With five minutes left in their hour-long window, Beckett seriously contemplated tossing the NYPD rule book aside and popping the siren on top of the police cruiser. Instead, she pushed on the accelerator, ran through a few yellow lights, and pulled her vehicle curb side with just a minute to spare. She had enjoyed the comfortable silence Castle and she had shared during the ride, and was momentarily startled when the shrill ring of his phone sliced through the air.
"Hello, mother." Castle said, picking up his phone. "Yea, she's here. Okay." He pushed the speaker button and extended the phone toward Beckett. "She wants to talk to you."
Beckett motioned toward her watch, but Castle just shrugged and kept the phone suspended in midair. "Hey, Martha. What's up?" She made an effort to speak calmly and slowly, not wanting to offend her future mother-in-law.
"Oh Katherine dear, are you okay?" The concern seeped through the phone as if Martha was there pulling Beckett into a tight embrace.
"Yea, I'm fine." She shot Castle a knowing glance.
"I just got off the phone with Sandy. I explained to her what happened, and she says she feels awful, just awful, about everything."
"Really, it's okay." She tried to sound as reassuring as possible.
"Now I feel partly responsible. I should have told her about your mother—"
"It's fine. I'm really not upset by it anymore. In fact, I feel a little silly for how I reacted." She could feel her face blush as she thought about her abrupt departure from the café.
"Oh no, don't feel silly. I can only imagine how hard this all must be for you."
"Tell her gram," Alexis piped up in the background.
"Oh darling, Alexis and I just want you to know that, while I know we can't begin to make up for your mother's absence, we are here if you want any help planning." Beckett could hear a shuffling on the other end and Alexis's voice took over. Castle shifted uncomfortably, feeling like he was listening in on a private conversation.
"And Kate, we mean it. I've actually been flipping through some wedding magazines lately, and I have lots of great suggestions. I really would love to help." Beckett was surprised by the genuine excitement she could hear and looked over at Castle smiling, hoping he would interpret his daughter's offer as a step toward mending their relationship.
"Yea, Alexis, that would be great."
"Great. Well grams and I got to go. Tell my dad to check his inbox."
Castle ended the call then clicked on the e-mail icon on his phone. The first message was from Alexis. He opened it and saw a picture of his daughter perched in a booth, two large cheese steaks sitting in front of her. The message read, Don't worry, I didn't forget to eat an extra one for you. Castle smiled down at his phone. "Remind me to thank my mother when she gets home."
"You and me both then," Beckett added, grateful for Martha's kind words.
Castle and Beckett strode into the precinct and found Ryan and Esposito hovering around the murder board. The daytime shift had long since gone home and the bullpen took on an eerily calm quality, like the surface of a lake before a storm. Beckett was glad for the reprieve, for the time when she could stare down the white board without the background noise of ringing telephones and water cooler conversations. It felt like she was facing off against the evidence, one on one, until she could find the right jab that would knock the missing link, the odd sock so to speak, out.
"Yo, mom and dad are back," Esposito called out. "And look at that, on time and everything." He sounded disappointed, almost like he was hoping for an excuse to start something.
"Please tell me you really had a countdown clock going," Castle teased.
"Of course not." Esposito guiltily pulled his shirt sleeve down to cover his watch.
"So can you get us up to speed?" Beckett asked.
"We ran background checks on Samantha, Jennifer, and then our butler, Alfred Pennyworth." Ryan pointed to the three new photographs on the board.
"Seriously. That's his name? You're not making that up?" Castle looked giddy.
"Holy crazy coincidence Batman." Beckett cocked her eyebrows and cracked a smile.
"You know, I never cared much for Robin, but somehow you made that sound incredibly sexy." He took a step toward her.
"Ahem." Ryan stepped between Castle and Beckett breaking their eye contact. "Yes, that is his legal name, but only since 2002. He changed it shortly after he started working for Daniel. Otherwise, no priors. Nothing to suggest he was involved in anything nefarious. And unless being painfully dense is a crime, same goes for Jennifer."
"Here's where the background checks get interesting," Esposito took over. "Samantha Roberts is not actually Samantha Roberts." He grabbed another photograph off the desk and pressed it to the board. Samantha's green eyes stared out at them from underneath dark, blunt cut bangs. "Meet Debra Boscoe."
"So she got a makeover and changed her name, same as Alfred Pennyworth?" asked Castle, stifling a laugh.
Not quite," Esposito continued. "When I was running the check on Samantha, I didn't get a single hit for anything beyond a year ago—no credit history, no DMV record, no prior addresses. It was like she was a ghost that just appeared out of nowhere. So I had Tory run her image through facial recognition, and we got a match for someone else in the system." He pointed to Debra's picture.
"So Samantha would be like her secret identity then?" Castle asked, rubbing his hands together, excitement tingeing his voice.
"Sure," Esposito pointed his finger at Castle, "but before you get too excited and go all holy...Batman…whatever on me, you should know her secret identity was more of an attempt to mask some shady stuff from her past than don a cape and save the world."
"Holy swerve Batman!" Castle exclaimed.
Esposito narrowed his eyes. "Holy serious business Castle." Castle smiled and lifted his hand for a fist bump, but Esposito snubbed him and turned back toward the white board, clearly in a huff about something.
"So what sort of shady past are we talking about?" asked Beckett, circumventing the line of fire between Castle and Esposito.
Ryan opened a file folder and said, "I'll give you one guess."
"Drugs," Castle and Beckett said in unison.
"Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner." Ryan scanned the documents he was holding. "Multiple arrests for possession and sale of cocaine, spent some time in the Ohio Reformatory for Women, her last arrest was just over two years ago, but nothing since. My guess would be she forged a birth certificate and got a new license that way. It's not the perfect fix for hiding from your past, but it's enough to keep most people from asking too many questions.
"You mean people like Daniel Henry." Castle stated. "Isn't a year ago about when she started dating him?"
Beckett nodded. "Okay, let's send some unis to bring her in. In the meantime, I've got some leftovers in the fridge with my name on them" Beckett headed toward the break room, but Esposito called out before she could get more than two steps away.
"You're going to want to see this too." Beckett stopped and swiveled toward him, regrets over the sandwich she left in the café causing her stomach to churn. "Now it may be nothing, but we found some inconsistencies in Daniel's financials." Ryan heard his cue and dashed over to his desk and picked up a jumbled pile of papers.
Shuffling through the stack he plucked out a couple pages painted with bright yellow highlighter marks. "So a multimillionaire businessman like Daniel has a lot of money going in and out of multiple accounts. Finding a pattern of inconsistencies or a transaction that doesn't quite add up is like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack."
"Or the one dollar bill in a pile of one hundreds," Castle offered, trailing off when he saw the glower return to Esposito's face.
"Anyhow, I noticed that just over a year ago Daniel's expenses for various public relations events—charity donations, fundraisers, club promotions—increased dramatically." He pointed to a couple of the highlighted lines.
"How dramatically?" Beckett asked, guessing a substantial amount as she eyeballed the figures.
"We're talking in the ballpark of twenty million."
"Whoa!" Castle stood up and grabbed the paper from Ryan, suddenly more interested in the long line of expenses. "Could it be he was just trying to clean up his public image with some charitable donations?" He sounded skeptical.
"If anyone understands cleaning up their public image it would be you now, wouldn't it?" Beckett teased. "How many donations did it take for people to forget about a certain naked horseback riding incident."
"Oh yea, I had forgotten about that." Ryan started snickering off to the side and Beckett's devilish grin only got bigger.
"The more important question, Detective Beckett," Castle mirrored her smile, "is what kind of charitable acts you will be doing to make up for reminding everyone of my past discretions."
"Ahem," Ryan said for the second time in ten minutes. "We seriously need an inappropriate for work jar for you two. One dollar for every inappropriate comment. Esposito and I can use the money to get plastered after work every Friday with how much money there would be. Maybe it would help us to forget some of the things we have to overhear."
Beckett rolled her eyes and Castle raised his hands feigning innocence. "So let me see if I can get this all straight." She rubbed her temples trying to bring some clarity to a case that was quickly unraveling, multiple loose ends draped across the murder board taunting her. "Caitlyn is murdered shortly after receiving a mystery call that came from Daniel's residence. Daniel is murdered earlier this afternoon. The only thing, as of now, connecting the two are the footprints found in the alleyways."
"High heel prints," Castle amended.
"Right," Beckett said. "Then we've got Caitlyn's involvement with Detective Davis in uncovering a drug ring that they suspected Daniel was running out of his clubs. But no drugs were found. Samantha isn't actually Samantha. There are suspicious expenses for PR events showing up in financials. And then there's what Daniel said right before he died—tell her he didn't' know." Just recounting the evidence was making her head pound. It felt like the more she tried to focus on the big picture, to squint her eyes until the hidden image emerged, the more muddled the details became.
Castle watched Beckett lean back against the desk, her arms crossed over her chest, her shoulders slumped forward. He saw the small creases cutting into her forward that only appeared when her focus began to turn to frustration. As much as he wanted to solve the case—to solve every case for that matter—to find justice for the victim, for him it was as much about finding peace of mind for his partner. The tension he saw building in Beckett's shoulders, the way she bit into her lower lip as her eyes darted from each piece of evidence like a hummingbird flitting among flowers, only heightened that desire. "Hey Ryan," he waved the financial sheet he was still holding, "do you have the number for Daniel's PR consultant?" He turned toward Beckett. "It's going to take a little while to get Samantha…I mean Debra in here. What do you say we look into what twenty million dollars will get us?"
Ryan scribbled a name and number down on a piece of paper and handed it to Castle. "Her name is Amber Conrad. Only contact we've had with her so far was when we called to verify Daniel's alibi for Caitlyn's murder."
"Hey Esposito do you mind calling to see if she's still in her office?" Castle extended the paper to Esposito. He grabbed it with a huff and headed toward his desk mumbling about grunt work. Castle shot Ryan a confused look, and when Esposito was safely out of earshot asked, "what is up with him?"
"Ask Beckett, I'm guessing she knows more than me."
"What?" Hearing her name caught her off guard. What did she have to do with Esposito's sour mood?
"All I know is while you two were gone he heard through the grapevine that Lanie is going out of town next weekend with some guy named Brian. He's been super snippety since."
Beckett tried to recall all the conversations she'd had with Lanie recently but couldn't remember any mention of anyone named Brian. It had been weeks since they'd had a girl's night where Lanie said anything about her love life, and even then it was only to lament about a date from hell she had endured.
"Huh, that's too bad," was all she said. If Lanie was romantically involved with someone and hadn't mentioned anything she wasn't about to feed the rumor mill with speculation.
Esposito walked back into their huddle and noticed the hushed voices and averted eyes. "What's up gossip girls?" he stared down Ryan.
"Javi, I…"
"Save it man. I'm fine. You're making a big deal out of nothing." The placid expression he was struggling to maintain gave away more about his emotional state than if he would have burst out crying.
"Of course," Ryan said, not about to try to excavate feelings Esposito had painstakingly buried.
Esposito turned his attention to Beckett. "Amber Conrad is in her office. Here's the address. She's expecting you."
"Thanks Javi," Beckett said with enough delicacy that it elicited a pff as he sulked back to his desk.
With steaming leftover Chinese food balanced precariously in her lap, Beckett headed toward the mid-town office address that housed Daniel Henry's headquarters.
"You sure you don't want me to drive?" Castle asked as he watched a peapod fall off Beckett's white, plastic fork and bounce off the front of her jacket.
"I'm sure." Beckett took a hard right and Castle grimaced as the sauce in the bottom of the container sloshed up the side, a mere inch from staining her second outfit of the day. He briefly wondered if she carried a backup for her backup and decided he would bring in some extra clothes for her to hide in the break room. He liked knowing a thoughtful gesture was waiting the wings for a day when she could really use the pick-me-up.
Beckett pulled the car to a stop outside of a commercial high rise, its dark windows staring vacantly back at her, save for the few still occupied by workers—there presence breathing life into the otherwise dead building. She scrutinized the building the same way she would her dirty laundry basket after a couple weeks of neglect, overwhelmed and tired just thinking of the task at hand. This case was starting to wear on her and she wished, like a book whose ending you could skip ahead to, she could bypass all the drudgery of chasing leads and just nail their murderer. She tossed her leftover remnants into one of the garbage cans lining the sidewalk, and she and Castle rode the elevator up to the fifth floor.
The doors opened into a foyer—an empty, circular reception desk straight ahead, framed images of Daniel's clubs lining the walls, and a larger version of the chandeliers that decorated Club Couture hung from the ceiling directly above the desk. Save for the soft, instrumental music strumming down the halls, the floor was quiet.
"Hello?" Castle said, peering down one of the hallways. Only the silence responded. "So much for expecting us."
"Do you have that number on you? Let me give her a call." Beckett was mid-dial when a frazzled woman came running down the hall, her stride made awkward by a slight limp that gave her the appearance of continually ascending and then descending, like she were standing on a boat being rocked by the waves.
"You must be Detective Beckett." She hobbled to a stop and caught her breath, smoothing down her pencil skirt and pushing a long brown strand of hair behind her ear. "So sorry I left you waiting." She ushered them down the hall toward her office. "It's just been a crazy couple of days as you can imagine and I've been swamped trying to do damage control and stay abreast of all the rumors flying. You don't happen to have any details about the murder that would help me set the record straight, do you?"
Beckett and Castle took seats in twin, white leather chairs opposite her desk. "Any information we have at this time we're keeping under wraps until we know more," Beckett replied. Miss Conrad made an expression that looked like she bit into something bitter. "I'm sure you can understand the need for discretion."
"So what can I do for you then?" Miss Conrad asked.
Not ready to disclose the purpose of the visit just yet, Beckett asked, "In what capacity did you work with both Daniel Henry and Caitlyn Madison."
"I was the head of Daniel's public relations committee, which essentially means it was my job to find back-door routes to promoting Daniel and his brand. I worked mostly on getting him favorable press, creating a social media presence, market research, and managing his public image. That included managing Caitlyn."
"As the ambassador of his image, so to speak," said Castle, "you had to come across some people that had a less than favorable opinion of Daniel. Can you think of anyone that disliked him enough to murder him?"
"Both Daniel and Caitlyn had their skeletons in the closet," she said, tracing her thumb in a circular pattern around her palm, "but nothing you would kill over. He got his fair share of hate mail, mostly from evangelical groups and social conservatives, but they were always empty threats."
"What do you know about Daniel's involvement with drug trafficking?" Castle asked, drawing Miss Conrad's attention long enough to give Beckett the freedom to scrutinize her response for any tells.
Miss Conrad shifted slightly in her seat, her eyes darting down to her feet then back up to Castle's face. "Daniel Henry was an upstanding citizen." She sat up tall in her chair and clasped her hands together in her lap. "I can't imagine him being involved in something of that nature."
"Is that answer coming from his PR consultant or from a woman being questioned during a murder investigation?" Beckett asked, straightening up herself, her posture looming a good couple inches above Miss Conrad's.
"Both." Her tone was cool but held a hint of anger.
"One last question," Beckett said, sensing the air in room growing cold, "we noticed that Mr. Henry had been spending a lot more lately on PR events—charity donations, benefits, and the like—can you me why?"
"It was actually my idea. When Daniel hired me about a year ago he was trying to revamp his image, turn his brand from booze and babes into high-end luxury entertainment for the elite. And it worked thanks to all the positive press surrounding his philanthropy and his partnership with notable celebrities."
"But twenty million dollars?" Castle stated. Miss Conrad didn't respond.
"Miss Conrad?" Beckett pressed.
Miss Conrad shuffled some papers sitting on her desk, pushing them into a pile that she tapped together, then moved on to gathering the pencils and fastening them together with a rubber band. "You know," she finally said, "I wasn't in charge of every dollar that got spent. Twenty million seems like an awful lot, but when you're rebranding the dollars often add up." She set her banded cluster of pencils down and placed her hand back in her lap.
"Okay, well we're going to need to see a breakdown of the expenses—where he donated money to, what events he sponsored—just to make sure everything checks out." Beckett and Castle stood to leave.
"Uh, detective." Miss Conrad followed them to the door, "can I ask you how you think this is related to Daniel or Caitlyn's murder?" Her voice registered confusion but her face read fear.
"It's probably not," Beckett said casually, "but we like to make sure all our bases are covered. Thank you for your time, Miss Conrad."
Halfway back to the precinct Beckett's phone rang. "Hey Espo, what's up?" She clicked on speakerphone so Castle could listen in.
"CSU just sent over an extended report looking at comparisons from the two crime scenes."
"And?"
"They confirmed the heel prints found outside each scene are a match."
"Can they tell us the shoe brand or any distinguishing features?" Beckett knew it was a long shot.
"Nope, nothing on the shoe itself save for the size, but they did find out something interesting about the person wearing the shoe?"
"What's that?"
"Based on the gait, the depth of the impression, and the drag patterns, whoever left those prints is walking with a clear disability, maybe..."
Beckett's head snapped up from her phone and she turned toward Castle, his eyes wide and unblinking. She slammed on the brakes, burning tread marks into the road as she did a complete turn around.
"Esposito," she cut off whatever he was still saying as she hit the accelerator and pointed the cruiser back toward midtown, "send a unit to Amber Conrad's office. We might need some back-up."
Please let me know what you think! Will write for reviews! And for those thinking that this case is coming to a close, stay seated, there are still a few more twists and turns ahead. And of course a lot more Casketty goodness-I know why you all read fanfiction. :)