Chapter Eleven: Beneath You

Author's Note: So I get time off school for the summer and have a week before I have to go back to work on a (relatively) regular basis. Does this sound like a good opportunity to write some fic? Yes! Does this sound like a better opportunity to: go see The Avengers for a third time even though I keep telling myself I can't afford to see it every Saturday? Read the first five books of the John Carter of Mars series? Lie on the couch and see if you can watch two full seasons of Star Trek: Enterprise in seven days? Yes, it does. (And for the record: yes, you can, especially if you skip that incarnation of evil "These Are the Voyages".)

ON WITH THE SHOW!

It was almost 4 AM before Castle got back to the loft. While Beckett had called the Precinct and he'd called home the moment his phone signaled that they'd come far enough through the subway tunnels to pick up a signal, lest the gang at the 12th and his family be too worried about them, Castle was not remotely surprised to find his mother and his daughter waiting up for him in the living room.

Martha and Alexis were neither talking amongst themselves nor engaged with any sort of media, simply sitting and waiting anxiously. In the fraction of a second between the door opening and that tableau changing utterly, Castle had time to wonder how many other times they had done this without him knowing: waiting and wondering and worrying whether he'd come home safely.

The emotions from that were difficult to sort out. But the moment won out and he set that thought aside for consideration at a much later and more convenient time as Alexis leapt to her feet and dashed towards him, pajama pants flapping. Priorities were priorities, after all.

"Dad!" she all but wailed. He almost dropped his key ring as she raced towards him and he threw out his arms to catch her. Hugging her back, Castle looked over her red hair to Martha, who had her eyes closed in what looked like a sigh of relief.

"What happened to you?" Alexis mumbled into his shirtfront. Before he could reply, she pulled back a few inches and repeated in an entirely different tone, "No, really. What—" Her nose wrinkled, and her brow underwent the same change as she tried to figure out the nature of the stains on his clothes. "What is that?"

"I suspect I do not know, neither do I want to know," he told her, disentangling her arms the rest of the way and pulling off his probably ruined jacket.

"Where have you been all night?" Martha joined in the questioning. She too ventured into Castle's sphere of odor to clasp his shoulders firmly, look him in the eye, and then pull away before the smell of his clothes could transfer itself to hers in the same way it had jumped to Alexis' bathrobe. Realizing this, Alexis hurriedly unwrapped it from her shoulders and dumped it in the overly fragrant pile that had begun with her father's jacket and had grown with the addition of his socks and button-up shirt. This left him in an undershirt that had once been a fetching shade of dark blue and a pair of pants, both of which didn't smell very good either, but would do until he could get in the shower and preferably burn what remained of his clothes.

"I'm not sure I can explain," he answered his mother's clearly heartfelt question. "Would you believe me if I told you that I've just spent—" He leaned to one side to check the oven clock in the kitchen. "—almost seven hours wandering around the forgotten abandoned subway tunnels of Manhattan?"

"From anyone else? No," drawled Martha. "From you? Anytime."

Castle made a face at her. "What if I told you I was zapped down there by a magical booby trap along with Beckett, a warrior Slayer woman, and a sort of remotely sometimes friendly vampire, and was attacked several times by demons that wanted to do terrible things to us until I fought them off with the terrible sound of that ultrasonic dog whistle app Alexis found for me?" All mostly true, except he'd only deployed the dog whistle once: while it had sent their attackers—and their guides—running with what seemed to be screaming headaches, Spike had snatched the phone out of Castle's hand and announced that if he (Castle) ever did that again, he (Spike) was going to smash the device into smithereens (Castle's phrase) and use it to cut the writer into such little tiny bits that the next pack of demons that came along would be able to eat him as hot dogs (Spike's phrase).

Things had gone figuratively if not literally downhill from that point, as it turned out that Buffy had not known that Spike firstly could hear and secondly did not like the sound of dog whistles, and considered this blackmail-worthy information. She'd immediately informed them all that she was going to release that little tidbit to (apparently) everyone back home the next time she wanted something or he'd annoyed her, which seemed to happen often. Castle had found the resulting argument incomprehensible but hilarious, full of people he'd never met and references to incidents and customs he knew nothing about, and had been truly sorry when it had been interrupted by—to his delight, much later—an otherwise unidentified Something Large with Tentacles.

In the walk through stepping stones of belief that is the process of telling a story, it seemed that Martha and Alexis had tripped over 'magical booby trap' and faceplanted on 'vampire', preempting any chance of getting to the Something Large with Tentacles. "Dad," scolded Alexis, "be serious."

"I thought I was," he sighed—seriously. "Okay, pumpkin. Let me go take a shower and I'll have a more believable story all ready to tell you by the time I'm done. Although—" He'd knelt to retrieve his phone from his jacket pocket, and gotten a whiff of it. "—that might be sometime in July."

Alexis collapsed back onto a couch, disappearing from view behind its cushioned back. "I'm so glad you're all right, Dad. So I'm postponing the vengeance for scaring us until a later date."

"Do I at least get a warning before this vengeance occurs?"

"No. Proper revenge for scaring me is that you be scared too," said the couch.

Castle shrugged. By Revenge Logic, that was fair enough. "What about you, mother? Planning acts of terrible revenge?"

She treated him to another performance of the stinkeye she'd perfected. "You're the one who trained her in 'acts of terrible revenge'. Between your childish mind and her brilliance, I need only stand back and observe with smug satisfaction and the absolute right to say I told you so."

"Four of my favorite words."

Alexis suddenly sat back up, appearing from behind the couch cushions as rapidly as she'd vanished. "Wait! Detective Beckett was with you! Is she—"

"She's all right, Alexis. No one got hurt," he reassured her. It wasn't quite true—lots of monstery looking things had gotten hurt as the little group had slowly and frustratingly made their way towards the aboveground human world and the streets of Manhattan, and there were some bruises scattered around on their side—but it was true enough.

"Come on," he encouraged her, rounding the couch and taking her hand to pull her up from where she'd rejoined the cushions. "Showers and beds all around, little miss stinky. Isn't it a school night?"

Alexis reminded him that "No, today's Sunday," as she let herself be dragged off the couch by her wrists. "Big mister stinky-er."

She was right, he realized after a few seconds' thought while skiing her across the hardwood floor and towards the stairs. He'd bought her a new pair of special sliding socks just a few months ago for Christmas and was pleased to see that she was wearing them. He'd utterly lost track of time as the case had accelerated from impromptu conferences at the Old Haunt on Friday evening through the searching of Matthew and Martin Bulis' house that had landed Castle, Beckett, Buffy, and Spike in those damned tunnels on Saturday night.

A lot had happened in a relatively short space of time, but he was glad of it. When he and Beckett and the guys didn't have any leads or good ideas, things dragged on for days. But when a case accelerated like this one, it usually meant it was getting somewhere.

Between getting back to her own apartment and turning up at the Precinct Sunday morning, Beckett calculated that she had spent about an hour and a half in the shower trying to scrub the smell of some abandoned and some other all-too-inhabited tunnels off her skin, taking into account the shower she'd taken immediately after locking her door behind her and the one she'd taken after a few hours of sleep. So it was a clean and nice-smelling Beckett, with only slightly damp hair, who arrived at her desk to find that the boys had constructed a 'BIG HONKING EVIDENCE LIST' around the edges of her murderboard.

"Nice," she semi-sarcastically told Ryan, who grinned unapologetically—mainly because the title was in Esposito's handwriting and if she'd disapproved it wouldn't have been Ryan who caught the flak from it.

"If I'd been gone any longer, would I have found little drawings everywhere? Well done on finding Martin Bulis, by the way," Beckett added more seriously. The boys had evidently taken advantage of her absence to decorate the board to their hearts' content, as the DMV picture of Bulis that had previously been on the board had been replaced by one taken at booking and someone who wrote a lot like Ryan had written 'arrested' next to it.

"Thank you," Ryan accepted, and "Nah, Castle's the one who scribbles on the board. Where is he, anyway?"

"If he smelled half as bad as I did, probably still in the shower. We split up once we got out of the tunnels, but he promised to be here before noon."

She heard his next question coming a mile off. "What were you doing down there, anyway? Espo and I thought you'd found something at that house that told you where to find Bulis, but he was nowhere near those tunnels."

Beckett and Castle had spent some time trying to figure out how they were going to answer that question as they'd wandered in what had felt like increasingly futile circles. They hadn't come up with anything that would hold up under scrutiny—including the truth—and Buffy and Spike, while full of incredibly inventive suggestions, had not been particularly helpful, as "you got hit on the head and knocked out and dragged off and left there" had turned into "hypnotized by secret agents and you don't remember" and then "hiding from zombies". Castle had not helped either by telling the pair that they'd already tried out 'abducted by aliens' on Captain Montgomery and he hadn't gone for it.

The Beckett School of Lying, however, instructed her to tell the truth as much as possible while simultaneously revealing as little actual information as she could, so she simply went with: "It's a long story, Ryan, and not particularly relevant to the case." Before he could persist, she changed the subject (another precept of the Beckett School of Lying, although she wouldn't have labeled it as such). "So, anything interesting happening with Bulis?"

"Not a thing," said Ryan, shaking his head not all that sadly. "Hasn't asked for a lawyer, even when we offered him one, hasn't done anything actually. He just sat down there in a holding cell, which he had all to himself, by the way, until you called in and we brought him up to the Box."

She turned to look. There was indeed an officer in uniform standing guard over the door into the interrogation room, and if she took a few steps to the side she would probably be able to see Bulis through the window. "No one's interviewed him yet?"

"And miss seeing you go to town on his ass?" Esposito piped up, catching the tail end of the conversation as he returned to the bullpen with a file folder in hand. "No way, lady."

"Esposito!" she greeted him happily. "Is that evidence—" She reached a hand out for the manila folder. "—or a birthday card for Lanie?"

"Wait, I thought her birthday wasn't until—" he spluttered until he realized she was joking. "Actually, it's the latest enhancement of the traffic cam footage that shows our victim near the abandoned building she was found in and someone walking with her. They've been trying to get the resolution up to where we can actually identify him, but right now the best we can say is that he's male and probably in his twenties or thirties. The clothes sort of match what Bulis seems to wearing on another traffic cam we found where he's walking with his buddy from the coffee place, but that wasn't a very good camera and on both videos they're so generic they could be anyone. Anyway, this guy is carrying a backpack and Bulis in the other video isn't."

Esposito pulled the still frame out of the folder and handed it to Beckett, who looked it over. Steph was clearly visible, with a coffee mug in one hand and something that Beckett rather thought was a wooden stake in the other. The light had caught her face just right as she looked up, and the timestamp from the camera that had snapped a picture of a red-light runner placed this moment right on the edge of their kill zone, but her companion had been looking down and moving as the shutter had blinked. His features were fuzzy and shadowed, and his clothes were the anonymous blur of almost all male chilly weather gear. The enlargement didn't help. Based on what they knew about Steph's vital statistics, her height in particular, the man in the picture might be Martin Bulis, but he lacked any defining features. They couldn't even see if he was wearing Martin's little beard-and-mustache combination, as no light had been cast on his face. But he was indeed carrying a backpack.

Sharing the expression on her face and Ryan's, who was looking over her shoulder, Esposito added, "They have a few more tricks they can try down in the photo lab, so maybe they'll come up with something else."

"Well, it can't hurt to mention it if it looks like pushing him could help," Beckett decided, starting to hand it back to Esposito.

"What can't hurt to mention? Is that a picture? Can I see?" Castle greeted them all, approaching with Beckett's coffee on offer.

"Traffic cam enhancement," she brought him up to speed, trading him the snapshot for the mug of almost-but-not-quite-too-hot very good coffee. It was magic Castle coffee, she'd long since decided, since it was never quite as good even if she went to the same place and bought the same thing and experimented with how long it should be given to cool. She'd told Lanie this once, although not that she had timed the cooling process, taking sips at regular intervals to find out when it would taste just as good as when Castle brought it to the 12th. Lanie had given her the 'girl, you are pathetic and why don't you just jump that man' look. Kate Beckett had very hurriedly changed the subject.

Castle looked it over, turning it this way and that as if he could illuminate a bygone Tuesday night with the fluorescent lights overhead. "It sort of looks like him. But not definitely. Hey!" he interrupted his own train of thought, distracted. "Who wrote 'big honking evidence list' on the board? Because that wasn't me," he defended himself, turning to Beckett to plead his case.

As she gathered up photocopies of the evidence she meant to use or refer to in the upcoming interrogation, Beckett pointed at Esposito, who failed to look innocent in any way whatsoever.

"Castle," she called, although she hated to interrupt the spectacle of him craning back and forth at ridiculous angles to read the aforementioned evidence list, "you coming?" She took a few steps towards the interrogation room to illustrate.

"Wouldn't miss it," he averred, abandoning the murderboard and handing over the snapshot, which she added to her evidence folder.

Ryan and Esposito followed them, Ryan a little more vocally than his partner. "Wait a minute!" he protested. "You still haven't told us how you ended up in the deep dark subway tunnels or what you were doing there!"

Beckett and Castle looked each other and exchanged miniscule shrugs. Neither of them had come up with a good cover story yet, and the truth was not going to play well with the guys—much less Montgomery.

"Later," Beckett told them. "Once this case is over." By which time they'd hopefully have come up with something believable.

"Sorry, guys," she heard Castle say over his shoulder to Ryan and Esposito, "looks like the latest installment of Adventure Time with Beckett and Castle will have to wait."

They seemed to settle for that, because as she and Castle headed to the interrogation room and the guys broke off to the adjacent room on the other side of the two-way mirror she also heard Ryan exclaim, "Hey dude. Dude. Bulis. Box. Beckett."

Esposito added, "Bingo!" and she could almost see them fist-bump.

"Detective Beckett?" said Martin Bulis. "Mr. Castle? I thought—" He glanced around the room from the corner he'd taken up residence in as if looking for someone else. Ryan and Esposito, she assumed.

"Hello again, Martin," she answered casually. "We need to talk. Sit down, please." Following her own directions, she took a seat in one of the chairs with its back to the two-way mirror. Castle took the other, leaving Martin with no choice but to sit down exposed to whoever might be watching from behind the glass.

He hovered for a minute more, and then threw himself into the remaining chair almost convulsively before jumping up, leaning across the table, and saying fervently, "I didn't kill her! She was my friend!"

"So I've been told. Sit down. Actually," she went on, placing her hand on the full file folder almost absently, "I've been told quite a lot of things since we last spoke. One thing I don't know, though, is why you were hiding out at that shop. You seem to spend a lot of time there, if the parking tickets you've gotten in the last few months are any indication. Why?" Her tone was friendly, non-confrontational, meant to lure Bulis into a false sense of security as they talked about things that couldn't get him in trouble. It would all go out the window the minute she saw an opportunity to trap him in a lie or an incriminating statement.

Martin fidgeted before deciding that it was a harmless enough question. "It's sort of my workroom. I use it for…experiments…that I can't do at home. No one's ever there."

Beckett said nothing, and Castle followed her lead, knowing that she used silence as a tool. Most people felt compelled to fill in blank spaces, especially if they were answering questions and the silence implied that the answer hadn't been sufficient.

Sure enough, Martin went on. "I was trying some things that I read in a book at home—at my brother's house—and I almost destroyed some stuff by mistake. I knew what I did wrong and I could do it better next time, I said, but he told me I wasn't allowed to try it again at home. So I found somewhere else to practice."

"Sounds interesting," Castle commented. "Did you ever figure it out?"

"Yeah, yeah I did," he nodded, breaking into a tiny smile at the thought of achieving something interesting. "You wouldn't believe it if I told you."

Beckett didn't let him get too confident. "We've been in your brother's house, Martin. We just might."

The smile fell away really quickly, eroding his self-confidence even further as it scrabbled for a grip on the edges and missed.

"So tell me again how you knew Stephanie Amador," the detective instructed him.

"She. Was. My. Friend." Martin gritted out, as if saying it again and slowly this time would make her believe it. "We met just after I started working at Krimsonn. I noticed her because she kept coming in regularly—and usually right before we closed. Most people don't want coffee at eleven PM but when I asked she said she worked really late. We'd chat while I was closing up the shop sometimes. She kicked that drunk guy out—you saw the video. She told great stories."

"What kind of stories?" Castle wanted to know and, to disguise his real reason for asking, added, "I'm a writer, so I'm always interested in stories."

Martin stared at him, calculating, and mistakenly decided it was safe. "Monsters in New York, magic and fantasy, that sort of thing. I think she watched a lot of movies," he tried to laugh it off.

"Did you believe her?" Beckett asked quietly.

"What? Uh, no. It was silly stuff. But I liked them. I liked talking to her."

"Ever ask her out?" Sometimes lawyers said that they never asked questions without already knowing the answer. It was a useful strategy for detectives, too.

"No. I kinda wanted to. She was really cute, but she was way out of my league, y'know?"

"Why was that, Martin?"

Martin couldn't answer that truthfully without explaining that he knew Steph had been a Slayer and thereby revealing more knowledge than he was pretending to have. He finally settled for, "I just knew."

"Really? Did you know she was going to ask you?"

"What?" said Martin again, but in a different tone. "How do you know that?"

"She even gave you a nickname so she could talk about you to her friends without ruining the surprise," Castle said. "She called you 'Taylor'. Talked about you all the time, apparently."

He hadn't known this, and was going, to Beckett's expert eye, a little pale. "Really?"

"A shame you had that fight a couple weeks ago," Beckett continued casually. "We hear it got kind of violent. She broke some of your things, didn't she?"

"Who told you that?"

"She was upset, you know. She called someone she trusted and told her that a friend had betrayed her. Steph wanted that friend back."

Helpfully, Castle said, "That'd be you."

Beckett opened her file folder, and withdrew two photographs. "We found this in her apartment," she said, sliding the picture of the half-statue concealed in Steph's apartment across the table, "and this in your room." The picture of the rest of the statue, in several pieces, joined the first image.

Martin picked them up and looked them over, which Beckett realized as an action that gave him time to think. She'd recently been told that she fiddled with her hair for much the same reason, although she wasn't sure how much she trusted that assessment…or, more accurately, the assessor.

"It was an accident," Martin said finally, putting them down and pushing the pictures back towards Beckett. "Steph took the other half with her because she was still mad and thought I'd have to come find her and apologize to get it back. But it wasn't that important. I'm surprised she kept it."

"Really?" Beckett silently blessed Ryan and Esposito and the wonderful things they could get done while she wasn't there. While she'd been wandering around tunnels, they'd been doing detective work. "This seems like a lot of money for something unimportant." They'd found a receipt from one of the pawn shops Steph had been checking out before she died. She had been following up leads to find out who had purchased the statue, and the guys had found Martin's purchase of the statue in the records they'd obtained while following in her footsteps.

Martin looked at the purchase record she handed him, and rallied well. "You're telling me you've never bought something on impulse and regretted it? It looked neat in the shop and I was having a good day. But it didn't match my stuff, okay?"

"Why didn't you take it back?" Beckett asked. "Before Steph broke it, of course."

"You don't take things back to pawnshops, Detective. They're not good about returns, unless it was broken when you bought it, and even then…look, is this all? I had a fight with a friend where no one got hurt, almost two weeks later she's killed horribly, and you think I killed her because—what? I never got to ask her out and some dumb statue got broken?"

Well, if he was going to shout, she was going to push back. "Do you know what this is, Martin?" This picture was of the empty bottle of tizanadine that Leesha had found in Matthew and Martin Bulis' house.

"It's an empty pill bottle." He looked again. "And it's my brother's. Look, there's his name on the label."

"Along with the prescription date," Beckett pointed out. "Very recently, as it happens. Martin, we did some research. If your brother needed this much medication in that short a time, he would not be overseas traveling on business."

"Good for him. So?"

"So Steph was poisoned, Martin."

When he didn't reply, Castle took a turn. "She and her friends know about this stuff. Knew it right away. They call it 'moxie'. Know why? Because if one of them is dosed with it, moxie—that means courage—is all they have left."

"What happened to the rest of the medicine in this bottle?" Beckett demanded.

"I don't know." Martin's denial was sullen.

"As it happens, tizanadine capsules—like the ones that used to be in here—" she emphasized, moving the image back into his field of view, "—can also be broken open and the medicine put in food or drink. Like the coffee you mixed for her the night she died, for example."

He said nothing.

"We found the wrappers for surgical tubing in your trashcan. They had food stains on them, but I'm sure your fingerprints will turn up all over that plastic. Her killer, Martin, used that kind of tubing to drain her blood." Martin stared into space resolutely, and she stood and leaned over the table to get into his field of view. "Martin! She was scared. She was drugged so she couldn't fight and tied up, and her heart was racing."

She wanted to meet his eyes as she spoke, but he wouldn't look at her. "Her own heart killed her, Martin. She gave it to the wrong person—and he used it to kill her."

When Martin moved, almost thirty seconds later, it was to shake his head fervently. "No. No. NO! I didn't kill her!" he reiterated. "I had no reason to kill her—no motive, isn't that how you say it? She was my friend, we'd had a fight, but we made up, right? Otherwise why would she come back and hang out with me again? If she didn't trust me why would she accept a drink from me?"

Castle was pretty sure he knew where Beckett would take that, so he set it up nicely for her. "What is it you do at that…shall we call it a workshop?" he punned harmlessly. "Must be something really interesting if your brother chucked it out of the house."

The young man looked severely wrong-footed. "I made something explode," he said before he could think. "Little things," he amended, realizing that telling the police that you like to make things explode was something that would probably not win their friendship. "Not big things. And, and it was just a trick, anyway."

"Oh, right," sighed Beckett, sitting back down as if relaxing. "Magic tricks."

"Um, yeah." He thought about it. "I guess."

"Now, Martin, before you go any further," she warned him, "we've seen some of your magic tricks. There were some clever ones in your house—you didn't really move everything to your workshop—" That was cute, Castle, thanks, she thought. "—did you? There were the amusing booby trap tricks. And that particularly clever one."

His eyes raced back and forth, obviously trying to think of which particular little surprise she was referring to.

"The one with the mirror," Castle informed him, and enjoyed the look of surprise that he tried to cover. He clearly had not intended anyone who stumbled into that to come back to complain to him about it. More importantly, he now knew that they knew what they were talking about, and that his talk of magic tricks and minor explosions was a cover story. God knew what he'd actually been practicing in that empty space.

Beckett went with it. "Luckily we have some good friends. Some friends in common, actually. I was Steph's friend. And they knew her pretty well. They tell me—Steph's friends—that she loved to tell stories. But you knew that. And one day she told you about how she got to be the way she was, why she could do the things she could do."

As it was, Beckett thought ruefully, she barely believed in half the things she'd seen and been told about over the past few days. She did not want to go on a police recording talking about Slayers and special powers and magical booby traps. Fortunately, Martin seemed to know how he'd sound talking about them too, and was mostly speaking in euphemisms.

"She told a lot of stories," he said cautiously.

"She was quite a woman, wasn't she?" Castle prodded him. "She was cute, she had a great imagination, she was a fighter…that's quite a mix. No wonder you felt outclassed. And you still wanted to ask her out? What made you think she'd say yes?"

They had just told him that Steph had been planning to make a move of her own anyway, but as Castle and Beckett understood it, Martin had killed Steph because he had felt outclassed and she'd reviled his attempt to even the score a little. If they were right, he was likely to jump on that.

He did. "I'd have thought of something. We were friends, right? There had to be something she liked about me. I'd even have helped her…uh, that is, if she wanted to play at running around New York hunting monsters," Martin improvised.

"So you were going to do better, is that right?" Beckett checked. "Impress her somehow?"

Martin was remembering to be wary now. "Never hurts, right?"

She smiled at him, and it was not a very happy smile. "Steph wasn't very impressed, though, was she? She got angry, instead. Maybe you tried a little too hard and tried something dangerous. She stopped you. She didn't know you were trying to be her equal—to help her, right? All she saw was someone she liked doing something stupid, even though she'd told you all about how stupid it was. All those stories and you hadn't learned a thing."

He was positively grey now. "I didn't kill her," he repeated stubbornly.

Beckett played the traffic cam footage card, extracting the printed photograph from her folder and placing it before him with a tap of her finger on the time-and-date stamp. "You were with her right before she died. This is two blocks away from the place she died. Here's Steph. There's the coffee you made her. She hadn't felt the effects yet, had she? And here's you."

Martin looked at the picture, and thought about it, evidently still a little shaken from Beckett's exposure of his thoughts and feelings. "That could be anyone," he said finally. "That's not me," he added more determinedly.

"You don't have an alibi," she warned him. "The movie theatre? It's not going to hold up."

"I could sneak out of the Angelica," Castle colored in the details for her. "My daughter could sneak out of the Angelica. She could sneak out by accident."

"At that time of night, you could get your ticket, put in some face time, and sneak right back out to meet up with Steph around here." She slid the photograph towards him again. "Still want to tell me this isn't you?"

He said nothing, and she pushed harder on the motive, which usually got to people who had committed murder for emotional reasons. (Hard evidence usually worked better on those who had acted for money or on impulse, she'd found, not that it was a hard and fast rule.) "She wanted to be your friend again, Martin. She reached out to you to clear up that confused mess you two had gotten into. Maybe she was even a little touched that you'd tried to be worthy of her, to help her, once the shock of you doing something stupid wore off. Because as far as she knew, you'd stopped. You'd understood what you'd done wrong and were willing to be friends again. She was more forgiving than you were. And that was her mistake, wasn't it? Thinking that you valued her friendship more than your pride."

They didn't have a lot of evidence, Beckett knew, so she watched Martin carefully as he thought about what she'd said and his possible courses of action. What they had was, as she'd had to point out to Castle on more than one occasion before and probably would have to on any number of cases since, a story. A good story, a story that made sense, but not one backed up by solid witnesses, video footage, or forensic evidence. She needed him to confess.

He didn't.

"No," he repeated. "I didn't kill her. You can't prove I did. So I didn't. And that's my final word on the subject, so either arrest me properly and try to prove it in a courtroom—because you can't, and I'll call Matthew and he'll get me a real lawyer, not some crap public defender like your buddies tried to offer me—or let me go."

Beckett was not going to get angry. She definitely was not going to get angry, and she reminded herself forcefully of that as the emotional part of her brain that did not like to listen to this tried to get very angry at this man indeed.

"Martin Bulis," she said formally, for the recorder, "you are still under arrest for the murder of Stephanie Amador. For the moment, you will be taken back to a holding cell while this investigation continues." She proceeded to read out the date and the time and identify all participants in the room before switching off the recorder.

"I didn't," Martin said stubbornly, but as she rose from her seat she caught his eyes unexpectedly and she saw that it was obstinacy rather than truth. Beckett wasn't going to say anything off the record—it was already irregular that she was a friend of the victim in this case, and only because Steph's friends would only talk honestly to her had she been left on the case—so she simply stared back and let him know that she knew. He looked away.

Castle followed her out the door, but had no such reservations about impromptu statements. "As they say, Martin, the proof is out there."

Egregious misquotations aside.

"If this were an Agatha Christie novel," speculated Castle as they rejoined Ryan and Esposito, "people confronted with the suggestion of evidence would jump up and confess all the time. Her detectives never have hard evidence. It's all 'you did this and this is why' and 'he did that because I say so' and people jump up and confess."

"That would be nice," Beckett said halfheartedly. But in the real world, she needed forensic evidence, a confession, or both, and Martin Bulis had taken the road of digging in his heels and repeating that he didn't do it until the detective ran out of ways to prove that he did. She hated it when they did that.

"So what now?" Ryan wanted to know as they slogged dispiritedly back to the little hub of desks and chairs and oversized whiteboard that made up home base for Beckett's miniature taskforce.

"Now we find evidence," she replied, even though that seemed fairly obvious. "I'll ask Lanie if there's anything else she can learn from Steph's body. Some tests that took time to run or something she's thought of recently. While I'm doing that, Esposito, go and check with the photo lab or the computer technicians or whoever's looking into that surveillance footage. Ryan, get onto Krimsonn and see if anyone remembers what Bulis was wearing last Tuesday night, especially if he had a backpack. Maybe we can match that up with what that guy's wearing on the traffic camera."

"What about me?" Castle wanted to know as they reached the bullpen and the guys went about their tasks. "What can I do to help?"

She reached around for something he could do and came up with two things. "Did you ever finish going through Steph's computer?"

"No," he admitted. "I stopped once I found that the mysterious Taylor was coffee-boy over there." He nodded over his shoulder at Martin Bulis, who was being led from the interrogation room by a uniformed policewoman.

"Well, get back on that, see if you find anything else interesting. And if you get the chance while you're working on that…"

"What?"

She smiled beseechingly at him. "Pizza delivery?"

Martin Bulis sat in his holding cell and tried to think of ways that he could get out of this without bringing his older brother into the picture. He was sick and tired of having to run to Matthew—the older brother, the successful brother—for help and support and occasionally for spending money, and the advice that came, unwanted, with it all. But he'd dropped out of college because they didn't offer classes in his real interest—the magic, the legends—and he couldn't be bothered to go to boring classes in much else, and as a result there weren't that many places that would hire him. Krimsonn, he'd decided not long after getting a job there, was almost as boring as accountancy classes, although at least Krimsonn hadn't been Matthew's idea like the accounting minor had been.

How the hell, he wondered, had he been so unlucky as to leave Steph's body in a place where it had been almost immediately found? She'd been talking just the other day about how the building was going to be torn down and at least half a dozen kinds of demons that she was worried about this month would have to find somewhere else to prowl. They shouldn't have found her until after it had been knocked down, and wouldn't that have messed any evidence up but good, if he'd left some? The police wouldn't be able to find any, and the Slayers would have heard 'throat lacerations, blood everywhere' and started sharpening stakes. They wouldn't have looked any further. They'd have just gone on with their endless war. The Slayers forgot about the police, he had learned, and he had picked up the habit. That had been a mistake.

But no, someone had to find her body. But no, the detective assigned to the case knew what Slayers were—knew who Steph was, worse still! But no, she'd asked all the right questions and hung on to the case even though the other two Slayers, whom Martin had never met, had probably taken off on their war against everything nonhuman anyway.

Martin took a deep breath, tipped his head back against the cold stone wall, and let it out slowly. They didn't have any proof, he reminded himself. There was no way they would get the traffic cameras or whatever surveillance footage to resolve enough to show his face. Even an amateur magic user could muck up a camera's workings—in fact, not disrupting electronics was the harder task to learn. He'd long since learned to manipulate the energy around himself in a sort of poor mage's invisibility cloak. Didn't do anything about people, but hell on cameras.

They didn't have the cameras. And they didn't have the clothes, which had been unbelievably messy. She had struggled, although he'd put most of his brother's medicine in that coffee and without Slayer strength, she'd been just a petite girl who'd been taken by surprise and knocked down against a hard floor. Her blood had gotten all over his sweater and pants as he'd held her down and it had gushed out into the two gallon jars he'd packed in the backpack. He'd picked it up at the Angelica where he'd left it, full of generic plastic jugs and surgical tubes and some hollow needles he'd stolen from a charity clinic he'd stopped by one day. They'd been having a rush day and no one had looked twice at him after he volunteered to help fetch and carry and rolled up his sleeves to prove that he wasn't a drug addict looking for clean needles to enable his next fix. Needle track-free, his help had been welcomed.

Rope was cheap. Rope was easy. Rope was everywhere. Rope could be cut into little tiny pieces with kitchen scissors and scattered into every trashcan he passed.

He'd gotten rid of the clothes. He'd packed a change of clothes and easily flattened sandals and some wipes to get rid of the worst of what had ended up on his skin. Once he was clean and changed so that he would leave no tracks when he moved away, he'd poured the blood that had pooled in the jars over her body, careful not to splash and directing it over anywhere he'd touched or stepped. It had been horribly metallic and he had felt as if it had caught in his teeth, as if he was chewing on her death every time he moved his mouth.

The bloody clothes he had dumped in an alleyway far from the building where Steph's body lay, certain that some homeless passerby in need of a warm sweater would pick it up and take it even further away, never to be seen again. He hadn't gone back to check—that would be stupid, with the police wandering around—but it had been almost a week. The clothes were long gone.

So, he reminded himself, they didn't have the cameras and they didn't have the clothes and they apparently didn't have any forensic evidence, or that unnecessarily persistent Detective Beckett would have dropped it in front of him just like she'd presented those pictures.

He just wished that she hadn't been on good terms with the Slayers. She had gotten a lot of it, he admitted to himself nervously. He didn't know how, didn't know who she'd talked to—hell, he didn't know who Steph had talked to. He'd assumed that because she'd kept her friendship with him secret, never making him part of her little gang, she'd have kept the fight they'd had secret too.

Damn it, he had wanted to help! She'd been better than the 'cute' he'd told Beckett and her inexplicable shadow Castle, she'd been gorgeous. He'd have called her 'vivacious' if that hadn't been horribly fifties and somehow implied redheads with curly hair and swimsuits. The life in her had lit her up; she'd so obviously loved what she was doing. Saving the world. One monster at a time. We're not losing, she'd insisted, laughing. We're here. So we're winning.

Huh. Well, now she wasn't.

She'd been shocked to see him; it hadn't been him she'd been looking for, it was the statue. The pure demon in potentia, the trader had called it, trying to impress him. Its power had impressed him. Its potential to help him had impressed him. It had been powerful enough to get her attention, but it hadn't worked like he'd hoped. Steph had been furious. You idiot, she'd yelled at him. What do you think you're doing? How dare you do this?

And she'd smashed it. It had taken over a year to find and he'd paid more for it than Beckett thought. That was just what had gone down on the ledger. He'd paid more in promises that hadn't been written down. Items he'd traded that had vanished as if they'd never existed. And she had broken it beyond repair as if it were some dollar-fifty ceramic plate from a general store.

How dare you. Even now, even though he'd made her pay for those words, they still made him angry. As if she had been so much better. As if he couldn't hope to be anything near her.

She had been furious. The detective and her friend were wrong. Martin had seen in her eyes that he'd done something unforgivable, and in trying to obtain what he'd most wanted he'd traded that very thing away. He'd wanted to be her lover, and he'd become her enemy instead.

Deals with the devil. He should have known.

"I'm told it's a hell of a thing, killing a Slayer. Did it make you feel all special inside?"

He opened his eyes and sat up, startled. It didn't take long to find the source of the voice. She was leaning against the wall outside his cell, beyond the bars, and she was definitely not a cop.

"Who are you?" he blurted out. "How did you get in here?" A suspicion came over him, and he narrowed his eyes, looking her over and wishing he'd asked Steph more about her fellow Slayers while she was still speaking to him. She was small, blonde, fair, slender, confident, twenties…very cute. Not a cop. The clothes she was wearing said that; the attitude said more. She was…balanced. Wary, but not afraid. More aware than wary, actually. Also, she knew who he was—and she did not like him. But she wasn't looking for a way to get through the bars between him and her and hurt him. Another Slayer, then.

"So are you Leesha or Perrin?"

"Nope. Y'know, there are actually more than two of us these days. But you knew that, didn't you?"

"Did Beckett send you down here?" he demanded. He wished he hadn't. It had sounded more desperate than demanding.

She grinned. It was a faintly disturbing smile. "Kate Beckett is a wonderful woman. I quite like her. But she has no idea I'm down here. Fact is, she told me 'stay out, 'less I know you're here'. One of these days I will work on listening to people who tell me not to do things. When I have the time."

Martin now knew no more than he had a minute ago. "What do you want?"

"I always try to find out about things that kill one Slayer, just in case they think they can run off and kill more. I like telling 'em they're wrong. You, by the way," she added tauntingly, "do not measure up."

He was being insulted. He knew he was being insulted. But just in case this woman was Beckett's attempt at getting him to confess—the detective had admitted that she knew other Slayers, and there was no way she and her friend had gotten out of the lost subways by themselves—he held his tongue and didn't tell her exactly how easy Steph had been to kill. "I didn't kill her," he said again, with a sigh as if tired of repeating it. He was tired of repeating it.

The woman smiled at him prettily and said, "You're lying," confidently. He had a plan all prepared to close his eyes and ignore her until she went away, but she went on to say, "Did you know that feelings have smells? Not smooth-feeling, rough-feeling, although I suppose if you're feeling rough, y'know, that would have a smell."

He had to open his eyes to properly give her a 'what the hell are you talking about?' look, which kind of ruined his whole plan to ignore her. His plans always worked out better if he had time to think about them in advance.

"Fear has a smell—even humans can smell that, it gets bad enough," she explained. "Guilt has a smell. Apparently, lying-to-me has a smell. That must be the reason, 'cause otherwise I'd get away with it a whole lot more. I have a friend, you see—" She stopped, thought about it, went on as Martin stared at her in utter confusion. "—I have two friends, since Oz turned up again, who always know when someone is sick or angry or upset, because there's a smell of it, you see."

"Whatever," Martin muttered, hoping this crazy woman would go away. Based on previous evidence, though, it was not, he mused regretfully, his lucky day.

"—makes lying to him pretty well impossible. It's very annoying. Wish I could do that, 'cause you, Martin, would smell guilty as hell. If hell smells guilty. It would, though, don't you think?"

What?

"They probably wouldn't believe me anyway," she went on, flicking a thumb up towards the ceiling and the general direction of, presumably, Beckett and her detective crew.

"But here's the thing, and it's a big thing, so listen up."

He had nothing better to do until whatever police officer was supposed to be guarding the holding cells and keeping random Slayers from harassing him turned up and actually did his job. He definitely wasn't going to shout at her and cause a scene that would cause him to be recorded as anything else but a model prisoner. So Martin listened up, even though he didn't bother to look at her.

"You killed a friend of mine," she said seriously.

"No," he denied tiredly.

"You did. And you know you did, so you smell guilty. Just 'cause I can't smell it doesn't mean it's not there." She sighed regretfully. "Hell, maybe we both do."

That made so little sense, even compared to everything else she'd been saying, that he had to look over at her.

"I sent her here," the Slayer said. She looked, suddenly, very tired. "I told her she could change the world. That's so much more important than saving it, did you know? You save the world, no one notices. It keeps on going and everyone can pretend you didn't do anything, even though you did. But you change the world…that matters, see? That's why Steph was here. That's why she did what she did. And you—you have no idea why she did anything. You thought you knew everything and you just don't get any of it."

She sagged against the wall and closed her eyes. For a moment, Martin thought that she had actually gone to sleep, exhausted by the work she did and the life she lived. But just as he was almost starting to believe this, she dragged herself to her feet and crossed the couple of paces to the bars, staring him down.

"Are you listening to me, Martin? Because here's the thing. You get out of here? We are coming for you. All of the Slayers. Anywhere you go. You killed one of our own, and we are not happy bundles of joy because of it."

To his dismay, Martin realized that he had pressed himself as far into the furthest corner from her as he could go. "You don't hurt humans," he croaked. Steph had said that once. "You don't, it's not allowed."

"We don't kill humans," she corrected him angrily. "Gotta be better than the bad guys in some ways. But there are loads of ways to make someone's life miserable without killing him. Plenty of people I know could stand to go ouch for a while."

The Slayer meant it. He could tell. It was in the obviousness of everything she said. Her words, her body language, the way one hand was working on putting fingerprints in the steel of the bar while the other was clenched round what looked like a knife worn against her back. That was a dead giveaway.

And she wouldn't stop until she was sure that he'd gotten her point…so to speak. "We can be anywhere. We could be anyone. Somewhere with big locks and people to keep an eye on you…sounding better all the time, huh? And hey, you'll be the Big Bad. Sure there are plenty of people ready to be impressed you killed a woman who trusted you. Just none of them are out here."

Martin had seen Steph fight, with all the grace and speed and power of an avalanche. He'd seen her angry. He'd seen her not angry or particularly put out at all, pulling off feats of strength and agility that would have made an Olympic athlete cry.

He was beginning to realize that his only advantage—the element of surprise—was utterly lost, and that he'd angered some very dangerous people.

When he looked up, she was gone, with no more evidence of how she'd gotten out than how she'd gotten in. They are hunters, he thought, and there is a more dangerous game than man.

"Officer!" he shouted suddenly, before she could come back or another one could get in to do more than talk. "Officer! I want to talk to Detective Beckett!"

Author's Note: Oh my god, as I finish this scene—with another scene bumped to the next chapter!—it's five-thirty in the morning. Where did all this… Typical. One of these days I'll learn to write in reliable intervals rather than dumping twelve pages of Verdana 9-point text to Word in a few hours.

SO: Opinions? I am not a violent person—I don't even own a water gun, although I do carry pepper spray—so it's very hard for me to come up with compelling reasons to kill someone. (Sarcasm is so much more satisfying!) In no particular order, then: Do Martin's motives 'work'? Have I gotten Buffy's dialogue a little closer to her distinctive voice? How did Martha and Alexis' cameos fit in? How about the interrogation?

Next and Lastly: The validity of threats. It's still always about blood. And drinks at the Old Haunt are on Castle. See you there.