CHAPTER NINE
"Where are we going?" Kieryn asked with a groan, twirling a long strand of her orangey hair in her index finger and glancing at Dean in the drivers seat beside her.
"I told you that." He said sternly. God, this girl was beginning to give him one hell of a headache. Wow, had Dean just combined the words God and Hell in one sentence? It seemed as though he had.
"No." Kieryn protested firmly, folding her arms over one another and leaning as far back into the leather of the passenger seat as possible. "You said we're going to interview Mrs Donahue. You know what you should have said?"
Dean forced himself to restrain from groaning. "No." He uttered in annoyance. "Enlighten me."
Kieryn grinned brightly. "You should have said, 'oh, it's almost three. Let's go find somewhere to eat.'"
"I'll tell you what I should do." Dean muttered under his breath, the words barely escaping past his lips. If he'd known that working with this girl would be so infuriating beforehand, he would've never signed on for the role of babysitting. Babysitting an impatient, stubborn, irritating amateur. Dean couldn't think of a worse punishment.
"You just passed the freaking diner!" Kieryn cursed suddenly, sitting upright in the passenger seat and gazing out the window as her favourite diner in town rolled right past her window. "Idiot."
Ignoring Kieryn's last remark, Dean swiftly pulled the car over to the curb before pulling an abrupt U-turn and driving back down the way they'd came.
"Next time, a little warning before you try spinning off of the road, yeah?" Kieryn murmured angrily before perking up automatically as Dean's car pulled a tight left into the diner. It was a different one to the one he and Sam had visited two nights before, this one seemed littered with cars all over the small parking square.
As he and Kieryn approached the building, Kieryn leading, Dean trailing behind muttering incoherent curse words, Dean noted the bright neon pink letters along the front strip of the diner reading El Romeo's.
Kieryn pushed the double doors of the familiar diner ajar, savouring the fresh scent of bacon and eggs that wafted in the atmosphere. She smiled as she reminisced the few childhood memories she'd had in this very restaurant. Kieryn had grown up her whole life in this town, up until she was 18, of course, when she'd moved away to Lansing to attend university. But four years later it seemed that her home town wanted her back again, and she had been forced to return.
"Kerry! Good to see you back here, girl." The middle-aged waitress greeted as she approached the table Kieryn and Dean were seated at. Kieryn had picked the table of course, Dean thought begrudgingly.
"Hey Michelle!" Kieryn chimed, with matching amount of enthusiasm as the other woman. "This is Dean." She said finally, beckoning toward the man seated across from her. The waitress followed the girls hand and soon her eyes fell upon Dean for the first time since the pair had walked in.
"Oh Kieryn! Picked yourself up a hunky boyfriend while you were away, huh?"
Dean almost choked on the breath he had been holding and he scrambled to cover up his alarm with a quick cough.
Kieryn merely ignored Dean's state of shock, smiling brightly at the other women before nodding accordingly.
Dean cleared his throat and Kieryn's head whipped around immediately, facing him with the hint of a glare that only he would pick up on.
"Yeah, honey?" She said mockingly, smiling sweetly which only made Dean even more infuriated than before. The mental image of him strangling the girl at that moment seemed disturbingly pleasing.
Dean shook away the thought before looking up at the plump brunette waitress before them. "Can I get the breakfast special?" He asked charmingly as the waitress nodded and scribbled down upon the small lined notepad in her grip. "Oh, and a coffee thanks. Black, three sugars." Perhaps a sugary caffeine blast would sweeten his mood. Dean severely doubted it, but it was worth a shot.
"Got quite a sweet tooth this one, hasn't he?" The waitress said to the redheaded girl and Kieryn laughed loudly.
"Michelle, could I get a coffee too? Milk, no sugar," Kieryn started, "and I'll have the breakfast special too, thanks."
"Coming right up." The elder woman said with a sickly sweet smile, strolling off back towards the kitchen to announce their order.
Dean folded his arms over his chest, leaning back into the red cushioned leather of the seat. He was unhappy with this whole deal. If it had been Sam with him, they'd have finished with interviewing the widows of all three victims by now. They'd have talked to the neighbours, the friends and any other relatives of the victims. They'd also have been to the morgue, talked to the coroner about the latest body. All before lunch. So far, being stuck with the stubborn redhead, they'd managed only to interview Mrs McGregor once more and Kellie Trewavas, the hot blonde who had been the girlfriend of victim number two. It had turned out that Kieryn knew Kellie briefly. Her exact words when she heard that Kellie had been the victim's lover consisted of; "Kellie freakin' Trewavas? I went to high school with that bitch. It should've been her that I ganked, not her man." Kieryn's relationship with her had meant that Dean had had to go in alone to interview her. He hadn't minded that one bit. In fact, the quiet had been quite refreshing.
"I say, once we're done with lunch, we head over to the Donahue's place for a little chat before calling it a day. Yeah?" Kieryn took a large slurp from the coffee mug that had just been delivered to her before setting it back down on the plastic tabletop. She watched as Dean's blank expression shrivelled and was replaced with obvious annoyance. Kieryn smirked lightly to herself. Who knew that irritating a man like Dean could prove to be so entertaining? And so easily achievable, too.
"We've still got to visit the morgue." He said gruffly, refusing to make direct eye contact with the girl. He was glancing out of the diner window and watched as the first drop of rain hit the concreted parking area, followed by the ascending rattle as the droplets plummeted down onto the iron roof of the diner.
"In this weather?" Kieryn mumbled, shaking her head. "No way. Bad shit happens in this kind of weather."
Dean huffed out a sigh of frustration, his nostrils flaring as the wafting smell of food grew closer. Just as he looked up, the same waitress from before placed two steaming plates upon the table top, piled with bacon, eggs, hash browns, sausages and a bagel and drizzled with maple syrup.
"Can't Em and Sam go to the morgue instead?" Kieryn begged once the waitress had walked away, forking a mouthful of her food into her mouth while watching Dean with pleading blue eyes.
Dean sighed, grumbling something incoherent to himself. "Look, you're the one who insisted on helping," he lectured, shoving another forkful into his mouth before proceeding to speak with his mouth full, "honey, these are just the perks of the job."
"Last time I checked, you didn't exactly hand me a contract with the list of requirements on it! I didn't know we'd have to visit dead people!"
Dean chuckled darkly. "Fine. You don't want to go in, I'll go in without you. You can sit in the car. Or walk home for all I care."
"No," Kieryn objected quickly, shaking her head furiously. "You're not leaving me behind." As much as she despised the idea of having to visit the morgue, she didn't want to be left out of this. She was just as capable at working alongside these brothers as anyone else. That was a fact she was going to have to strive to prove.
"Fine." Dean murmured. "But don't go complaining when we get in there."
"What exactly am I supposed to be looking for again?" Emerson asked, glancing over at the tall brunette man seated at her dining room table, his head buried deep into the large book propped up in his hold.
"Anything." Sam murmured, failing to remove his gaze for even a second from the fine print of the weathered hardback before him.
Emerson nodded slowly, refocusing her eyes upon the two murder files spread over the shiny planks. She was laying on her stomach on the wooden floor, elbows propped up in order to keep her head high. Before her were the case files of the first two murder victims, the papers from each one scattered accordingly on either side of her, depending on which file they had come from.
In the five hours she had been laying there, relaying over all the police reports, autopsy reports and the information given to her that Sam and Dean had collected from locals the day earlier, she hadn't found a single thing that Sam had praised as helpful evidence. Yet the whole time he had been in Emerson's home since that morning, he had been silent, attention focused solely on the large encyclopaedic looking books and nothing else.
Emerson huffed out a loud, dramatic sigh, scanning over the autopsy report of the first victim one last time.
"Hey, I think I might have something." She said as her eyes finally flicked across an interesting statement in the text.
Sam looked up from his book immediately, his chocolate brown eyes watching Emerson expectantly as she smiled, pulling herself from the floor and strolling over to him to place the autopsy page in front of him.
"You're going to have to give me a little more help than that." He mumbled sarcastically as Emerson stood silently.
With his words, she chuckled quietly, pointing toward the sentence that caught her attention moments before, waiting as Sam read it aloud.
"Body was clear of all consumed substances approximately 24 hours before time of death." Sam's brows shrivelled up in confusion as he tried to process the words upon the page. "And that means?"
"The man didn't eat a thing for a whole 24 hours before he died," Emerson explained. "God, who willingly goes that long without food?"
"What does it say for the other victim?" Sam asked, his mind already working in auto-pilot. He watched as the blonde girl scanned the autopsy report of the second victim, her blue eyes alight with heavy concentration, before she grinned triumphantly and pushed the paper toward Sam. "It's the same." He concluded, nodding as his eyes scanned the file once more, coming to the assumption.
"Damn right." Emerson murmured. "Someone must have held these poor guys captive beforehand."
"Kieryn didn't… leave the house at all, the night before these murders. Did she?"
Emerson watched Sam wearily, confusion riddling her tone as she answered as truthfully as she recalled. "No. At least, I don't think she did."
"Good." Sam nodded. "It can't have been her that captured these men the night before, then. Something else must be setting things up before bringing her in to kill them."
Emerson was shaking her head lightly and Sam felt immediate guilt once he sensed the fear behind her blank expression. "I just can't believe we're investigating a crime my baby sister supposedly committed." She sighed, walking away from the dining table and pulling herself up to sit upon the island bench top in the centre of the modern kitchen. "It's just not right."
Sam thought over the blonde girl's words. She was right, it was completely wrong for a woman of her youth, her whole life ahead of her, to be brought to such abnormal lengths in order to save the life of her sister. No one should have to face the things that he and Dean faced every day, yet with each second, someone in the world was losing their innocence entirely and there was nothing that Sam nor his brother could do to stop it. It was just the way of the world.
"No." Sam murmured finally. "It's not."
