Chapter Text
Dean knows he should be grateful for the chance at having some down-time for once, but after a few weeks of doing nothing but a couple of routine salt-and-burns, he's starting to feel twitchy and restless. He's never handled boredom particularly well, and there hasn't been much to do except hustle some extra pool in order to try and build up their cash reserves, and sit in front of the motel tv and complain about the fact that the cable channels always just showed the same freakin' movie over and over.
There's only so many times that one man can watch Erin Brockovich, Julia Robert's cleavage be damned.
Sam wasn't broadcasting his anxiousness quite as overtly, but Dean can tell that he's been feeling fidgety lately as well and it seems that whenever he looks at Sam, he's either moping around like an overgrown child or spending hours on his laptop trying to find any news story that would remotely fall into their wheelhouse. Dean knows that there's probably something wrong with him for almost hoping that Sam finds a case involving some monster or another terrorizing innocent victims, but he can't help but he can't help but be a little relieved when Sam eagerly shoves his laptop in Dean's face one morning while Dean is still lying in bed and barely awake, demanding his attention.
On the screen, a picture of pretty, smiling brunette who looks to be in her early twenties, identified as Laura Hanson from New York City, stares back at him from above a headline that announces her untimely death. It's a tragic story, sure, but when Dean begins to read the article and finds out that she died from heart failure and doesn't see mention of unusual circumstances, he frowns at Sam in confusion.
"Are you sure this is really our kind of thing? I know she was pretty young, but I don't know if the heart failure thing is that weird."
Sam reaches over Dean and scrolls down towards the bottom of the article, highlighting one of the sections. "Okay, I'll admit that part alone is a little too thin to base a hunt around but check this out: when Laura's body was found, the article says that she was emaciated to the point that her own sister had difficulty identifying her body."
"Not for nothing, but didn't the article say she was a model? Most of them seem like they're half-starved just in general."
"Sure, but it isn't like she and her sister rarely saw each other. They lived together, and her sister claims that Laura looked perfectly fine just the day before she died. It seems a little off is all I'm saying."
Dean drums his fingers on the laptop as he mulls over Sam's words. It still isn't much to go on, but it's better than the big fat nothing that they'd had lately. It probably couldn't hurt to at least follow up on it.
"So what're you thinking then? Some kind of monster that feeds off of life force?" He inquires and watches as the some of the tension melts away from Sam's body; he was clearly ready to keep fighting Dean on this one if he had to.
"It definitely could be. Maybe something similar to a Shtriga," Sam agreed, "It could also be some sort of witchcraft. I don't think we'll know anything for sure until we're able to get more details though."
Dean jumps up from the bed and barely manages to stifle a yawn as he beings throwing piles of clothing into his duffle bag, not even bothering to distinguish between the clean and dirty ones in his haste.
"Well, New York here we come."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dean always forgets how much he hates New York until he has to go back there again. Too crowded, too noisy and, perhaps the greatest crime of all, the parking was such a nightmare that he was constantly paranoid that Baby might suffer some kind of traumatic incident, but he pushes all of these petty annoyances aside when he and Sam arrive at the apartment that Laura shared with her sister, decked out in their usual law enforcement get-up.
Katie Hanson looks as if she's barely holding it together, but she's courteous enough when she invites them into her apartment. She's not crying at the moment, but her eyes are swollen and red, and her is slightly hoarse when she speaks. Cases involving siblings always hit too close to home for him and his stomach twists uncomfortably whenever he looks at the poor woman for too long.
"Do you...do you think someone was involved with her death?" She asks, wringing her hands and sniffing a little. "All I was told was that her heart gave out."
"As of right now, we can't say that for sure," Sam says gently. "But we were hoping that you might be able to help us figure that out . Did Laura have any enemies that you know of? Or any kind of recent behavioral changes that you noticed?"
"I can't imagine that anyone would want to hurt her. Laura was always the more outgoing and cheerful one of the two of us; she could charm just about anyone." For just a second, there's a fraction of a smile on the woman's face before her expression becomes grief-stricken again. "Cheerful up until a few weeks ago, at least."
Sam leans forward in his seat with his pen poised about the notepad in his hands. "Can you think of anything in particular that may have been upsetting her?"
Katie laughs bitterly. "It was that damn job of hers. She was doing work for that fancy department store, Armel's; they're working on their big spring catalog. She was so excited when she finally managed to land a big modeling campaign, but all it ended up doing was stress out."
"Do you know why?" Sam asks as he scribbles out some notes.
"She kept telling me she was fine," Katie says while shaking her head, "But she was always so exhausted and miserable when she came home that she would just immediately collapse in bed. She was practically a zombie most of the time. When I found out that a few of the other models she worked with were literally hospitalized for exhaustion at one point, I tried to tell her that she should find another gig, but she was convinced that this was her big shot and that she just needed to tough it out. Maybe if I had been able to convince her to at least take it easy for a few days, she wouldn't have been at the studio that day, putting so much strain on herself, and she wouldn't have died there all alone. They didn't even find her body until hours later. Maybe if I had tried a little harder..." Her face crumples and she buries it in her palms as she begins to weep.
Dean shares a glance with Sam when Katie mentions that her sister's body was actually found in the modeling studio. To the best of Dean's recollection, that part hadn't been mentioned in the newspaper. He wonders if the studio is simply trying to keep that part under wraps due to the fact that no foul play is suspected and that dead models don't exactly equal good publicity, or if there's something more sinister at work there.
"There's no way you could have predicted that any of this would happen," Dean consoles, gently nudging a box of kleenex across the coffee table. "We don't know for sure that her job had anything to do with her death and even if it did, you shouldn't blame yourself for something you had no control over."
"I should have done something," Katie insists, semi-hysterical and past the point of listening to reason, lost as she was in grief. "I mean, I knew that she had lost a little bit of weight since she started the shoot but when I went to..." her sentence chokes off for a second and she clears her throat, "when I went to identify her, I didn't even recognize her at first; she looked almost skeletal. She was practically a different person. How is something like that even possible?"
It's not a question that either of them have an answer to, and Dean gets the feeling that there's not anything that they could say to her right now that would ease the pain of her sister's death even slightly. The best thing they can do for her is get rid of whatever creature was to blame for Laura's death before it had the chance to kill anyone else, and they leave after asking her a few more questions that don't take long to finish up.
When they drive to the morgue and flash their badges in order to get access to the coroner's report and examine the body, Dean can't but recoil a little when he pulls out the drawer that she's lying in. Katie wasn't exaggerating when she said that her sister was barely recognizable; every ounce of her flesh was wrapped tightly around her bones, making her look almost like a husk. Her face, once youthful and kind, looks like it's been aged by at least twenty years and stretches over her skull in a way that pulls the corners of her lips into an almost obscene looking smile. Before they came here, part of Dean wondered if Laura might have been hiding some sort of severe drug addiction that might explain the weight loss and personality changes, but actually seeing the body and reading the negative toxicology report puts that theory to rest easily enough.
Unfortunately, while the theory that some sort of life-sucking entity is involved in the situation has more or less been confirmed to them based on existing evidence, they don't actually have enough to go on to be certain of what specific creature it is that they need to off. The modeling aspect of the case is beginning to look more and more like it's the root of the issue and until they're able to delve into it, Dean has a feeling that they're not going to be able to get anything done.
When he and Sam get back to the impala, Sam turns to Dean and looks at him with a grim expression. "You know what we have to do next, don't you?"
Dean sighs. "Yup."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Turn a little bit to the right; your bad side is showing," Dean tells Sam as he fiddles with a digital camera.
"What bad side?," Sam demands with a frown, insulted. The look on his face is so amusing that Dean quickly snaps a picture of it, much to Sam's annoyance.
"Look, I'm just saying that we should be putting our best foot forward if we're gonna be world famous models. And stop frowning, you'll get wrinkles."
"Not sure if 'world famous' is really the sort of potential that we're working with here," Sam says dryly.
Dean's hand flies to his heart in mock scandalization. "I'm surprised at you, Sammy. How could you say such a dirty lie?"
It's entirely true, of course. The only reason that their half-baked plan to play at being models for even just few days has a chance of success is because Bobby informed them (after cackling wildly at their predicament) that he knew the owner of a model agency in LA who owed him one for some sort of ghost related favor and would likely be able to get them contracted with the Armel's catalog shoot. All they had to do was send in a few pictures so they could be made into a fake portfolio. Easy peasy. Kind of.
"Because we're taking our headshots and portfolio pictures with a cheap camera inside a motel room that hasn't seen a vacuum since the Nixon administration?" Sam asks sarcastically.
"Hey, there's no way I'm about to shell out like three hundred dollars so some douche can take a few 'professional' pictures of us. I'm pretty sure we can just slap a black and white filter on these and it'll be the same damn thing," Dean rants as he scrolls through the camera's library to see how may relatively usable pictures they've taken today. It isn't promising. "Now how about you start putting your back into it a little? Really make love to the camera."
Sam throws his head back and laughs at the ridiculousness of the entire situation and Dean takes the opportunity to get a few pictures of it. They turn out surprisingly well, and Dean decides that laughter is a good look on Sam as he also attempts to ignore the strange flutter he gets in his belly when he lingers on the pictures a little too long.
He shakes his head as if doing so will somehow scramble up the decidedly non-brotherly thoughts going through his mind.
Maybe it's time to make Sam have a turn with the camera for a while.