Who: Sam and Sam What: Weird/ghostly murders, plus a vessel. This is Sam's sorta thing! When: Late morning Where: Same hotel mentioned in the post here. Status/Rating: Incomplete/R (gory!) Notes: MJ, let me know if this is okay. Don't worry if it's not, I can change it/post us something else!
"So, you see stuff like this a lot?"
Seriously? Sam turned around to look at the older man standing next to him. "Um… no?" Lying had never actually been his strong suit in life, even in this line of work.
"Then what's with the dahlia?" the guy asked him, gesturing to the giant corsage thing that he was holding in his left hand. "You're not some Black Dahlia expert?"
"No," Sam shook his head. "I'm just…working."
"On what?"
Good question. Sam clutched the vessel in his hand perhaps a bit harder than even a fake flower was meant to be clutched. He hated vessels like this; the ones that didn't have some obvious on/off device that helped him figure out how it was meant to be used once he found the soul. No, vessles like these tended to be more helpful when it came to the actual act of finding the soul. Or at least finding the messes the souls were making. But then when it came to capturing souls he'd get thrown around because he couldn't use the vessel.
He looked over at the man again and opened his mouth, but nothing actually came out. He hadn't had a lot of time to do research before coming out to the latest crime scene, figuring that it was a now or never sort of thing when it all came down to it. He could spend time looking around the internet, or he could just go see one of the bodies up close. Kind of convenient that there'd been another murder so soon after the vessel'd been dropped on top of his head while he'd been trying to get a few extra hours.
The way he'd rushed out of the apartment that morning he hadn't had a chance to eat breakfast and that had been a good thing, given the nature of the crime scene he'd walked into. He'd seen some things in his time working for the Devil, but this had to take the cake. All he'd known that morning was that the vessel he'd received was a plastic flower, a dahlia. In the that morning he'd seen a headline, 'Black Dahliah copy-cat murders plague hotel'. Well, a bit of word association had gotten him in the car and on the way out.
Sam had never heard of the Black Dahlia before, so he hadn't been prepared to see the body laying there on the ground. Only the face was uncovered, but there was blood everywhere and even seeing just the face was enough. Corner to corner the mouth had been slit up to the ears. The hands had been positioned (positioned, he assumed, because he didn't think that someone could really die in that position) up over her head at ninety degree angles and the legs were spread eagled, almost at one hundred and eighty degrees. That would have been fine and all, but the torso was on one side of the room and the waist and legs were on the other. It was probably the last detail that made his stomach start flipping up and down.
"What're you working on?" the man asked again.
"Uh…" Sam found his eyes darting towards the blood spattered on the curtains and faded floral wallpaper. "Yeah, I gotta go…" He kind of did feel like he was going to throw up.
"Wait, let me give you my card. I do unsolved murders too; been working on the Zodiac down in—"
"Excuse me," Sam pushed his way past the man and away from the crime scene in general. He couldn't remember his excuse for getting access to the place or why the cops had let him in. But he was heading out now to barf and getting back in was pretty much the furthest thing from his mind.