This week, the murder victim is a very famous baseball player who was hit in the head with a bat.

Beckett and Castle go to talk to the player’s wife and teammate. Neither of them can figure out why he would have been out late at night, but his wife seems to think that this tragedy has to do with a recent trip that her husband took to Cuba. He was originally from Cuba, and when he went back, he was cheered and congratulated by Cubans and Fidel Castro alike. When he returned to the United States, his former fans turned against him for making an appearance in the communist country.

A man named Alfredo Quintana is in question for having to do with the murder. Though he claims that he didn’t kill Vega, he was responsible for turning many of the Cuban fans against the baseball player.

Beckett and Castle bring in Anton Wade, a loan shark who saw Vega after he died but claims that he didn’t actually commit the murder. They find out that Vega borrowed $200,000 from the loan shark.

After it seems as though Wade is innocent, Castle and Beckett go to talk to Bobby Fox, the deceased athlete’s agent. Beckett has a momentary freeze-up moment when they encounter Joe Torre in the office who Castle is coincidentally on friendly terms with. When they meet with Bobby Fox, he tells them the story of how he got Vega out of Cuba by bribing some high ranking official with a Rolex watch. Fox claims that he had never wanted Vega to take the return trip to Cuba.

When odd marks on the body reveal that Vega was in a fight shortly before his death, his teammate Tommy Zane becomes a suspect because of a mark leaving the imprint of a championship ring that both players have.

In Castle’s home life, his daughter, Alexis is doing a genealogy project. This brings up questions of Castle’s past and who his father really his, a fact that he seems less disturbed about than his daughter.

When Castle and Beckett go to see Zane at his club, he tells them that the fight was over questions of an affair. Vega’s wife had asked Zane about suspicions of her husband cheating, while Vega thought that Zane was having an affair with his wife. Beckett and Castle leave this confrontation with a picture of the girl that Vega was supposedly hooking up with.

Maggie Vega is noticeably upset when the Beckett and Castle come to her about the affair. She obviously knew all this information before but purposely hid it from the cops to avoid embarrassment on her own part, though it is also plausible that she killed her husband for his money.

The next suspect is Mario Sanchez, a member of the Cuban consul who was in Cuba with Vega. He got into a fight with Vega in a restaurant shortly before his death. They had gotten into a disagreement about Vega wanting to help people in Cuba. Sanchez reveals that Vega was in love with Lara, a girl from Cuba.

When Ana Rivera, a waitress who recently escaped from Cuba is brought into the police station, she reveals that she was in recent contact with Vega because he wanted to know how she got out of Cuba. Beckett and Castle realize that Vega was trying to formulate a plan to get Lara to the United States. Ana tells them that her family knew a man who took her by boat to Jamaica and then by plane to the United States.

The police call Alfredo Quintana back in to the station. They find Vega’s $200,000 in his bank accounts and figure out that he helped smuggle Lara into the country. When they go to the apartment that Vega has arranged for her, she’s not there, but they do find blood and footprints.

Beckett and Castle find Lara at the Cuban consul. It turns out that she’s not his lover at all. She’s his daughter! The guilty party in all of this? Bobby Fox, the agent. Fox knew all along about Vega’s daughter, but the player only recently became aware. When Fox smuggled Vega out of the country, it wasn’t just a Rolex that he used for the bribe, it was his fiancé. Vega was made to think that his fiancé left him while really she was in jail in Cuba being made an example of because Vega escaped. When Vega found out that she was dead and had given birth to a daughter, he went to great lengths to get his daughter to New York with him. Lara identifies Fox as a man that she saw at her apartment on the night of her father’s murder.