“Untouched,” Castiel said. “The intruder targeted only the baby.”
“At least until she was interrupted,” Sam said.
Good point, Dean thought. Who knows what she would have done if the nurse hadn’t interrupted her—doing what?—with the baby? They had no idea what the neck connection meant, for the baby or the intruder. A mental link? A transfer of… something? A feeding?
“How’s the baby now?”
“Fine, according to Dr. Hartwell,” Castiel said. “The baby was more upset by the nurse’s scream than by anything else that happened that night. Hartwell’s requested some lab work.”
“All right, Cass,” Dean said. “We’ll catch you up later.”
Dean ended the call and they walked into the living room where Sally sat with her brother Ramon and her grandmother, looking at them expectantly. He launched into a rundown on what Keating had told him about five missing pregnant women from the early sixties, back when Braden Heights was called Larkin’s Korner.
“That’s it,” Mary said, attempting to snap her fingers, but then merely shook her hand up and down for emphasis, index finger pointed at Sam. “The name of the town I couldn’t remember.”
“No wonder you couldn’t find it on a map, Grandma Mary,” Ramon said. “It no longer exists!”
“Larkin’s Korner is Braden Heights now,” Sally said, letting the revelation sink in.
“Where your great grandaunt Malaya moved with her American G.I., and also where she died in childbirth.”
“So Malaya died here,” Sally said and shivered. “In this town.”
“I don’t know the exact address,” the old woman said. She looked up at Sam. “But it must have been close, right?”
Sam nodded. “Braden Heights isn’t that big.”
“This Malaya,” Dean asked the old woman, recalling the beginning of Arthur Keating’s story about the Larkin family leaving in disgrace. “Any chance she married a doctor? Name of Nodd?”
“Dr. Calvin Nodd,” Mary said, surprised. “How did you know?”
“She married into a prominent family, owned a lot of land here,” Dean said. “Nodd’s mother was a Ruth Larkin. The town was named after the Larkin family. The heirs have been selling off the last of the lots.”
“Where are they?” Sam asked.
“They pulled up stakes, headed for Europe, haven’t been seen around here since,” Dean said. “After Nodd’s daughter skipped town, the not-so-good doctor snapped. Psychotic break. PTSD. Something. Nearly killed a patient during childbirth.”
“Calvin did this?” Mary asked, stunned. “I never knew. After Malaya died we lost touch with him. Except for the few pictures of Riza he sent us before she ran away. After that, nothing. We wrote him, but received no answer. We respected his silence, to grieve in his own way. Sadly, with Malaya and Riza gone, nothing remained to connect us… except painful memories.” Remorseful, she shook her head. “Maybe we should have tried harder to reach out to him.”
“What happened to Nodd?” Sam asked Dean.
“Larkin family bought off the witnesses,” Dean said. “He never stood trial. Bolted. Never heard from again.”
“Lot of that going around,” Sam mused.
Distracted during the conversation between the Winchesters and Mary, Sally became more agitated, lost in disturbing thoughts and connections. “If Malaya died here… and now Dave, over fifty years later.” Her face grew taut in dawning horror, at the unlikelihood of mere coincidence. She looked down at her hands, both shaking uncontrollably, and pressed them to her chest. Ramon put his arm around her shoulder in an attempt to comfort her. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
Rising from her seat, her grandmother said, “Let me make you some tea, dear.”
Sally said softly, “I need a shot of whiskey.”
“Not in your condition, Dalisay!”
Sally gasped and dropped her hands to her lower abdomen, as if somehow, in all the revelations about Malaya’s death and the runaway pregnant women, she’d forgotten she herself was pregnant. And maybe she had. But considering what had come to light, the fact that she was expecting had taken on a sinister aspect.
She looked at the Winchesters, her eyes darting feverishly back and forth between them. “Somebody please tell me what the hell is going on!”
“We don’t know—yet,” Sam said.
“But we’re working on it,” Dean assured her.
Hard to believe Malaya’s death during childbirth and the five young missing pregnant women from the early sixties—six if you counted Riza herself—were not somehow connected to what was happening in Braden Heights today. But what was the connection? Malaya’s death had resulted from hemorrhaging, an apparent accidental death during a common medical procedure. And the missing women had run off to escape their circumstances during a local recession. Everything up to that point, Dean could rationalize. But none of those missing women were heard from again, as if they’d dropped off the face of the earth. And the first Braden Heights murder occurred when the Holcombs came to town, more specifically when Sally Holcomb arrived. And Sally had a familial connection to the Larkin family, which had practically owned the town when Malaya died and those women went missing.
Dean’s cell phone rang. “Cordero,” he told Sam after checking the display. “Agent Banks.”
“Thought you’d want to know,” Cordero said. “We got another one.”
“Another murder?” Dean said, looking to Sam, who only heard his side of the conversation. “Same M.O.?”
“Somewhat,” Cordero said. “Opposite Green situation. Gutted, but kept his eyes. And apparently this vic fought back. Not that it helped.”
Dean took down the address. “On our way.”
TWENTY-FIVE
While Dean drove the Impala to the Barrows address, Sam called Castiel to give him the latest development. The angel’s gold Lincoln arrived less than two minutes after Dean parked the Impala several houses away from the crime scene. The BHPD had cordoned off nearly half the suburban block with a combination of police cruisers and yellow crime scene tape. Patrol officers checked IDs of residents before allowing them to pass through, while turning away random gawkers out for a closer look. But no one left. They merely gathered beyond the taped border, each asking and answering questions, with facts in short supply. Everyone seemed to agree that somebody had fallen out a second-story window. Comments from neighbors standing with bystanders supplied the victim’s name in short order.
Dean flashed his FBI ID at the nearest patrol officer guarding the perimeter and was waved through, along with Sam and Castiel. Several steps inside the police line, Dean heard a woman whispering behind him, unnaturally close, her words unintelligible. Unnerved, he looked over his shoulder but saw only the people gathering at the police tape. Dismissing the odd sound, he looked away and caught movement at the periphery of his vision, a woman in a red dress walking briskly on the far side of the street. Briefly, she turned toward him, and his jaw dropped in recognition.
“Lisa?”
“Dean?” Sam said, stopping beside him.
“Hold on,” Dean said, raising a hand to stop his brother or Castiel from following him as he strode across the street to investigate. He could’ve sworn he’d seen Lisa Braeden, but he’d looked away for a moment and lost track of her. Why would she be here? Dean wondered. She lived in Indiana, but Cicero was nearly two hundred miles away. And she wouldn’t be looking for him. Even if Castiel hadn’t wiped her memories of Dean at his request, she’d have no way of knowing he’d come to Braden Heights.
He caught a flash of dark movement shifting behind the trunk of a red maple, the roots of which had raised two sections of sidewalk into an inverted V, and he veered toward the tree. A moment later, he caught himself nervously rubbing his right forearm, where he bore the Mark. Stepping over the curb, he glanced around the tree, expecting to see someone who resembled Lisa rather than Lisa herself, but no one was there. A lost-dog flyer stapled to the tree tr
unk flapped in the breeze and for a second Dean imagined it sounded like a whispering voice. Had the whole episode been a vision triggered by the Mark? Best to put it out of his mind. He was in control. Not the other way around. Shaking his head, he returned to the others.
Sam looked around, checking no one was within earshot. “Dean? What was that all about?”
“Nothing,” Dean replied dismissively, making sure his left hand didn’t stray again to the Mark. Sam already worried too much about the Mark’s effect on him. No need to feed that fire. And that meant no mention of hallucinating Lisa. “Thought I saw… someone sneaking around.”
“And?”
“Maybe a witness,” Dean explained, spreading his arms. “Lost her. Probably a curious neighbor. Ducked inside her house when she saw me coming.”
Sam seemed unconvinced by Dean’s explanation, but Dean ignored the lingering doubt in his brother’s gaze, and resumed his path to the crime scene.
Due to limited parking, several emergency vehicles clogged the street at various angles, some obstructing driveways, others double-parked. The trio weaved their way through police cruisers, the medical examiner’s SUV, a black crime scene unit van and a white EMT van, parked closest to the Barrows residence.
At the front door, Assistant Chief Cordero talked to a sobbing woman in her mid to late thirties. An older woman holding a crying infant stood on her right, an older man to her left. The wife’s parents, Dean guessed, based on the resemblance between the two women.
Looking up, Dean saw bright yellow curtains fluttering through a shattered window. He noticed a few splashes of red, equally bright, on the flapping material. Beneath the window, on the sidewalk below, four police officers stood in a loose circle, intentionally obstructing the view of a supine corpse lying in a pool of congealing blood.
Within the ring of cops, the medical examiner—who’d been squatting next to the body—stood up with a grunt of discomfort and tugged off a pair of blue latex gloves, signaling the end of his official on-scene examination of the body.
Once again, Dean flashed his fake ID, this time to the cop with a military style crew-cut standing nearest the remains of Kevin Barrows. The man nodded, raising no objection when Dean, Sam and Castiel moved forward to examine the body.
Two pools of blood formed a grim solid figure eight under the corpse, the top half by the head, where the skull had split open on impact, and another larger circle around the abdomen which had been ripped open, through shredded clothes, to reveal the slashed devastation of the man’s liver, stomach and intestines. Besides the intact eyes, which seemed to stare at everything and nothing at once, something else seemed at odds with the other victims Dean had examined. Breathing through his mouth to avoid the stench of human fecal matter, Dean leaned forward. “This is different.”
“You noticed, huh?” Dr. Trumble, the medical examiner said, impressed.
“Abandoned your animal attack theory?”
“Not at all,” Trumble said, annoyed once again. “Clearly these slash marks were inflicted by animal claws. The difference you’ve noticed is the organs.”
Sam leaned forward, wrinkling his nose as he caught a whiff from the perforated bowel. “They’re slashed too.”
“They’re present,” Castiel said. “All the organs. And intestines.”
“Give the man a prize,” Trumble said. “Apparently, the fall from the second-story window frightened the animal enough that it ran off without consuming any of the exposed flesh or organs.” He leaned over, pointing. “Note the transverse colon. Pulled completely out of the abdominal cavity, yet despite significant trauma, there are no bite marks or missing pieces.” He chuckled and, with a bit of gallows humor, said, “Consummatio interruptus, you might say.”
“Pretty sure none of us would say that, Doc,” Dean replied.
Castiel glanced up at the sobbing wife and crying infant then looked back at Trumble. “I find nothing about this situation amusing.”
With a dismissive wave before he walked away from them, the medical examiner said, “Give it time, agent man. Give it time.”
Trumble signaled for one of the EMTs hovering nearby. Turning his back to the Barrows widow, he instructed the young man to fetch a body bag and a gurney to take the corpse to the morgue. With the help of a female EMT, the first one wheeled the gurney from their van to a position beside the body. The widow looked on in shock, her eyes impossibly wide as she pressed a hand to her mouth. She shook her head, turned and retreated into the house. Her mother said something to Cordero before following her daughter inside. The wife’s father rubbed his grizzled jaw as he stared across the street without seeming to focus on anything in particular. Dean thought maybe the older man needed to look anywhere but at the body the EMTs were settling into the unzipped body bag.
Sam had stood with his back to the corpse, but glanced down at the sound of the zipper sealing the ravaged remains of Kevin Barrows inside. The EMTs gripped the bag by its side straps and, on the count of three, transferred it to the lowered gurney.
“We need to find out what the wife knows,” Sam said and strode toward the front door.
Dean and Castiel followed in his wake.
* * *
Sam listened as Cordero briefed him on Melissa Barrows’ account of the attack, but was determined to talk to the woman himself. Though she was in a fragile state at the moment, he needed to question her while her memory of the incident was fresh. Unfortunately, that meant the emotions were still raw. But any little detail might give them the clue they needed to stop the attacker. He had to focus on that for now.
Melissa had retreated into the kitchen, staring out the window at the backyard while her mother stood nearby holding baby Noelle, who had stopped crying but fidgeted in the older woman’s arms.
Dean and Castiel had followed him inside the house but hung back beyond the archway into the kitchen, giving both women some space.
Sam stepped forward. “Mrs. Barrows, I’m Special Agent Rutherford, with the FBI,” he said. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
Without turning to face him, she plucked several tissues from a cardboard box on the table and dabbed her eyes with them. She nodded slightly and said softly, “Thank you.”
“I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
Her mother heaved a frustrated sigh. “Everyone has a thousand questions,” she said. “My daughter just lost her husband! Can’t you see she’s grieving?”
“I know, ma’am,” Sam said. “But we’re trying to catch whoever did this.”
“Well, look around,” she said bitterly. “He’s certainly not here!”
“She,” Melissa Barrows said softly. “The attacker was a woman.”
“Mrs. Barrows?” Sam said, edging around the table in an attempt to make eye contact. “I was told you didn’t see the attacker.”
“No.”
“You heard her, then?”
“No,” Melissa said, sniffling. She swiped at her nose, as if she were annoyed at herself. “Static.”
Confused, Sam canted his head. Though convinced she had information he needed, he had to tread lightly. She’d suffered a devastating loss and might shut him down at any moment if the situation became overwhelming for her. “You heard static?”
“On the baby monitor,” she said. “After Kevin went up to the nursery. I had put Noelle down, finally gotten her to sleep. I was exhausted. And it was his turn, when we heard her. Wasn’t much… just a little cry.” She held her thumb and index finger an inch apart as a way of indicating brevity. “But we worried about every little thing. Double-checked and triple-checked. We obsessed about her safety because it took so long to bring her into our lives. One of us had to check, don’t you see?” She fought a sob, pressing the wad of tissues to her mouth. “It could have been me,” she said. “Then maybe Kevin would… would still be here.”
“You don’t know that, Melissa,” her mother said. “He—she could have come after him next. Kevin sacrificed himself to save y
ou and this precious little girl.”
“I know… I know he did,” Melissa said. “I called the police but they… it was over before they got here.”
“You heard Noelle cry on the baby monitor and Kevin went up to investigate?”
Melissa nodded. “But once he entered the nursery, the monitor… the sounds changed. Filled with static. I heard him yell and then lots of static.”
“If you didn’t hear her or see her upstairs or after—the fall,” Sam said, “how do you know it was a woman?”
“Because, when Kevin yelled, he said, ‘Get away from her, you freaky bitch!’” She finally turned around to stare at Sam, clutching the back of the nearest kitchen chair for support, almost as if she dared him to dispute her conclusion. “Would he say something like that if it wasn’t a woman?”
“No,” Sam said, but thought it only proved that Kevin believed it was a woman. Appearances, especially in a hunter’s line of work, could be deceiving. “Did you hear him say anything else?”
“Not really,” she said. “With all the static, I could hear him better from the stairwell, telling me to call the police. He fought with her… Kevin wasn’t a small man. He played college football. But she… she slammed him into the wall—so hard the house shook. And she never made a sound.”
“Do you have any idea how this woman could have gotten into your home?”
Melissa shook her head. “We were home all day,” she said. “With a newborn, we don’t get out much. I never saw any sign of an intruder.”
“You need to find this woman before she tries to steal another baby,” Melissa’s mother said. “Whoever she is, she’s a menace. And a murderer.”
“Why do you think she came to steal the child?” Castiel asked.
The woman startled, as if she’d forgotten Dean and Castiel stood a few feet away.
“Isn’t it obvious?” she said. “Kevin didn’t find her rooting through a jewelry box or looking for a wall safe. She was sneaking around in the damn nursery.”
Supernatural--Cold Fire Page 17