Author's Note: Thank you everyone for your comments & reviews. I love hearing your thoughts about the case. Keep them coming!
Chapter 7
The case was just as baffling as the last. A young woman found slumped in a stall in the woman's restroom at a sports bar off Houston. No blood, no visible markings. Nothing.
Except this time, her purse was fully intact.
"Is anyone else seeing the similarities here?" Castle mused, poking his head into the other bathroom stall to look around.
Kate whirled around, shoving one hand into a latex glove as she spoke. "To what?"
"Young woman slumped over dead. No visible COD, no signs of struggle," he ticked off each point on his fingers. "Not to mention the fact that we're just a few blocks from the other crime scene."
"You think they're related?"
"Well, what are the odds?"
Before Castle could answer, the door swung inwards, notes of an animated conversation preceding the individuals to whom the voices belonged. "Bro, it's a woman's bathroom."
"What, you afraid you'll lose your masculinity?"
All eyes turned to them as Ryan and Esposito entered, and they paused their conversation, heads turning from side to side.
"What?" Ryan asked harmlessly.
Kate huffed a laugh and shook her head before stepping aside to allow the ME to bring them up to speed.
Lanie consulted her clipboard. "Annalise Franklin, twenty four. Patron came in to use the facilities and found her sprawled here against the wall."
"COD?"
"Nothing so far, though she appears to have thrown up just before she died." Lanie gestured over her shoulder to the toilet. "Judging by how busy the bar is, I'm guessing she hasn't been dead long."
"What was she doing here?" Espo asked.
"Eating a burger and watching the game with her boyfriend." Kate nodded toward the door. "Ernesto Garcia. Unis are talking to him now."
Castle and Kate spoke with the staff while CSU finished their work, and by the time they'd headed back to the precinct and spoken with Annalise's parents, it was closing in on nine p.m. Despite the urge to stay and begin digging into the life of their vic, the team decided to call it a night, head home for some sleep.
Nevertheless, it was nearly ten when they finally arrived at the loft with the deli sandwiches they'd grabbed on the way home. Kate closed and locked the door, tiredly leaned back against it as she wriggled out of her boots, released an exhausted sigh. Four days ago, they'd been wrapped up in luxurious sheets in a swanky hotel. Now here they were, thoroughly exhausted and tangled up in not one, but two cases in the same day.
She much preferred the former.
Castle was already in the kitchen, pulling down plates and retrieving their half-finished bottle of wine from the refrigerator. Kate slipped off her coat and tossed it onto the sofa, too lazy to hang it in the closet, and joined him at the bar. He greeted her with a glass of wine and a plate containing her unwrapped sandwich, and she took it with a tired smile and quiet 'thank you.'
Dinner was hurried and shrouded in silence, merely focused on attending the basic needs of food followed by sleep.
Half an hour later found them crawling into bed, sharing a brief goodnight kiss before extinguishing the lights and succumbing to their exhaustion.
Kate fell asleep with Castle's arm heavy over her waist, his face nuzzled into the back of her neck, both of them fully clothed.
Again.
Annalise's death, as they promptly discovered the next morning, wasn't at all straightforward.
Seven thirty a.m. found Kate frantically stumbling into the clothes that Castle had been doing his best to prevent her from putting on, while the man himself dashed to the bathroom for a hurried shower. Her damp hair was thoroughly mussed from the tangle of his fingers; she hastily tied it back into a bun before dabbing on a bit of makeup that would hopefully help to tamp down the heat in her cheeks and heady darkness of her eyes.
By eight, they were sliding into her cruiser, Castle sitting on his hands to stop himself from reaching for her, Kate biting down on her lip and forcing herself to focus on the road.
They were so busted.
"Hey, Lanie."
The door to the morgue swung open, revealing a slightly flushed Kate and a tousled Castle striding along behind her, both trying – and failing – to appear focused and professional.
Lanie gave them a pointed once-over, silently raised an eyebrow. Kate leveled a glare at her friend, but next to Castle's still damp hair, the gesture was completely ineffective. She unsubtly wiped the back of her hand across her mouth, a futile attempt at removing the taste of their rather passionate kiss from her lips. It didn't help; after the last three weeks, she was fairly certain that Castle was permanently infused into every cell of her body.
"Prolonging the honeymoon again, I see," Lanie sassed.
"Shut up."
"I'm just saying..."
"You said you found something?" Kate interrupted, forcing the conversation away from their less-than-PG elevator activities and back to the case at hand. Whatever the ME had found, it'd better be good enough to have warranted the interruption of Castle's seductive exploration of her body in what had been well on its way to becoming one of their more passionate bouts of morning sex.
"I found internal signs of asphyxia," Lanie began, "but there are no visible signs of strangulation. No bruising, no signs of a struggle."
"What does that mean?"
She shook her head. "Not sure. Tox results came back negative, but I'm running some more tests just to be sure."
"You think you know what happened?" Castle asked perceptively.
"Two vics, no visible COD and nothing in the standard tox screen?" she recited.
"Poisoning?" he guessed.
"I think that's the most likely culprit. Something a standard tox screen wouldn't necessarily catch." She turned back to Kate. "Given the odd nature of these deaths and the proximity of the crime scenes, I'll run them on both vics, see if anything pops."
"Okay, thanks Lanie."
She nodded, turned back to her work as Castle and Kate made their way out of the morgue, the doors swinging shut in unison behind them.
"They have to be connected," Castle stated as they headed off down the hall, steps perfectly in sync.
She turned her head in agreement. "I think you're probably right, but..."
"I'm sorry, what was that?" he interrupted. "I'm what?"
"What?"
"Repeat what you just said. I'm what?"
Kate retraced her words, pursed her lips in disapproval. "Shut up."
Castle pulled out his phone, quickly called up his recording app and held the device up to her mouth. "No, please, say that again. So I have it on record for future reference."
"In your dreams. Now, as I was saying," she continued, brushing aside his request, "we don't have COD for either one of them. If we can't even prove their deaths were murder, it'll be hard to prove they're connected."
"Well it's out there somewhere. It has to be."
Kate pushed open the door, holding it behind her as she stepped onto the sidewalk. "Yeah, well, maybe Lanie will find something."
Hopefully. At this point, it was the most promising scenario.
"Morning guys," Kate greeted as they entered the bullpen, Castle veering off to the break room while Kate headed to her desk, removed her jacket and booted up her computer.
"Hey, what'd Lanie have to say?" Ryan asked, standing and making his way to the murder board, folders in hand.
"She thinks our vics might've been poisoned," she relayed, snagging a marker and beginning to add to their fairly empty murder board.
"She thinks they're connected?"
"I mean, I think they have to be," Kate agreed. "Let's compare phones and financials, see if we can find anything that might suggest a connection."
"You got it."
While Ryan headed off to gather the necessary information on the two young women, Kate busied herself with retrieving a second white board, re-outlining what they had for Jenna's case. She arranged the boards next to each other, jotting down every piece of information, then standing back to scan the information.
"You know, this might be nothing," Castle began, passing his wife a mug of coffee as he approached, and gesturing to the 'potential subjects' portion of the murder board. "But wasn't Ernesto wearing a Pace University hoodie last night?"
"Yeah, so?"
"So that's where Sara and Jenna met," he recollected accurately.
Kate tilted her head, contemplating.
"We don't have anything better," Castle pointed out around a drink of coffee.
"Hey Espo," Kate called across the bullpen, waited until he looked up from the financial records before continuing. "Let's dig into Ernesto, see if we can come up with anything connecting him to Jenna. Castle and I are gonna go to Annalise's apartment, talk to her coworkers. See what we can find."
"On it, boss," he complied easily.
Kate turned back around to find Castle already holding out her jacket, offered a tender smile before turning her back and allowing him to help her into the garment. He turned her around with a gentle touch on her shoulders, smoothed the collar as she fastened the buttons.
"Thanks," she murmured, grabbing her leather portfolio, phone, and keys before turning again.
She reached out, discretely linked her fingers with his own as she made her way to the elevator, Castle falling into step next to her. He looked shocked at the contact but wasn't about to complain; he merely smiled to himself, careful to keep his eyes focused neutrally ahead of him as they waited for the elevator.
The moment the doors closed, however, it was a very different story.
Thoughts?