000 - Character Info
PERSONALITY: Smart, sassy, and savvy, Kate Beckett is a model cop and a brilliant detective who not only takes her job very seriously, she does it damn well, her precinct captain asserting that she is the best he's ever trained. She has a fierce sense of justice and a fiery drive to get to the bottom of every case she's assigned to, no matter how hard, how complicated, or how strange it may be. In fact, the stranger cases are where she really seems to excel. Her coworkers know just who to call when an unusual murder scene is found, and in New York City, it's a pretty common occurrence. Kate's eye for detail and penchant for thinking outside the box have made her one of the most successful and respected homicide detectives on the force, but that isn't to say that her prestige has come without a price.
Kate's mother was murdered ten years prior to the series timeline, and her killer was never caught. The murder was written off as a random act of violence, and it's haunted her ever since. Unsatisfied with the way the case was handled, Kate decided to become a detective, and spent the first three years of her career looking for something, anything that might have been overlooked in the initial investigation. Finding nothing, and almost losing herself to the investigation itself, Kate locked her mother's file away, swearing she would never open it again lest she lose everything she had worked so hard to rebuild after her breakdown. The entire incident gave her a sharp aptitude for connecting dots in an unusual fashion, and a driving need to provide as many answers and as much closure for the people in the lives of the victims she investigates.
Kate is a very strong and independent woman. She lives alone and has no problem with that, despite the decidedly dangerous line of work she's in. She has been known to send security details away, even when she has been directly threatened during cases. She doesn't take crap from anybody, and can throw out smartass retorts with the best of them. She has an uncanny ability to get witnesses and suspects to talk, using a deadly combo of Piercing Stare and Compelling Evidence to crack even the toughest of nuts (pun possibly intended). She's not afraid to make--or call--a few bluffs, and despite her stern and somewhat skeptical nature, she doesn't hesitate to go with what her gut--or her heart--tells her, even if it's not always logical.
Though she is curt and somewhat terse and very no-nonsense about most things, she is never cruel or unreasonable, and no matter how someone may "pull on her pigtails", she is ultimately a very kind person who always puts others before herself. She doesn't make promises she can't keep, but she does her best to bolster traumatized victims and heartbroken next-of-kin, assuring them that she will do everything possible to solve the case. Her friends and coworkers tease her for being a workaholic, because even during downtime, Kate has a tendency to have work on the brain, and has been known to sleep in the station break room--if she sleeps at all--so she can stare at the pieces of each case as long as possible until she finds a way to connect them. Thus, she doesn't have much of a social life. She either can't or simply chooses not to cook, instead ordering takeout most of the time (and leaving questionable leftovers in her fridge for extended periods of time), and can't stop thinking about work long enough to go out on a real date, often finding herself distracted during social events to the point that she muses on evidence aloud in lieu of actually spending time or making conversation with her company.
In what little free time she makes use of, Kate is an avid reader, specifically an avid mystery reader. She is actually a huge fan of Richard Castle's work, and has read all of his books, even having gone so far as to wait in line for an hour to get one autographed and joining his online fan club. Of course, this was all before she was unwillingly partnered with him while he claimed to be doing research for his newest character, Nikki Heat, the heroine of his new series. Kate would at this point sooner die than own up to how much of a fan she actually is. She's also a fervent baseball follower, explaining to Castle that her father has been taking her to baseball games since she was three, and has a serious fangirl moment when she meets "Joe Freakin' Torre!!1" during a case involving the murder of a Cuban baseball player. It's also indicated that Kate reads comic books, as she asks for clarification, "Which Frank? Epic Comic or Dark Horse years?" when Castle remarks that artwork found in a victim's apartment reminds him of early Frank Miller. Kate rounds off her unexpected talents with an infallible poker face and quite a competitive streak, even going so far as to put a friendly wager on who will crack a case first (but not before scolding Castle and her other coworkers for inciting such a betting pool in the first place).
In a nutshell, Detective Kate Beckett is an unparalleled member of the NYPD, an unfaltering defender of justice no matter the situation, and an unexceptionable comrade and coworker. She puts her life on the line day in and day out to try and make her city a better place, and though she keeps her cards close to her chest and her emotions closer, you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone else quite so straightforward and genuinely dedicated to probity.
BACKGROUND: Not much is specified on Kate's childhood in canon. Kate's exact age is not specified either, but she appears to be in her mid- to late-twenties. We know that her father, Jim, was a big baseball fan and took young Kate to many a game from the time she was three. Her mother Johanna was killed ten years ago, the case leaving her with no sense of closure, and she spent the next several years trying to save her father from losing himself and his life to alcoholism. The death was written off as a random attack and attributed to gang violence, and Kate never believed a word of it. She was certain there was something that had been missed, something that could have led to the killer, but the case was dropped, and Kate was left bitter and unsatisfied. Determined to crack the case, even long after it had gone cold, Kate poured herself into getting onto the police force, and became a homicide detective in the Twelfth Precinct, under Roy Montgomery. She spent the first three years of her career using every free second analyzing and re-analyzing her mother's case, looking for the tiniest overlooked detail, the seemingly most insignificant bit of evidence, anything that could have given her some insight into the reason her mother was killed. It nearly consumed her.
Rather than allow the case to destroy her and her budding career, however, Kate knew when to say when. She put the case down, called it a day, and locked it away in archives, swearing she would never open it again. Instead, she took to immersing herself in mystery novels--Richard Castle's novels, not to put too fine a point on it. She found herself drawn into the stories and intrigued by the way the protagonist had a way of thinking outside the box and finding the pivotal clues everyone else seemed to miss, and found the books an interesting insight into the motives and methods of murderers. She grew captivated with the book series and became not-so-secretly one of Castle's biggest fans.
Her knowledge of Castle's work actually proved to be advantageous when the murder of a young social worker was staged in the same manner as a crime scene in one of his stories. Recognizing the MO, Kate was put in contact with Castle, who was put on the case as a consultant, since it seemed he had a copycat killer pulling murders right out of his books. Kate was visibly a bit disappointed when her object-of-worship turned out to be...well...Castle. He was silly, he was inappropriate, and he was incorrigibly irritating. After spending the whole case dealing with his inane commentary and thinly veiled (if mostly harmless and good-natured) innuendo, Kate was all too happy to bid farewell to her unlikely partner in stopping crime. Imagine her chagrin, however, when Captain Montgomery informed her that Castle was going to be on their case, as it were, for a little while longer. It seemed he had been quite taken with Detective Beckett, and had plans to base the heroine of his new book series, Nikki Heat, on her, and thus had need to shadow her on investigations for authenticity. Dismayed, Kate tried to protest, but because Castle had friends in high places--i.e. the mayor of New York himself--there was nothing to be done about it. Castle was an honorary member of the NYPD Homicide Investigations team until further notice.
Determined not to let his chafing presence interfere with her job, Kate tried her damndest to keep Castle out of crime scenes and harm's way, but her efforts proved mostly in vain. He repeatedly broke protocol and managed to wheedle his way into flanking her, refusing to stay in the car where it was safe and insisting on being present during questioning. Eventually, she just stopped trying, and didn't bother getting upset when he inevitably appeared over her shoulder. Their dynamic was bristly at best, at least at first, and Kate surely didn't appreciate the way he 'profiled' her, rattling off that she had likely joined the force on account of an unsolved trauma in her past that had involved someone close to her and hurt her deeply. She didn't really confirm or deny this at the time, but after a handful of cases, Kate did reveal that it was her mother's death that led her to become a cop. She explained to him that she actually wore her mother's wedding ring on a necklace, to represent "the life she lost", and her father's five-year sobriety watch to represent, "the life she saved", as she helped him get through the very trying years after her mother's death. She hated to admit that Castle's presence had actually been helpful in the cases he'd tagged along on, but she really couldn't ignore that his insight and strangely creative ideas had been sort of invaluable. And thus the genuine ire was replaced with begrudging tolerance and long-suffering forbearance. He was irritating, invasive, and intractable, but he did have some good ideas from time to time, and if nothing else, he meant well.
Unfortunately, his good intentions were not so well-received when Kate learned he had been working on reopening her mother's case file, confident he could crack it. Outraged and stung that he had invaded her privacy like that, she told him forcefully that if he didn't drop the entire thing that they were done, his research be damned. Despite this, however, Castle was adamant about the case, certain he could find a break in it, and he continued to prod without her knowledge or blessing. When he came to her with news regarding a previously overlooked connection to two other murders, Kate was initially furious, telling Castle they were done and he was off the team. But after the knee-jerk pain faded and she considered that he had actually achieved what she had nearly lost herself trying to do, she realized that this may in fact have been just the opening she'd been looking for all this time. When he offered a genuine and heartfelt apology, she accepted his contrition and admitted that they kind of made a good team. Somehow, despite everything, she had managed to grow fond of his asinine comments and ridiculous antics, though she certainly wasn't about to tell him that.
Her mother's case was brought to the table again several investigations later, when the stab wounds on a victim seem strangely similar to those that were found on Kate's mother. A respected forensic pathologist, Dr. Murray, was brought in for a second opinion, and assured Kate that there was no doubt in his mind that the cases were connected, and whoever killed this latest victim was also responsible for killing Kate's mother. At first, Kate was so shaken and overwhelmed by the news that she asked the captain to take her off the case, only to be inspired by none other than Castle himself to not give up. Upon further investigation, she and Castle managed to corner the man who killed her mother, a corrupt politician named Coonan, but he wouldn't budge on who ordered the hit. Things quickly went south when Coonan held Castle at gunpoint to escape custody. Castle managed to injure Coonan in an effort to break free, but Kate was forced to make a split-second decision, and shot Coonan to save Castle's life. He died shortly thereafter, before they could get the information on his boss, and Kate was left yet again with dead ends on her mother's case. She did get some closure in that she had discovered who killed her, but had no further leads on who ordered the hit.
Racked with guilt that she killed her prime informant for his sake, Castle approached Kate afterwards to tell her he was done and was stepping down. He said he wouldn't shadow her any more, and apologized for what had happened, vexed that she'd had to kill someone so pivotal in her mother's case in order to save him. But to Castle's surprise, Kate told him she wanted him to stay. "I've gotten used to you pulling my pigtails," she told him, and explained that he made a hard job more fun. She told him that without him, she never would have gotten this far in the case in the first place, and when she finally found out who was responsible for her mother's death, she wanted him to be there with her.
On a later case, Kate received a phone call from a man who said he wanted to report a murder. When she asked him what happened, he gleefully explained that he was the one who had done it, but wouldn't give any details, explaining that it wasn't any fun if he made it easy. After tracing the call to Grand Central Station, they found a body, shot five times, a letter scratched into the base of each bullet. The letters spelled N-I-K-K-I, and it became very clear very quickly that they were dealing with someone delusional, who was obsessed with the character Nikki Heat, and didn't seem to understand that she and Kate were in fact not the same person. The case escalated to two more victims, both of whom were shot four times, with letters scratched into the bases of those bullets as well. Nikki Will Burn, the message read, and after cornering their suspect in his apartment, they discover what the message meant. The suspect, Ben Conrad, killed himself upon being surrounded by the police and FBI, and when they entered his apartment, they found blueprints for the Twelfth Precinct station, and the makings of a bomb. Figuring the case closed, everyone went home, though Castle wasn't convinced it was over yet. He felt that the wrap-up was too easy, and it wasn't until his daughter made an offhand remark that it hit him--the evidence showed that the killer was left-handed, but Ben Conrad had shot himself with his right hand. Realizing that they'd been duped and that Ben had been killed by someone else--their actual killer, Castle tried to get a hold of Kate to warn her that she was still in danger--she was still being targeted. But by the time she answered her phone, it was too late. As Castle rounded a corner, there was a loud explosion and a blast of heat as Kate's apartment went up in flames.
ABILITIES: Kate may not have superpowers (unless sarcasm and a sharp tongue count), but she's not a damsel in distress by a long shot. She's got a lot more common sense than the average person, and isn't afraid to take a few risks to get what she wants. A trained detective, she's uncannily perceptive, noticing things about people that they don't necessarily notice themselves, and as a member of the New York Police Department, she's trained in basic combat and firearms. She can detain suspects twice her size without much issue, and is an excellent shot with a pistol. A homicide detective, she has a very high tolerance for blood and guts, as it were, and isn't squeamish at all, taking crime scenes in stride and reacting surprisingly calmly to situations that would make most people balk or recoil. She also appears to have some specific training in [kick]boxing and/or martial arts, and is shown sparring one more than one occasion during the run of the series.