SPN fic: Revelations 4/6 (Gen, PG-13)
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
"He's claiming self-defense," Detective Gilroy said, "and the stepmother backs him up. The neighboring houses are too far away for anyone to have heard anything, so right now their story is the only story we've got." He did not sound especially pleased with this state of affairs.
"So what story is that?" Victor asked.
Gilroy stared broodingly into the oversized ceramic mug that he'd been gulping steaming coffee from when Victor and Winchester had arrived. The mug said "World's greatest Dad!" on it in bold, primary-colored letters.
"The story is," he said in a weary voice, "Jim Miller stormed out of the house a few minutes after you guys got done talking to him. He came back a few hours later, drunk as the proverbial skunk, and started whaling on his son, which apparently is a long-standing habit with him. Alice Miller made herself scarce in the upstairs bedroom, which seems to be a long-standing habit with her, and stayed there for about twenty minutes, until the noise downstairs stopped. Then she came down to find Miller on the kitchen floor with his throat slit and Max rocking in a corner. She called 911. Max was still sitting there rocking when the first squad car showed up."
"Jesus Christ," Winchester muttered.
He looked as if he really wanted to punch somebody. Victor couldn't really blame him. Federal agents didn't deal with a lot of domestic violence as a rule, but Victor retained a vivid recollection of one of his early cases, when a supposedly kidnapped twelve-year-old turned out to have been beaten to death by his stepfather. He remembered exactly what it had felt like when he'd first followed the evidence to its logical conclusion, the sour taste in his mouth and the dull ache in his chest. The ugliness of the case had stuck with him for weeks afterwards, and was probably the final straw in the destruction of his second marriage. He'd grown a thicker skin since then, but not so thick that he couldn't empathize with Winchester's reaction.
Still, empathy or no empathy, they had a case to focus on. And something about Gilroy's manner hinted that there was more to the story.
"So do you believe it?" Victor asked.
Gilroy grimaced as if the question pained him. "Some of it. Most of it, maybe. Max sure as hell took a beating from somebody, and his father's the most likely candidate. I've put in a request for Max's medical records, to see if he has a history of injuries that would point to abuse, but it'll probably take a couple of days for the paperwork to come in. Anyway, that part I buy."
"So which part don't you buy?"
"Take a look." Gilroy rotated the computer monitor on his desk so that Victor and Winchester could see the screen. It displayed, in high resolution and gory color, a photo of Jim Miller lying dead in his own kitchen, head lolled sideways in a still-wet puddle of blood. The deep, wide gash across his throat was clearly visible. "According to Max, he tried to get away and Miller rushed him. Max grabbed a kitchen knife from the counter, struck out in self-defense, and this happened."
"Huh," Victor said.
Gilroy nodded. "Yeah, that's exactly what I said. Huh."
"I'm sure it's very meaningful to both of you," Winchester said irritably, "but how about sharing with the rest of the class?"
Three or four days ago, Victor might've been annoyed by that. But by now he'd spent enough time in close quarters with the kid to know that "Winchester is feeling upset" and "Winchester is acting like an asshole" were more or less equivalent statements, so he simply leaned forward and tapped his finger against the screen
"Take a look at this wound. His throat's sliced wide open, practically ear to ear. Now I may not be the world's biggest expert on knife wounds, but I've seen enough to know that a guy striking out the way Max says he did is a hell of a lot more likely to stab than to slice. And even if he did slice, no way he would've put enough force behind it to cut that deep. A wound like that? Doesn't happen by accident."
"That's what I thought too," Gilroy said. "But wait. It gets weirder. You cut the artery like that, you get a big spray of blood. If you're standing in front of the victim, you're going to get most of it on you. Even cutting from behind, you're bound to at least get some on your hands. But the only blood Max had on him was from his own injuries. Even his hands were clean when we picked him up."
"What about Mrs. Miller?" Victor asked.
"Not a drop on her," Gilroy sighed.
"Wait a minute." Winchester frowned. "So what, you're saying Max didn't do it? That neither one of them did it?"
"I'm not saying anything definite until I get the autopsy and the full forensics report back," Gilroy told him. "Right now, I'm just pointing out stuff that doesn't add up."
Victor contemplated a scenario in which an unknown third person came into the Miller house, killed Jim Miller and ran off, leaving Max and Mrs. Miller to cover up for mysterious reasons of their own. It didn't sound very convincing.
"Maybe it wasn't self-defense," he suggested. "Maybe Max just decides he's had enough of being his father's punching bag. So he waits until Miller's guard is down and slits his throat from behi--" He broke off. Just visualizing the scene in his mind let him see exactly what was wrong with it.
Gilroy must've thought of it too, because he shook his head before Victor even finished speaking. "We considered that. But Max is at least five inches shorter than Miller was. He'd have to stand on a goddamn box to make a cut like that from behind. And the same goes for the Mrs."
Victor manfully resisted the urge to bang his head on Gilroy desk. Was it too much to ask for something, anything about this fucking case to make sense? Ever?
"You're holding them both, right?" he asked. "In separate rooms?"
"For now," Gilroy said. "We've booked Max, since he's the one who actually confessed to doing the killing. We're holding Mrs. Miller for questioning for now, but we'll have to either book her or let her go pretty soon. Oh, and there's a public defense attorney on the way, so if you want to talk to Max first, you'd better do it fast."
The ceiling lights flickered with a faint crackling sound. Gilroy's monitor screen went black for a couple of seconds, then came back on with a reboot prompt. Gilroy thumped it on the side and swore.
"What the hell?" Winchester was on his feet, right hand moving toward the sidearm in his jacket. "This building get a lot of electrical problems?"
"Not really." Gilroy thumped the CPU too, as if that would somehow make it reboot faster. "Then again, this building's eighty years old and was put together with spit and a prayer to begin with. The city keeps saying they'll build us a new one, but I'm not holding my breath."
"Damn." Winchester headed for the door, face tense and hand still hovering near his gun. "Was it the whole building, or just this room?" He stuck his head into the hallway. "Hey, you! Did the lights just flicker out here?"
The unseen person in the hallway must've answered in the affirmative, because Winchester looked grim when he ducked back into the room and shut the door behind him.
"I think it's the building," he announced, "or at least this whole floor."
Gilroy gave Victor a wry questioning look, as if to say is he always this nuts?
Victor was starting to wonder the same thing. Between the salt in the motel room and the current jumpiness, Winchester was starting to look positively unstable. Still, he was Victor's partner for the time being, and that meant keeping up a united front when dealing with the locals. So he ignored Gilroy's expression and did his best to look as he saw nothing out of the ordinary.
"What is it?" he asked Winchester, and mentally resolved to kick the kid's ass right back to Chicago if he didn't get a reasonable answer.
As it turned out, he got no answer at all. Winchester didn't get a chance to say a word before the Gilroy's office door swung open to admit one of the uniformed cops, ghost-white and far more shaken than any middle-aged beat cop had any business looking.
"Detective Gilroy? We're not sure what happened, sir, but... you need to see this right now."
The holding area at the back of the station looked like a slaughterhouse. Blood on the floor, blood on the walls, even a few crimson spatters on the ceiling. Three dead cops in the corridor and the small office in front of the cells. Four dead prisoners in the cells, the doors all locked and showing no signs of forced entry. Only Max Miller's cell stood open and free of gore. Max himself was nowhere to be found.
"Jesus Christ," Gilroy whispered in a strangled voice, staring down in blank shock at the desk sergeant's corpse. The man's throat had been slashed so deep, Victor could see the white flash of bone at the back of the gaping wound. "Who could do this? Who the fuck could just come in here and do this, without anyone noticing?"
"It's an isolated area," Detective Perez said. She was Gilroy's partner, a statuesque woman in a tailored navy suit whose presence Victor would've thoroughly appreciated under any other circumstances. "No one comes through here unless there's somebody new to lock up." She stepped sideways to let the crime-scene photographer get a better angle on the body. "Whoever it was, they must've come in through the fire doors at the back and come out the same way. We should get the tapes from the security cameras."
There were ambulances waiting outside to take the bodies away, a forensics team dusting for fingerprints, a couple of guys in lab coats taking samples of each individual bloodstain. An FBI team from Detroit was on its way over, summoned by Grant after Victor had called in. Before long, the reporters would start creeping in like cockroaches.
"We need to talk to Alice Miller," Victor said. The idea of someone other than Max having killed Jim Miller seemed a lot more probable now than it had half an hour before. "Whoever these guys are, they're heavy hitters. If Max has been involved with them for a while, she might know something." He shoved his hands in his pockets and resisted the urge to fidget, to pace, to do anything that would only get in the way of the people who were actually doing something useful. "And didn't Jim Miller have a brother somewhere?"
"Roger Miller," Winchester said in a distracted voice. He'd been wandering around the scene for the past fifteen minutes, looking over people's shoulders and poking into corners. So far, he'd managed to be remarkably unobtrusive about it; at least, no one had tripped over him or told him to get the fuck out of the way. In fact, the only person who currently seemed to have a problem with Victor's partner was Victor himself.
Winchester had known something was coming, had braced for it the moment the lights had flickered in Gilroy's office. And now, for all his air of random wandering, he was looking for something specific; Victor was sure of it.
He was going to get answers if he had to beat them out of the kid, but it would have to wait until they were alone. In the meantime, though, he could at least arm himself with some information.
"Excuse me," Victor muttered, and was roundly ignored as he left the room.
"Two calls in one day," Reidy said. Victor could practically hear his grin over the phone. "I knew it. You can't live without me."
"Actually, I just need a favor. Have you got any contacts at the ATF?"
"A couple. Why?"
Victor threw a quick glance over his shoulder to make sure he was still alone in the corridor. "I want Winchester's background file. Everything, not just the basic shit on the official forms. Can you get it for me?"
"Maybe," Reidy said cautiously. "You want to tell me what you need it for?"
"Don't know myself yet," Victor admitted. "But there's something off about this guy, and I want to know what it is. I think he knows more about this case than he's letting on."
"All right," Reidy said, "I'll see what I can do. You just watch your back, all right? My doctor tells me I'm supposed to be lowering my stress levels, and let me tell you, this is not helping."
"Try getting laid once in a while," Victor told him, and hung up.
Back at the scene, he found Winchester inside Max's abandoned cell, standing with his hands clasped behind him and his head tilted back, staring at the ceiling.
"Don't touch anything," Victor said, though he could see that the place had already been dusted.
"They're finished in here." Winchester rocked on his heels a little as he spoke, gaze still fixed on a shadowed spot above the door. "Missed a spot, though."
He reached up and swiped his fingers across the ceiling, then held his hand out toward Victor. There was a smear of fine yellowish powder on his fingertips.
Victor frowned. "Is that what I think it is?"
Winchester nodded. "Sulfur."
Alice Miller had nothing useful to tell them. She knew nothing about Claudia Miller's death beyond her husband's "crazy tales." She had no idea who might've stormed a police station to bust her stepson from a holding cell. She stuck to her story of coming downstairs and discovering that Max had killed his father. When Gilroy and Perez tried to push her on it, she broke down into incoherent sobs that wouldn't stop until one of ambulance guys came up from downstairs to give her a sedative.
"I'm gonna charge her as an accessory," Gilroy said. He looked rumpled and weary, and his voice was hoarse. "We'll never make it stick, but it'll let us hold her another day or two."
"You really think she knows anything?" Winchester asked.
"I don't think she knows shit," Gilroy admitted. "I think she believes what she's telling us. But she might've seen or heard something by accident. Something that doesn't even mean anything to her, but maybe it could help us."
Victor thought that sounded pretty desperate. Then again, he couldn't really blame Gilroy for being desperate. The guy had a massacre on his hands, right on his home turf. Seven dead people, a missing murder suspect, half a dozen security tapes showing nothing but static. No wonder he was so determined to hang on to his one potential witness.
By the time Victor and Winchester left the station, it was nearly two in the morning. They had to sneak out one of the side exits to avoid the TV crews camping out front. Some enterprising wannabe with a camcorder nearly caught up with them in the parking lot, but Winchester growled "No comment at him" with such dark ferocity that the guy spun around and slinked off without completing his first question.
"Freakin' vultures..." Winchester muttered under his breath. He looked pale and haggard under the dim glow of the parking-lot lights, mouth tight and eyes shadowed.
Victor suspected that he himself was looking no better. They'd both been awake for over twenty hours straight, running mostly on coffee and nerves. Victor's clothes were rumpled and the back of his neck felt grimy. He rubbed his face, and winced at the sandpaper rasp of stubble beneath his fingers.
"Let's go get some sleep," he said.
Winchester nodded jerkily, got into the car, and then just sat there with his hands resting on the steering wheel.
Victor fidgeted in the passenger seat for a minute or so, then pointedly cleared his throat. "The key goes into the ignition," he prompted.
Winchester didn't appear to be listening. "Do you think we set him off?" he said quietly. "Jim Miller, I mean."
Victor closed his eyes and let his head thump back against the seat. This was not a conversation he wanted to have in a parking lot at two in the morning with a guy he wasn't sure he trusted.
"Don't go there, kid. Miller was an abusive drunk bastard long before we got here."
"His wife says he's been sober for years. Hadn't laid a hand on Max for years. Then we show up asking questions about Claudia and--"
"Doesn't mean anything. When people go off like that, it's because they're ready to go off like that. And if they're ready, they'll always find an excuse. If it hadn't been us, it would've been something else."
"So you do think it was us?"
"No." Victor gritted his teeth and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. He could feel a headache coming on, made up of equal parts frustration, sleep deprivation and caffeine. "I'm saying we were an excuse."
"But that's--"
"I'm also saying you need to shut up and drive."
He considered it a minor miracle when Winchester actually shut up and drove.
Victor had thought it would take at least a day or two for Reidy's ATF contact to come through with anything useful, but he checked his e-mail at the hotel's 24-hour business office just in case. Apparently, being bored to death in a hospital made Reidy extra-productive, because there was an e-mail with an innocuously titled file attachment waiting in Victor's inbox.
He stood guard over the hotel's slow and ancient printer until the last page was done, then erased the e-mail, found a chair at the back of the lobby from where he could see any interruptions coming, and sat down to read.
The first few pages were the standard background information forms Winchester had filled out to get his security clearance. Victor skimmed through them, absorbing the names and dates without paying close attention. Birthplace: Lawrence, Kansas. Birth parents: John Winchester and Mary Winchester (nee Travis), both deceased. Brother: Samuel Winchester, student, currently residing in Berkeley, California. Adopted father: James Murphy, clergyman, Blue Earth, Minnesota. Education history, employment history, personal references... Victor was just setting the top sheets aside when the dates on the top page clicked in his mind.
Mary Winchester had died on Sam's sixth-month birthday.
No fucking way.
Victor put the forms aside and focused his tired eyes on the rest of the file. This was the detailed story, the one he technically wasn't supposed to see without jumping through a long sequence of bureaucratic hoops first. But all it did was fill in a few blank spots on what Victor had already figured out.
Mary Winchester had died in a mysterious house fire that had apparently started on the ceiling of her baby's nursery. Her husband had been questioned in connection with her death but not charged. Three years later, John Winchester was killed in an "unknown wild animal attack," though Victor had trouble imagining what sort of wild animal might've shown up to claw a man to death in a parking lot in downtown Jersey City.
Winchester's will had named Murphy as his children's guardian, and that, apparently, was the end of the story. Well, except for the part where Dean Winchester was now concealing information while worming his way into an investigation he should never have been allowed to touch. "Conflict of interest" didn't even begin to cover it, and Victor was going to have a few choice words with the ATF about their failure to catch that minor detail. In the meantime...
Victor clutched the file in his hand and fumed all the way through the elevator ride to the fifth floor. By the time he reached the door to their room, he was more than ready to storm in and rip Winchester a new one. But it took him a moment to dig the key card from his back pocket, and that was long enough for him to hear Winchester's voice, speaking to someone inside the room. The door was too thick for effective eavesdropping, so Victor silently pushed it open and edged inside.
The door opened into a short hallway with the bathroom on one side and the closet on the other. Winchester was out of sight around the corner, but Victor could hear him clearly if he stopped just past the bathroom door and held still.
"...still not anywhere near Sacramento, I promise... Yes. Yes I did... My partner thinks I'm a freak, by the way, I hope you're happy... Oh, please. You were wearing paisley pants last time I saw you, dude, so don't even try calling me a freak... Whatever. Look, I gotta go, okay? Go drink some herbal tea or take a yoga class or something and stop calling me in the middle of the night... Talk to you later. Bitch."
Victor waited until he was sure the conversation was over before marching into the room. Winchester was sprawled on his bed in boxers and a t-shirt, cell phone still clutched in one hand. He sat up abruptly when Victor threw the file at him.
"What the hell is this, Winchester?"
"Huh?" Winchester held the pages under the light of the bedside lamp. A nervous expression flitted across his face, and was quickly replaced by a look of exaggerated annoyance. "I don't know, how about a gross invasion of my privacy?"
"Don't even start with me, asshole!" Victor was so furious, he could feel himself shaking. "You've been withholding information on the case. A case you shouldn't be working on in the first place. Give me one reason why I shouldn't call Chicago and have your ass suspended right now."
"Uhm... because everyone in Chicago is asleep?" Winchester attempted a smirk, but quickly wiped it off his face when Victor kept glaring at him. "Look, I'm sorry. I know it looks bad, but I swear, you're way better off with me on this case than off it. Just... trust me on this, all right?"
"Trust you?" Victor's command of the English language momentarily abandoned him. He opened and closed his mouth a couple of time, struggling to find the words that would express exactly how far he was from trusting Winchester on anything whatsoever.
He was still working on it when the door smashed open behind him, hitting the wall with enough force to send bits of plaster raining from the ceiling. Something that felt like giant fist hit Victor between the shoulder blades, propelling him across the room to slam into the opposite wall. He got his arms up just in time to shield his head from the impact, but the force of it still left him stunned for a few seconds. He fell to the floor in a heap, and rolled over to see the massive oak dresser that had been standing opposite the beds sliding across the carpet toward him. It bumped his feet and toppled over onto his legs. A hot spike of pain stabbed from his left knee up to his hip, startling a hoarse yell out of him.
"Henriksen!" Winchester started to lunge off the bed, but the covers surged up to wrap around him and pull him back.
"Please don't move," Max Miller pleaded from the doorway. "I don't want to hurt anyone, but I will if you make me."
Chapter 5
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
"He's claiming self-defense," Detective Gilroy said, "and the stepmother backs him up. The neighboring houses are too far away for anyone to have heard anything, so right now their story is the only story we've got." He did not sound especially pleased with this state of affairs.
"So what story is that?" Victor asked.
Gilroy stared broodingly into the oversized ceramic mug that he'd been gulping steaming coffee from when Victor and Winchester had arrived. The mug said "World's greatest Dad!" on it in bold, primary-colored letters.
"The story is," he said in a weary voice, "Jim Miller stormed out of the house a few minutes after you guys got done talking to him. He came back a few hours later, drunk as the proverbial skunk, and started whaling on his son, which apparently is a long-standing habit with him. Alice Miller made herself scarce in the upstairs bedroom, which seems to be a long-standing habit with her, and stayed there for about twenty minutes, until the noise downstairs stopped. Then she came down to find Miller on the kitchen floor with his throat slit and Max rocking in a corner. She called 911. Max was still sitting there rocking when the first squad car showed up."
"Jesus Christ," Winchester muttered.
He looked as if he really wanted to punch somebody. Victor couldn't really blame him. Federal agents didn't deal with a lot of domestic violence as a rule, but Victor retained a vivid recollection of one of his early cases, when a supposedly kidnapped twelve-year-old turned out to have been beaten to death by his stepfather. He remembered exactly what it had felt like when he'd first followed the evidence to its logical conclusion, the sour taste in his mouth and the dull ache in his chest. The ugliness of the case had stuck with him for weeks afterwards, and was probably the final straw in the destruction of his second marriage. He'd grown a thicker skin since then, but not so thick that he couldn't empathize with Winchester's reaction.
Still, empathy or no empathy, they had a case to focus on. And something about Gilroy's manner hinted that there was more to the story.
"So do you believe it?" Victor asked.
Gilroy grimaced as if the question pained him. "Some of it. Most of it, maybe. Max sure as hell took a beating from somebody, and his father's the most likely candidate. I've put in a request for Max's medical records, to see if he has a history of injuries that would point to abuse, but it'll probably take a couple of days for the paperwork to come in. Anyway, that part I buy."
"So which part don't you buy?"
"Take a look." Gilroy rotated the computer monitor on his desk so that Victor and Winchester could see the screen. It displayed, in high resolution and gory color, a photo of Jim Miller lying dead in his own kitchen, head lolled sideways in a still-wet puddle of blood. The deep, wide gash across his throat was clearly visible. "According to Max, he tried to get away and Miller rushed him. Max grabbed a kitchen knife from the counter, struck out in self-defense, and this happened."
"Huh," Victor said.
Gilroy nodded. "Yeah, that's exactly what I said. Huh."
"I'm sure it's very meaningful to both of you," Winchester said irritably, "but how about sharing with the rest of the class?"
Three or four days ago, Victor might've been annoyed by that. But by now he'd spent enough time in close quarters with the kid to know that "Winchester is feeling upset" and "Winchester is acting like an asshole" were more or less equivalent statements, so he simply leaned forward and tapped his finger against the screen
"Take a look at this wound. His throat's sliced wide open, practically ear to ear. Now I may not be the world's biggest expert on knife wounds, but I've seen enough to know that a guy striking out the way Max says he did is a hell of a lot more likely to stab than to slice. And even if he did slice, no way he would've put enough force behind it to cut that deep. A wound like that? Doesn't happen by accident."
"That's what I thought too," Gilroy said. "But wait. It gets weirder. You cut the artery like that, you get a big spray of blood. If you're standing in front of the victim, you're going to get most of it on you. Even cutting from behind, you're bound to at least get some on your hands. But the only blood Max had on him was from his own injuries. Even his hands were clean when we picked him up."
"What about Mrs. Miller?" Victor asked.
"Not a drop on her," Gilroy sighed.
"Wait a minute." Winchester frowned. "So what, you're saying Max didn't do it? That neither one of them did it?"
"I'm not saying anything definite until I get the autopsy and the full forensics report back," Gilroy told him. "Right now, I'm just pointing out stuff that doesn't add up."
Victor contemplated a scenario in which an unknown third person came into the Miller house, killed Jim Miller and ran off, leaving Max and Mrs. Miller to cover up for mysterious reasons of their own. It didn't sound very convincing.
"Maybe it wasn't self-defense," he suggested. "Maybe Max just decides he's had enough of being his father's punching bag. So he waits until Miller's guard is down and slits his throat from behi--" He broke off. Just visualizing the scene in his mind let him see exactly what was wrong with it.
Gilroy must've thought of it too, because he shook his head before Victor even finished speaking. "We considered that. But Max is at least five inches shorter than Miller was. He'd have to stand on a goddamn box to make a cut like that from behind. And the same goes for the Mrs."
Victor manfully resisted the urge to bang his head on Gilroy desk. Was it too much to ask for something, anything about this fucking case to make sense? Ever?
"You're holding them both, right?" he asked. "In separate rooms?"
"For now," Gilroy said. "We've booked Max, since he's the one who actually confessed to doing the killing. We're holding Mrs. Miller for questioning for now, but we'll have to either book her or let her go pretty soon. Oh, and there's a public defense attorney on the way, so if you want to talk to Max first, you'd better do it fast."
The ceiling lights flickered with a faint crackling sound. Gilroy's monitor screen went black for a couple of seconds, then came back on with a reboot prompt. Gilroy thumped it on the side and swore.
"What the hell?" Winchester was on his feet, right hand moving toward the sidearm in his jacket. "This building get a lot of electrical problems?"
"Not really." Gilroy thumped the CPU too, as if that would somehow make it reboot faster. "Then again, this building's eighty years old and was put together with spit and a prayer to begin with. The city keeps saying they'll build us a new one, but I'm not holding my breath."
"Damn." Winchester headed for the door, face tense and hand still hovering near his gun. "Was it the whole building, or just this room?" He stuck his head into the hallway. "Hey, you! Did the lights just flicker out here?"
The unseen person in the hallway must've answered in the affirmative, because Winchester looked grim when he ducked back into the room and shut the door behind him.
"I think it's the building," he announced, "or at least this whole floor."
Gilroy gave Victor a wry questioning look, as if to say is he always this nuts?
Victor was starting to wonder the same thing. Between the salt in the motel room and the current jumpiness, Winchester was starting to look positively unstable. Still, he was Victor's partner for the time being, and that meant keeping up a united front when dealing with the locals. So he ignored Gilroy's expression and did his best to look as he saw nothing out of the ordinary.
"What is it?" he asked Winchester, and mentally resolved to kick the kid's ass right back to Chicago if he didn't get a reasonable answer.
As it turned out, he got no answer at all. Winchester didn't get a chance to say a word before the Gilroy's office door swung open to admit one of the uniformed cops, ghost-white and far more shaken than any middle-aged beat cop had any business looking.
"Detective Gilroy? We're not sure what happened, sir, but... you need to see this right now."
The holding area at the back of the station looked like a slaughterhouse. Blood on the floor, blood on the walls, even a few crimson spatters on the ceiling. Three dead cops in the corridor and the small office in front of the cells. Four dead prisoners in the cells, the doors all locked and showing no signs of forced entry. Only Max Miller's cell stood open and free of gore. Max himself was nowhere to be found.
"Jesus Christ," Gilroy whispered in a strangled voice, staring down in blank shock at the desk sergeant's corpse. The man's throat had been slashed so deep, Victor could see the white flash of bone at the back of the gaping wound. "Who could do this? Who the fuck could just come in here and do this, without anyone noticing?"
"It's an isolated area," Detective Perez said. She was Gilroy's partner, a statuesque woman in a tailored navy suit whose presence Victor would've thoroughly appreciated under any other circumstances. "No one comes through here unless there's somebody new to lock up." She stepped sideways to let the crime-scene photographer get a better angle on the body. "Whoever it was, they must've come in through the fire doors at the back and come out the same way. We should get the tapes from the security cameras."
There were ambulances waiting outside to take the bodies away, a forensics team dusting for fingerprints, a couple of guys in lab coats taking samples of each individual bloodstain. An FBI team from Detroit was on its way over, summoned by Grant after Victor had called in. Before long, the reporters would start creeping in like cockroaches.
"We need to talk to Alice Miller," Victor said. The idea of someone other than Max having killed Jim Miller seemed a lot more probable now than it had half an hour before. "Whoever these guys are, they're heavy hitters. If Max has been involved with them for a while, she might know something." He shoved his hands in his pockets and resisted the urge to fidget, to pace, to do anything that would only get in the way of the people who were actually doing something useful. "And didn't Jim Miller have a brother somewhere?"
"Roger Miller," Winchester said in a distracted voice. He'd been wandering around the scene for the past fifteen minutes, looking over people's shoulders and poking into corners. So far, he'd managed to be remarkably unobtrusive about it; at least, no one had tripped over him or told him to get the fuck out of the way. In fact, the only person who currently seemed to have a problem with Victor's partner was Victor himself.
Winchester had known something was coming, had braced for it the moment the lights had flickered in Gilroy's office. And now, for all his air of random wandering, he was looking for something specific; Victor was sure of it.
He was going to get answers if he had to beat them out of the kid, but it would have to wait until they were alone. In the meantime, though, he could at least arm himself with some information.
"Excuse me," Victor muttered, and was roundly ignored as he left the room.
"Two calls in one day," Reidy said. Victor could practically hear his grin over the phone. "I knew it. You can't live without me."
"Actually, I just need a favor. Have you got any contacts at the ATF?"
"A couple. Why?"
Victor threw a quick glance over his shoulder to make sure he was still alone in the corridor. "I want Winchester's background file. Everything, not just the basic shit on the official forms. Can you get it for me?"
"Maybe," Reidy said cautiously. "You want to tell me what you need it for?"
"Don't know myself yet," Victor admitted. "But there's something off about this guy, and I want to know what it is. I think he knows more about this case than he's letting on."
"All right," Reidy said, "I'll see what I can do. You just watch your back, all right? My doctor tells me I'm supposed to be lowering my stress levels, and let me tell you, this is not helping."
"Try getting laid once in a while," Victor told him, and hung up.
Back at the scene, he found Winchester inside Max's abandoned cell, standing with his hands clasped behind him and his head tilted back, staring at the ceiling.
"Don't touch anything," Victor said, though he could see that the place had already been dusted.
"They're finished in here." Winchester rocked on his heels a little as he spoke, gaze still fixed on a shadowed spot above the door. "Missed a spot, though."
He reached up and swiped his fingers across the ceiling, then held his hand out toward Victor. There was a smear of fine yellowish powder on his fingertips.
Victor frowned. "Is that what I think it is?"
Winchester nodded. "Sulfur."
Alice Miller had nothing useful to tell them. She knew nothing about Claudia Miller's death beyond her husband's "crazy tales." She had no idea who might've stormed a police station to bust her stepson from a holding cell. She stuck to her story of coming downstairs and discovering that Max had killed his father. When Gilroy and Perez tried to push her on it, she broke down into incoherent sobs that wouldn't stop until one of ambulance guys came up from downstairs to give her a sedative.
"I'm gonna charge her as an accessory," Gilroy said. He looked rumpled and weary, and his voice was hoarse. "We'll never make it stick, but it'll let us hold her another day or two."
"You really think she knows anything?" Winchester asked.
"I don't think she knows shit," Gilroy admitted. "I think she believes what she's telling us. But she might've seen or heard something by accident. Something that doesn't even mean anything to her, but maybe it could help us."
Victor thought that sounded pretty desperate. Then again, he couldn't really blame Gilroy for being desperate. The guy had a massacre on his hands, right on his home turf. Seven dead people, a missing murder suspect, half a dozen security tapes showing nothing but static. No wonder he was so determined to hang on to his one potential witness.
By the time Victor and Winchester left the station, it was nearly two in the morning. They had to sneak out one of the side exits to avoid the TV crews camping out front. Some enterprising wannabe with a camcorder nearly caught up with them in the parking lot, but Winchester growled "No comment at him" with such dark ferocity that the guy spun around and slinked off without completing his first question.
"Freakin' vultures..." Winchester muttered under his breath. He looked pale and haggard under the dim glow of the parking-lot lights, mouth tight and eyes shadowed.
Victor suspected that he himself was looking no better. They'd both been awake for over twenty hours straight, running mostly on coffee and nerves. Victor's clothes were rumpled and the back of his neck felt grimy. He rubbed his face, and winced at the sandpaper rasp of stubble beneath his fingers.
"Let's go get some sleep," he said.
Winchester nodded jerkily, got into the car, and then just sat there with his hands resting on the steering wheel.
Victor fidgeted in the passenger seat for a minute or so, then pointedly cleared his throat. "The key goes into the ignition," he prompted.
Winchester didn't appear to be listening. "Do you think we set him off?" he said quietly. "Jim Miller, I mean."
Victor closed his eyes and let his head thump back against the seat. This was not a conversation he wanted to have in a parking lot at two in the morning with a guy he wasn't sure he trusted.
"Don't go there, kid. Miller was an abusive drunk bastard long before we got here."
"His wife says he's been sober for years. Hadn't laid a hand on Max for years. Then we show up asking questions about Claudia and--"
"Doesn't mean anything. When people go off like that, it's because they're ready to go off like that. And if they're ready, they'll always find an excuse. If it hadn't been us, it would've been something else."
"So you do think it was us?"
"No." Victor gritted his teeth and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. He could feel a headache coming on, made up of equal parts frustration, sleep deprivation and caffeine. "I'm saying we were an excuse."
"But that's--"
"I'm also saying you need to shut up and drive."
He considered it a minor miracle when Winchester actually shut up and drove.
Victor had thought it would take at least a day or two for Reidy's ATF contact to come through with anything useful, but he checked his e-mail at the hotel's 24-hour business office just in case. Apparently, being bored to death in a hospital made Reidy extra-productive, because there was an e-mail with an innocuously titled file attachment waiting in Victor's inbox.
He stood guard over the hotel's slow and ancient printer until the last page was done, then erased the e-mail, found a chair at the back of the lobby from where he could see any interruptions coming, and sat down to read.
The first few pages were the standard background information forms Winchester had filled out to get his security clearance. Victor skimmed through them, absorbing the names and dates without paying close attention. Birthplace: Lawrence, Kansas. Birth parents: John Winchester and Mary Winchester (nee Travis), both deceased. Brother: Samuel Winchester, student, currently residing in Berkeley, California. Adopted father: James Murphy, clergyman, Blue Earth, Minnesota. Education history, employment history, personal references... Victor was just setting the top sheets aside when the dates on the top page clicked in his mind.
Mary Winchester had died on Sam's sixth-month birthday.
No fucking way.
Victor put the forms aside and focused his tired eyes on the rest of the file. This was the detailed story, the one he technically wasn't supposed to see without jumping through a long sequence of bureaucratic hoops first. But all it did was fill in a few blank spots on what Victor had already figured out.
Mary Winchester had died in a mysterious house fire that had apparently started on the ceiling of her baby's nursery. Her husband had been questioned in connection with her death but not charged. Three years later, John Winchester was killed in an "unknown wild animal attack," though Victor had trouble imagining what sort of wild animal might've shown up to claw a man to death in a parking lot in downtown Jersey City.
Winchester's will had named Murphy as his children's guardian, and that, apparently, was the end of the story. Well, except for the part where Dean Winchester was now concealing information while worming his way into an investigation he should never have been allowed to touch. "Conflict of interest" didn't even begin to cover it, and Victor was going to have a few choice words with the ATF about their failure to catch that minor detail. In the meantime...
Victor clutched the file in his hand and fumed all the way through the elevator ride to the fifth floor. By the time he reached the door to their room, he was more than ready to storm in and rip Winchester a new one. But it took him a moment to dig the key card from his back pocket, and that was long enough for him to hear Winchester's voice, speaking to someone inside the room. The door was too thick for effective eavesdropping, so Victor silently pushed it open and edged inside.
The door opened into a short hallway with the bathroom on one side and the closet on the other. Winchester was out of sight around the corner, but Victor could hear him clearly if he stopped just past the bathroom door and held still.
"...still not anywhere near Sacramento, I promise... Yes. Yes I did... My partner thinks I'm a freak, by the way, I hope you're happy... Oh, please. You were wearing paisley pants last time I saw you, dude, so don't even try calling me a freak... Whatever. Look, I gotta go, okay? Go drink some herbal tea or take a yoga class or something and stop calling me in the middle of the night... Talk to you later. Bitch."
Victor waited until he was sure the conversation was over before marching into the room. Winchester was sprawled on his bed in boxers and a t-shirt, cell phone still clutched in one hand. He sat up abruptly when Victor threw the file at him.
"What the hell is this, Winchester?"
"Huh?" Winchester held the pages under the light of the bedside lamp. A nervous expression flitted across his face, and was quickly replaced by a look of exaggerated annoyance. "I don't know, how about a gross invasion of my privacy?"
"Don't even start with me, asshole!" Victor was so furious, he could feel himself shaking. "You've been withholding information on the case. A case you shouldn't be working on in the first place. Give me one reason why I shouldn't call Chicago and have your ass suspended right now."
"Uhm... because everyone in Chicago is asleep?" Winchester attempted a smirk, but quickly wiped it off his face when Victor kept glaring at him. "Look, I'm sorry. I know it looks bad, but I swear, you're way better off with me on this case than off it. Just... trust me on this, all right?"
"Trust you?" Victor's command of the English language momentarily abandoned him. He opened and closed his mouth a couple of time, struggling to find the words that would express exactly how far he was from trusting Winchester on anything whatsoever.
He was still working on it when the door smashed open behind him, hitting the wall with enough force to send bits of plaster raining from the ceiling. Something that felt like giant fist hit Victor between the shoulder blades, propelling him across the room to slam into the opposite wall. He got his arms up just in time to shield his head from the impact, but the force of it still left him stunned for a few seconds. He fell to the floor in a heap, and rolled over to see the massive oak dresser that had been standing opposite the beds sliding across the carpet toward him. It bumped his feet and toppled over onto his legs. A hot spike of pain stabbed from his left knee up to his hip, startling a hoarse yell out of him.
"Henriksen!" Winchester started to lunge off the bed, but the covers surged up to wrap around him and pull him back.
"Please don't move," Max Miller pleaded from the doorway. "I don't want to hurt anyone, but I will if you make me."
Chapter 5