Chapter Text
For a wild second, Kate felt an overpowering urge to fling herself into the inferno that engulfed the car. It was not so much suicidal as furious, a need to extinguish emotions too enormous to bear. As usual, lucidity won out and she just stood and stared, taking it all in. The flames. The smoke. The smell of melting plastic and chemicals.
Wait a minute. She sniffed the air.
"Ms. Beckett - "
Her eyes focused more clearly on the details, as though this were - well, it was a crime scene, not just an accident, she was sure of it - as though it were her crime scene. There was someone at her elbow, wisely not taking hold of it, talking at her. Brady, Hamptons police chief.
"Chief Brady - " She turned to face him. "There's no body. He's not there."
"Detective, please," Brady urged. "I'm so very sorry - please, step away. You don't have to watch this - "
"Has anyone searched the area?" Kate demanded.
"For - what?" The chief's voice had a familiarly wary tone to it; he'd dealt with her - and Castle's! - methods before.
"Footprints," she said immediately. "Signs of a struggle. Something he might have dropped. Anything to tell us whether he left the scene on his own, or was taken away."
"Detective," said Brady again. "We have no reason to believe that Mr. Castle will be found anywhere except in that vehicle. I know you must feel terrible, but - "
"What about the smell?" Kate said.
"The smell?"
"Yeah, there's a distinct smell when a body burns." She swallowed hard, forcing herself to put mental distance between her conflicting thoughts. "I don't smell it. I don't think there's a body in the car."
"He might have been thrown out - but then we'd have found him nearby," Brady said, thoughtful now. "At any rate, we can't search the car until the fire's out. Here's the truck."
He strode off to meet the firefighters and Kate sidled out of the way, staying where she could see the wreck.
He could be anywhere by then, Kate said to herself. If he was taken... She started looking for skid marks, tire treads, things she knew the Hamptons police wouldn't think to check for, walking in expanding circles. Trying not to feel the looming emptiness beside her where he would have been. Should be.
Instead, it was the chauffeur who politely cleared his throat as he drifted into earshot.
"Madam," he said. "Your phone."
"What about it?" Kate said, her eyes still sweeping the ground. She had to change - the dress was impossible to hold out of the way - and the shoes weren't cutting it either -
"Perhaps you should answer it, ma'am."
Kate paused to look up; the man was holding out her phone, which she must have left in the car. It was blinking, vibrating, and chiming, and when she took it she could see the caller's number, but she didn't recognize it.
Cautiously, she answered it. "Hello?"
"Kate Beckett?" said a man's voice. Vaguely familiar - older, with a Brooklyn twang.
"Who's this?"
"An old friend," the man chuckled. "We broke bread once, that time the murder went down. The linguini was delicious."
"Vinnie? Vinnie Cardano?"
"The one and only, at your service."
It was the mobster she and Castle had cultivated over pasta on her first visit to the Hamptons. The man Castle had not-subtly-enough hinted at being a suspect in a murder. They'd seen him from a distance occasionally since then and kept out of his way.
The sound of his voice made her blood run cold.
"What's the occasion, Mr. Cardano?" She sat on the edge of the backseat with the car door open.
"Cagy, aren't you? Occupational hazard, I suppose. I want to wish you all the best on your happy day."
Struggling to keep her voice even, Kate replied, "What do you know about my day?"
"I know it's been rudely interrupted. I got something here might help you get it back on track."
"Something - " She ground her teeth. Was Cardano involved? Was this the mob's revenge for her and Castle giving up Mickey Barbozza? "What kind of something?"
"No, no, you know it don't work like that. You know where I live? Can you get here without anybody following you?"
"Why should I?"
"Just do it." The call was ended. Kate stared at the phone for a full minute, her mind racing, then stood up and asked the chauffeur, "If I ask you to take me somewhere and ask no questions, will you do it?"
"Yes, ma'am," he said after only a moment's hesitation. Kate gathered herself and her dress into the car and the man closed her door and got behind the wheel. She directed him to a crossroads a couple of miles from the crash site and he got out to open her door again.
"Thank you," she said, shaking his hand, but then she had to ask. "You don't know me, don't know why I asked you to bring me here. Why'd you do it?"
The driver said, almost bashfully, "You have a - compelling manner about you, Ms. Beckett. And I have no doubt that, had I declined to drive you, you would have gone on foot."
Kate gave him a smile. He'd read her right.
"Shall I wait here for you, ma'am?"
"Thanks, but no," she told him. "Perhaps you could go back to - the house. In case anyone there needs the car."
She was thinking of Martha, of Alexis - surely the Hamptons police would be there by now, they wouldn't miss Kate for a while. They'd assume she was still at the scene, maybe in shock.
Not hiking down a long drive to the house of Vinnie Cardano.