horror. That kind of an attitude would have won the neurosurgeon no friends.
“So, you’re saying that Dr. Barrett had a lot of enemies?” Jaren asked.
The receptionist backpedaled a little, as if she didn’t want to speak ill of the dead. “He had a lot of grateful patients,” she assured them hastily, and then relented, “but yes, he did have a lot of people who didn’t like him. I don’t know if you’d call them enemies, but he had a tendency to rub everyone the wrong way. But I never thought…” Her voice trailed off as she glanced at the body on the floor and then shivered.
Kyle squatted down beside the body, his attention focused on the large wooden stake protruding from the man’s chest.
“Death by wooden stake. Don’t think I’ve ever come across that before,” he said more to himself than to his partner. “This does seem to be a little extreme.”
“I’ll—I’ll be in the next room if you need me,” Carole stammered, already backing away from them—and the corpse. “I—I just can’t—”
Giving her a comforting smile, Jaren took the woman’s arm and escorted her out of the doctor’s study.
“You just sit down at your desk and we’ll get back to you if we have any more questions,” she said kindly. Turning around, she appraised the slain surgeon. The stake had been driven into the middle of his chest. Deeply. “Think it’s a statement?”
Kyle glanced at her over his shoulder. “That someone hated him?”
She was going for something a bit more colorful. “That someone thought of him as a vampire.”
Kyle stared at her as if she’d lost her mind. “Come again?”
“Are you baiting me?” she asked. A frown was the only answer she received. Humoring the man, she went into detail. “Everyone knows that the only way to kill a vampire is to drive a stake through his heart.”
It didn’t make any sense to him. They weren’t living in the Middle Ages, they were living in an enlightened society. “So, someone was calling Barrett a vampire?”
“Blood sucker, most likely. Maybe they were protesting his fee. Or a surgery that went wrong,” she suddenly guessed. In her opinion, those could have all been viable reasons for murder, given the right person.
Kyle wasn’t ready to grant that she’d had an interesting theory just yet. “Don’t you think that’s a little off the wall?” he scoffed.
“To you and me, yes,” she agreed. “But maybe not to the killer.” And it was the killer’s mind they were attempting to assess.
Jaren had pulled on a pair of rubber gloves the minute they’d gotten off the elevator on the third floor. As Kyle examined the doctor more closely, she went through the surgeon’s things on his desk and shelves, looking for a lead.
When she came to a black-bound, hardcover book, she paused. There it was, in plain sight on the shelf behind his desk.
“Well, how about that.”
The bemused note in her voice caught his attention. Though he wanted to pretend he hadn’t heard her, something about the woman was hard to ignore.
“What?”
Jaren turned from the shelves, holding a thick volume in her hands. “The good doctor’s reading material might have given our killer the idea.”
Damn but he missed his old partner’s monotone, straightforward voice. When Castle talked, it wasn’t in circles. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Jaren held up the book she’d found.
“The Vampire Diaries” Kyle read and then scoffed. “Who reads trash like that?”
His reaction to the book didn’t surprise her. “Apparently, enough people to put this on the New York Times bestseller list for several weeks.”
Few things caught him off guard, but she’d scored a point. “You’re kidding me.”
“I don’t think it’s possible to kid you,” she added when he eyed her curiously. “But to answer your question, no, I’m not kidding. The Vampire Diaries has been on the list for close to five weeks now.” She flipped some of the pages. “Not a bad story, as far as things like that go.”
Kyle stared at her as if she’d just announced that she was an extra terrestrial, sent down to conquer Earth. “You read it?”
If he was trying to embarrass her, he was going to have to do a lot better than that, Jaren thought wickedly. “Yes, I did. I wanted to see what the fuss was about. I like leaving myself open to new experiences—like getting along with a partner who acts as if he’s constantly got a bur under his saddle.”
Kyle didn’t appear to hear her, or, if he did, he was ignoring her comment and focusing on what she’d said before that. He circled the dead man, taking the body in at all angles.
“Vampires, huh?”
Jaren shrugged. “Some women find fantasizing about vampires romantic.”
He laughed shortly, letting her know what he thought of that. “Some women marry prisoners who have no chance of getting out.”
“Takes all kinds,” she agreed. “Besides,” Jaren quipped, “the woman who marries a lifer always knows where he is at night.” He looked at her. “And before you ask, yes, I’m kidding.”
“You guys mind taking this to the next room?” asked a tall, gangly man wearing what looked like paper scrubs over his regular clothing. He was one of three crime-scene investigators who had been sent to go over the doctor’s office, preserving it just as it had been when the receptionist found Barrett.
“No problem. We need to ask Carole for a list of the doctor’s most recent patients,” Jaren told the investigator agreeably. She leaned over and extended her hand. “I’m Jaren Rosetti, by the way.”
“Hank Elder,” the investigator responded, shaking her hand.
“Carole?” Kyle asked as they exited the doctor’s study.
“The receptionist,” she told him.
He stopped short of the woman’s desk. “I don’t recall her giving us her name.”
“That’s because she didn’t,” Jaren told him. “She’s wearing a name tag.”
He’d been too interested in the weapon used to kill the surgeon to notice all that much about the woman who had called the murder in.
“I tend not to look at a woman’s chest area,” he said. “Avoids problems.”
“It’s okay, that’s what you’ve got me for.”
Kyle suppressed another sigh. “Knew there was a reason.”
Carole obliged them with an extensive list of the names of the neurosurgeon’s patients in the last
