Seventeen
Richard Castle gripped onto the door handle of his partner's apartment door and twisted it. When it turned and the door opened easily, he smiled. Perfect.
She had promised to leave the door unlocked for him as she suspected she'd be in the shower when he arrived. As he was over half an hour late, he came to the disappointing realization that she probably was no longer wet or naked, but he was hoping to remedy that situation as quickly as possible. To be blunt, he was in desperate need of stress release and he found no better outlet for said release than from his lovely partner.
The reason for his tardiness could be simply explained. That Saturday he intended to drop his daughter off at a sleep-over birthday party and then join his lady friend for drinks, dinner, and between-the-sheets activities (though not necessarily in that order). Unfortunately, he'd been cornered by some mothers at the sleepover when he went to drop off his daughter. She was thirteen now, she told him; she didn't need him to walk her to the door. Why, oh why, hadn't he listened?
Upon stepping into Kate's apartment, Castle called out her name. He heard her, "In here!" reply from the direction of her bedroom. Walking in, he found her sitting in the middle of the bed, papers and folders spread out all around her.
"Sorry I'm late," he told her as he toed off his shoes. "Got cornered by a bunch of horny single moms trying to drop Alexis off."
"Really?" Kate laughed as he climbed up into the bed with her.
"Yeah. Evidently, when your kid turns thirteen it's some sort of unspoken rule that you have to get divorced and then hit on the single dads of your daughter's friends. It's really bizarre, actually."
"Sorry to hear that," Kate, said, though she wasn't exactly paying attention to him and he could tell.
To remedy this, he dropped his lips to her shoulder and kissed it. Then, he moved them to her neck and kissed her again.
She turned her head towards him, suspicious. "What are you doing?"
He kissed her neck again. "Trying to distract you. Is it working?"
"No," she corrected. "I'm working."
She turned her attention back to the pages of information in front of her, but only for a moment, before her partner's antics stared up again. While his lips remained on her neck his right hand skimmed across her back, rounded her hip, dipped into the front of her yoga pants and landed at her crotch. She gasped.
Castle chuckled against her neck. Pressing his fingers harder against the front of her panties, he asked, "How about now?"
"Castle!" she scolded, nudging his arm away with her elbow.
"What?"
His tone was innocent, but she knew his intentions were nothing but. "This is our case, you know? I'm working on narrowing down our suspect pool."
He smiled at her. "I know and this is my way of helping."
Rolling her eyes, Kate turned back to the paperwork in front of her. The latest case was a strange one, no doubt. The body of a woman had been found by sanitation workers attempting to empty a dumpster located at a midtown apartment building. As the garbage and thus the woman had gone through a trash compactor before entering the dumpster, identification was difficult at best.
Believing the woman could be a resident of the building, the detectives along with a few uniformed officers canvassed the apartments trying to discover if anyone was missing. On the seventh floor, they found a man who had not heard from his wife that day, which he found odd, especially given her purse and cell phone remained inside the apartment. As she had only been gone for twelve hours, he could not officially report her missing, but Castle and Beckett decided to operate as though she was their victim.
Due to the gruesome nature of the body, they needed to wait for the medical examiner's office to identify the woman by her dental records. In the meantime, the ME intended to piece together what she could of the body in an attempt to determine cause of death. Due to the vast amounts of garbage it was too difficult to tell just by looking at the scene if she had been killed before or after the trash compactor. For the woman's sake, Kate hoped it was before and she certainly didn't envy the crime scene tech's task of sifting through all that refuse.
"Do you think they'll have answers for us Monday morning?" Castle asked her.
"I hope so. They should at least have dental records to identify her by. From what I heard, they did find a jaw mostly intact," Kate explained.
Castle grimaced. "Shit this was a bad one."
"I know," she sighed.
"Which is exactly why we should be focusing on positive things." With that, he stuck his hand back into her pants and moved his lips to the spot at the base of her jaw that he knew drove her crazy.
"Castle," she groaned, though it was less a groan of annoyance than it was of pleasure.
He hummed against her throat. "I'm just being practical. You said it yourself we won't have answers until Monday. What are you going to do all day tomorrow? Alexis is only at her sleepover tonight."
Kate consider this a moment; the man did make a valid point. When she felt his tongue brush against her pulse point, she gave in. "Okay, alright, but we cannot have sex on our case docs. Help me clean them up first."
"I'll clean them up," he told her, sliding off the bed. He began gathering the stacks of pages together in a less than neat fashion before shooting her a naughty grin. "You take off your clothes."
"I'm telling you Beckett it's not him; it cannot be him."
By Monday afternoon, all the bliss they'd found in Kate's bedroom forty-eight hours earlier had completely vanished and the detective duo were back to doing what they did best outside the bedroom: arguing.
Kate stopped at her desk, tossed down her folder of papers, and threw her arms up in the air. "He confessed!"
"But the story doesn't make sense!" Castle insisted. It didn't and he'd known it from the start—the story was all wrong.
First thing that morning they'd received word that the missing woman from the apartment building's seventh floor, Cathy Turner, was indeed their victim. At that point, they still did not have COD, but the ME's office felt reasonably confident she was killed before entering the trash compactor. With this news in hand, the partners went to interview the woman's husband, coworkers, and neighbors in the building.
From that first conversation, Kate's gut told her that the husband should be their main person of interest. He was hiding something; his body language and eye contact practically screamed it. He was distraught and that seemed genuine, but Kate found that often time heat-of-the-moment killers, like spouses, were distraught because they very much regretted their actions.
As the day went on and their interviews continued, Castle began to disagree with his partner. From the victim's sister, they learned that Cathy intended on filing for divorce from her husband. While this information fueled Kate's theory, Castle felt it did the opposite. The sister told them Cathy seemed relieved and happy about her decision. In fact, she had said after discussing it with her husband they were both happier for it because it would be an end to their constant bickering and stress.
With this information, Kate decided to bring the husband in for questioning. Reluctantly, Castle joined her in the interrogation. It only took her seven minutes to break him. The husband broke down in tears and confessed that he had killed his wife. Stabbed her with a knife from the kitchen and, upon realizing what he'd done, threw both her and the knife into the trash chute.
While Kate took this confession as a win, Castle didn't buy it. There was something too rehearsed, too phony about it.
Planting her fists at her hips, Kate stared at her partner. "Why is that your default line? 'The story doesn't make sense,'" she mocked him in a deep tone. "It's not about the story, Castle."
He pressed his lips together and took a step towards her. "It is about the story; it's always about the story."
"Why?"
"Because it is. And," he shook his head sadly at her, "if you don't understand that, you don't understand me."
Castle was right.
Kate hated to admit it, but he had totally called this one.
After voicing his doubts on the validity of the confession to Montgomery, their Captain suggested they follow his instincts and ask any more questions they felt necessary. Due to the state of the victim's body, they would not be able to confirm she died from stab wounds for at least another day, so they would not be wasting time by continuing their questioning.
Castle decided to re-interview the victim's neighbors, figuring one of them had to have heard or seen something. While talking to the family that lived across the hall from the Turners, both of them noticed how nervous and uncomfortable the seventeen-year-old son appeared during the duration of their discussion. It wasn't until they were on their way out that Kate spotted a maroon splatter on the boy's sneakers. When she confronted him about it, the boy tried to run away. Castle caught him and the whole story came out.
Evidently, the victim's husband and the teenage neighbor were having an affair. The teen viewed the victim as standing in the way of his happiness, so he went over to her apartment the prior week and the two had argued. The boy ended up stabbing her in the neck during their fight. When the victim's husband came home, he helped the boy dispose of the body and clean up the blood. Then, in order to protect the person he loved, the husband confessed to the crime.
"Well, I gotta say," Castle sighed to his partner as they watched the cuffed seventeen-year-old leave for central booking, "I didn't think the husband did it…but I never saw this one coming."
"Yeah." Kate echoed his sigh. "This just proves you can never really figure anyone out."
"Mmm. Well, ah, good work on this one Beckett; I didn't see that blood on his shoe," he told her with a soft smile.
"No, Castle; this is your collar. I wouldn't have looked further than the husband's confession," she admitted. Then, lowering her voice, she took a step closer to him. "After, ah, after we do our paperwork we should probably talk about some stuff."
He nodded. "Yeah, okay. My place tonight?" He suggested; she nodded confirming their plans.
Due to the icy atmosphere between them since their argument, Kate was not exactly looking forward to her trip to Castle's that night, but she knew they had to talk it out. It truly bothered her that he felt as though she didn't understand him, because she thought she did. She always thought his story theories were just a quirk, a gimmick. For a long time, they made absolutely no sense to her, but after she found out about his novelist past, she thought that had been the connection. Each case was like a short story in a book and the story had to make sense; it had to flow, but to her as long as they found a killer—especially one who confessed—the story always made sense.
Kate didn't knock on Castle's apartment door until shortly after nine, thus ensuring his daughter would be in bed. He invited her in and offered her a drink, but she refused. Instead she hung up her coat, toed off her shoes and joined him on the couch.
"First, I want to apologize to you," she told him. "I don't want you to think I was belittling your process or your casework, because I would never do that. I was annoyed with you, so I said those things but," she paused and reached out for his hand. "Castle, I think you're an amazing investigator, you know that right? You're a great cop."
He smiled softly at her and squeezed her hand. He used his other hand to skim across his cheeks and rub the stubble that had formed there throughout the day. He wanted to make her understand, after everything they'd been through he knew he should, but the words didn't come easy; he'd never spoken them aloud before.
"My mother is an actress; you know that. She's always been an actress. Plays run at night so, ah, a lot of times I had a babysitter or a neighbor who would check in on me during the nights she had shows."
Kate nodded and scooted a bit closer to him. She wasn't sure how this story related to what they were discussing, but she was definitely intrigued.
"I was about eleven, I guess, and I was walking through a park near our apartment building just before dusk. I had ducked away from my babysitter and I was just exploring—you know, picking up rocks, throwing them at trees, looking for trouble like any pre-teen boy would. And, as I walked through the park, I came upon a man being mugged. I didn't realize it at the time, I just saw two people arguing, so I ducked behind a tree so they couldn't see me, but I could still see them.
"Then, one man—the larger of the two—pulled out an object from his coat. I didn't know what it was until I saw him jam it forward into the smaller man's gut." He paused and looked her in the eye. "It was a knife; he stabbed him and then he just…ran off."
Kate squeezed Castle's hand a bit tighter and he continued his story after rubbing his hand over his mouth.
"I was terrified—frozen. I didn't know what to do so I just ran in the opposite direction. I ran all the way home." He paused and cleared his throat before continuing. "The next day, I checked the papers and I found an article about it. The victim fortunately lived, but they never found the mugger. I felt so guilty for not going to the police with what I saw. I mean, it was dark; I don't know that I could have identified the mugger even in a lineup, but for a very long time I felt extremely guilty, but I was also afraid I would be in trouble for just watching it happen."
"Oh Castle," she sighed, pulling his hand and forearm into her lap. "You were a scared little kid; no one would blame you for that."
"But I blamed myself," he insisted. "For years that night haunted me. All I could wonder was: why? What had happened to that man to make him mug and stab someone else? What happened to him afterwards? What was his story?
"So I wrote it down…horribly, of course. But I wrote and I kept writing, because I had to work it out. Why do people do the things they do?"
Kate felt the hairs at the back of her neck prickling at his words. How many times had that exact sentence crossed her mind? Particularly in the wake of her mother's death. Why did people do what they did? What compelled certain people to kill others instead of just leaving, walking away?
Suddenly, his story made perfect sense to her. Having a failed writing career was not the only reason he had chosen to become a cop. It wasn't just something he woke up one day and thought would be a decent job with good benefits. He was compelled on a deeper level.
"Is that," she began softly. "Is that why you chose to become a cop? When you decided to no longer pursue your writing career?"
He nodded slowly. "Yeah, I figured the least I could do was to maybe catch a few bad guys before they stabbed anyone. Plus, I knew I'd look good in the uniform."
Kate couldn't help but laugh at his last comment, though she didn't disagree. She had seen him in his dress uniform just a few times, but in it he was very attractive.
With a smile, she leaned over and kissed him. "I'm glad I know this about you."
He eyed her a bit skeptically. "Really? Knowing what happened to me doesn't change how you see me?"
Her brow winkled as she shook her head. "Why would it?"
He shrugged a bit dumbly. "I dunno…I just thought it would which is why I never…"
"You never told anyone before?" she concluded. "Not even your mother?"
He laughed. "Oh, definitely not her; she wouldn't have handled that story well."
Kate leaned in and rested her head on his shoulder. The fact that he had never told anyone about such a crucial moment in his life surprised her. Then again, she countered herself, why? She never spoke to anyone about her mother's case, and probably wouldn't have had it not dropped into their laps the year before. As it was, there were many things about that case she kept hidden, so she could understand him keeping that particular story under wraps.
"You're really great cop, Castle."
He sighed into the top of her head and dropped a kiss there. "You're not so bad yourself, partner."
A/N: Please note, this was written in December, long before the airing of "Hollander's Woods" - I realize this is an AU story anyway, but I just wanted to make note of that.