16. So far away from me

Beckett had gone home, looked at the cans of soda in her fridge, wished passionately that she had a bottle of vodka to mix with them, and finally cast herself down on her couch and been miserable. She doesn’t understand at all why Castle had invited her round to dinner just to ditch her, and she’s too upset to try to work it out.  Eventually she stops herself crying, changes into soft leggings and t-shirt, and goes through her yoga forms, trying to calm her mind.  Needing to stop to blow her nose and blot her eyes every so often does nothing to assist in regaining her composure.

It had all been going so well, too. She’d been getting over her stupid jealousy of Castle’s relationship with his daughter – okay, so she still wasn’t wholly comfortable, but she’d been getting there – and all she’d needed was a little longer to be sorted out.  Just a little longer, so that she could relax out of that hideous strength that she needs to get through Christmas and New Year, past the anniversary; past the need to hold on for her father, and the risk that she’d let something slip.  And he had been better, this year.  They’d played the game she’d bought him and it had been good…

She dissolves into tears again. She’d bought the game at a shop Castle had shown her and they’d played it too.  Now she won’t.  She’s hardly going to take it to work, is she?  It’ll just sit there on the shelf, as lonely as she.  Another wasted effort, another waste of time.  She sits on her yoga mat, head on her knees, and wonders if she’ll ever find another opportunity to have someone who would have let her be Kat.  She doesn’t think so, and right now she doesn’t even want to try.  The universe obviously doesn’t think it’s in the cosmic scheme of matters.

Eventually, she goes to bed, in her quiet, cool sheets and coverlet, her muted, soothing colours and pretty, abstract patterns. And in the morning she wakens, washes, and dresses in her formal, Beckett armour of sharply tailored pants and jackets, stiffly collared and cuffed button-downs; her gun and shield in place.  If she’s not allowed to be weak sometimes, she might as well prove that she’s strong.

There’s no new body, and no reason to call Castle. Only paperwork, and plenty of it.  A diktat’s come down from 1PP: the cold case rate is too high: there’s to be a concerted effort to solve them.  Beckett’s team hardly have any, but wider team spirit leaves them as busy as anyone as they help where they’re needed.

It’s what Beckett needs. Too busy to think, too busy to care, too busy for more than a few hours’ sleep a night.  Too busy to miss Castle. 

And then a new body drops a couple of days in and she has no choice but to ring him. So she hammers her voice and her feelings into complete submission to her will and calls him, though she’d have paid a small fortune to pass it off to Ryan. 

“Rick Castle.”

“It’s Beckett. We got a body.  Sara D Roosevelt Park, at Hester Street.  We’re on our way.”  Click. 

When Castle gets to the crime scene Beckett, Ryan, Esposito and – oh Lord, Perlmutter, why couldn’t it have been Lanie? – are all staring at the corpse. Castle muscles his way into the group next to Beckett, who flicks a glance at him.

“Hey, Castle.” She doesn’t sound anything other than neutral.  Right back to how she used to sound, in fact, last November.  He suddenly wonders, for the first time, what she’d heard him say the other night.  Because right now, he’s not at all sure that she heard what he thinks he said. If she had let him finish she’d have understood, he thinks, still irritated.  Anyway, this is hardly the place to open a discussion about it.

“What happened?”

Perlmutter looks up with his trademark snide stare and speaks with his trademark snide tone.

“She got murdered. Have you thought up a theory yet, Mr Castle?”  The word farfetched – it’s the nicest word that occurs to Castle’s thesaurical brain – is clearly intended to be inserted in that sentence.

“Perlmutter,” Esposito snaps, “how about you do your job so we can do ours? Stop flappin’ your jaw and get choppin’ her up.”  Castle looks at Espo, mouth open.  Espo winks at him when Perlmutter – and Beckett – aren’t looking, and makes a feed-the-birds gesture.  Ryan follows up with a small grin.  Perlmutter harrumphs and huffs and shortly loads the corpse into the morgue wagon, telling Beckett that he’ll have something for her shortly.  It doesn’t seem to make her any happier with the day.

“Okay. This is Susan Godley.  29, not married – at least, her driver’s licence still says Miss, not even Ms – lives in the East Village, works at Canobank.”  Beckett turns to Ryan and Esposito.  “You two take her workplace.  Anything you can find out, but I don’t suppose you’ll get much this time round.”  She makes a face.  “All those financial types are either close-mouthed or bragging.  Either way they never say anything useful first off.”

She flicks back to Castle. “I’m going to go back to the bullpen, find out next of kin, then go see the family.”  She waits a beat.  “You coming, Castle?”

“Sure.” For an instant he’d thought she wasn’t even going to ask him.  That would be a whole other level of neutrality.  He slides into the passenger seat of the cruiser, but Beckett doesn’t hurry to get in, looking around the scene again.  Finally she takes the driver’s seat, fires the engine, and starts for the precinct. 

“What were you looking for, Beckett?”

“Anything unusual or off,” she replies. It’s not exactly informative.

“And?”

“And what?”

“And was there anything unusual or off?” There’s a lace of irritation through his words.

“No...” There’s a note in that which suggests very strongly that Beckett had hoped, or thinks, that there would be something, and hasn’t found it.  There’s another note which suggests that the conversation is firmly over, and so it proves.  Beckett has an air of furrowed-brow thinking, and there’s a strong sense of her shuffling options and considerations in her head, amplified by the twitching and tapping of her fingers on the steering wheel.  Not a single syllable of her thoughts exits her mouth.   This is hardly unusual, but it’s not making Castle any happier.

Back in the precinct Beckett spends a few moments hunting down next of kin information, emerging from a fog of computer data triumphantly waving a scrawled name and address. At least, Castle assumes that this is what the chicken-scratchings convey.

“Got it,” she says. “Parents.”  Her look of triumph as she’s beaten the IT into submission has faded rapidly in the face of the unpleasant, necessary, task ahead of her.  She looks at her watch.  “It’s late.  You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.”

What? Beckett’s never asked him that before.  Never.  Not once.  He’s never deserted a live investigation.  Why on earth would she think he would now?  He’s just chewing on that gristly thought when her phone rings, diverting her reach from her coat to the device.

“Beckett.”

“Okay.”

“Nothing on tox?”

“Anything else?”

“Oh. Right.”

“Prints? DNA?  Anything?”

“Okay. Let me know as soon as you do.”

She looks crossly at her phone and then at Castle. “That was Perlmutter.  Susan Godley was hit with a blunt instrument – we knew that right from the moment we showed up, but he can’t be more precise yet – no tox, no alcohol, no drugs, no sex” –

“Was there rock and roll?” Beckett glares.

“No prints, and no DNA. No murder weapon, either.”  She mutters bitterly under her breath.  It sounds very much like useless man why isn’t Lanie on this? Castle certainly sympathises with that.  Perlmutter is unprepossessing in looks, intelligence and personality.  He has all the charm and sparkling wit of a brain-damaged cockroach.  Just as well he’s in the morgue and not allowed to practice on real live people.

Beckett is drawing a timeline. In the middle is a window for time of death, centred round five a.m.  She glares at that, too. 

“What’s up? You’ll set the board on fire if you stare at it much harder.”  The glare is turned back on him.

“She wasn’t dressed for clubbing. So what’s an unmarried twenty-nine year old doing in a park at five am?”

Castle doesn’t engage brain before opening mouth. “Why don’t you tell me?  You’re a hot unmarried twenty-nine year old.  You don’t go clubbing.  What would you be doing in a park at five a.m.?”

Beckett acquires a very strange look indeed. If he’d been asked to define it, he’d have plumped for the word agonised.  But then it’s gone again, as if it had never been.

“Looking at a corpse,” she bites. “That’s what I’d be doing.”

Or alternatively, trying to talk her father into going home rather than finishing the bottle. He’d come rather too close to street drunkenness on one too many occasions, before she’d abandoned him, and then past it. But he isn’t like that any more, she reminds herself.  He hasn’t been for five years.  She flicks another glance at her watch, face twisting almost unnoticeably, and shrugs into her coat and scarf.

“Time to go tell the parents.”

Castle follows her out to her cruiser.

“Our victim couldn’t have been looking at corpses,” he points out.

“No. Last I heard Canobank was a bank, not an outpost of the NYPD’s Homicide division,” Beckett snips.

“So why else would a single” –

“We don’t know she was single.”

“attractive, twenty-nine year old be in the park? She wasn’t in running kit, she wasn’t in clubbing gear, she wasn’t dressed up.”  His eyes widen.  “I know!  She was meeting her CIA handler.  Espionage.  Working in a bank was her cover story.”

“I don’t think so,” Beckett says discouragingly. “Most likely she was going home after pulling an all-nighter.”  She frowns.  “It’s off.”

“What’s off?”

“I don’t know yet. Something.”  She frowns even more ferociously.  But that’s where it stays. 

The parents are devastated, clinging to each other for support, world shattered in one sentence, breaking around them. All Beckett’s empathy is wasted on the barrier of their shared grief.  They try to be useful, though, despite their agony: maybe it’s the only way they can make something better of this hour.  Between boyfriends, they think.  A good girl: came by every week for family dinner.  Doing well at work: hoping for a promotion soon.  Never really spoke about what she actually did, or knew: confidentiality was key.  Didn’t want there to be any chance any of them could ever be accused of insider dealing.  Apparently it had happened to one of her co-workers, and he’d been sacked out of hand, after a brief investigation.

Beckett keeps her poker face, at that last. There’s a thought.  She carries on, but no more apples fall no matter how hard she shakes the tree.  She leaves on a cloud of soft, sympathetic thanks and farewells, echoed by Castle.

“I’m going back to the precinct,” she says as she pulls away from the kerb. “Can I drop you off somewhere?”

“Why? Aren’t I coming back too?”

“There won’t be anything more tonight. Perlmutter’s off-duty” – she makes an annoyed noise at the fortunately absent ME – “and I’ve got other work to do.  1PP’s put a purge on old cases, and we’re all busy.”

“I could help.”

“Paperwork, Castle. Not your strong point.”  And, of course, she doesn’t want him there.  She wants peace and quiet and solitude and definitely not the man who ditched her two nights ago.  Still, she’s been strong all day.  It’s not as if she had let him get under her skin.  Not at all. 

Castle makes a mutinous face. “I can help,” he grumbles.  Beckett is unmoved.  “You’re supposed to let me shadow you.  How’m I supposed to know how the precinct ticks if I don’t see all of it?”

“Use your imagination, Castle. You’ve got plenty of it.” 

She’d have said that right back at the beginning, too. In exactly that get-lost-playboy tone.  She’s shutting him out.  First she wouldn’t come to his loft, then she walked out on him, and now she’s behaving just like she did in the beginning.  He’d wanted something better than a series of booty calls, and she’d blown him off without even letting him finish or explaining why.  Now she’s acting like it’s all his fault.  Well, it’s not his fault and he’s not going to behave like it is.  Nor is he going to allow her to shut him out.  He’s got a book – likely a series – to write, and he’s not going to let that be spoilt just because Beckett’s played him for a fool.

He retreats into silence and thought. He’d really thought that she might be up for a proper relationship, and she’d simply walked away.  Her loss.  It doesn’t bite any less today than it had two days ago, and telling himself he’s well rid doesn’t help either.  He will at least extract an explanation from her, but not now.

“We’re here,” Beckett’s cool, clear tones interrupt his thinking. Here is Broome Street, and specifically his building.  “See you tomorrow.  Maybe Perlmutter will have got his finger out his ass and found something useful by then.  Wish it were Lanie.”

Castle is left with no option but to get out the car – at least, unless he’s willing to start an argument. He isn’t, and he’s also not willing to take the chance that Beckett really meant that she was going back to do paperwork and old cases.  Regardless of what he had said, that provides him with neither background nor inspiration.

Beckett makes her way back to the Twelfth in welcome solitude punctuated by the irritated tapping of her fingers on the wheel. For as long as she can be irritated by the case she won’t be made miserable by the rest of her life.  Even if “that’s not what I want. I’m not doing this any more” is on repeat loop in her head.  She’s got far too much to do to think about that.

The bullpen is quiet and gloomy, and the pile of cold cases casts shadows across Beckett’s desk. By some quirk of lighting and the alignment of the pile of files, the shadows look as if they’re reaching out to claw at her.  She shivers, and shakes off the momentary chill.  There are no ghosts here.  Only the job and the case and a way to forget.  She’s a success: everybody knows it.  But here and now, the ravenous maw of 1PP needs fed and satiated: or she won’t be a success for long.  She stands between the living and the dead; between her team and the brass.  And between her father and perdition.

She pulls the first file from the pile, and begins.

In between the cold case files, and occasionally during, as questions or points occur to her on the live case, Beckett scrawls her thoughts on a separate piece of paper, or on her murder board. The man sacked for insider trading keeps pressing on the front of her head.

After four old cases, and with the clock rounding on midnight, she’s too tired to continue. She’ll go home, and return early.  The murder board, now bespattered with her thoughts, blindly watches her leave, somehow reproachful: as if she should stay longer, press on further, work harder.  She still has to push herself to do more, do better, to push away the burdens of her life.  After all, she hasn’t found any other way to do so, and her previous hope that she might have found a way had been broken on the wheel of Castle’s words and her inability to be comfortable seeing him with his family.  Nothing else, but to work and forget.

Dawn slithers greyly through her curtains, and brings her to wakefulness. Tired as she is, once her eyes have opened she can’t find sleep again, shrugs on her daytime self and begins again.

She’s sipping a second cup of coffee and scowling at the latest cold file when Esposito saunters in.

“Yo, Beckett.”

“Hey, Espo.” Esposito casts a darkling glance at the murder board.

“Get somewhere? Gotta lot of stuff up there, wasn’t there last night.  You been home?”

“Yep. Had some thoughts, wrote them up.  D’you want to add what you got?  Anything from the co-workers?  Has Ryan started on cameras, cell phone records?  How’d she get to the park anyway?  Do we know?”

Espo looks unimpressed at the memory of talking to the bank staff. “Not much.  Shut their mouths as soon as we flashed the badges.”  Beckett scowls even more blackly.

“Nothing?”

“Didn’t say that,” Espo smirks. Scowl changes to outright glare.

“What do we got, Espo?”

“We got the name of the guy who got fired for being suspected of insider trading.” Beckett’s glare changes to a feral smile.

“Do we now? Make me happy, Espo.  Tell me that Ryan or uniforms are picking him up.”  Esposito grins in return.

“Guess I’m makin’ you happy, Beckett. ‘Cause that’s what’s happenin’ right now.”  Her smile acquires fangs.

By the time that Ryan and a couple of sizeably burly uniforms have returned, Beckett’s had sufficient time to sharpen her smile, fangs and mood into razor-edged focus. The reason for a couple of big uniforms becomes obvious as soon as she looks into Interrogation from Observation – this man is himself big, and fit, and in a very, very bad mood.  That suits Beckett just fine.  She’s not at all impressed by the greed-is-good, big swinging dicks of Wall Street, and she’s not in the best of moods herself.  This guy looks as if he’s up for a fight and to try to intimidate her.  Boy, is he in for a nasty surprise.

“Espo, Ryan, I’m going to take this one alone,” she says. “He’s just the type to think he can outthink or outmuscle a woman, so we’re going to use his stupidity against him.”  The boys grin back at her, nastily.  They’ve watched this game before, and it’s always entertaining.  For them.  It’s very rarely any fun for the one on the other side of the table.

Beckett delays for a psychologically significant time precisely calculated to let the suspect wind himself up to fury at being treated like an ordinary person. After all, he’s wearing a designer suit that probably cost 3,000 dollars or more, his watch looks like a Breitling, and he’s wearing a very obvious signet ring.  He clearly thinks he’s the top of the tree.

She walks in.

“What am I doing here? You’ve no right to hold me.  Do you know who I am?”

“Yes. You’re James Cardon, lately fired from Canobank for insider dealing.  You’re lucky you’re not in an orange jumpsuit.”  Beckett’s voice is cold and contemptuous, designed to reduce arrogant fools to a small pile of waste inside three sentences.

“That was a mistake. I’m suing.  That bitch lied."

“Who lied?” This is almost too easy.

“Susan. Susan Godley.  The uber-bitch of compliance.  She invented the whole thing to have me out.  She hated me.  She just wanted to get back at me for having the job she wanted and making megabucks while she was pulling down peanuts.”

“So she was in compliance? Hardly likely to want your job as a trader.  Looks like her job trumped yours, though.  After all, you got fired.”

“So? I’ll get a better deal.  No skin off my nose.”  Beckett raises a cynical eyebrow. 

“This day and age? You’ll be lucky to get a job sweeping the streets.  She’s screwed your life up, and you’re trying to tell me you’re not bothered?  Guess what, Cardon, I don’t believe you.  You’ve been out of work for three weeks already because of her.”  There’s fury blazing in his face, now, but sweat on his lip.  Beckett starts to go in hard.

“I bet when we run your financials we’ll find that you’re living way beyond your means, Cardon. You’ll have to sell that pretty watch.”  She’s taunting, pushing.  Because he hasn’t asked the obvious question – Why am I here?  And he’s so convinced he’s the smartest person in the room that he hasn’t asked for a lawyer either.  Perfect.  Just what she likes.  Stupidity all dressed up in self-importance.

“Fuck that, cop. I’ve done nothing wrong.”

“I’ll decide that.” She waits a beat.  “Where were you between four and six this morning?”  It suddenly, obviously, dawns on him that he’s in serious trouble.