She opened her eyes to a man's head haloed by harsh florescent
lights.
"Ma'am?" He was young, blond, and highly concerned
about something. She was lying on the floor. That was why she
could feel the press of hard, cold tiles against her back.
"Don't try to get up yet, ma'am." The man put a
restraining hand on her shoulder.
Blue sleeve. Police uniform blue.
"Where am I?" she asked and was alarmed to hear her
words come out in a bullfrog croak.
"Don't try to get up yet," the young policeman
repeated. She blinked and stared up at the ceiling. The smell of
fresh vomit hung heavy in the air, but she couldn't quite place
the other sharp tang just yet.
"Are you hurt anywhere that you're aware of, ma'am?"
he asked. She dutifully glanced down at herself, intending to take
inventory.
She was covered in blood. Recently dried blood still a
shocking, bright red. She felt no pain though.
"I don't think so," she said and gingerly patted down
the length of her torso and legs.
In the background, a man's voice, ragged with hysteria, moaned
over and over, "Oh my God. Oh my God."
"Are you telling me that you aren't bleeding, ma'am?"
The policeman watched her with an expression hovering somewhere
between worry and dawning suspicion. She could see flecks of dried
vomit on his shirt.
"No. I don't think I am," she said as the buzz coming
from somewhere behind the policeman's shoulder resolved itself
into a chorus of voices.
"-probable time of death 9 p.m.--"
"-checked in three days ago-"
"-notified the parents-"
"-another set of prints here-"
She was lying on her back in the middle of a crime scene and
that was the hum that accompanied the cataloguing of death.
"What's the last thing that you remember, ma'am?" The
policeman's eyes had gone a gunmetal blue to match his steely
tone.
That copper tang was the smell of fresh death.
"Please," she whispered. "I need to sit
up." When he looked as if he would refuse her request, she
said in a slightly louder voice, "Please, officer. I don't
think I'm injured."
He helped her up to a sitting position, keeping a firm grip on
her shoulders the entire time. Blood, blood everywhere in a
bathroom she had never seen before. She followed bloody handprints
to the bathtub and saw-
A pretty little girl lying in a red-clouded tub of water.
A pretty little girl with red-gold hair that floated around her
head like an exotic strain of kelp.
A pretty little girl with a precise gash that spread across her
throat like a thin-lipped second smile.
Literally caged in by the long arms of the law, Scully bent and
heaved the contents of her stomach over and over until there was
nothing left but the bitter taste of bile.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Mulder sat on one of a cluster of battered blue plastic chairs
attempting to impersonate a waiting room and pretended to watch
the sports highlight reel. Jordan hung in the air for an
impossible second before dunking over a hapless Celtic. Scully's
brief phone call played over and over again in Mulder's head, an
absurdist soundtrack that definitely did not jibe with feats of
athletic derring-do.
Sixty-five agonizing hours ago he had knocked on her motel room
door to ask about a detail from the Foster interview only to find
she was not in her room. Sixty-five agonizing hours of not knowing
what had happened to her until tonight when he had gotten a phone
call startling in its refusal to offer explanations. "Mulder,
it's me," she had said in a voice that gave nothing away.
"I'm at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge. They want to make
sure I'm okay." She had hung up before he could ask any
questions.
Sturdy, practical nurse's shoes appeared in front of him.
"Agent Mulder? Agent Scully is in room 216. The doctor just
finished examining her."
He stood up and looked into brown eyes spider-webbed by fine
red capillaries. "Thank you," he said. "I'm, uh,
sorry about before--" He trailed off, trying not to shuffle
his feet.
The nurse continued to regard him impassively. They had
exchanged words and he had raised his voice and grabbed her arm in
a grip that would probably leave bruises. She looked like she was
mentally rehearsing the thousand and one synonyms for police
brutality she could use in the police report she planned to file.
"The elevator is right around the corner," she said and
brushed by him in a blur of outraged white uniform.
Two plainclothes cops stood outside the door to room 216.
"Agent Mulder?" the older man asked. He looked like
Central Casting's top pick for Seasoned Veteran Detective with his
dark, mournful eyes, graying walrus mustache, and decade-old
sports jacket. "Detective Nowitzki. This is Detective
Fong." He gestured towards the woman next to him. Mulder
nodded at them both as everybody played a desultory round of Show
Me Your Badge.
"How is Agent Scully?" Mulder asked.
Nowitzki looked at him with a strangely intent sympathy.
"Physically, she's fine. We were concerned because she was
unconscious when the first officers arrived on the scene."
Mulder could feel the fine hairs on the back of his neck rise.
"What scene are you talking about?" he demanded.
"She didn't tell you?" Fong asked in return. She was
definitely not Central Casting. Not with that shellacked black
hair, sleek black pantsuit and those insanely high heels Scully
also seemed to favor.
"I must have gotten the Cliffs Notes version," he
snapped. Fong watched him with sharp eyes.
"Agent Mulder," Nowitzki broke in. "Agent Scully
is in a very serious situation. The night manager at a local Day's
Inn heard suspicious noises and called the police. Agent Scully
was passed out in the bathroom, next to a body. That body has been
identified as Sarah Tollman, the little girl who went missing
three days ago. We found Agent Scully's fingerprints all over the
place."
In one of those meaningless free associations the mind seemed
to offer up at the most inopportune moments, Mulder suddenly
remembered a scene from "The Grifters." Angelica
Houston's character's boss had discovered she was double-crossing
him and had ordered her to wrap a dozen oranges up in a towel.
Anyone hit in the stomach with those towel- wrapped oranges would
suffer severe internal bleeding, Angelica Houston's character
stammered as she crouched before her boss and carried out his
orders. The sheer terror in her voice had stuck in Mulder's mind
even though the investigator in him knew that such a scenario was
forensically impossible. Staring at Nowitzki and Fong with wide
eyes, Mulder wondered if a dozen oranges to the stomach could
possibly compare to the impact of Nowitzki's words.
"Have you determined a cause of death?" Mulder asked.
Somehow his voice stayed steady even as he wanted to scream,
"That's circumstantial evidence, asshole."
"Sarah Tollman's throat was slashed with what appears to
be a scalpel. We haven't located the weapon yet," Fong said.
Mulder couldn't bring himself to talk about Scully in the
carefully bland, dispassionate language of law enforcement any
further. He hated the passive voice with its furtive elision of
the subject and the subject's ability to act. "I'd like to
see Agent Scully," he said. Subject verb object. He moved
towards the door.
Nowitzki put a warning hand on his arm. "Agent Mulder, we
need to get an official statement from Agent Scully. We just
stopped off at the hospital to make sure she hadn't sustained any
injuries."
"What are you saying, Detective?" Mulder wanted to
wince at the sudden snarl in his voice. "Are you saying that
Agent Scully is under arrest?"
"The evidence certainly seems to suggest that Agent Scully
was present during the murder," Fong seemed to want to appeal
to his rational side. She didn't know that where Scully was
concerned, rationality tended to absent itself like a discreet
valet who had caught his master with his pants down.
"Agent Mulder, please," Nowitzki said, eyeing him
warily. "This is an awkward situation for all of us."
Mulder resisted the urge to take a swing at Nowitzki. "I
just want to make sure Agent Scully really is `physically fine',
as you term it."
Nowitzki and Fong exchanged quick glances and nodded at each
other. "Five minutes, Agent Mulder," Fong told him. Some
Quantico handbook somewhere probably stated that federal agents
should say "Thank you" after the local police granted
them permission to see their partners, but he had never been one
for following protocol.
His first glimpse of Scully was oversized medical scrubs,
slippered feet dangling from the examination table, a curtain of
red hair, and a bone-white face. She lifted her head when she
heard the door snick shut behind him. "Mulder," she said
in a thin, flat voice.
Privately, he had always thought of Scully as a supernova, a
luminous, white-hot burst of light that obliterated the darkness
for miles around and guided lost sailors back home. They didn't
need flashlights when she was around, he had told her
half-jokingly once during an interminable stakeout. She had looked
a little embarrassed and said, "You really know how to
flatter a girl, Mulder. You make me sound like an especially
unfortunate victim of radiation fallout." He had smiled at
her and promised to open an X-File on the matter as soon as they
got back to the office.
He rued the comparison as he looked at her now. Supernovas
collapsed into dull white dwarfs and then black holes, rips in the
fabric of the universe. He could not let her implode.
"Scully," he said, desperate to touch her, but unsure
if he should. "Are you all right?"
She ignored his inane question. "They took my
clothes," she said in a shell-shocked voice. "For
evidence." Her hands shook so hard she couldn't push an
errant strand of hair behind her ear.
He was next to her before he knew what he was doing. "It's
okay, Scully," he soothed, smoothing her hair for her.
"It's okay." Tiny tremors shook her entire body. He
wrapped an arm around her shoulders and held her.
Her shuddering subsided after a few minutes and she tensed. He
let go of her. "I have to give my statement to Detective
Nowitzki and Detective Fong," she said and he wanted to cry
over the closed-off look in her eyes.
He slipped his trench coat over her shoulders. "It's cold
outside," he said in a suspiciously too- gruff voice. She
tugged the edges together and stood up. Even exhausted and
strained, she still glowed in the dim, institutional lighting.
Pallas Athena after a hard day on the battlefield.
As they walked down the hall behind Nowitzki and Fong, he
hovered near her, expecting that he would have to disguise the
fact that she was stumbling and he was supporting her. He was
wrong.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Although grief hung about her workday life like a constant
familiar, Manderley was never prepared to witness its infinite set
of permutations. There was the newlywed wife's howling despair
when she learned that a strung-out teenage junkie had shot her
husband in the convenience store he always stopped by on his way
home from work. There was the aging father's stoic grief when he
learned that someone had stabbed his only son to death in his own
apartment. Then there was the Tollmans' dumb, stunned grief when
she, Nowitzki, and Agent Mulder came to interview them about their
murdered daughter.
"Mr. and Mrs. Tollman," Nowitzki got the interview
started, somber and sympathetic in his paying-his- respects suit.
"We'd like to ask you a few questions about Sarah." This
was their routine. Nowitzki paved the way with his liquid eyes and
the Old World pain that clung to him like an aura. She catalogued
body language and tone of voice and asked the tough questions.
Neither of the Tollmans responded. Marsha Tollman doubled over
in sudden agony. Robert Tollman patted her back with a distant,
abstracted air.
"Mr. and Mrs. Tollman," Agent Mulder leaned forward
from the overstuffed armchair that threatened to swallow him.
"I know this must be incredibly difficult for you, but we
need you to tell us everything you can so that we can capture
whoever did this to Sarah." Like Nowitzki, he radiated
empathy and a barely concealed sadness of his own. His smart
charcoal suit just happened to cost ten times more than Nowitzki's
did.
Nowitzki gave her a barely perceptible one-shoulder shrug from
across the coffee table. A burly, bald Assistant Director from the
FBI had emerged from Jenkins' office six hours ago. Ten minutes
later, Jenkins, who thought interagency collaboration only one
step away from bestiality, had told her and Nowitzki to "work
with Agent Mulder on this investigation."
"We've gone over all of this with the police
already," Tollman said in a deadened monotone. He was a tall,
thin man. A cancer researcher at a firm called Genetech.
Ironically enough, a shelf of books on alien abductions sat right
above his head.
"I know, Mr. Tollman," Agent Mulder's voice was a low
rumble designed to pry secrets from the reluctant.
"Sometimes, though, it helps to go over everything again. You
may think of a particular detail that slipped your mind before.
Or, I may see a pattern that I couldn't figure out just from
reading your statement."
Tollman nodded, one hand still mechanically stroking his wife's
trembling back. Manderley felt her own throat constrict at the
sound of Marsha Tollman's muffled sobs.
Agent Mulder looked down at the pile of papers in his lap. Then
he fixed his gaze on Mr. Tollman. "How did you first discover
that Sarah was missing?"
"We were about to go to bed," Tollman seemed to be
staring hard at a picture of Sarah propped up on the fireplace.
"Marsha and I always say good-night to Sarah before we turn
in. This was about ten o'clock. We went to her room and she wasn't
there." Tears streamed down his face. "She had gone up
to her room around eight o'clock to read The Secret Garden. She's
a tremendous reader. She always read far beyond her grade
level."
"She was a tremendous reader," Marsha Tollman had
pulled herself away from her husband in the middle of his account.
"Was, Robert. She's dead now."
If Marsha Tollman's hard words gave him pause, Agent Mulder
didn't let on. He looked at her with compassionate eyes. "Did
you or your husband see or hear anything that night that struck
you as remotely suspicious?
Marsha Tollman shook her head. "No," she whispered
hoarsely. "This is a safe neighborhood. Kids could walk home
from their friends' houses at night." She pulled restlessly
at the hem of her batik-printed shirt. The Tollmans were a strange
play of sartorial contrasts. Robert Tollman wore the standard
upper- middle class male uniform of a polo shirt and khakis.
Marsha Tollman favored pricey hippie couture. Manderley wondered
where Sarah Tollman had gotten her red-gold hair. Both the
Tollmans were dark-haired.
"Did you notice anybody suspicious in the area
recently?" Agent Mulder asked.
Robert Tollman shook his head. "No. Like Marsha said, this
is a safe neighborhood."
"Has anybody come to do work on the house recently? A
plumber? An electrician? Do you have a handyman?" Manderley
caught Nowitzki's warning glance, but she couldn't stop herself
from pressing. She tried to soften her brisk tone so that she
didn't sound like she was interrogating the couple. "Have you
had construction done on the house in the past few months?"
"No," Robert Tollman said and she wanted to apologize
for the numb bewilderment he politely tried to suppress.
"Nobody. We've had the same plumber for the past five years,
if that helps."
Next to him, Marsha Tollman started to cry, harsh, racking sobs
that shook her body. Her face twisted helplessly until it looked
like a tragic mask.
"Mr. Tollman," Agent Mulder said, but Manderley
didn't hear the rest of his question. She was hearing her mother's
guttural sobbing as two polite, but desperately uncomfortable
policemen stood in their living room and said, "We're so
sorry Mr. and Mrs. Fong. There's been a lot of gang activity in
and around the Chinatown area. It was late at night. Officer
Sullivan thought your son was about to pull out a weapon."
Manderley closed her eyes against the memory of her father's
anguished, accented demand, "How? How this happen?" It
had been New Year's Eve. The blue of the policemen's uniforms
clashed with the bright vermilion of the jacket her aunt had sent
her from San Francisco.
Nowitzki and Agent Mulder were standing up now. The interview
was over apparently. "Here's my card. If anything at all
occurs to you, call me at anytime," Nowitzki put a gentle
hand on Robert Tollman's shoulder.
"Thank you very much, Mr. and Mrs. Tollman," Agent
Mulder said. He looked at Manderley curiously for a moment before
giving the Tollmans his card as well.
Manderley put her card in front of Robert Tollman. "I'm so
sorry for your loss," she said, awkward and miserable because
there were no proper words for a moment like this.
Outside, the biting New England air slapped against her face.
She wrapped her coat around herself more tightly and tried to
pretend that it was Sammy helping her ward off the chill. April
was a cruel, cruel month in Massachusetts, mixing harsh winter
with the erratic promise of spring.
"I need to see the crime scene," Agent Mulder said,
all traces of collegiality magically erased. The man didn't seem
to know the meaning of the word "please."
Nowitzki saw that she was about to say something highly
unprofessional and cut in before she struck a blow against
interagency cooperation. "You were going to visit the crime
scene again after we interviewed the Tollmans, weren't you,
Manny?"
Manderley hoped Nowitzki could read the "fuck you" in
her eyes loud and clear. "Yes, I was," she said with a
stiff smile. "I'd be interested to hear your impressions,
Agent Mulder." Judging by the way Agent Mulder's face
darkened, he liked Nowitzki's suggestion about as much as she did.
"Great. I'll see you back at the station, Manny. You too,
Agent Mulder," Nowitzki got into the car and started the
engine before mouthing an "I'm sorry" at her.
"Bastard," she mouthed back at him while Agent Mulder
searched for his keys. She wasn't really upset, though. She and
Nowitzki both knew they had to get a clearer read on Agent Mulder.
Stranger things were possible than a pair of FBI agents who
moonlighted as serial killers.
The interior of Agent Mulder's Ford rental smelled like stale
coffee and some kind of seed. Pumpkin seeds, maybe. Manderley
glanced at the tube of lipstick lying on the floor of the
passenger seat just long enough to determine that it was a MAC
lipstick and was indeed a color suitable for fair- complexioned
redheads. Agent Mulder drove in absolute silence. His tendency to
speed up at yellow lights and take corners sharply were the only
overt signs of the impatience and hostility he had displayed all
day.
A less charitable investigator might start thinking about the
ways anxiety sometimes manifested itself as aggression.
Manderley rubbed at her wrists, trying not to think about the
muted despair of the Tollman family or the strung-out anger of the
man beside her. The lining of her blazer scraped against raw flesh
and she blushed at the sudden heat that overtook her. She'd left
bite marks all along Sammy's shoulders as surely as the handcuffs
had left chafe marks on her own wrists. Sammy who was smooth skin
and soft flesh. Warmth and wet that kept dead nine year-old girls
with staring blue eyes from invading her dreams. "Oh Officer,
please. I'll be good," Sammy had pleaded in a naughty-girl
voice that made Manderley want to laugh and moan at the same time.
They'd been together for eleven months, had moved in together six
months ago, but Manderley still wanted to remember every detail of
every night they'd spent together.
"Do you want the heat on high, Detective Fong?" Agent
Mulder looked pointedly at her restless hands.
"No. I'm fine," she said and wondered at the sudden
pain that flitted across his face. "I think I'm coming down
with Carpal Tunnels."
Agent Mulder didn't seem to believe her, glancing at her arms
again. Spooky Mulder. That's what Nowitzki had said last night.
Reportedly, the man was an uncanny profiler with a frighteningly
sharp mind. He had no qualms about pushing anyone's buttons, as
evidenced by the casual arrogance with which he'd dismissed
everybody's theories on the Sarah Tollman case this morning.
"Basically, you've got circumstantial evidence right now,
gentlemen. And ladies," he'd said, lounging in his seat in
the conference room. "The killer's still out there
somewhere." Last night, nobody had wanted to believe that
Special Agent Dana Scully, FBI had taken a scalpel to Sarah
Tollman. After spending an hour in Agent Mulder's presence, there
were some who now hoped she was the killer out of sheer spite.
"It's probably faster if you take Soldier's Field
Road," Manderley hated having to play navigator. She hated it
even more when the driver ignored her directions and decided to
take the back roads instead.
"Don't worry, Detective Fong," Agent Mulder said.
"I grew up around here."
A cell phone rang. Agent Mulder fumbled in his trench coat.
Then her own cell phone rang as well.
"Manny?" She heard the thrum of excitement in
Nowitzki's voice. He always sounded this way when they finally
caught a break. "They found the murder weapon. It's got Agent
Scully's prints all over it. You and Agent Mulder should get down
here immediately."
Agent Mulder had gotten the news too. His hands clenched tight
around the steering wheel as he turned the car around. The tires
screeched viciously.
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