Chapter 19: Police Work, Perps and Pretenders
The bullpen had the smell of a place that had been worked in too long without a win. Cold coffee, printer toner, the wet wool of six coats drying on the backs of chairs. Beckett stood at the murder board with a marker she hadn't used in ten minutes.
Three days. Four arrests, all small: a driver, two dispatchers, a man who kept a ledger in a shoebox. Every one of them had gone quiet in the box. None of them knew Bellamy's face. None of them had heard of Salazar or Mercer, and the lawyers had been waiting before the cuffs came off.
The board had stopped growing.
"Nothing," she said. "Nobody else has run. Nobody else has shown up at the front desk shaking."
Cho looked up from his temporary desk. He had his sleeves rolled back and a pen in his hand.
"You think whoever it is has stopped?" Kate asked.
"I didn't say that." He capped the pen. "If the person realized we'd recognized the pattern, he would change tactics."
Kate turned around. Ryan's keyboard stopped clattering, which was how she knew Esposito had heard it too.
"How do you know that?"
"Know what?"
"That he'd change tactics," Kate said. "Not stop. Change. You said it like you'd seen him do it."
Cho set the pen down and squared it against the edge of a file. "I've seen the approach before. That's all."
"From who?"
"Nobody you'd have a file on."
Castle rolled his chair in from the edge of her desk, close enough that the wheels squeaked. "Oh, that's a good one. Nobody you'd have a file on." He counted on his fingers. "So, prior agency. Likely federal, possibly military. Somebody who ran assets, flipped people, and then left. Or was pushed. And now he's out there doing it to a crime syndicate for reasons all his own." He looked pleased with himself. "Am I close?"
Cho picked the file back up. "You're always close."
"That's not a no."
Castle waited. Cho read the page.
The morning went the way the other mornings had, which was badly. At eleven, Ryan came back from a records pull with a printout and the beginnings of a headache, and by two they had a name.
Landry Arnette. Forty-one, no fixed address, three phones registered under three names, and a habit of appearing on the same paperwork as Nolan Pike. Not on the shells. On the deposits. He carried things between people who did not want to meet.
"Bellamy's client list has a gap," Ryan said. "Eighteen months of billing with no vendor correspondence. Arnette is the correspondence. He did the handoffs."
"And Pike used him twice," Esposito said. "Same month Marheim died."
Kate was already reaching for her coat.
They found Arnette outside a check-cashing place on West 46th, a slim man in a grey overcoat with a leather bag under his arm. He saw the three of them coming and he did not hesitate. He dropped the bag, went sideways off the kerb, and ran.
Kate ran. She heard Castle behind her, and Cho's footsteps, lighter, faster, cutting the angle across the sidewalk. Arnette went around the corner of a loading dock at speed.
The collision was loud. Arnette came off the corner and out of nowhere, a big man, broad through the shoulders, came in from the side and slammed Arnette into the wall. The stranger had the man’s hands zip tied behind his back before Beckett was inside fifteen feet.
She slowed. Cho did not.
Cho stopped two paces from the man and looked at him, and something moved across his face that Beckett had never seen there. Surprise, maybe. It was gone before she could name it.
"Rigsby," he said.
The big man smiled in return. He was tall, six-three at least, sandy-haired, wearing a leather jacket with a canvas shopping bag still hooked on his wrist.
"Hey." Rigsby's voice was low and flat, the voice of a man choosing his words. "Been a while."
Castle arrived, breathing hard, and looked up at Rigsby and then at Cho. "Okay," he said. "Who's the giant?"
Nobody answered him.
Arnette was swearing into the brick wall. Beckett read him his rights, and took him by the elbow. Then Rigsby spoke again.
"He took my wallet. Off me, by the coffee cart, ten minutes ago."
"I never touched your wallet," Arnette said.
"He came right at my coat and kept going."
"I never saw you."
Rigsby stepped in and reached down, and his hand went into the side pocket of Arnette's overcoat. He came out with a brown leather wallet, held it up, and handed it to Kate. His other hand was at the same pocket for half a second longer than the wallet needed, and then it was back at his side, empty.
Kate turned the wallet over. Wayne Rigsby's licence, a bank card, forty dollars.
"Where's the coffee cart?" she asked.
"Up by the corner. Blue awning."
"And what were you doing down here?"
"Shopping," Rigsby said. He lifted the canvas bag. "Gift for my wife."
Castle leaned over to look into the bag. Rigsby let him. There was a box inside, plain, no logo, and nothing else.
"Sir, you understand I have to ask," Kate said. "You put your hands on a fleeing suspect."
"He ran into me."
"You tackled him. That's more than standing there."
Rigsby looked at her levelly. "Ma'am, he had my wallet."
Arnette grumbled something under his breath that nobody could make out.
Kate looked between the two of them. She had a courier with three phones and no fixed address and a stranger with a bag and a story. Nothing in it was a crime. She had no reason to detain the man, and she knew exactly how thin a false arrest would read upstairs.
"Get him in the car," she told Esposito, who had pulled up at the kerb.
Cho hadn't moved. He stood with his hands at his sides, watching Rigsby with the same flat attention he gave to people across an interview table.
"Does Grace know what you're doing?" Cho asked.
"I'm shopping."
"You brought the kids to New York."
"They're at the hotel. A nanny the hotel arranged, vetted, for the afternoon." Rigsby shifted the bag to his other hand. "Grace is staying with the boss. Nobody knows how long she'll be needed. So I brought the children up so the family stays close."
Kate put it together a second before Castle did, but Castle started talking faster than she could. “Wait. You’re Grace Van Pelt’s husband!”
“Guilty as charged.” Rigsby grinned.
Cho didn't blink.
"Which hotel?"
Rigsby told him. Cho didn't write it down.
“Do you need me for anything detective? I’d like to get back to my shopping. The hotel nanny charges by the hour. You pay a high price for convenience.” Rigsby asked Kate.
Kate released him. She watched him walk off up the avenue, unhurried, the canvas bag swinging, and he turned once at the corner and looked back at Cho for the length of a breath, and then he was gone into the crowd.
Castle spun on Cho the second the man was out of earshot.
"Okay. Who else finds it suspicious that our suspect just tried to steal the wallet belonging to Grace’s husband?"
"Strange," Cho said. "But not impossible.”
"Not impossible. That's it? That's the whole answer?"
"That's the answer."
Kate pulled out her phone and thumbed in the licence number from the wallet while it was still fresh. Then she looked at Cho.
"Does his showing up have anything to do with whoever's been moving our suspects around?"
Cho's mouth stayed where it was. "I don't know."
"You don't know."
"No."
Kate pocketed the phone. She knew it wasn't the whole answer. She also knew she could stand here all afternoon and get the same eight words back.
So she didn't stand there all afternoon. She went back to the precinct, to her desk, opened the Arnette file, and read it twice. Neither pass gave her anything heavier than the wallet, and the wallet had walked away in Wayne Rigsby's hand.
The rest of the day went the way the case had been going. Small men, small arrests, closed mouths. By six the board looked exactly as it had at eight that morning.
The board didn't change by seven, so Kate called it and let Castle drive them uptown. He talked the whole way about Rigsby, about wrists and zip ties and the shopping bag, and she let the radio do more of the listening than she did.
——
The rain had stopped. The street outside the loft had that rinsed look, the sidewalk dark and clean, and the lights in the windows up on the 50th floor were a warm gold against it.
Teresa had her sleeves pushed back and her hands in a bowl of cold water, lifting tomato halves out of it and laying them on the board. She had a long-sleeve shirt on, grey, and jeans that fit her again instead of hanging off her hips. Martha had helped her fix her hair that morning into something loose at the back, and the makeup Martha had bought her was on, only a little of it, enough that her face didn’t look like a photograph of somebody else.
The key turned in the lock. She looked up.
Castle came in first with his coat half off, and behind him Kate Beckett, who hung in the doorway a beat and let her eyes move across the room. Teresa watched her find the table. Kate's eyes widened a fraction and then a grin broke across her face, real and quick, the kind that shows up before a person decides whether to allow it.
"Teresa." Kate came over and hung her coat on the back of the chair. "You look really good."
Teresa felt the heat climb her neck. "Martha's a miracle worker."
"She's a menace, is what she is." Castle replied as he walked past the table and into the kitchen.
"Same thing." Teresa wiped her hands on the towel and turned. "How've you been?"
"Busy. Badly busy." Kate tipped her head. "How are you feeling?"
"Better. Every day, a little better." Teresa lowered her voice. "The physio exercises are helping. Don't tell Grace I said that. She’s a taskmaster. She counts my repetitions out loud. From the other room. She’ll just start making me do more.”
Kate laughed, short and genuine. "That does sound like her."
Then she fell silent.
The laugh was there and then it wasn't, and something small moved under Kate's expression, a shadow that crossed and settled and was gone. Teresa had spent her career reading faces for a living and whether she could remember it or not, the skill was still there. She caught it the way you catch a dropped glass.
"What's wrong?"
Kate looked up, and she looked surprised. That was the thing Teresa noticed most. Kate was a woman read others all day long and seemed to have stopped expecting it from this side of the room. Especially from Teresa.
"Nothing's wrong."
"You just went somewhere."
"I didn't."
Teresa said nothing. She held Kate's eyes and waited, and it took four seconds.
"I need to talk to Grace," Kate said.
She said it quietly. She also glanced at the kitchen while she said it, which was the part that Teresa kept.
Teresa looked over too. Grace stood at the stove with her back to them, a wooden spoon in one hand, the hood light on over the burners. Castle was leaning on the counter next to her, the two of them inside the smell of onion and sausage and something with a burn to it.
"How hot are we doing?" Castle asked.
"Not very."
"Define not very."
"Your daughter's eating this."
"Alexis eats ghost peppers for sport. I'm asking for me."
"Mild." Grace knocked the spoon on the pot rim and set it down. “I know what happens to men who eat food that is too spicy for them.”
Teresa turned back to Kate. Her stomach had gone tight, the way she had noticed it did when a piece of information didn't fit a slot it should have fit.
Grace had told her about her CBI team. Grace had told her she'd shot a man twice in the chest and said it like a weather report. Grace had told her about Canyon Creek and the blazer and the eleven years of photographs. Grace had sat on that couch for three hours and answered every question Teresa thought to ask, and Teresa had taken all of it, built a floor out of it and currently stood on that floor.
Now Kate Beckett was standing in the loft with her coat hung over a chair, looking at the same woman and needing to have a word.
"You're going to ask me if she's done anything suspicious," Teresa said.
"I wasn't going to ask you that."
"You were thinking it."
Kate's mouth pulled to one side. She did not deny it.
Teresa set the towel down on the board. Behind her the tap dripped into the dish water, one drop, then another, and she could hear the two voices in the kitchen start arguing in the low, easy way people argue about food.
"Whatever it is," Teresa said, "I need to hear it."
Kate's eyebrows went up.
"I've had everything about my own life handed to me secondhand for two weeks," Teresa said. "By you, by Grace, by Cho, by a stack of photographs." She kept her voice level and low so the kitchen wouldn't hear it. "If there's a problem with the woman who's been telling me who I am, I need to hear it now."
Kate studied her for a long moment. Then she put her coat over the back of the chair and sat down at the table instead of walking into the kitchen, which surprised Teresa more than anything else that had happened all day.
Kate sat at the head of the table with both hands flat on the wood and said nothing for a moment. Then she turned her head toward the kitchen.
"Grace. Come sit down."
The spoon knocked the rim of the pot and stopped. The hood light threw a yellow band across the floor by the doorway.
"Watch the stove," Grace said to Castle, who was already leaning on the counter. "Stir it. Do not eat it."
"I would never."
"You absolutely would."
The tap ran, and then shut off. Grace came out with a dish towel in her hands, drying them, and dropped the towel over the back of the chair across from Teresa. She sat down.
Before Kate opened her mouth, Grace spoke.
"Wayne called me about an hour ago," she said. "He said he ran into you and Cho today."
Kate's face did something small. Her brows lifted, then settled flat. Teresa watched it happen and knew exactly what she was looking at, the way she apparently knew a lot of things lately: surprise, caught early and put away.
Teresa looked back across the table. Grace's hands were folded on the wood in front of her. Her shoulders were square and her chin was level, and she was working at looking unbothered. It was a good job. It was not a perfect job.
Teresa kept her mouth shut the way she had promised herself. Both of them could talk first.
Kate found her voice. "Why is your husband in New York?"
Grace nodded once. She had the manner of someone being deposed, calm and cooperative and entirely inside her own account.
"At first I was going to stay at the hotel with him and the kids," Grace said. "I didn't want to be away from them more than a week. Ben just turned five. Maddie's two. They're that age." She flattened one hand. "The first morning I left the hotel to meet Cho at the precinct, Ben cried for an hour. He stood at the door with his shoes on. The next day, when I came here to the loft the first time, he did it again. Nobody can explain a case to a five-year-old."
"So you moved," Kate said.
"I checked into a room at a cheap hotel two blocks over. Thin walls, no view, clean enough." Grace's thumb moved along the edge of the table. "On the weekends, when Cho comes by here to take the shift, I go and stay with Wayne and the kids. That's the whole arrangement."
Teresa frowned. The frown was on her face before she got a chance to check it.
Grace saw it and smiled. The smile was tired and warm at the same time. "That face right there," she said, "is exactly why I didn't say anything."
"You've been here every night," Teresa said. "Sitting with me, counting my repetitions, watching me sleep. Your husband and your two kids are a short ride away."
"They’re not far."
"It's the same city, Grace." Teresa put her hand flat on the table. "You should be with them. I'm not a wreckage you have to stand guard over."
Kate sighed. It was a short sound, only air, but it pulled Teresa's attention back across the table. Kate was still sitting straight, and she did not look like a woman who had gotten what she came for.
"We found Rigsby on West 46th," Kate said. "Cho and I were chasing a suspect. A financial courier named Arnette. Your husband came around the corner and put him into a wall. Zip ties, hands behind his back, before I was inside fifteen feet."
Grace didn't move.
"He said Arnette took his wallet when he was by the coffee cart," Kate said. "Then he reached into the man's pocket, took the wallet out, and handed it to me before he picked up his shopping bag and walked off."
Grace's hands stayed folded.
Teresa looked from one of them to the other. There was a pressure in the room now, low and steady, the kind she felt in her chest before a storm, and she had no idea where it came from.
"So," Teresa said, and turned back to Grace. "How's Wayne doing, raising two kids in a hotel room and catching pickpockets on his lunch break?"
Grace looked at her for a beat. Then she looked down at the table and let a breath out through her nose.
"Wayne's fine," she said. "He takes them to the pool in the mornings. He's better with them than I am some days. He does the voices when he reads to Ben."
"And the shopping."
"He bought me something today, apparently. He won't tell me what it is." Grace's mouth curved, small. "He's never kept a gift quiet in his life. He's keeping this one."
Kate opened her mouth. Grace got there first.
"He's always been good at being where he isn't expected," Grace said. "It's how he runs surveillance without anyone clocking him. It's how your courier never saw him coming."
Teresa heard the sentence twice. She had no memory of ever doing it herself, but she understood it in her ribs, the same way she understood the pull she got from a photograph of a man asleep under a newspaper. Being where you aren't expected was a tool, and Grace had just told her Wayne owned one, and told it to her with a straight face.
"Where's the box now?" Kate asked.
"In the hotel, I suppose. He was teasing me about it when he called."
Kate wrote nothing down. She sat with her hands on the table and her eyes moving slowly from Grace to Teresa and back, and something in her expression shifted, the way a piece looks after it's been moved on a board.
Kate stood up. The chair legs scraped a short note out of the floorboards, and she reached for her jacket before she said anything.
"Grace. Thank you. Genuinely." She shrugged into the coat and squared the collar with both hands. "I know what you've given up to sit here for two weeks."
"I haven't given up anything."
Kate let that stand. She came around the table to where Teresa sat and stopped beside her chair.
"I’m happy to see you doing so well," she said.
Teresa looked up at her. That landed somewhere behind her ribs and stayed there, small and warm.
"Maybe I should tell Grace your secret," Kate said with a sly smile. "But then, I would be afraid of what you could figure out about me if you really put you mind to it."
"Go catch somebody."
Kate picked up her bag off the back of the chair and walked to the door.
Castle got there first, standing near the door not quite blocking Kate’s path.”
"Beckett. Stay for supper."
"I have a case."
"You have a case that hasn't moved in three days. You could do with a break." He tipped his head toward the kitchen. "There's wine. My mother has opinions about wine."
"Castle."
"Forty-five minutes. That's a coffee break, stretched."
Kate shook her head. She had one hand on the door handle and her eyes on the latch, and from the table Teresa could read the answer in the set of her jaw before she said it.
"Not tonight."
"You're missing out on… whatever it is Grace is cooking."
"Goodnight, Castle." Kate said firmly.
Castle lowered his voice. Whatever he said next went under the kitchen noise, and Teresa caught only the shape of it, serious and short, no joke in it. Kate said something back, also short, also low. Then she was out the door and the latch clicked and the hallway was quiet.
Castle stood there a moment with his hand on the hook. Then he came back to the counter and picked up the wooden spoon Grace had left in the pot, and stirred like a man with something on his mind.
Teresa turned her head.
Grace was watching her. She had been watching her the whole time, Teresa realized, from the moment Kate had walked to the door, and she hadn't pretended otherwise.
Teresa pushed her chair back a few inches and turned to face her squarely. “You know more than you're telling me."
Grace didn't blink. "Yes."
"Why?”
Grace folded her hands on the table. The hood light from the kitchen struck the edge of her face and left the rest of it in the warm dark, and she looked at Teresa the way a person looks at a wound they're trying to keep clean.
"Because some of what I know doesn't hold together when it's said out loud," Grace said. "Not yet. And some of it isn't mine to hand you while you're still putting your own life back in order."
"So something is still happening."
"Something is still happening. Nothing illegal. Not by anyone in this room, not by anyone helping you." Grace's voice stayed soft and flat. "We want to make sure what happened to you doesn't happen to another woman. That's the whole of it. That's everything I can give you tonight."
Teresa sat with that.
There was a small, stupid certainty under her sternum, the same one that had pulled at her when she looked at a photograph of a man with a newspaper over his face. She had no idea where it came from. She had no idea whether it was a memory, or instinct, or the last of a life she couldn't reach. But it was there, and it was steady, and it told her plainly that the woman across the table was telling the truth about everything except the part she was holding back.
"All right," Teresa said.
Grace's shoulders came down an inch.
"I'll trust you for a little longer."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me. I want it noted that I dislike it."
"Duly noted."
Teresa sat back and crossed her arms over her chest.
"And I still think you should be at that hotel. With Ben and Maddie. Not sleeping blocks away on a couch in Castle’s living room, counting my repetitions, while your husband reads to them doing voices."
Grace didn't argue. She reached over and put her hand on Teresa's forearm and squeezed it once, warm through the grey sleeve.
"Here's the thing you're not seeing," Grace said. "If somebody broke in that door tonight and put a bullet in Castle or his mother or his daughter, Kate Beckett would shoot me in the street. And if anybody got to you again, Cho would never forgive me." She held Teresa's eyes. "So I'm not here out of charity. I'm here because leaving you unguarded would put a lot of people at risk, and I'd rather not be the reason someone gets hurt."
Teresa looked down at the hand on her arm. Then at the kitchen doorway, where the smell of garlic and wine had thickened enough to reach the table.
"Fine," she said. "But you're eating at least as much of that as I do. I'm not carrying the smell alone."
Grace laughed, short and low, and let go of her arm and stood up to go help.