| abstract | - Darius is also the near-witness the police first encounter at the crime scene, an art student at Tisch, who was also the deceased's assistant. He locked up at 8 p.m. on the night of the murder to go to his night school classes and doesn't know what his boss was doing back in the gallery after that. There are several other things Darius doesn't know when he speaks to Beckett, Ryan and Castle, not least why anyone would want his ex-boss dead. That particular mystery, however, doesn't long remain. Mr. Fink was the hub of a trade in expensive forgeries which comprised a Bahraini diplomat, Bahir Harun, and Fink's former assistant, Rocco Jones. Rocco would put together an acceptable imitation, at least by the less-than-demanding standards of Mr. Harun's clients (or rather, often, their wives), Mr. Fink would broker the deal, and the two older men would split the difference between the price of the copy and the near-realistic price of the original. When Jeremy Prestwick is brought to the gallery by Esposito and Ryan, Darius feels sorry for him, caught up in the periphery of this violence, and unable to remember his own part in it all. Or so it seems. Darius is, in fact, George Heller, a counterfeiter with two felony convictions, who couldn't afford to fall foul of New York's 'three strike' approach to crime. Jeremy noticed the fake nature of the painting he got back when he sent his own original in for restoration, and confronted Fink. Although the gallery owner had much to lose if unmasked, George/Darius had more, and shot Jeremy and then Fink. Jeremy's love of Russian literature, and specifically the 1200 page copy of "War and Peace" he was carrying, saved his life, but the shock and trauma made him an amnesiac. But George/Darius figured that he could frame Jeremy by planting the murder weapon in Jeremy's apartment. However, Jeremy's super later wrote a statement confirming that George/Darius bribed him twice to get access to Jeremy's apartment, which led to his arrest. George was actually using his roommate's identity when he called himself Darius.
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