This chapter will introduce a case they get two weeks after Montgomery calls Castle and Beckett and about four weeks after Kate woke up, and they bring in Ryan and Esposito to help. Hope you all enjoy.
Disclaimer: Once again, I do not own any rights to Castle or its characters, I only own the first four books and the first two seasons on DVD.
Two weeks later and she's still reeling from that phone call. It shocked her to her very core and made her look at everyone suspiciously. If Montgomery had had to fake his own death so he could, as he said, 'help from the underground with no one looking', then she wondered who it was he was trying to hide from. Who he was trying to keep off his trail and, as he stated, her trail as well.
"Question everything, Kate. You don't know who it is you're dealing with. They're powerful, more powerful than you could even imagine, and it goes way beyond the precinct. Trust only Ryan and Esposito and Castle. They're the good guys. Other than that, I've never been sure," he had told her.
That was all he would say. No 'I'm sorry about worrying you when I supposedly died, I'm sorry you got shot at my funeral', he didn't explain anything to her about how he even did it. All she guessed was that a friend of his had been on the inside of this and had taken the shot instead of others and that he had worn protection against the bullet with something that looked like blood under so it would look like he bled out. It was a good cover if you didn't look closer, which she guessed the people behind it didn't want them to look closer so quickly hushed it up.
"Kate?" she heard a quiet voice near her.
Beckett jumped and turned her head slightly to see Castle sitting in his seat, looking at her with the same tense, questioning expression she could practically feel mirrored in her own. The two of them had become very conspiratorial since the phone call. And they hadn't even told Ryan and Esposito yet. "Yeah, sorry, I was a bit—"
"Out of it? Yeah, I know how that feels. I can't stop wondering if the people I see, the people I talk to, had something to do with it and…why. Why they would do this," he finished, a deep frown replacing his usual smile and a small crease in the middle of his forehead.
"I don't know, Castle," she whispered, feeling her own frown settle deeper and her heart drop even more as she looked around at the people she had thought of as a second family, "I would think, if I had to guess, that it was about money or maybe covering something up, but I can't think of anything they could have done." She turned to Castle and felt the tears sting her eyes, "I've known these people for years, Rick, and…and I can't believe they would do anything bad much less kill our captain and be working for the person that killed my mother."
Castle reached over and held her hand tightly in his, brushing his thumb in a circle against the back of her hand, "Maybe it's not all of them, Kate. Maybe it's just a few that aren't even in this department of the precinct. We'll have to look deeper to figure that out but, well…we need help to do that," he told her, grimacing as he knew what she would say even before he finished his sentence. After the call, they'd had a long conversation, or more an argument really, about bringing Ryan and Esposito into this like Montgomery had asked, but she refused. She knew she could trust them completely, that wasn't the issue though. The issue was that she didn't want to put them in the line of fire. She knew she had a large target on her back and guessed that now Castle did too, and she didn't want to endanger any of the others. She refused to.
"I know, but…I can't do that to them Castle. I can't make them as paranoid as I feel right now so…drop it? Please?" she asked.
Castle looked at her for a moment, trying to gouge her feelings from the expressions on her face and in her eyes, and nodded, "Alright," he said, "I won't say anything about it until you're ready because wither you like it or not they're going to be brought into this one day."
Kate was about to respond when Ryan came in talking on his phone, "Gates just called," he told her, referring to their new captain, Victoria Gates, "we got a case."
Beckett nodded, standing up and grabbing her jacket, "They may be brought into it, but it sure as hell won't be today," she told him before they followed Ryan out to the front of the building where Esposito sat waiting in his car. Ryan jumped in the car with him as Beckett followed in her own with Castle riding shotgun.
LINE BREAK
The body that awaited them seemed to cry out foul play. It was a female, twenty-five, Caucasian with blond hair and blue eyes, five foot eight at the most it seemed. She was dressed in a grey pencil skirt, a white button up shirt with a black undershirt, her hair was pulled up in a bun and her make-up smeared, while her black pumps still lying on the ground beside the chair she sat slumped in. Her eyes were wide, her mouth open in its final scream, and a large pool of blood flowed from the center of her white blouse. But, something nagged at the back of Kate's mind and made her wonder if she'd ever seen this woman before.
"Detective Beckett, I didn't know you were back at work yet," Lanie said, smiling as she stood up from her post beside the victim and hugged her friend.
Beckett smiled, "Yeah, I've been back for a few days, I've just been kept on desk work," she explained, shrugging before turning to the guys, "What have we got?" she asked.
Esposito was the one who spoke first, "Her name's Miranda Smith, she's twenty-five, lives here with her boyfriend Henry Sage who's thirty and hasn't been seen since last night."
"I found this under the chair," Lanie said, holding up a sharpened steak knife covered in blood, "and it seems to be the murder weapon, but the stab wound doesn't match up completely to my estimation though I'll look into it later. My best guess for the time window would be about 10 P.M. to 2 A.M. this morning."
Kate nodded, "Anything about where she works?" she asked.
Ryan and Esposito had been looking around in the other rooms but right when Kate finished her sentence, Ryan called out to her, "Beckett! You'll want to see this!" he called.
Kate walked into the other room, seeming to be her office, and looked at what Ryan held out to her and feeling her blood run cold. It was a picture of Miranda when she was a teenager it seemed in a law firm with her mentor beside her.
"That…wow," Castle said beside her, his own eyes as wide as Kate's.
"That's…that's my mother," she said, reaching out to take the photo from Ryan. She looked at Miranda's face closer and frowned, "I…Miranda was an intern that my mother had taken on because she thought she was brilliant. We sort of…we were sort of friends before my Mom…before she was…"
Kate didn't need to finish the sentence. They could guess what had happened from there. When her mother was murdered, Miranda would have been there for her in the beginning, but after numerous tries and a young Kate Beckett wanting to cut her ties to many people in her mother's life because the memories were too raw, she had lost contact with her. "When was the last time you talked to her, Kate?" Esposito asked.
Kate thought back, all her memories in the months, even the first two years after that day; a little fuzzy at times from the numbness she had felt. "About…two years after my Mom's murder. She had called to wish me and my Dad a happy Christmas, but we didn't answer. The first few years around that time were the worst for us."
Castle reached for her hand and squeezed it gently, "It's alright, Kate," he muttered, pulling her gently to him and wrapping his arms around her waist as she laid her head on his chest while Esposito and Ryan went into the other room to give them some space.
Kate shook her head, "Castle, no it's not. This is a woman that was connected to my mother. If anything, this seems to be a warning or a show to me that she was getting too close or they could rip at the wound whenever they wanted. I don't know. I just…I think you're right," she told him all in a rush, her eyes wide and glassy with the threat of tears. When Castle raised an eyebrow in question she continued, "I think we need to tell Ryan and Espo. We need all the help we can get with not just this but figuring out who it is."
Castle nodded, "Tonight, if that's alright. We'll tell them tonight."
Kate nodded and went to join her team in the living room.
LINE BREAK
It was around eight that night when Espo and Ryan showed up at Castle's loft. It took all of ten minutes for it all to spill from Kate and Castle's mouth, neither really realizing how much they had wanted to tell the two until they finally did.
At first, the two were shocked beyond the point of speaking. All they did was look between the two and try to divulge if they were telling some sick joke or not. "You mean to tell us," Esposito said after a few moments of silence, "that the captain's alive and went underground because the people who killed your Mom knew he was looking into it too much and wanted to take him out before he could find out everything?"
Castle nodded, "We got the call two weeks ago. He explained as much as he could to us and told us that there were even some in the 12th, I'm not sure if it's your department or the 12th in general, were in on it too, and that there were numerous people that had been in Kate's life that could have been a part of this. The only thing is that we don't know who it could be."
"Did he say anything else?" Ryan asked.
Kate nodded, "He said to trust you two, that he knew you two were good." Kate could see their anger when she said that and quickly continued, "I didn't want to tell you because I know that I already have a huge target on my back, Castle too, but I didn't want to put that burden on you both as well. I didn't want to ask you two to do more than you already do for me."
Esposito laughed, "Katherine Houghton Beckett," he said, making Kate smile a little at the use of her full name, "that has to be the sorriest excuse I've ever heard."
Kate laughed fully, wiping away a small tear as Ryan agreed with his partner, "We're all in, Beckett. If these people want to come after you, they'll have to come through us first."
Kate smiled as she looked at her three guys. She felt her heart swell and felt hopeful about this. That maybe, with the four of them working together, five when they included Lanie of course, maybe they could do this. They could put this to rest after all these years or, and this was a strong possibility, die trying.