So this was what it was like to have the cosmic rug pulled out
from under you.
Scully closed her eyes against the erratic lights that pulsed
like an angry migraine. She'd spent the night in a holding cell
two years ago. Back then, she had faced down a Senate committee
because Krycek had resurfaced, quivering with intrigue and the
seductive promise of answers. Righteous outrage coursing through
her, she hadn't slept at all that night. Instead, she had
alternated between assuring herself that nothing had happened to
Mulder, wherever he was, and re-drafting her prepared statement so
that she could lambast the pompous politicians who hid behind
words like "duty" and "national safety."
None of those certainties held anymore. Words like
"truth," "duty," and "justice" were
just that. Mere words. The only things she could count on this
afternoon were the hardness of her prison cell mattress, the
chemical aftertaste of her prison lunch, and the shocking orange
of her prison jumpsuit.
Somewhere nearby, an angry female voice shrieked, "Fuck
you, you fucking motherfuckers. I didn't do nuh-thing."
Scully wished she had the luxury of such conviction.
Nowitzki had come in half an hour ago to tell her that someone
would take her to an interrogation room shortly. He was waiting
for Fong and Mulder to come back to the station. After he left,
Skinner had sat with her in awkward silence for a few minutes. He
looked smaller, shrunken. When he stood up to go, he laid a hand
against her cheek in a benediction she couldn't decode.
Bless me Father for I have sinned.
So she waited for the impassive guard to call her "Agent
Scully" and escort her down the bleak prison halls.
The door opened and Mulder stood in front of her, steely-eyed
and tender all at once.
"I've only got a few minutes, Scully," he said and
the tight knot inside her curled in on itself even more.
"Mulder," she said. She could only manage his name.
"I'm going to the crime scene as soon as you finish
answering their questions," he crossed the room to sit down
next to her. He smelled like fresh air and the faintest hint of
spring rain. She wanted to bury her face in his shoulder and shut
out the acrid stench of industrial strength disinfectant.
"Forensics probably did a piss-poor job there since they
figured this is as open-and-shut as they come." She closed
her eyes against the conviction in his tumbling words. "I've
looked at the photos and I can't believe how clumsy the set-up
was. Nobody kills like that. One clean slash across the throat.
I've already asked the ME to examine the body again for anything
he can find."
"Mulder," she put her hand on his arm and forced
herself to look at him. She had never been a coward and never
would be. She would watch as the faith shining in his eyes
dampened and died. She chose her words as carefully as she could.
"I appreciate everything that you're doing. I appreciate it
more than I can ever express. But, you cannot rule out the
possibility that this isn't a set-up of some sort."
For a moment, she found herself facing Special Agent Fox
Mulder, the ace profiler who always got his man. "What are
you implying, Scully?"
"Look at the facts, Mulder," she said and it was like
an obscene parody of the conversations they always had. "Look
at the wealth of hard, cold facts. My fingerprints are all over
the crime scene. My fingerprints are on the murder weapon. The
murder weapon is a scalpel. I was found unconscious at the crime
scene with Sarah Tollman's blood all over me."
"Are you suggesting that you did in fact kill Sarah
Tollman?" Mulder's eyes could drill a hole in a dime at
twenty yards. She wondered if every suspect Mulder interrogated
felt quite so pinned down and exposed. "What are you saying,
Scully?"
She closed her eyes briefly and then willed herself to meet
his. These were the words she had rehearsed all night long.
"What I am saying is this: I disappeared three days ago and I
cannot give any account of my actions during that time. I have no
recollection of that time. You and I both know that I have done
things without any conscious knowledge of my actions before."
She had prepared herself for an explosion and she wasn't
disappointed. Mulder almost overturned the mattress she was
sitting on. "Damn it, Scully," he hissed, eyes a hard
green. Three long strides took him from one end of the room to
another and then back. "You know and I know that you did not
do this. That chip in your neck isn't some kind of mind control
technology that can force you to kill someone."
Her own voice sounded so small and weak to her ears. "I
don't know that, Mulder. Don't you see? That's the thing. I don't
know. I only know what the facts are."
Then he was crouched in front of her, hands gripping her arms
with a desperate strength. "You can't give up on me,
Scully," he insisted. "How is this different from
Providence? Why did you believe I didn't kill David and Amy
Cassandra?"
"Mulder," she said and the word fell from her lips a
caress. "I'm not giving up. I'm not. I'm asking you to find
Sarah Tollman's killer. That's what you need to do. Not move
heaven and earth to clear me of murder charges. You need to find
out what happened to that little girl no matter what you
discover."
Gently, she pulled herself out of his grasp and stood up. She
wanted to tell him that she too felt as if she had always
foolishly believed that the sun revolved around the Earth and not
the other way around and now someone had given her ocular proof
that this was decidedly not the case.
Things fell apart and the center could never be counted on to
hold.
"You did not kill Sarah Tollman, Scully," Mulder
said, staring up at her with the fervor of a true believer at the
stake. She heard the echo of another time in his words. She had
been filled with rage and he had said in equal parts encouragement
and reproof, "You have one remaining witness, Agent Scully.
I'd think you'd want to know what her story is."
"How can you know that, Mulder?" she asked.
"I do, Scully," he told her. He pulled her against
him so that his head rested against her stomach.
Another certainty overturned. The only things she could count
on this afternoon were Mulder's unyielding faith in her and in
them.
They pulled apart just before the guard came to take her to
interrogation room 1.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Countless simulations at Quantico, hundreds of interrogations,
and Scully still managed to raise every red flag imaginable.
Mulder stood behind the two-way mirror and dug his fingernails
into his palms. Next to him, Skinner watched the proceedings,
grim-faced and silent. They had barely exchanged three words since
last night when Mulder had begged him to keep the Tollman case
under federal jurisdiction by any means necessary. Although
Skinner had done exactly that, Mulder couldn't bring himself to
thank him. Skinner had looked at the pictures of Sarah Tollman,
seen red-gold hair and pale blue eyes, and he'd believed Scully
was a killer. He watched Mulder with a terrible kindness that made
Mulder want to beat him senseless.
"You worked a case involving an Emily Sim last year,
correct?" Fong's interrogation technique had all the subtlety
of the Wizard of Oz frantically shouting, "Pay no mind to the
man behind the curtain."
"Yes, I did," Scully said tightly. Her precise
articulation called to mind the neat slash on Sarah Tollman's
throat.
"You took over her medical treatment, correct?"
"Yes, I did," Scully said. "Her parents had been
murdered and she was seriously ill."
"She died under your care, didn't she?"
Scully's eyes narrowed like a cat's. "Yes, she did,
Detective. Is there a point to this line of questioning?" The
sibilance of her s's was the warning rasp of a rattlesnake.
Fong stared back at Scully coolly before remarking, "The
staff at the San Diego County Hospital remembered that you seemed
very attached to Emily Sim. Why is that?"
For one treacherous moment, Mulder experienced firsthand what a
guilty Scully might look like. She opened her mouth twice, but no
sound came out. She had gone sickly white. "As I said before,
Emily Sim was very ill and she had no one to take care of
her." Her voice shook. She was a terrible liar and both Fong
and Nowitzki could tell.
"If you say so, Agent Scully," Fong said and
scribbled something on a notepad.
There was silence until Nowitzki leaned forward and fixed his
sad, dark eyes on Scully. "What we do is tough work, Agent
Scully," he said. The tone of his voice suggested that the
two of them were sipping coffee with the college kids in Harvard
Square. "It takes a toll. Especially on the strong
ones." He paused, seeming to expect Scully to nod in
agreement. Mulder felt a brief pang of sympathy for Nowitzki when
she merely arched an eyebrow and stared at him like a scornful
Sphinx.
"Three years ago, my daughter Katie was raped. She was
twenty-one. A college senior on her way back to her apartment on a
Saturday night. We never caught the bastard."
Fong settled back in her seat as if to prepare herself for a
long story.
"The next month, I'm working a serial rapist case. I
corner the asshole in an alley. It's just him and me. I'm looking
at the fucker and I'm thinking I should just take him out right
here. He's a sick man who specialized in sodomizing old ladies.
I'm staring at him and I see every sick act every sick fuck I've
ever put away has committed. It would be so easy to pull the
trigger."
Nowitzki's voice had taken on the clipped cadences of a very
special guest star on NYPD Blue.
On the other side of the glass, Skinner turned to Jenkins.
"Is all of this true, Captain Jenkins?" he asked.
"It might be," Jenkins shrugged, apparently
unconcerned. The vague obsequiousness he'd adopted this morning
had all but vanished.
Mulder concentrated on the show Nowitzki was putting on.
"Manny can attest to all of this." The surprised look on
Fong's face declared that this was news to her. "I was this
close to crossing the line. Manny was the one who stopped me.
`Don't cross the line, Jimmy,' she said to me. `Don't cross the
line.'"
Nowitzki lowered his voice and leaned in so that he and Scully
were eye-to-eye. "Is that what happened to you, Dana? Did you
see a few too many children getting hurt and you wanted to put an
end to that? Did you cross the line?"
Scully stared at Nowitzki until he looked down. She knew the
endless tricks, the countless ways to counterfeit intimacy and
understanding. "That's a very moving story, Detective
Nowitzki," she said in a voice like liquid ice. "But as
I said before, I have no recollection of what happened between the
time I last checked in with Agent Mulder and when I regained
consciousness at the Day's Inn. So, you'll excuse me if I'm unable
to provide a similarly dramatic testimonial."
"Agent Scully," Fong broke in. "Perhaps you
could at least provide us with an account of the case you and your
partner were investigating."
Mulder could pinpoint the exact moment Scully slipped into
Special Agent Dana Scully, M.D. mode. She sat up a little
straighter and spoke in her crisp, lecture mode. "Agent
Mulder and I were asked to consult on the recent spate of child
murders here in Boston. Three little girls were basically abducted
from their homes while they slept. In each case, the parents
neither heard nor saw anything suspicious. Katie Foster's parents
had no clue she was missing until her mother came to wake her up
for school. The bodies of each of the three girls were recovered
at a different spot near the Charles River. All of the evidence
suggests that this is the work of an escalating serial
killer."
"You spoke with Sarah Tollman just before her
disappearance, correct?" Fong asked.
Scully looked like she wanted to give Fong tips on her
interviewing technique. "I spoke with Mr. and Mrs. Tollman
briefly on the day before she went missing. Sarah was friends with
Katie Foster, the second victim. I have never spoken to Sarah
Tollman."
"But you were in the Tollman residence," Fong said.
"Yes, I was," Scully said.
"You probably saw the pictures of Sarah in the living
room," Fong may as well have telegraphed her next move.
"I don't specifically recall noticing any pictures of
Sarah."
"It seems to me that Sarah Tollman looks a lot like Emily
Sim," Fong suggested.
Scully stayed silent.
Fong shifted tactics. "Agent Scully, we have you placed at
the murder scene. Your fingerprints are on the murder weapon. You
do understand how serious this situation is, don't you?"
"As I have said repeatedly," Scully spat out each
word. "I understand the gravity of the situation completely.
I am trying to tell you everything I can, but the fact remains
that I have absolutely no recollection of what happened from the
time I last spoke to Agent Mulder at the motel to the moment I
came to at the Day's Inn."
The next minute passed by in a blur for Mulder.
Fong leaned in confidentially. "Dana," she said and
Scully flinched. "I probably shouldn't tell you this. I want
to help you, though. Both Detective Nowitzki and I do. All of the
facts scream that you killed Sarah Tollman, but, I don't think you
did it."
Skinner turned on Jenkins, snarling, "Stop this interview
right now, Captain."
Mulder ran into the hall and jerked open the door to the
interrogation room. Inside, Scully stared at Fong in bemusement.
"That's a very generous assessment, Detective," she said
and the disdain in her voice was so subtle only he could hear it.
"I hope you have some empirical evidence to support your
claim."
By this time, Jenkins had materialized behind him, hollering,
"That's enough, Fong. What were you thinking?"
Fong remained seated, eyes wide. Mulder recognized her
expression. That was the look of an overconfident cop whose risky
tactic had just blown up in her face. Skinner was still
terrorizing Jenkins. Nowitzki seemed to be apologizing to Scully.
Mulder couldn't help himself. He leaned in close to Fong like a
lover about to nibble on his beloved's ear. She tensed
immediately. "I'm on to you, Detective," he murmured.
"And I will be watching. The next time you and your partner
try to play mind games with Agent Scully I will personally see to
it that both of you lose your badges." Fong didn't
acknowledge him, but her hands were shaking as she organized her
files.
Scully met his eyes briefly before the guard led her back to
her cell.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"Murder most foul, as in the best it is."
That line looped endlessly in Manderley's mind as she stood in
the blood-stained Day's Inn bathroom. Sarah Tollman's body was
long gone, tagged and bagged at the county morgue. Someone had
made a vague attempt to draw a chalk outline of her body in the
tub. The crooked yellow lines seemed so much more ghoulish than
the actual flesh and blood body.
Manderley flipped through the crime scene photos and tried to
forget about the afternoon's disastrous interrogation. That part
of her had honestly believed what she said to Agent Scully didn't
seem to matter to anyone. Nowitzki had avoided her for the rest of
the day. Jenkins made noises about suspensions and reprimands,
although he was mainly sound and fury, especially when pressured
by federal agencies he viewed with contempt.
Spooky Mulder had threatened her and he'd sounded completely
sincere.
She stared at the dull, brown stains on the dingy white-tiled
floor. She'd seen hundred of crimes scenes before, but she'd never
seen a trail of perfect bloody handprints pointing to the murder
victim. Something was very rotten in the state of Denmark.
She heard a soft sound behind her and spun around. It was six
in the evening and close enough to the witching hour when she was
surrounded by the violence of death. Just her luck. Agent Mulder
was in the house.
For a moment he looked as if he planned to ignore her
completely. Then, he nodded curtly. "Detective Fong," he
said and the temperature in the room dropped ten degrees.
"Agent Mulder," she acknowledged. She would not
apologize. Being a second generation, Chinese woman detective with
a girlfriend who had multiple piercings meant never saying sorry.
Manderley turned back to examining the bloody handprints. Out
of the corner of her eye, she saw Mulder bend over the tub.
"Murder most foul, as in the best it is. But this the most
foul, strange, and unnatural."
"Excuse me?"
She hadn't realized she'd spoken out loud. "Sorry,"
she said. "Just a few lines that keep running through my
head."
The look Mulder gave her was intent and speculative. She tried
not to appear uncomfortable. "Hamlet. The Ghost's
speech," he said. "What made you think of that?"
"I don't know. It's probably nothing," she could feel
herself starting to turn red under his scrutiny. "Sometimes
snippets of things get stuck in my head the same way stupid songs
do."
"That seems like an extremely apt snippet," he said,
still taking her measure.
"Well, you know what all the wacky psychoanalysts
say," she shrugged. "Either you speak about your
unconscious, or your unconscious speaks you."
"And what does your unconscious have to say, Detective
Fong?" Mulder leaned back against the wall. His face gave
nothing away.
She did want to make amends somehow for the scene she'd caused
earlier today. Maybe offering her insights up to God's gift to
profiling would be sacrifice enough. The worst thing he could do
was laugh at her. She took a deep breath and said,
"Everything about this case seems a little too
convenient."
Mulder's response was the noncomittal "Hmm" she
remembered so well from seminars and office hours. She needed to
give up more. "The evidence almost feels contrived. These
handprints in particular really bother me. They're so perfect.
It's almost as if somebody took the time to put them here."
That was interest she saw gleaming in Mulder's eyes. He took a
plastic bag out of his pocket and slipped something into his
mouth. Sunflower seeds. She watched as he slid the seed out of its
shell and spat the shell into the toilet. "How many child
murders have you worked before, Detective?" he asked and she
could picture him in a college seminar room, long legs propped up
on the table as the undergraduate girls laughed at his ironic
witticisms and committed everything he said to paper.
"Only two," she said. "One was a murder-suicide.
The mother fed her six year old son arsenic in his Chubby Hubby
and then slashed her wrists as he lay dying in her arms. The other
was a post-partum depression murder. The mother had gone off her
meds, so she smothered her baby girl."
"How do those murders compare to this one?" Mulder
asked.
Manderley hated the Socratic method, but she wanted to impose
some order on the throng of impressions buzzing in her brain.
"There's a madness to child murders, isn't there?" she
said, not really posing a question at all. "A howl in the
air. Carol Kitchens, the post-partum mother, scratched at her
cheeks until she drew blood. They had to sedate her and put her in
a straitjacket before they could get her out of the house."
He nodded. "Do people still talk about the Edward
Hutcheons murders from about seven years back?"
She blinked. Nowitzki had talked about them again just last
night. The Boston police were stumped. The regional FBI office was
stumped. Then Mulder wrote the profile that finally caught
Hutcheons. "A few. From what Nowitzki said it sounded like
the murder scenes were like something out of the Grand Guignol.
Totally baroque re-enactments of the Abraham sacrificing Isaac
story."
"That's a good way to describe Hutcheons," Mulder
said. There was a tactile quality to the approval in his voice
that made Manderley want to rub her face against it like a cat.
"Most serial killings are basically melodramas, aren't
they?" she asked, leaning against the opposite bathroom wall.
Sometimes she and Nowitzki talked criminal psychology, but not
that frequently. Her insights seemed to unnerve him. "The
killer's always trying to recreate the family romance somehow. So,
he, or she, is trying to kill off Mom, Dad, Big Brother, Big
Sister or some combination thereof. Read your standard profile and
it's like a really bad version of Freud. Totally crude stuff. The
killer must be a white male, 25-35. He's got a very small wiener,
hence his need to kill with large phallic objects." Manderley
trailed off. She'd suddenly remembered her audience.
Mulder looked like he both agreed with her and found her
amusing. "There are a lot of terrible profiles out
there," he conceded. "What are your thoughts on this
murder, Detective? Is this another recreation of the family
romance?"
She shook her head. "No. This one is so cold and clinical
and precise. It feels like the work of a hired gun almost."
Mulder nodded again. "Would a hired gun use a
scalpel?"
"No," she said and her voice had taken on the murmur
of late night conversations. "That throat wound is
window-dressing. The real cause of death is much more subtle.
Poison maybe. The ME did a tox screen, but he may have missed
something."
The sharp trill of Mulder's cell phone startled them both.
"Mulder," he said, rubbing the back of his head. He'd
bumped it when the phone rang. Manderley politely turned away from
him and the charmed circle they'd recently shared.
"Thanks," she heard him say.
"Congratulations, Detective Fong," he said. She
turned towards him to see that he was smiling. A small, wry smile
that didn't quite reach his eyes but made her feel as if she had
breached some outer sanctum in his psyche's wary maze. "That
was the ME. Sarah Tollman died from a curare overdose administered
half an hour before the slash to her throat. He just found the
needle mark in between the third and fourth toes of her right
foot. You're officially a member of the Spooky club now."
Manderley felt light-headed.
"And there's more," he said, all traces of humor
gone. "The ME also found severe irregularities in Sarah
Tollman's DNA. Looks like Robert and Marsha have some `splainin to
do."
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