Sophie's apartment was tidy and unremarkable. She emerged at six o'clock exactly carrying a leather backpack and a nylon duffle. Her dark curls were damp and she'd changed out of her floury clothes.
She climbed into the back seat of the Impala and immediately passed another bakery box up to the brothers.
"Chocolate croissants," she said, "I don't make them for the restaurant, just for friends."
Day one went well. Sophie was, as expected, a heck of a researcher. Her reading and typing speeds were a little shocking. When she took all of the related missing-persons incidents Sam had collected and built a statistical model with them in R both the brothers just stared.
"So if you look at this graph," Sophie said, slouching at the table in their hotel room and pointing at the screen of her laptop, "You'll see that the likelihood of finding a body is directly correlated to age. The older victims are just disappearing. The younger ones are being murdered and then located."
"How did you do that?" Dean asked.
"R," Sophie replied, "Basic analytics software. Learned it for my PhD."
"She has a PhD?" Dean whispered to his brother.
"She's a meteorologist," Sam replied with a shrug.
The hunt went well. Amazingly well. And coming home afterwards - wet, muddy and covered in blood - to a smiling face and homemade soup? It was indescribable. A day turned into a week, and soon a comfortable rhythm developed.
After deciding another border crossing was pushing it, they decided to pursue a swath of leads in Canada. Sophie seemed to know a good cheap hotel in every town they visited. Things were good, better than good.
Sophie was fantastic at research, but had exactly no desire to put a gun in her hand. They showed her how to lay salt lines, a few tricks to test strangers for danger, and got her decently handy with a switch blade - insisting she keep it on her at all times - but knew better than to ask her to come with them when shots were likely to be fired. So she stayed home. She built algorithms that could scrub for suspicious cases. She 3D modeled the projected interiors of decrepit buildings. It was fantastic.
One day fifteen of their little experiment Dean did something impulsive, something he was sure to regret. He kissed Sophie goodbye. And to everyone's surprise she didn't smack him.
"Get home safe," she murmured against his cheek, then waved them off.
It turned into a little ritual.
On day twenty-four Sophie pulled up a graph on her computer and told them efficiency was up 83% since she'd joined up. Neither Sam nor Dean was entirely sure how she'd come to the figure, but she said it with that perfect newscaster diction and neither was ready to argue.