Chapter 77

It was at the Central Park, the homicide squad found a deceased woman slumped inside a carriage on the carousel. The historic carousel was in full motion with the music blaring when they arrived. Within a quarter hour the ME had arrived at the murder scene and soon confirmed with the team that the woman had been shot four times with a .45. Dr Parish also shared there were contusions on the victim's left side consistent with the muzzle of a .45 being jammed into her ribs which lent assumption that the killer was left-handed.

The CSU team picked out the slugs from the back of the carousel's carriage. Those slugs happened to be engraved with the letters W. I. L. L.

They deduced the killer was sending Beckett a message but only had 'Nikki will' to go with. With potential for a third victim Castle put it out there that the guy was a serial killer.

Beckett gave him a look as she replied, "I would think that a serial killer would be like the holy grail for a crime novelist."

"I don't know, Beckett." He stared at the body. "It's complicated." It was also about that time that Castle started to feel guilty about writing the Nikki Heat novel and consequently placing Beckett in a spot of bother.

"What's the matter, Castle?" She asked as she watched a string of black SUVs drive towards them.

"My novel has put you in the firing line of a crazy person."

"Oh, Castle." Beckett soothed, then countered him with logic but it didn't have much of an impact on Castle's course of thinking. It didn't ease the guilt either. What distracted Castle from his burden of guilt was the appearance of the SUV that pulled up. He stopped talking. A flood of agents spilled from the vehicles, one of which was a red headed woman in very high heels barking off orders at everyone.

With confidence that scratched the border of arrogance, the petite woman approached Beckett and Castle. The writer noticed that Beckett immediately straightened up. The woman introduced herself as Special Agent Jordan Shaw, the same Jordan Shaw that broke the Hudson Valley Strangler case back in 1991. What also distracted him was the immediate reaction Beckett had when the Special Agent Shaw flexed her muscles on Beckett's turf.

"Agent Shaw," Beckett began, "My people have already secured the area. CSU is on the scene, and we are canvassing the park. So as happy as I am to see the cavalry, there is really not much left here for you to do."

"Detective," Shaw replied.

On the tone alone Rick yanked his notebook and pen from his pocket ready to scribble.

"The gods in the marble halls have sent me here to catch a killer, which I will do with or without your help, okay?" She looked at the writer, then the detective. "Now could I see the body?"

Rick wrote like a madman, excited by the presence of Agent Shaw.

Beckett snatched the pad away to read what he wrote. She lowered her hand and glared at him. "You are seriously going to put that in the movie?"

"Well, yeah." With wide eyes he looked at Kate, saw her expression. "No." He replied. "No."

Ryan who had been busy joined the group and took a moment to acknowledge the woman in the suit. When he sensed Beckett was anticipating his update, he held up a paper bag with a gloved hand, "Unies pulled this from a trash bin. Wallet's inside." He stepped aside a little when Esposito closed in. The wallet was extracted from the bag. "The vic's name is Michelle Lewis."

They closed in as Esposito opened the wallet and extracted a card, "According to her business card, she's a dog walker."

Beckett pointed at the surface of the wallet, "There's a print here, and it's too large to be our victim's. Let's get it to the lab for –"

Jordan Shaw clicked her cellphone above the wallet. Everyone looked at her.

"What are you doing?" Beckett asked.

"That print," Shaw said, "Is already in the lab and being processed. No muss, no fuss, no black powder on your clothes." She smiled.

Wow!" Castle reacted, "There's an app for that?"

"That's why I joined the FBI, Mr. Castle, for the toys." Shaw looked to Beckett. "I'm really eager to see that body, Detective Beckett." She walked towards the doorway to the carousal.

Castle started after the agent, "Can I take a look at that –"

Beckett pushed him backwards with her arm.

Castle stopped and looked at Beckett who was clearly jealous, "Be a chance to check it later."

Precinct

Castle said, "Thank you. And if you want me to autograph those for you, just form a single file line right here. (They all look at him in disbelieve) Or not.

Beckett leaned against the police car, with Castle beside her. They read the police record on Donald Salt a two time loser who happened to own the pinkie print found on the second victim's purse. It was also matched to the partial pinkie her team recovered from Grand Central. Donald Salt was on parole for a manslaughter conviction in 2005.

Castle said, "Two pinkie prints? So, he was at the station and the carousel."

Beckett lowered the phone, "And the purse puts him with our victim." She nudged Castle, quietly ordered, "Tell me everything you know about Jordan Shaw."

Castle dived right in, "Honey, she is like the federal you. She is good. She is real good. She cracked open that Hudson Valley Strangler case when she was just twenty five."

"I thought they caught him from a speeding ticket?"

"Well, don't ask me how, but she profiled that he drove a Yugo."

"They found a girl tied up in the back." She said.

"Uh-huh."

"Jordan Shaw saved that girl's life."

"She did. You know how Shaw said this guy likes to make a scene, Beckett?"

"Mm?"

"And she said she wouldn't be surprised if he was also an arsonist? Do you think that's what drew him to the Nikki Heat character in the first place? As she suggested?"

"I dunno. But the hundred copies of Heat Wave, Castle?"

"Extreme. FBI budget must be huge to buy in bulk like that."

"Yes." She agreed. Well, when Avery read the book notes?"

"Oh yeah. That was flattering and embarrassing."

"The implication we were sleeping together was."

Rick crossed his arms and looked at Beckett in disbelief, "Well, we are."

"I know," she grumbled. "I was so embarrassed."

"Mm. That was embarrassing. I mean, they all think we've done it and that I wrote about it. But I don't write about my sex life."

'They all laughed," she hissed

"Like you said, Beckett, it's fiction." He pointed towards the entrance of the garage to where a black SUV came towards them.

Beckett pushed off the car, closed the trunk and walked to the passenger side of the vehicle as it came to a halt. She opened the door as Rick did the same on at the back behind the driver.

Shaw said to Beckett, "Let's mount up. We'll meet my team at Donald Salt's apartment."

Shaw's SUV crawled along an alley and pulled up outside Salt's building about a quarter hour after they exited the garage. The occupants remained in the car, Beckett in the front passenger seat and Castle in the back behind Shaw who was on the phone.

"Yeah …. Okay-"

Beckett watched out the front, kind of listened to the conversation.

"- Just pulled up now…. Yep …. got it." Shaw hung up then said to Beckett and Castle, "Salt lives in that brick building." She pointed through the front window. "His supervisor says he left work an hour ago. So, he should be home by now. When the others get here, we'll take him."

Castle listened while he played with a set of night vision goggles. They were similar to the set he had at home. Inquisitive about a button, he pressed on it, which caused the goggles to make a burring sound.

His actions caught Shaw's attention and she looked via the review mirror like a parent. "What is he doing?"

Beckett didn't bother to look at what Castle was up to, and shrugged her shoulder dismissively. "He, um, touches things."

A whirring started up in the back seat.

Castle held the goggled to his eyes and said like he was talking to himself, "Night vision goggles. I think I have the newer model though." He looked at Beckett momentarily, "You know, maybe in my third book Nikki Heat will cross swords with a good-looking, yet coldhearted FBI profiler. Call it Federal Heat."

Beckett turned about in her seat to stare at him with an icy look.

"Or maybe not," he added as he looked away from her glaring eyes.

Shaw who been observing their behavior and interactions since meeting them a day or so back, asked with an inquisitive expression. "So how long have you two been sleeping together?"

Beckett's eyes sharply turned to Shaw's. Rick continued to play with the goggles, with no reaction at all. In silence he prayed that Kate would not crumble under the direct pressure. No one had asked them before now.

"I'm…" Kate tried to think, suppressed the surging panic. "We're…." She cleared her throat, and said with confidence, "We're not sleeping together." She glanced at him for support but he was too bloody busy with the goggles to help her out of the hole she felt she'd fallen into. "We – he –"

Castle chuckled with amusement.

"He just observes me." Beckett stated, then swallowed.

Shaw scoffed, "Yeah, I've seen how he observes you."

"No, she's right." Castle said as he continued to play, "Aside from my second wife, this is the most sexless relationship I've ever been in."

"I've been profiling people for a long time. I'm hardly ever wrong."

Beckett defended, "Well, this time you are… wrong."

Shaw directed herself back at Beckett, "So if you're not sleeping together, why do you keep him around?"

"You know I can hear you?" Castle politely inquired. He turned the taser about, now focused on figuring out how that tool worked.

"He's actually proven to be surprisingly helpful." Beckett commented.

"Hmm. Have to take your word on that."

"A compliment from, Beckett. Outrageous." Castle declared as he powered up the taser. It whirled and beeped and drew Shaw's attention.

"Put the taser down."

Castle powered down taser. Once again, it beeped and shut down. He discarded it on the seat. His attention went to the three dark SUV that showed up in the alley with them.

Shaw opened the car door as she said, "Okay, the team's here." She looked into the review mirror at Castle. "You stay in the car."

Beckett turned about wearing a smartass smirk. She said to him, "You heard her, Castle. Stay."

The two women got out of the car.

Castle said, "Could you at least crack the window for me?" He sat back in his seat a little frustrated that he was not allowed to join the group. Agents followed Beckett and Shaw to the entrance of the alley.

What got Castle's attention a minute or so later, was a man that resembled their suspect crossed the road towards the alley.

Shaw sighted the man too and shouted, "Hang on. Stop! FBI! Hey!"

The man leaped into a run towards away from the FBI. Castle who saw him coming, grabbed the taser and powered it up. He abruptly got out of the car as the guy passed and fired the taser on Salt.

He got him. Salt's arms shot out.

"Aah! Oh!" Salt dropped to the ground.

Castle absorbed it all, the way the body dropped, the muscles jerking the limbs about. Beckett and Shaw rushed past him and stopped over the body.

"See, I'm helping." Castle squawked.

Both women frowned at him.

"Yeah, I'll buy you an ice cream later," Shaw said,

Beckett then moved fast. She holstered her gun, grabbed the cuffs and put Salt into them, "Agent Shaw, we got a problem. His pinkie finger's missing."

"Which one of you is Nikki Heat?" Salt asked trying to see the women.

Salt saw plenty of the two women a half hour later when they questioned him in the interrogation room for a lengthy time. Salt talked. He was a dumb smart ass but he shared enough information for them to know they had been set up by the real killer.

With ten fingers intact, he'd been killing time surfing one of those internet barter sites, when he had come across a bizarre advert seeking a finger. He bit the bait dangling in front of him. $5000 for his pinkie and a few extra bits he needed to do. The advertisement specified the individual needed to have a violent felony conviction and to be recently paroled. A further condition of the transaction was his finger print would be planted at a murder scene. He also had to be willing to suffer through the indignity of a false arrest by Detective Nikki Heat who would be coming for him. Because of those conditions, he had needed to have an alibi.

Every night since the man had taken Salt's digit, and walked away with it in his cooler, Salt had been perched on his favorite bar stool at McSorley's until closing.

Beckett had ended up extracting the bandage from the stump of Salt's amputated finger. A code of numbers was handwritten on the bandage.

The numbers were not random. The serial killer had bought another man's finger so he could leave a print that would lead Beckett and her team directly to the code. Whatever the reference key was, the team understood the killer believed it was a code Nikki Heat would be able to crack. It was Castle who brought it to realization when he discovered the code related to the typeset of a manuscript, usually 300 words a page.

The kiiler used Heat Wave and they cracked the code that gave the message, 'I will kill someone else before midnight tonight unless you stop me.'

Midnight was eight hours away. The killer had put then on the clock. He was challenging the police to stop him.

With eight hours left, Beckett used her white board to go over subway routes, in search of a trace of a pattern from Grand Central to the carousel, to the next location. There was nothing definitive.

Castle joined her and together they deviated from train lines to search for a common theme about how the killer chose his victims.

First a man, then a woman. Victims consisted of a lawyer and a dog walker. There was no pattern there. No way to predict where he was going to go next.

The Lab results came back on the bandage that had been wrapped around Salt's maimed finger. The bandage tested positive for traces of formaldehyde, methanol and ethanol. It happened that Castle and Shaw simultaneously identified the substances as Embalming fluid.

Against the time, striving to identify the killer before midnight, they hunted the people who worked in mortuaries and had a criminal record, within the city. They produced six names.

Six undertakers from the city were summoned to the Precinct. None of them could be the murderer. The team realized, too close to midnight, that they'd been baited by the killer, just like they had with the fingerprint. They were wasting their time.

Beckett and Castle were in the war room set up by the FBI team when Ryan stuck his head in the room, "Beckett?"

Castle and Beckett turned about.

"He's on the phone. He's asking for Nikki Heat." Ryan said.

Beckett walked into the bull pen, to the phone at Ryan's desk with Castle behind her.

Shaw called out, "We're tracing the call."

Beckett waited for the green light from Shaw and when she saw the wave, she picked up the landline phone, "Hello?"

"Nikki?" A distorted voice greeted. "You were supposed to stop me. I wanted you to stop me."

"Tell me where you are," Beckett said.

"Will you come alone?"

Beckett looked at Shaw, who nodded.

"Yes," Beckett replied, "Just you and me. We can figure this out. I can help you. You just need to trust me."

"Tell me something… How does it feel to know that you have failed?" A gun shot went off in the phone. Beckett looked to Shaw as the call went dead.

"We have it." An agent called out.

The teams drove to a parking lot out near Queens.

Cars pulled up, tires squealing.

Shaw was out of her car barking orders to every agent that spilled from the vehicles. "Check the stairs. Get a unit on the roof. I want eyes on every inch of this structure."

Beckett's team gathered momentarily and then paired off searching the parking garage. She said to Castle, "He was just here, Castle. That body can't be too far."

"We'll find something."

Ryan called out, "Over here! A lot of blood. A woman's shoe. Got a broken heel."

The team gathered and commenced to search for clues.

Shaw pointed to the concrete floor of the garage, "Strands of hair. Looks like she put up a fight."

Beckett also pointed towards a brick wall, "There's four shell casings. There's no way she would've survived without medical attention."

Castle connected eyes with Beckett, "Then where's the body? He always leaves the body where he kills."

"And he always kills in famous places with lots of foot traffic." Shaw said, "He's changing his M.O."

"Which makes him more unpredictable, which makes him more dangerous." Castle replied.

Detective Avery approached the group, carrying a walkie talking, "Structure's clear, Sir," he said to Shaw, "There's no body."

"Where the hell did he put her?" Shaw asked, frustrated.

Beckett brightened, as she pointed to the ground, at the drops of blood. "He put her in his trunk. That blood trail ends right here."

"So he waited," Castle said, "Probably left his car idling, takes down his victim, popped his trunk, put her in, drove away, body on board."

Shaw said to Avery, "Get the parking attendant to give us a list off all the vehicles through here and the video footage."

Agent Avery left to do the task.

Castle gazed about, then looked at Shaw, "What, you think he used his own car?"

Shaw replied, "No, but if he stole it tonight, he might not have had time to switch the plates. We put out an APB."

Beckett said, "I'll get my guys to get a roster of all the people who had monthlies on this floor."

Shaw answered, "My people are already on it and I got way more people than you do. Your captain has a unit on your apartment. Go home, get some rest."

"It's not necess –"

"No argument," Shaw said, "You're no good to me if you're burned out."

Castle caught Beckett's attention and signaled to her not to argue. Instead of creating a crisis, Beckett thought about her team, decided they did need a break as they had been running about. She gave Rick a nod, then waved her partners in. She sent them home for a break.