. The case was already cold." He shrugged at Kate. "You know the rest."
"Yeah." Kate bit down on the inside of her lip, the coppery taste of blood filling her mouth as she broke the tender skin. The rest. She'd fallen into the trap of chasing normality and Jim had found something akin to solace in the bottle. "Yeah. Case closed."
"Case closed," Rick echoed.
"Until today," she whispered, sitting up a little straighter and draining the rest of the coffee. "Can we - I mean, you - look into this? Dig a little deeper?" She met Esposito's eyes first, and he nodded.
"Yeah. No problem, Beckett," he told her, and she smiled. Beckett. The boys called her Beckett. She was one of them.
"We'll check out these detectives who ran the case," Ryan added, and beside him, Lanie nodded.
"Oh, Kate," she said, a heavy sigh on her lips as they locked eyes, and Kate swallowed, nodding at her new friend. "I'll take a proper look at the M.E.'s report, okay. I'll take it down to the lab with me, run a few things, get my head around it."
Kate managed a smile, and nodding, she swallowed the fresh flood of tears that were threatening.
"Hey," Rick murmured, leaning into her, pressing his lips to her ear. "We've got this."
The knock on the door broke the silence, and Kate opened her eyes, her gaze locking with Rick's. Would this visit bring answers, or just more questions? She extricated herself from his arms, feeling the loss of warmth and comfort as she padded over to the door, looking through the peephole to double check who was on the other side. She slid the bolt open at the sight of Lanie, hugging her friend before stepping back and ushering her inside and through to the kitchen table.
"Hey." Lanie regarded her with the same sympathy she'd shown at the precinct earlier, before nodding at Rick and taking a seat opposite him. Kate slid onto the chair at the end of the table, her eyes fixed on the folder in Lanie's hand as the silence between them grew, Lanie apparently loathe to share her findings.
"What have you got?" Kate asked at last, meeting Lanie's eyes, and her friend looked up, nodding as she cleared her throat.
"Okay. I've looked these over and over, and I got a second opinion, and I still don't know what I'm looking at, what I'm seeing here-"
Beside her, Rick reached out, his hand resting on Kate's arm, his thumb brushing up and down.
"Obviously someone went to jail for your mom's murder, but you know, they never found the weapon. Now, I asked Jav- I mean, Esposito, and he said nothing in the confession detailed anything about the weapon used."
"Well… a knife," Kate said, her mind spinning. "She was stabbed."
"Yeah. Well. In my line of work, there are a lot of different knives, and sometimes you can trace them," Lanie informed her. "And in this case, it's been used in several murders. Little fragments from the blade were left behind, every time."
She opened the folder, spreading the files across the table, and Kate swallowed. Five manila folders, and atop them all, a photograph of her mom, smiling from the cover. She reached for it, opening it on autopilot, her eyes widening at the crime scene photographs that confronted her. Her mom… in the alley. She shook her head, flicking through them as bile rose in her throat. Her mom… on the slab in the morgue.
She flipped the file shut, anger flaring and heat spreading through her veins. "Tell me."
"I've gone through a lot of files. I don't know if I've found them all. I probably haven't." She indicated to the paperwork on the kitchen table. "Sweetie, your mom was killed by the same man who killed Diane Cavanaugh, Jennifer Stewart and Scott Murray." She frowned. "Here's the kicker. He also killed Jack Coonan."
"And if Dick Coonan recognized me, he knows who killed my mom."
Lanie nodded, her eyes downcast. "Yeah. Probably. I spoke to Javi about that too. They tried to bring him back in." She paused, tapping her finger on the table. "Kate, right now he's their best lead for the Jack Coonan case too. They went to his place, but he's left town."
Lanie stood, gathering up the paperwork, except for the copy of Johanna Beckett's file, and squeezing Kate's arm, she walked to the door, letting herself out with a gentle "bye" as Kate closed her eyes, slumping down, resting her head on her forearm.
She swallowed, unable to hold it in any longer, and Rick, beside her, ran steady circles across her back, the rhythmic motion comforting as she felt the dampness from her tears trickling across her cheeks and onto her wrists and the wooden table.
Normality. To move past this. That was all she'd ever wanted, from the day her mom had been found in that alley. She'd wanted to be more than the girl whose mom was killed.
The fear of never moving past her mom's murder had haunted her, and as her father had thrown himself at the bottle, she'd thrown herself at life, pursuing - albeit timidly - to prove to herself that she could be something.
And she had become something. Someone. She had fought, tooth and nail, for every shred of convention in her life. College. Semester abroad. Grad school. Marriage. Baby. Career.
And divorce.
She had fought, only to become someone she didn't recognize.
Random gang violence. There was no moving on from that kind of assault to her own sense of safety. There was no moving on from a shattered belief system. There was no moving on when chance and coincidence had met in a rage, destroying the long held faith that bad things did not happen to good people.
There was no moving on, but she had to find a way to be more than she was.
Conventional hadn't worked.
She unfurled, squaring her shoulders and turning to Rick. He halted his rhythmic circles across her back as she met his eyes, his touch still comforting.
Conventional wasn't falling in love with a famous mystery writer either.
She blinked, shaking her head. Falling in love. When, exactly, had that happened?
And ordinary women didn't become homicide cops.
She smiled at Rick, leaning in and brushing a soft kiss against his mouth, the intensity of the touch a shock as want curled within her, singing through her veins as she captured his mouth with hers.
Everything made sense now; the myths she'd been carrying for the last decade discarded at last. Random gang violence? No. That had never made sense. The newfound certainty that someone had been blackmailed into making a confession pounded in her veins.
Kate pulled away from Rick, her lips curving up in spite of the tears that she knew were still streaked across her face. There was no choice here. Not anymore. She stood up, pushing the chair back across the floor so fast it squeaked in protest against the floorboards.
"Where are you going?" he asked as she stalked across the room.
"My laptop's in the bedroom." She pointed through the open door to where it lay on her bed. "I have to check out what NYPD forms I need to complete so I can sit the next Academy entrance exam."
A/N: And with that I'm officially over the 50k word challenge of Ficathon. Thanks, you guys, for reading and joining me on this fun AU journey! We've still got another few chapters to go! Thanks Jamie and Kylie for editing this one! x