Chapter 2
Dean really didn't want to pick through an entire pile of rubble searching for personal objects their ghost could be attached to. And without knowing the identity of said ghost, they'd have to salvage any and every item that could serve as an anchor point. Burning down the building—again—might have been a swifter method, but since they couldn't guarantee that would work, they didn't want to try it and end up burying a potential focal object even further.
So they were gonna have to go about this the tedious way, and hope they could find something to help them ID the ghost. Sam and Ryn would work on the arson file from their end, leaving Dean, Cas, and Amy to sniff around the ruined restaurant.
But it was already late evening and dark, so Dean called it quits for the day and they went to find a motel to check into. After booking a room—a single, since his two celestial companions could go without sleep—the three of them then headed across the street to a bar and grill for some dinner. Dean and Amy ordered burgers while Cas, of course, abstained. Though he occasionally nicked a french fry from their plates.
"Are we really going to go sifting through the wreckage tomorrow?" Amy asked.
Dean sighed. "I admit, it's not much, but maybe if we poke around, the ghost might show itself. Then if we can ID it, maybe we can figure out some kind of tracking spell to locate what it's attached to."
Cas canted his head in contemplation. "That could be useful. I might also be able to pinpoint the psychic signature if the ghost manifests and expends a great deal of its energy."
Dean perked up. "How hard would that be?"
"You'd have to keep it distracted."
Dean slumped back in his chair with an eye roll. Translation: be its punching bag and hope it didn't get too many licks in before Cas found the stupid item.
"We could do that, right?" Amy said, looking at him expectantly.
Dean snorted, but shrugged. "We might not have much of a choice." At least Amy could probably take on a ghost without getting hurt.
She stood up from the table. "I'll go get us some beers."
Dean whipped his head up. "Excuse me?"
Amy raised her brows pointedly. "Beers. You know, the thing we do at the end of the day on a hunt."
Dean held up a finger. "Whoa, there is no 'we' with the beers. Cas and I can have a beer. You can have root beer."
She gaped at him with an affronted mien. "I'm not a kid anymore."
"No bartender is gonna look at you and think so."
"If they card me, I have my FBI creds," Amy countered, and pulled out the fake badge Dean had made her.
"Give me that," he snipped, snatching it out of her hand.
Amy huffed. "It's not like I'm gonna get drunk off one beer. What's the big deal?"
"Alcohol is inebriating, even if the effects might be minimal for you," Cas said.
"Uncle Dean drinks all the time."
"Yeah, and this is one of those do as I say, not as I do things," he scowled, pocketing her fake creds.
"Come on," she whined.
Dean shooed her away. "Go get us some sodas."
Amy gave him a bland look, but then rolled her eyes and finally headed for the bar counter. Dean grumbled under his breath about not getting a beer tonight.
Cas's lips were twitching.
"What?" Dean snapped.
"I've always wondered if there was anything that could get you to curb your drinking. Now I know."
Dean shot the angel a peeved glower.
Cas glanced over his shoulder to where Amy was waiting at the crowded bar counter, and his expression turned somewhat melancholic. "I know she's grown up…but she's still so young."
"Yeah," Dean agreed, also watching her from across the restaurant. "She's doing good, though. I gotta admit, I was worried at first. But she's learned from the best. She just needs some field experience."
Cas looked back at him with a smirk. "You've certainly changed your tune."
Dean huffed. "It was inevitable, right? Our family hunts. So will she."
Cas nodded, then canted his head in thought. "I suppose one beer wouldn't hurt…"
"No," Dean growled.
Cas's mouth quirked again, but he didn't say anything because Amy was just coming back, two glasses of soda in hand. One was a lighter color than the other, and that's the one she wordlessly set in front of Dean. He picked it up and tasted it, and had to hold back a snort. Root beer. She'd probably gotten coca cola for herself.
Amy went back to eating her burger. Cas lifted a fry from her plate.
The mutual silence was then broken by a notification chime, and Amy pulled out her phone. She straightened abruptly. "Another body's just been found on the same street as our first victim."
Dean frowned. "What? Hold up, how could you possibly find that out so quickly?"
"I set up an alert on social media platforms for any hashtags involving dead bodies or police roll outs," she replied, and angled her phone toward him. "People are currently tweeting about a death that just happened."
Dean's brows rose in astonishment as he read the Twitter feed. Sure enough, people were commenting on the police coming out and cordoning off the same block from this afternoon because of a dead body.
"Okay," he said. "That's pretty clever." He was damn impressed, actually.
"We should get over there and take a look, right?" Amy asked.
Dean nodded, and pulled out his wallet to pay the bill. He didn't say that sometimes deaths happened that were unrelated to the case, because it was always prudent to check.
They left the restaurant and drove toward the reported scene where first responders had already set up a perimeter around an alleyway and flashing red and blue lights danced across the dark buildings.
Dean reached into his pocket for his badge, and found Amy's there too, so he handed it back to her as they made their way across the street to the mouth of the alley. There was a body lying a little ways down next to a trash can simmering with fire. Even from this distance, Dean could tell by the rags that the guy was homeless.
They flashed their credentials at the officer guarding entrance to the scene, and he let them in. A detective was there, standing over the body with a memo pad, but he wasn't writing anything. He looked up in confusion at their approach.
"Can I help you?"
"FBI," Dean announced. "We were in town about another case when we heard about this one, thought we'd come take a look."
The detective snorted. "What case? Homeless guy dropped dead, probably from exposure."
Cas furrowed his brows. "It's only fifty-five degrees outside right now."
"And someone saw a bunch of smoke," Amy spoke up.
The detective's eyes hardened on her. "You been taking witness statements?"
She blanched. "Oh, no. It was just on…" She reached for her phone. "Twitter."
His gaze remained steely. "What are you, twelve?"
"That's Agent Hathaway," Dean said sharply. "And yeah, people are talking."
The detective let out a derisive sounding snort and gestured to the trash can. "Guy was trying to keep warm, stood too close to the smoke. He even reeks of it. Hell, maybe that's what killed him."
Dean's gut pinged at that, but he kept his poker face on. "Guess we'll see what the ME says."
The detective flipped his blank memo pad closed. "I'll go see what's keeping the coroner." He strode off, leaving them alone with the body.
Dean stepped closer to get a better look. The dude's face was covered in grime, and he definitely smelled heavily of smoke. "So, looks like our ghost likes to kill with smoke inhalation. Fits with someone who died in a fire."
Cas turned to face down the alley, mouth pursed in thought. "We're two blocks away from the restaurant."
"And it's unusual for ghosts to travel that far from the scene of their death, right?" Amy checked.
"Unusual, but not impossible," Cas replied. "However, it usually takes ghosts a long time to master the ability to do that."
"Maybe our homeless vic went sifting through the rubble and picked up the personal item our ghost is bound to," Dean theorized.
Cas turned his gaze to the body and bent down.
"Watch for needles," Dean said, partly for Cas, partly for Amy's benefit.
Cas didn't respond, but he was careful as he started searching through the man's pockets. Dean kept an eye out for Mr. Snooty Detective, who would most likely object to them tampering with his crime scene. Even though he didn't think it was the scene of a crime.
Cas pulled out some gum wrappers, a miniature package of floss, and some crumpled one dollar bills. He finally stood up, empty handed.
"Think that's his?" Amy asked, pointing to a shopping cart that was half buried under a tarp.
Dean went over to it and gingerly lifted the flap to take a look inside. There were some plastic gallons of water, ratty blankets, newspaper, and a lot of empty soda cans. But there were also some random knickknacks, things that looked like they'd been picked out of garbage cans—a dirty yo-yo, cracked flashlight, and broken toaster. Dean doubted those were anything special to someone. He picked up the yo-yo, though, just in case. But it didn't smell like smoke, so he didn't think it had come from the restaurant.
"Dean," Cas said in warning, and he backed up just as the detective was returning.
"You're still here?"
"We were just leaving," Dean replied.
The detective eyed them suspiciously as they walked out.
"Well, that was a bust," Dean said when they reached the Impala.
"Now what?" Amy asked.
He cocked his head in a shrug. "If we don't get any new leads by morning, we'll come back out here after the cops are gone and keep looking for an object the homeless guy might have picked up."
She frowned. "The cops won't take everything into evidence?"
"They don't think it's a crime. They'll just leave it. But we might have to make a stop at the morgue tomorrow to double check the dude's personal effects."
"But Dad already looked."
"You'd be surprised where homeless people stash stuff," he said. "Better to let someone else do that search."
Amy quirked a confused look at him, but he quickly got in the car so he wouldn't have to explain. Cas and Amy climbed in as well, and they headed back to the motel.
Hopefully they'd catch a break soon. Because it was clear that this ghost was probably just getting started.
Sam grabbed the last stack of papers from the printer and returned to the study table where he'd spread out everything from the arson file that the investigator had emailed him. There was a ton on the scene itself—photographs of the damage, burn pattern analysis, chemical tests. But there was less when it came to suspects or motives. No one had been trying to buy the restaurant or plot of land it sat on, and from what Sam had gathered, no one had wanted to deal with the property afterward, and the real estate agent who'd died had drawn the short straw with that.
He started sorting through the recent pages, and paused at a detective's report. "Get this, turns out the cops did positively ID the third customer."
Ryn looked over from where she'd been tacking up pictures of the fire scene on a board. "That's great. Now they can narrow down the identity of the ghost."
Sam furrowed his brow as he kept reading, then huffed in consternation. "The guy was Iranian, so as soon as the cops found that out, they declared the fire was a bombing and act of terrorism. They stopped investigating after that."
Ryn scoffed. "A terrorist attack on a Japanese restaurant that was barely full of people?"
Sam shook his head. That was lazy police work, right there. Not to mention they'd condemned someone who was probably innocent. But as Sam read the bio on the third victim, he noticed that the guy had no family, no ties to anyone. Which made him an easy scapegoat.
Ryn moved to the left of the board and tapped one of the photographs of the crime scene that showed a charred outline against the wall. It looked like the silhouette of a person. "This is the kind of thing you see at the site of a nuclear detonation."
"Like the shadow men at Hiroshima," Sam said.
Those were haunting images. Shapes of objects and people left on the surfaces of sidewalks and walls because they'd absorbed the heat of the blast to the point where they'd been vaporized, and only the charcoal imprint forever seared into the pavement marked that they'd ever existed.
Ryn nodded. "This fire might have been supernatural."
Sam's mouth thinned. If that was the case, were they hunting a ghost who'd died in that fire? Or the thing that had set it to begin with?
"I should look into the history of the area," he said. "Maybe the ghost isn't from these recent deaths. You keep digging into the victims we do have?"
Ryn gave a nod of agreement, and came to take a seat across the table from him. Sam pulled up the restaurant owner's bio, as that seemed a good place to start. They really needed to narrow down their suspects before more people kept dying.