TV Recap: Castle 6-8 - A Murder is Forever

I was wondering what was up in those opening scenes.  I thought they were showing us the killer early on for the first time ever.  Mind you, there’s nothing wrong with that form of mystery.  Colombo and often Diagnosis: Murder and Monk told us who the killer was early on and the plot was then watching to see how the detective would catch them.  But that wasn’t quite the case here.

Still, I’m getting ahead of myself as the episode opens with our victim being introduced at a conference.  Only she’s not there.  She’s dead in a parking garage at her office.  And there’s a man with a knife in the passenger seat.

By the time the police get to the scene of the crime, the car has been torn apart with the knife.  The victim is a best selling and popular couple’s counselor who has taken animal behavior and translated it to humans.  Her clients included many rich and famous people.  Would one of those provide the motive?  Her boyfriend didn’t know of any particular issue she was having.

While they start looking at her clients, they also go to her apartment, which was ransacked much like her car.  And they catch a picture from the back of the man we saw in her car.  They find an eye witness who is able to identify him and the car he got into.  And they find a video of it.  He’s a notorious cleaner who has never been caught but is linked to quite a few crimes in the city.  When Ryan and Esposito catch him, he is destroying evidence, including a picture of the victim.

Naturally, he denies everything.  Meanwhile, they’ve found a file is missing from one of her computers.  It’s a client going through a divorce.  She gave him the file in exchange for a free room at one of his hotels.  She also had a private jet in standby.  When Castle and Beckett go to search the room, they eventually find a giant diamond in the safe.

Suddenly, they are looking at the case in a completely different light.  Especially when the diamond comes back as flawless and worth at least $60 Million.  Someone else knows about it since Ryan and Esposito are hit and shot at when trying to take it back to the station.

One of her clients had a diamond just like that.  They deny it of course, and leave the interrogation.  That’s when the cleaner finally admits, off the record, that the diamond is what he was after.  Those clients were mugged and it was stolen a couple nights before.  However, the mugger was a man.

Then a lab comes back with the results on the diamond.  It’s synthetic.  That not only increases the value, but it also makes it a target of the diamond cartels in Africa.

And the boyfriend?  He had connections to the cartels under his real name, but he was fighting against them hoping to break their yoke in Africa and on the diamond market period.  Yes, he was the mugger, but the victim was in on it.  They were going to take that private jet to get it verified.  If they could prove there was a way to make flawless synthetic diamonds, it would accomplish his goals.

So we’re back to the couple who owned the diamond.  The man admits that he had come up with a way to make diamonds, but it was a twist on something he had already sold to the cartels.  He was making a few and selling them, but if anyone found out, he’d be ruined.  It’s why they didn’t report the diamond stolen.  But he also didn’t commit the murder.

His wife did.  That wasn’t a big shock if you were watching the episode since she was standing there silently behind him very worried.  Great acting.  Anyway, she didn’t mean to kill the victim, but she was trying to get the diamond back and “the gun went off.”  She was trying to protect her husband, but he is furious with her that the murder has taken place period.

In sub-plot news, a lion picture in Castle’s bedroom starts bugging Beckett, but after fighting about, Castle eventually moves it and puts up a collage of seashells from their past in the bedroom instead.  And Ryan and Esposito got a very funny scene in which they start to argue over who is the male and female in their relationship (something from the victim’s book).

Despite the gun fight, this was still a fairly fun episode, and I really enjoyed it.  Alexis and Martha weren’t in it at all, so nothing new on that front.

Thoughts on the case?