Mulder stood in the Tollmans' study and stared at an all too
familiar scene. Eleven at night and all through the house not a
creature was stirring except for a Fed, two detectives, and a
forensics team. The clothes, books, and papers lying on the floor
of every room in a wanton tangle strongly suggested that Robert
and Marsha Tollman had fled their own home with precipitate haste.
The study looked gutted. Empty filing cabinet drawers gaped.
The computer sat on the desk, a mess of useless plastic and
exposed wires. A mediocre homage to Monet hung askew over the
desk, revealing an empty safe behind it. Mulder had to laugh at
the Tollmans' lack of creativity. That painting may as well have
been a sign that read, "To whom it may concern: here are the
valuables."
He flipped through a copy of The Secret Garden. It had been
lying right by the wide-open front door and he'd almost tripped
over it. The pages still gave off a papery new-book smell and the
spine was uncreased. He pictured a serious little girl with red
hair reading in her room, enraptured by the story and solemnly
respectful of the book.
Samantha had treated her books with that same infinite care.
They'd sat shiny-covered and pristine on her bookcase and he'd
always laughed at her. "How will anybody know you've read
your books if they look like they're brand new?" he would
ask, plucking a book from its shelf and pretending to crack its
spine. His own books were dog-eared and tattered.
The Secret Garden was a book about sickly children and deep
family secrets and he couldn't remember anymore whether or not
Samantha had read it. "Girl books," he'd sneered with a
twelve year old boy's unshakeable confidence in his own tastes. He
read attentively now.
"'Well,' Ben Weatherstaff exclaimed. `Upon my word. P'raps
tha' art a young `un after all, an' p'raps tha's got child's blood
in thy veins instead of sour buttermilk."
Something far less natural than child's blood and far more
insidious than sour buttermilk coursed through Sarah Tollman's
veins.
Fong walked into the study looking as carefully neutral as
Scully always did during their 9 a.m. "are you suggesting
that this substance is extraterrestrial in nature, Agent
Mulder" meetings with Skinner. "Forensics says there
isn't a single fingerprint anywhere in the house." She
stepped over a pile of Scientific Americans to stand on the last,
tiny oasis of floorspace in a desert of domestic detritus.
"And, as far as I can tell, there isn't a single trace of
personal information left in the house. No photo, bank statement,
phone bill, or credit card statement, ID. Nothing."
He nodded and continued to flip through The Secret Garden.
Standard m.o. The Hasty Abandonment Fairy always brought the Cover
Up Fairy and the Deny Everything Fairy along for the ride.
"What is all of this, Agent Mulder?" Fong asked.
"Concealed puncture marks. Severe genetic irregularities.
People who drop everything and leave right after they learn their
daughter has been murdered."
"Gee, Detective Fong. It all sounds so cut and dried when
you put it like that," he said and regretted his words when
Fong's lips thinned to an angry line.
"You know what, Mulder?" she stared hard at him. He
kept his eyes on the book in his hands. He was pretty sure Fong
was asking a rhetorical question and the follow-up line would be
"You're a bastard" or some variation thereof.
"Mary finds the secret garden and the other kid fucking
learns how to walk by the end and gets reconciled with his father.
So put the damn book down and tell me what's going on."
When he looked back up at her, he saw that Fong, like Scully,
had mastered the art of the imperious glare. He sighed. "I
don't know what's going on, Detective Fong. I can say that Agent
Scully and I have encountered cases of severe genetic
abnormalities and vanishing witnesses and evidence before. I think
our best bet is to talk to the good people at Genetech and get
whatever information we can about Robert Tollman's research
interests. We should also take a close look at Sarah Tollman's
medical records."
He had to give Fong credit. She didn't change expression.
"You think there's some kind of link between Tollman's work
and his daughter's condition?"
"I think there is," he said. "Agent Scully and I
have seen this kind of thing before."
"The Emily Sims case," Fong said. He couldn't tell
what she was thinking.
"Yes," he agreed reluctantly. "That's certainly
one instance."
Fong studied him for another minute before she turned towards
the door. She stopped suddenly and bent down to pick something up
from the floor.
"You might want to take a look at this." She held up
a piece of paper.
Somebody had written "Dana Scully, 85 American Legion
Highway" under a Genetech logo.
"Does Agent Scully hand out her motel address on a regular
basis?" she asked.
"That isn't her handwriting." If he were Spiderman,
his spidey sense would be set on "vibrate" right now.
Fong was already in the hall. "Bromley," he heard her
call. "I need the records for all outgoing calls from this
number and incoming calls to 85 American Legion Highway in the
past week. Check for cell phone numbers listed under Tollman as
well."
There was a murmur of voices and then Fong came back into the
study with Nowitzki in tow. "Agent Mulder, we found this in
the master bedroom closet," Nowitzki said.
Mulder stared at the glinting, scalpel-like instrument in the
evidence bag. He'd held an identical weapon in his hands a year
ago while remembering a woman who was and was not Samantha as she
instructed him on the only way to kill a man who was not a man.
"And the plot thickens," he said and walked out of
the study.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Mulder's warm hand traced the contours of her bare foot. A
callused fingertip poked gently between her toes, making them
wriggle slightly in protest. Scully squeezed her eyes shut tighter
and wondered what Mulder would do next. Playful Mulder would start
tickling her, she'd laugh, and he'd know she was awake. Amorous
Mulder might place hot kisses on her foot and work up from there.
Either way, this was her new favorite wake-up call.
He shook her shoulder gently. "Scully," he said. His
voice was all business. "Get up."
This wasn't how the game was supposed to go.
She opened her eyes to see him standing backlit by her side. He
wore his dark trench coat over a wrinkled suit and apparently
hadn't shaved in a few days. Groggy from sleep, she tried to
figure out the where and when of her present situation. Then she
saw gray institutional walls and remembered. As if on cue, female
voices took up their ballads of wrongful incarceration.
"Mulder, what are you doing here?" she asked. She
kept her thin blanket tucked firmly around her armpits like the
good girls in a Doris Day- Rock Hudson vehicle.
Although his voice was FBI issue, his eyes were the warm
green-brown she'd seen so many times from the vantage-point of a
hospital bed. You made it, Scully, they said. You're safe. He
captured her right foot and held it firmly as he brushed a gentle
finger between her third and fourth toe. "Puncture
mark," he said.
She felt as if she'd stumbled into an ongoing conversation.
"What are you talking about, Mulder?" She jerked her
foot away from his grasp and pulled herself into a sitting
position, trying not to notice the brief flicker of hurt in those
welcome-back eyes.
Mulder sat down next to her and the bulge of his holster nudged
at her hip. "You have a puncture mark in the exact same place
as Sarah Tollman," he told her. Long fingers brushed between
her toes once again as if to make sure the puncture mark was still
there. She understood the impulse. In their world, evidence had a
way of vanishing as easily as a fist does when it becomes an open
hand. "The ME missed it the first time he examined the body
and I'm guessing doctors in an emergency room are used to more
obvious causes of injury."
The tense set of her shoulders told her he expected her to
argue with him. She couldn't though. Not when a fierce triumph
blazed in his eyes. So, she asked about the facts that could be
documented. "What else did the ME find?"
"Death by poison," he said. "And, the Tollmans
disappeared without a trace and we found a very familiar looking
scalpel in their house." His mouth quirked upward in a tired
smile. "If the glove don't fit, you must acquit. That's what
I told the judge this morning."
"Jesus," she whispered and it was all that she could
say.
"As of eight a.m. this morning, you are no longer in the
custody of any correctional facility." He waved a thick stack
of papers at her. "Reasonable doubt works wonders, doesn't
it?"
He couldn't know how much his words hurt her.
Mulder stood up, sparking with brisk energy. "Let's spring
you from this joint, Scully," he said out of the corner of
his mouth like a B movie crook. She stumbled a little as the guard
opened the door for them.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
A little girl's dead blue eyes stared up from the combination
coffee/ dining table of a new room in a new, top secret hotel and
Scully remembered how two months out of Quantico, a freshly minted
FBI agent, she'd briefly been involved with a young law professor
from Georgetown. Allen had been all pressed Oxford shirts and
crisp diction. He'd always looked at her with equal parts
appreciation and amusement, as if he couldn't quite believe that
he ate dinner every night with a living, breathing embodiment of
the Law who spilled pasta arrabiata on her shirts and believed in
bringing criminals to justice.
"Really, Dana," he would say while they sat in one of
those tasteful restaurants he so loved. "You do know that
every modern judicial system organizes itself around judgment and
punishment, not some na‹ve search for the truth. Even the word
`justice' has its roots in the Latin word for `judgment.' No trial
ever proves its defendant `innocent'. Only `not-guilty '."
She'd admired the sly, teasing quality of their conversation as
much as she admired his slender hands, golden eyes, and incisive
mind. "Judgment and punishment rest on a foundation of
empirical facts," she'd shot back, watching his fingers twist
around his wine-glass stem.
He had raised his glass to her in a lazy half- salute. "To
you then, Lady Justice. Give reasonable doubt hell."
Looking at Sarah Tollman's pictures as they lay next to
documents that named her as a murder suspect, Scully wanted to
call Allen and tell him that he and all those other legal scholars
who coined carefully precise terms for the simple process of
"whodunit" were wrong. Doubt was anything but
reasonable. It spread and spread just like the universe itself.
Scully rubbed at the bridge of her nose. Two days had passed
since she'd woken up in that motel bathroom, but she still
couldn't give an account of how or why she had been there. Nor
could she say anything about what she had or had not done there.
Maybe Allen had been right about one thing. There was no such
thing as being declared "innocent". At best, there was
only being damningly declared "not guilty."
She pushed the coroner's report and the detectives' careful
notes aside, focused on the photographs, and tried to ignore
Mulder sprawled out on the bed asleep. Like the laptop set to
"idle" mode on the nightstand, he did not rest
peacefully. He all but hummed and whirred with latent,
rapid-firing circuits.
Mulder was convinced that someone had wanted Sarah Tollman dead
because she was the product of a genetic experimentation program
gone wrong. As soon as they'd gotten back to the new motel, he'd
begun laying out his case. Sarah Tollman, like the clones they'd
encountered their first year together, had a third strand of DNA
not possible in nature. "The coroner says there's no way
anybody could have detected these genetic anomalies short of a DNA
test," he'd said, circling and underlining salient points in
the coroner's report and the little girl's medical history.
"Sarah Tollman's medical records don't reveal anything
besides a few common childhood ailments. In fact, that in and of
itself is striking. This is a little girl who's only been to the
doctor for a couple of colds and a sprained wrist."
She had stared at the pictures of a pretty little girl with a
gash across her throat and idly wondered what synthetic DNA might
look like. It would look like a little girl's braid, she'd decided
as Mulder began to explain that the same people responsible for
Sarah Tollman's death also wanted to discredit the X-Files. Left
plait. Right plait. Middle plait. That was how Scully had learned
to braid hair.
Mulder suddenly bolted upright in bed, gasping. His eyes were
wide and frightened. "Mulder," she crouched by the bed.
"It's me. You were dreaming." His skin felt hot and dry
like a computer monitor left on for too long.
He leaned into her touch while he took two deep breaths.
"I'm okay, Scully," he said, eyes closed. "Just a
bad dream." She eased away from him. Touching was how Mulder
had ended up caught in a restless sleep while she sat and examined
crime scene photos in a room saturated with the smell of sex.
"Can you get back to sleep, Mulder?" she asked.
"We don't have to meet with Detective Fong until six
tonight."
He turned onto his side, back facing her, and she saw the angry
red scratches she'd left. "Go to sleep, Mulder," she
whispered. "I'll wake you up." She let herself smooth
his hair briefly.
She was too tired to continue staring at chin- length red-gold
hair and baby fat cheeks so she swept the photos and endless pages
of notes into a neat pile and decided to take a shower. She stood
in the bathroom's heavy steam and looked at her hands and the
finger-shaped bruises on her hips.
They had been going over the Tollmans' phone records when she
started crying. Tears dropped and blurred the numbers into a vague
black smear. "Scully," Mulder had said in his soft,
sickbed voice. She couldn't look at him. "I'm sorry,"
she'd whispered as she continued to cry. In the back of her mind,
somebody who may have been Bill or Charlie or Richie Fisher next
door sneered, "Crying's for sissy girls."
"Scully," he'd said again and traced a tear down her
cheek. He hadn't said "Don't cry" as her tears escalated
into sobs. He had just held her. When she was through, he'd bent
down to kiss her. On the forehead. She could tell because in his
code of chivalry you never took advantage of damsels in distress.
She was tired of being a damsel in distress. She wanted to be a
broad, so she'd intercepted him midway in a clash of teeth and
tongues. "Ohshitscully," Mulder had breathed all in one
word against her temple as she tugged his pants down. He'd torn at
the buttons on her shirt, sending them flying every which way.
They'd been urgent and rough and when it was over, no one was
completely satisfied. She had waited until Mulder had fallen
asleep and let go of her before she got out of bed.
She stood under the hot water until her skin turned an angry,
lobster red. When she stepped back into the room, Mulder was
asleep again and he offered the thin line of his spine to her like
a gift.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
There was a knock on her cubicle door and Manderley almost
reached for her gun. "Don't shoot, Detective Fong."
Mulder drawled from the doorway. Scully stood next to him looking
very federal and imposing. Mulder looked slightly less so with his
hands raised in mock-surrender.
"I'm sorry," Manderley said. She could feel herself
turning red. "I think I'm going through caffeine withdrawal
right now. That always makes me twitchy."
Mulder nodded. "I can go talk to my supplier. Cream and
sugar?"
"Yes, please." Manderley said, caught off-guard. In
her experience, men who carried guns and badges didn't volunteer
to act as beverage dispensers.
"How many, Fong?" That was almost a genuine smile on
Mulder's face.
"One cream. Four sugars." Scully blinked in surprise.
Manderley shrugged. "As some very wise men once said, I like
my sugar with coffee and cream.
Mulder headed off for the coffee maker, taking all of the
camaraderie in the room away with him. Manderley stared at Scully.
Or rather, she kept her eyes on a point about two inches above the
top of Scully's head and tried to think of something safe to say.
"Have a seat, Agent Scully," she gestured towards one
of the chairs in front of her desk. At least she hadn't said the
first two things that popped into her mind. Those would be:
"Glad to see you're not in prison anymore" and
"Orange really isn't your color."
Scully sat down and silence reigned again.
Manderley glanced down at the crazy quilt of facts and
allegations on the Tollmans decorating her desk at the present.
She and Nowitzki had canvassed the Tollmans' neighborhood only to
discover that, like any suburban family, the Tollmans were a
queasy mixture of the banal and the potentially sinister.
Scully examined the view from Manderley's window with a fierce
intensity that no dumpster and parking lot could ever deserve.
Mulder came back juggling three cups of coffee just as
Manderley was about to ask Scully how she was feeling.
"What've you got for us, Detective?" he asked as he
distributed coffee to the needy. He leaned his back against the
doorway expectantly.
"Not as much as we'd hoped for, frankly," Manderley
tried to stick her tongue against the roof of her mouth and talk
at the same time. Her coffee was scalding hot. "All of the
Tollmans' neighbors were more than happy to air the family's dirty
laundry. This being upper middle class America, though, the dirty
laundry smells more like John Cheever than it does American
Gothic."
"What do the neighbors have to say, Detective Fong?"
Scully asked with the slightest hint of impatience. Mulder glanced
at her, but she had her eyes fixed on a picture of Marsha Tollman.
"The consensus seems to be that Robert and Marsha Tollman
had hit a very rough patch in their marriage. They were sleeping
in separate bedrooms and Robert Tollman's phone records reveal
that he had called a John Hampton four times in the past two
weeks. John Hampton is an attorney who specializes in
divorce."
Neither Mulder nor Scully looked very impressed. Manderley
scanned her notes. "The Tollmans' next door neighbors seemed
to feel that Sarah was frightened of her father. They said it
frequently sounded as if somebody was crying next door."
"Did they suspect child abuse?" Mulder asked.
"They hinted around. The cleaning lady said that she had
to scrub blood off the kitchen floors more than once, but, again,
this could all be innuendo. Those neighbors were like sharks at a
feeding frenzy."
Mulder watched Scully look at Marsha Tollman's picture again.
"What did the neighbors have to say about the wife?" he
asked.
Manderley glanced at the picture as well. Marsha Tollman seemed
tired and drawn. Her smile was strained. "Most of the
neighbors thought Marsha was a sweet woman with an unfortunate
habit of dabbling in alternative medicines. Healing crystals,
auras, etc. She also entertained some fairly out-there ideas.
She'd told her neighbors that she'd been abducted by aliens as a
child."
The air in the room suddenly thrummed with electricity. Both
Mulder and Scully were watching her intently. "Did the
neighbors remember her mentioning a group called MUFON?"
Scully asked. For the first time, she looked Manderley in the eye.
Manderley nodded. "Yes. Apparently, she'd started the
local chapter."
Something passed between Mulder and Scully as they exchanged
glances. She just didn't know what.
"Can I use your phone, Detective Fong?" Scully asked.
Manderley nodded even though the visual Morse code between the two
agents was beginning to bother her.
"What's the sudden interest in MUFON?" she turned to
Mulder. He started to answer and then suddenly stopped as he
caught a glimpse of Sammy's picture on the desk.
"Mulder, what is it?" Scully had put the phone down.
"Where did you get this picture, Detective Fong?"
Mulder asked and his voice frightened Manderley. He sounded like a
man willing to inflict infinite bodily harm on her.
"That's Sammy. She's my. . .girlfriend," she stumbled
over the words even though she shouldn't have cared less about
this man's stance on heterosexism. Jenkins was nowhere near an
honorary member of Queer Nation, but he'd put in his time at the
People's Republic of Cambridge and he insisted on maintaining an
open closet policy at the precinct.
"Mulder," Scully sounded as if she was offering
comfort and issuing a warning at the same time.
Manderley looked at Sammy's picture again. To any stranger, it
was merely a picture of a pretty little eight year old girl in
overalls and pigtails. She kept it on her desk because she loved
to look at the picture of Little Miss Middle America and think
about the Sammy she knew with the nose-ring and the blue and red
dragon tattoo that muscled its way up her back, and realize anew
these two were the same person. Besides, Sammy had so few memories
of her childhood, let alone physical reminders, and the fact that
she would give this picture away to anyone never ceased to take
Manderley's breath away.
"That's very interesting, Detective," Mulder advanced
on her and his voice contained a world of grief and rage. "I
have the exact same picture in my wallet." He held it out to
her. Sammy. Pig-tails. Check. Overalls. Check. "This is my
sister Samantha. She's been missing since she was eight." |