Chapter 9: The Red Stain
The deep, pillowed silence of the loft held Teresa for hours. The exhaustion was a black tide, and she sank into it, oblivious to the distant sirens weaving through the city grid far below.
Then, she was walking.
It wasn’t a conscious decision. One moment there was nothing, and the next, her feet were moving on scuffed linoleum. A building. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead, casting a sickly greenish-yellow pall. The air was stale, recycled, smelling of dust and old coffee. She didn’t recognize it, but a profound, cellular sense of rightness pulled her forward. She should know this place.
She pushed through a set of heavy double doors into a wide, open-concept space. Desks. Dozens of them, arranged in neat pairs sitting back-to-back. But they were wrong. They were barren. No computers, no stacks of case files, no family photos or half-dead plants. Just empty surfaces reflecting the ugly light.
Silence. A silence so complete it pressed against her eardrums.
Her boot scuffed the floor. The sound echoed.
Something grabbed her ankle.
A cold, iron grip. She gasped, her heart jackhammering against her ribs, and looked down.
Kimball Cho lay on the floor beside a desk, his dark eyes open and unseeing. A thick, dark pool haloed his head, soaking into the collar of his crisp white shirt. One hand was wrapped around her ankle, the fingers rigid. His face was waxy, pale. Dead.
A strangled noise caught in Teresa’s throat. She tried to pull away, but the grip was relentless.
She wrenched her gaze up, away from him, and the world dissolved into a scream she couldn’t voice.
The walls. The empty desks. The support columns. Every surface was smeared, slashed, painted with the same thing. Smiley faces. Crude, dripping circles with two lines for eyes and wide, upturned curves for grins. They were everywhere. Dozens. Hundreds. They swam in her vision, painted in a rust-brown that could only be blood.
The yellow light gleamed on the wet strokes.
Teresa woke.
It wasn't a gradual ascent. It was a violent ejection. She bolted upright, a raw gasp tearing from her lungs, her right hand flying to her own throat as if to pull the silent scream out. The indigo duvet was tangled around her legs. She was drenched, her new periwinkle shirt stuck to her back with cold sweat. Shivers wracked her frame, making her teeth chatter.
The guest room was dark, lit only by the faint ambient glow from the city beyond the windows. The walkie-talkie’s red eye watched.
The dream. It was already crumbling, disintegrating like ash in a wind. The specifics blurred, faded, sucked back into the black hole of her memory and a wash of pain. The feeling of the linoleum. The color of the light. The arrangement of the desks. It was all slipping, so fast.
No.
One image held, stark and horrible against the dissolving backdrop: the smiley face. The bloody grin.
Her hand shot out, fumbling over the nightstand. It knocked against the base of the new reading lamp, brushed the box of granola bars. Her fingers closed around the cool, sharp cylinder of the pencil. The legal pad was beside it. She dragged them onto her lap, the movement jerky, frantic.
She didn’t turn on the light. She drew in the near-dark, guided by streetlight and panic.
A circle. Two short lines curved down. A a curved line, upturned.
The graphite scratched against the paper, a loud, desperate sound in the quiet room.
She stared at it. The knocking started. Not a sound, but a feeling—a dense, solid pressure against the seamless, blank wall inside her mind. Thud. The drawn face seemed to pulse on the page. It was a key. It had to be a key.
She drew it again, on the same page, below the first. Thud. Again. Thud. Each stroke was an attempt to turn the key, to force the lock. She filled the first page with them, a grid of identical, haunting grins. She flipped the page. The second page filled faster, her hand moving with a frantic, obsessive rhythm. The circles became uneven, the lines harder, deeper.
Thud. Thud. THUD.
Nothing opened. No flood of memory, no clarity. Just the same, taunting image and the relentless, impotent knocking against an unyielding door. Frustration boiled up, hot and acrid, mixing with the dregs of her terror. Her breathing grew ragged.
She stared at the page, her frantic pulse the only sound in the room. It meant something. This stupid, childish symbol meant something terrible.
…And she couldn’t remember.
The pages were a cemetery of empty grins. They told her nothing. They just stared back, a silent chorus of her own failure. The pressure behind her eyes tightened into a sharp, blinding pain.
A hot, helpless rage detonated in her chest. It was cleaner than the fear, more immediate than the confusion. Her hand, cramped and stiff, clenched around the legal pad.
She stared at her own frantic, useless work for one more second. Then her arm whipped sideways, fueled by a fury that lit up every injury. The notepad cartwheeled through the dark air, pages fluttering like wounded birds. The pencil clattered against the wall separately.
They landed in a soft, anticlimactic whisper on the plush rug near the door. The sound was barely there. It made her feel even more foolish, more trapped.
She looked at her empty, trembling hands. The rage evaporated, leaving a hollow, freezing cavern behind her ribs. A sob hitched in her throat, sharp and ugly. Then another. She couldn’t stop them.
She folded forward, burying her face in her palms. The heels of her hands pressed hard into her eye sockets, stars bursting in the private dark. The crying was silent at first, just brutal, shaking tremors that tore at her stitches. Then it broke into raw, muffled gasps against her skin.
She cried for the phantom blood on the walls, for Cho’s dead eyes in the dream, for the faces of women she couldn’t picture. She cried for the stupid, empty smiles on the scattered paper. Mostly, she cried because her own mind was a locked room, and she was pounding on the door until her fists were bloody, and no one inside was answering.
The tremors slowly gentled into shivers, then into exhausted, hiccupping breaths. The pain in her shoulder and ribs had settled into a deep, familiar throbbing chorus. The cool darkness of the pillow called to her. She didn’t have the strength to lift her head, to arrange herself. She simply let her weight fall sideways, her wet face finding the cotton pillowcase.
She dragged a corner of the duvet over her head, blocking out the city’s glow, the red eye of the walkie-talkie, the sight of the notepad on the floor. The fabric muffled the world. Her breath warmed the small, dark space.
The crying had drained the last of the frantic energy from her limbs. The muffled dark under the duvet became a warm, airless cocoon, and exhaustion pulled her under within minutes. This sleep was thin and brittle, a pane of ice over deep, black water.
She slept for about another hour, before her dreams surfaced again.
This time, there was no transition. She was just doing it. Her hands were stacked, her weight driving down into a man’s sternum. The rhythm was all wrong. Every compression was a monumental effort, her arms leaden and slow. A cracking sound, sickening and wet, accompanied each push.
The man was balding, with a trimmed salt-and-pepper beard. He wore black pants with suspenders over a white shirt. The shirt was a canvas of crimson, so soaked it stuck to his chest in glossy, dark folds. His eyes were open, pale blue and clouded.
Other shapes littered the periphery of her vision. Legs splayed under tables. An arm outstretched on a checkered tile floor. She couldn’t look. All her concentration was on the impossible, sluggish metronome of her own arms. One. Two. Three.
A hand shot up and clamped over hers.
The grip was iron-cold and sure. Her compressions stopped dead. The man’s head turned on the tile, his clouded eyes fixing on hers. His lips peeled back from his teeth.
“Your fault,” he gurgled, blood bubbling at the corner of his mouth.
Teresa tried to wrench her hands away, but his grip was a vise. A wet, choking sound came from her own throat.
Then, a rustle. A shift. All around the room, the other bodies stirred. They didn’t sit up. They just turned their heads in unison, a dreadful, creaking chorus. Their mouths opened.
“Your fault,” the first man said, clearer now.
“Your fault,” a woman’s voice echoed from near the wall.
“Your fault.” A man by the door.
“Your fault, your fault, your fault.” It built, overlapping, a tidal wave of accusation that filled the vast, bloody room. It came from every lifeless throat.
Teresa recoiled, finally tearing her hands free. They were covered in hot, slick blood. She stumbled backward, falling onto her hips, and scrambled away from the reaching man. She crawled, her palms slipping in red streaks on the tile, the chant hammering her from all sides.
The tile beneath her hands softened, became gritty. Cold, wet blades of grass tickled her wrists. The chanting faded, replaced by a hollow, keening wind.
She was in a graveyard. Dense fog curled around weathered headstones. The world was muted greens and grays. Her breath plumed in the cold air, and she crawled, panicked and crying, through the dewy grass. The scent of damp earth and decay filled her nose.
A polished granite stone loomed before her. The fog peeled back from its face as if by command.
LISBON.
The name was etched deep, the letters stark and final. Her own name. A choked sob escaped her. Lying on the grass before the stone was a boy. He was maybe ten, wearing a ripped jacket. His face was a mask of blood and dirt. Static screamed in Teresa’s head.
She crawled to him, her movements frantic. Her bloody fingers fumbled for the pulse point in his neck. She pressed. Nothing. A flat, terrifying stillness beneath the skin.
“No, no, no,” she whimpered, rolling him flat. She positioned her hands and began compressions anew. They were faster now, desperate. “Come on. Come on, please. Breathe.”
The sky darkened above her. A single, fat drop splashed on the boy’s forehead, diluting the blood. Another hit her arm. Warm. Coppery.
She looked up. The clouds had opened. It was raining blood. A drizzle, then a steady, warm shower that pattered on the leaves, the stones, her upturned face, painting the world in shades of rust.
A roar split the air.
It was not human. It was something raw and full of shattered glass, a sound of pure, animal rage that came from the far end of the row of stones. Teresa’s blood went cold. She shook the boy’s shoulders, her voice breaking into a high, desperate keen.
“Tommy! Tommy, get up! You have to get up! We have to run!”
The roar came again, closer. Heavy, crunching footsteps approached through the downpour, snapping twigs underfoot. She turned.
A man emerged from the fog and blood-rain. He was impossibly tall, a looming silhouette that seemed to blot out the weeping sky. In one hand, he held a shotgun, its barrel dripping red. In the other, a near-empty bottle of vodka dangled from his fingers.
He took a staggering step forward, his growl a low, vibrating threat. “Should’ve killed you years ago,” he slurred, the words thick and venomous. “You should be dead. All of ‘em… so many people… would be alive if I’d killed you.”
Teresa was frozen. The nightmare held her in a vise of pure, paralyzing panic. The man raised the shotgun, the movement slow and terribly deliberate.
Instinct short-circuited the fear. She lunged, not away, but toward him, a primal move to disarm. Her hands connected with nothing but air. A massive hand caught the front of her shirt, and he threw her.
She sailed backward, weightless for a horrific second. The impact with the ground was a universe of pain. It exploded through her ribs, her shoulder, her spine, whiting out her vision. Every injury from her waking world screamed in unison.
Gasping, she scrambled backward on her elbows and heels through the slick grass. The shotgun boomed. A geyser of earth and torn turf erupted inches from her leg. She tried to get up, to run, but her legs buckled, useless as wet paper.
She was too weak.
Her wild eyes caught a dark, dense row of privet hedges along a nearby fence line. With a final, tearing effort, she dragged herself toward it. She pushed through the scratchy, wet branches, the leaves slapping her face. She curled into the innermost darkness at the base of the hedge, pulling her knees to her chest.
She crammed a fist into her mouth, biting down on her knuckles to silence her ragged breaths. The taste of blood and soil filled her mouth. She cowered, making herself small, as the heavy, dripping footsteps crunched closer and closer through the red rain outside her fragile, green cage. She looked down at her hands finding them red with blood. She rubbed them on the grass, on her clothes, it wouldn’t come off. Why wouldn’t it come off?
Why wouldn't it come off? The question looped in her skull, a frantic, stuck record scraping against the roaring in her ears and the rustle of leaves. She scrubbed her palms raw against the dirt, the wool of Castle’s borrowed coat, anything, but the phantom blood remained, a sticky, accusing film.
The shotgun blast still echoed, but the footsteps had stopped. The blood-rain became a gentle patter, then silence. The hedge was just a hedge, the darkness around her no longer a graveyard’s void but a closet’s confined stillness, smelling of cedar and clean cotton. The transition wasn’t a awakening, but a slippage, one terrible reality blearily overlaying another without her consent.
Her body still vibrated with the impact of the throw, every nerve screaming in perfect sync with her injuries. The silence now was worse than the roar. It was a held breath. She curled tighter into the corner, her face pressed into a bundle of something soft, her shoulders shaking with silent, relentless sobs.
The keypad on the loft’s private elevator beeped, a sharp, digital sound in the marble-clad silence of the lobby. Kate Beckett leaned against the wall, the taste of stale precinct coffee and frustration like a coating on her tongue. Three-thirteen AM. Her eyes felt gritty, her shirt collar too tight. The fluorescent lights hummed a headache into existence.
She pulled her phone out, thumbed a contact. It rang once.
“Cho.”
“It’s Beckett. I’m in the lobby. Coming up.”
“Copy.”
The elevator ride was smooth and silent. When the doors sighed open directly into the loft’s foyer, Cho was already there, a still, dark silhouette against the sprawling, shadowed living room. He looked as fresh as he had eight hours ago, which was irritating.
“Anything?” Beckett asked, stepping past him, her eyes automatically scanning the dim space.
“Quiet,” Cho said, his voice low. “She’s been down since around ten. Rodgers and the girl turned in hours ago.” He picked his jacket off the back of a chair, sliding it on. “No calls. No movement.”
Beckett gave a short nod, unclipping her holster. “Get some real sleep. I’ve got it until six.”
“See you at the precinct.” Cho moved to the door, setting the alarm with a few practiced taps on the panel before he left. The lock engaged with a solid, definitive thunk.
Alone, Beckett let out a long, slow breath. The expansive loft felt both empty and unbearably full—pressurized with waiting. She dropped her weapon on the coffee table beside the makeshift bed, a nest of blankets on Castle’s usually pristine sofa. She toed off her boots, lay back, and stared at the ceiling’s exposed ducts.
Sleep was a theoretical concept. Her mind reran the evidence: the blood-smeared shears, the ghostly M. Volkov, the dead trafficker in the garage with hands shredded down to the tendon. Look at the hands, Lisbon had said. Beckett’s own hands flexed restlessly.
The glow of a digital clock on a media console shifted from 4:29 to 4:30.
A loud, wooden thud cracked the silence above her.
Beckett was on her feet, weapon in hand, before the sound fully faded. She moved swiftly to the stairs, taking them two at a time, her socked feet silent on the treads. At the top, two doors stood ajar. Martha, in a silk robe, and Alexis, in oversized t-shirt, peered out, their faces pale ovals in the dark.
Beckett raised a finger to her lips, then a flat palm, urging them back. They retreated, eyes wide. She advanced down the short hall toward the guest room, the Glock held tight and low.
The door was slightly open. She pushed it slowly with her elbow, leading with the barrel.
The bed was a shipwreck of disarranged linen, the duvet spilling onto the floor. The pillows were gone, shoved toward the headboard. The yellow legal pad and pencil lay abandoned near the doorway, pages covered in frantic, looping smiley faces.
The room was empty.
A cold thread of alarm pulled tight in her chest. She swept the room—under the bed, the ensuite bathroom dark and vacant. Her breath hitched. Then she heard it: a wet, ragged inhalation, choked off halfway. A sob, so soft it was almost just a sigh of air.
It came from the walk-in closet.
Beckett lowered her weapon, the immediate threat assessment shifting. She thumbed the safety on, holstered the Glock, and clicked on the bedside lamp. A soft yellow pool pushed back the darkness, not dispelling it, but shaping it.
She crossed to the closet and crouched at its entrance. Inside, it was a canyon of shadows and hanging fabrics. She gently pushed aside the new clothes Alexis had bought—the plum cashmere, the leather jacket—and the older coats belonging to Castle.
Teresa was wedged in the far corner, folded in on herself like discarded paper. Her knees were drawn to her chest, her arms wrapped around them, the cast a stark white beacon in the dark. She was rocking, a slow, painful-looking rhythm. Her eyes were open, glazed, reflecting the sliver of light from the room but seeing nothing in this one. Tears traced clean lines through the sweat on her cheeks, and each shallow, hiccupping breath threatened to become a wail.
Sleepwalking. Not a fugue, but a prison. She was locked into a nightmare.
“Teresa,” Beckett whispered, her voice deliberately calm, a flat stone dropped into turbulent water.
There was no reaction. The rocking continued. A low, broken murmur escaped Teresa’s lips. “...won’t come off...”
Beckett moved closer, slowly, until she was kneeling just inside the closet. The air was close, warm with trapped fear. “Teresa, you’re safe. You’re in Castle’s loft. You’re in the closet.”
Teresa continued, her voice low and broken. “Blood on… my hands. Won’t… come off.”
Beckett reached out, not to shake, but to lay her hand very gently on Teresa’s good forearm, a point of grounding contact. The skin was icy cold, damp with sweat.
The touch jolted her. Teresa’s head snapped up, her wild, green eyes still unfocused, but filled with a terror so profound it was like looking into an open wound. “We have to run, Tommy. He is drunk, he wants to kill us. You have to get up.”
Beckett gave Teresa’s arm a firmer shake and called her name more loudly, “Teresa!”
Teresa startled. She flinched back, a sharp movement that made her gasp in pain as her shoulder hit the wall.
“It’s Kate Beckett. NYPD. You’re safe.”
Recognition, slow and viscous, seeped into her expression. The panic didn’t vanish, but it blurred, mixed with a crushing wave of shame. She looked from Beckett’s face down to her own clenched fists, still held tight against her body. She uncurled them slowly, staring at her clean, trembling palms as if they were artifacts from another life.
“I was… there was…” The words dissolved. She shook her head, a barely perceptible movement, and the tears fell anew, silent now.
“I know,” Beckett said, her voice soft. “I know.”