"Finely-Tuned Insanity" . . . Scully looked over the report Mulder handed her as they stood in the middle of a busy police station.

     "Well, it says here they didn't find a match," she said in puzzlement, looking up at him.

     "No, but they did find something else," he offered swiftly as he laid an arm across her shoulder, guiding her out of the room and into a deserted hallway. "Check the next page, what I circled."

     His fingers lingered on her back for a moment, and then moved across her shoulder as he steadied her stance, before dropping his hand. Her attention remained fixed on the report, as she willingly accepted and trusted Mulder's guidance.

     "The skin sample contains no oils or essential fatty acids. Mulder, there are any number of factors which could have caused that result. Where are you going with this?" She looked up from the report and met his gaze.

     He looked about the hallway for a moment, ascertaining that no one else was in earshot before explaining exactly where he was going with it.

     "Okay, it's not yet the finely-tuned insanity that you've come to expect from me, it's just a theory," he responded with a slight, charming smile. "But what if he's not doing this out of a psychotic impulse, but rather out of some physical hunger? Maybe he needs to replenish this chemical deficiency in order to survive?"

     A tad of skepticism in her voice, Scully asked, "from a dry skin sample you're concluding, what?, that's he's some kind of a fat-sucking vampire?" Her voice (and eyebrows) rose and Mulder was immediately on the defensive.

     "I don't know how else to explain Lauren Macklevy's missing adipose and I bet if you checked the Abderveen victims you'd find exactly the same thing. This killer secretes a digestive substance which renders the victims fat --"

     Scully cut him off, a slight tinge of surprise entering her voice as she finished his bizarre theory for him.

     "-- which he ingests before the rest of the body dissolves entirely," she finished, a sardonic matter-of-fact note rounding out her sentence.

     A look of satisfaction and agreement flit across Mulder's face as he added, "there are examples of this in nature, aren't there?" he questioned.

     Skepticism once more in her expression and voice, warily Scully responded, "yeah, scorpions predigest their food outside of their bodies by regurgitating on their prey, but I don't know too many scorpions who surf the Internet," she concluded with a slight smile.