17. I'm not in love

“What the hell is this about?”

“Where were you?”

“In bed.” Beckett raises a nastily sceptical eyebrow.

“Really? Whose bed?”

“My own bed.”

“Really. You sure about that?”

At that point there’s a knock on the door. It’s Ryan. 

“A moment, please, Detective Beckett,” he says, in the formal way they use when they want to prove to a suspect that she is quite unquestionably and unmistakably the one in charge. (She’s always in charge.) 

“I’ll be back,” she says ominously.

“What is it, Ryan?” He grins boyishly at her.

“Well, Beckett, I got building security footage from the vic’s building, her work, and this asshole’s building too, and while you’ve been fretting him and sweating him, I’ve been running it. Guess what?”

Beckett acquires the edged, predatory expression of a starved tiger looking at a tethered goat.

“You found something.”

“I sure did. Two somethings.”

“Spill it, then.”

“Spill what,” comes from behind her. It’s Castle.

“Hey, man,” chirps Ryan. He turns back to Beckett.  “Cardon went to her building late last night.  Hung around for a while, then left.  ‘Bout four thirty, she left.  Colleagues told us she liked to start really early: she was often talking to Europe, sometimes even Hong Kong or Dubai.  Time zones.”

“Time zones are a pain,” Castle interjects. “When I’m on book tours I’m always trying to work out what time it is so I’m not calling Alexis to say goodnight in the middle of class.”  Beckett ignores the irrelevancy.

“So what was the other something?”

“Well, Cardon went back to his building and never left again, so his alibi checks out.” Beckett winces.  Sending down a rich, arrogant asshole would have been highly satisfying.  “But come and look at this.”  

They make their way to the tech room and Ryan loads up the footage. “This is the view from the street cams from her building towards the park.  Lookee here.”  He points to a figure.  “That’s Susan.”  He runs a few frames forward, and points again.  “That’s someone falling into step behind her, and if I go back” – he does – “you can see them waiting for her.”

“Someone who knew her habits,” Castle points out.

“Even if Cardon could have slipped out again, that’s not him.” Her voice holds a tinge of regret.  “Far too small, and female.”

Espo joins them. “Looks like someone really wanted to talk to our vic.”  He peers at the screen.  “Looks like an argument.”

“Okay. Let’s see if we can get a better view, or anything that might help us identify her.  Can we track them any further?  Ryan, you get more footage, closer to the park and the crime scene. See if we can pick the suspect up catching a cab or in the subway, or at an ATM.  It’s a long shot.  While Ryan’s doing that, Espo, you go back and ask her co-workers who she’d had a row with recently.  Get uniforms canvassing for witnesses on that walk.  At four-thirty in the morning, we’ll be lucky even to get the pan handlers, but they might as well try.”

“What are you going to do?” Castle asks, not entirely innocently.

“Let Cardon out,” Beckett growls, “then try to think about what was off at that scene.  Shake some info out of Perlmutter, too.”

While Beckett clacks off, with annoyance in every tap of her heels, to release Cardon, Castle reviews her murder board, and is considerably more irritated than he has any right to be when he realises that it contains an awful lot of thinking that clearly took more time than just this morning. And he missed the interrogation, which would have provided him with a substantial quantity of inspiration and fixed Nikki Heat’s demeanour firmly in his head again.  It takes him a few moments to realise that Beckett hasn’t returned.

Castle slides into Observation, and notes with gathering annoyance that Beckett is still interrogating Cardon. She’s taken the cuffs off him, though, and her expression and demeanour is less hostile and more focused than if he were still a suspect.  But Castle should be in there, not out here watching.  Still, he can’t interrupt.  He’ll simply have to wait, shut out of the action again.

Shut out her life, shut out the case. She’s put up all her walls again, and he hasn’t the faintest idea why.  She’s the one who walked out, and yet she’s behaving like he’s the bad guy.

He watches and listens, and a few minutes later Beckett exits, with Cardon.

“We might want to talk to you again, Mr Cardon. Don’t leave town.”

“You can’t say that.”

“Yes she can,” says Castle, helpfully. Cardon looks bitterly at the two of them and leaves.

“Why didn’t you let me sit in?” Castle asks as the elevator door closes behind Cardon.

“Because he was a misogynistic jackass who thought he could out-think me. If you had been in there he wouldn’t have reacted the way I wanted.”

Oh. Okay then.  That makes sense, he supposes.  He just doesn’t like it, which reminds him of his earlier grievance.

“And what about all the extra points on your murder board? I thought you said you were working on old cases?”

“I was. But just because I’m working on an old case doesn’t mean I don’t have ideas on the new one.  So when I did I wrote it down.”  She looks coldly at him.  “Would you prefer I forgot them?  Lost a possible lead?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Of course not.”  He can’t argue with that either.  It’s all so very sensible and reasonable and he still feels as if she’s shutting him out.  “So what did he tell you?”

“Nothing useful. She got him fired – and I’m sure he deserved it – but he didn’t know if anyone else had been fired, if anyone disliked her, or anything outside his fat arrogant greedy head.  Useless.”  Her face contorts into a grimace.  “And thinking of useless,” she carries on, “now I need to call Perlmutter.”

Calling Perlmutter only gets them summoned to the morgue. Perlmutter, it appears, wants to show them something.  Well, he wants to show Beckett something.  But Castle isn’t going to be shut out any more, and besides which, him showing up will irritate Perlmutter immensely.

It does. Perlmutter is extremely irritated, and doesn’t scruple to show it.  Rather stupidly, though, he ignores Beckett’s obvious desire for answers in favour of sniping at Castle.  It takes – oooohhh, around three seconds? – for that to backfire.

“Doctor Perlmutter! Are you going to say anything useful or are you going to behave like a playground toddler some more?  Quit trying to rile Castle and do your job.  We’re not here to listen to you making an ass of yourself.”

Castle stares at the back of Beckett’s head. She’s defending him.  Well, standing in the way of Perlmutter’s nastiness, anyway.  What on earth is going on here?

Perlmutter sulkily coughs up the limited information he’s found: mainly that the blow was struck with limited force, probably by someone slightly shorter than Susan Godley, but through sheer misfortune had connected at the right angle to kill her.

“That’s it?” Beckett says.  “Nothing more?”

“That, Detective, is it. There is no more information.  You and your pet Malamute can leave now.  Stop distracting me and let me get on with some real work.”

It is quite possible that Beckett is going to shoot Perlmutter. Her hand has even dropped to her hip.  Castle, while appreciating her sentiment, is strongly of the opinion that if she’s going to go down for murder it should at least be in a good cause, not for squishing a cockroach.  He very cautiously – he doesn’t need shot, either – taps his fingers over the hand on her gun, and puts his other hand very gently on her shoulder to turn her to leave.  The fact that he would like to punch Perlmutter’s lights out isn’t really doing much for his mood, either; but at least he and Beckett are back on something approaching the same page.

Beckett fulminates high and wide about Perlmutter all the way back to the precinct. She doesn’t draw breath till they’re halfway there, when Castle jumps in.

“Beckett, your insults are no doubt heartfelt, but they’re very clichéd.”   There’s a growl from the driver’s seat.  “I’ve got some much better ones for you.  Alexis gave me a book a couple of Christmases ago called Shakespeare’s Insults and it’s got some wonderful ones.”

“Like what?” Her words are brisk, but he can hear that he’s caught her interest.

“Well, there was ‘thou deboshed fish thou’.”

“I get the fish bit. But deboshed?”

Castle shrugs. “Debauched, apparently. I looked it up.”  He grins happily.  “Then there was ‘Thou art like a toad; ugly and venomous’, and ‘Thou cream faced loon’ which I really liked.”  Beckett is already sniggering before he’s finished the second insult.

“And finally: ‘Some report a sea-maid spawn’d him; some that he was begot between two stock-fishes. But it is certain that when he makes water his urine is congealed ice.’”  Castle smirks.  “C’mon, Beckett.  You can’t say that this doesn’t describe Perlmutter precisely.”

By then she’s laughing almost too hard to drive safely.

“Stop, Castle. At least till I get us back.  I don’t want to crash.”  She splutters again as she mutters “cream faced loon”.  They’re closer to normal than in weeks, as the journey passes with muffled snickers and sniggers and snorts, every time one of them thinks about the insults. 

Ryan has been reviewing camera footage from around the park. There’s not enough of it, and it’s significantly impaired by the number of blown bulbs in the streetlamps, but there’s some.  And that some has the same shadowy figure within it, leaving via East Houston.  And while there aren’t that many street cameras at the exit, there are street cameras at the subway station and there are cameras in the subway station and suddenly they have a clear view of their shadow-perp as it pushes its hood back and is revealed to be female (as suspected), with short dark hair and a curvaceous figure.

“I’ll see if the techs can enhance the picture,” he says.

“Can we get that to Espo anyway for the canvass? Might help.”

“She’s little,” Castle says, incredulously.  “How does anyone that small hit hard enough to kill someone?”

“You’d be amazed,” Ryan says. “Tap the right point and it’s all over.”

“And you can’t tell in that coat how fit she is,” Beckett points out. “For all we know she’s the state weightlifting champion for Illinois.”

“Doesn’t look likely,” Castle notes.

“That doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

“One case we got, Perlmutter told us the hit was by someone six-foot eight. We went looking for a basketball player.  Turned out to be someone five-foot three, an’ shaped more like the basket ball.”

“Huh?”

“He was standing on a table when he coshed the vic.” Castle sniggers at Ryan’s tale.

“Are you saying I shouldn’t make assumptions?” There’s a very tiny tension starting to become apparent.

“Yes. Cop work needs an open mind.  So she might be the weightlifting champion of Illinois.  It’s not very likely, though.  What is possible is that she goes to a gym somewhere and does some training, from the way she moves.  Or she could just be a yoga nut and do it at home.  Point is, we don’t know.  Till we find her, we don’t know anything.  Till we get the footage enhanced, we don’t know anything more than a guess at her height – and she could be wearing flat boots or heeled boots so we could be up to four inches off either way – and that she’s got dark hair.  She could go to a salon this morning and be blonde or red or brunette or blue.”

Beckett stops for breath.

“So we need someone to recognise the photo, or get the sketch artist to do a new one?”

“Yes. Till then, assumptions just lead us down the wrong track.”

Castle can’t help his pointed look at her following that comment.

“Yeah?” she says.

“You never make assumptions?”

“No. I rely on what the evidence and the witnesses tell me and follow the leads and then we cross-check them.  That’s what we do.”

“Is it?” Castle mutters bitterly. It’s not what she’d done in his loft.  She’s never checked her thinking about that.  She just walked out. 

Beckett and Ryan are discussing how fast the footage can be enhanced and don’t hear him.

Matters might have been superficially lightened by the back-and-forth in the car, but nothing’s actually fixed. Castle goes and makes himself a coffee and then, when the caffeine hit has soothed him slightly, makes another, and one for Beckett.  He might be irritated, but he won’t be rude.

Nor, it seems, will Beckett. “Thanks, Castle,” she says with a small smile.  “I need it.  I hate those Wall Street traders.  Best way to deal with them is to reduce them to nothing.”  Her teeth flash white and sharp.  “Works every time.”

“Sure does,” Ryan says from behind Castle. “Makes great watching.”

“Watching? You weren’t in there?”

“Naw. No way.  It only works if Beckett’s in on her own.  They either try ‘n come on to her or they try to treat her like a fluffy-headed idiot.  Then – bam! And they’re looking for their balls in the trash.”

Ryan and Beckett exchange a satisfied smile. Castle’s mood has improved immensely.  Not just not him, but not anyone.  That’s…very bearable.  Very.

“Wish I’d seen it,” Castle droops, theatrically.

“Get here a bit earlier, then,” Ryan suggests, grinning. “We brought him in not much after eight.”

“Ugh,” Castle says. “That’s still night-time.” Beckett rolls her eyes.  Castle grins, relaxed for the first time this morning.  “I wouldn’t have been able to learn anything.  Too busy yawning.”

Further banter is prevented when Beckett’s phone rings. “Beckett?”  Indistinguishable mutters.  “Prints?  Tell me they’re on a database.”  More mutters.  “Not?  Bye.”  She looks up.  “We got prints.  But they’re not matched.”  Her face twists in annoyance.  “Where’s Espo?”

“He went to pick up the footage.”

“What footage?” Beckett raps out.

“The footage from Canobank’s reception area. Seems our girl had a very angry visitor, couple of days ago.  Day before we found her.”

“Ooohhhh,” Castle says happily. He can hardly wait till Esposito returns, bouncing in his chair and far more fidgety even than normal.  Fortunately Espo is not long.  Beckett is beginning to look as if she’s going to shoot him if he doesn’t calm down.

“It’s her!” comes in quadruple stereo. It is, indeed, the woman from the subway footage.

“She wasn’t happy, was she?”

“Screaming mad.”

“Espo,” Beckett says coolly, “tell me you got a name out of the receptionist.”

“Sure did. Carrie.  Carrie Franks.”  He pauses, expectantly.

“And what else, Espo?”

“She was Cardon’s girlfriend.”

“What are we waiting for? Go pick her up.”

“Uniforms are already on it, Beckett. Thought I’d come an’ give you the good news.  Might cheer you up.  You’ve looked like someone pissed on your parade all week.”

Castle pricks up his ears. Beckett’s been miserable? Good, he thinks, unworthily.  That makes two of them.  His thought is swiftly followed by why?  He wonders again what she thinks he said.  Then he stops wondering, because he knows.  He said he wasn’t doing it any more.  And she walked out before he could say I don’t just want booty calls.  Well, if she’d waited for an explanation she wouldn’t be miserable.  Of course, nor would he.  He takes a proper look at Beckett.  Miserable appears to be an understatement.

“C’mon, Castle. Carrie Franks is here.”

Interrogation matters are back to normal, it seems.

“Yeah, that was me. So what?  That bitch got my fiancé fired.”

“Fiancé?” Castle says, surprised.

“Yeah. She wanted him for herself.  Couldn’t stand it when we got engaged.”  Beckett strongly doubts that, from the picture of the victim she’s built up.  Still, if it keeps this woman talking… Carrie Franks is as arrogant and stupid as her boyfriend – fiancé – and is making much the same mistakes.  Beckett lets sympathy seep into her voice and picks up the thread that Castle’s tugged.

“When did you get engaged?”

“Month ago.” Ah.  But…

“Can I see your ring?” Castle asks. “I’m a bit of a connoisseur of fine jewellery.”  Beckett only just stops herself shaking her head, but it works.

“Haven’t got one.”

“That’s unusual,” Beckett says, concerned interest in her voice. The rhythm and flow of their joint interrogation is sweeping Carrie up.  Beckett is extremely interested, but concern isn’t her primary feeling.  Suddenly she realises what was off at the scene.  If Susan Godley was on her way to work, why wasn’t she wearing the right number of accessories?  She had make-up on, so why not more jewellery?  It’s Rule 101 of professional female work – if you’re not a cop, of course.  She should have had earrings, a necklace and at least one ring – most likely.  Maybe a bracelet, as well.  She’d had earrings and a slim pendant – but nothing else.  “Why not?”

“We had one all picked out. Jamie” – Jamie?  Pet name, clearly – “showed me it in Van Cleef & Arpels.  It was beautiful…”  Her face twists.  “And then that bitch Godley started the investigation and he was fired and couldn’t put the deposit down.  When his name’s cleared, we’ll go back.”

Beckett’s mind is racing through the implications. From the focused aura beside her, so is Castle’s.

“I’d like you to write out your statement, please, Ms Franks.” And don’t scare the horses here.  “We’ll leave you to do that.”  She passes over pen and paper, and they exit, back to the murder board.

“That’s what was off.”

“What?”

“No ring. She should have had one.  We need to ask her mother what she normally wore.  Ryan!”

“Yo?”

“Get that reception footage enhanced as far as you can. I wanna know what jewellery our victim was wearing that day – necklace, rings, bracelets.”

“On it.”

“You think she did it.”

“I do. I think she did it and took the ring.  Espo!”

“Yo, boss?”

“You get down to the morgue – if I have to go see Perlmutter I’ll likely punch him if he doesn’t quit with the snide remarks – and see if he can get any traces of wearing a ring and any prints from Susan’s hands. I know it’s a long shot.  When you’ve done that, get Cardon back and ask him about this ring and engagement.”

“I think she did it too,” Castle says. “It fits the story.”

“C’mon, then. We need to go see her parents again.”

Beckett is not talkative, in the car. Castle recognises her running thoughts and leads and evidence trails, and doesn’t interrupt.  Building theory together this morning, and sharing the interrogation, has returned him to some equanimity.  It’s also returned him to some ability to reason and think.  Mostly, what he’s thinking is that he needs to do some thinking.  He could usefully start at I rely on what the witnesses tell me.  Oh.  Ooops.  He told her he wasn’t doing it any more and she took him at his word.  Relied on what he told her.  No assumptions required.  And Kate Beckett would never bother with anything within a hundred miles of begging for a second chance. 

But. That’s all very well, but.  She wouldn’t even dip a toe in the water of a relationship, let alone dive in.  And if that’s how she feels, there’s not much point hoping for more.  Better to cut his losses and stop now.  Except that there had been soft, affectionate Kat.  Until suddenly there wasn’t.