Witness
K Hanna Korossy
It took three months to tie up the basics of the Benders case.
The excavations at the farm went on for weeks. The DNA from the teeth and bones and—God help them—cured meat and sausage found at the house would tie up the lab for a year. But, between the cars and the personal effects on the property and the missing persons reports, tentative IDs were finished by the end of the first month. Including Riley's. His funeral was one of the few things Kathleen took time off for. Between the magnitude of the case, especially in a relatively small place like Hibbing, and her involvement in it, the Benders practically became her life those months.
But in her free time, in the privacy of her office, Kathleen worked on another file. One that was unofficial and personal, labeled simply "Winchester."
She hadn't been a cop for eight years for nothing. It hadn't taken much to figure out that the enigmatic Greg Washington searching for his "cousin" was really the supposedly dead Dean Winchester. That had intrigued her already, especially considering the real Dean Winchester had reportedly been killed by an acquaintance he attacked. But his and his brother's skills, the matter-of-fact way they dealt with what would have horrified most people, and the little slips—our usual playmates, they're just people—had set her wondering. And, well, she hadn't been a cop for eight years for nothing.
It wasn't a commonly known fact that departments did not communicate well with each other. Unless a suspect was in a national database, he could be wanted for murder in one state and unknowingly released after a traffic stop in the next. It took effort to truly collect a complete file on a mobile suspect, and even so there was no way to contact every single small-town department, the ones who probably would have had the most information. Still, Kathleen had tried, and the file she collected, although doubtless incomplete, was still…impressive.
And odd.
The story seemed to begin with the death of Mary Winchester in 1983 in Lawrence, Kansas, in a fire that was ruled accidental. Her husband and two children left town soon after. Two years later, John Winchester started showing up on law enforcement radar. Some of the charges were to be expected: credit card fraud, misdemeanor and felony theft, trespassing. Others were not. She could almost understand impersonating an officer—the apple hadn't fallen far from the tree there—but arson? Carrying concealed weapons? Grave desecration? It was as if grief had driven the man insane.
But then his son Dean had started getting picked up for some of the same offenses, starting at the tender age of nine.
Not that any of them went to trial. Most didn't even reach the indictment stage, the defendant in question skipping town and most of the time never being seen again in that area. The map of their activity zigzagged across the country, in no pattern Kathleen could put her finger on. It was strange.
And then there was Sam Winchester. No arrests, held on suspicion only twice, both in the last nine months. Before that, good student on full scholarship at Stanford, which he'd left in his senior year after the death of his girlfriend. In a fire deemed accidental.
Kathleen started putting pieces together. It made for a bizarre picture, and for a few days she'd doubted her own sanity. Cannibalistic humans were one thing, but monsters? Ghosts? She'd never believed in that sort of nonsense.
But she was too much a cop to deny what the facts were telling her, no matter how weird. After three weeks of calling nationwide departments, Kathleen moved on to the internet. She began with fires, then disappearances and mysterious deaths.
That was when the file had really started growing.
Finding them in Richardson, Texas, had been almost a fluke; only one girl had died, an apparent suicide. But it had been in a so-called haunted house, one that had suspiciously burned down soon after. Kathleen would never have found it if a lurid paranormal website hadn't mentioned the presence of two amateur "ghosthunters" by the name of Sam and Dean.
They turned up again about a month later, in Fitchburg, Wisconsin. No deaths there, just a string of unexplained sick child and a missing doctor. The children suddenly started getting better one day, and if not for the report the CDC filed on two men pretending to be CDC doctors and the waves they were making about it, it would have been wholly unremarkable. Kathleen faxed the hospital sketches and got visual confirmation: Sam and Dean Winchester.
After a sleepless night of soul-searching, she called the CDC to tell them the two men they were looking for were witnesses, and since no harm was done to please drop the matter. The fact was, not only were they doing no real harm, she was starting to see the good they were accomplishing. Trouble was already there before they arrived. It stopped, then they left. The pieces weren't hard to assemble.
A week later, a postcard had arrived from Kentucky with one word on it: Thanks. It was signed simply "S & D." The picture was a black-and-white photo of a stripper. Kathleen knew who'd picked it out.
She kept looking. The trail was sporadic; apparently the brothers went where there were cases, and of the father there was no sign. Unexplained deaths in Louisiana that ended when the Winchester boys rolled into town. Maulings and roadside attacks and another haunted house in upstate New York, where they seemed to stay a while. A bunch of missing persons in Manning, Colorado, turning up dazed, with blood loss and "mauled necks" weeks later, describing two young men who'd freed them from their sadistic captors. She didn't intervene again, but didn't need to. No one else seemed to have put together the pattern she had, each department learning the hard way about the Winchesters, many none the wiser after the two left town. Her file grew with each sighting, but she buried it at the bottom of her drawer. This was her off-duty pursuit, and if Sam and Dean did what Kathleen now believed they did, she had no intention of trying to stop them.
Still, it was good distraction from Riley. Kathleen wondered a lot about the kind of experiences they had, the training their father had apparently given them, and what a life like theirs had to be like. The little time she'd spent with Sam had revealed a sensitive and caring young man who also wouldn't hesitate to take down a threat. And Dean could charm the hair off a dog while hitting on anything with breasts, but choked up when talking about his brother. On the whole, it was encouraging to know there were people like them out there, especially if there were things hiding in the darkness.
And then she got word about the TA—a traffic "accident"—all three Winchesters together, going up against a semi.
Kathleen stopped right there.
She didn't want to know how it turned out. Didn't want confirmation the two men she'd grown fond of from afar had died. As a cop, she was a realist, but Kathleen preferred thinking of them as still out there doing the job they'd never be known or appreciated for. She knew and would remember, but the file would stay buried in her drawer.
The second postcard arrived four months later, from Arizona. The picture was American Gothic, Looney Tunes-style. She knew who'd sent it even without a message, even with only a simple signature: S & D.
It was the last thing she added to the file. But Kathleen did so choked up and grinning.
The End