Unexpected Appearance Chapter 36

The key feels cold in her hand as Kate inserts it into the padlock. As if used often, it turns easily. After Rick's longer arms raise the metal door, she stares at the unit's contents. Carefully preserved in special nitrogen packing, her mother's wedding dress hangs from a tall rack. Banker's boxes, many labeled in Johanna Beckett's hand, fill metal shelves. Large totes are stacked against the walls. "Where should we start?" Rick asks.

Kate points at the banker's boxes. "It looks like those have case files and records in them. My mother's research on Pulgatti may be in there." Kate strides across the unit, reaching for a box labeled "N-P," and puts it on the floor. Kneeling beside it, she pulls off the lid.

"Anything?" Rick asks.

"There's a file with Pulgatti's letter to my mother, asking her to look into his case, but that's it."

"Maybe when she realized the case wasn't just about Pulgatti, she put the rest in a different file," Rick suggests, reaching for an "A-B" box. "We can try Armen."

Laying it on the floor near Kate's box, he crouches and quickly flips through the files. "Here's Armen's file. It has reports of his shooting investigation. Oh, this is interesting, Beckett. When they picked up Pulgatti, they ran tests for gunpowder residue on his clothes and hands. They came up negative. The detective involved, Napolitano, wrote that little detail off, claiming that Pulgatti had scrubbed up and ditched the contaminated clothes somewhere. But, ooh!"

"What, Castle?"

"Beckett, this is a copy, but I think the original report was altered."

"Why?"

"Because there are gaps in Napolitano's name, as if it was typed in over White-Out that wasn't dry yet. That used to happen to me all the time. The report was altered by someone who didn't want anyone to know who the original detective was. And I think your mother might have noticed. She circled two of the most messed up mentions of Napolitano's name and put a question mark next to them."

"If she had doubts, she would have asked questions," Beckett declares.

"And if she asked them of the wrong person, that might have gotten her killed," Rick agrees. "We need to find out who the detective originally on the Pulgatti investigation was."

"Montgomery might know," Kate figures. "But we really need to find his tape. If there's a Bracken file, it should be in your box."

Rick pulls out a thick folder. "This is it. There are a lot of reports about drug dealers being kicked loose by Bracken's office. She has Simmons and Zussman written across the top of them. But there's no tape."

"She must have put it somewhere special for safekeeping," Kate asserts.

"Brilliant and curious girl that you were growing up, you must have twigged to where your Mom would hide things she didn't want you to get your hands on," Rick guesses.

"Well, after I got into her makeup to give Maddie, you remember her from Q3, a makeover, Mom put the kinds she really cared about in a lockable carved wooden box with a jade elephant on it. My father had given her the box for something. I don't remember what. He gave her several things with elephants. She liked them. When she was little, my grandfather read her Kipling's The Elephant's Child, and she was hooked. But I have no idea where she would have hidden a tape."

"So maybe she had another special hiding place you didn't know about. It wouldn't be in the files." Rick points toward the stack of containers against the wall. "It might be in one of those."

Kate scoots across the room. "Let's look."

"Microcassettes aren't very big. Your mother wouldn't have needed a large box to hide it. It could be in a relatively small space," Rick offers.

"Right," Kate agrees. "We'll go through everything."

Rick rubs the small of his back after he opens another tote containing stacks of small notebooks. He holds one up for Kate to see. "Beckett, what are these?"

"They were my mother's version of a Day Runner. She wrote down her appointments, calls, all of that. She said she could never keep anything straight without them."

"So if we found one covering the right time period, it would tell us where she went and who she talked to?"

"It would if we could read it. Take a look."

Rick flips through the pages of the book he's holding. "I see what you mean. It looks like she used some kind of personal shorthand."

"She did. She also used it in files if she thought the DA could get away with subpoenaing them. My dad and I could never figure it out, and she didn't want us to. She said that if we didn't know, we'd be useless as witnesses. I think she also believed she was protecting us. My dad gave me the one that was found in her effects. It's back at my apartment. I always hoped I could figure something out from it, but no matter how many times I went through it, I never could."

"Hmm. Did your mother ever study codes or ciphers, anything like that?" Rick wonders.

"Not that I know of."

"Then it shouldn't be based on a random number series or something else high-tech. With a big enough sample, we should be able to figure something out. And this," Rick points to the tote, "is a pretty big sample. If we can match the timespans up with some of the cases she was working on, files of whom she was seeing, that should give us some kind of a clue to how she made her notes. Perhaps it will point us toward the tape."

"Maybe, Castle. But before we try anything like that, let's finish going through the rest of these containers. That tape could still be here."

"That would simplify matters. Continuing to dig."

At three am, Rick puts down the large tote he's carrying just long enough to let himself into his loft. The lights are out, and no noises are coming from the mezzanine. He smiles, nodding to himself. Alexis must be getting some sleep before her exam, and if his mother isn't sleeping in her room, she's probably having a good time wherever she is. His tote contains a group of Johanna Beckett's files and a stack of her notebooks that should roughly match up with their timespan. He told Kate he'd get an early start tomorrow, or a few hours later that day, to use his speed-reading skills to try to make some sense of them. But he's not about to wait that long. He starts a pot of coffee but doubts he'll need it to stay awake. Johanna's notations are swirling in his brain, and he's determined to figure them out.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, he remembers seeing something similar. While she was in the hall talking to the principal, he'd snuck a look at his fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Morelli's lesson plan book. He wanted to see if he could figure out how she scheduled the pop quizzes his fellow students lived in fear of. He usually had no trouble with them as long as he'd done the mandatory reading – and that never took much of his time. But it would have been nice to know when he had to fit it in among the much more interesting things he liked to read – and what he was writing. He remembers staring at the short notations and trying to match them up with past quizzes. Before he could decode anything, he heard the click of Mrs. Morrelli's sensible low heels and scurried back to his desk. So, back then, he was stuck doing the reading as soon as it was assigned. Now, he's given an assignment to himself.