Dr. Charles "Chuck" Vaughn is caught up in Close Encounters of the Murderous Kind due to being a colleague of Marie Subbarao, the victim. He is himself a man of science, and therefore he points out to Beckett and Castle the altitude chamber at the center where he and Marie worked side by side as a device which could produce the explosive decompression which was the (grisly) cause and manner of death. Sadly, both this and the only similar one in the city come up clean for DNA, and even Beckett is on the brink of admitting the remote possibility of Castle's alien spaceship airlock hypothesis.