Hello all! Hope you've got your paper bags for breathing into nearby on this one, as you are going to mos-def need them! This song, much like 'Little Green Bag' was chosen as the title as much for its stylistic relationship - it tells the story of a wicked wicked man and that seemed appropriate here. Enjoy!

Everyone looked at Adam, who had gone deathly pale. As Castle was nearest to him, he put his hands on the young man's shoulders and looked at him.

'Adam,' he said calmly. 'Adam, it's okay.'

'I...I always knew there was something off when he died, there...there were questions that were just too slick with an answer, and...God...I need to...I could use some water.'

'Why don't you head into the bathroom, right through there.'

Castle pointed him in the right direction, and when he was out of earshot, Beckett let it loose.

'I want to know everything you know, right now,' she demanded.

'Kate, we brought these files straight here,' Esposito replied. 'We need to eat first, too, give ourselves a little breathing room before we go deep again.'

As the others went into the kitchen, he went down the hallway to the main-floor guest bathroom and wasn't surprised when he heard the light sniffling on the other side of the door. He lifted his hand, knocked lightly. 'Adam, it's Rick, I'm coming in.'

When he received no response of protest, he pushed the door open. To his utter lack of surprise, he saw Adam sitting on the floor, the stench of fresh sickness ripe in the trapped atmosphere of the small room. As if the man were his own child, he lowered the toilet lid and flushed it, then sat down to look at him.

'It's a hard thing to learn the truth about the loss of a loved one,' he murmured. 'I won't pretend to know what you're going through because I've never known my father so I have no real background of my own to offer in sympathy.'

'Rick, it's fine, I just needed to get it out in private,' he said in a shaky voice, and for the first time Castle saw what he'd been telling his wife - Adam was still so young, hardly older than she'd been when her own mother had been taken. Now, it was looking like the same people responsible for ordering her death had done the deed themselves to Adam's father.

'Adam, do you know why she pulled you into this case when it ostensibly had nothing to do with your father's death?'

Adam frowned, sat up a little straighter. 'No, I didn't really think about it.'

'It's because, whether she realizes it or not, she wants you to have justice for him as well. She knows what it's like to have someone you love ripped away unfairly by another person's hand and she knows you don't go to sleep at night entirely peaceful because of it.'

'Solving this case won't bring him back to me,' Adam pointed out. 'He'll still be gone.'

'And so will Kate's mother. But you will know that the murdering bastards are locked away rotting, and if they get the death penalty, they're going to know the sorrow and the panic your father and Kate's mother felt.'

'He watched Johanna die,' Adam said, blankly staring at the wall, then looked at Castle whose eyes were bugging out of his head. 'That wasn't in his diary, he told me that once when he told me about her case, after the word got around about Dick Coonan being shot to death in the Twelfth.'

'You have to tell her that, Adam.'

'I know and I will, when the time is right, which is in dare I say about an hour, because we're going to be putting together this case right from the very start.'

'Well, before that, we're going to eat. Yes we are,' Castle insisted when Adam shook his head in protest. 'Come on, up we go.'

He offered his hand to Adam and pulled him to hi feet, then passed him the mouthwash. 'I know we're having Mexican for lunch but you could do with a hit of this.'

Meredeth's enchiladas were exactly what the doctor ordered; by the time they were ready to sit down in the living room and get to work, they all had cleared nasal passages and clearer heads as they looked at Castle's Smart-board which had been set up to be a murder-board.

'Okay, we need to start with a hard hinging point,' Beckett said. 'We can use my mother's murder as that point.'

'You sure?' Castle looked at her, as he picked up one of the Smart-board markers. 'We can start somewhere else.'

'No point in walking on eggshells around it, Richard. We opened this door, we will walk through it.'

'Okay.'

He opened what looked like a little speech bubble beside a picture of Johanna Beckett, wrote in the bare-bones details of the case - Johanna Beckett, d. January 9, 1999, alley between 2nd and 3rd Ave on East 62nd St. 'What else do we know about her case?'

'That John Raglan wasn't the first on-scene, it was Jarrad Brennan the beat cop,' Ryan filled in, 'and he took her cellphone from her purse.'

'At her request,' Adam said, and Beckett's head whipped around.

'What?'

'My dad found her just as she was expiring and she said to him 'take the phone in my purse' and then she was gone. He did as she asked, just as another beat cop was coming up to see if he needed help.'

'Roy,' Beckett murmured, and fought the shudder. 'He said he thought he saw your dad put something in his pocket that night.'

'Why wouldn't he have mentioned that in his diary?' Esposito wondered aloud.

'Probably thought it was too dangerous,' Ryan said. 'We know they got to the captain and threatened him, and he shut his mouth about the whole thing. No wonder he wants this solved as much as we do.'

'Let's stay focused, Kate,' Castle told her, knowing this would be another night of her weeping in his arms. But he would rather have a wife crying her eyes out and expressing herself instead of keeping it bottled up and reigned in like the old Beckett could have. 'John Raglan shows up and writes her off as nothing more than gang violence.'

'Her colleagues are killed around the same time. Diane Cavanaugh on her way home from a New Year's Even party, Scott Murphy and Jennifer Stewart were both killed on their way home from work a couple weeks later in different parts of the city, so no one thought to put it together.'

'Five years later, Timo Ross is working in the seven-two and comes across suspicious things about the major takedown of Julio Robinson, big-time drug king. That takedown was a joint effort between the seven-two and the two-three were Mike Doran was a captain.,' Ryan said, looking over his notes as Castle scribbled furiously on the board. 'He goes to Mike and something goes down between them because a week later, he's dead.'

'Then we jump ahead eight years. Mike is retired from the force and his daughter Angela, who was also Timo's fiancee at the time and she comes across Timo's information that got him killed. She does what any smart reporter would do, and the daughter of a cop, and goes to him about the information Timo dug up,' Esposito added, never forgetting the night he saw Angela's broken body in an alleyway. It was etched into his mind because he'd felt Tessi move for the first time inside Meredeth, his firstborn bay, his little princess, and he'd had to rip Mike and Christine's world apart when he told them their only child was murdered.

'Which was what?' Adam asked. 'I've been swamped with paperwork and we haven't really talked about Timo's death all that much, only that he died.'

'Timo found out that several of the cops who were in on the takedown were on Julio Robinson's payroll. Robinson was the baddest of bad cats,' Esposito explained patiently; he'd known Timo the best of them all and felt it a personal responsibility to speak of him now. 'He ran all kinds of pills and powders, some of which were his own street brew. And for the longest time he was untouchable, but Timo had a way of sniffing things out, he was probably the best narc the NYPD will ever see. I mean, they called him the Weed-Whacker for a reason.'

'So he gets dead, and his fiancee Angela, Mike's daughter finds out what got him dead, that a bunch of cops were dirty who took him down.'

'Right, because somehow Julio was still making a shitload of money while he was in prison.'

'And Angela's father was one of them, she confronted him and knowing what we know he turned around and called people to have her whacked.' Adam blew out a breath. 'That's ice cold.'

'But it goes just beyond Mike being a dirty cop. He was taking his marching orders from higher up because if he was at the top of the food chain, this would have been much heavier six years ago when he went to jail,' Beckett said, bringing the current case up to speed. 'So the question now is, who else is involved?'