A/Ns: We did not quite make the 1,000 review milestone, but we got close. Normally, that would mean I just hold off on the double post until next time. However, I am going on vacation next weekend, so getting two chapters edited and up is going to be tough. Therefore, you all get an extra special treat this time! Four awesome somebodies on AO3 need to get us over the hump, and I'll post the next chapter on Monday.

Chapter Warnings: Andy's starting a food fight without the food, Sam's thinking they may need to re-lable their Jedi Master as more of a Sith Lord, Dean's sort of finally almost getting through to Diana, and our Death Omen is showing up places she's not meant to be. Darn you, Death Omen!

-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-

The Road So Far (This Time Around)

Season 2: Chapter 38

-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-

The precinct was never quiet, even in the latest hours of the night or earliest in the morning. There were always criminals of all walks; scumbags and drunks and trouble makers were brought in and out all hours of the day. But this was possibly the quietest it ever got, between the hours of six and nine am, with the first shift of beat cops out on the streets, the night prowlers finally in bed and the day crime not yet getting started. A little lull period, in which Diana Ballard was usually at home, asleep after a long night's work on a case. But not this morning. Not this case.

Diana blew out a breath of air, enough to shift her hair off her forehead. The mostly blank report in front of her was a pain in her tired ass, but there was no going home until she got it written up. At least some of it.

The detective scrubbed face, exhaustion starting to kick in. Well, long-past kicked in, really, but she was used to the occasional all-nighter. Just, not usually two in a row, and her and Pete both were steadily heading for thirty six hours on the job now. They still had to confront Dean Winchester, now that they had his name. They had enough to charge him, so all that was left was one last chance to talk. Then, either way, they could wrap this up. It would be in the DA's hands by noon.

It didn't sit right with her, of course. There were too many unanswered questions. But she and Pete had to get sleep at some point.

Diana sighed and put her fingers back to the keys. A few more paragraphs, a couple more sections. She could get that much done. Before she could move her fingers, however, the blinking cursor suddenly took off all on its own. The detective blinked dumbly at her computer as it started typing for itself, the same two words, over and over again.

Dana Shulps.

Dana Shulps Dana Shulps DanaShulpsDanaShulpsDanaShulpsDanaShulps

She pulled back, fingers flying off the keys, a trill of terror suddenly mixed in with all the confusion. What was going on? Diana sucked in a breath and blinked, only to find a blank page once more staring back at her.

What?

No, seriously, what just happened?

The detective shook her head, rubbed at her eyes, and checked again. Mostly blank doc just waiting for her to fill it out. Man…she was more tired than she thought. With a moment of hesitation she wasn't proud of, Diana put her fingers back to the keys, but couldn't stop staring at the screen, waiting for something to happen.

Okay, maybe it was time for that last round of interrogation. She could finish the report afterward.

No sooner had Diana stood up then something did happen, and it had nothing to do with her computer. The precinct erupted in chaos, and it all started in the bullpen. Shouts erupted and Diana went for her gun, spotting Pete shooting out of his seat in front of her. They and a dozen other cops and detectives ran towards the yelling.

It was chaos. There were half a dozen small fights broken out, two of them involving civilians and the rest cops. Others who seemed to still be in their right minds were trying to break up the fighters. Diana and Pete dove into one themselves, but it was like the men and women couldn't even hear them. They just kept at each other, grappling and exchanging weak punches, no matter who pulled them off or what was said. A few had been detained, but even handcuffed to whatever was nearest, they were still trying to get back in the fight. One cop – Charlie, the front desk officer – was dragging one of the waiting chairs behind him, one hand still cuffed to it, as he went back in one armed to his battle with Janice Price.

It made no sense. Diana knew these people. Worked with these people. What was going on?

And then it all stopped. On a dime, all at once, every combatant dropped arms. Exactly one hundred and twenty seconds after the first fight broke out between two recovering drunks, every single one of the men and women involved in a tussle just stopped, blinking, dazed, and most definitely confused. It left a couple of the non-crazies trying to pull people off one another stumbling back at the sudden lack of resistance, often with their now dazed fighter in hand. A couple tumbled to the floor together.

"What the hell," Diana said loudly as the chaos died down into murmurs of discord and injury. She wasn't the only one. Diana helped Janice up from the ground, where she'd gone down in a post chaos tackle by a fellow cop. She had a black eye and a sharp cut on one cheekbone, but otherwise, she was alright. They all were. Despite the weird and random breakout of violence, no one was seriously harmed.

It was another seven and a half minutes of trying to figure out what the hell had happened – everyone talking over each other to get to the bottom of the unexplainable chaos – before a rookie came flying into the main entrance, panting heavily with a look of pure panic on his face.

"He's gone."

Diana stopped what she was doing – an informal interrogation of yet another friend and coworker who was utterly clueless as to why he suddenly needed to punch the living daylights out of his partner – and turned, stone cold dread pooling in her stomach.

"What?"

"The suspect." The out of breath cop panted, spitting out words between heaving gasps. "Sam Winchester. He's gone."

Diana turned wide eyes to her partner, but Pete's face was already morphing from surprise to pure rage. He took off for interrogation, and Diana had to run to keep up.

-o-o-o-

Sam looked up as the door to his own little interrogation room opened, admitting an officer and…. Andy. In a mustache. A very fake mustache. The Stanford near-grad managed to keep a straight face as Andy nodded at the cop before proceeding over to the table Sam was camped out at. He set his briefcase down as the officer closed the door, leaving them alone in the silent room.

"Mr. Winchester."

"So, I take it you're the reason they suddenly know our names?" Sam raised an eyebrow at the poor kid, who looked sheepishly at him as he opened up the case, supposedly under the pretense of actually lawyering. The hunter cast a glance at the camera in the corner of the room, but the blinking red light was currently off.

"Sorry," Andy muttered, digging out a pad of paper and a pen, and passing a folded piece of paper Sam's way. "I didn't realize they didn't know. Guess I'm, uh, kinda new at this."

Sam didn't rag on him for it. First of all, he was sure Dean already had. But more than that, Sam knew the kid was only trying to help. Knew how risky it was for Andy – a wanted murderer with a warrant out for his arrest – to walk willingly into a police station to help get them out of this mess. That took guts, and loyalty the Winchesters had never asked from him. The hunter gave a forgiving nod and reached forward, snagging the folded paper off the surface of the table. "You've been in to see Dean?"

Andy nodded, though he knew Sam got the answer first from the scrawl of his brother's handwriting. "Yeah. They've got a pretty solid case on him, far as I can tell. But he says it's the cop – the dude one, not the lady one – framing him. Dirty as a mud pie on Tatooien, apparently."

Sam quickly scanned his brother's coded note, bobbing his head at Andy's information. "Does he have a plan?" Other than helping to get Sam out, given the allusion to 'The Great Escape' in his not-so-many worded note.

"Uh…" Andy shrugged, not exactly inspiring a lot of confidence. Sam pinned him with an expectant look. "He told me to make a distraction."

"Alright." Folding the paper back up, he shoved it into his pocket as he stood, stretching his long legs. The room he was in was windowless – a proper interrogation room located in the interior of the building's layout – so they'd have to go out the door they came in. Which was currently locked from the outside and guarded by a bored kid probably new to the force. Sam had a couple of thoughts, but none of them particularly quiet or subtle. "Any ideas?"

Andy lifted his wrist, pulling back the cheap suit he was wearing to look at his way-too-big-for-his-wrist watch that Sam wondered if he'd stolen from the same place he got the briefcase and fake mustache. "Give it… twenty seconds."

Sam raised a brow, but Andy just grinned up at him. At exactly the twenty second mark – and Sam was counting silently in his head – there was a shout from outside, followed by a grunt and then what sounded like all Hell breaking loose. Andy winked at him with that same grin and walked over to the door just as it swung inward.

The officer on the other side was, oddly enough, holding the door open with one hand, the other slapped over his eyes like a kid playing hide-n-seek. Andy strolled past, one hand in his pocket, the other swinging his briefcase without a care in the world. Sam stared after him until the kid whistled for him and Sam tilted his head back to keep from rolling his eyes. With a sigh, the Winchester just shook his head and followed.

Right. Jedi.

Sam thought maybe it ought to be 'Sith Lord', given the chaos they walked into as soon as they rounded the corner into the main room. There were fights breaking out across the room, some between civilians, some between cops (Sam stared in wide-eyed horror at those), with other officers trying to break up the bouts fruitlessly. The weirdest part, though, was definitely the way that any cop they got near immediately turned their backs on the pair, a hand slapped over their eyes as they crossed paths.

Andy smiled, all innocence and sparkles, up at him. "I might have dropped a word here, and there…and maybe way over there, while they escorted me to your room."

Sam could only stand, shaking his head for a solid second, trying as hard as he could not to smile (the kid did not need any encouragement), before a stapler went flying over their heads. Both hunters ducked out of instinct. Sharing a look, the two decided they'd loitered long enough and took off quickly for the front doors, most officers too pre-occupied to notice them, a few of them ducking their gazes when they did.

-o-o-o-

Dean was a quarter of his way through a table-top out rendition of The Rolling Stones' Hot Rock album (side A, track four: '(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction', a true piece of Rock'n'Roll perfection, in his humble opinion), when he heard the fight break out. His first through was, 'What the hell?' followed by the realization that Andy might have taken his suggestions a little too much to heart. Which immediately got a smirk and an 'atta boy' out of him before Dean realized that, likely, this would call more attention to them than just letting Sam escape on his own.

Oh well. It's not like Winchesters ever caught a break when it came to winning. And he'd kill to see what was happening out in the station right now.

He rolled the thin, long strip of metal and the interior spring mechanism he'd swiped from Andy's pen between the palms of his hand, considering whether or not to pick the cuffs now or wait for that asshat detective to 'transfer' him in the middle of the woods at two in the friggin' morning. It was probably safer to wait, Dean thought. If he played his hand too early and they caught him out of his bracelets, he wouldn't get a second chance. Despite the confident front he'd pulled with the kid, last time had cut it way too close. Dean wasn't planning on letting things come down to the wire quite so tightly a second time.

Dean was just pocketing his borrowed lock-picks someplace the cops wouldn't look when the air across the room from him flickered. The hunter immediately went on guard, too used to that phenomenon not to spot it immediately for what it was. Ghost. Dean's hands slid into fists on the table top, painfully aware of the handcuffs and suddenly wishing he'd picked them after all. It happened again, the air shifted, blinked rapidly, before a woman was suddenly in the room with him. Her clothes ragged, blood dried on her chest and neck, throat slashed, and red eyes open wide, staring right at him.

Dean recognized her. The missing drug dealer. Pete's old flame and first murder.

Oh, yeah, and also their death omen.

"Oh shit," Dean muttered, eyes going wide as the ghost raised an arm, stumbling towards him, gargling through her split vocal cords. Fresh blood spilled down her chest as she tried to warn him of his impending doom at the hands of her own murderer.

Dean had time to pretty much think, 'Son of a bitch!' before the door burst open.

-o-o-o-

Peter Sheridan stormed into interrogation to a wide eyed Dean Winchester staring at the far wall like he'd just seen a ghost. But Sheridan didn't care about that. No, all he cared about was that this piece of shit, this asshole who knew a hell of a lot more than he should, had just facilitated his brother's escape. Pete didn't know how, but damn it, he knew he had. He knew it.

The detective hauled their murder suspect clear out of the chair, slamming him into the back wall. He didn't care that the interrogation table screeched across the floor, dragged by the chain securely attached to their dirtbag's cuffs. He hoped it hurt like hell.

Dean grunted against the hard wall, trying to raise his arms up to stop the cop practically choking him to death, but couldn't. The table kept his arms stretched out and down, bracelets biting into his skin and sure to leave one hell of a bruise.

He really should have picked those locks, damnit.

"You son of a bitch," the cop hissed in his face, spittle landing on Dean's skin. He turned his head away the best he could. "How'd you do it?"

"Do what?" Dean cracked one eye open to grin at the cop. Sure, yeah, there was a solid chance it was gonna get him killed, but Dean Winchester never could take a bullet lying down. Or, er, strangulation. "You lose something, Detective?"

The punch that landed wasn't wholly unexpected, but it still hurt like a bitch. Man might be a coward and a dirty cop, but he wasn't a pushover, apparently.

"Pete!" The lady cop's voice was practically a shriek in the room, and it stilled the murderous detective for a single moment. Dean could feel the hands fist and un-fist in the stupid B.P.D. sweatshirt Detective Ballard had given him at the start of this nightmare.

"He'd dirt, Diana. He killed Tony, Karen. And now he's helped his brother escape? We can't let him get away with that." Sheridan didn't look over at his partner, just kept his eyes locked on the fierce green staring right back at him. Unafraid. Pete gritted his teeth. He'd put the fear of God in those eyes before he was done with Dean Winchester.

"How, Pete?" Diana's words, frank and biting, finally caused the cop to look her way. Her chest was heaving, she'd clearly run after him, but her stance was firm. Her face…the turmoil there was evident, but so was determination. Damn her morality. "He never left this room. How'd he help Sam escape?"

"I don't know," Pete hissed, looking back at their prime suspect. The suspect he'd easily pin Karen and Tony's murders on, so long as he could keep the man quiet long enough. He pulled Dean off the wall and slammed him back again. "The lawyer. Something. But I know he did."

"You should really buy a guy dinner before you get rough with him," Dean mocked, that smug smirk still on his face. Would nothing wipe the damn thing off? Sheridan tightened his grip. He bet oxygen deprivation would. Winchester picked his head off the wall and leaned into the detective, like he could see the murderous intent clear on his face and thought to match it. "Or you gonna give me a pretty necklace before you brick me up in a wall, too, Pete?"

Sheridan clenched his teeth, fisted hands tightened in the sweatshirt, inching up towards his neck with obvious purpose.

"Peter!" Diana barked again, this time with more incredulity. She still hadn't clued into what her partner – lover, Dean's mind supplied for him again – was capable of.

"No one would know."

She stared, blinking in disbelief, at the man she shared her bed and her life with, currently pinning a suspect to the interrogation room wall with every intention to finish the job. "Are you kidding me right now?"

Pete didn't look at her, just glared up into the cold eyes of a guaranteed murderer. He was sure of it, even if he knew this guy hadn't murdered the Giles. Dean Winchester was a killer, of that Peter had no doubt.

"The precinct is in chaos, Diana! And he did it. Any one of them out there could have come in here and killed him." Peter's grip shifted, hand itching for his gun. "Hell, he could have done it to himself."

The silence that rang through the room was deafening, but no one moved. No one backed down. Over by the door, Diana's voice got quiet.

"Put him down. We have enough to charge him. Let's leave it at that and go get some air."

Sheridan's eyes shuttered at the command, calm and in control. He lowered his eyes from Dean's, eyeing his neck with a deep (and deeply disturbing) sigh. Then he was hauling Dean off the wall and shoving him back towards the table. The hunter didn't quite make it, hitting the surface and practically sprawling over it to stop from going down, knocking the meagre contents to the floor.

Pete barely looked at Diana as he left the room, a single glance her way that she couldn't read. Didn't want to read. Because that look was somehow disappointed that she hadn't let him… let him what? She shook her head. Jesus, what was happening? She really didn't want to know.

Diana bent down, picking up the notepad and pen that had scattered on the floor as their suspect managed to seat himself back in the chair, leaning over his legs to give the handcuffs some slack. He was rubbing at his wrists. They probably hurt like hell. She didn't bother saying anything to the man, about her partner's treatment of him or anything else. Diana didn't believe in killing a man in cold blood, but she did believe in the system that would take Dean Winchester down. She straightened up, notepad in hand, ready to toss it on the table and leave as well, when she glanced down at the scrawled writing. Diana froze.

Dana Shulps.

Right there, at the top of the page. Dana Shulps. And below it a bunch of nonsense. Words that didn't make any sense. But Diana couldn't shake that first name. That name that had appeared on her computer, all on its own, like some sort of…

Slowly, she turned to their prime suspect, setting the notepad on the table. Tapping it, she asked, "What is this?"

Dean looked up at her with one eye squinted, still rubbing at his wrists. Diana caught a flash of a bruise and frowned. That looked…the width of that bruise, the deep purple of it, didn't make sense. They looked deep – old and bad – but they definitely hadn't been there earlier.

Her perp straightened – sitting back with a look of annoyed defeat – and Diana shook herself out of it. This case, man. It felt like she was going crazy. Diana kept her eyes locked firmly on her prime suspect, ignoring his wrists and the damage Pete had done.

"Anagrams."

Diana's frown became pinched. "What?"

"An anagram." Dean sighed. "A word made from another word, with the letters all scrambled-"

"I know what an anagram is." The man raised his hands at her harried, aggravated tone and she bit back a sigh of her own. She tapped the notepad again. "Dana Shulps. That's the starting word? Where did you get it from?"

Dean eyed her, glancing at the paper her hand was spread over, and then back up. She could tell by his calculated pause he was about to lie to her. "Something Tony was working on. A clue, I guess. He didn't share it with me. But there's no Dana Shulps in any of his files so, I figured…"

He shrugged, and Diana finished his thought for him, "Maybe it's an anagram for something else."

Dean just shrugged again. "Why not. Tony's left me a lot worse before."

He was lying again, but that wasn't the part she really cared about at the moment. "Where did you see it, exactly?"

The man eyed her once again, like he was trying to suss out the same thing she was, only in reverse. "Printer. At the house and the office. It was everywhere. Hell, the damn thing was written on Tony's desk. Whatever it means, it shows up and dead bodies seem to follow."

Diana swallowed past the sudden spike in her throat. She drew her hand off the notepad and turned to leave. She was letting this man get to her.

"You saw it somewhere too, I take it, Detective?"

Diana paused, turning her chin into her shoulder, not quite looking at him, before she left the room. This time, she made sure the door was firmly locked and, for good measure, put an officer on the door with strict orders not to let anyone in.

-o-o-o-

The tap water was tepid, at best. What she needed was ice cold, but the precinct's pipes had always sucked. Never as hot as you wanted them in the winters, never as cold as you hoped for in the summers. Diana looked up at her reflection, water running down her face in rivulets. What she needed was a hot shower, a good cup of coffee, and a long night's sleep. With the circles under her eyes as dark as bruises and her hair having seen better days, she looked about as bad as she felt.

Water ran down her neck, disappearing below the v-shaped collar of her blouse. Diana stared at the clear trail left behind, before reaching up and tugging at the thin chain hanging around her neck. She pulled free the pendant at the end of the necklace. It was a beautiful, simple little thing Pete had given her that, in many ways, she cherished.

Handmade, one of a kind, over on Carson street, he'd said.

'You gonna give me a necklace before you brick me up in a wall, too, Pete?'

What had Dean meant by that?

Diana sighed, shook her head, and tucked the necklace back into her blouse. Dean must have seen it. But how could he have known Pete gave it to her? Had he seen them together? When? Pete wasn't the most discrete, she could admit, but…

She shook her head again. She was letting that man – a conman – get in her head and under her skin. It didn't matter. So, he was that good at being evil. Fine. She would just have to that much better at being good. Diana reached forward and turned the faucet off. She just had to shake this (whatever this was) and finish the job. Then Dean Winchester could rot in a jail cell and she could figure out everything else, with Pete and…well, just everything else, sometime after that.

The detective was reaching for a paper towel when the faucet beneath her turned back on, making her jump. She stared at the spout pouring water into the sink. Hot water. Very hot water; steam was rising from the porcelain basin. Diana eyed the faucet knobs, but they seemed to be in the off position. She reached out, trying to turn one, only for there to be no give.

What the hell?

Diana verbally gasped when two more faucets burst to life, and then another two, and another until the entire row of sinks was pouring water like damn Niagara Falls.

"What on earth-"

The steam started fogging up the mirrors. Diana stared at the cloudy surfaces, a true trill of fear running down her spine, as a squeegee, squeaking sound like someone dragging fingers down the wet mirror, was accompanied by letters starting to appear, one by one in the fog, with no one there to draw them.

D-A-N-A S-H-U-L

Diana tried to run for it, but the minute she turned, she was met by red eyes and gurgling blood.

-o-o-o-

Dean was not expecting the lady cop to make a second appearance so soon. Sure, he was pretty certain Diana was beginning to realize how fucked up her boyfriend was, but the hunter was also pretty sure he'd lost any common ground with her over the near forty-eight hours he'd been here. Of course, that wasn't entirely his fault, being assaulted by her dickhead boyfriend, having to facilitate Sam's escape, and accusing her partner (in more ways than one) of cold-blooded murder.

Given all that, he didn't think she'd come bursting into the interrogation room in a hurry. She did take the time to close the door behind her, locking out the armed guard standing just on the other side. Dean blinked at her frazzled expression, then sat up a hundred times straighter as the deer-in-headlights look registered. He knew that look.

"What happened? What did you see?"

Diana paused, taken back by his question, which was, apparently, the wrong thing to say. Dean saw the hesitation, the doubt, immediately triggered in her gaze, but she pushed through it. Instead of answering, Diana crossed the room to hover over the table. She crossed her arms, then immediately uncrossed one in order to point at his wrists, which hung between his knees, still chained.

"Those bruises. Where did you get them?"

Dean glanced down at his forearms and the ugly markings there, identical to Karen Giles'. Yup. Their death omen might be pretty damn useless, but she sure packed a punch, regardless. He looked back up at the detective, lips a thin smile. "You were here, lady. You saw your boyfriend manhandle me-"

"Handcuffs don't leave marks like that. They're thicker than that. Older too. Now where did you get them?"

Her brisk, sharp words wiped the smile right off his face. He scoffed, dropping his arms and leaning back in the chair, shoulders slumped and facade of nonchalant control back in place. "You wouldn't believe me if I told you."

Diana stared, unblinking and unnerving. Damn, she really was good, for a cop. Then, taking the hunter by surprise, she stuck her arm out, pulling up her sleeve to reveal identical bruises slapped across her own wrists. "Try me."

Dean sat up, staring at the marks he remembered seeing on the detective's skin once before. He sure as hell hadn't had a matching set at the time, but that was Time for you: a bitch.

"You saw her, didn't you?" He looked up at her, all the smirk and smugness long gone.

The detective's eyes wavered, but nothing else gave her away, and her tone, if anything, grew icier. "Saw who?"

Dean just huffed. "Red eyes, blonde hair, bleeding from the throat? That ringing any bells?"

Diana Ballard paled, and her pretty brown eyes finally darted away. She cleared her throat, lowering the sleeve of her suit to cover the marking. "That's not possible."

He spread his arms as much as he could while cuffed, as if to say, 'and yet.'

"You expect me to believe that woman was a… a what?" Diana laughed, but this was anything but funny. "A ghost?"

It sounded ridiculous just coming out of her mouth. But Dean wasn't laughing. He just stared at her, eyes as deadly serious as they had been when Pete had him up against the wall. Only less…hostile.

"You're serious- what? A ghost? Really." She crossed her arms. "Ghosts don't exist."

"And yet, you look exactly like someone who just saw one." Diana hardly looked amused by his quip. Dean tapped his heel against the leg of the chair and, with a one-shouldered shrug, amended, "It's a death omen, if you wanna talk technicalities."

If anything, she looked even less amused. Which, no, wasn't really possible. "A death omen."

"Yeah. They usually show up to warn others." Dean shrugged, but those intense green eyes never left hers. "In this case, she's following your buddy Pete around, warning all his next victims. Trying to stop the same thing that happened to her. So far, she's not been all that successful."

Clearly.

Diana turned away from him, most likely at the mounting evidence – no matter how unbelievable, it was quickly becoming less and less dismissible – that Pete was what this man said he was. This man, who was so obviously a conman. He had to be.

"This is insane," she muttered under her breath, reaching up to rub at her temple but ending up so much closer to clutching her hair.

"I know," Dean said aloud, though there was no way he could have heard her. "You think you're going crazy. But let's skip that part, yeah? Because this thing doesn't show up without a reason. So let's go to the next step, where we keep you alive."

Diana leveled a glare – a terrified glare, but still a glare – on him. "You can't honestly think Pete is going to try and kill me."

"You tell me. You're the one who just told the guy 'no' after he showed his hand on the whole, 'let's kill a suspect in cold blood' thing. How do you think good old, calm, anger-management Pete is gonna take that?"

Dean stared at her as he spoke, daring her to counter what he could already tell she knew. And she did know. That look Pete had given her on his way out… Diana shivered and turned partially away from the man, trying to hide how clearly unsettled she was.

"I thought you said you were a PI," was what she eventually threw out, and while it may not have been the most subtle change of topic, Dean let her have it.

"Yeah…I'm really more like a Ghostbuster."

Diana huffed, shaking her head from her slightly turned away position, still not quite looking at him. She stared at the floor for a good thirty seconds, Dean just biding his time while he let the sane woman contemplate the insane, before she finally turned fully towards him, a decision clearly made. Her shoulders were squared, her chin was up, and that decent (and probably actually good at her job) cop was back in the room with them.

"Why should I believe any of this, huh?" She tossed an arm out to the side before it landed on her hip, hiking up her blazer. "You're a conman. All of this? You could just be playing me."

Which wasn't exactly something he could deny. He could be. He wasn't, at least not at the moment, but that didn't mean he hadn't in the last forty-eight hours spent with her. So he just shrugged and went for broke in the good old honesty category.

"Sure, but you're a cop. Trust your gut, not me." The look she leveled his way wasn't a kind one, but he also knew when he'd won someone over, and he'd finally won Detective Ballard to his side of crazy. Which meant it was time to go for broke. "Out of curiosity, what did your gut say about Sam?"

The sigh that left her chest was the world-weary, what-have-I-just-agreed-to kind that Dean knew only too well. Diana dropped her hand from her hip and ran it through her hair. "Other than that he was your brother before we had your name?" She sent a look his way that dared him to challenge her, but he just smiled the kind of smile that teenage kids sent their parents in emoji form when they'd broken the family heirloom vase. Not that Dean would know anything about that. She rolled her eyes. "Why?"

Dean thought about it for another, maybe, half a second. If that. He weirdly liked this lady, after all, poor choice in men aside. "Go to the first motel listed in the Yellow Pages. Look for Jim Rockford."

The detective's sharp eyes snapped to his, widening as they realized what he was offering. "You're giving your brother up."

Shrugging was pretty much the only damn thing one could do while handcuffed to a table, but Dean was getting pretty tired of it. "Look, you can arrest him if you want, or you can help him solve this case and, maybe," he raised his hands here, waving identically bruised wrists in the air, "we both get out of this with no more visits from a death omen."

Diana stared at him just long enough to let out another one of those sighs.

-o-o-o-

When Peter Sheridan came out of the washroom after a prolonged stare into the mirror, a good slap to the face, and a reminder that he could handle this, he'd handled it before, it was to the sight of his partner walking out of the precinct. Only, he knew Diana. That was her hurried, urgent-but-trying-not-to-make-a-scene walk that really wanted to be a run. Pete's eyes narrowed as he turned his head back the way she'd come, from the hallway that led to interrogation.

Something ugly pooled in his stomach. On anyone else it might have been dread. On Peter Sheridan, it was just anger. He took off at his own decent pace towards Dean Winchester's room – determined to finish this once and for all – but drew up short as he rounded the corner to an armed officer standing guard outside the door.

"Damnit, Diana," he hissed between clenched teeth as he spun back around and headed the same way his partner had gone. That Dean kid had gotten to her and now he was going to have to kill her too.

By the time he made it to the parking lot, she was already pulling onto the street in her dark blue sedan. Sheridan swore, turning in a circle, fingers curling into fists with the urge to hit something. He grabbed at his hair, loosened his tie. This was falling apart, damnit!

Okay, think. Peter took a deep breath, smoothed out his tie, cracked his neck, and knew what he had to do. He didn't know how the hell Dean Winchester knew what he did – if he even knew what he did or was just a damn clever con – but if it was true, than he had to destroy the evidence.

He had to get to the old supply store on Ashland and burn it to the ground before anyone discovered Claire Becker's body.

-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-

A/Ns: My internal thoughts while writing this chapter? "Four chapters. This friggin' episode is gonna take four chapters. Good god Gertrude, whyyyyyyyy?"

Non-Linear Story Choice: Lemme know if the bit at the start of this chapter - the fight breaking out and Sam being found gone, and then jumping back to Andy walking in to talk to Sam - was at all confusing. I don't usually write that way, but I had some struggles with order this chapter. I will swap it around for future readers if it just isn't working out.

Reviews: Folks on AO3! Make it happen and I'll get you that next chapter ;) Everyone else after those four reviews, plus the peeps at ff dot net: I would still really love to hear from you :D