Chapter 4
A/N So the case starts here. As always I don't own Castle or the associated characters, just taking them out for a spin in my own little world. Thanks for the reviews, story and author alerts, I hope everyone is enjoying reading as much as I am writing. Special thanks to GloriaJV who provided me some answers to my requests at the end of last chapter, and thus their choice for lunch (and a nice extra detail). As a complete aside I was also inspired to finish this chapter tonight after eating at the Elephant and Castle Pub in Washington DC…I am sure you all see the connection
The dim rays of early morning were beginning to creep into Castle's bedroom. Spooned together, Rick on his back with his right arm around Kate's shoulder, as her face was nestled on his chest. Both were sound asleep, with almost matching relaxed expressions on their faces.
Their peace was shattered by an obnoxious ringing coming from the Kate's phone laying on the nightstand. She went to automatically reaching for her phone, years of behavior automatically guiding her to the answer button and a gruff "Beckett".
"Ok. Where. Alright yeah I'll tell Castle. What do you mean don't eat first. That bad huh. Beckett flavored, and Castle twisted, ok. Alright we'll see you in about 30."
"Castle wake up we got a body, Espo says it's a bad one, something right up our alley."
"What does that say about us." He mumbled as he struggled to wake up.
"I guess we're just special. Espo said it would be best to do this one on an empty stomach so go make us some coffee while I hop in the shower."
"You sure you don't want any company?" Castle did have an extremely swoon worthy morning bedroom voice, and Kate shook her head to try and clear the thoughts of them in the shower together away."
"Another time, come on, let's get ready." She stood up and started walking over to the shower, but just as she got to the door she looked back and saw Castle trying to fall back asleep."
"Castle wake up." She said a little louder and with her back to him, took off her tank top she had slept in. One hand over her chest, she threw the shirt over his face. He immediately jumped awake, looking at the piece of clothing in his hands, and then quickly over to the door to his bathroom, to see the extremely naked back of Kate Beckett, her borrowed boxers too large on her, hanging on her hips, mere millimeters from being indecently low.
"I'm up, I'm up."
"I am sure you are." She looked back at him and teased as the door closed.
There was weird, there was Beckett and Castle flavored, and then there was this. Kate knew immediately after stepping past the yellow tape that this was something different, and judging by the way Castle seemed to tense up as they came across the crime scene, it looked like he agreed.
They had been called to an industrial park, a series of warehouses adjacent to a number of small office suites. Apparently the night guard doing his last patrol before the morning shift started, had noted one of the lights on in a supposedly vacant warehouse. Figuring it was squatters or kids, he had gone in to investigate and roust the offenders. What he had found inside had make him sick, and he still having trouble talking as the EMS crew sat with him, taking his vitals.
They saw Lanie off to the side, talking with Ryan and Esposito and they walked over to them.
"It this really what it looks like?" Beckett asked them.
"At first glance it is." Lanie replied
They saw the body, bound to a wheel chair. The most obvious fact was that where the face was supposed to be, there was a mass of bloody tissue and bone shards. The body was clothed only in a pair of boxer briefs, and there were what looked like EKG leads placed on the chest, with evidence of circular electrical burns scattered on the chest. Walking around, Beckett could see the back of the head, mostly spared from the damage done to the front, was itself a disturbing sight. The scalp was bare, apparently the victim had his hair shaved off. Small circular bruises were scattered around, the chaffed and red marks visible from the pale white of the scalp.
Next to the body was a small folding table and laid out on its surface was a collection of personal items, including a wallet, several keys on a key ring, some wadded up papers, a couple of pens and a single piece of white paper, neatly folded in half.
"What is this?" Castle spoke, his hushed tone drawing blank stares from the rest of their small group.
"I have no idea, I if I am being honest, the fact that you are freaked out about this is making me extremely nervous." Beckett replied.
"I passed nervous about 10 minutes ago." Espo said.
"We have an ID?" Beckett still felt uneasy, but knew she had to get her team focused on the case, not on the grotesque display.
"No luck. There was no ID on the body, and there is a wallet on the table over there but no ID, just some papers and cash. It also looks like his fingers have been dipped in some sort of corrosive, meaning that finger prints are a no go. Clearly dental records or facial recognition are not going to help much either." Espo replied.
"Night watchman found him about 6:00 am. He said this warehouse is supposed to be unoccupied, and has been for about 8 months. That's pretty much all we got out of him, but I did get his supervisors name and I called and he is coming down to talk with us about their security plans." Ryan answered.
"Lanie, should I even bother to ask about TOD or COD?" asked Beckett
"Not until I get him back to the morgue, I can tell you that it looks like a shotgun did that to his face, and it looks like it was done postmortem. It also doesn't look like he was killed here. I don't see any blood splatters, outside of the expected droplets associated with him being wheeled in here. I'll get CSU to do a full sweep of the room and see if anything else turns up.
"Alright, Esposito and Ryan, you guys finish up here, see what the security guard and his supervisor can get you, and see if this place has any sort of security cameras or anything that can get us some clues. Castle and I are going to start sorting through this evidence back at the station and see if we can find anything.
"Yo, Beckett, you might want to take a look at this first." Esposito had picked up the folded piece of white paper on the table, noting it looked slightly out of place with the rest of the crumpled and obviously used personal effects.
Unfolding the paper, Castle leaning over her shoulder to read, Kate saw typed bold text.
I have committed the perfect murder. Catch me if you can. I have left you all the clues you need to identify my subject here and maybe to even find me.
Are you two smart enough?
See you soon.
"Well that just jumped this up to a 12.9 on the weird and creepy scale." Castle remarked.
"Great, another psycho who thinks that killing people is a game and that we want to play along." Beckett replied. "Ok, get CSU to bag and process this as fast as possible, I want to start looking it over,"
Knowing this was going to be a long day, Castle and Beckett stopped to pick up some coffee, and some breakfast, glad that they had taken Esposito's advice not to eat before going to the crime scene. They got back to the precinct a little over an hour later to find that the crime scene technicians had delivered sealed bags of the personal effects to the conference room complete with an inventory and preliminary notes.
Beckett looked over the list, "so they dusted everything for prints, and they couldn't find a single one. Apparently everything was wiped down."
"Lets see what we've got." Castle had pulled on pair of gloves and started to spread the material around on the table to get a better view." "Concentrate on anything that might give us a clue to who our mystery man was?"
Beckett nodded, pulling on her own pair of gloves, and grabbing the wallet. Opening up the evidence bag she opened the wallet and spread out the contents. There was no ID, no credit cards, nothing with a name on it. There was $200 dollars in cash, with at least 50 of it in 1's and 5's. There was an expired subway pass from 2 weeks ago, indicating that the victim had boarded a train at 81st St, on the D line by the Natural History Museum. There were 2 ballpoint pens, one from a bank and the other from steak house.
Castle had started with the key ring, noting that there were no car keys, or at least a car key with a recognizable emblem. There was a bronze key, with a "Do not Duplicate" warning on it, a small silver key, and another bronze key, smaller, with a narrow tapering end and few grooves. He moved over to the crumpled up papers, gently smoothing them out. He looked over them; the first was a flyer for a program at the museum, "Brain Awareness Day" set for two days from today. The next was an advertisement for a bar called WAM, and the last was a printed sheet of paper, with what looked like computer programming code written on it.
Glancing over at Kate he asked "Anything jumping out at you?"
"Not really, no neon sign saying my name is…" "There seems to be nothing too unique in the personal possessions, but maybe if we link it together somehow."
"Well the keys are not labeled, I have a flyer for a museum program about the brain, an ad for a bar, and what looks like some random computer code.
"Museum, hold on a sec." Kate quickly grabbed the subway pass. "I have an expired pass for the D line near the museum."
"Anything else that gives us a physical location?" Castle asked.
"The pens, the bank is on East 62nd, the steak house is on East 57th."
Castle looked at the bar ad "The bar is on East 62nd as well. What are you thinking?"
"Everything we have collected so far points us to a small geographic area. Do you think its where our John Doe lives or works?"
"Possible, but it seems a little too coincidental. Clearly our killer went through his possessions, and left us only these clues, it's a game and these are our supposed to help us make our first move."
"Well even narrowing down an area is not going to help too much, it's not like we have a photo or name to ask anyone at these locations about, and going in asking about a white male in his 30's is not going to get us too far." Becket felt the beginnings of a headache as she rubbed her temple. She stood up and walked back to the bullpen.
"I am going to set up two boards, one for our victim, and one for our killer. How about you take what little, to nothing, that we know about our killer and spin some theories, and I'll fill in what we have on our victim. Lanie said she was going to make our John Doe her priority this morning so maybe after lunch she'll have something more for us."
Castle seemed a little taken aback, she was indulging him in his wild theory building, and letting him have an entire murder board to himself to start coming up with their killer's story. Standing up he promised himself to take it seriously, but not too seriously, this case was screaming for psychotic ninjas or government cyborg assassin.
Beckett and Castle spent the next hour in virtual silence, standing next to each other, but both lost in their respective boards. Kate's was neater, sections detailing the victims physical attributes, what they were able to determine at the scene, and the personal items with their locations. She had flipped the board and put a map of New York on it and was now busy pinning the addresses gleamed from the personal effects, as well as the location of the warehouse.
By contrast Castle's board was significantly messier. He had crafted a spider web pattern, putting up a picture of a question mark inside a clip art head, with a double headed arrow to a picture of the victim. He had a copy of the letter, taped up, and had rewritten the text and circled several words. Lines coming out from the victim detailed some of the wounds suffered by the victim and underneath each were lists of implements and possible professions with access or reasons why to use them.
Both had stopped momentarily and looked over at the other. Beckett noted with an amused sigh that Castle had a big grin on his face and saw that at least one entry in each of lists contained some outrageous item, like under professions with access to a shotgun he had put in Elmer Fudd.
"Switch" Beckett said.
Immediately they swapped spots and both went to the others board to look over the work that had been completed. Over the next 30 minutes they made notes, crossed out lines and added notes to the boards. Stepping away Castle looked over to see Beckett tapping a dry erase marker next on her cheek and looking at both boards.
"This makes absolutely no sense" she stated, never moving her eyes from the boards.
"Tell me about it, whoever our killer is, he clearly put some thought into this, and it doesn't look like he made any stupid mistakes."
"It's just so much harder to figure this out when we don't even know who our victim is. Right now we can place him in a rough geographic area, but that's about it."
"Well if our killer planted those items on the body there must be some reason, something about those locations will guide us to more information.
Ryan and Esposito came back into the bullpen at that moment, moving to put their jackets on their desks. "What did you guys find out?" Beckett asked.
Ryan started looking over his notes. "Not a whole lot. The area does have some cameras, but most are personal use for the offices. Guard does rounds every 2 hours, and it takes him about 45 minutes to do his route. He was still pretty shaky, but was pretty certain that there were no lights on at his 4 am check. He said he didn't recall seeing any cars moving through the area and the last car in was around 9 pm. I asked about trucks and vans and he said they come in and out all the time for the offices and warehouses, but the last one in that was logged was at 7:30 pm. He said that after 5 all vehicles coming in should be logged, but since he was out making his rounds, and they have not hired another night guard, he left the sign in log at the guard booth while he was walking the area.
Esposito jumped in "Warehouse is been vacant for about 8 months, previous tenant was a online gag gift store, they used it to store inventory. Security chief thinks the last time anyone was in there was about 2 months ago, said that the owners were showing the space to some prospective tenants. Other than that no one reported any strange vehicles or people wandering around the area and no one had reported any other break ins."
Beckett took a quick second to organize her thoughts and game plan. "Ok well until we gt a TOD from Lanie its going to be tough to narrow our time frame down. Why don't we grab some lunch and then we can look over the surveillance tapes for the last 24 hours and see if we see anything, since its likely whatever happened, some part of it took place on premise within the last day."
Castle had his phone out and was scrolling through his take out ordering app. "What does everyone feel like?"
"Chinese" "Burgers" "Italian" all three detectives responded with a different answer. Castle looked at all three of them, then thinking about it for a second, said "Italian it is, we could use some comfort food after this morning."
He saw all three of them nod in agreement and Ryan and Esposito wrote down their orders. Ryan turned to hand the paper to Beckett, but she waved him off muttering "he knows what to order me." Ryan threw Castle a funny grin, but handed him the paper and Castle stood up to walk into the break room to place the order.
Lunch arrived about 45 minutes later, Castle going downstairs to pay and bring the food back up. The detectives had already cleared the break room table and grabbed a few sodas as Castle walked in, the aroma of red sauce, garlic, and oregano announcing his presence.
They all dug in and after about 10 minutes of enjoying their meals, Beckett got up and cued the first security tape, one looking out from an office front window, which was around the west corner from the warehouse. Starting at 7 am that morning he ran the tape backwards at 3X speed looking for signs of activity. One hand on the remote and the other using a fork to spear a piece of meatball from her plate of spaghetti, Beckett attentively looked to see when a car or a person would come into frame. Ryan would note the time and description on a pad. As soon as Esposito finished eating he took the paper and started to cross reference with the guards sign in logs. From the first sheet he noted 2 cars and a van that did not appear on the guards log. Noting their times he handed the highlighted page to Castle, who had just finished his meal. Throwing away his containers he went to the victim murder board and filled in the make, location and time on the tape of the unregistered vehicles.
They repeated the process for the next 2 hours, noting when all was said and done that approximately 9 cars and 3 vans had some in after 5 pm and did not appear to have been logged by the guard or signed themselves in. they were able to get partial license plates on 4 cars and one of the vans. Ryan and Esposito started digging into the license plates, and Castle and Beckett headed down to the morgue to go see what Lanie had been able to find.
A/N
Coming up…Lanie, autopsies, sleeping arrangements and some time out in the field.