Another Chance

Chapter 31

Dr. Lyra expertly wields a wand over the barely perceptible curve of Kate's abdomen while Castle anxiously regards the procedure. "Everything looks good. From the measurements and development, your due date is in July, around Independence Day, although I would not recommend fireworks as the best method to celebrate a birth. If you want to know the sex of the baby, I can tell you."

"I want to know," Castle blurts out.

Lyra looks down at her patient. "Kate?"

"If I don't let you tell him, he'll drive me crazy until I do. Go ahead."

Lyra tilts the screen so that Kate can view it easily and points. "It's what you see here, or rather what you don't see here. No little ding-a-ling."

"Much as I appreciate a Chuck Berry fan, I'm not sure I appreciate the description," Castle complains. "but if I understand you, we're having a girl?"

Lyra turns to him. "Yes, Rick, Kate is carrying a girl."

Castle claps his hands together. "Fantastic! Kate, we should celebrate. No fireworks, I promise."

Kate shakes her head. "Castle, I'd love too, but I need to get back to the precinct. The boys are going to be bringing in potential witnesses all afternoon."

Lyra scowls. "Kate, you're not overdoing, are you? It's nothing to worry about - yet - but your heart rate has been up a little. That means it's working a bit harder. You'll want to keep your stress to a minimum."

Kate can see Castle's lips pressed firmly together. She hurriedly promises Lyra that she'll be careful and gets ready to leave the office.

Castle holds what's gnawing at him in until Kate's sitting beside him in the car. "Kate, what the hell! You didn't tell me your heart rate was going up. When you've looked at your readouts, you said everything is fine."

"It is, Castle. There were no little flashing red lights. Maybe a yellow one on and off for the last few days, but my pulse was just a little faster, that's all."

"Damn it, Kate, it's enough! We've still got five months to go, and it isn't going to get any better. Maybe you should cut back, go part-time or something."

"Dr. Lyra didn't say that, Castle. She just said not to work too hard. And I won't. If anything I'll probably be bored silly. We haven't had a witness who could add anything new to this case in over a week."

Castle nods slowly. "That's why you're stressed out. I know you better than Lyra does. You're not working too hard. You just can't stand not having a break in the case. So we'll have to fix that."

Kate rolls her eyes. "How Babe? We had a killing in the middle of a crowded big box store. The murderer was wearing a hoodie, and the angle was wrong for the surveillance cameras to get a shot of his face. Security couldn't catch him. The car he drove, according to the video from the parking lot was stolen. It was abandoned, wiped clean. There must have been at least a hundred people in that store that either saw the murder, saw the killer come in or saw him get away, but so far we have zip for anything useful to go on to catch him."

"Maybe you're asking the wrong people the wrong questions," Castle suggests. "Instead of concentrating on the killer, why not concentrate on the victim? She was one of the sales people, right? Sharri Levin, if I recall."

"Uh huh. She got a ring out of the jewelry case for the killer to look at. He slit her throat with a knife, grabbed the ring and fled. He slashed her jugular. She bled out before anyone could do anything to help her. The motive is robbery, Castle. It could have been anyone showing the perp that ring. Sharri was just unlucky."

Castle reaches to grab Kate's hand. "But what if she wasn't? What if the killer was after her all along and the ring was just an excuse? If he wanted to steal something precious, why not go to a real jewelry store? New York is full of them, as my credit cards can attest. Murdering someone for a ring from a big box store, doesn't make sense. There are probably hundreds or thousands of rings just like it shipped out of China. There had to be another reason."

Kate sighs as she leans back in her seat. "Maybe, Castle, but big box store or not that ring was worth over a thousand bucks. People have been slaughtered for twenty bucks from an ATM. Or sometimes a killer is just crazy, like Charles Bollendorf. You know that as well as I do."

"But it's worth looking into, isn't it? At least you won't be all stressy and bored."

"OK, Castle. We'll see what deep dark secrets if any, Sharri Levin has in her background. In the meantime, I need you to do something for me."

"Anything!"

Kate winks at him. "Stop by that sandwich place on the way to the precinct. I'm starved."

Castle grins. "Six inch or footlong?"

"Babe, you know I like them big."

Alexis looks up from her tablet as Micah comes back from work. "I've been doing research on why people get attached to stuffed animals, but there isn't much about the caretaker aspect except the monkey love experiments; you know, where the baby monkeys like the terrycloth mother better than the wire mother even though the wire mother dispensed food. Most of the papers I've found are about the person feeling nurturing toward the stuffed animal, not vice versa. But even with that, stuffed animals still help with depression, because children and sometimes adults tell them their deepest secrets and fears."

Micah plops down beside her, propping his chin on his hand. "That could present us with a problem. Our fuzzy therapists analyze what's said to them and reflect it back. That takes a lot of processing power and memory. We were thinking about a link to the cloud, but maybe that isn't such a good idea. If Fuzzyther - wow, we really need a better name - gets hacked that would be an incredible breach of privacy."

"It would," Alexis agrees. "Like someone reading your diary or worse, stealing files from a shrink. So what do we do?"

"We can't let it be accessible from the net at all, but we don't want it to run out of memory either. Probably some kind of portable drive or card that could be switched out. It would have to be small enough to not take up much room, but big enough so that a kid couldn't swallow it by accident. And we wouldn't want it to show or come loose, but it shouldn't be too hard to get to either. And if we had updates for the programming, we'd want to be able to have people insert those too, if they can't just download them. It will be a lot to design and source, and the way capacity grows we'll have to keep on top of it, or Fuzzyther will be outdated before we ever try to get it to market. We have stuff like that at the store, it takes so long to get there that by the time its been on the shelf for a month, the customers - at least the younger ones - think it's from the Jurassic. Can we really do this? Can we really make Fuzzyther happen?"

Alexis frames his face in her hands. "We will definitely be changing the name, but with the two of us working together, I know we can."