Supernatural--Cold Fire (14 page)

“You know what happened to Cass?” Dean asked Sam.

“No,” Sam said, opening his laptop on the small table by the window in their shabby budget motel room, its only redeeming feature—well two if you counted the free WiFi—being the framed photos of classic muscle cars on the wall facing the twin beds. A cherry red ’67 Pontiac GTO and cobalt blue ’70 Plymouth Hemi ’Cuda.

“Another wild goose chase?”

“Dean, I don’t know.”

“One minute he’s right behind me. The next he’s off into the wild blue yonder.”

“You could call him.”

“I’m good,” Dean said, settling back on his bed, doubling his pillow to stare comfortably at the far wall. Those cars were sweet, but no competition for Baby. Still, better than gazing at another vase of impressionistic flowers or landscapes of apocalyptically vacant beaches.

Once they’d returned to their motel room, their first order of business was ditching the Fed suits for more comfortable attire. Dean had picked the nearest bed and plopped down on it, hands interlaced behind his head, lamenting the poor quality of the mattress and the strange odor permeating their room. “Dude, I miss my bunker bedroom.”

“Maybe get that on a tattoo,” Sam had suggested sarcastically.

They had lived on the road for most of their lives, interrupted by brief periods of what passed for normalcy. All the crappy motel rooms had become anonymous pit stops along the way, with one fading into the next. When that’s all you know, that’s all you expect. But the bunker had changed their expectations, giving them a home of sorts. It represented downtime, but it also represented a standard of living no grimy motel clinging to an interstate highway exit could match. But maybe that was the point. The road kept them from becoming soft and complacent. For hunters, the road meant war and battle. So maybe it was best they find no comfort there.

“Could be a ghoul,” Dean speculated while Sam poked around the Web on his laptop. “Or a rakshasa or a rugaru. Hell, maybe a wendigo. All flesh eaters.”

“I don’t know,” Sam said absently.

“Victims still had their hearts and brains, so we can rule out werewolves and wraiths. And rawheads go for kids.”

“Interesting,” Sam said from across the room from behind his laptop.

“Aidan was eighteen,” Dean replied, pushing himself up on his elbows. “Not technically a kid anymore. And Holcomb? Definitely not a kid.”

“No, this local news article,” Sam said, pointing at the screen, though it was directed away from Dean. “Traffic accident.”

“Traffic accident?” Dean asked, perplexed. “Unless it involves a hook hanging from a door handle, how does that concern us?”

“Elijah Green,” Sam said, skimming the article again to read the salient facts aloud. “Pharmaceutical sales rep, returning home to Braden Heights from Evansville, crossed into oncoming traffic, head on collision with a semi.”

“Let me guess,” Dean said. “Didn’t end well for Big Pharma.”

“Not at all,” Sam said, shaking his head. “Killed on impact. Apparently he was rushing home to witness the birth of his daughter.”

“Tragic on two or three levels,” Dean said. “But unless this is some sort of
Maximum Overdrive
situation, what’s the angle?”

“Green suffered head trauma,” Sam said. “The details are a bit vague here, but from a comment the trucker made to the press, it sounds like both of Green’s eyes were destroyed.”

Dean sat up. “Faulty airbags?”

Sam shook his head.

“What about the rest of him? Insides still inside?”

“Doesn’t say. But guess who was at the scene?”

“Cordero?”

“Sands,” Sam said. “Captain Jaime Sands.”

“The Green file!” Dean said, remembering their brief introduction. “Thought she was referring to color coding or a recycling report.”

He sat up and flipped between the two business cards he’d set on the bedside table in front of the digital clock radio, settling on the Sands card. He took out his phone to dial her number but the phone rang before he entered the first digit. He checked the caller ID.

“Cass,” he told Sam before answering the call. Instead of a greeting, he said, “What happened?”

“Dean,” Castiel said. “I interviewed Aidan’s parents.” After a moment, he added, “Were you expecting something else?”

Like another magical mystery tour that led nowhere?
Dean thought.
No, not at all.
“No,” he lied. “Another dead end, right?”

“Something,” Castiel said. “Maybe only a coincidence.”

“Tell me.”

Castiel explained how Donald Dufford had recently been terminated by Vargus just as Holcomb was scheduled to start.

“So Vargus links one victim to the father of the other victim,” Dean said. “I don’t know.”

“It’s a stretch,” Castiel admitted.

“It’s something, anyway,” Dean said. As leads went, it wasn’t much, but it was more than they had an hour ago. “Sam also found something. Possible third victim.” He told Castiel about the Green accident. “I’ll talk to Sands. BHPD may have withheld some details from the press.”

“Where are you?”

“Oh, that’s right,” Dean said, remembering Castiel hadn’t been with them when they checked into the latest fleabag special. “Look for the Blue Castle Lodge on Front Street.”

“That name is indecisive,” Castiel said.

“Nobody will mistake this place for a castle,” Dean said, “but there’s a picture of one on the sign out front.”

After ending the call, Dean dialed the cell phone number on the business card he still held and waited three rings for her to pick up.

“Captain Sands.”

“Captain, this is Special Agent Banks.”

“What can I do for you?”

“What can you tell me about the fatal accident involving Elijah Green?”

“Green? But that’s—never mind,” she said. “His wife had gone into labor with their first child. He was speeding to get home in time for the birth. He drifted into oncoming traffic. Hit a semi head on. Killed instantly. Car totaled. Driver of the truck was treated at the scene and released after declining hospitalization.”

“What about Green’s body?” Dean asked. “From the witness account, he lost his eyes. Was he disemboweled?”

“Disemboweled? No, of course not,” Sands said. “But the eyes… yeah, that was odd.”

“How so?”

“Some of these highway fatalities are gruesome, to say the least, especially on interstate; at those speeds decapitation is not uncommon. But with Green’s eyes, whatever caused that damage, well, we were unable to tie it to anything specific in the wreckage. And he was the lone occupant of the vehicle. But I remember thinking at the time…”

“What?”

“Keep in mind,” she said, “this is not something I put in the official report. Too ‘out there,’ if you know what I mean.”

“Unofficially, then,” Dean encouraged.

She sighed in resignation, obviously concerned she might be putting her professional reputation on the line by engaging in this type of speculation. “Unofficially—judging by some of the lacerations on his face—I had the impression that something gouged out his eyes before the crash.”

Before they began, Jesse Vetter had been meticulous about covering every inch of the nursery’s hardwood floor and baseboards with drop cloths, secured with two rolls’ worth of masking tape. He’d bordered the windows and the doorframe with more tape and tossed another drop cloth over the door itself. Forbidding Olivia to lift a finger, he’d moved all the furniture to the center of the room, with a third translucent drop cloth tossed over the crib and fish mobile, dresser, changing table, standing lamp, and wooden rocking chair, commenting that the whole mass looked like the world’s most ungainly ghost. Only then had they begun to paint the room in aquatic, gender neutral colors, banishing from existence its humdrum off-white walls.

“Really, Olivia,” he’d said before they began, “where’s the mental stimulation for an infant staring into a white void all day?”

Olivia had shrugged, smiling as she played along. With the palm of one hand on the eight-month swell of her abdomen, she’d said, “Maybe the baby will achieve a Zen state.”

“No!” Jesse said. “Who wants a blank slate Zen baby? That’s creepy. There’s a reason chalkboards come with chalk.”

“They use Smart Boards these days.”

“As long as she—
or he
—finishes school before they decide to implant telepathic gizmos in students’ brains, I’m fine with any kind of board.”

For the messy occasion, she’d tied a scarf over her shoulder-length black hair and dressed in distressed denim maternity bib overalls over a roomy white cotton shirt, both of which she’d picked up for a song at a local thrift shop.

Rather than putting on some clothing well past its prime, Jesse had purchased a white cap and painter coveralls from the hardware store. Olivia had ribbed him mercilessly, calling him the Good Humor man and every so often asking for her Chocolate Eclair or King Cone.

“Is this too blue?” Jesse asked. Two days ago they had painted the base layer the lightest color, Pale Water, from floor to ceiling. The day before they had painted the next darkest color, Pale Adam Jade, in a wave pattern halfway up the wall. But now, for the deepest, and lowest wave, the green verged on blue.

“It’s fine, Jesse,” Olivia said.

“Hard to call it gender neutral if you do blue.”

“I see green,” Olivia assured him.

“If you do blue,” he said, “you have to do pink to cancel it out or be inclusive or something. What do you think about a rainbow on the far wall? Too much?”

“Don’t know if it’s too much,” Olivia said, “but believe me, you don’t want me trying to paint seven side-by-side arcs.”

“Seven?”

“Roy G. Biv,” Olivia said, referring to the mnemonic device. Then in a sing-song voice, “Red, orange, yellow—”

“I know what it stands for,” Jesse interrupted. “We don’t need to be all literal and scientific about it. Three or four colors should be enough.”

“Ah, so you would stimulate this infant’s mind with misinformation, Mr. Vetter.”

“Don’t make me splatter you, Ms. Krum,” Jesse said, waving a loaded paintbrush in front of her face.

“Don’t splat,” she said, hands raised, laughing. “I surrender!”

Smiling, Jesse lowered the paintbrush to the edge of the paint can and, after a moment, his face took on a serious cast. “Other than your paint-speckled nose,” he said, “any regrets?”

With a thumb, she rubbed the edge of her nose and examined the green smear before wiping it on the sheets of newspaper under the paint can. She patted her large abdomen. “Not much I can do about it now.”

Frowning, he asked, “Seriously?”

“I’m kidding,” she said. “Seriously. No regrets.”

They heard footfalls on the stairs outside the nursery.

“You’re both great guys,” she said as Brandon Perreault ducked in through the doorway, tucking in his elbows to avoid getting paint on his pinstriped business suit. “I’ve known you my whole life. You’ll make wonderful fathers.”

Brandon examined the nearly complete paint job, nodding to indicate his appreciation. “Looking good. Sorry I’m late.”

“No, you’re not,” Jesse replied, threatening to flick the still loaded wet paintbrush at his husband’s expensive suit. “You hate painting.”

“That’s not entirely false,” Brandon admitted. “But I have other talents. I can cook dinner.” He looked specifically at Olivia. “Or pick something up, if you’d rather…?”

“Yes!” she said. “Been craving Chinese all day.”

“Liv!” Jesse said. “You should have said something.”

“There was work to do,” she said. “I’m not a shirker.”

“Unlike Brandon here.”

“Hey, it’s not like I was feeding pigeons in the park all day.”

“Why are you still standing there, B?” Jesse asked. “Get back in your car and get the food!”

“Right,” Brandon said, turning to Olivia again. “The usual?”

“No,” she said. “I waited too long.” She pursed her lips. “Maybe a little bit of everything? I’m starving!”

“Yes, ma’am,” Brandon said, executing a playful salute. “Anything surrogate mother wants, surrogate mother shall have.”

* * *

Brandon refused to admit to Jesse or Olivia that he had hung around the office later than strictly necessary to finish his work. He’d worked up a to-do list for the next day and completed a few other low-priority tasks, checked on some preliminary vendor bids even though the deadline was two weeks away, because he never joked about disliking painting. He hated getting paint in his hair, under his fingernails or on his clothes, even if they were old or ripped and he intended to toss them in the trash immediately after painting. He hated the anxiety of having wet paint on his person, to be smeared on anything and everything he might bump into or squeeze past.

That was the one area of baby-prep where he fell short of full participation. He’d helped buy and assemble the nursery furniture and he’d gone through endless paint swatches and samples to help pick the final colors with Jesse, but the actual painting, no thanks! He’d rather pay a handyman to do that dirty work. But if Olivia and Jesse for some reason wanted to take on that job, they were more than welcome to it.

He’d play errand boy and pick up the food and clean up afterward. He’d even help clean the nursery, as long as it could wait until after the paint splashed on the tarps and masking tape had completely dried. The idea of peeling off paint-wet tape and rolling up drop cloths with glistening gobs of the stuff ready to soil anything in the vicinity was almost worse than the idea of painting itself.