Now What? Chapter 24

Scowling at the murder board, Kate shoves her phone back into her pocket. "Lanie says Zack had no drugs in his system, but from the high levels of chlorine in his blood, the caustic used to knock him out was a chlorine generator, and that it would be easy to find chemicals to do that around a pool."

"Which clears no one," Rick realizes. "Still, our best bet is that the heavily accented whatever he is that Bridget saw is our killer. He found what he needed on site, soaked something with it, and used it to put Zack out."

"Yeah, Castle, but we don't have a motive, and without one, we don't even know where to look for this guy."

Esposito jogs across the bullpen. "Yo, Beckett, I may have a line on motive. I just finished going over Zack's financials. He had a partial scholarship to pick up his tuition, but he still needed to pay for his books and his living expenses."

"A lot of students get jobs on campus to pay those," Rick notes.

"Yeah, but Zack didn't," Esposito says. "With all the hours he was putting into swimming, he wouldn't have had the time. He didn't have any student loans either."

"His mom was just squeaking by," Kate says. "She couldn't have helped him much."

"And NCAA rules preclude him from receiving financial assistance from outside his family," Rick adds.

"So where did he get the money?" Esposito wonders.

"He could have borrowed it from some very bad guys," Rick speculates. "Maybe the guy with the accent was one of them."

"We don't even know there was an argument," Kate says. "We just know Bridget says she saw something."

Ryan joins the group. "Just got off the phone with a uni at Zack's apartment. It's been tossed."

"I'll get CSU in there to check for prints," Kate says. "Come on, Castle. Let's go see if we can figure out what whoever searched the place was looking for."

"Well, we know it wasn't Bridget," Rick offers. "She's been here with the sketch artist. And after five years, she would have known where to look for his secrets anyway. It took Meredith about five minutes to figure out where I kept mine – the ones she was interested in, anyway."

"Oh man, did she find your porn?" Esposito asks.

"No, my checkbook."

Kate rolls her eyes. "Come on, Castle. Let's go to Bensonhurst."

"We ought to take the sketch the artist did with Bridget," Rick suggests. "She said the guy met Zack under the El. That means he was in the neighborhood. From Bridget's reaction of 'Not Brooklyn,' the natives must be pretty insular. Someone must have noticed him."

"Assuming he wasn't a figment of Bridget's imagination. All right, Castle, we'll bring it," Kate allows. "But checking out Zack's place is our priority."

Rick gazes around Zack's apartment. "This reminds me of my first hovel. We used to have cockroach races. Wonder if that's how Kafka got the idea. Looks like Zack didn't do his chores."

"Zack was killed, and then his place was trashed. Not a coincidence," Kate asserts.

"They left the TV and the laptop," Rick observes. "So if this was part of a debt collection effort, it wasn't a very efficient one. Hmm, a dental pick. Zack may not have been much of a housekeeper, but he was into oral hygiene. You think dental plaque slows you down in the water?"

Kate points at what's left of a mattress. "They were looking for something specific. Otherwise, there would be no reason to rip it apart like that. Maybe they didn't find what they were looking for."

As a door slams down the hall, Rick sees a poster move. "Maybe it's still here, but it's just too well hidden." Rick pulls the poster aside, revealing a hole in the wall. He reaches inside and pulls out a bag with two liquid-filled glass ampules.

"Whatever those are, Zack wasn't using them," Kate asserts. "They would have shown up on Lanie's post-mortem."

"From the drug research I've done, there's only one thing that comes in those vials that you'd find outside a doctor's office or a hospital, Rick declares, "anabolic steroids."

"But Zack was clean. So why would he have steroids?" Kate questions.

"He needed money, Beckett, and he hangs around with athletes. What better way to make it than to peddle steroids?"

Kate presses her fingers to her lips. "So maybe the man Bridget saw with Zack was his dealer."

"So you believe her now?"

"Let's have Lanie take a look at those and take it from there."

"They're steroids, all right," Lanie announces.

"You said Zack didn't have drugs in his system," Kate recalls.

"Actually, steroids don't show up unless you're looking for them, which I wasn't. They wouldn't have worked as the murder weapon. But the kind Zack had wouldn't have shown up even on a standard steroids test," Lanie adds. "They're loaded with masking agents. Someone would have to be specifically looking for that formula."

"So, was he using?" Kate presses.

"Nope! I went back and looked. Your boy was steroid-free."

"So he was dealing," Rick reasserts. "Where does a drug like that come from?"

"There's been some talk about a new performance-enhancing beat-the-test drug developed somewhere in Eastern Europe," Lanie says.

Rick nods. "Ah, Eastern Europe, home of the hard to identify accent."

"Zack only had a couple of vials," Kate recalls. "If he was dealing, he would have needed more product."

"Perhaps that's what he and his secret slav were arguing about," Rick says. "Maybe his dealer wanted money upfront."

"I'll have Ryan run the sketch past Narcotics and Vice to see if they recognize it. We should get it out to the 62nd," Kate adds. "They serve Bensonhurst. They might know this guy."

"Super-secret steroids are hardly street drugs," Rick points out. "He might not be on cop radar. But if Zack was dealing, his teammates or other school athletes would be his most likely customers."

"Esposito can talk to his teammates about steroids and find out what they know," Kate figures.

"Beckett, Zack met his Eastern European contact in his neighborhood," Rick reminds her. "Someone there, someone who was tight with the local hero, must know who he is. Zack must have had a hangout – or his old friends do. Someone close to Zack has got to be able to identify the mysterious menace. And the person most likely to know who was close to Zack is…."

"Bridget," Kate finishes. "All right, let's ask her."

"Once Zack started swimming on teams, he didn't have much time to hang around with his friends. I mean, he was with me, but," Bridget's hands trace her generous curves, "they couldn't give him what I could."

"Think," Kate urges. "Was there someone, maybe a friend from before Zack started spending as much time in the water?"

"There was Tommy Marcone. They were in kindergarten together and other classes later – when Tommy wasn't cutting. He was always getting into trouble and trying to pull Zack with him. He got arrested a couple of times. Zack might have been, too, if he wasn't in the water."

"What did Tommy get arrested for?" Rick asks.

"Boosting cars. He was good at it. The times he got caught were when he tried driving them around instead of taking them straight to be chopped up."

"You have a chop shop in your neighborhood?" Rick queries.

"Sure. Best place for guys to get parts for fixing up their own cars. But Tommy wised up. I haven't heard of him being busted lately."

Kate pushes out of her seat in Interrogation One. "We'll find out about that."