Chapter Seven: Once More With Feeling

Apology: Spring Break. And I spent it watching Stargate: Universe, which didn't exactly help me write the distinctive voices of everyone in this story. It (SGU) was an interesting concept, but I didn't actually feel connected to any of the characters…I spent most of it missing SG-1! (And yes, I know they show up from time to time, why do you think I kept watching?) But that's a different and incredibly less interesting story. Once I started writing, though, I had to get out of bed at ridiculous hours of the morning to, say, add two and a half pages of text onto the beginning of the chapter. My writing brain only works when it's inconvenient.

Author's Note: Yes, yes I went there. My shamelessness knows no bounds. But there was really nothing else that worked for this chapter. And I know you don't believe me. Let me know if this chapter changes your mind, okay?

And: Oh. Wow. "47 Seconds". ARGH! (cries on floor) SADNESS!

ON WITH THE SHOW!

Spending time waiting for the Department of Motor Vehicles to get around to your request was never enjoyable, but if you had to do so, Kate Beckett had long since decided, it was better to do so over the telephone than in person. There were infinitely fewer small children in the immediate proximity, and you could always get coffee from the break room, check your email inbox, order pastries from that nearby bakery that had just started delivering on the other line (and eat them too), or even take a bathroom break if there was anyone nearby who would fill in for you by listening to the taped 'holding' message for a few minutes.

If you were really desperate, you could do paperwork.

Eventually, the overworked state employee on the other end of the line got back to her with the proper names and contact information of the people on Danielle's list of Steph's friends—all except the still unidentified "Taylor". Hanging up on the DMV with a sense of relief, and discarding the pastry wrappers in her desk trashcan, Beckett was about to get to work on calling her way through everyone on the list when she was interrupted.

"Detective Beckett? It's me again."

'Me again' was Buffy Summers, who had yet again managed to walk past a precinct full of cops, all of whom would tell her that she was not supposed to be in the Homicide detectives' bullpen without an escort or at least a visitor's pass. Unsurprisingly, she had neither.

By now, Beckett had accepted that Slayers followed different rules and decided to let it slide. Mostly. Beckoning the young woman into Castle's usual chair, she couldn't help commenting, "If I was half that good at getting into places I wasn't supposed to be, I wouldn't need the bulletproof vest. I'm impressed." And, before she forgot, "So did you destroy Castle's bar, or can I reassure him that he won't have to pay for more repairs?"

The blonde Slayer grinned. "Well, Leesha went a bit stake-happy and broke a chair, but that's about it. There might be some broken glasses, but the building is still standing, I promise." She caught her breath at that last sentence and went on, "Actually, I need a favor. But I think it'll help you too."

"Well, I've just spent an hour on the phone, and I'm going to have to spend the next calling everyone who ever knew Steph. I'd be happy to take a break, especially a useful one. What do you need?"

"Yesterday," Buffy explained, somewhat sheepishly, "when I was up here, I saw something in your files—about Steph. I think it was a picture, but I can't remember what it was of. I know I wasn't supposed to look at them the first time, but I knew it mattered, and then your friend Castle turned up, which was really weird, and I forgot."

Beckett raised a skeptical eyebrow at her. "You want to look at all the paperwork on Steph. Again. For something you're not sure about."

"I'll know it when I see it," she retorted indignantly. "And if it is important, it might help us all find who killed a friend of mine."

The two women watched each other for a minute, considering their options. Finally, Beckett relented, gesturing slightly as if actually throwing her hands in the air in resignation.

"All right. What are we looking for? And how much of what was on my desk did you get through? You couldn't have been up here alone for more than a few minutes."

Having gotten what she wanted, Buffy was all smiles again. "Detective, I can't count the hours I've spent paging through old books to find something—anything—important before we run out of time to save the world. My family's gotten really good at Research Mode. And, well, if I was really good at it, I'd know what I saw without having to wake up early and ask for help. But I was thinking about it so much it kept me awake…and if I fidgeted any more, I was going to get picked up and dumped out of bed whether I liked it or not, so I came here."

As she spoke, she was sorting through file folders and message slips, looking at each page briefly before going on to the next. Beckett hurriedly picked up and re-stacked a handful of manila folders that had gotten out of order.

"Can I help? You said it was a picture? Person, place, or thing?"

"Yeah, picture," the younger woman muttered absently, flicking through photographs of the crime scene where they'd found Steph's body. Almost involuntarily, she was growling softly at the images. "Not a person. A thing. Brown, maybe pottery? Got writing on it. Not English."

Beckett organized things visually and remembered what she saw—that was why she, alone of all the detectives at the 12th, solved cases using a murderboard. Being able to see things helped her remember what was what and spot patterns. Castle, on the other hand, kept track of things by turning them into a narrative. They both played to their strengths. So Beckett knew that there were only a limited number of photographs of things that had been taken in this case.

Locating and opening the file of photographs that had been taken of Steph's apartment, Beckett scanned the images for things that fit the vague criteria the Slayer had given her. After a moment, she said, "Is this it?"

Buffy dropped the folder she was holding on the desk—Beckett winced as documents spilled out—and reached for the photo the detective held. She handed it over without a fuss, having seen no more relevance in it this time than when she'd first seen it.

"Yes," the Slayer said definitely, smiling. She had a nice smile. "That's it. That's what I saw. Thanks, Kate."

Beckett was somewhat taken aback by the sudden informality, but after a moment, not surprised. Even after only knowing her for a few hours, she could already say with the utmost confidence that Buffy was not a formal person. "So what is it?" she asked, gently turning the picture back towards her so she could look too.

It looked like half of a statuette, although what the complete figure had represented was impossible to discern from what was left. Based on the contortions of the image in the photo, it had never been anything human. The half-statue was fairly small, about the size and width of a hand—the crime scene tech who had taken the photo had deliberately included his hand in the picture as a point of comparison. It was a rich cinnamon brown in the artificial lighting provided by the photographer, but was covered in jet-black markings that might be letters in no language the detective had ever seen, or might equally possibly be a child's random scribbles.

When Beckett quietly pointed out that there would be information on the back of the picture, the two women read together that it had been found in Steph's closet along with her weapons cache, wrapped in a ball of rags and sealed shut with masking tape. Whoever had logged the item had also added that they were unable to identify the material it was made out of without a laboratory analysis, and also that it seemed to be broken. The rest of it, whatever it was, had not been found.

"I have absolutely no idea," Buffy responded to Beckett's question, but she didn't sound discouraged. "But it looks important, don't you think?"

Beckett gave her the skeptical look again. It was marginally less effective this time.

"Um…can I use your computer? I don't know what this is, and you don't know what it is, but I can almost promise that if Willow gets one look at this, she'll not only know what it is, but where it was made and what it smells like when it gets wet. She's good like that."

There was clearly no help for it. "You're lucky I'm used to unconventional police work, Buffy. But only this image, understood? And don't tell my captain I'm letting you do this."

"Rules are boring, Kate," Buffy told her helpfully. "You should only follow rules that work for you."

Beckett couldn't help the grin at such a defiant philosophy. "That's how you do things, is it? And how's that worked out so far?"

"If I followed all the rules all the time, I'd be dead. Again. …So pretty well, considering."

Buffy, as it turned out, couldn't work a scanner, because "Willow and Dawn do the computer things". She could attach an image and send an email, and left promising to let Beckett know if her friends came up with anything useful. Only after she was long gone did the detective realize that she still had no way to contact the younger woman if she needed to.

Until then, Beckett had phone calls to make. She briefly considered texting Castle to see if he would come in and at least keep her company and make her desk and space feel not quite so empty, but decided against it, because if she just wanted someone to sit, talk, and not be helpful she'd have gotten herself a parrot instead of a partner. (She decided not to tell him about this comparison until a day when he was being more than usually annoying.)

As she spoke to a parade of confused and increasingly upset men and women—most of whom sounded like they were in their teens or early twenties, although a couple sounded older—Beckett noted the replies to a set of standard questions. She started off by asking each person to define and describe their relationship to Steph, including where and when they had met, and then asked everyone if they knew who Taylor was. No one could give her any more information than Danielle had last night, making the detective wonder if the unknown man was really all that important. Almost everyone on her list of calls to make said that they had been close friends with Steph, and none of those had ever met Taylor. It was possible he was irrelevant to Steph's gruesome death, but it was a loose end she couldn't leave dangling.

Also, as a certain visiting blonde Slayer had pointed out last night, you'd be surprised what you can hide from your friends, if you try.

Beckett asked all of them for an alibi. Each and every one of them practically howled with rage, denied any possibility of their involvement, insisted that she just didn't understand the bond between a Slayer and her companions, and then gave her the information she wanted anyway.

Jotting down yet another alibi, she glanced over at Ryan and Esposito's desks and hoped that either the boys would be back soon, or Castle would show up and volunteer to call around helping her to verify alibis. This would have been a fairly unprecedented event, but then most things her writer partner did were unprecedented or unconventional in some way. Including hunting for a secret passage and offering to explore it with a toilet-paper-and-plunger torch; ordering a customized bulletproof vest with WRITER blazoned all over it; and borrowing-without-permission a federal agent's Taser gun and then actually shooting someone with it, to name only three examples.

Lastly, she asked each of Steph's friends who they thought had killed their Slayer friend, and dutifully wrote down their answers even if she thought they belonged in a Hollywood horror movie rather than a police report. Once or twice she had to ask for definitions. The answers, when she hung up on the last person and reviewed her results, were wide-ranging and decidedly esoteric. The only common factor was that no one had fingered another of Steph's circle, which was practically unheard of in Beckett's experience. There was always that one person—the family member with a grudge, the friend who had been publically shunned—who someone else would point out and say, "They could have done it, because this one time…"

Sometime during her protracted phone conversations, Beckett noticed then, someone had stopped by her desk and left a stuffed legal-sized envelope. She vaguely remembered the presence of one of the department's mail runners, of whom she had never learned the name. When she put aside her telephone notes and opened it, she found that it contained the laptop that she and Castle had retrieved from Steph's apartment back on Wednesday. Also included was a note from the technical division indicating that they had sufficiently cleared their backlog to have the time to break through the password-protection Steph had set up on what was clearly her personal computer.

Before she could boot up the laptop and investigate its contents, however, the elevator binged and all her guys emerged from the elevator, laughing and joking together as they made their way towards her through the small crowd waiting to use the elevator. Castle was doing an elaborate pantomime of a…actually, she had no idea…as Ryan and Esposito egged him on.

"Well, if it isn't the Three Stooges," Beckett greeted them. "Morning, Stooges."

Castle paused in mid-pantomime and grinned at her. "Morning, Beckett! And I call not Moe."

"Hey, bro, don't knock Moe," teased Esposito, grinning at his involuntary rhyme. "What if she says you're Moe?"

"Then I'd be very sad," Castle said, oozing sincerity in an obviously insincere manner.

"Guys?" Beckett broke in over Ryan adding, "But he'd do it." They dragged their collective attention back to her. "Can we focus? And don't you two have a case to close?"

Ryan waved a hand dismissively. "Nah, easy solve. The guy was right down the street, back in the bar he'd left earlier when he and the vic got thrown out for throwing punches at each other."

"Guess we're back on your case," Esposito said.

"Yeah," she said pointedly, "I noticed that."

"Oh man, Esposito, walked right into that one," joked Castle, who'd sprawled out in his usual chair. Beckett smacked his shoulder lightly with her notepad of phone records and then handed it off in the direction of the guys.

"Based on what we learned yesterday," she brought Ryan and Esposito up to speed, "we know we should be checking out Steph's friends as well as her enemies. I've talked to everyone on this list and gotten alibis from them that need confirming, which is what needs doing next. We still don't know who 'Taylor' is, although several of these people had also heard of him but never met him."

Ryan was paging through the notes as he listened. "What's 'chiragos'?" he asked, reading it off the bottom of the page. Turning to the next, he read on and pulled a face equal parts disgust and skepticism. (Beckett had made substantially the same face earlier.) "Oh. Seriously?"

She sympathized. "Luckily, that's not our job to find out," she reminded him. "Alibis are. Come on, someone in this case is lying to us, and I want to know who. Otherwise we'll end up investigating Chirago demons, and none of us want to do that; I stopped writing before he stopped explaining."

That unenviable outcome was further put off by Beckett's desk phone ringing. "Beckett," she acknowledged as she picked it up. After a moment, she said, "Really?" and a little later, "Yes, absolutely. Bring him in."

Hanging up and turning to her audience, she smiled. "Traffic just picked up one Mr. Brian Walton for speeding through a red light on his way out of Manhattan."

"Isn't that the guy who—" Castle asked after a moment.

"Started and lost a fight with Steph and may have been kicked out of Krimmson by her? Yes, it is. The traffic cop who pulled him over ran his ID through the database and triggered the APB we put out on him. They're bringing him downtown to the 12th as we speak."

Ryan and Esposito traded looks. "Well…" Esposito said with the air of one about to confer a great favor on someone else, "since we barely had to do anything on last night's case and you called all these people—"

"—and listened to ridiculous descriptions of nasty things—" contributed Ryan.

"—we can check alibis while you take on the guy in the Box."

"Thanks, guys," said Beckett, who had been intending to dump the alibi chase on them anyway but was happy to let them volunteer.

"Post-case drinks at the Old Haunt are on me," Castle offered as his own thank-you.

"Dude," said Ryan pityingly, "they were on you anyway."

Castle had to acknowledge that this was true, and the two detectives headed off to their respective desks satisfied.

Beckett stared around him at the murderboard. "I still feel like we're missing half the case," she said ruminatively to him. "I can't remember the last time I got a murder victim whose life I couldn't investigate properly. Even people who don't respect the police understand that we're still a force to be reckoned with, but the world Steph moved in? My badge is worth about as much as those chocolate ones."

"Those are good," Castle said cheerfully, but immediately sobered up as he organized a reply to Beckett's musing. "But that's why you've consulted the experts, right? If the victim had been pulled up from the bottom of the East River, and you wanted to know if there could still be evidence down there, you'd talk to divers—you wouldn't jump in to see what the bottom was like for yourself. Right?"

She actually laughed. "Of course I wouldn't jump in the river, Castle—do you have any idea how cold that water is?"

"Exactly," he beamed. "Always better to talk to the experts. I mean, look how well consulting me worked out!"

His grin was so obnoxious she wished she had her notepad back to smack him with, and had to settle for her best stinkeye.

Brian Walton was a big guy, but he moved with the assurance of someone who had been big his entire life and had learned to use his size to his advantage. Although he wasn't exactly overweight, he looked as if he had the potential to be at some point in a careless or neglectful future. He also looked angry rather than upset about being taken downtown to the 12th Precinct and put in an interrogation room. At the moment, Walton was aiming that look at the two-way mirror, and since he couldn't see where the person—Castle—behind it was, he had settled for panning from one end of the reflector to the other in a slow and patient swivel. For the past three minutes, he had also been tapping his fingers irregularly on the metal surface of the desk. The arrhythmic beat, magnified by the sound-activated recorder bolted to the table, was getting more on Castle's nerves every second it continued.

Castle broke away from the one-way staring contest when his detective partner beckoned to him with a manila file folder on her way past the viewing room. Following her into the interrogation room, he took his seat and let Beckett take the lead. She was good at many things, he would be the first to aver, but interrogation of a suspect was definitely at the top of the list.

"Mr. Walton," she began smoothly, catching and holding his gaze and dropping the file folder she carried onto the desk between them, "I'm Detective Kate Beckett. I see that you have been informed of your rights and declined a lawyer. Do you know why you're here?"

"Not unless you lot have stepped up the penalties for being in a hurry," he retorted. "Look, I have a flight to catch in a couple of hours. I was going to be early for once. Whatever this is about, let's just get it over with, okay?"

"A flight, huh?" Beckett asked. "To where, exactly?"

"Does it matter? Seattle."

She smiled a taut and somewhat insincere, to the experienced Castle eye, smile. "Tell me, Mr. Walton, do you know this woman?" Opening the file folder in a way that ensured he couldn't see the remaining contents, Beckett pulled out a picture of Steph that had been taken when she was still alive, and laid it on the table, facing him.

Walton took one look at the photo and his scowl deepened even further. "What the hell? Yeah, I know who that is. What's she done? That bitch attack someone else?"

"Did she attack you?" she countered, working with his choice of words.

"Broke my wrist," confirmed Walton, raising one large fist in illustration. "Seriously," he added, rapping that fist onto the photo still lying on the table, "that woman's dangerous. She's got real problems."

As interesting as that line of discussion was, Beckett couldn't pass up such an obvious transition. "I would say so, Mr. Walton. It doesn't get much more real than dead."

Walton's glare lost some of its fire, and he snatched his hand away from the picture as if it had caused her death. "What? How?" Beckett didn't immediately respond, and his confidence rebounded rapidly. "She finally take on someone tougher than her? Oh, I bet she did. Did someone shoot her? 'Cause I told her, all the super-strength in the world wasn't going to help her if she pissed off someone with a gun."

"Sounds like you knew her pretty well," Castle put in. "Give her a lot of advice, did you?"

He sized up Castle, picking up on those little hints that said Castle wasn't actually a cop. "No way, man. She wouldn't have listened anyway."

"So tell me more about this conversation you and Ms. Amador had, when you told her that all her strength wouldn't do her any good," Beckett said. She wanted to know if Walton was aware of just how strong Steph had been.

"It was maybe a month and a half ago—I'd just signed up for that gym she worked at. I came in the next day to look around, get a feel for the place, and I saw her moving some of the equipment around like she'd been using it. And it was big, heavy equipment, right? Stuff that has 'team lift' stamped all over it, but she was hauling it around like I could move this chair I'm sitting on." Walton glanced from one to the other as if checking whether or not they believed him. "I kind of stared for a minute, and then she saw me and got all embarrassed, like I'd forget what I'd seen if she shuffled her feet and distracted me enough."

"And you said…" Beckett prompted.

"Oh, that I was impressed, of course. Asked her where I could learn to do that, 'cause if that little slip of a girl could work out enough to move that stuff, I bet I could move, say, a car. She said it wasn't learned, you were made that way or you weren't. I asked what made her so special, and she shrugged and said she didn't know—and she was lying, by the way," Walton interrupted himself. "I could see it. She wasn't even trying very hard to hide it. And that's when I told her muscle wasn't everything, and some punk with a gun could take her down. She just glared at me and walked away. So was she shot?" He might have been unaware of the look on his face, which said that he wasn't particularly upset by the prospect.

"Actually," said Castle, "she was poisoned. And then someone bled her to death in a condemned building."

Walton grimaced. "She must have made someone really mad."

"Yes, we've been putting together quite a list," said Beckett, pulling another sheet of paper out of the file folder and looking over it. From his seat beside her, Castle could see that it was actually a page of Steph's phone records, but if the lighting allowed Walton to see through the page, all he would see were phone numbers, possibly of suspects. "You're on it, Mr. Walton."

He laughed a nervous, I-can't-believe-this-is-happening-to-me laugh. "Okay, yeah, she broke my wrist, but that wasn't personal or anything. It was just a practice bout that got out of hand."

"Not according to the staff at the gym," Beckett contradicted him. "According to them, you first cursed at her and then told her that…she was unnatural and didn't belong on this earth."

"Sure you didn't follow up on that and take her off it, Mr. Walton?" Castle asked pointedly. It sounded like a threat to him.

"Yeah, sure, 'cause you don't shout when you get hurt? I wasn't thinking. I didn't mean any of it—even if I did say that! You ever broken a bone? Helps to yell, you know!"

Beckett reached into the case file once again. "Apart from that incident, sir, did you have any other confrontations with this woman? Not necessarily at the gym—did you ever meet her anywhere else?"

He shook his head. "No. I didn't want to see her again, and it's a big city. What, you think I was just going to walk into her on the street?"

"Sure," Castle told him. "I run into people I know all the time."

"Have you ever been to a coffee shop called Krimsonn?" asked Beckett.

"What the hell? A coffee shop? What's that got to do with anything?" he exclaimed.

"Just answer, please, sir."

Walton had never really stopped scowling, but the expression changed tone a little bit as he thought about it. "I don't think so. I don't drink much coffee."

She placed a freeze-frame from the coffee shop recording next to the photograph of Steph. It showed a man who looked an awful lot like Brian Walton being marched out of Krimsonn by Steph. "Are you this man?"

He snatched the picture up and peered at it closely. "I don't believe it. They recorded that?"

"Mr. Walton?" Beckett encouraged him.

"Okay, look, I had a bad day and I was pretty sloshed. I took a wrong turn and got confused. Really, I don't remember much of that night until I woke up back at my apartment with the hangover from hell. I only know that's me because of the time and date stamp."

Personally, Castle would disagree with the description of 'pretty sloshed'. In the video, Walton was visibly drooling. That was a bit more than 'sloshed'. If drunkenness was drinks, it made 'shaken, not stirred' look like hot chocolate.

He looked around as if for sympathy. "I haven't binged that badly in a long time. And I haven't since. I took a three-hour shower, put some stuff on the bruises and bumps I'd picked up, and went out and got a haircut. I vaguely remember Steph being there, but then I remembered something blue and floating with red eyes showing up too."

Neither Beckett nor Castle had referred to their victim as 'Steph'. Walton clearly knew her better than he was claiming.

"So you had no grudge against Ms. Amador," Beckett said skeptically. "Even though she'd forcibly evicted you from an establishment when you were indisposed and on one occasion caused you physical harm."

Walton glared. "Look here, Detective. I didn't like her. She was arrogant and overconfident and showed off strength she hadn't worked for and hadn't earned. There was definitely something weird about her. And I'm pretty sure that she didn't like me. But I didn't kill her. Even if I wanted her dead, I wouldn't have to kill her. The way she acted, she was going to get herself into serious trouble before very long. I'm not surprised someone killed her. But I didn't do it."

Beckett was supremely noncommittal. "I'm pleased to hear that, sir. Can you tell me where you were last Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning?"

"I wish we could arrest people for being jerks," Castle complained a few minutes later as they left Walton to wait impatiently in the interrogation room.

"I don't like him much either, Castle," his detective partner sympathized, "but if we started arresting jerks, we'd run out of cell space before we even got to the end of the street."

He was still laughing as Ryan and Esposito intercepted them on their way back to the bullpen.

"Alibis check out." Ryan delivered bad news with a shrug, handing Beckett her notepad. "Please, take this terrifying list of strange things stranger people believe in away."

"So what's the verdict on your guy?" Esposito asked. Taking another look at their expressions, he amended, "Not good there either, huh?"

Beckett put her hands on her hips and glared at the unenlightening murderboard. "He's pretty pleased that she's dead. But he has an alibi. And if he had killed her…I don't think that guy would have staged something as elaborate as drugging her and then bleeding her to death through surgical tubing."

"Yeah, he'd probably just have hit her with a rock," Castle agreed sullenly.

"Or shot her, as he took such pains to explain." She sighed, turning away from the baffling assemblage of dead ends, and took her seat. "I'll confirm where he was during the time of death zone. Guys," to Ryan and Esposito, "did any surveillance camera footage of the crime scene ever turn up? Or even of Krimsonn that night, since that's the last place she was seen alive?"

"Yeah, we're working on that," Ryan explained. "It's taken longer than usual to get the footage, but the problem's not on our end. I'll call around, see what's holding things up."

"Thanks, Ryan."

"I'll finish up the paperwork from last night," Esposito told his partner over his shoulder as he headed back to their desks.

"What do you need me to do?"

Beckett looked around for some task to give Castle. After a moment, her gaze fell on the in-house mailroom envelope, which still contained Steph's password-unprotected laptop. "Why don't you take a look through her computer, see if anything turns up in her email or Internet history?"

"Great!" he replied cheerfully, sliding the small laptop onto his knees and getting it started up. "Maybe I'll even find Taylor."

She was busy tracking down the contact information for Walton's alibi, but not so busy that she couldn't agree that "That would be good."

For the next few minutes, Beckett went through the motions of talking to people who just about remembered the man under suspicion, when pressed. If any more evidence pointed to him, she would have had to spend much more time on it, and if need be would come back to the witnesses who were establishing, much to her disappointment, that Brian Walton had had nothing to do with Steph's murder. Beside her, Castle's fingers raced over the keyboard as he navigated Steph's computer, tracing her activities and looking over the things she'd been interested in before she was violently killed. Careful to maintain the appearance of looking into the middle distance where all phone calls are located when not looking at her notes from earlier, she managed to watch him work out of the corner of her eye. Kate Beckett wasn't willing to admit it to anyone just yet, except perhaps Lanie during a girls' night out, but she did enjoy watching him use that fantastic imagination and creativity of his, especially when he was having fun, learning something new, and putting it to good use. She loved her work anyway, but it was much more…interesting…when he was a part of it.

Although if anyone had asked directly, she probably would have denied it. And most of the people who knew enough to ask would know that she was lying.

"Surveillance cams are in," Ryan called across the intervening space at one point. "Still no idea if there's anything useful in it all."

She waved acknowledgement as she finished talking to the taxi driver who had delivered a legally intoxicated Brian Walton to his apartment door right in the middle of their kill zone. "Send me some of it," she started to say, "and I'll take a look."

Castle interrupted. "Oh my God. Beckett? I know who Taylor is." He looked up from the laptop screen, scanning the murderboard. "I know who Taylor is," he repeated.

"Well?" she demanded, spinning her chair around and nudging his shin with her shoe not quite hard enough to be a kick. "Are you going to tell us who he is, or do you have to explain how you got there first?"

He looked pitifully at her, and not because his shin hurt. "But it's so terribly clever…You see," he continued, because Beckett had expected the story above the facts, "Steph was keeping a secret from her friends. I think she was thinking about getting involved with someone outside her circle, so she gave him a code name so no one could find out her secret before she was ready to tell them."

"That's why her friends don't know who Taylor is," agreed Beckett, slightly impatiently. She knew this.

"I looked at her email account first, but there's no one in her contacts named Taylor—and if she was going to code-name someone, you'd want to be consistent, especially considering how close her friends were to her. I bet some of them had access to this computer. Then I started to go through her Internet history, and I noticed that she downloaded a lot of music."

"So?"

"She kept all of it on here! I ran a search through the files for 'Taylor'. Turns out there are a bunch of artists named Taylor, especially if you download everything like Steph did. I came up with a bunch of Taylor Swift songs, of course…" He scrolled down the display. "James Taylor, Taylor Dayne, Taylor Greenwood, Taylor Momsen…and then you get into song titles."

"Castle," said Beckett, who would be happy to talk about music with Castle if they weren't trying to solve a case, but was running out of patience. "The point."

"That is the point," he said sincerely. "I only found two songs with 'Taylor' in the title: something called 'Taylor Was a Good Girl', which I've never heard before, and then the song she named her Taylor after: 'Taylor the Latte Boy'."

Beckett had just mentioned Krimsonn, the coffee shop Steph had frequented, so the two men who had been the Slayer's late-working friends sprang immediately to mind. "'Taylor the Latte Boy'," she repeated as her mind spun. "He even said it!" She couldn't immediately recall their names off-hand, but one of them—Martin, that was it—had reacted especially strongly to the news of Steph's murder, and the other—Kevin—had told them that Martin had carried a torch for the young woman.

"I want Martin Bulis in here right now," Beckett said, snatching up the keys for the cruiser. "Well spotted, Castle. Let's go get him."

Disclaimer: I've had 'Taylor the Latte Boy' stuck in my head for something like seven blasted years now. I can't stand the song. It's not my fault a bunch of girls decided to sing it in chorus—to a guy named Taylor who I think all of them had a crush on—at a band performance the one year I was in high school band. About time I finally got to put it to work.

And: Okay, what else was I supposed to name a chapter where THE plot point hinged on a song?

Next Chapter: And probably the last. Which is sort of a spoiler for the question: Is Castle right? (Oh go on, tell me you don't check the time every time Beckett arrests someone. "Is it him? Well…it's 9:15, so, no. How about her? 9:30. Probably not. 9:56? Almost definitely.") Instead, we consider the questions of motive, evidence, and strange statuary.