A quick word of thanks to the tremendously talented Gwyn Rhys who - fuck me sideways - broke a lot of reading habits to start reading this WIP, liked it enough to say so and while my jaw was still hanging open, graciously offered (okay, I might have whined a little - bite me) to be my beta for the duration of it. Someone give this chick a cigar. She's game.
In the room, no one spoke. Kroeger stayed seated, every now and then making some thick snorting sound that was meant to sound rough and robust and instead had Bagnio gritting his teeth wanting to tell him to be a man for fuck's sake. Scully was standing by the whiteboard, chewing her lip and staring through the white that wasn't white any more (hadn't been white to start with) but was now filled with green and blue and red writing. Bodies, Bagnio thought, queasy at the thrill that shot through him, the word lit up inside his head like some superstar in its own right, a beacon on the rocks. Bodies.
As sick as it was, it was thrilling at the same time and anyone who denied that was, in Bagnio's own opinion, lying their P-fucking-C heads off about it. Or they were Mulder. One or the other, the truth was the same. It just tasted different on each person's tongue. Justice, dysfunctional, duty: musty, boring words, like chewing chalk. Cunning, killings, hunter and hunted: chocolate against the chalk. The thrill of chasing something so sick but so clever was why he had gone down the road he had. Which was not to say he was a bad cop. Not him. He looked out for his partners, went by the book, did the boring overtime like everyone else.
The way he figured it, if it got him out there using his brains for Joe Public to live another day, then who gave a fuck what pushed him to do it. Not like he didn't care; he felt it twisting in his gut when he interviewed the parents, the husbands, the wives, the kids, whoever it was that was left over to imagine it all. It wasn't a crime getting a little worked up about the idea of catching a monster. Being the cowboy who fucked over the Indians was what being a hero was all about; any idiot knew that. That thought led him, inevitably, uncharitably, to thoughts of why exactly Mulder had been fool enough to leave ISU when he had been born for it and as if on cue, Mulder with Skinner in tow walked back into the room.
He had a direct line to Kroeger's face and saw the way his expression had worked in on itself. Not a lot of love there. And why should there be? Mulder had worked him over and for no good reason that Bagnio could see. What did it achieve? A guy like Kroeger had the memory of a goldfish; the lesson - if that was what it had been - would never take. It would congeal and slide right off the tumor that passed for Kroeger's brain. His eyes left him in favor of watching Mulder for a moment or two, enjoying the view until Skinner's stony gaze laid into him. Nothing ugly, just some consideration. He returned the look with an affable nod and took himself off to the coffee machine in the corner of the room. Now there was a guy who had a good reason for everything he did, who kept a tidy house. So if he was doing Mulder, then he had a good reason for that too.
Not that Mulder was uninterested in Bagnio. There was definite interest there; he would bet the bank on that. And the way he saw it, he had been getting somewhere with the guy. Slow progress because Mulder was wary but he'd been getting somewhere and to Bagnio's mind, having to work for it made Mulder the object of an even greater attraction. And it wasn't like Mulder bought into any of his own hype; he just believed in suspicion as a tactic. That's what came from being on the wrong end of too much crap. Which, right off the bat, he could see was a complete injustice because Mulder didn't deserve one half of the reputation he currently enjoyed. Sure, he'd heard all the talk. And if talk was true, the guy probably did have a screw or two loose from whatever happened with his sister going missing and so forth. So fucking what. The way he figured it, that didn't make him all that much different from the rest of the world. Everybody had something in the back of their head that didn't fit the way it should. Whatever Mulder's thing was, Bagnio was still up for a piece of it.
Incredibly, when he'd asked around - discreet, disciplined inquiries - his luck had held though preference was not something on which anyone could agree. Maybe Mulder liked it both ways. He didn't know and he didn't care as long as dick was on the menu and it seemed from what he heard, that not only was it something Mulder went for but that the man's tastes were specific. The kind of specific tastes that Bagnio himself was guided by. That was some dumb luck. Or so he had thought until this case and now all of a sudden, here was Skinner, shooting him watchful looks and putting his hands all over Mulder. Right in the middle of Bagnio's luck.
He didn't know yet what that meant or how far he was prepared to mess with Skinner, even for the enticing prospect of getting cozy with Mulder. Some of that was down to the fact that Skinner was an AD and Bagnio was in the habit of looking up, not down. Mostly, and the hell of the matter, it was that he liked Skinner. Or at least, he liked Skinner's type. He'd served with guys like that: old-style, down to earth and loyal. He liked them as friends and now and again, as something more. They weren't really his type but they had an alertness to them that he was drawn to, a focus that snapped tight onto the important stuff and never lost sight of it. Skinner had that and maybe under some odd mishmash of circumstances they might have jerked off like buddies or done something slick and sweaty for as long as it took to get it out of their systems. Or something. Nothing permanent could have come from it, even if the situation had been favorable, he knew that. Too much rock against rock, dent matching dent.
They made good friends, guys like that. They stuck by you when you turned up asking for favors, ten years between phonecalls. He was the same. And maybe it was all the sameness but he couldn't hold things together with guys like that. Mulder, though. Now he was a different proposition. There was that ass, unarguably fuckable; there were those thighs, with exactly the kind of strength in them that Bagnio most admired. Add to that the tightness around Mulder's mouth, the faint insomniac purple under his eyes and that's when Bagnio bought into the fan club. There was a vulnerability there that turned him on, that got him thinking about how goddamn charming Mulder could be, how accessible he made himself when all the good sense in the world said he should clam up and play safe.
He poured himself out a cup of coffee, suddenly aware he'd been standing there like a jackass, staring out the window. Taking it back to his seat, he trained his focus onto Mulder who was slouching against the wall, frowning at the whiteboard and carefully avoiding Kroeger's eye. Not out of guilt, Bagnio felt certain. Just courtesy and a little distaste. Interesting. Interested. He was interested in what went on in that man's head. Really interested. It sucked in every imaginable way to see Skinner there standing next to him, a step too close to be plain friendly. He didn't know what he wanted to do about that. If he wanted to. It was something to think on. And time was something they had in spades. This case wasn't going to go away in a hurry - nobody said it but sure as shit everyone was thinking it. Not this UNSUB. He swallowed a mouthful of coffee, glad to feel its burn settle in his gut and tuned in to Mulder's voice.
"We start from here," Mulder was saying firmly in response to whatever his partner had just said. "1981. Forget about the 1980 Arlington murder. That's not part of our profile killings."
"Mulder, it has similar features to the others we've isolated."
Scully raised an eyebrow at Mulder but Bagnio heard the gentleness in her voice. A good partner, that's what she was. First rule he learnt when he was a wet-behind-the-ears beat cop. You don't fuck your partner over in front of nobody, Stevie. He could still see Larry's stubborn, Moses-face: serenely foulmouthed friend, in fair weather and foul. He had guided a then still cocky Bagnio's foot out of his mouth more times than once. The father that his own father had never been. Could never be. As usual, the thought of that brought an ache to the back of his throat, a taste of metal and copper and frying bacon where the flat sweet heat of coffee should have been.
Years later he still felt the same outswell of emotion when he remembered coming across his father, flat on his back on the kitchen floor, bacon crisping itself into ashes on the stove and blood pooling behind his steel wool hair, staining it. Call an ambulance. Steven, you do it now son or so help me God. He had bitten down on his own tongue, terror bubbling in his nose, eating at the tethers of his mind. And relief: relief clogging every pore, making it possible for him to sit in a chair and watch the cracks in the ceiling for over an hour. Not moving. Never moving. The right prayer answered for once.
His thoughts buzzed dully at the back of his head, overgorged flies still feeding on the same inbred, hydra-headed secret. It took him more effort than was comfortable to concentrate on Scully again but he forced himself to listen. Hard.
She was reading aloud from the victimology. "Troubled teen from a dysfunctional single parent family; previous criminal record; Caucasian, black/brown, 5'7"; found badly mutilated but well-preserved; medical examiner confirmed evidence of sexual assault - rape and post-mortem masturbation and mutilation; cause of death: blunt-force trauma to the head; body site: an alleyway. Why leave it out?"
He liked the way her mouth became thinner when she read out the trauma details to the body. Human, just like the rest of us, Agent Scully? He thought that for all her good looks, she looked much more approachable when she looked at Mulder like that, her expression mildly exasperated but willing. She had an idea where Mulder was going with it and she was getting him to spell it out. Bagnio flicked a quick look at Skinner. Nothing there apart from his usual set expression but he figured that Skinner had seen this dance before.
"Even if it wasn't for the age of the child not fitting the profile of our killer, there's the mother, Scully." Mulder included all of them in his answer, briefly meeting each person's eyes as he talked. Bagnio made sure to flip open his notebook when Mulder's gaze fell on him, wondering when in the hell Mulder had managed to read through the file enough to become this familiar with it.
"Look at her medical history," Mulder said. "We've got a pediatric neuorologist from the Arlington Pediatric Clinic who says that in 1976, she realized that the three children, ranging from age eight to fifteen, had been issued what she described --on page 15-- as "an incredible amount" of medications in a very short period of time. She specifically stated that, in May of 1976, thirty doses of Fioricet were prescribed to the youngest child --Jonathan-- on each of the following dates: May 3, May 10, May 16, May 23, May 31, June 8, June 14, June 16, June 21 and June 28. Another one of her sons was also prescribed thirty doses on the following dates in May of 1976: May 7, May 16, May 23, June 5 and June 11."
"Fioricet is a habit forming barbiturate, Mulder. Are you saying the wife had a drug habit?" Scully asked.
A small smile played at the corner of Mulder's mouth. "Isn't that text-book 'drug-seeking' behavior?"
Bagnio watched Scully bite her lip before replying and began surreptitiously leafing through his own copy of that file.
"You're saying the wife killed her child?" Scully asked, clearly unconvinced.
Mulder shook his head. "In addition to Fioricet, she's also been prescribed BuSpar, Inderal, Prozac and Xanax. In 1979, she was hospitalized twice. The discharge report says that at the time of her evaluation in the emergency room, she was emotionally distraught and acutely intoxicated. Her blood alcohol level was found to be 0.29. Two days prior to the body of the oldest child being discovered, she kicked him out of home. If she wanted to kill him, she wouldn't have done that. She would have kept him close, been especially nice to him for a few days beforehand because in her mind he would already have been dead. She would be constructing a fantasy frame of mind where she had been the perfect mother and something had 'happened' to her child. Instead she kicked him out. Look at her meds - if she was a danger to anyone, she was a danger to herself."
Mulder stopped and, crossing his arms, looked around the room while Scully opened her copy and began to look through it. Bagnio got there first.
"Boyfriend. She had a live-in boyfriend."
"Right." Mulder nodded at Bagnio before giving his attention back to Scully. "When he's checked out by someone, he'll have petty sexual crimes on his record. I'm guessing that there was probably some kind of conflict involving the oldest child who was either preyed on by the boyfriend or knew that the boyfriend was preying on his mother or maybe a combination of the both. Boyfriend works on the mother who's mentally malleable, mother sides with the boyfriend and trouble ensues, resulting in the child making accusations that the mother didn't want to believe. When the child was kicked out, I'd say that the boyfriend went after him with some vague predatory notions of teaching him a lesson and things got out of hand. He won't have interfered with a child of that age before. They'll all have been younger. The rape was post-mortem as was the mutilation. The UNSUB we're looking for wants to inflict pain and see the victim's reaction."
"What about the mutilation?" Scully interrupted.
"To the face, Scully. More cause to think that the killer knew the victim very well. He felt immense anger towards that child who had disrupted his cozy little niche. In his mind he made it the child's fault. Everything was the child's fault. If not for him, none of this would have happened. Because he knew him, he had to depersonalize him before he could masturbate on his face. This isn't a guy who's inflicting pain. This is someone who lost control of the type of predatory situation he normally pursued. Besides, our UNSUB doesn't want a teenager. He wants men. He may have started with sexually immature men - young men - nineteen or twenty years old - but he'll have graduated soon enough to a higher age bracket."
"Okay," Scully said thoughtfully. "So we rule out the 1980 murder."
Mulder nodded and flicked Bagnio another quick glance before he turned back to the whiteboard. And that was all Bagnio got in the way of acknowledgment. He felt a little like chopped liver but congratulated himself on having the kind of ego that assumed Mulder had noted his contribution. His muscles flexing. How blowjob-worthy he was. Whatever.
Skinner cleared his throat just then, raising a few heads. He blended into the background so well that people forgot he was there when he chose to give that impression. Bagnio had certainly forgotten.
"I'm going to direct that file to Homicide." Skinner reached out for the file and Mulder handed it to him with a bemused look.
"You're going to do that right now, Sir?"
Bagnio watched with interest as a patentable look of irritation passed over Skinner's face.
"Yes I am, Agent Mulder. Continue."
Mulder didn't seem fazed by that summary dismissal. Instead he looked like he wanted to smile and follow Skinner out. But he continued. Following orders, Bagnio mused, feeling a little smug at the thought of how much trouble Mulder would be buying if he got involved with Skinner. Much easier to get involved with a fellow officer of more or less equal rank. Even Mulder, surely, could get used to easier?
"Twenty bodies," Mulder said and Bagnio felt a twitch of sympathy at the patience in his voice. "All men but all different ages, living in a mix of socioeconomic neighborhoods and killed with varying M.O. Nothing very helpful in the files. Common points of victimology tally with the 1980 Arlington victim in terms of what was done to the body and the general body type. Police in each precinct checked all known pedophiles and sexual priors. They visited schools, colleges, held information sessions - the usual stuff. They've had undercover agents hanging out at gay bars trying to overhear conversations and pick up leads. No dice. We're going to have to work out the point at which our UNSUB chose them."
Cooke spoke up then, undoing Bagnio's impression that it was just Scully, him and Mulder in the room together. "And how do we do that?"
"By doing it all over again," Mulder said.
If he was joking, Bagnio could see no sign of it. He looked over at Kroeger, expecting protest but he just sat there, pale and morose. Bagnio found himself callously wishing it would last longer than he suspected it would.
"Using your profile," Cooke said, more of a statement than a question.
"Yeah. You and Armstrong can take the first seven. Bagnio and Kroeger - you can take the next seven. Scully and I will take the last six. I've appended a list of questions that I want you to ask. Anything you want to ask, by way of supplementary questions, is fine. But make sure you ask those." Mulder paused and sighed. It seemed almost wistful to Bagnio and he wondered if Mulder knew he was doing it. "That's it. That's all for tonight. Go home."
Everyone seemed frozen for a moment before the fact of release actually made itself understood. Then Bagnio had to practically shout to make himself heard over the noise of chairs being scraped back and files packed up quickly, as though Mulder might change his mind at any moment and like some temperamental, unloved school teacher, order them back into their seats again until the bell itself, proper, rang.
"Mulder, you already picked out the twenty bodies before we did. Right? Mulder? You picked them already, didn't you?"
Mulder had sat himself down in the chair behind his desk and remained there, sprawled, a sculptor's wet dream. He had let his head fall back and was massaging the back of his neck with his left hand, his elbow crooked up against his face. He didn't appear to have heard Bagnio for a moment but then shook his head and smiled, without turning around all the way.
"Go home, Bagnio."
He grinned back even though Mulder couldn't see him, a rush of affection shaping his mouth. "I'm gone."
Not that it was an easy thing to get shot of the rest of the team. Outside, in the hallway, he nearly fell over Kroeger having a snickering conversation with two cops he half-recognized from an old case the ISU had run. The conversation petered out into an uneasy silence when they saw him but not before he heard the word 'faggot'. From the startled look one of them threw at him, he didn't assume as he might have otherwise done that it was him they were talking about. Besides, there was no way anyone around here was going to think that about him. No way, no how.
"Rawlinson, right? And Ercoles?" He put his hand out easily and shook each man's hand. "You guys worked the Riptide Killer case with us, didn't you?"
Rawlinson was a fair, bluff faced man who colored under his scrutiny, saying feebly, "Could have, was all a while ago, now."
His partner, a sharp-eyed Italian, didn't fuck about. "Yeah, sure. Don't be stupider than you look, Tommy. Sure, I remember you. How you doing, Bagnio?"
"Long day at the office, that's how I'm doing." He put his briefcase down and worked his neck into a snap-crackle-pop noise on either side. "What brings you guys out over here?"
"They've been co-opted into the Secret Service," Kroeger sneered, jerking his head belligerently at the briefing room.
He wasn't quite back to his malevolent, Cromagnon self but the healing process has begun, Bagnio thought wryly to himself.
"Is that right? Well, enjoy yourselves. Agent Mulder, he's some genius in there. Best damn profiler I ever worked with."
Rawlingson laughed uncomfortably. "Yeah, that Spooky, huh? Heard a tale or two about him."
"Take it from me, Rawlingson," Bagnio said gently. "The kiddie cases that guy wore himself out on - he oughta be given a frigging medal. Faggot or no faggot."
He rode the thick little silence that fell over the four of them for a few seconds before nodding politely to Ercoles and Kroeger who was looking at him with the disgust reserved for a pedophile.
"I gotta make tracks. You take it easy, Ercoles."
Ercoles' nod was part apology, part agreement. He could feel Kroeger glowering into his back as he walked away and grinned to himself. If that asshole thought he was going to join him in his bigoted, repressed fawning over Mulder, this was all a rude shock of awakening for him. No fucking finesse, that was Kroeger's problem. All wham bam and no clues about how to interest a self-involved guy like Mulder in the hook. He was still shaking his head over the guy's phenomenal cluelessness when he ran into Cooke and Armstrong, down in the parking garage, talking in low, worried tones.
"Listen, you leave it with me, Mikey, okay? You forget about it," Cooke was saying to Armstrong when Bagnio neared them.
For a split second he was tempted to pretend he just couldn't see or hear them, wanting only to get the hell out of the building without involving himself in more sociable bullshit. But he didn't mind Cooke, from what he'd seen of the guy, and he wasn't about to just blow him off. A little wet behind the ears but least he wasn't the scummy waste of space that Kroeger was.
"Starting your night off in the garage?" he asked Cooke, nodding at Armstrong who fumbled a doubtful smile back at him.
"Earned ourselves a good night's rest, I'll tell you that," Cooke proclaimed cheerfully, stretching his arms up above his head.
Bagnio didn't buy it but he went along with it. "You don't have to convince me of that." He nodded at Armstrong. "Hey, Armstrong, how's it going? You hanging in there with Spooky?"
"Good, good. You?" Armstrong's response was half-hearted, a parody of wellbeing.
He took a closer look at the kid. Armstrong looked even more confused than he usually did and a little miserable, in the bargain. "Hey listen, Armstrong, you don't need to get too worked up over Mulder, okay? His bark is worse than his bite. Really."
Armstrong didn't seem in the least reassured. Instead he threw a troubled look at Cooke who made a small but definite shake of the head. Well, well, well - and what the fuck is this, Bagnio wondered while giving Cooke a pleasant look of inquiry. No way was Cooke so dumb that he couldn't tell Bagnio had seen the whole thing.
Coming at it straight on, he asked casually, "Something going on, guys?"
Cooke's reply was immediate and affable. "Personal shit, Bagnio. Nothing to worry about."
And that was about all he was going to find out, he could tell. Well, it was nothing to do with him, anyway. Sure as shit, he didn't want to know about either Cooke or Armstrong --Mikey??-- in any off-duty sense. He was very careful about how much he extended himself beyond the job to any of his fellow detectives. He had too much to lose and nothing very attractive to gain. Mulder, of course, was an exception to that rule. That thought made him grin all the way into the frozen section of the supermarket where he stopped in to get some dinner.
A well dressed woman gave him a look as he reached past her to grab himself a steak. He checked her out discreetly. She wasn't all that young anymore if the lines around her mouth and eyes were anything to go by - maybe early 40s. Sexy in a way that came from the obvious care she took with her clothes and makeup. Had a pretty good body too under that suit. It all said available, making an effort and got a life. He smiled at her, vaguely wondering if it was worth the effort and feeling old at the same time. Could he have reached the stage where he cruised flesh in the frozen section? There was something more depressing about that scenario somehow than plucking himself a one-time fuck out of a club.
As it was, she made the choice for him. A sharp raised eyebrow and a careful step away from him. Stung, Bagnio slapped the steak into his cart and made for another aisle, not stopping the squeak-squeak of the wheels until he caught sight of himself in the mirror looming above the double freezer doors he was heading towards. One good look and he was surprised she had stopped at merely stepping away. If he had been in her shoes, he would have considered calling security. Opening the freezer door, he paused in mid-reach for a tub of icecream and looked at himself reflected up there.
He looked bad, really really bad. His face was pasty and had a grimy, shiny look about it; his eyes were bloodshot and there was a thin, yellowing smear of mayonnaise at the corner of his mouth, drying out from his lunch; his hands - he looked down at them in mild dismay - his hands were black from handling crime scene photos. As chilled air from the freezer poured out and wound itself foggily around him, he realized that to add to all these fine, fuck-me-backwards qualities, he stank. No bones about it - he was rancid.
Christ, he thought nervously, minutes later as he lined up in the express checkout, arms tight against his sides, imagining somehow that his armpits were writhing with sweat, that oceans of the stuff was waiting to pour through his shirt and drench the ground around him if he moved his arms even one tiny stupid inch. Some fucking charm king he was. Suddenly it seemed pathetic to him that he hadn't picked up that chick, that blouse wearing, ball breaking, desperate, over the hill, uppity slut. He felt himself going all the way from mild and bemused irritation to a messy, reckless anger that was becoming less and less of a stranger to him these days. Instead of rolling with the feeling, he took a breath and then swallowed that back too, thinking better of exhaling, thinking to himself that the person in front of him might yet turn around and demand what in the name of God he thought soap and aftershave was for.
Maybe there was something about Mulder that did this to a person. Some kinda Houdini thing where you forgot all decent basics like not looking like a frigging hobo. A couple of days in direct range of Mulder's brain going full tilt was like getting a little tan in Chernobyl. It got all the way from the skin down into the blood and before a guy knew it, he was down in the frozen section, scaring the women away. The way Bagnio figured it, Mulder was too used to calling all the shots, sweeping people up in his wake. He probably had little idea of how hard it was for the rest of them to bear up under the load.
Look at the way they all had the jitters by the end of today; look at himself, for fuck's sake. Let loose, the guy could be a menace without someone around to give him a dose of reality, the way the rest of the just-human crowd saw it. He pulled into his driveway, thinking that it all came back to the same thing anyway, all these fine thoughts. He could see how good he could be for Mulder, if Mulder would just give it a try. Even genius could be improved by a leash. He believed that.
He brought the grocery bags out of the passenger seat and placed them down by the door while he opened up both deadbolts. This wasn't the worst side of Washington but it didn't hurt to be careful. He looked around himself before going in. There was no one around; the night was dark and still with only the faint yells of next door's kids --pair of brats-- to break the silence. Probably railing against their bedtime, as usual. He checked his watch. Well past their bedtime, really. Thunder rumbled overhead, giving him a comfortable beat-the-rain-home feel. It was early yet but he could already smell the rain on the air. Maybe after a hot shower, he could take a beer out the back and watch the storm let itself loose. Maybe let loose a little, himself.
Opening up the door, he picked up the bags and carried them in, feeling them rip and give a little just as he slid them out of his hands and onto the dining table. He left the steak out and was emptying the rest of his aborted grocery trip into the fridge when something moved at the corner of his eye. Whipping around, his gun already halfway out from its holster, he breathed a shaky sigh of relief as recognition and belated memory kicked in. Carefully he took his finger off the safety release.
"Jesus. I gotta tell you, I'm getting senile in my old age. I clean forgot about you."
The man seated behind Bagnio said nothing back in reply.
"Cat got your tongue?" he asked teasingly, walking over and running a finger over the man's mouth, hidden behind a strip of silk tied tightly over it.
"I hope you're going to do the right thing and behave now, I really do," Bagnio said, checking the slack in the rope he'd used to tie the man to the kitchen chair. He was pleased to see his knots still held tight.
"Because I gotta tell you, I've had a hell of a day."
Mulder stayed as he was until Skinner returned, enjoying the way the blood went to his head with his neck tipped as far back as he could manage it.
"Sent them home?"
"Yeah," he said, slowly sitting back up straight, blinking back the black spots behind his eyes.
"Good thinking," Skinner said, starting to collect the papers on his desk, putting them away into his briefcase.
Mulder got up, feeling his knees creak in overused protest, and followed suit. "So, there's bad news on the jurisdiction front, huh?"
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Skinner's hands still in mid-action for a moment before he spoke. "Go to the top of the class, Mulder."
"If it helps, I was prepared for the worst."
"When exactly did you pick out those twenty bodies, tell me?"
Mulder threw him a narrow glance. There was understanding and then there was being an asshole. "Cut it out, Walter. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that even if these cases hadn't been dead in the water all this time, at best they add up to a series of local crimes. I figured you were going to talk to Manning and maybe some of the precinct chiefs, if you could manage it."
"Yeah well, I got nothing, Mulder. There's no way around it. I talked to Homicide in Richmond, in Arlington and in Chesterfield County. Nothing, not one thing that we could even build upon to claim a federal connection. These are local homicides and even if you stitched them up together tight enough to satisfy God himself, we're still in the same place. The FBI cannot exercise federal jurisdiction in an intrastate matter."
Mulder waited for Skinner to catch up to him before leaving the room. They walked down the hallway together in silence. Not until they were in the jeep and Mulder was driving for a steady ten minutes, did he speak. They were stopped for a red light and he turned a little so he could look at Skinner.
"Who would you put your money on?"
"Bagnio," Skinner replied, without pause.
"Why?"
Skinner rubbed a hand over his face and Mulder caught himself wanting to ward off the grimace that was bound to follow it, wanting to be a source of relief in some way. A useless thought.
"He's smart, Mulder. He's very smart and he's got his own... agendas."
"Yeah, I know," Mulder said.
Skinner looked like he was about to say something and then stopped. Mulder could hear him thinking better of it.
"Walter, I've got him where I can see him. He's not going to sneak up on either of us."
"And your money?" Skinner asked quietly. "Where's your money placed?"
Mulder turned back to the road, the light changing back to green and the car in front accelerating away from them. "I don't know," he admitted reluctantly.
"Not even a feeling?"
Files opened inside his head. He could see a twenty five year old man named Aaron, face down in the grass behind a warehouse, gasping sightlessly into the open sky, multiple stab wounds covering his body and only minutes to go before he died from the inside out. He could see moonlight gleaming off the face of another man who was found propped up against a trash can in an alleyway behind a seafood restaurant, near a quay. His name had been Steven. Steven who was thirty years old and had green eyes that spilled tears for the moonlight to snag itself on while his guts spilled themselves out onto the dirty wooden slats under his body. He knew what had been done to James Hearsh, a flashy ad exec from Richmond with few friends, who had no idea his life would stop one night when he was thirty four years old, who couldn't cry because his eyelids had been cut off. He could see all the bodies; he knew what had been done to each man; he had profiled the killer. But he couldn't make any more progress.
"Mulder, did you hear me?"
He blinked. The eye slipped shut inside of him and he could feel the steady vibrations of the wheel under his fingers, the heated air banked up behind his tongue, the sounds of Skinner speaking.
"Not even a feeling. Something's not right and I don't know what it is. I just don--"
He broke off, steadying himself against the familiar urge to dip into past failures, to castigate and take a retrospective walk down his hallways of ghouls.
"I'm sorry about taking off - going to that club," he said instead, appropos of nothing, unsure to what degree he meant it but knowing it needed saying.
Skinner sighed next to him and Mulder felt again the inevitability of being with him, sometimes unable to even understand a single word they said to each other and other times --times like right now-- saying everything without needing to put it in words.
"I don't think it changes anything, sometimes." He slowed down to take a bend and then drove up the long winding driveway of the safe house. Being sorry, I mean."
"You're probably right," Skinner replied and looked at him for a moment when they got out of the car, his eyes dark against the night all around them. "But it matters anyway, I think. Because of what it makes you feel when you say it."
Mulder considered that a moment and then asked, puzzled, "What does it make me feel?"
Skinner shook his head and grinned suddenly at him: an intimate, open split of white teeth, 100% genuine-Walter. "I don't have the answers Mulder. I'm just as desperate as you."
Then he was fishing out the house keys and opening up the front door while Mulder stood behind him, a fist of sweetness clenching itself around his heart, crowding him with fascination at the thought that there was no one else Skinner would show that smile to, not like that.
He stood out on the doorstep for a few moments before Skinner, striding down the corridor, called out over his shoulder without turning around, "Mulder! Now is an inappropriate time to get in touch with your inner Nature Boy. Get inside."
They ate cold pizza in silence, Skinner moving lightly, his face as self-contained as ever but lacking some of its natural capacity for violence. Mulder, by contrast, felt his thoughts slurring into each other urgently like a swarm of poison-drunk insects straggling back to their nest in the last few minutes of life. What would he do with a lover? And which lover should it be? Bagnio's face swam into focus. Was he the killer and if so - if so, then what did it say about the attraction he undoubtedly felt towards the man? Why couldn't he make any more connections in this case? The answer to each of those was monotonously the same: he didn't know; he didn't know; he didn't know; he didn't know.
They went to bed with equal care, giving each other plenty of time in the bathroom and plenty of room in the bed.
"See you tomorrow," Mulder said from his side of the bed.
"Leave me some water for a shower, this time," Skinner said by way of reply and turned over onto his side.
Mulder fell asleep while he was still smirking at the unfairness of that comment and woke up in what seemed to him to be scant minutes later. Something tugged at his consciousness, as if he'd woken up just for it. He squinted over at the alarm clock on the small table on Skinner's side of the room. A little past four in the morning. He threw aside his side of the sheets and got out of bed quietly, wincing as his muscles refused to stretch with him. His bruises were yellowing and fading but the first few moments of waking each day still reminded him of exactly where they used to be. He glanced over at Skinner cautiously but he hadn't moved. He was facing away from Mulder, an arm under his pillow and the blankets pooled around his waist. Mulder surveyed the wide strong back facing him; Skinner's back. It was bare and brown and bracketed with tendons and muscles. And there was something to be said for an undisturbed view of it.
Feeling restless and wide awake, he padded off quietly towards the kitchen, issuing himself orders as he went. Get a glass of water. Drink it and go back to sleep. Do not dwell on Skinner. No point. The mantra playing in his head, he crossed the dark living room and started for the kitchen. Abruptly he stopped, coming to a halt. Something felt different. As if the air in the room had changed texture. He stopped where he was and moved backwards, not bothering to disguise the sound. There would be no point to that. It was better to get to the light switch as fast as he could. His heels hit the edge of the wall and he kept a hand in front of him while he fumbled with the other for the light switch behind him. As defenses went, it wasn't even facesaving but instinct drove anyway and his hand was clenched in a tight fist as light flooded the living room.
The room was empty.
Mulder expelled a whoosh of air. Empty. Got himself worked up over nothing. Feeling vaguely idiotic, he still checked all the windows and both, front and back door, again. Nothing. He left the kitchen window last, knowing what he would see when he looked out of it. A van, dark and dead, fooling no one with its idleness. He almost waved at it, then thought better of it. Skinner was already heated up enough about being driven back into a corner with the investigation. Better not to tease the surveillance. But hell, if he were to make a thick sandwich and a cup of coffee right there, against the window, where they could see him, would that be such a crime? Getting out bread, butter, some Polish sausage and the sharp biting cheese that Skinner favored, he thought not.
He could see from the glistening leaves outside that it had rained while he slept and he opened up the window to let some of the metallic smell of post-rain air into the kitchen. Leaning against the counter, he cut thick slices of everything that could be sliced and thick slathers of everything that could be slathered, in this case, just the butter. A longing for some pickles, sweet and yellow and mustardy, came over him. Simple, embarrassing nostalgia, its roots buried in a time when his mother looked at him instead of through him. When Sam was there. Younger-impatient-wandering-across-the-road-needs-watching there; secret-entrusting-brother-adoring there; afterschool-pickles-only-sandwiches there. He didn't think he'd seen any the first time he opened the fridge or else he would have noticed them but he got up to check anyway. Pickles to keep the faith with. The thought made him smile even though he didn't feel like smiling at all.
His back to the window as he reached in to rummage through a collection of bottles that looked like they were already breeding (because surely neither the hoi sin sauce nor the barbeque sauce had been there yesterday?), he had nothing but a dark shadow materializing on a section of the wall above his head to warn him. A second later, something thudded against his back with enough force to knock his head into the upper part of the fridge. He could taste blood and his teeth hurt dully. Down at his feet, a pool of dark, viscous sauce was seeping through broken shards of glass. He must have dropped the bottle. Sharp needles were carving into his back. He pushed back hard against the death grip and rammed his back into the wall behind him. Something gave and for a moment he couldn't work out if it was his back that had collapsed or the needles. Then he felt the weight leave him and instantly turned around, ready with a leg braced to defend himself.
It was a goddamn cat. Bloody. Mulder registered the blood slowly, stupidly. The cat -- a motley gray-and-honey-streaked Tom -- had blood congealing into its fur and it was shivering. He stared at it haplessly for a second before looking up at the kitchen window. It was just as it had been before: open to half its width, the window shade rolled up tight, the cool night breeze making its vertical stripes of cream and bottlegreen sway lightly against the glass. If the surveillance team was worried, it wasn't letting on. The dark van stayed as it was, too. And why not? All it was was a cat -- for chrissakes! -- sneaking in a window, looking for refuge from the damp night. Mulder warily approached it, a hand outstretched. It lay there stunned, eyes nearly closed over, not making any further attempt to bite or scratch. It didn't take him too long to work out why he'd never heard it. Blood pulsed out its mouth in dark, hopeless dribbles. Gingerly handling it by its neck, Mulder looked closer. Someone had cut its tongue out.
"Jesus."
"Mulder, what the hell's going on?"
"Fuck!!" Mulder's heartbeat shot through his throat and into his mouth. "Fuck, Walter! What the fuck are you doing sneaking up on me?"
Skinner had noiselessly appeared at the kitchen door and was staring at Mulder with a tired, angry puzzlement.
"You couldn't just make a sandwich?"
Mulder stared, then laughed in a low wheezing gasp, the side of his mouth already puffy from being knocked against the fridge and protesting the movement. He saw himself, barbeque sauce puddling at his feet and a bleeding cat's neck between his hands.
"You're really flogging this whole 'sense of humor' thing, Walter."
"File it away in the XFiles. You okay? Are you bleeding?"
"I'm okay. Got a few scratches on my back - damn thing jumped me, coming in the window. Someone's fucked with it and then... I don't know." Mulder frowned, considering the cat. "Someone was at that window not too long ago. They must have been."
"You thinking what I'm thinking?"
"Yeah." Mulder followed Skinner's thoughtful gaze out the window, his eyes also settling on the dark van.
"Go get your gun," Skinner said, his own Smith and Wesson in his hand, held down by his side. "I'm going to make a few calls first."
"What about the cat?" Mulder asked, taking in the stillness of the animal and the glassy sheen of its eyes.
Skinner grimaced. "It's not in any fit state, Mulder. I'll deal with it. Just go get your gun - you're making me nervous."
When Mulder returned, having taken a quick minute to put jeans and a sweater on, Skinner was already on the phone and from the tone of his voice, Mulder thought it was safe to assume it was either Gills or Manning. The cat was on a chair, its neck at an unnatural angle. Skinner had broken it. Mulder stared at it for a moment, thinking how freakish the whole episode was. But there was meaning in it somewhere. He knew there was; if he could just get inside their UNSUB's head the way he needed to, he could work this out. He just had to be patient.
He could hear Skinner's side of the conversation, his voice silken and flat. How a man with so much natural antipathy for being commanded had survived the Marines and got to the rank of AD, was...worth thinking about. Worth profiling. He went back into the kitchen and opened up cupboards, looking for something to put the cat in. As much as it didn't bother Skinner, there was something obscene about its matted bloody fur and unnatural neck being right there in plain view. There were garbage bags under the sink and he placed the cat inside one of them, taking care not to handle it too much. They wouldn't be the only people who wanted to get a closer look at it.
"Well, you'd better take it seriously now," Skinner said, his voice hard enough to make Mulder look askance at him.
"No, we won't go out." Skinner put the phone down and glared at it for a black-browed second before nodding at the door. "Let's go. Manning's sending backup."
"I thought you just said we wouldn't be going outside?"
"You know what you're like, Mulder. Never doing what you're told," Skinner said, sending him a bland look that invited conspiracy and had Mulder smiling at him. "Someone has to go after you when you act out your Lone Ranger fantasies, don't they?"
Mulder felt his smile widen into a grin. Offhand ideas of standing around in the middle of the night, having conversations full of this kind of understanding humor shifted inside him, bewildering him with the delicacy of their urges.
"Heel, Tonto," he murmured, walking over to the door and opening it, not looking to see if Skinner was behind him, knowing he would be, knowing Skinner had his back.
Light filtered through the thick clouds, weak and gray, newly dragged up out of the night but still enough for Skinner to be able to see Mulder clearly. He left the door open behind him and followed Mulder down the steps. Both of them scanned the street and houses on either side before making their way across the road to the surveillance van. All in accordance with good procedure but Skinner knew without needing any further confirmation that their UNSUB was gone. Proof that he'd been there at all in the first place wasn't going to be so hard to offer up to Manning. Not with that cat as Exhibit A. And now the van. Mulder turned back then to glance at him, a grave almost consoling look on his face, before he tapped on the side of the van with his gun, keeping a healthy distance away from it. The bastard was psychic. Hair prickled the back of Skinner's neck, jerking his hand up there to smooth it down again. He knew and Mulder knew he knew. The cat had been a pointer. A sly tap on the shoulder. Looky here, folks.
"Try the door," he suggested quietly, training his gun on the van, taking care to keep Mulder out of his sights.
Even as he reached for the door, Mulder said, his voice weary with presience, "Christ, Walter, what are we going to do?"
He didn't reply. There was nothing he could think of to say. The van opened up and they both lowered their weapons within a second of each other, Mulder closing the distance between himself and the van in an effort to catch the bloodied body spilling out of it.
"Fuck!" Mulder's cheek was streaked with blood when he turned around to Skinner again, face empty of expresion, his arms still holding up the dead man whose head was lolling back on his neck, whose face was a mass of blood and gouged skin, whose eyes were cut out.
Skinner swore under his breath and got his legs pumping across the road to Mulder. Cold air knifed itself into his lungs, making him uncomfortably aware of wearing nothing but his pajama bottoms. Dead bodies and sleepwear somehow seemed a blasphemous combination. Together they pushed the man back into a roughly upright position before trying to take survey of what had been done to him and his partner.
Everything.
For a moment, it seemed true. Bright, arterial blood was sprayed across the windscreen, gouts of it still fresh and dripping sludgily off the dashboard. A pair of sparklers, the kind that lit up and fizzed in kids' birthday cakes, had been inserted into each man's eye sockets and allowed to burn down to the bone. The stink of burned flesh was high in the air. Each man was handcuffed to the steering wheel, their hands covered in blood.
"Son of a bitch," Skinner breathed, transfixed by the sheer nightmare come to life in front of him. "He bled them."
He was standing close enough to Mulder that their shoulders were brushing and he felt the tremor that went through him, even though his voice, when he spoke, was even and considered. "You're right - there are slashes along their wrists, see? The mutilation...he did that while they were bleeding out."
"Christ."
Skinner looked at the destroyed cavities of chest and groin. Someone unfamiliar with human anatomy would not have known they were there. Where the chest used to be, each man was a mess of blood and white bone. Deep stab wounds covered the entire area down to the ribs, so many of them that they overlapped and criss-crossed each other. It was impossible to tell how many times they had been stabbed. There were more sparklers jammed into their hearts, the blood seeping in thin ribbons over the deeper, plummier ruin of arteries and veins. Their dicks had been fished out, all the more bizarre and eyecatching because they had not been sliced up with a knife and were not covered in blood. What they did have were razor thin skewers of bamboo shoved up them. Only the protruding tips and a small patch of haemorraged, abused flesh under each skewer could be seen. It would have been excruciating. Each man was sitting in a pool of blood, still fresh and fake-looking. Whether that meant rape of some kind, Skinner couldn't be sure. It was all he could to look at it but Mulder was and he knew without knowing exactly why or how that he needed to keep looking with him.
"He did them one at a time," Mulder said. "So that the other guy would know just what was coming to him. He bled them one after the other. He might have made one of them do some of this stuff to his partner, on the promise - fake of course - of release. He would have said that he would let the guy go. If he behaved. If he cut his partner."
"Christ," Skinner said again, bile rising up in his throat.
Mulder smiled thinly at him. "Oh, he likes to stay and play, this guy. He likes to touch. He probably came in his pants."
Something in his voice looped itself back into Skinner's ears, setting off sirens.
"Hey!" He took Mulder's arm by the elbow and shook him. Hard. Furious with him, suddenly. "Mulder, don't you dare. Don't you fucking dare."
Mulder looked back at him, the expression on his face as old as time. "It's a gift. A celebration. A slap in the face. All of those things. Guess the bait works, huh? It must be true love. He wants me to know he knows."
"What? What does he know?"
Mulder exhaled softly. "Everything, Walter. Things you can't even guess at. He knows everything."
Helpless, Skinner pulled him closer, right there on the street, rationalizing it with one half of his brain and tightening his hand at the back of Mulder's waist with the other.
"It has nothing to do with you," he said, feeling his mouth firm up into a snarl, instinct ruling him in the face of Mulder's pale, disconnected face. "Nothing, Mulder. Goddamn, you have the ego of a $1000 whore. You think you rule a mind like that? Bullshit. He's playing you. He's playing you like you're playing him. That's all. You knew it would be that way."
"He's winning," Mulder said bleakly, his eyes moving from Skinner back to the bodies. "Isn't he?"
Skinner frowned, unsure just how to deal with Mulder when he got like this: fragile enough to shatter at the gentlest touch if the right pressure was applied but with a will forged from steel under it, ready to slice through false emotion. What he wanted to do was to believe in Mulder, wholeheartedly, to proclaim that belief to Mulder. What he felt was something more complicated. Mulder was no flash in the pan but he was a creature of his own confidence, an athlete of experimental life. Let that self-awareness ebb and he became an ordinary man like any other faster than Skinner could blink. It mattered nothing that he was genius like Skinner had never seen in his lifetime. And he was, in Skinner's opinion, running on close to empty. And he was still the only man who had any hope of stopping this UNSUB. And Skinner was an AD. Without the nameplate, without the responsibility, without the rest of the ladder to climb - maybe he could have given in to what his gut insisted upon.
Instead he pulled Mulder closer, bent his head down to his ear and said into it as gently as he could, "We'll get him, Mulder. He knows it and we know it. That's why he's trying to put you off. We can't give in to it."
Mulder's smile was wry and gentle. "The little train who thought he could?"
Skinner let his hand rest on Mulder's shoulder a moment longer than it should have. "This isn't make believe," he said, deliberately ambiguous and not at all sure that there was kindness behind it.
Mulder pushed away from him, eyes turning a dark, mossy color. "I can hear backup on its way."
Skinner stepped back from Mulder a little, observing the niceties, and they waited together until a couple of discreet dark cars and a towtruck pulled up in the driveway. Ten professional minutes later, they were looking at an empty street. The cat had been taken away too. Skinner felt almost able to believe nothing had happened at all.
Almost, being the key word.
They had barely got back indoors when Manning rang.
"What's going on down there, Walter?"
Skinner treaded warily, aware that the leash had just become shorter. "We don't know yet for sure but Mulder says it's the UNSUB."
Manning sighed at the other end, paternal as all hell and not fooling Skinner one little bit. "Walter, Walter, tell me something new, something I don't know. I'm begging you. And I'm giving you four days. I want some progress by then."
"You don't catch a serial killer with a timetable, John," Skinner retorted, stung despite knowing it was coming.
"Four days, Walter. I mean it."
"What happens then?"
"Keep me happy and I keep you happy, Walter. We both want that, I know." Manning paused and then added, his voice made even smoother with warning. "Otherwise, I'm going to have to take an alternate approach, I'm afraid. Not necessarily one that will be of the most utility to Agent Mulder."
Skinner scowled at the receiver. "What the hell does that mean?"
But Manning had already rung off, terminating the connection.
"He wants answers, right? Results. Movement." Mulder grinned at him, the gesture more a baring of teeth than anything.
Skinner nodded, not willing to pull his punches, too afraid Mulder would find it patronizing, too desperate to not push Mulder's buttons, too unsettled by that last fact to offer him any kind of comfort.
Mulder's grin widened and he gave a small, unconcerned shrug."Well then, we'll just have to change our approach." He wandered aimlessly over to one of the buttersoft leather couches and trailed his fingertips up and down it, deliberately. He didn't look at Skinner, not even when he spoke again, issuing a series of peremptory orders.
"Get dressed and call Manning. Tell him we're going to check out a lead. Get the others to start looking through the files, the way we talked about doing it when we were in the briefing room."
Skinner did all those things and didn't ask a single question: at least, not until he met Mulder's fey, sparkling eyes in the hallway mirror where Skinner was standing, doing up his tie while Mulder lounged behind him, prowling, impatient.
He knotted his tie with care, glowered at himself in the mirror for a moment and then turned around and grabbed Mulder by the elbow, catching him offbalance. Aware he was not being particularly gentle, Skinner pulled until Mulder was those two contentious steps closer to him. Not daring to think on it, he moved his legs awkwardly apart and pinned Mulder between them, knowing that Mulder's hand, pushing against his chest held all the conviction of a ten pound weakling. Mulder's eyes were on him, annoyed, unsure and darkening with every moment into a familiar sullen want. Skinner met his gaze levelly and gave him the opportunity to ask to be let go of. Mulder said nothing; he just blinked at Skinner, communicating in some secret morse code that could not be fathomed by anyone but himself. Skinner shook his head at Mulder, finding himself vaguely amused and reaching out, unzipped him. He found his mouth, murmured his name and kissed him hard, tasting the arousal that Mulder kept swallowing down.
Skinner gathered him in closer, learning the feel of him again: lean and long, limbs restless against Skinner, ragged sighs and angry half-curses now coming from that mouth, swollen by Skinner's treatment of it. He stared, watching as Mulder bit down, sucking his lower lip back into his mouth. It was difficult to remember the original largesse with which he'd given in to this impulse. Mulder's bitten mouth, Mulder's eyes on him, wanting and not-wanting: Skinner could have, without a single pulse of conscience, pushed him to his knees and turned the tables. And Mulder would do it. He could see that. He would go down for Skinner, accepting, uncomplaining, thinking it was what he was bound to do. Stupid, debauched prick, Skinner thought, the words turning tender in his mind even as he formed them.
Putting a hand over Mulder's dick, he felt it jerk gratifyingly, hard and leaking itself into a wet spot in a few tense seconds which he spent rubbing the pad of his thumb over its blunt head, watching Mulder while he did it. Mulder looked back at him, his jaw clenched in protest, his hips shifting mindlessly against Skinner's supporting hand moored at his back, splayed over the bottom of his spine. Skinner awkwardly drew Mulder's dick out of his briefs and compensated for his clumsiness with a tight, hard grip. A dick was a dick. It didn't take a village.
It took Mulder no time at all, making Skinner wonder how long it had been for him like this. There was nothing innocent about a hallway jerk off, not when it was between the two of them but at least it was approaching something safe. He wasn't going to haul off and punch Mulder while he had his dick hanging out. He could be trusted that far. He wondered about it even as Mulder opened his eyes wider, hips slamming up against Skinner, mouth oozing a trickle of blood where he had bitten it harder. Skinner couldn't look away, not even to give Mulder the privacy he so patently wanted. Instead he gentled his gaze as much as he was able and worked Mulder's dick with care, promising release with every stroke of his hand, letting Mulder fuck it with short, desperate thrusts.
And when Mulder began to lose his rhythm, faltering as some measure of thought rekindled itself in his overeager brain, narrowing his pupils with panic, Skinner took over calmly and capably, feeling himself getting harder than he had in a calendar year. He kept his hand curled around the length of Mulder's dick and fisted up, slowly, gripping the ridge of it between his thumb and forefinger. He kept his eyes on Mulder, his dick almost a secondary consideration and slowed down or sped up according to what he read there in the tight, naked lines etched around Mulder's mouth, his eyes, in the flare of his nostrils as he struggled for breath between clenched teeth. He let his hand travel up in a warm wide massage up Mulder's side, squeezing his hip, rubbing his ass and pushed his fingers into his hair, pulling his head to his mouth. Pumping Mulder hard and fast all the while, Skinner pressed kisses into his hair, whispering the kind of uncensored words into his ear that were ordinarily unthinkable.
And if it wasn't his whispering, kiss bestowing mouth, it was his hand that coaxed Mulder's orgasm from him. Skinner couldn't be sure which it had really been, Mulder thrusting hard into his hand, groaning at Skinner to shut up, just shut up. Vaguely he thought of Kroeger and then Mulder was coming into his hand, over his briefs and pants, eyes shut so tight they looked bruised. Skinner pressed Mulder's head into his shoulder and held him for maybe half a minute, letting him sweat and settle. Finally when he did push himself off Skinner, he looked so distracted and bewildered that Skinner had to counsel himself against soliciting instant payback. In any case the spell was broken with Mulder zipping himself back up and drifting down towards the hallway, mumbling about a change of pants. Skinner still hadn't said anything and was loath to break the oddly sanguine silence that sprung up between them with Mulder's return. Energized, Skinner thought with a reluctant admiration that bordered on distaste. The asshole was revved up from a handjob and already back on the job.
"Mulder." Skinner had to say his name a few times before Mulder refocussed on him.
Mulder's reply was, in the circumstances, typically annotated and difficult to decipher. "Good. That was--- Don't talk about it."
And even then, all Skinner asked was, "Where the hell are we going, Mulder?"
"Arlington," was what he got back, Mulder's mind already absenting itself again in anticipation of whatever time clock had just started ticking in his head.
Skinner took the wheel so Mulder could go through a pile of files he brought with him. And persisted, patiently. "Who are we going to see, Mulder? We can't just take off to Arlington. Manning will want to know more than that."
"Mrs Miller," Mulder said, his reply almost an afterthought. "Her name's Mrs Miller. Tell Manning if he really cares, the file number is FX348940. It's in box number three and it's one of the files that Kroeger found."
"And what are we going to talk to her about?" Skinner couldn't check the faint impatience in his voice.
Mulder shrugged again. "Murder, of course. Not just others' but hers as well."
Skinner stared at him, taking his eyes off the traffic for a second. "Hers? Mulder, what the hell is that supposed to mean?"
"It means you'd better step on the gas," Mulder said calmly, a hint of apology in his voice.
END OF PART 10
