Disclaimer—Recognizable characters belong to Eric Kripke. Any similarity to events or persons living or dead is purely coincidental. No copyright infringement intended.
Author's Notes—I hate to say how long this has been in the works, but it's been on my computer for... a while. We'll leave it at that. :) Many thanks again to Malther and penknight for their valuable input and patience.
Spoilers—Vague references to the Pilot and Home in Season 1.
Feedback—Always greatly appreciated.
Ramble On—Dean spent some time in New Orleans before John went missing. He found something more than just a Supernatural occurrence there.
Now...
He sat in the corner booth at the roadside diner. The regional newspaper was spread out on the table in front of him, next to the empty lunch plate that had held a decent club sandwich and potato wedges. The soda in his glass was watered down now from the melted ice, as he'd spent most of his energies in the restaurant on research. Research was one of the necessary evils of his job. He was not, by any stretch of the imagination, professionally trained in the gathering of information. It was something he had learned from his father.
He smiled slightly, thinking about the man who taught him everything he knew. His father was special. Hell, his whole family was. Not everyone would want, or be as dedicated to, the job that he shared with his family. Ghost hunting, after all, didn't look so good on a résumé.
That was one thing Dean Winchester had never had a need for: a résumé. His father, John, trained him, teaching him everything he would need to get by, including as anything he needed to be, especially given the types of precarious situations the Winchesters often found themselves in the midst of.
At least, Dean and John had no trouble adjusting to the shifting winds. Dean's little brother Sam was another story all together. Every now and again, Dean wondered about his kid brother. He would always feel protective towards him. After all, it had been Dean's responsibility to carry Sam to safety, out of their burning house.
It hadn't been just any blaze either. The fires of Hell itself were let loose upon Sam's nursery ceiling all those years ago.
Dean tried to keep his past safe and sound on Memory Lane. Visiting those particularly rough years of his childhood had never been his idea of fun. Besides, he had a very important job to do. He needed to remain calm, focused, and alert in order to face what others dared not even think about, let alone believe.
He folded up the newspaper and dropped a few dollars on the table for the waitress before standing. He carried the paper under his arm, safe from the prying eyes of other patrons who might wonder why he had circled an obituary notice. Ambling to the counter, he paid for his meal before stepping out into the bright sunshine.
It was October in Louisiana, but the midday temperatures were still somewhat warm. When nighttime rolled around, he'd break out his leather jacket. For now, it was tucked away safely in the backseat of his vintage 1967 Chevy Impala.
Sliding into the driver's seat, he set the newspaper down beside him then started the car. He smiled as it made the familiar growl, roaring to life. Pulling out of the parking lot, he got back onto Highway 61. According to the sign up ahead, New Orleans wasn't too much farther.
The obituary in the paper talked about the untimely demise of a well known attorney in his mid-fifties. Earlier in the week, John had found an article describing the sudden death of the exercise enthusiast, in otherwise perfect health, who simply fell dead in the midst of trial preparation, in front of associates and assistants. He encouraged his older boy to venture off to the Big Easy by himself.
John had hoped, if all of his other parenting skills ultimately failed, that the one thing he successfully instilled in his boys would be self-confidence, enough to get them through the various trials and tribulations that would fill their lives. John knew he had done so with Sam. In fact, he'd managed to help make Sam so self-sufficient that he estranged himself from the rest of the Winchester clan. Dean, however, had been on John's side since day one.
Of course, Dean still had memories of the fire that night, whereas Sam had no recollection of his mother or the evil that stole her away from them.
John knew Dean was capable of dealing with whatever paranormal activity lurked in New Orleans. And he wanted Dean to see that he could handle investigations--hunts--by his own wits alone.
Dean had only the faintest sketch of the story from the newspaper and the single online article. But, even the vaguest of information gave him a good start.
Alain Martin was a senior partner at his prestigious law firm in the very heart of New Orleans. After all, it was his name on the door: Griffin and Martin. Surely someone at the firm might be willing to share some information, since it doubled as the crime scene.
The obituary claimed he was survived by a daughter and a brother or two, but made no mention of a wife, leading Dean to believe the good attorney was divorced. He pondered, as he continued his drive into the city, what had transpired in his marital life, if anything. Court records would certainly let him know.
The last lines of the obituary said that autopsy reports were still pending, and no funeral arrangements had been made yet. That meant Mr. Martin, Esquire, was still in a holding pattern at the city morgue. Dean could easily check that out.
Any of those three locations would be a good place to start, but he opted to check out the luxurious legal suites first. They occupied the sixth floor of an office building near the courthouse. Dean parked the Impala in what seemed like a good central location.
He entered the lobby and moved directly for the elevator. Upon his arrival on the appropriate floor, Dean could tell immediately that Martin's coworkers had been hit hard by the news. The vibe he sensed was one of sorrow. It wasn't new. His business was closely related with death. If he wasn't solving murders, he was making sure paranormal killers were put to rest once and for all. This was all old hat to Dean by now, who had been in the business practically his entire life.
In a way, the Winchester family were angels of mercy, freeing souls from their treacherous limbo, allowing the spirits to be at peace, in one way or another.
So, he knew death well, along with all the various stages that survivors went through. The mood at the law firm was exactly within the psychological norms. It provided the precise environment that Dean needed for the initial investigative stage of his visit. Vacant, distracted workers would allow anyone to walk in and amongst them, without question, even those in torn blue jeans while everyone else wore expensive three-piece suits.
Making his way through the law office, he walked with a sense of purpose, just in case someone might've been more alert than the rest. He'd often found that confidence was his best disguise: if you looked like you were supposed to be there, then you were supposed to be there.
He passed various cubicles and an extensive law library, whose open double doors had been barred with yellow police tape. The scene of the crime. He'd seen many in his extensive career, but never any that didn't seem to have anything marked as evidence. He was able to see the outline on the carpet, but no obvious blood stains. No spatter, no nothing. With the tape in place, he knew it was still an active crime scene. Something was definitely still amiss in the room; the police weren't done there yet.
Continuing on, he found one particular secretary in disarray, especially despondent. The plate on her desk read: Collette Fontaine. She was pretty, or would've been without her brow knitted in grief. Just beyond her desk, Dean spotted a frosted glass door with a name printed in bold black letters: "Alain F. Martin, Senior Partner."
He slowly approached her desk. "Excuse me," Dean began. When she turned her tear-streaked face to him, he offered her a slight smile. "Hi... I'm a law student, LSU. Mr. Martin spoke at one of my classes…"
"Civil procedure?" she asked, sniffling. "Dr. Wesby's lecture class?"
Dean smiled. Sometimes it was just too easy. "Yeah. He was so inspiring… He made such an impression on me, my classmates. When I heard what happened, I wanted to come here, see if there was anything I could do…"
Sniffling again, she shook her blonde head slowly.
"Were you there?" he asked as gently as he could.
Swallowing hard, she said shakily: "One minute, he's standing there, talking to us, giving us what was probably the best closing argument of his life, when he just..."
"Was it a stroke, you think? Heart attack?"
She shrugged. "He grabbed his stomach... And then started to complain about pain in his legs and feet..."
Dean, seeing her eyes water further, nudged the box of Kleenex on her desk closer towards her.
"And then he just... fell over!"
"He looked like a real athletic guy... You would think it wouldn't be health problems." He was fishing and, given her state, he knew she wouldn't catch on to it.
"I don't know," she admitted. "But you're right. I wish I did know... The police, they won't tell me anything."
Dean nodded slowly. "If you ever want to talk, to remember Mr. Martin..." He wrote his cell phone number down on a post-it pad he found on her desk. "I'm Dean."
She smiled, dabbing her eyes with a tissue. "Collette."
He winked at her. "Hang in there. It'll all be okay."
"Thank you," she said, looking up at him.
He offered a slight smile, and then headed down the corridor. He overheard some water-cooler chat, but nothing that really jumped out. There was no smoking gun, no solid lead. Not at his first stop of the day.
Checking his watch as he headed down the sidewalk, he couldn't imagine the court clerk's office closing before five PM. The morgue might be easier to tackle later that night, after they closed up shop for the day. Rational, normal people tended to avoid scary places like that at night.
He found his way to the clerk's office, and smiled at one of the assistant clerks. She seemed to be in her mid thirties. A soccer mom, he bet. She, too, had a plaque on her desk: Janet Meraux. "Hi. I'm Dean; I work for Griffin and Martin..."
Mrs. Meraux gave Dean a over once, and not in a way that made him smile. She took in the torn blue jeans, the gray tee shirt with a green work shirt over it, along with his peculiar necklace. It wasn't exactly normal attire for the employees of Griffin and Martin, she knew. "Sure you do."
"I do. I just started today. Everyone is walking around in kind of a fog... They're all in shock. Nobody over there figured they could even come up here today, to ask for a copy of Mr. Martin's divorce papers." The real question he had there was: does Mr. Martin have divorce documents? The clerk's initial reaction was to frown, and Dean wasn't sure he liked that.
"Mr. Martin didn't have a copy of his own divorce decree?"
"His assistant, Corrine? No… Collette! She said she couldn't find it. She's really torn up about the whole thing. She said she was there when it happened."
The clerk muttered something under her breath Dean couldn't quite make out, and he decided it best not to press. "I can get you a copy," she said. "It'll be five dollars."
"For the copy?" Dean asked, frowning.
She nodded.
"They didn't tell me that part... Can I get the copy, and then come back with the money?"
She shook her head. "That's not our policy."
"I swear I'll bring it back, but they need that document now, something about the will, lines of inheritance... and I don't have any money on me."
She sighed heavily.
"Please, Ms. Meraux..."
She shook her head.
"What if I sweetened the deal... Made it ten bucks?"
"You're trying to bribe me with five dollars?"
'Kinda,' he thought. He shrugged slightly. "Not really?"
She sighed. "It's your first day; I'll cut you some slack."
He grinned. "You are wonderful." He had far more important things to do with his five dollars, like buying dinner. A little dinner and a little visit to the morgue. Who wouldn't enjoy that in the darkness of night?
A few minutes later, he was holding a hot stack of papers, fresh from the copier. He smiled one last time at the clerk, before heading out and back to his car. As he slid behind the wheel, he skimmed the documents. Attached, as "Exhibit A," was the prenuptial agreement, which kept the former Mrs. Martin from his extensive estate, save $10,000 for the first two years after the divorce. A sorry little severance package, hardly worth mentioning to an attorney who, he guessed, was worth at least a hundred times more than that. With the divorce having become final five years ago, that paltry alimony was long since gone. Maybe the former missus still held a grudge for her ex's wealth.
Full custody of then-thirteen-year-old Patricia went to her father, with minimal, if any, visitation rights going to mom Karen. Dean guessed the littlest Martin knew which side of her bread was buttered. Living in luxury with Dad, or trying to make ends meet with Mom? Didn't sound like a tough question for a girl who had grown up in the upper class her whole life.
He tossed the pages into the passenger seat, and started the car. Since it was still early, with the sun shining down, he opted for a trip to the nearest public library. So far, he was coming up with a great big goose egg. Maybe his father had made a mistake in sending him there. Maybe there wasn't anything there after all.
The library was nearly dead on a Thursday afternoon. One young woman sat at one of the computer terminals. As he walked past her, he noticed she was typing an e-mail to a friend as well as her intoxicating perfume. An older man was hunting and pecking at what looked to be a word processing program. Nothing too interesting to Dean, who had settled in at the back terminal and pulled up the library's online historical records.
He made the mistake of starting out entirely too broadly. "Mysterious death" and "middle age, healthy male" turned up hundreds of hits. The first few were products of drug overdoses, things that were later deemed to be suicides. Some were genuinely unknown cases. Autopsies had revealed nothing out of the ordinary. Investigations into their deaths were closed for lack of evidence.
Hopping out of the historical records, he punched what only made sense, given his location, into an informational occult search engine. "Voodoo," he muttered, hitting the enter key.
He hoped that wasn't what he was chasing. Some weird old lady with a chicken bone around her neck... Maybe if he broke her crystal ball, they'd be safe.
Although, as the search engine provided various hits, he started thinking about what Collette had said, about having pains in his stomach and legs. Normally heart attacks, strokes dealt with chest or arm pains. Sighing slightly, he clicked on information about voodoo dolls. He just wasn't sure pricking a Cabbage Patch doll with a safety pin would do much damage.
At any rate, he printed off a few pages of things that might help, and decided to scope out the morgue, get a feel for the place, and check for back exits if he needed. Police tended to frown upon people being in places they weren't supposed to be. The truth of the situation was that Dean was supposed to be there--it was his job, of course--but he didn't count on New Orleans' finest agreeing with him.
He noticed several things as he casually circled the block. There was a back door, which emptied into a fenced-in courtyard. Not his ideal escape. There were several windows he might be able to break out of, but they were all somewhat high off the ground. Jumping down wouldn't be too big of a problem. The jumping up to reach them might. As he idled at a stoplight near the front door, he saw a young woman, maybe his age, head for the door. She had soft dark hair, wore blue jeans and a maroon fitted tee shirt, with a backpack slung over a shoulder and headphones in her ears. 'Kids today and their iPods,' he thought, figuring she might have been the daughter of the coroner or something.
When the light changed, he pulled through the intersection and turned, so that he could see the entrance of the morgue in his rear-view mirror. The young woman smiled at several people who were leaving. One stopped to talk to her for a moment before she waved at him and entered. Dean continued down the road, stopping when he found a pizza place.
Parking the Impala, he headed inside, ordering a large supreme pizza. His wait time was about twenty minutes. "Do you have a phone book I could borrow? Just gotta look up a number..."
The teenager behind the counter regarded him for a moment then shrugged. "Sure, dude," he said, pulling the thick book out from a drawer.
"Thanks, man," he said, flipping through it. Locating the morgue's number, he punched it into his cell phone. He set the book back on the counter before heading outside to place the call. Leaning against the brick exterior, he listened to the rings.
"New Orleans City Morgue."
It was a woman's voice, and Dean's thoughts landed on the girl he'd seen walk in. "Wh... Who'd you say I called?"
"New Orleans City Morgue," she repeated, a little slower.
"Nuh-uh, no way! Rach, is that you? Did Jim-bo put you up to that?" he asked, a slight smile forming on his face.
"There is no Rachel or Jim here," she responded. "Now, is there something I can do for you?"
Under normal circumstances, Dean enjoyed loaded questions. But, alas, he was working and didn't have the time. "I really called the morgue? Dude, I totally thought it was Jim-bo's number."
"It's really the morgue," she confirmed, sounding a little annoyed.
"Wow... with dead people?"
"Sir, unless you have a substantive question about the work we do here, I will be hanging up this phone now."
"It's getting kind of late. You guys open all night?"
"People don't just die in the daylight. Thank you for calling," she said, and the line went dead.
Dean frowned. They were still open. Maybe with the night crew, though, it wouldn't be so bad. Besides, he had another idea up his sleeve. Sliding his cell phone into his pocket, he headed into the pizza place again.
He didn't have to wait too much longer for his order, and he ate most of it while leaning against the trunk of the Impala, thinking about what all the trunk held: silver bullets, crosses, wooden stakes, lighter fluid, guns, among other tools of his trade. He wasn't entirely sure what could combat voodoo, especially what kinds of things he had. Salt circles work for most things. Maybe he could call his Dad, see what he thought. Maybe there was some sort of universal counter curse he knew about.
Finishing another piece of pizza, he pulled out his cell phone, and dialed his dad's number. He frowned slightly when he received John's voice mail. "Dad, it's me. I'm down here in New Orleans and, uh... still investigating, but I wanted to know if you had any information, knew anything about voodoo. Anyway, I'm going to be sneaking into somewhere shortly, so I'll probably have the phone off, but you can still leave me a message. Thanks, Dad," he said, hanging up.
There were only two slices of pizza left. Good enough, he figured. Rather than driving back to the morgue, he walked, carrying the pizza box. He let himself in through the glass door, and found his way to the front desk, where the dark haired girl he'd seen earlier sat. He smiled easily.
"Hey there. Somebody order a pizza?"
She looked up at him, fixing her dark green eyes on his face and blinked with her long lashes. "Don't think so."
"Are you sure? Somebody called it in not that long ago, told me City Morgue."
"I assure you, nobody called in a pizza order."
"You sure you don't want to ask around?" He noticed the entry was small, and all three doors leading further into the building were all marked "Authorized Personnel Only." He wasn't sure if anyone else was working, but if she went to check, he might be able to slip into the back, check out the body, and leave before she returned. "I'd hate to take away somebody's dinner, y'know. I'll wait here while you ask."
"Look, pal--" she began, standing slowly.
She was a little on the short side, pretty cute, really, with soft curves, nice lips, Dean decided
"--No one here ordered pizza, and I can guarantee you that 'Jim-bo' and 'Rach' aren't here either."
Dean's confident façade almost faltered. Almost. "Wh... What are you talking about?"
"You were the asshole that called here a little while ago."
"Look, lady, I deliver pizzas. I've been delivering for a couple hours now, on the clock."
"You aren't wearing the uniform for the pizza place down the street there," she said, nodding in its direction.
"It messes with my style. They get that."
"The box isn't in one of those thermal bags to keep the pizza warm."
Dean was starting to find her annoying. "It's in my car."
"Which is where, exactly?"
"Outside."
"Great. Go outside, get in it, and don't come back here again or else I will call the police."
"I really don't think that's necessary. I'm just trying to deliver a pizza--"
"The hell you are, pal. Buzz off," she said, growing agitated. "Right now."
Dean lowered the pizza box, easing it onto her desk. "All right, all right. I'll come clean, okay?"
She folded her arms over her chest.
"It's just that I've seen you around and, uh... Well, I think you're beautiful." He could sense he was losing her interest, fast. "And you certainly have an interesting job. I thought I'd just... try to be clever, to meet you."
"So, you prank called me and tried to deliver a pizza?"
"Well, they're not the normal pick up lines, now are they?" he asked, smiling at her. He watched, delighted, as a hint of a smile dawned on her face. "I'm Dean." He held his hand out to her.
Slowly, she uncrossed her arms, placing her hand in his. "Darcy."
"Darcy... Wow..." Dean was ages past where butterflies took to his stomach when he met girls. But there was something about her touch that was different. He tried to ignore it. "That's a gorgeous name. It fits you."
"Y'know, lying doesn't really become you," she said, lowering her hand. "It isn't becoming for anyone."
He chose not to respond to that. "I'm surprised. You don't have one of those thick New Orleans drawls..."
"I don't think either one of us are from here originally... are we?" she asked knowingly.
"I'm from Kansas."
"Well, Toto, you're certainly not there anymore."
He chuckled slightly. "No, I'm definitely not."
"So, what do you want, Dean?" She crossed her arms again, looking at him. "'Cause I know for sure it isn't me." It was like she could see right through him.
The Road Ahead...
"You develop a real sense of macabre working here."
"Defensive mechanism, right?"
She nodded. "What do you do? To protect yourself from what you do?"
He looked at her honestly. "Kill the hell out of unholy sons of bitches."