Don’t let the title of this week’s Castle fool you. It’s more like kidnapping most fowl--there is a murder because there is always a murder, but it’s mostly about a kidnapping.
We start in a park. Two BMX bikers are doing some night stunts when one of them hits something and goes flying. The other catches up to see what took down his friend and they happen to find a body.
At Castle’s apartment, Alexis has a new companion, she is pet-sitting her boyfriend’s rat, Theodore, which has a better diet than most humans. Castle leaves to investigate the murder.
Castle joins Beckett in the park. Castle tells her he thinks a rat is a strange pet. She tells him that he is the strangest pet she’s ever had. He seems pleased.
Lanie is with the body. She says the victim is Leonard Levitt, he was shot three times once in the chest and twice in the back. The victim’s belongings are still on him, so Beckett rules out theft. Castle finds a feather from a bird of prey in Leonard’s pocket and makes up a story about a killer who marks his victims with feathers. Beckett shoots his fiction down.
At the precinct, Esposito reports that Leonard worked at a subway station uptown and lives in Queens, which means the park would have been out of his way. Esposito thought the victim might have been in the park to buy weed or sex, but he has no record for doing either. Leonard also has no immediate family.
Team Castkett visits Lanie. She tells them that he died between 5 and 7 p.m. The victim also had a broken wrist, which could have been caused by the bikers. All three gun shot wounds came from the same gun but the wound in the front was from at least 150 ft away and the two wounds in the back were from only about six feet away. Castle and Beckett think that after Leonard was shot, he tried to get away and whoever shot him hunted him down and made sure he was dead.
Esposito and Ryan go to Leonard’s apartment and find that it is full of electronic gadgets, pieces and plans. It looks like Leonard was putting together something complicated. They also find what looks to be a countdown board with a number over a million on it. They also find night vision goggles and other widgets used for surveillance as well as a map of the park with a post-it on it pointing to the place his body was found with the time 5:26 p.m. and the letters "BHS" on it.
In the subway, Castle and Beckett find out from Leonard’s boss, Mario Rivera, that he changes light bulbs in the subways station and has not missed work in 22 years. Rivera says Leonard was anti-social but tells them to talk to another light bulb worker, Arthur Sandsone. Arthur said Leonard was a hero; he invented a system that would allow workers to turn off the power to a section of the subway tunnel so workers wouldn’t get electrocuted when changing bulbs. He also tells Castle and Beckett that he thinks some light bulb corporation killed Leonard because Leonard had forced the subway to upgrade their light bulbs meaning that all the old ones they had been using would just sit in a warehouse somewhere. Arthur also tells them that the counter in Leonard’s apartment was the number of light bulbs Leonard changed.
Back at the precinct, Castle tells Esposito what they learned from Arthur, including Arthur’s conspiracy theory. Beckett says the theory is crazy but Ryan shows up with Leonard’s phone records. Apparently, Leonard had called the New York City Employee Tip Line. He called to report his boss, Rivera, for illegally selling the old light bulbs from the subway for profit. Before Rivera worked for the subway, he was in the Marines for 8 years where he won a metal for sharp shooting.
Rivera tells Team Castkett he was at work when Leonard was murdered but Beckett has his clock-out record that show he left before 5 and had enough time to get to the park to murder Leonard. They accuse Rivera of smuggling the light bulbs to Costa Rica. Rivera claims he was doing the city a favor and it shouldn’t matter if he made a little profit from it. He uses his smuggling business as his alibi. He was sending out a shipment at the time of the murder. His alibi holds.