Rick Castle awoke a few minutes after a beam of bright sunlight found a chink in the blinds and made a beeline for his closed eyes. Blinking like a very large and unkempt mole, he groaned and squirmed around on his bed trying to find a new comfortable position so he could fall back asleep. Just as he was beginning to drift off once more, the furious whine of a vacuum cleaner from somewhere above his head jolted him back awake, and he lifted himself up from the mattress in surprise before crashing back down to the bed's surface as his arms gave out from underneath him.
Bowing to the inevitable, he managed to get off of the bed and stand upright, swaying a bit as he pressed a hand to his forehead and winced. What had he done last night? Oh, yeah, Sweet Sixteen party. With a crime fiction theme, no less. He was going to have to have a serious talk with his ex-wife and publisher Gina about the personal appearances section of his contract.
The way he felt right now, Castle figured the crime had been how much he had had to drink to assuage his hurt pride at having to accept the gig. The fiction was probably the supreme illusion he fostered that he could still drink the way he did when he was twenty with no real consequences. Good thing most of the girls there had been underage and he hadn't been forced to prove that other things were still functioning the way they used to. At least not after the first half dozen tequilas.
Castle ran both hands over the stubble on his cheeks, giving the bristles a vigorous scratching to try to clear his head. Once he could open his eyes halfway and keep them open for more than a couple of seconds, he thought it might be safe to walk to the bathroom, which he did carefully, rising up on tiptoes and hurrying a bit to traverse the section of cold tile that wasn't covered by area rugs.
After he had relieved himself and splashed some water on his face, he rinsed his mouth with some mouthwash and got up the courage to peer into the mirror.
"You're looking old, fella," he commented. "Too old for selling out, at least."
Reaching over to the back of the bathroom door, he grabbed a terry robe on his way out and shrugged into it as he padded down the hall to the kitchen. His undershirt overlapped his boxer shorts in the front and served to cover the soft flesh collecting around his midsection, and he rubbed at the evidence of rich food, alcohol and a sedentary lifestyle as though it were a stain that would magically disappear if he just scrubbed at it long enough.
Alexis was sitting at the breakfast bar in the kitchen eating a bowl of soup and reading a book. She looked up when her father entered.
"Hi, daddy. You look old today," she commented before turning back to her book.
"Hi back, sugar pie. When I was teaching you about honesty, did I mention the thing about sometimes it's okay to lie?" he commented, leaning over to deposit a kiss on the teenager's red hair when he passed by. As he opened the fridge and reached in for the carton of orange juice, Castle could hear a bustle at the kitchen entrance. He closed the door and turned back around to face the noise, raising the carton to his lips and taking two or three large gulps before lowering it and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
"Good morning, Martha," he said to the stylishly dressed older woman standing there appraising him coolly.
"Good afternoon, Richard. You look old, dear," she said before sweeping into the room to pick up a set of car keys and a handbag from the counter.
All Castle could manage at this pronouncement was a silent opening and closing of his jaws as his daughter grinned at him and mouthed, You see? in his direction.
"Where are you off to, mother?" he asked, coming around to stand at the end of the counter.
"I'm going to a fundraising planning meeting, my misguided son. Save the whales or elephants or some such. Something large, at any rate. I'll be back in time for dinner. Make something nice, will you?"
Before turning to go out the door, she paused and regarded her grown son again before saying, "At least close your robe, dear. It's bad enough you have to put all that smut in your books. When Alexis writes her tell-all memoirs, I don't want her to remember you parading around the apartment naked. Oh, and Gina called. Something about wages. No, stages. No, no, pages."
With a wry stare, Martha swirled out of the room and down the hallway, leaving Castle and his daughter shaking helplessly with laughter.
Kate had the day off. An actual day off. Even though she was in the middle of a murder investigation, it was well in hand and she could afford to divert her attention for a little while. No, change that. The case had come up against a brick wall, so nothing was happening to further the investigation. But this meant she could have a day off!
Sighing, the detective sat down at her dressing table and looked in the mirror. She really needed some time to relax. There, right under her eyes. The circles were deeper than a week ago. She was starting to look old. Maybe she could blame it on Castle.
Picking up a small bottle of the eye moisturizer that Lanie Parish, the medical examiner, had recommended, Kate unscrewed the lid and dipped the end of her index finger into it. She swooshed small amounts of the cool cream under each eye before closing the container and picking up a comb. After running it through her hair a few times and surveying the result, Kate resigned herself to the fact that it was going to take a lot more than some cream and a comb-through to hide the evidence of her worries. She replaced the comb on the surface of the dresser and stood, looking down at the big fuzzy slippers on her feet and track-pants-and-sweatshirt combo she was wearing as pajamas. Maybe Lanie was right. Maybe it was time to feminize a bit. But for herself, not for that crazed novelist person.
Moving through her apartment to the kitchen, Kate poured herself a glass of milk and went to sit on the couch in the living room. It wouldn't hurt on her day off to take a few minutes to run through the case, would it? After all, there were no union rules governing a homicide detective's hours of work. And Kate's favorite way to relax was to chew on a case anyway. She'd never been the knitting type.
It had started with a call two weeks earlier from a citizen complaining of a strange smell coming from their building's dumpster. The desk sergeant at the local precinct argued a bit about whether any smell from a dumpster should be considered strange or not before sending a couple of uniforms to check it out just to shut the old lady up.
When the two officers had approached the dumpster, they had to agree that there was a very strange smell coming from it. And when the building's superintendent provided a ladder and held it so one of the cops could climb up and have a look inside, the officer almost added the smell of vomit to the mix, luckily turning his head to the side at the last moment so he wouldn't contaminate the scene of a particularly grisly murder. Then things had gotten very exciting indeed.
Three more corpses in various stages of desiccation and decomposition had quickly been discovered in three other dumpsters, all within a ten-block radius, and Kate and her team assembled the appropriate maps, crime scene photos and anything else they could get their hands on to make up a case board to start building their investigation.
It had looked promising at first until the autopsy reports came in showing the four men had each been killed in different ways – one by strangulation as evidenced by purple and black finger marks around the neck; one by gunshots to the head, since the back half of the skull was missing; one by asphyxiation with a plastic bag taped tightly over the head and face; and one by, of all things, a fast-acting poison. And they had each been dead for varying periods of time. Lanie estimated from between two weeks to two days. So whoever had done the deeds had spaced the killings out and then dumped the bodies all on the same night.
Castle had been downright gleeful. Kate was pretty sure he didn't try to be disrespectful to the dead, but when he grinned and rubbed his hands together as he viewed the photographs, it made her ask him what kind of childhood he had had. "The theater," had been his enigmatic reply.
So now, two weeks later, they still had four bodies, four horrific deaths, several unhelpful interviews from the unfortunate people who had found the victims, and no apparent connection among the dead men that a homicide detective could see. But there was a connection that a novelist who ran in the social circles of Rick Castle could see, and that was what the information on the disk was for: to furnish a theoretical motive.
However tenuous, Kate could now draw a line from victim to victim. Actually, a square with each victim at a corner and an "X" from corner to corner. But as Castle had explained it to Kate and her team, for the metaphor and the story to be complete, there would have to be someone else at the intersection of that "X." Kate sipped at her milk and frowned. It was her job to test the theory by solving this case. And to do it in enough time so that that person, the one who belonged on the "X" – whoever he or she was – didn't end up being the fifth corpse.