ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: Mistress Orchid is a real person. She has generously given me permission to fictionalize her here.
*
Dean looked out the window at the crappy Seattle weather and sighed.
"What?" Sam asked, glancing up from the public-records tome in front of him.
"This case really blows, man," Dean said, shaking his head. "A serial killer who's been dead twenty years; now his ghost is back at it again. That just doesn't seem fair."
"Yeah," Sam agreed. "And the cops have no way to catch him."
That was what had alerted them that this was their kind of case in the first place. The reports said that two of Seattle's Finest had happened upon the tail end of a crime in progress and had given chase. Both officers swore that the suspect had turned down a blind alley just a few feet ahead of them and vanished. They also later I.D.'d a photo of Liam Locke, deceased.
For the Winchesters, the trouble was in what happened over the intervening decades. Although Locke had been cremated when he died, some entrepreneurial genius had eventually gained custody of the estate and put the urn into Locke's own footlocker -- the one where he had kept his 'tools' and 'trophies'. The grizzly artifact had then been sold to a private party. Somebody local, they knew, but beyond that the trail was obfuscated. There had been a paperwork shell-game to conceal the buyer, presumably to shield this nut-job from the wrath of Locke's victims' families.
So now the brothers were playing 'trunk, trunk, who's got the trunk?' in the City's bureaucratic paperwork quagmire.
"Weird," Sam muttered. "Come look at this, Dean." When his brother was peering over his shoulder, Sam pointed. "What is this about an orchid warehouse? All the other businesses we've traced are nightclubs and bars and other entertainment stuff."
"Orchid warehouse," Dean repeated to himself. "Why does that...?" He cut himself off abruptly.
"What?"
"Um," Dean hesitated momentarily. "Let me go check some things out." He patted his lanky brother on the shoulder and gathered up his jacket.
"What? Dean!" Sam called after his suddenly retreating older sibling.
"Just let me go poke around a little, Sammy. It might be nothing," Dean said casually. "You keep looking here. I'll meet up with you later." With that, he was out the door and gone.
Sam made an 'I can't believe this' noise, shook his head, then sighed and returned to the research spread out all over the table in front of him. *'He's probably just doing this to get out of helping me,'* he thought cynically.
~o~0~o~
They hooked back up a few hours later at a deli for dinner.
"You know that orchid business you were wondering about? I found it," Dean smirked, taking a bite of his sandwich. "Well, sorta."
"What does that mean?" Sam questioned around a mouthful.
"That damn footlocker is at a private club that's in a converted warehouse."
"So what does that have to do with flowers?" Sam wondered.
"The manager of the club is named Mistress Orchid." Dean tried to sound casual.
"*Mistress* Orchid?" Sam questioned uneasily.
"Yeah," Dean said. "It's a BDSM club."
~o~0~o~
Back at the motel, Dean continued to explain his plan for retrieving the footlocker. The private club --named 'Strict', as it turned out-- had mad-tight security; there was no way they were going to be able to break into the place. But Dean had managed to wrangle him and Sam a one-night guest pass; the catch was, they were required to participate. And the invitation mentioned 'dungeon attire'.
"No freakin' way!" Sam vehemently asserted. "I am *so* not doing this, Dean."
"Aw, come on, Sammy," Dean needled. "You're afraid of wearing a dog collar and letting some chick in leather spank you?" He snorted a laugh and asked, "Where's your sense of adventure?"
"Not in some freaky fetish dungeon," Sam assured him, shaking his head and crossing his arms stubbornly.
~o~0~o~
"I can't believe you talked me into this," Sam grumbled as he stripped, stowing his belongings in a locker provided by the establishment.
"Sam," Dean said, exasperated, "we've been over this already. We can't just let this ghost keep on killing people. We have to stop it, now, tonight."
"I know, I know," Sam sighed. "But I feel damn silly walking around like this, in the middle of a bunch of strangers, no less." He indicated his club-provided 'attire' with a vague wave and a small grimace: a leather torso harness and a fresh-out-of-the-package pair of tidy-whities.
"It's not so bad," Dean told him, adjusting his borrowed leather wrist cuffs, seemingly oblivious to the slave collar around his neck, the ankle cuffs with the dangling metal rings, and his own brand new jockeys that seemed a little bit too small. "Just look at what some of the other people are wearing."
"This is so messed up," Sam grumbled, as he closed his locker with a clang.
"Just keep an eye out for that trunk," Dean admonished. "We'll split up, cover more ground that way."
"I don't think we're 'covering' much of anything tonight," his brother muttered self-consciously.
~o~0~o~