Disclaimer: If they were mine I'd be rich. Sadly I am not.
"Look at me I'm a grown up." Jack joked when Sam opened the door to see her standing in a dark pant suit she'd bought at the local thrift store with her red hair neatly brushed into a bun and a bit of makeup. She looked older, still young for a cop but older than eighteen.
"Just hope they don't look to closely." Sam teased. Jack rolled her eyes at him.
"Thanks. You clean up good too." She said sarcastically. She looked past him to see Dean exit the bathroom in a suit similar to Sam's, tugging on his tie uncomfortably.
"Remember we talk to the security guy and you check out the apartment, you sense anything off and you get out of there." Sam reminded her parroting Dean's instructions. Jack nodded flipping her fake badge open and reading the name on it again, Elizabeth Reed, she snickered.
"Lets go." Dean said tucking a gun into the small of his back.
The man on security detail tonight was not t he same as the one from the night before but he said he'd spoken to the other security guard. Dean was right in that the real police had already been by to collect all the security tapes from the night before.
"Yeah, he called me to ask if I'd take his shift tonight. He was spooked by what happened last night." The security guard, Russ, told Dean and Sam after they flashed their badges.
"Any particular reason why? Aside from the obvious I mean." Dean asked.
"Aside from the obvious," Russ hesitated.
"Please anything you can tell us would really help." Sam said sincerely.
"He says Mrs. Masters, you know the wife, came home around ten." Russ said dropping his voice as a tenant got off the elevator and walked out the front doors of the lobby.
"And?" Dean pressed.
"And then fifteen minutes later she came back down calm and cool. Then he says she sort of went blank and after a minute she started screaming about finding her husband dead. Was really going nuts that's how she banged her head, on the desk." He pointed to a piece of the desk with a knick in it.
"She was in shock?" Sam asked.
"That's not the weird thing though." Russ continued.
"Then what is?" Dean asked.
"He says when he went to help her up her eyes were all fucked- I mean messed up." The man said amending his language in front of the "officers".
"Messed up how?" Dean asked seriously.
"Black, like no white or nothing." Russ said. "I didn't believe it. I thought maybe my buddy had fallen off the wagon again."
"Do you believe him now?" Sam asked sensing that there was more.
"I don't know I-" Russ ran his hand through his short graying hair. "When the cops came to collect the tapes I got curious." Russ said, his eyes darting quickly between them, expecting to get into trouble for whatever he did.
"Don't worry, this is all off the record." Dean assured the man.
"Anyway, I got a little curious so I made them wait up here while I went to go get the tapes." Russ started again more relaxed now.
"You looked at the tapes." Dean said.
"Yeah/" Russ said starting to look spooked himself. "They were all static for that floor of the building. All static and some blurry dark shadow thing in some of the frames."
Sam looked at Dean thinking the same thing he was. A demon was possessing Erica Masters.
"Thank you sir, you've been a huge help." Sam said smiling at Russ.
"We're going to have a look around upstairs. If its not too much trouble." Dean told him. Russ nodded looking grave.
Jack was already up their having gone up the back stairs through the building. The man wouldn't have believed three detectives coming to ask one man a few questions.
Jack entered the apartment ducking under the yellow police tape. The door wasn't even locked. She edge around not touching anything, the last thing she needed was for some asshole to pick up her prints and run up her priors, that would be a fun game of show and tell. She made her way to the dining room area where the man was killed. More crime scene tape and a white sheet over the floor where a tape outline was where the body had been. Dark rosettes of dried blood spotted the carpet with several spots of it on the wall to the right of the outline.
They table had been cleared, she saw with disappointment. If the damn cops had left the table as is she could have used the candles to get a fix on what happened here. A nearly inaudible sound came from the living room and Jack smoothly took her pistol out from under her jacket. She walked stealthily out of the dining room with her gun pointed straight ahead and the safety off.
"Woah, hey now. I know we're in a thing but you don't have to shoot me." Dean said putting his hands up. Jack exhaled and lowered her gun thumbing the safety back on.
"You get anything out of the guard?" She asked. Dean nodded but it was Sam who filled her in on the details.
"Sounds like a demonic possession." Sam said.
"So we break out the Latin and prayer beads?" Jack asked.
"Looks like. Ever been to an exorcism before?" Sam asked.
"Once. Didn't like it the first time around." Jack answered grimacing at the memory.
"You won't like it the second time around either." Dean said shortly walking past her to the dining room.
"Maybe we can get something from the spill patterns." He called out to them.
Sam looked over the bloodstains from very angle he could think but he couldn't make out any relevance to them at all. He could see from the look on Dean's face that he knew it too.
"Well that was a bust." Dean said.
"We don't really need to know the exact demon though do we?" Jack asked.
"No but it might've helped to know. Maybe guess its next move." Sam said straightening up from his kneeling position on the floor.
"You catch anything? There were candles in here right, Sammy?" Dean asked.
"Yeah." Sam answered.
"They took them, so I couldn't get anything from the place." Jack said.
A door opened and closed and the three went quiet, waiting.
"You've got about ten minutes." A man's voice said. A couple of low murmurs that sounded too young to be their mark were heard.
Dean gestured for the other two to follow him though the kitchen to the left of the dining area, concealed from the living room.
He froze and made a move for his gun when he saw that the kitchen was occupied. By Erica Masters. She looked at them curiously. She was dressed head to toe in black with her make up immaculate and a perfectly planned sorrowful look on her pretty features.
Dean saw Jack thumb the safety off her gun again with a dark look in her eyes and he telegraphed her not to do anything. He took his hand from behind his jacket and gave the woman a charming smile.
"I'm detective Perry ma'am and these are my associates, Detective's Reed and Tyler." Dean said pointing at Jack then Sam.
"I had no idea so many people were on my husband's case. I'm grateful for the work you're doing on our behalf." She said smoothly extending a hand to Dean. He eyed it carefully, but Jack beat him to the handshake. A flicker of pain crossed the woman's features as Jack pressed her hand into hers, with a St. Michael medallion in her palm that she'd slipped there.
"We'll do our best ma'am and you have our deepest condolences." Jack said holding on when the woman tried to pull away.
Finally Erica wrenched her hand free keeping the pleasant smile on her face. Jack tried not to look smug as she let Dean pull her back behind him with a scowl on his face.
"Mrs. Masters?" A uniformed cop came through the kitchen door. He stopped when he saw them standing a few feet from her. His nametag said May on it. Dean almost snorted, what kind of name was that for a cop?
"Who are you?" Officer May asked.
"These are detectives." Erica answered.
"I don't know them." Officer May said suspiciously. Dean was saved from having to make up a story by a young guy stomping into the room. He glared at everyone there with eyes that were beat red.
"Can we go now? Becca's crying in her room." He said.
"Of course honey." Erica said softly. She reached out her hand to her son but he flinched away from her touch. He looked at the officer and the three strangers there and nodded walking back out the room with a tell tale sniffle.
"He's very upset by all this." Erica explained to them.
"That's to be expected." Dean said back to her.
"I think we have everything we need." Dean said. They walked out with the group which was joined by a young girl of about thirteen who was crying into her brother's jacket. They had a couple of backpacks full of clothes and miscellaneous things. Before they parted ways Dean saw Erica ran her hand over the top of the young girls head in a seemingly maternal gesture. She closed her eyes momentarily and a flush showed faintly for a moment. When she opened her eyes they glittered with a feral, hungry gleam.
'She feeds off the pain.' Dean thought tearing his eyes from her to get into the elevator with Jack and Sam, separate from 'Erica', Officer May and the kids.
"Tonight. First we get the kids out then we go for the bitch." Dean said. "And don't pull that shit again." He added to Jack.
"She bit her lip to keep from shoving her foot down her throat and nodded. When push came to shove, all personal shit aside, when Dean gave an order about a hunt you shut the fuck up and listened. Because he knew more than either Her or Sam. Besides she wasn't about to admit a method to her madness back in the house. That she didn't that thing touching Dean because the first and only exorcism she ever saw, when she was five and still living in Louisiana, was a kind of demon that could body jump through touch alone. Hell no.
TBC……………….
AN: Next chapter is the exorcism. Then the real action starts. Stayed tuned folks…..