Malus Genius 6

Several long minutes of glacial silence passed. Mulder tried, and failed, to ignore it. It was hard to ignore glacial silence when you were alone in a car with a woman and there was nothing else to look at except falling leaves and white-washed fences.

He was just about to ask Scully what was wrong when she cleared her throat. Still looking out the window, she asked, "Mulder, what was all that about, back at Kopeck's place?"

He glanced at her, surprised at the tack she had taken. "What was all what about? The questions about the family business, or about Kopeck's father?"

She shook her head. "No, Mulder. The black widow spider, the praying mantis..." She turned her face his way and regarded him coolly. "Is there something you want to say to me?"

He considered giving her a flippant answer, then decided against it. He drummed his fingers thoughtfully on the steering wheel. "Yeah. I'd like for you to see me as something more than a sex object, Scully."

She snorted.

The car swept through the bright autumn landscape. Leaves of copper and gold were falling on either side of the country road, floating softly down to the grass.

After a minute she said, "You're serious."

"It's just..." he began. He sighed. "I'm getting old, Scully."

She cocked an eyebrow at him. "And?"

"No, I am. I mean, I'm still a decade or two away from needing Viagra, but the day is coming. Time marches on. Someday I really will be gray, and then -- "

"Oh, my God," she said, surprising him with the incredulity in her tone. "Is that what this is about? The gray hair in the shower yesterday morning?"

"No," he said, and gnawed at his lip. "Or yes. Partially, maybe. The truth is, I'm not in my prime any more -- "

"Mulder, I was only kidding about that."

He glanced at her, then away again. "You didn't sound like you were kidding."

"Unfortunately, there's no laugh track in your bedroom."

"You think it needs one?" He smiled, but the smile didn't reach his eyes.

She didn't smile back. "Mulder, don't start. You have very little cause to complain when I just found out that you knew damned well -- "

He opened his mouth to interrupt, but before he could form the words his cell phone rang in his breast pocket. "Damn," he swore, pulling out the phone. "Mulder," he snapped into the receiver, frustration coloring his usual flat professionalism.

The voice on the other end was so loud and so agitated that he flinched and jerked the phone away before bringing it gingerly back to his ear. He listened to the excited caller on the other end of the line, watching the road with only half his attention now. "Okay," he said finally. "We're on our way."

"What is it?" Scully asked as he tucked the phone back into his pocket.

"There's been another death," he told her, checking over his shoulder before starting the car into a three-point turn. "It looks like Mr. Kopeck might not be so innocent after all. This time, the body's at the gym."

****

It was just too awful, even for someone like Eric Noonan, thought Mr. Kopeck. He glanced at the dead body with a sense of horror. He supposed death was rarely dignified, but to die naked in a gym while stealing someone else's deodorant was the epitome of indignity.

The locker room was streaked with blood: blood on the lockers, blood on the three wooden benches. It ran in a rivulet to the little metal drain set in the concrete floor. Mr. Kopeck shuddered. The locker where he'd left his gym bag yawned open, the empty Nike bag inside.

Law enforcement -- the two FBI agents, two Troopers from the Vermont State Police, and a detective from the same Derby barracks -- milled around him. The FBI agents seemed perfectly at home amid the carnage, the Troopers completely at sea, and the lone detective somewhere in the middle. All of them were talking in the language of crime and death: fingerprints, footprints, trace evidence, post-mortem lividity. Mr. Kopeck buried his face in his hands.

"Right Guard," noted Agent Mulder, observing the deodorant in the dead man's grip. "Too bad it wasn't the strongest protection he could buy."

"No," said Mr. Kopeck, looking up. "That was mine. I think he was borrowing it."

Agent Scully pinned him with a glance. "Borrowing it?"

He shrugged. "Stealing it. Whatever."

The younger of the two Troopers squinted at him. "So you killed him because he was stealing your deodorant?"

"No!" yelped Mr. Kopeck. "I didn't kill anyone. I just found the body. You can ask Belinda out there. I walked in here and found him this way."

"You didn't see anything suspicious?" the detective asked him.

"I didn't see anyone -- any person," said Mr. Kopeck scrupulously, wondering which would be worse, a prison cell or a rubber room.

With the FBI in charge, neither the Troopers nor the State Police detective had much to occupy them at the scene. Soon the Troopers announced they were off to notify the next of kin. The detective followed.

The fewer people there were in the room, the more disturbing Mr. Kopeck found the murder scene. Besides, he wondered, where was the demon? Had it returned to his desk? His kitchen? Was it running around loose, a menace to every unsuspecting citizen of Craftsbury Common? Was it even now watching him from some shadowy corner?

Mr. Kopeck wiped his damp palms on his sweatpants. "Can I go now?" he asked the two FBI agents. "I already gave the other detective my statement."

Mulder and Scully exchanged looks. "This is going to take me a little while, Mulder," she said, gesturing at Noonan's dead body.

"Take your time." He said it as calmly as if he were sitting behind a desk pushing paper, and not standing over a naked, blood-spattered corpse. He turned to Mr. Kopeck. "I would like to ask you a few more questions, if you don't mind."

Mr. Kopeck's gaze slid to the body on the floor. "Do we have to do it here? It's just a little hard to concentrate, you know, with Eric -- "

"If you'd prefer, we can go outside."

Agent Mulder pulled the locker room door open, and Mr. Kopeck got up and walked with him out into the hallway, to where the smell of established mildew and fresh blood gave way to the cleaner air of racketball courts and waxed wooden floors. Mr. Kopeck glanced back and forth, half expecting to see the demon disappearing around a corner.

Mulder gestured to a bench against one wall, and together they sat down. "So how did it happen?" he asked without preamble.

"I -- I don't know," Mr. Kopeck stammered. "The last time I saw Eric alive, he was flirting with Belinda at the desk. The next thing I knew, he was lying dead on the locker room floor."

Mulder lifted one eyebrow. "You say the victim was flirting with the woman at the desk?"

"Well, I consider it flirting," said Mr. Kopeck stiffly. "Maybe you wouldn't."

"Did she flirt back?"

Mr. Kopeck wondered if all FBI agents were so nosey. What could this possibly have to do with Eric's murder? "I guess so. She was laughing at his jokes, anyway. It -- it surprised me, because..."

"Yes?" said Agent Mulder after a moment. "You were saying?"

Mr. Kopeck shook his head. "Nothing."

"No, you said it surprised you. Why did it surprise you that she flirted back?"

"Well," answered Mr. Kopeck, feeling foolish, "I realize now I was probably wrong, but before Eric came in, I thought maybe Belinda was -- I think she was going to ask me out."

"Oh?"

Mr. Kopeck squirmed. "Maybe. I don't know. She talked to me, and she mentioned she was going to the movies. And then...you know, I was half-hoping she was going to ask me out, and I was half-terrified she was going to."

"That would have been a problem?"

"I don't know. Maybe. She's a little young for me. Plus she always sets the radio here to the bubblegum pop station from Burlington, and no offense if you're a Backstreet Boys fan, but if I have to listen to one more chorus of 'As Long as You Love Me,' I'm going to drink Drano. I mean, she's nice, but...I'm not sure I'm ready..." He shrugged. "Anyway, she probably wasn't going to say anything anyway. It's just that I've never been very good at reading these situations. And I'm way out of practice."

Agent Mulder nodded slowly. "You knew all of the people who've died here this week, didn't you, Mr. Kopeck?"

He swallowed, and wondered how he was supposed to answer. Outraged innocence? Mournful agreement? He couldn't decide, so he just nodded.

Agent Mulder was silent. Finally he leaned back against the wall behind them. "You said you teach World History?" he asked conversationally.

Mr. Kopeck had not expected his casual tone. "Yes, that's right."

"In that case, do you know the story of Brutus before the Battle of Philippi?"

Somewhat puzzled, Mr. Kopeck nodded. "Yes -- it's in Plutarch, and Shakespeare too. Brutus was an ambitious Roman who had joined in the conspiracy to assassinate Julius Caesar. Civil war followed. On the evening before the battle in which he was to die, Brutus couldn't sleep. In the darkest hour of the night he was visited by a -- "

Mr. Kopeck ground to a halt.

"Yes?" prodded Agent Mulder.

"By a -- a demon."

Mulder nodded. "Do you know what the creature said when Brutus asked it who it was?"

Mr. Kopeck bit his lip nervously. "'Sum malus tuus genius' -- 'I am your evil spirit.'"

Agent Mulder regarded him in expectant silence.

Mr. Kopeck turned his head and asked with lowered brows, "So what are you implying, Agent Mulder?"

Agent Mulder folded his arms over his chest. "Ambition caught up with Brutus. Manifest ambition in the form a demon, Mr. Kopeck, in the form of an evil spirit."

Mr. Kopeck's mouth felt suddenly dry. He swallowed. "It's a story, Agent Mulder. The demon is just -- WAS just a dramatic device."

"Is it?"

"Of course it is," Mr. Kopeck replied, trying to look appalled instead of terrified. "Are you...are you seriously suggesting...?"

Mulder cleared his throat. "You're just recently divorced, aren't you, Mr. Kopeck?"

Mr. Kopeck looked down at his shoes. "It's not final yet. My wife left me two months ago."

"Left you for another man?"

Mr. Kopeck flushed, and glanced at Mulder resentfully. "Not that it's any of your business, but yes."

Beside him, Mulder nodded sympathetically. "I imagine that's been hard to get used to."

"You could say that."

"So, then..." the FBI agent continued, "I suppose this has been an eventful couple of months for you. Recently and quite unfamiliarly, you've been propositioned by one student, probably found yourself eyeing others, and had reason to wonder if the woman at the desk outside might be interested in you."

Mr. Kopeck turned and regarded him apprehensively. "Yes."

"And three people have died."

Mr. Kopeck sat for a moment, wondering what Agent Mulder was getting at. "So what are you suggesting? Are you trying to tell me my evil spirit is...lust?"

Mulder tilted his head thoughtfully, looking off into the distance. "Maybe it would be more accurate to call it a manifestation of the conflict you've been feeling lately about sex."

Mr. Kopeck snorted.

"Or I could just be nuts," Agent Mulder said lightly.

"I think that's more likely."

"Still," Mulder said, "it makes an interesting theory, don't you think?"

They heard voices in the hallway intersection beside them, and both turned their heads. A second later Belinda strolled past in the tight-fitting uniform of an aerobics instructor, spandex shorts and a sports bra. She was talking to another woman in similarly body-hugging workout gear. The two men watched the women go by, listening until the soft sound of their voices faded.

Mr. Kopeck sighed. "Sex used to be so much fun," he said sadly. He shook his head in confusion. "How did it turn so complicated?"

"Forget needing glasses or starting to go gray," Agent Mulder said. "That's the real sign of encroaching age."

Mr. Kopeck frowned. "I think you're right. I remember when I was a teenager, it was all I could think about. I wanted to do it all day. Hell, when I was twenty-one, I did do it all day."

"I did it all day when I was fourteen," said Agent Mulder. "Of course, those were all solo flights."

Mr. Kopeck leaned his chin on his hand and sighed. "I think it's unfair that men are in their sexual prime when we're nineteen. That kind of potential is wasted on a nineteen-year-old. I mean, did you have your sexual act together when you were nineteen?" He turned and looked at Mulder questioningly.

"I'm not sure I have my sexual act together now."

Mr. Kopeck nodded. "I certainly didn't when I was nineteen, I know that much. At that age I considered the evening a swaggering success if I didn't end up scrubbing at my date's sweater with a handkerchief and apologizing for my over-enthusiasm."

"Assuming you could get a date at all."

"Exactly," agreed Mr. Kopeck. "I was skinny, I had zits. Whereas, women...women don't hit their peak until their mid-thirties. They've got motive AND opportunity."

"They out-live us, too," Agent Mulder pointed out helpfully.

Mr. Kopeck shook his head. "Life is so fucking unfair."

They both lapsed into silence.

A few minutes later they heard the brisk tap of high heels, and Agent Scully appeared, trim and efficient-looking, tugging off a pair of surgical gloves as she approached. "All done here, Mulder," she said.

Agent Mulder stood.

"Is that it?" asked Mr. Kopeck, looking up hopefully. "Are we finished?"

"For now. But think about what I said," Agent Mulder told him. "I have a feeling you're not going to solve your problem until you face up to what's causing it."

Mr. Kopeck nodded, and watched as the two agents turned and walked away. Agent Scully paused to throw her gloves in a nearby trash can, Mulder adroitly stepping aside for her as if the move had been choreographed.

Mr. Kopeck stared after them. It was easy for Mulder to talk, he thought bitterly. He'd seen the way Agent Scully looked at her partner. He had a feeling Mulder was getting some on a regular basis. Everyone seemed to be, except him.

"Hey, Mr. K."

Mr. Kopeck turned at the sound of a familiar voice. "Brittany," he said with some surprise, getting to his feet. "And Kandee." Both were standing before him in their blue and gold cheerleading uniforms, pompoms at the ready. The day, he reflected sardonically, just kept getting better.

****

END 06/10

Plausible Deniability & Amanda Wilde (MaybeAmanda)
Address:
pdeniability@hotmail.com / maybe_a@rocketmail.com

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