CHAPTER TEN

Kieryn followed alongside Dean as they descended through the bustling corridor, shoving her hands deep into the pockets of her tan coat. The hallway smelt of misery, a thick, overpowering stench of decay that no amount of air freshener could ever subside. She huddled closer to Dean's side quickly, basking in the odd sense of security being around him gave her and ignoring the confused glance he shot her.

Dean approached the young looking secretary behind the counter, digging his badge from his pocket and nodding for Kieryn to do the same. "FBI, Mam." He said formally, as he and Kieryn held up their fake I.D. in turn. "We'd like to speak with Dr. Kaiser regarding the Brian McGregor autopsy results."

"Go right on through." The woman behind the desk answered, pointing toward the glass double doors and smiling at the pair before diverting her gaze back to her computer.

"Dr. Kaiser?" Dean called as he and Kieryn entered the coroners office, a separate room from where the autopsies took place, much to Kieryn's relief.

Through a door to the left of the office entrance, an elderly man's head poked around, noticing the guests. "Come on in." He said, before disappearing once more behind the doorframe.

"Oh God." Kieryn murmured to Dean, glancing up at him fearfully. "We don't actually have to go in there, do we?"

"Perks of the job." Dean grinned cunningly at the redheaded girl before strolling over toward the entrance to the examination room. Kieryn huffed out a sigh of irritation, muttering something incoherent under her breath before following suit of Dean, bracing herself for a horrid scene as she pushed the door closed again and turned to face the Doctor's work.

Instantly she was taken aback by how clean the room seemed. She'd expected to immediately be greeted with the messy, cut open bodies of multiple pale, stinky corpses, lying upon rusted tin beds alongside steel trolleys holding the bloodied saws and hammers and other various tools found in an autopsy room. But instead, her eyes only located one body, a man's, laying restfully upon a shiny steel elevated tray.

Kieryn let out the breath she had unknowingly been holding, following behind Dean as he approached the corpse, making sure not to look for too long as the Doctor began another incision of the man's chest. She stood behind Dean silently, glancing around the room at anything but the dead man before them.

"First dead body?" Dr. Kaiser asked suddenly, having sensed the girl's weariness. Kieryn realized that he and Dean's eyes were both fixed on her and a blush crept up to her cheeks, staining them pink as she nodded hesitantly. "Now, normally I'd let the first timers hold the heart." As he said this, Kieryn's eyes opened wide with terror and she took a hurried step backward. "But," the doctor continued, "it seems this man's heart has been removed completely."

"Do you have a cause of death, yet?" Dean asked, refocusing the topic. As much as he enjoyed seeing the redhead's discomfort and the silence from her that this whole ordeal had blessed him with, he wanted to get this over and done with as quick as possible. It had been one heck of a long day, and it wasn't even 5 o'clock yet.

"Definitely the slice to the neck." Dr. Kaiser replied. "If it had been cut any deeper, the head would have rolled right off." With this, the man chuckled and Kieryn and Dean shared a weary glance, unsure about what could possibly be amusing about that. "The heart was not removed until after the man had suffered sufficient blood loss."

"What are these?" Kieryn asked, pointing to bruises circling each of the man's wrists.

"Ahh." Dr. Kaiser began, "these are ligature marks. Caused by friction between rope and skin mostly, depending on the material used to tie the victim. In this case, rope was in fact used, as I discovered remnants of rope fibres lodged within a small cut mark on the man's inner wrist."

Dean's eyes widened in realization. "So he was held captive, first?"

"Presumably, yes."

"Could I have a copy of the completed autopsy report sent to me?" Dean asked once the doctor had finished giving the pair a play-by-play of all the wounds the man received during the time of his death. Apparently, severe bruising to his ribcage and torso implied that the man had been beaten sufficiently before the cut to his neck, indicating that he had put on quite a fight. The doctor had also given them his theory that whoever the murderer was, they had to have hit the man with a lot of strength to have left behind such severe internal bruising. A kind of strength that to Kieryn's relief, she could not possibly possess.

"Sure thing." Dr. Kaiser said, holding the door to his autopsy room ajar for the two FBI agents to exit through. "I'll have my secretary send it to FBI headquarters as soon as I'm done with it."

"No!" Kieryn blurted suddenly, before scrambling to find the right words. "Sorry, but we'll need you to be sending it to this address, here." With this she reached for a pen upon the desk in the doctor's office as well as a blank piece of squared noted paper, scrawling her and her sister's house address across it before placing it neatly on top of the doctor's desk.

"Okay then." Dr. Kaiser nodded and Dean spoke the man a quick thank you accompanied by a curt nod, before leaving the office with Kieryn trailing behind.

"That wasn't so bad." Kieryn grinned, her whole demeanour brightening automatically as the pair exited the dull building altogether, crossing the car park in the direction of Dean's Impala.

"Too bad the heart was missing." Dean chuckled, "I would've loved to have seen your face."

"Yeah, yeah." Kieryn mumbled inaudibly, pulling the passenger door of Dean's car ajar and sliding her body inside.

"When was the first time Kieryn sleepwalked?" Sam asked Emerson, purely out of curiosity rather than routine.

After Em's discovery earlier on, she'd insisted on having a well deserved break, and the pair had ended up both lying on the floor of the dining room, each looking up at the ceiling, talking of useless things for the past half an hour or so, drinking Heinekens from the girls' fridge supply. Only now had he plucked up the courage to ask the question itching at his mind all day.

"About 16 months ago." Em replied, straining her memory back to the frantic phone call she'd shared with her sister that first night. "She was at university at the time. In Lansing. I was still here, looking after the house, working part time at a local CD store downtown. Kieryn was always the ambitious one, the one who dreamed of a college life, so that's why she got to go to college while I stayed behind. One of us needed to keep an eye on the house, anyway." With this, Emerson threw her hands up in the air before flopping them back onto the hard floor with a thud.

Sam watched the girl intently, waiting as she let out a deep sigh, her gaze locked solely on the ceiling above her as she began to speak once more, the words filing from her mouth with total ease.

"Anyway. It was some time during November. I remember it was about 1 in the morning when she rang me. I'd been asleep a few hours already because I was supposed to be starting early at work the next morning. I was pissed off, thinking she'd gotten drunk or something and decided to call just to tell me how much she loved me." With this she chuckled, adding, "wouldn't have been the first time either."

Emerson bit her lip, remembering the fear in her sister's voice as she'd spoken. "She told me she'd done something wrong. Wouldn't tell me a thing else, just kept insisting that I leave Petoskey immediately to come and pick her up." She shook her head to rid the forming tears, her blonde hair shaking like ripples with the motion. "When I got there, at about 5am, the police had just arrived on scene. One of the girl's staying in a room just down the hall from her had been killed."

Sam noticed a lone tear creeping down the side of Em's cheek before she had the chance to swipe it away. The last thing she wanted to do was cry in front of this man she hardly knew. She hated even crying in front of her sister, let alone an almost absolute stranger.

Inhaling a deep breath, she willed herself to continue with the story, knowing that once it was out in the open, things could only get better. There was even the possibility that Sam could help, along with his brother. Perhaps they could rid Kieryn of this horrible curse and she could go back to school. Their lives could go back to normal.

"I found Kieryn on the roof of the goddamn building. Can you believe that? She climbed through the window onto the freaking roof when the cops pulled up, knowing there would be no way in hell she'd be able to explain how she'd ended up covered in the dead girl's blood.

"She told me all about what she remembered during the drive back to Petoskey. Which was virtually nothing. She remembered going to sleep at 10 and waking up beside the dead girl a few hours later. The knife was on the floor next to her, blood all over the carpet and drenching her t-shirt. That's when she called me. She told me that after that she basically sat in shock for at least two hours before sneaking back down the hallway to her room. Then not long before I arrived she heard a scream and soon after, the cops pulled up. That was about when she climbed onto the roof."

"Whoa." Sam murmured, regretting that it was the only response he could muster. "And she never got caught?"

"I think, after a while, it was just ruled as a suicide. Apparently, the theory fit with the evidence they had. The girl had just been dealing with the death of a long term boyfriend. And Kieryn hadn't left behind a single clue that could have led them back to her."

Sam was amazed at the lengths Emerson had gone through to protect her younger sister. It was incredible how composed she seemed to have been during the time, even though the usual person would have wanted to break down completely, confess, or knock themselves right off the face of the Earth. Sam admired the unbreakable bond the sister's seemed to share, despite Kieryn's obvious strive to hide her feelings, he knew that she must be extremely thankful for the risks Emerson had taken for her. If not, then she was an idiot.

"Do you see your parents at all?" Sam inquired, his gaze drifting back to the blonde girl as she abruptly sat up from her lying position. It was then that he decided he'd probably better do the same.

"Apparently Mom died when I was still in diapers. Dad ditched town not long after that, left us with Uncle Jasper."

So she did know. Sam felt a flood of relief jolt through him at the revelation. "Did your uncle ever tell you how your mother died?" He asked, his words soft with sincerity. He didn't want to alarm Emerson with his invasive questions, but his curiosity seemed to have gotten the better of him.

Emerson seemed unharmed by the question and merely shrugged. "He never said. We never asked."

"So Kieryn knows, then. About your mother's death and your dad leaving?"

"Oh, yeah, she knows. She still denies it as best she can." Em smirked, "but that's just Kieryn for yah. Would rather cover up the truth than deal with it. Until the age of ten she truly believed that Dad had been kidnapped or something. Wouldn't even consider that he'd abandoned us altogether. After that, all she'd say on the matter was that Uncle Jasper's more of a father then our biological one will ever be. But that's easy enough for her to say. She was always Jas and Marie's favourite."

"Is Jasper still around?"

Em's smile fell to a frown as abruptly as the question had left Sam's mouth. "No. He and Aunt Marie were killed in a car accident when I was 18 and Kier was 16. I guess that's another reason I didn't go to college. I was looking after Kieryn until she was old enough to leave home."

"I'm sorry, Em." Sam mumbled, resting his elbows behind him to prop himself up from the wooden floor.

"Nah. Don't fret." Despite her reassuring words, Sam could sense the underlying pain within her tone. Catching gaze with the blonde, Sam's eyes warmed with an unmistakeable expression of sorrow and Emerson immediately flicked her eyes elsewhere while biting down on her bottom lip, hard.

In silence she rose from the floor completely, stretching her arms behind her back briefly before glancing at the clock hung upon the kitchen wall.

"It's half five. Kieryn and Dean sure are taking their time," she muttered, wishing the two would hurry up and get back so she could be rid of the anxiety that filled her. Suddenly she was overwhelmed with the need for a good cleanse and began making her way toward the kitchen and dining room exit. "I'm gonna have a quick shower." She told Sam, turning back around in the doorway to face him, "feel free to make yourself at home." With this, she disappeared around the corner, leaving the bewildered brunette man still seated soundlessly upon the floor of her dining room.

A/N: Sorry for the lack of action. Necessary bonding time here. :) I would love a review so don't be shy in dropping one. Struggling through a bit of writer's block recently and reviews would probably help to get my creative juices flowing again! Anyway, hope you're all enjoying. Let me know! :D