This cops-and-robbers bullshit was killing him. Not for the first time, the thought grabbed Kroeger by his balls and twisted at him. Killing him. Time to reconsider the day just gone by, had done nothing to improve his already rancid temper. He cut into the cafeteria line without so much as a 'sorry', pushing past Denis Brindle - fellow FBI man - fucking loser - who knew better than to take it up with him. The thought of another sludgy tray of dirty potato and loose eggs bit at his gut, already suffering from a night of overindulgence, but he still gave it a clear thumbs-up when he considered the alternative. Faggoty salad and sandwich bar. And fruit. Fuckloads of fruit, fresh and wholesome for those bastards who liked it. Pine nuts and dried apricots in little piles, ready for sprinkling over cereal. Always the desk jobs who lined up for those. Not even a meal was clear of politics any more. For instance, for the sake of proving a theory, take that iced cunt special - Agent Scully. That bitch hadn't so much as breathed on anything that wasn't festering in lettuce. Salad, his mother fucking, nigger loving ass, Kroeger thought. Fucking designer Chinese cabbage and cucumber with the skin left on. Slices of orange mixed in for who knew what fucked up reason. But he could see the bitch from where he was, paying for a boxful of it. Thinks she's too good for a plate of sweaty eggs and potatoes. Wrong!
Still, it was as close to sweat as that cold-freeze cunt would ever get, he thought with satisfaction. Probably made do with dildos. Late night, repressed, lights out, straining in the dark, bleating Mulder's name. She had a hard on for that profiling piece of shit too, he was sure. They all did. Everyone in that shitforbrains team. They must because noneofthemstoppedMulderwhen he - when ...
His libido distracted him from the squeeze of that thought, from the way it sat just under the surface of his mind, quiet as water in a pot. Instead he let his cock take over, widening its imagination with thoughts of Scully, suitably post-Kroeger. Blooded, broken in. Face down, ass up, thighs wide, mouth full (of his cock, jammed down her throat). Not right away of course. All things being equal, all cunts should be put to work for the privilege of his cock, made to take a Kroeger-special before they could have the honor, the god-ordained honor of his cock. Nothing fancy. His tastes ran to the simple and convenient; a beer bottle would do it - had done it. Fashionable, too, if that gum-chewing slut flapping about 'Rustic Charm' on the infomercial last night could be believed. Maybe that would be special enough, Vogue-Pussy-Living enough for Miss Royal Redhead? No! Wrong again, loyal listeners, cunts and cocksuckers! He knew her game - same as all of them. Pressure fuck Royal Redhead, tits all a jangle-jingle from demand and no supply.
And what the fuck was she doing on a serial killer investigation, he wanted to know. It was one thing to pair her off with a lunatic like Mulder. She probably came in handy there. Probably travelled with elephant-sized darts, ready to shoot tranquilizers into that son of a bitch, first sign of oncoming madness. How the fuck else would he still have a paying job, down in the basement or not. So, okay, he bought that. He was a reasonable man. Bitch went to medical school, after all. But a murder investigation? This murder investigation? He wouldn't let her buy body parts off a leper colony. Royal pain in the ass, was what she would be classified under. Pardon the pun. Kroeger grinned to himself. He could nearly feel the way her ass would grip his cock if he slapped a fist against that muscled rump. Ass red. Pussy spread. She would sweat then, he was sure. Lather up good enough to write his name in.
The thought made him laugh out loud in sudden, pleasantly horny amusement. He looked around to see if anyone had noticed and caught sight of Denis Brindle's watchful face, paling even as Kroeger met his eyes. Pathetic, limpdicked fuck. Kroeger still remembered him at last year's Christmas party. Weeping into his beer, telling anyone who would listen that his wife was going to die, that she had cancer. They had just found out. She had insisted he go to the party. To be with his friends. Hah. His friends. Did she know, the disease-carrying cunt, that he had no friends? Unless you counted that twerp Ferguson who walked around with his head up his ass. And you did not. So. Fact: Denis was not a Menace. Result: Denis was Fair Game. Which meant he couldn't be allowed to get away with that look. No! Not from the likes of Kroeger. A man had his reputation to consider.
"Hey Denis! We still on for tonight, baby?"
Kroeger was plenty loud. He watched the prick go that mottled red(head) color that always gave him the mother of all hard ons. Spilt blood to sharks. Didn't the dumb bastard know by now to keep his head down?
"Denisssssssss!" He lisped the name out, watching Brindle stiffen up. Mock whisper and a hand on his arm. "Was it the belt thing? Was that what you didn't like? I won't make it that tight this time, lover. I promise." He used a coaxing tone of voice, turning private and coy as more heads turned. "Tell that cripple wife of yours to wheel her fat ass over to the bath and hose herself down for a change. Man's got needs, am I right, Denis-Menace? That prick of yours is going to shrink away to nothing if you spend another year not exercising it? Right, baby?"
Denis Brindle, aka Denis-Menace, aka Loser in Life, twitched and got that shiny, tight look that Losers usually got just before they hit the canvas, spitting teeth. Kroeger wasn't sure what was getting him harder: Scully as BitchfuckingAnyWoman naked and taking it or that wet sheen in Denis-Menace's eyes, begging him to let this one go, to let it slide this one time. No! You let it slide once and you'll let it slide again. Discipline. It was all about discipline and that was why there were lines that couldn't be crossed between losers and winners. Besides, he liked it. Did the miserable jerk-off understand nothing? He fucking loved it.
"You worried I wanna go bareback, Denis-Menace? Is that why you're turning all shy on me now?"
He watched the other man bite his lip, throat beginning to work as he flung a desperate look around him, at the people behind him, at the waitstaff behind the steamy, covered food trays.
"I-I-I-I- I don't th- think you..."
Brindle broke off, glaring wretchedly down at his tray, his mouth twitching out a miserable, folks-he's-just-kidding, rictus grin. Other cops began moving away from him. The stink of a loser. Didn't mean they liked Kroeger any better. He wasn't dumb enough to think that. In fact, he wasn't That. Dumb. At all. There were people who had made the bad mistake of thinking that about him and he had used their miscalculation against them where he could. The list wasn't done with; there were still names enough to look forward to. Blackmail. Bruisemail. Greenmail. Bloodmail. There were uses and juices. Users and juicers. And riddle him this, cocks and cunts, can you be both? No! Either a user or a juicer. No middle ground, as his father well knew.
Which thought threatened to bring him all the way down again, back to pukling, mewling brat. And lead to the other thought that there are (were) people who make (made) him dumb sometimes. Fact: he can't help that. Hates it but he can't help it. All right then. Result: he finds his own ways to compensate. And once that's over, and sometimes during (while he's making it better), he finds some dumb fuck who's willing to take it out of him and into them. Prick or pussy, it made no difference. As long as the bruises flowed the right way. And speaking of. Speaking of such things, cuntlickers and cocksuckers, one and all. Looky here at Denis-Menace now. Like an overripe tomato. One more squeeze.
"A-a-a-a-all right, pussyboy," Kroeger sang out, some of the misery he'd been carrying around all morning lifting out of his guts, soft with the booze he'd pumped into them last night. "All right. Your l-l-l-l-loss. At least, lemme spring for that plate of crap you got there. All those radiowaves they're pumping into her don't come cheap, I'll bet."
Just to twist the screw in deeper, he frog marched Brindle over to eat breakfast with him. Gave the loser one more thing to fight his suicidal way out of. He wished Mulder was there to see it. The way people moved away when he took his tray through them, striding over to a table of cops who knew better than to get up and leave, the way they clearly wanted to. Stay put, fuckers, was what his shark-fin smile said to them. And they listened. Of course they did.
They did it for the same reason anyone else who knew the way things worked in Vice, did. They knew that Kroeger was untouchable. Immune from the consequences of his actions. Trouble with people like Mulder was that they thought they could dispense with people like him. Wrong! That fuckrat would pay. They all would. One day, he was going to bring the whole fucking lot of them crashing down. Then Mulder would see. Then Mr Pro-fucking-iler, Mr Takes-it-Where-he-Gets-It, Cocksucking, Assfucked, Pussyboy Whore would see.
Because Kroeger knew people.
That thought made him feel instantly better, as if someone had just mainlined the marrow back into his bones. Fuck the spook. He knew people: Humpty Dumpty men, putting him back together after every mess, giving him the rep he now lived off. He swam through sewers of shit and always came back up clean. Midas. That's what some of the guys called him. "Hey Midas! You're one tough fuck." That was him. Golden. Slippery when wet. Juiced all the fuck the way up. Don't mess with the Kroeger mandate. One half did him favors, the other half kept out of his way. Spineless, bitchfucked losers, the lot of them.
All on the promise of a favor.
"Maybe years from now, Mr. Kroeger. It might be years from now when I ask you for a favor."
As if the creepy, Godfather-ripoff bastard would live that long, with a habit like that. But even he had known better than to try humor in the situation. The one he had been rescued out of, and, although he didn't know it then - how could he - only the first of others like it. His very own chainsmoking man-eater come home to roost. The one he had earned the right to, well before now. Kroeger had no idea how people like that found out about people like him and he had a feeling he didn't want to know. After all, a favor, even unspecified, was a small price to pay for the efficiency with which his career had been saved, time and again. The last time (not even three months ago) had been worse than usual. Lately, the messes that came looking for him seemed to get higher and higher in their stakes.
Not that the bastard had even hesitated when Kroeger made the phonecall to him, pants down in a part of Chinatown he had no recollection of, high as a fucking kite with the added complication of a dead whore floating in scummy bath water next to him, no idea how she got there. Looking at no career, jail time and ten to fifteen spent with - knowing the way luck gave out when it finally did - some cousin-spawned, backwaters Bubba pushing his intestines up through his throat, bent over a toilet. But of course, none of that happened. Instead, the regular team of GQ blockheads came and did their thing. And there was that snooty, cancer-courting bastard reinventing the concept of cool, saying that none of it had happened. Just a favor. A favor in return for things becoming unhappened.
And what favor wasn't worth that? Man-eater come too late but better now than never.
Mulling that thought over, it took him a moment or so to realize that Brindle had made a run for it. Off to the men's room, no doubt to puke up his breakfast. Gutless wonder. If Bagnio hadn't come sauntering into the place just then, he would have followed Brindle. Just for fun. But Bagnio looked around once or twice, greeted some friends and then found Kroeger's face quick smart. Kroeger nodded at him and waited for him to find his way over, watching him walk around tables and people. Although not much was available about him by way of personal information, Kroeger got the message loud and clear when he dug around a bit. Bagnio was not just more than well-liked by most; he was also going places. A power-tripper, collecting promotions like some Brady Bunch kid looting candy on Halloween. The Juice was Loose.
He knew it too. Kroeger had clocked that about him, nearly the first time he had met him. It wasn't so much the walk. Bagnio walked like any tall man who was big around the shoulders: lazily, with grace, as if he had all the time in the world even when he was in a hurry. Kroeger himself was tall enough but not wide enough. He knew that if he tried to take over that walk, it would quickly become obvious that he was taking two steps for every three that were needed. The equation pissed him off same as it always did, ever since the first time he worked it out.
Probably hadn't occurred to Bagnio though. His arrogance didn't come from that walk. It was in the eyes, the blue-bright amusement in them that said Bagnio could take anyone all the way to the bank and back, if he wanted to. That's where it came from. Good-looking, got pussy and prick slathering over him, ADs making the sign of the cross over him, and didn't he know it. Thought he was king's come. Not that Kroeger wanted necessarily to lock himself into a pissing contest with him. He had met those eyes before now. Bagnio thought he was a slimeball, no doubt about that. Without any proof of it though, Kroeger wasn't too worried about being in Bagnio's bad books; he had his own lucky charm to keep him safe. Still, he pulled his head in a little because it always paid to start off careful with a proud bastard like that. Especially one that rivalled only Kroeger in the way he kept squeaky-clean on the books.
"Looks like we're on the move," Bagnio said to him, coming to a lazy halt in front of the table Kroeger was seated at.
"What're you talking about?"
"Boss's orders. A briefing by Mulder before we start requestioning the witnesses from our allocated files."
Kroeger spoke with a deliberate sneer. "Funny, I wouldn't name you as a guy who fell over himself to take orders."
Bagnio looked at him for a moment longer than Kroeger was strictly comfortable with. "I'm much better at giving them, it's true. But you might get further along if you worked out how to take instruction as well as give it, Richard."
Something in the ostentatious use of his name bugged Kroeger although Bagnio's voice never lost its soft, easy burr. "Wanna go, then by all fucking means, let's go." He got to his feet and started off for the door, dumping the still half-full tray in a wastebin on their way out.
A whole day spent with this rose-shitting bastard was all he needed. "C'mon, Steve," he said, his cheery tone not moving the sneer off his face nor the burn of temper out of his cheeks. "Move those dancin' feet."
It took him a few seconds to place the next look Bagnio threw at him, and when he did, he was so startled that he stopped right where he was. Oblivious of people behind him, rerouting the flow of traffic and grumbling, he stared through the floor, only coming back to himself when Bagnio snapped his fingers in front of his face.
"Today, Richard."
"Yeah, yeah," he mumbled half-heartedly, his thoughts still elsewhere. "Give it a rest."
It was the kind of look Kroeger himself had often worn when sizing up a new possibility.
"Agent Cooke."
Ben turned around, still brushing crumbs off himself. Swallowed dry toast hastily when he saw who it was.
"Agent Scully. Good morn--"
Red in the face, he stopped coughing just as she went over to the paper cups and poured him a glass of water from the cooler.
"You usually get your eggs and green ham here?" he asked when she returned, taking the water from her gratefully.
"Green eggs, Agent Cooke."
"How do you know it's the eggs that are green?"
He kept his voice light, respectful, in case she had some kind of thing about fraternization. He didn't know what to expect from Mulder's partner. Hell, Mulder was probably a nice enough guy in his own quirky way but spending her days looking for little green men with him could not be a help to her social skills.
"I have nephews, Agent Cooke."
She was dressed in some kind of dark but discernibly blue suit with a pale yellow shirt inside. Buttercup. He knew the name given to that shade of color because his wife had a dress in that color, a kind of loosely flowing shift that brought out her honeyed Italian coloring and did something to her long, ringleted, dark hair that turned his heart over. He couldn't imagine Scully in something so carefree and impractical for all that he did understand this wasn't her finest hour.
"It's Ben," he offered, without going as far as to put a hand out.
"Scully."
And got a careful hand outstretched to him instead as though she could read his mind and knew his hesitation, her cool, blue gaze warming to something approaching mischief. Impractical.
He was shaking her hand before he even knew it himself, surprising himself with a grin when she fell in step with him after paying for her salad. Ben had a second plate somehow in his hands, but was too hungry all of a sudden to turn it aside. They made their way to a table where they ate in a comfortable half-silence, passing salt and pepper shakers as required and talking a little about the day ahead. Inquiries had to be remade on every file that Mulder had earmarked. It was going to be a long day. He and Armstrong would presumably form one pair, Mulder and Scully another and that left Kroeger and Bagnio. There was a moment when she was stirring her coffee, absorbed by the task, when he very nearly asked her what Mulder was like. Whether she liked working with him. Only the memory of her face watching Mulder after that stunt with Kroeger, stopped him before it was too late. Whatever it was that their partnership was about, he had a feeling it wasn't breakfast material.
"You think it's safe letting Kroeger loose on Bagnio?" he asked instead.
"I'd say it was the other way around," Scully said wryly, a hint of a smile in her voice.
Ben made a noncommittal sound, not sure enough about the politics of the operation to state any firm opinion. Which was that Kroeger was a son of a bitch, going on reputation alone. He was grateful when Scully didn't pursue the subject but switched over gently into something personal.
"I saw the photos in your wallet when you were paying for your food," she said, her voice nearly confessional in tone. "How old are your girls?"
"There's two years between them - five and seven."
"Not a lot between them," Scully said. "That must make it easier for you and your wife."
Ben rolled his eyes. "You have no idea what pests they can be at that age."
"Oh, I have some idea."
He got the feeling she wasn't talking about nephews.
"It must be difficult with two kids," she went on.
"Difficult?"
"The job, I mean. And having kids at the same time."
"Oh!" Ben got it. "Yeah. Sure it is. It's tough. You get hardened to some shit but other shit makes you totally paranoid. I go by a schoolyard and I'm checking out the middle-aged men who don't seem to have any kids with them. I watch their eyes to see what they're looking at. Ruby - my wife - cuts herself, and I see spatter patterns." He laughed at himself, trying to lighten it up. "Those kids are gonna have some dating problems, I am telling you that right now."
"What does she do, your wife?"
"She owns a greenhouse. Runs it most of the time, too, now that the kids are older."
"That must be..." Scully paused, an expressively blank look on her face. "She must have a green thumb."
"I know what you mean." Ben grinned. "I can't really figure it out myself. I'm the skinny guy on the lawnmower in the bad Bermuda shorts who's never been to Bermuda, cutting the grass back to size. That's my green thumb right there."
"That's you? I didn't know you lived next door to my mother."
"I'm widely travelled," he said solemnly.
This was safer ground. He relaxed some more, drawing on the uncomplicated El Dorado of anecdote that every parent had recourse to. Jess would be five in two months time; Fern, her sister, had already turned seven in March. Between the two of them, there were plenty of snapshots to flesh out in an amusing way for friends and family. Even strangers.
To do her credit, he didn't think Scully's interest was faked. She couldn't know, not having kids herself, just what kind of loyalty he had to them or how impossible it was to separate the ego in his voice from the bland, undeniable fact of them. But he could tell she understood it. And liked it. She was betrayed into a genuine, full-throttle laugh, the first he'd heard from her to date, when he told her about the different dramatic triumphs Jess enjoyed, not the least of which was the blue marker incident three nights ago.
"She came out of her bedroom, covered, I swear to God, just covered in blue marker, drawn all over her face and her arms and well geez, you can imagine the state that put Ruby into."
"She's the rulemaker, then?" Scully said, teasing.
"Oh yeah," he immediately admitted, feeling idiotic for the smile that put on her face but warmed by the first human contact he'd had with anyone on this team apart from Mike. Mulder was... Mulder. He could be nice, but was too focussed and self-interested for Ben to imagine himself talking to him for any sustained length about anything trivial. Not trivial, he corrected himself almost immediately, just normal. Ordinary.
"And? What was it with the blue marker?" Scully asked.
He grinned. "You bet your backside, pardon my French, that Ruby demanded to know exactly that, right away. So, Jess, she goes back in the bedroom, comes tearing out with her scuba mask on, yelling 'help, I'm drowning, I'm drowning!!' "
There was that laugh again, genuine amusement crossing Scully's face.
"Kids can be tough at that age," she said, picking up the school photo of Jess that had come in a miniature size, perfect for his wallet, still smiling as she studied it. "You must be very happy with yours - funny and bright as well. And the other one - Fern? - she's quieter, you said?"
Ben found himself preening in a way that even he didn't indulge in usually, taking out Fern's photo from the back part of his pocket and handing it over to Scully. With Fern, it was her curiosity to know how things worked, her love of pretty clothes that somehow complemented the tomboyishness that drove Ruby crazy and had him flushing with pleasure at being preferred company, even though he knew it wasn't exactly right to react like that. She wanted to be a doctor, too, he said, careful to keep the note of pride out of his voice, as if it would somehow belittle Fern's calm, decisive choices - cutesy them in some unacceptable way that amounted to a betrayal.
Scully, for her part, took her cue from him. "I was twelve when I decided I was going to be a doctor."
Her voice made it clear it was a pivotal moment even as the twist of her mouth acknowledged the anomaly of her current position in the FBI. Ben found himself liking her better for it; none of the rumors about her had prepared him for her sense of humor. He felt comfortable enough with her that he could have gone on in that vein for another half-hour at the least but he stopped sooner than that, finding a sense of proportion from somewhere.
"Sorry, I don't really want to bore you stupid," he said finally.
Scully raised an eyebrow at that. "And I have some lakeshore property in the Mohabi Desert I really want you to see," she said, a definite glint in her clear, wide eyes.
Ben grinned, non-repentant. "Yeah, yeah. Okay. What about you? You got family? Sisters? Brothers?"
"Oh, there's a whole clan of Scullys." She sounded both dismayed and bolstered by the fact. "Two brothers - one younger, one older, and a sister, older. Bill Junior, Melissa and Charles."
"Man, you're the kind of person Mikey - Agent Armstrong - would be latching onto like a limpet. You couldn't keep him away from the house, I can tell ya. Me and Ruby, we're both lone guns, you know? No brothers or sisters between us. Mike, he loves the kids and all but he loves a group situation best. Guess it figures - political parents, only kid, blah blah. He would love a couple of brothers or sisters."
He had meant it as a compliment but to his surprise, it seemed to make her uncomfortable, as though he was forcing her hand in some way. "Well, I said family, Ben. I didn't say we all got along perfectly."
A small, uncomfortable silence - the first, so far - sat between them, brought on by a change in Scully's tone. When she spoke next, it was in a more neutral, pragmatic way about the files he and Armstrong would be following up, the weather, the way Mulder annoyed her on long journeys by trying to find patterns in radio static. Her manner was still familiar and informal but he knew he had been put aside, the shared sympathy between them vanishing as if it had been something he had fabricated for himself. Some sort of indulgence had been withdrawn from him and he felt stupid, like it was the morning after the night before of a drunken indiscretion.
When her cell phone rang, he could see it was a relief to her.
"Scully."
He was near enough to recognize Mulder's voice, charged with urgency, talking ten to the dozen. And just like that, the earlier focus Scully had had on him was back. But now it was throwing its beam far out, away from Ben. He shifted awkwardly in his chair and crossed his ankle over his opposite kneecap, the movement causing the hard wooden slats at his back to dig into his spine. Scully kept on saying Mulder's name, alternately reproaching him and gentling him. After what seemed to Ben to be a long time, Mulder finally hung up.
"Is everything okay?" he asked, when it became clear she wasn't going to say anything, wasn't even going to look at him and might not even have been aware he was still there.
Scully puffed out a small breath of air at the cell phone and shook her head at it. "The men guarding the house where Mulder and Skinner are staying, have been murdered. It seems highly likely at this time that it was our UNSUB. Feature points of mutilation and dismemberment appear to fit his patterns."
"Jesus Christ!"
She looked over at him. From the angle at which he was seated, Ben could see past the line of the table and down into her lap where her hands lay like question marks, painfully casual.
"Mulder says he and Skinner are going to pursue a different line of questioning - he said something about a 'hunch' down in Arlington. So in the interim, I'll take the rest of their cases for the day. I think we should get started. Where's Agent Armstrong?"
"I'm supposed to pick him up on my way out of the briefing today," Ben said slowly, his mind trying to grasp what had happened in a way that made some sense to him, startled by the way Scully had eclipsed him. "But I guess the briefing's off, now?"
She nodded, already gathering up her wallet, her bag. "Yes. Leave your cell phone on. I'll make sure Agents Kroeger and Bagnio are informed. All of us should be contactable. In case... So we can check in with each other."
When she next looked up, her eyes were filled with practicalities even as she handed him back the photo of Fern. "You don't want to forget this."
"Thanks," Ben said but he was already talking to her back.
He sat where he was for a while, watching her thread her way competently through the moving groups of agents until she changed directions and headed in a beeline towards two men whose profiles resolved themselves soon enough into Kroeger and Bagnio. Scully spoke for a while, uninterrupted, before Bagnio turned to Kroeger with a frown and then they were, all three of them, talking animatedly.
Ben got up and walked towards an opposite exit. He had no desire to speak to any of them. He managed to hold his leaden breakfast inside him until he had left the cafeteria. Then, taking the fire exit stairs two at a time, he went down a flight into the adjoining bathroom, exactly where Bureau regulations demanded it be placed, on alternate floors. It took next to no effort to throw the food up; it was practically walking out of his stomach on its own. When he was sure he was done, he rinsed his mouth out with cold water from the tap until he could no longer feel slivers of cooked egg scratching his throat. A few more minutes passed while he stared at his pale, disoriented face in a mirror panel that was fixed to the wall.
Feature points of mutilation and dismemberment...
Flipping the lid down and flushing, he sat on the commode with rubbery legs and called Ruby on his cell, uncaring that someone could walk in any moment.
"Hello, this is the Cookes' home. Please leave a message and we'll call you back soon as we can."
He hung up before the beep signalled the start of recording and waited a good ten minutes before finding an elevator that led him out of the building and into the gauzy, morning sunlight, dust spores shimmering in the air as passing traffic churned up and down Pensylvania Avenue.
"Okay," he said to the irate parking attendant, wanting a full day's worth of payment when he couldn't find his ticket. "Here, take it."
He kept trying to call home at every traffic light that turned red for him and finally got her, three blocks from Senator and Mrs Armstrong's security-gated, alabaster house.
"Hi, hon. I've been trying to get through." He tried hard to sound his usual self, his voice caressing hers but casual in its intimacy. "You in the middle of something?"
Ruby, not fooled, said with a fierceness that had generations of sun-ripened Italian temper in it, "Ben, if something's wrong, tell me straight. You okay? Are you hurt? Where are you calling from?"
"No, no, nobody's hurt - I'm not hurt. I'm in the car, just in the car. On my way to pick up Mike. I'm fine, Rub, honest."
"Then what is it?"
Ben sighed, without knowing he was going to do it and then wished he hadn't, the tremble in his breath sounding over-harsh in the sudden silence between them.
"It's just going to be a long day," he said, trying to put what earnestness he had at his disposal into his voice. "I wanted to hear your voice at the start of it. Just to talk a little. How's everything?"
"Everything's good. Everything's like normal." She paused and for a tense moment, Ben thought she would go back to questioning him, but she didn't. "The kids are at school. Your dad called and we talked for a little bit. Jess forgot to take her clarinet with her so she's going to come home in a mood. We're going to have to talk about that with her, you know. I think she's getting too used to me being at home again, doing everything for her."
"Yeah, I know. I probably need that talk too, I bet."
He heard the reluctant smile in her voice at that. "You're worse than the both of them put together, and you know it."
If tortured, one of the first things Ben would give away would be his irrational pleasure in her smile, and the lengths - the ridiculous lengths - he went to, to get it. He didn't care who knew. Finding himself grinning at the man in the Mercury next to him, he ostentatiously switched phone hands above window-level so he didn't have to explain himself. "You can go back to your old job any time you like, you know. Terry would buy the greenhouse off you in a flash."
"No thanks! Give up orchids and black roses for the trading floor? Even you say my temper is improving."
She was laughing now and Ben could see the way she would be pushing her thick, ringleted hair out of her eyes.
"I wish I could come home," he said suddenly, his voice thickened with longing, again catching him unawares. He tried to cover up by turning it into something uncomplicated. "We could get crazy all afternoon - you could pretend I'm this sex-driven cop playing hookey and I could pretend you're this beautiful, rose-breeding, ex-money market trader - whaddya say?"
"You sound like shit, Ben."
"Yeah, I know. I'm sorry, baby."
"Just get home when you can."
"You know I will. I'm okay. Don't mind me, this one's just a little messy, is all."
She kept on talking as if he hadn't spoken, hadn't offered up his transparent excuses. "We'll watch something stupid on TV. The girls can climb all over you and you can fall asleep on the couch with me and a couple of beers. I'll pretend you're this dumbass, overworked cop and you can pretend I'm this fabulously gorgeous, devoted head-rest. How's that sound?"
"Yeah." Ben put his foot down and let the car slide on into oncoming traffic, rolling down his window with one hand, craving the fume-filled freshness of unrecycled air. "Yeah, that sounds good, Rub. I'm gonna leave this on for a while, till Mike gets in. Put me on speaker and just forget about me?"
"I can do that," she said, sounding entirely charmed by the notion as she always did on the few occasions Ben had asked her to do it, heat crawling up the back of his neck when he did.
He weaved through cars and somehow made his way over four lanes of traffic to get into a turning lane while listening to Ruby moving around in the kitchen. At some point she had gone over to the radio and switched it on. Faintly, he could hear a bossa nova track playing: latin-flavored jazz that she only listened to when she was home alone. Ben couldn't quite tune into a song and hear it for very long before it became part of the background hum and it annoyed her enough to spoil her enjoyment of it. He wasn't sure why that was the case; he danced well enough to keep up with her for as long as she wanted to get up on a dance floor. Which could often be a marathon feature of an evening out. Ruby loved to dance.
She was probably keeping time with the music even as Ben listened to her getting things out of cupboards, sliding drawers open and shut, running water through something that would probably end up in the pasta sauce. Recipes were loose umbrellas under which she did anything she liked, somehow ending up with the dish she had named but with something entirely different mixing through the expected flavors. Ben only noticed this because, in hindsight, it should have been one of the earliest warnings that Ruby did as she damn well pleased. She had stood firm against her parents' traditional sense of outrage and married Ben, coolly assured that the children, when they had them, would right the balance. She had been right.
His own expectations of her had even less chance of taking root. A shaky grasp of what a woman wanted, culled from a father who thought a child who didn't come home to a waiting mother was a child who was going to grow up into a delinquent, had been dismissed in Ruby's rawly honest way. There had been times when he was sure he was making a real, sincere mistake with his life. But either the heart wanted what it did or his brain was smarter than he gave it credit for. Thinking of the tear-down rages she got into when he occasionally forgot himself and blabbed out his father's notions of her place in his life, Ben felt his grin reappear, threatening to assault surrounding cars again.
He could hear the solid sound of the big chef's knife coming down on the chopping board - vegetables, probably, and some of that smoked parmagiana that her mother must be shaking down Mob contacts to supply them with - and Ruby humming along. Somewhere between that and the music, he could hear the percolator gargling itself up into a rattling wheeze. He wondered if he had got her out of bed to answer the phone and thought that he probably had. Truthfully, he didn't feel sorry enough about it to care and she probably wouldn't have been much longer getting up, in any case; she was an early riser. She liked to cook early in the day so she could spend the afternoon in the greenhouse, watching people browse and letting them take their time about asking her for help.
He was surprised when he found himself only a few yards from the Armstrongs' gates.
"Time's fun when you're having flies," he murmured.
"You're the greatest, Kermit."
She put the phone down on him gently, leaving him free to call Mike and let him know he was parked outside.
Ben didn't do that straight away.
Instead he sat and thought back to the point at which Ruby said his father had called. Your dad called and we talked for a little bit. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't remember if her voice had changed when she talked about him. Some of the muscles in his shoulders and the back of his neck went right back to being coiled up tight again. Ruby's good work undone.
"Jeez-us, Benjamin."
He was genuinely pissed at himself. Ruby didn't take any shit but she had never been able to hide the way in which Ben's father got under her skin. Which was no surprise to Ben because he had lived with the bastard for half of his teenaged years. Closing his eyes, he contemplated calling her back but knew he couldn't. Worrying her once a day was forgiveable in his books; he would go crazy hiding the untenable aspects of his job from her. But his father wasn't his job, even if he felt like it sometimes.
For some reason, Ben found himself thinking of Mulder and Scully. He wondered where people like that, so removed from the mainstream he knew, came from. Did they know their fathers all the way into adulthood? Maybe they lived in some kind of limbo like he did, or possibly, in a state of permanent fawning the way Mike did. Maybe normal came in this kind of store-soiled packaging for everyone. Maybe he was being a jackass, more to the point. He rubbed his jaw, feeling out the stubble, wanting again nothing more than to go home: go home, have a shower, wash it - the people, the job, all of it - off himself and clear his mind so it stopped jerking off to this sort of speculative bullshit. No one could ever really be satisfied with their parents, anyway, how could they. One of these days, it'd be Fern and Jess, giving him and Ruby the what-for. The circle of life and all that crap.
His cellphone rang, startling him.
"Cooke."
"Ben, how come you're just sitting outside?"
"Ah shit, Mikey." Ben was helpless to prevent a healthy snort of laughter from escaping him. "Don't ask, all right? You ready?"
"Yeah, I was just looking for you and you were right outside so I waited. But you didn't call me."
Ben had a clearer picture of Mike peering out of the curtains than he wanted. A dog waiting for the promise of its daily walk to materialize.
"You want me to come in or are you coming out?"
There was a small silence on the other side of the phone.
"I'll come out."
Ten minutes later, during which he vacillated to and fro between ringing his dad - which wasn't like ringing Ruby back but boy, was it a bitch - and finally decided against it, Mike came loping up to the car.
"Hey," Ben said, watching him fold himself up into the passenger seat, wondering how a big lunk like that could be so graceful in motion and such an awkward proposition at other times.
"Hey," Mike answered, almost absently. "Can we go already or what?"
Ben put his own meaning to that: another disagreement in the Armstrong household. On how life is. He glanced over at the other man in time to see a look of open misery cross his face.
"What happened?"
Mike shrugged at him. "Same as always. I say to-may-to, he says to-mah-to. You know how it goes."
"C'mon now, it's not like he's gonna ask for your job back, right?"
The other man remained silent. Taking in his artificially relaxed posture, Ben lurched back into speech. "Aww, it's a joke for chrissakes!"
"Sure. It's what they all say, though, right? Mike Armstrong's daddy fixed him up in the job. I hear them saying it, Ben, I'm not that stupid. And it's true. I gotta do every damn thing he wants. Every damn thing or I'm out. He'll fix it. He means it."
"He's just used to threatening it, Mike. He wouldn't do it to you, no way he would."
"Yeah, whatever. Let's go already, okay?"
"Okay," Ben said quietly. After a moment's hesitation, he added, "You don't look so hot. Getting any more sleep this week?"
"Nope. Still feel like shit. I'm sleeping, that's no problem but when I wake up - shit. It feels like I've been running a marathon or something."
"Is it the job - this case, I mean?"
"Dunno. Agent Mulder and Agent Scully give me the heebies. So does the AD. They're all so fucking weird." Ben could see him at the corner of his vision, shaking his head in bewilderment. "Even when they're trying to be normal, they're weird."
"Yeah, I know what you mean, believe me. But they're the good guys, Mikey. I'm pretty sure of that."
"What about what Agent Mulder did to Kroeger, Ben? What was that for?"
"You got me there." Ben grimaced as that scene played out on double-quick time in his head. Not something to be easily forgotten. "Heckling Mulder, I guess. I guess that's what it was for. Maybe some other guy, I wouldn't think so much of Mulder for the way he went about it. But with Kroeger...from what I hear about that joker, whatever he gets is coming to him. In spades."
"Maybe."
Ben turned his head to stare incredulously at the other man. "What, you like this guy, Mikey? He's a big bully. He'd be the kind of guy stuffing you in a locker in junior high."
"Nobody ever stuffed me in a locker, Ben."
"Well, yeah." He laughed, acknowledging that as the truth. Something about Mike made him feel like a younger brother to Ben, one in need in protection. He often forgot the hulking, real-time size of the guy. Never mind anyone being stupid enough to try it, Mike probably wouldn't fit in any locker made by man. "Yeah, I guess they didn't."
"It wasn't right, though," Mike said to him suddenly.
"What wasn't?"
"What Agent Mulder did."
"Oh for chriss--- okay, yeah, I agree with you, all right? I never said I didn't." Ben fought for a more patient tone of voice. "Sure it was mean. But it was Kroeger, you know? Who really gives a fuck if the guy was too dumb to see where Mulder was leading him. A little bit of public humiliation will probably do him a world of good."
"Yeah, you can say that all you like but you don't know, Ben. You don't know what it's like to have a guy going on at you, everyone watching and you don't get what he's doing. And then, suddenly, ha-ha. You're the joke. Everyone's falling around laughing cause you're the joke like you were always supposed to be but you don't get it and you gotta be there and take it like it doesn't matter. No one ever got you in a bind like that, right?"
Too late, Ben caught the angle Mike was taking on the subject and felt like all of the insensitive asshole he sounded like.
"No one was laughing at him, Mikey," he said gently.
And felt sure he imagined the split-second of malignancy that came at him from the other side of the car. Especially when Mike expelled a long breath of air next to him and clapped a strong hand on his shoulder, nearly whacking the bone out of joint.
"Yeah, okay, I know. I'm just wound up."
"Shit, well you mind in the meantime not beating up on me?"
"You mind putting some bone into your back?"
"You mind getting your band off the wagon?"
Just like that, it was easy enough to slip into their usual Goon-like banter, the type that put Mike in a good mood because he could usually keep up with it. If it didn't give the guy the pleasure it did, Ben would have felt like some kind of slimey, patronizing bastard. As it was, he was used to the feeling and anyway, Mike picking up on it simply wasn't something that rated on the scale of Possible.
"You don't know your own strength, pal," he said instead of all the other things crowding his tongue in a spasm of drive-by conscience.
"Galileo," Skinner said, an air of satisfaction in the look he gave Mulder even as he narrowly missing going down the wrong turn-off.
Mulder rolled his eyes and bit into his burger, his mouth dumbly salivating over the burnt meat. It looked a lot like something was alive and moving around under the lettuce but he was hungry enough to ignore it. If it looked like there was more than one something wriggling around, he could give it some thought then. It wasn't like he would go hungry. There were licorice strips somewhere, black and red, hastily bought at the one and only gas station Skinner was prepared to stop at.
"Well?" Skinner rapped out. "Has the cone of silence descended, Mulder?"
"Didn't realize that was your serious answer," Mulder mumbled, burger grease coating his tongue, making him happy. "Don't you want to use a lifeline? Call a friend?"
"Want me to confiscate that burger?"
Mulder grinned. "Yeah, I can see it now." He fanned out both hands. "Headlines read: "Skinner Avenges Steak. President to Fly Back From Peace Talks. Oprah to Discuss the Spiritual Cow Inside Us All."
"Mulder."
"All right, keep your cufflinks on. Galileo is....rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr-Wrong! The answer, the correct answer is the Optus satellite launched by China in 1992."
He got a grunt of acknowledgement for that, Skinner shifting a hand to the middle of the steering wheel, letting it go on auto-pilot. He used his other hand to collapse his burger wrapper into his emptied container of fries, which was in turn deflated into its component parts. Four judicious, straw-straining sips of his shake later, he loaded up all the debris into his takeout bag and stowed it under his seat.
No doubt, Mulder reflected, as a prelude to being promptly disposed of in the very next trashcan they passed which Skinner deemed to have an appropriately secure lid. For a guilty second or so, he furtively tried to use his feet to gather up the incriminating confetti of salad scattered around his own seat. Lettuce garlanded his shoes and inched its way down the gaps between the seat and the seatbelt, a little further each time his fingers tried to cleverly snag it between his nails. Irritating.
"What the hell are you doing?"
And not so furtive.
"Turning away from the Dark Side."
A quick glance at Skinner showed him frowning at the horizon over the steering wheel. He shrugged, the movement of his shoulders more discernible through the white shirt he was wearing under his suit jacket. It was too hot for either of them to wear their jackets and Skinner had, in no uncertain terms, declared his aversion to having manufactured, chilled air tell him any different.
"Do it quietly," he said, at last. "I don't want to miss that turn-off."
"Silent-Conversions-R-Us," Mulder said, poking around in his take-out bag in the vain hope of locating some more fries.
Unsuccessful, he closed his eyes and let himself sink into the lazy, greasy-burger, hot-afternoon silence. It stayed comfortably between them for another half-hour until Skinner broke it.
"If it was the Chinese one that exploded, then what's wrong with Galileo?"
Mulder stretched his legs and murdered a lingering string of lettuce trapped between the seatbelt and his elbow. "NASA says it has 'developed another potentially major communications problem that may seriously impair its ability to transmit images of the giant planet.' So.."
"So?"
"So, putting it in everyday terms - they blasted a BETA video recorder into space with a manual written in Sanskrit and a VHS Jane Fonda exercise tape."
A shotgun bark of laughter from Skinner had Mulder shifting slightly in his seat, half-turning towards him.
"What's the communication problem?"
He made a vague gesture with one hand, mentally skimming the paragraph under the smokey-blue, fuzzed picture that had made it into Time magazine. Found the relevant part and translated it into layman's terms for Skinner's benefit.
"The tape recorder on board is ignoring a command to stop rewinding."
"It took something like six years to get up there, didn't it?"
"Yeah, exactly that."
Skinner snorted. "Hell, if I could get a six year old tape recorder to start rewinding, I'd throw a pajama party."
Mulder choked on the piece of licorice he was eating.
Skinner grinned at him - a pure, shit-eating grin that only made him worse - and let him cough himself out into a raw, throat-ripping wheeze before nudging Mulder's forgotten drink at him.
"Remind me never to take you fishing, Mulder. You make too much noise."
Mulder shook his head, taking jerky sips of syrup-laden Coke through his straw. "If a little Heimlich maneuver is all that stands between me and total boredom, just let me choke over here in my landlubbing way. I'm perfectly happy, believe me."
"Boredom? Your MTV-generation wouldn't know a good time if it bit them on the ass."
"Hey, that's not my MTV, Walter. I'm as over-the-hill as you."
"That might be overstating matters a little."
"Yeah, you're right. You're way ahead of me on that hill."
"Where's that laughtrack when I need it?"
"Story of your life," Mulder said, but he was smiling and Skinner gave him an impossibly warm, wry look.
Mulder held his eyes for a moment, memorizing the expression in them for an appropriate occasion in the shower. Then he turned his head to watch the flat, honeyed landscape go past them.
Nothing but farmhouses and gumdrop hills.
After a few monotonous minutes of that, his eyes began to close again, giving in to the heat and the general pace of events that had overtaken them both. He wondered if he looked as larval and decomposed as he felt. He was betting on a 'probably' on that count. Maybe that was why Skinner had insisted on driving. Short of an undignfied skirmish for the keys which Skinner had the foresight to get hold of before opting for the wheel, he had had no choice but to go along, albeit sullenly. Somehow, between Skinner's remorseless good humor and Scully's scolding, Mulder had got himself up to sniffing the wind again. He had only needed to read the slim file once but he read it three times anyway, making sure he could account for the sharpness in his gut.
Mrs Miller was the name of the woman who had found the bodies. She lived next-door to them - the best relationship any killer ever sustained, in Mulder's opinion. It was always the next door neighbor who was spared, who went on TV to talk about their why us, why this town, why these people nightmares. Just one of the supposed advances in profiling under Patterson's reign that Mulder had railed against. He had protested the use of victims's families, neighbors, people who walked their dogs for them and every other person whom Patterson had fed to the media mongering, to no avail. That was the American Way, according to Patterson who soaked up the attention like a mangrove tree in a monsoon and, inevitably, he had made a truism of it. He left behind him established methods of profiling and police consultation that routinely used the tabloids to 'junk' up the killer with false leads and bizarre claims. TV interviews with survivors and dog-walkers were de rigeur. Mulder kept pointing out the lack of quantative data that showed any significant level of success with this style of investigation and was, mostly, ignored.
Half the trouble was and always would be, that people wanted to know. They wanted the low-down, the dirty details - horror turned into gossip columns. Maybe America had to look farther than the vaunted family unit that contemporary profiling isolated as the genesis of psychopathology. Maybe the problem was the peculiarly American nurturing of so-called 'soft' culture and not the sheer numbers nor the greater acceptance of profiling as an unearthing tool, that accounted for its dysfunctional proportion of the world's serial killers. Soft culture itself wasn't an American invention. History had recorded it as a human flaw long before Columbus took in a tan at the Bahamas. Cicero, for one, Mulder thought to himself with a grin at the associated memories. He had had a professor at Oxford who was Cicero's biggest fan.
A very friendly professor.
Who, amongst other friendly sorts of education, had relayed to Mulder how Cicero, when sent to take up a political post in distant Asia Minor, begged a friend at home in Rome to send him all the news. The friend, fearing that his written hand would bore such a great orator, hired a professional scribe. Cicero wrote back, outraged. The scribe, not knowing whom he was writing to, had filled the new packets with accounts of funerals, gladiator contests, local gossip, stage successes and "other tittle-tattle that no one would have the impertinence to repeat to me when I am in Rome," Cicero had huffed. Put the skirts on the women instead of the men and full circle, back to the US of A. Nothing really changed. Cultural cacophony, emphasis on the phony. He thought for a moment about winding Skinner up by pitching it to him as a serious, statistic-infested theory but decided against it, the heat cultivating the sloth in him.
Anyway, it would be too easy.
Instead he went back to thinking about the case. As far as the file told the story, the vics were a gay couple who owned the place and had been living in it for the two years previously past. Local homicide detectives had gone through the house with a magnifying glass large enough to torch an entire colony of ants. Nothing. They were unremarkable in nearly every way but the manner of their death. There was the added complication that the pet dogs had got to them first, which had been unfortunate in terms of scene evidence. In itself though, that was not particularly sinister.
But the manner in which they had been left was strongly suggestive of a posing and there had been postmortem mutilation of the genitalia. Added to the extensive torture the killer had carried out while they were still alive, this fact was, at the very least ominously significant, and at the most, the sort of signature Mulder was looking for. The eventual cause of death, manual strangulation, also held true to their UNSUB's pathology. Semen was found in deeply gouged holes under the rib cage and forensics said both victims were alive during all of it. That's the way it was written up in the file, anyway. What it amounted to, in short, was that their UNSUB had carved up their livers and come on them. Only then had he strangled them.
It was obscene to find himself drifting off to such compellingly repulsive musings. He tried to wake himself up with a change of scenery and took another look at Skinner. Not that there was much entertainment to be had there. Skinner had closed off the circuit once more and was jaw-locked, concentrating on where he was going. The strange thing about all that heavy focus, Mulder thought, was the fact that it was habit. Skinner was neither done talking nor had he necessarily turned sour. A lull had appeared and he had slipped off into his own company again, focussing on the task at hand; simple as that. He was a solitary man.
Skinner didn't turn. Just sketched a line of irritation between his brows and said curtly, "What?"
Mulder grinned. "I'm wondering how often people mistake your absent-minded, zero quotient of social skills as butch menace?"
After a brief pause, Skinner replied, "I, on the other hand, do not waste a second wondering what kind of mental margaritas produce that kind of question. Take a leaf, Mulder."
"Spiked ones."
"You're not going to cry date-rape, are you?"
"Oh, this is a date? I think I prefer the briefing room. At least, we were stationary. Unless you can drive with your feet, cowboy, you're not going to get any action."
Skinner snorted. "You really were serious when you said you didn't get out much."
"I thought I said that about you."
"Did you? Probably a freudian slip on your part."
"Oh, your grasp of sidekick-ology is just slaying me here, Walter."
"Does the word multitask mean anything to you? Was that the turnoff we needed to take, the one we just sped past while you were busy flapping your mouth off at me?"
"Relax, Walter - it's this turnoff, the one we're just now about to spee--- ow fuck!"
Skinner had braked hard enough to send Mulder's head ricocheting off the car window before he turned a sharp left into the dusty dirt road bearing the marker Miller's Road. Rubbing the back of his head, Mulder found himself laughing at the sheer, jaundiced appreciation in the look Skinner turned on him.
"Your neck is so flexible," Skinner said, the terse rhythm of his speech lengthening into the telltale drawl that Mulder had learned to associate with incipient humor. "The way it lets your head bounce off things like that must be a real crowd-pleaser."
"Oh yeah, they'll make a rally-car driver out of me yet."
"I'll keep an eye out for you at the next Demons of Dirt extravaganza."
"Bet you say that to all the boys," Mulder said, directing a meaningful leer at Skinner.
"Not all of them," Skinner replied, his arm braced against the steering wheel, muscles shaping above his elbow as he navigated pot holes by flying over them. "Just you."
His tone precluded any more easy conversation as a continuing option and Mulder did not give in to the urge to smart-alec his way through it. Instead he sat quietly, trying to puzzle out how he had abracadabraed this change in the air. Even when they reached the gates that marked off the Millers' property, he was none the wiser.
"Might be better to park out here and walk up," Skinner suggested, pulling up to a stop. "They'd probably prefer that."
Mulder regarded him appraisingly. "I'm trying to imagine you with a bit of straw between your teeth. Grow up in the boonies, Walter?"
"The day they hand my files over to you, Mulder, you can satisfy every morbid curiosity you have about me. Until that day, you'll just have to speculate."
"Hm. Farm boy... farm girl.... the suspense is killing me."
"As long as you don't confuse a lack of patience with an intent to kill."
"Patience has nothing to do with it, Walter. I can't wait for you to sink that low in the ranks. I'll be buried under the hill that you're currently over, by then."
Skinner shook his head but looked amused. "Consorting with a one-man blowout is not going to help raise my credit with Manning any," he said mildly, in a voice that suggested he wasn't overly concerned with appeasement in that quarter.
Mulder opened his mouth, not entirely willing to let that one slip past him, when they both saw a man - the merest of bobbing dots - coming down the long, winding driveway to meet them.
Skinner lifted a hand to shade his eyes with, the better to track the man. "Is that her husband?"
"Ben. Yeah, I think so."
"Do we have anything more than a name to go on?"
"Sure - he likes dancing around the pumpkin patch on All Hallow's Eve. Christ. What do you want? There were these two gay, very dead, limelight stealing bodies to contend with."
Skinner turned and stared at him. "What nerve am I fucking this time?"
Reining in a nearly physical urge to smack him, Mulder tried to remember that Skinner wasn't Scully. "I'm thinking about what angle's waiting to be played out and you're interrupting me."
"Yeah, well I'll put myself to good use and call the coin toss for the pumpkin patch angle."
Mulder scowled at him. "Are you going to do something about this Comedy Centrale vibe that you have going, or am I? It's starting to seem like part of your personality."
"With you around as a suppressant, I'll be in remission soon enough," Skinner said drily, and went on, denying Mulder the chance to vent his spleen. "Before you stick that fist in my face like you obviously want to, explain this 'angle' stuff to me so at least I'll know when to keep out of the conversation."
Mulder rebelled for a moment at such a matter-of-fact attempt at flattery but in the end, could as much stop himself from launching into his thoughts as the fabled crow could help dropping its bit of cheese into the fox's waiting jaws. That was Skinner's particular charm right there. There should be a tee-shirt for it, he thought bitterly: "Crude but effective".
Even so, it didn't stop him for a second. "Once you have the angle, what you have is a vulnerable point of truth. Once you have that, no amount of practice, no amount of training, no amount of understanding of what Guy X is trying to do to you, nothing - nothing is going to help. You'll flip on it all, every secret you promised to take to the grave. You've been targeted where it's going to cause a reaction."
"Sounds more like a case of keyhole-peeping to me, Mulder."
"What do you think all the talk of 'seers' and 'revelators' and 'prophets' through the ages, were? The 'truthsayers' and the 'shamans'? They got the angle. They had the ability to do it, to find that point of truth that makes every turn in the puzzle unbend itself."
"And that's where your mutant powers of investigation come from?" Skinner asked, in tones that even the most charitable of listeners could not label as anything but cynical.
"Screw you." Mulder wasn't in the least inclined to be charitable. "We all do it, and some of us do it better than others. The ones people remember are the ones who do it best. I wouldn't count you in that list but if you think that means you don't do it, think again."
"Do what?"
"Prowl for the angle, Walter. I've seen you. You play the authority figure, the sharp dresser. You command attention consciously through appearance and you put out that sober, hard-to-reach smokescreen. People buy that; they like someone who takes a little doing before they become friendly. They like that same person being a guy who can get focussed when it becomes necessary. Women - men too, I'll bet - cream themselves when you respond to problems with that completely serious and directed way you have. You didn't fall out of the crib like that, Walter. You made it up to suit your face."
"Your ego astounds me," Skinner retorted, folding his arms across his chest. "Think what you like. I can't stop you but don't forget you're here too. You're getting your kicks out of it just the same as I am."
"Deny it," Mulder dared him, suddenly feverish with triumph. "Go on. Tell me I'm wrong. Tell me. Tell me you didn't use it to pull Sharon in and then one day, the tide just went out again, right Walter? You and all your goddamn morals and glamors, and you weren't prepared for it when the tide went out from under your feet. Right? Am I right?"
"Screw you, Mulder. There's more to life than being right."
"Do you have to be so predictable?"
"Do you have to be such an obsessive asshole?"
Mulder shook his head, half marvelling, half disgusted. "Obsessive? Easy for you to say, Walter. You don't know what it's like to chase proof, every day hoping..." He flushed, biting off the sentence, knowing he sounded like some paltry beggar putting forward his own brief.
"We make our own beds, Mulder."
"That's it? We make our own beds?"
Skinner looked at him, his brows lifting. "That's it."
Mulder looked away, his hands clenching into fists by his side. When he looked back he saw Skinner take note of them and smile faintly.
"I wouldn't," Skinner advised.
"I'm not so sure."
"Then you're a bigger fool than I'm currently giving you credit for."
"Oh, the Grand Prince. Generous to a fault. Is this where I start thanking you for jerking me off? Was that you giving me credit?"
The look that earned him could have skinned a cat. "There are times when I seriously believe you're demented. Christ. Don't go buying trouble, Mulder. Take things for what they are. Who knows, you might find you like it."
Mulder tried to shake off Skinner's grip; somehow he had managed to wrap a hand around Mulder's wrist. "Great. I'll keep that in mind. Should I start looking for Sam on the back of milk cartons? Is that sedate enough for you, Walter? Creditworthy?"
Skinner's fingers didn't yield but his thumb slid over the pulse in Mulder's hand, soothing it.
"There's more to life than being right," he repeated, quietly.
"Was I? Right about you?"
"Wrong question, Mulder."
"Answer me."
Skinner let go of his hand. "Yes."
He walked away from Mulder and towards the man whose face was becoming more distinct the closer he got to them. After a moment, Mulder followed him, oddly disappointed.
Within shouting distance, the man launched into introductions. "Ben Miller. You the FBI agents?"
"Yeah," Skinner shouted back. "We've come up to talk to your wife and you. I'm Walter Skinner. This is Agent Fox Mulder."
Unlocking the big padlock that sat fatly astride the two gates, Miller unwrapped a long length of chain and opened up the driveway to them. "Come in. You'll have to pardon me for not getting fully dressed. It's a hotter day than we're used to, around these parts."
"You'd think we were in Hogsbelly, Dumbsville. These parts?" Mulder muttered next to Skinner.
"Shut up or I'll wreck your whole 'angle' thing."
"Wow. Subvert the cause of justice just for lil ole me? Scarlett, I didn't know you cared."
Mulder walked past Skinner before the other man had a chance to put a word in and shrugged himself into his nice-young-man persona, taking a careful inventory of Ben Miller as he did.
"Agent Mulder," he said, shaking Miller's hand firmly.
Miller nodded. He was wearing incongruously well-made jeans, neatly turned up at the ends with blunt-tipped cowboy boots. Mulder could see the spurs winking silver up at him. Tall, and broadshouldered in the bargain, Miller topped Mulder in height by a clean two inches. He had a navy blue Polo sweater on with a crisp white-shirted collar poking out from under it. Clean living, money spending aristo-slummer. That's what Mulder made of him.
Which meant he fitted in around these parts just fine.
Mulder frowned in thought, something about Miller striking the wrong note in him. Then again, there was Skinner. He let himself watch the other man as he introduced himself to Miller and fell into step alongside him, both men assuming Mulder would follow behind them. Skinner was asking questions - how was Mrs Miller, did she have a doctor in to see her, was she aware of this visit, was Ben - already it was Ben - okay for groceries, how were the cops he had dealt with, did they have new padlocks on their doors, bolts on their windows, had they been shown photos, did they know anyone with a grudge against them.
Hey, Ben, did you know that A.D. Skinner is not averse to another man's mouth on his cock?
Reliving the scene that thought evoked as vividly as it did, Mulder still had trouble believing it was the same man. Skinner was back in jacket again, taking his coloring from the steady navy-blueness of it, a man of character, of authority. Not a guy who would let a subordinate blow him in a briefing room in the F.B.I. building. Not a guy who would kiss that subordinate for the thrill of it. Not after viewing a graphic wanna-fuck? history of said subordinate's hobbies. The firm line of Skinner's jaw, Nintendo-tough, mocked the veracity of all such thoughts. Yet they were true. And Skinner had. So maybe all he was sensing off Miller were misfired blanks, desires that didn't gell with who the man really was but had been dragged up out of him in the aftermath of the killings.
Miller ushered them into the house with an old-gold courtesy that gave him brownie points with Skinner but only set Mulder's hackles rising. He waited till Miller went to fetch his wife and then rolled his eyes pointedly at Skinner.
"What?"
"The guy's a freak."
"I thought you profilers worked off psychological clues. What's Freud's take on Freak Syndrome?"
"I'm too Jung to be Freudened, Walter."
Skinner's mouth twitched. "You're a sorry bastard."
"A sorry bastard who's getting the couch. Enjoy your perch there, Raging Bull."
Mulder grinned at Skinner who - as Mulder knew he would - rather than sit next to him on the couch, was in the process of fitting himself into a chair that had never contemplated a man of his build.
"One day, I am going to kill you. You shouldn't doubt that," Skinner said absently, looking around the place.
As well he might. All in all, it was an odd house, Mulder thought. He had an idea it was built as a summer house, even though there was no water to be found for miles around. It had that feeling about it, as though it got dusted off and brought out for use now and again instead of being lived in day out, day in. From the outside it was all steepled roofs and cheery, red-brick, battened-down coziness. A high house, atop a high hill, much like all the other quaint and monied farmhouses around this area. But it was much more secluded in location. Whether by design or simple idiosyncrasy, Mulder couldn't tell. They had dodged a wild tangle of blackberry bushes which lay in wait at the final bend of the driveway, before the house could even be glimpsed. While it wasn't a long way across to the neighbor on either side of it, the house being long rather than wide, the bushes rose up in an impenetrable halo around it. A person would have to be well clear of the house before anyone would even see them, before anyone would even know they were there.
"This is a creepy house, Walter."
Skinner grimaced. "Can't argue with you there. Can you imagine our suave buddy, Ben, hauling those off a game reserve?"
Mulder followed Skinner's gaze to where a montage of rare, endangered animals held court unapologetically above a mirrored rectangle of tiled wall. It was a display calculated to inspire the chaotic series of impressions that crowded Mulder: the fine, ash-gray wrinkles of elephant skin next to the pure curve of ivory tusk, the frozen snarl of a Siberian tiger, the black, black hooded eyes of the bald eagle, the huge, wild mane of the weathered Moremi lion the only thing blacker.
"Those are illegal," Skinner said, a note of disgust in his voice.
"Yeah, well check out the sidetable next to you," Mulder said softly.
"Jesus!" Skinner's chair scraped loudly against the slate floor as he pushed himself away from the large, finger-nailed bowl that held a pair of keys, a notepad and pen and a collection of loose change.
"What the hell is.. Shit."
"Yeah." Mulder looked at the gorilla paw, its perfectly shaped joints, the cracked soup plate vista of its palm and the way it tapered off into an untidy, truncated nearly-wrist. "At the risk of sounding romantic, Walter, someone here likes to hunt."
Grim-faced, Skinner took his glasses off and studied them, one hand rubbing at the bridge of his nose. "Were you expecting this?" he asked tightly, not looking at Mulder.
"Not exactly." Mulder hesitated. "I'm not battling disbelief either, though. Something about the file is just plain wrong. I expected weirdness in some form."
"If you start talking about vibes, so help me, Mulder, I am going to draw my weapon."
Checking the obvious pun on the tip of his tongue, Mulder said instead, gently as he could, "You need to get some distance here. They're not going to talk to us with you glaring like that, like you want to hit someone."
"I know. Maybe you should--"
The Millers came into the sitting room together, and Skinner cut himself off from finishing the sentence. Mulder stood up at once, instinct telling him she would like that. After a small pause, Skinner followed suit, getting to his feet just as Mrs Miller sat down. She looked to be in her late sixties and had the steel-gray coloring to her skin that women of her generation often did. Mulder found himself pinned under an approving pair of wide, blue eyes, only slightly clouded with age. She was wearing a long, flowing dress of peacock-blue which exactly matched the color of her eyes, with a silk scarf tied negligently around her neck. For all the years on her face now, it was easy to see that she would have been a beautiful woman once. Regardless, he had a feeling, looking at the stiff, upright way in which she sat on the couch with her husband perched on the arm-end of it, that she had never been an easy woman to live with.
"Efff-Bee-I," she said slowly, drawing out the syllables as she looked from one of them to the other. "Well, now. Isn't this something. And who exactly from this fine institution is here today to visit with me?"
Mulder smiled at her. "Agent Fox Mulder, Ma'am," he offered.
"Fox," she said thoughtfully, and he noted the high, proud cast of her cheekbones when she turned to Skinner, a brow lifted in enquiry. "Fox in the henhouse, and who are you? The dog in the kennel?"
Malice brimmed behind her amused cackle and Mulder could see Skinner's dislike telegraphing itself across the room.
"Walter Skinner. Assistant Director of the FBI."
"Oho! An Assistant Director, no less. And me without my pearls on. My, my. All this for poor Neil and Tim?
"Other men have been killed, Mrs Miller," Skinner said tonelessly. "This is a serious matter."
"Let me tell you about serious, son." Her voice had turned hard and low. "Serious is taking some pie over to those sweet young men and finding them i-in that state. I thought I would die from the shock. Those poor, stupid dogs." Her voice wavered for the first time. "They had to be put down, you know. So you don't need to come here rolling your FBI Assistant Director hips at me, telling me what's serious and what's not."
Mulder didn't think she was faking the tears shining in her eyes but he wasn't sure that Skinner, stony in profile, liked her any better for it.
"I apologize, Ma'am. For both of us. We're trying to see the right thing done here and we've been walking the trail of this killer for some time now." Reflexively he tried to pick up a shading of her vocal rhythm, knowing from experience that it helped people identify with him better.
Skinner tried. He had to give him that much. "Agent Mulder's right. I'm not as tactful as he is, Mrs Miller, but I am just trying to do the best job I can, same as he is."
Mrs Miller ignored him and kept her attention on Mulder. "Why do I need to repeat everything again? The police have already taken my statement."
Mulder had not brought the file in with him because it generally unsettled people to see their words recorded on paper in front of him. They became more guarded in what they said next, as if they would fail some test of truthfulness if there was any variance between their earlier statement and the new one. They weren't satisfied that it was just the way human beings worked, their memory expanding or collapsing according to the pressure brought to bear on it. Most of the time, he didn't need to bring files along with him, anyway. His own memory was powerful enough to see the words as they read on the page, and he could see Mrs Miller's statement now. Certainly, it had been thorough. She hadn't come across quite the arrogant matriach she was now but that was probably understandable, given the circumstances.
He chose his words carefully, relieved that Skinner had obviously wound himself back into hand and was not going to interrupt him. "It often helps to talk to the person rather than read what they say. Things can get lost in the translation. Something might occur to you this time around, that it didn't the first time. It may be a little easier to cast your mind back this time."
"Okay, Mr. Fox-in-the-henhouse. You came all this way. May as well go away satisfied." She threw Skinner a disdainful look. "Wouldn't want you coming back too often, hospitable though we folk are, if you understand me."
Mulder preserved a neutral expression and said politely, "We're grateful you agreed to see us at all, Ma'am. I'll do my best to not keep you long."
"Such lovely manners," she said, and it was impossible to tell if she was being sarcastic. "Your mother must have brought you up in just the right way."
Skinner shifted in his awkward chair and Mulder dove in before he could say anything, however well-meant. "Did you know the tw--"
"What makes you think those boys dying is the work of the same guy you're after?"
Not until Ben Miller interrupted them, did he realize how easily they had forgotten him. What little personality he had shown down by the gates may as well have not been there with Mrs Miller in the room. The question itself was an awkward one. Mulder didn't want to get trapped into talking about the criminal instead of letting Mrs Miller talk about the crime. Investigative Analysis and Technique 101. Or it should be.
"The manner of their killing was very unique, and fits the pattern of the other murders we have been investigating."
"Why them? Was-- was it someone they knew?"
"A.D. Skinner and I are looking into all the possibilities, Mr. Miller. That's probably all I can say on that for now."
Mrs Miller, momentarily derailed, came back to life at the thought of being denied something. "What harm would it do to tell us something? All those cops, making me sit around for hours, telling them the same things again and again, not even offering me a cup of coffee until Ben told them to get me some. And would they tell us anything? No. You look here, boys. I am nobody's fool. You can't come down here, harassing a poor old lady, for no good reason. I don't see what I could tell you about Neil and Tim, anyway, that would be something you don't already know."
"Do you know if either of them was maybe seeing someone else?" Skinner interrupted.
Mulder shot Skinner a disbelieving look. Surely he understood not to push that point? He cleared his throat a little, willing Skinner to look at him and pick up on the danger.
"Seeing someone else?" Mrs Miller echoed, clearly puzzled by Skinner's choice of phrase. "Be plain, Mr A.D. FBI man. What do you mean by that? Neither of them had a girlfriend, if that's what you're insinuating. No girl could have done that anyway. It isn't natural for a woman to be mixed up in those kinds of animal acts."
The unspoken corollary to that being that men were more than capable, that men were nothing but animals.
"Ma'am," Mulder tried to smooth it over hurriedly, seeing Skinner's jaw knotting into a steady pulse. "We appreciate your sentiments on this, we really do but--"
"Plain English being - were either of your wonder-boys screwing around on each other," Skinner said tightly, with deliberate emphasis on every word.
Silence met his statement, Mulder closing his eyes briefly in a tired flash of anger. The thought hammered at him again, as it had over the course of this investigation - if it was Scully, this wouldn't have.... He didn't finish it.
"Are you trying to say that Neil and Tim... that they were homos?" The revulsion in Ben Miller's voice was plain enough.
"Ben!" Mrs Miller looked pale but her tone was sharper than a butcher's knife. "Don't be so ridiculous. That cannot be what they mean."
Too late, Mulder saw Skinner realize his error. "We have to take everything into account. I don't mean to insult anybody here."
Ben Miller shook his head. "Oh no, no you don't. I heard you loud and clear. You're saying those boys were faggots. And that just isn't plain true. We would have known it, if that was the case. You got no right to go around tainting their reputation." He jabbed his finger in the air, at Skinner, accusingly. "They were good boys, the both of them. You got no right coming in here, making these filthy accusations."
"That's exactly right." Mrs Miller's breath came in shallow, panting wheezes, as if the air itself had turned nasty. "And you call yourself government agents. Talking this filth. Suggesting that those boys, those kind, sweet, happy boys were involved in that kind of unnatural, Godless depravity. Shame! You can both just get right out of my house, right now. I don't hold with this sort of shamelessness. They're d-dead, for G-God's sake."
She had started crying in earnest, now, but even then it seemed to Mulder like there was some satisfaction in it for her, some righteously outraged part of her that was enjoying putting on the show. Skinner, face closed-off, was showing signs of an even faster fraying temper, hypocrisy not high on his list of tolerable sins. The gentle approach, as far as Mulder could see, had already been blown sky high.
"I came a long way to ask you a question, Mrs. Miller," he said in a wholly different tone to the one he had been using so far. "The least you can do is humor me. Either here or down at the Bureau, in Washington."
"Well, now," Mrs Miller said, and her smile was poisonous with welcome. "Not such a sweet thing after all, are you? What would your mother say? Hm? Oh, I'll bet you aren't very close. I know boys like you, Agent Fowl-Fox. I'd take odds that she doesn't like you very much at all. Not the sort of son she wanted, in the first place."
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Skinner move as if to speak but he held up a hand to check him. "Why did you say you were looking for the dog, Mrs Miller?"
"Oh, he's slow as well. And here I was, thinking it was just this rude mountain over this side of the room who had the market on that commodity. Why do you think, Agent Fox? They're always there, larger than life, making their racket. The boys, bless their souls, never were of a mind to control them. They needed a firm talking-to sometimes, as Ben can tell you."
Ben Miller smiled fondly. "Oh there were times I had to take my belt to the cheeky bastards, if you'll pardon my French. Did them a world of good though the boys wouldn't have agreed, I'm betting."
"I'm not talking about Neil and Tim's dogs, Mrs Miller. I'm talking about the dog you kept asking about, long after the first time you talked about those three dogs feeding from the dead bodies."
"I never talked about any dog. I was talking about those three dogs - Peter, Tim and Drew. Stupid people-named dogs. Those dogs."
"You said.." Mulder made a show of casting his mind back when in fact the page he wanted was clear in his mind. "and I'm quoting you now: "It must be the dog. The dog's done this. If we can just find it, I'm sure everyone will realize that it was him, not.. I don't know where he is." Are you saying you don't remember saying this or are you saying you didn't say this?"
"No, I didn't say that... I mean I don't... I just mis-said myself, then, that's what," Mrs Miller said but she sounded weak, her reply lacking in punch.
"I don't believe so, Mrs Miller. I don't believe you at all. I think you were talking about a separate dog. A dog that you remembered because of the shock of the situation you found yourself in. Again."
This time, both Ben Miller and Skinner reacted; Miller got up from the arm-end he was sitting on and Skinner exclaimed something, low and under his breath.
"Hey, hey, hey. You can't just-- you can't bully her into whatever story you guys are concocting because you need to go back to Washington with something. You leave her alone," Miller said. He sounded mad as hell but his expression was more guarded than that and Mulder noted it.
"I'm simply asking a question. And making a guess, based on the facts at hand. If you know of something that contradicts my conclusions, Mrs Miller, now is the time to volunteer it."
Mrs Miller did not collapse all at once.
It took time. Mulder asked questions - whose dog was that dog, why did two dead murdered men remind you of that dog, who did it remind you of, why are you lying, what are you afraid of; Ben Miller prowled like some frustrated kin of the Moremi lion up on the wall, ready to shred something but kept at bay by a large, disliked body of water; Skinner functioned as that body of water. Mrs Miller eventually gave way to a determined flood of sobs that made it clear she was no longer going to speak, even if only to nonsensically deny each opposing choice Mulder ruthlessly placed before her. They left two hours after they arrived, Ben Miller exuding menace but doing no more than dog their heels with threats, all the way to the front door.
They were half-way down the winding driveway, before Skinner stopped and said, his tone one of explosion more than comment. "Goddamn, Mulder!"
Startled out of his thoughts, Mulder raised his brows at Skinner. "What?"
"How did you put all that together from the file? How did you even notice the discrepancy? There were boxes and boxes of files and you--." Skinner broke off, directing a bemused glance at Mulder's frown. "I know, I know. You just did."
Mulder shrugged apologetically.
Skinner fell back into step with him. "They won't ever roll over on what they know, whatever that is. You do know that, don't you?"
"Yeah I know. I just wanted to see their faces when I put it to them, to make sure."
"Do you think they know who killed the two men?"
"I wouldn't go as far as that. But I think she knew someone, once. Someone who was disturbed enough to be nominated as a candidate, at least in her mind. Someone with a dog."
"Christ, Mulder. It's a huge reach, even with all of this and their reaction to it and... Manning won't give his blessing, for one."
"We have to get surveillance," Mulder said stubbornly. "Around the clock. It would be irresponsible not to. If we have got lucky and this killing has some sort of personal meaning to our UNSUB, then we need to watch them, very very carefully."
"Mulder, it's been risky enough sponsoring this joy ride. On wha--"
"It wasn't a joy ride!" Mulder's protest was fierce and immediate. "There's something real going on here and we both know it. Don't give me your career-kissass bullshit, Walter."
"Okay. Not a joy ride. Okay. But even a martyr like you should understand the lack of bullshit in what I'm saying. On what authority am I going to step into an investigation that is outside federal jurisdiction? Be serious, Mulder."
Mulder said nothing until they were in the car again, Skinner still insisting on driving. He turned it over in his mind again and again.
"Why can't we just sit Armstrong and Cooke up here for a few days? Who would know?"
"Who would kn-- Jesus, Mulder! That's the kind of desperate talk that makes trouble. Legal and political. You know the legality of gathering evidence extrajurisdictionally. You know what would happen to this case and both our reputations. I want what you want, too. Don't you think I do? You're smarter than this."
Mulder sagged against the seatbelt in defeat. He knew Skinner was right on that point.
"Suits you fine though, doesn't it?" He knew he was being somewhat unfair but was not able to check his frustration.
"The fact that I don't want to sink my career with a torpedo doesn't make me unethical. I care. I care but I don't have to justify myself to you and I'm not going to. If you think this is about advancement in the ranks, then you can go on thinking that. Obviously Patterson fucked you harder than you realize if that's the best estimate you can make of my behavior."
Mulder felt his face pale. "Fuck you," he breathed, suddenly furious. "Low blow, Walter. You don't see me crucifying you on your ex-wife every chance I get."
Skinner's smile was both tired and cynical. "Except you do, Mulder. You did and you do."
Only the fact that Mulder's cell chose that moment to ring, stopped the ugly words clenched behind his teeth from spilling over onto them both. They looked at each other for a tense moment before Mulder answered the phone, breaking up the tension.
"Mulder."
"Mulder, it's me."
"What is it, Scully?" He could see Skinner tune in, his face losing some of its harshness. "What's happened?"
"Mulder, he called. He called."
"What? What do you mean he called?"
Skinner cursed fluently in the background as Mulder looked at his watch.
"The UNSUB. He put in a phonecall."
"Where?"
"Richmond, one of the precinct houses... I-I don't know which one. Manning paged the team and I was the only one who had returned to the Bureau. All of them are still out, making inquiries."
"When did he call?"
She anticipated the point. "They were all out, during the call. Only I was at the Bureau. He called at 1:45pm. They taped it, Mulder. Manning wants to talk to Skinner about issuing a press statement."
"No, damn it! No press statements. I have to hear it. We don't know why he's done this. It could mean anything, everything. Don't let them do anything, Scully. We're coming back to Washington right now."
Skinner leant over and easily slid the phone out of his numb, angry fingers. "Stop grandstanding," he said gently to Mulder before speaking into the receiver. "Agent Scully?"
"Yes, Sir."
"Agent Scully, tell me exactly what Director Manning said."
"Sir, he said that there had been a call from the killer and that there had been an ultimatum. The killer is holding someone hostage. A man named Nathan Varma. He's mid-30s, dark hair, green eyes, average height and build. He fits the profile, except that his coloring is more olive than white. His mother is from Jamaica. The caller said that unless Agent Mulder talked to him within the next three hours, he would start...he would hurt Mr. Varma."
"Does he have any family?"
"Yes, Sir. He has a wife and two young children - a girl and a boy - and both his parents are still alive. They have already issued a public plea for his release. Mr. Varma's father feels the abduction is race-related. Because he's white and Mrs Varma is of ethnic origin. Director Manning wants to issue an FBI counter-statement immediately and bring the Varma family in from the spotlight and under our control before something more is said."
Skinner was sitting right up close next to Mulder, close enough for Mulder to feel the warmth radiating from the other man's body. He might have been flattered by Skinner's proximity but he knew that it was driven by practical considerations. This way, he too was able to hear Scully's answers. To Mulder, that was an even more flattering gesture.
Skinner's breath ghosted off the edge of Mulder's cheek when he next spoke, raising the fine hairs on the back of his neck. "Has anyone from the press made any connection with other killings currently under investigation in the state?"
"No, Sir - only these Mulder-lookalike killings" Scully replied, relief evident in her voice
Mulder himself shared that relief, even though the situation as it stood was verging on disasterous. Yet his relief was tempered with a sense of the inevitable.
"It's early days yet," he warned.
Skinner nodded. "I want you to speak with Director Manning, Agent Scully. Tell him that Mulder has formulated an appropriate press response and that we are on our way back from a positive investigation exercise, with results to report."
There was a small silence on the other end of the phone before Scully acknowledged him. "Yes, Sir."
"That's all, Agent."
Mulder watched him hang up. Then asked him, with every appearance of cordiality, "What the fuck does that mean?"
"Exactly what it sounded like."
"We can't share this information with Manning. For one thing, this is an unauthorized query and for another, Manning will march into the whole situation, baying for glory, and we'll lose this gift that we got handed to us on a platter. Don't let that happen, Walter."
"It has to happen."
"Bullshit to your 'has to'. People are going to die. I am telling you this as a fact. And you're telling Manning I'm going to talk to the press when you know damn well that I won't do any such thing."
"An appropriate press response, Mulder. You don't have to talk to them."
"Give me the opportunity and I know exactly where it's appropriate to stick that."
"You have to do it. What would you rather have happen? Me do it? Manning?"
Mulder slung an arm over his face, his eyelids suddenly hot and swollen. "People are being killed and you won't let me solve this case."
"What do you want me to say?" Skinner sounded just as fed-up of the whole thing as he was.
"We need more man power, Walter."
"We don't have the jurisdiction. Accept it."
Mulder sat bolt upright in his seat as a thought laid itself out in all its audacity.
"Yes we do. Yes we fucking do."
He rasped out a laugh, throat suddenly raw and hurting with repressed whoops. He reached over and put a hand on Skinner's forearm, squeezing it. "Asshole! I'm an asshole!"
Skinner looked at him carefully, eyebrows knitted together into a frown. Much the same way he would probably look at a counting seal, Mulder thought. An anomaly, but a potentially useful one.
"No argument from me there, Mulder. But I still don't get it."
"The UNSUB," Mulder said impatiently, nearly tripping over his words. "He's given us jurisdiction. Screw Manning - we have jurisdiction."
END OF PART 11
