From: ephemeral@ephemeralfic.org
Date: 14 May 2005 15:35:55 -0000
Subject: NEW: The Pattern - 1 of 16  by Joann Humby
Source: direct

Reply To: jhumby@lineone.net


TITLE: The Pattern
RATING: Strong language and adult themes
CLASSIFICATION: X A R
DATE: 14th May 2005 
TIMELINE: Pre-XF and S7 (with refs to S8)
ARCHIVE: Ephemeral, Gossamer - yes. Others please ask.
AUTHOR: Joann Humby - jhumby@lineone.net

LEGALLY:
We all know the score. The characters are not mine, never will be. 
They're owned by some combination of Fox, 1013 and CC.

WARNING:
Includes discussion of suicide, religion and other adult themes.
No other keywords given, sorry - they'd be spoilers for the story.

SUMMARY:
For Mulder, catching Monty Props the first time was hard. The 
second time it nearly killed him. Third time lucky? 

A mix of pre-XF and XF days. A story of Monty Props, Bill 
Patterson, Diana Fowley and Walter Skinner. And of course Mulder 
and Scully. A tale of two love affairs, two bosses and a series of 
murders.

With grateful thanks to all my betas - Ann and Sana who've had to 
listen to me moving slowly on this for months, Lisby and 
MaybeAmanda who helped push it to a conclusion, and Medusa, 
Vyper and Blue who provided fresh eyes at critical moments. 
What a team!


==========

1988

According to Monty Props' fantasy, he was the real deal. Part 
Charles Manson, part Svengali, part Rasputin. Pure charisma.

According to Mulder's profile, on the unknown subject who was 
seemingly the cause of at least seven deaths in the last two years, 
he was a sociopath. 

Either way, in 1988, Monty Props was right at the center of the 
ISU's "what the fuck" list and therefore of Mulder's universe.

The plastic crate on Mulder's desk looked like the signal for an 
office move. Only the yellow post-it note with the word "Links?" in 
Bill Patterson's fast scrawl gave the game away. Autopsy reports, 
eye-witness accounts, police interviews, impassioned pleas from 
family members suggesting that there was more to the deaths than 
met the eye.

The tattoo on the first victim found its mirror in the pages of the 
second victim's diary and the doodles on the third victim's suicide 
note. A cult perhaps? 

The family of the third victim had decided to publish her note, in 
the hopes of alerting other parents of impressionable adolescents, 
and maybe of finding out more about the symbols. Another family 
came forward, sent the diary of the second victim to the newspaper 
whose reporter forwarded it to the local PD. The Medical Examiner 
who'd autopsied the young man with the tattoo pulled the pattern 
into a second state and suggested it was a matter for the FBI.

A couple of days later Mulder had added two more names to the list 
of probable victims. By the next day the body count was at least 
seven.

At least seven. 

It was that "at least" that had given the case its nightmare 
significance and was the reason why a blitz attack had been ordered 
by Patterson. 

So now there were phone calls to make. Faxes to send. Newspaper 
archives to sort through. Patterson assigned three additional 
profilers to speed up the process, borrowed agents from other 
divisions to handle the routine material and filter it all down 
into something Mulder might eventually have enough hours in the day 
to read.

Another week of such action and the groundwork should be complete. 
The team would go back to their normal duties and whatever happened 
next would be up to Mulder.

At 7 p.m., Dave Hennessey, in his role as the voice of commonsense, 
called a timeout. Pizzas were ordered, fresh coffee brewed, and 
everyone met up at the table for an informal progress meeting and 
meal break.

Not that the rest of the world cared. The phone still rang. Worse 
than that, it still had to be answered.

Agent Karen Gardiner felt no guilt about playing to the sexual 
stereotype and pretending to be the secretary - not when it was in 
a good cause. And frankly, after a twelve-hour shift and with no 
sign of a let-up in the schedule, an undisturbed ten-minute break 
seemed like a very good cause. She was effective too, skilled in 
keeping the smirk out of her voice. "Diana Fowley?" she mouthed to 
the group of diners, waving her hand to show it was a question.

"Put her through to the kid; he could use a laugh."

Tired chuckles and raised eyebrows from the rest of the agents as 
Hennessey's theatrically loud whisper got the expected single 
finger response from Mulder. A good trick under the circumstances, 
given that he achieved the gesture without even raising his head 
and without any loss of control over the slice of pizza in his 
hand.

Gardiner returned to the call. "I'm sorry, Dr. Fowley, there's no 
one from the task force available to take your call at the moment. 
If you'd care to fax through your notes, I'll see they reach the 
right person."

"Fowley?" attempted Mulder, suddenly looking up and half-choking on 
a mouthful of pizza as he tried to swallow it fast enough to make 
himself heard.

"One moment," said Karen, putting the call on hold with the 
deftness of a true pro. She waved the handset at Mulder. "Yeah, you 
want to talk?"

He looked around for something to wipe his hands on but found the 
table disappointingly bare of napkins, did as good a job as he 
could with the autopsy report on which he'd been scribbling his 
notes.

"Gross," supplied Hennessey, "I hope that's Bill's copy."

Mulder shook his head. "Yours." He looked at Karen, "Can you put 
her through to my desk?" 

"Sure thing, boss!"

Fresh laughter rocked the table as he headed away. 

The kid was old enough to have a wife and kids of his own, a 
mortgage, a station wagon and a dog. What he actually had was the 
makings of an ulcer and a definite reputation. 

But it was Diana Fowley's reputation that had brought him to the 
phone. "Dr. Fowley. I'm Fox Mulder."

"Ah - 'Serial Killers and the Occult'."

Theirs was a specialized business, an awfully small world, but 
there were still protocols to follow and acknowledgements to 
deliver. "Psychosis, Brain Activity and Paranormal Phenomena," he 
said, acknowledging her thesis. Shared territories established and 
backgrounds drawn. They knew each other's work. They had nothing 
further to prove. "You want to talk about the suicides we're 
investigating?"

"No. But I think we should."

The kid smiled and tilted his chair a little further back.

-------------

2000

Skinner handed the photos to Mulder. Mulder thumbed through them 
quickly, scarcely even looking at them before passing them along to 
Scully, who was only slightly slower to send them back to their 
boss.

"I take it you've already seen the pictures," said Skinner.

Mulder nodded. "Someone in behavioral sent the file over."

"What do you think?"

"It's him - Monty Props."

"I know it's not an X-File."

"It is if it's Props. I talked to the prison warden this morning 
and he's still locked up."

Skinner nodded. "They would appreciate your input."

"We'll get right on it," confirmed Scully.

---------

The meeting with Monty Props in the prison interview room had been 
disturbing. At least to Mulder. He wondered if it had felt the same 
to Scully. He saved his questions until they were safely back on 
the freeway. "What did you think of him?"

"A little man with delusions of grandeur - putting a show on for us 
- living on past glory."

Yeah, he nodded, that was exactly it. She'd got it in one. 

The Props that Mulder had known might not have hit the front pages 
by inspiring a cult to a mass suicide, nor had he psyched up a 
cabal of followers to launch a high profile killing spree, but he'd 
had style, the power to subvert and destroy. "You've read the case 
notes. Didn't you find him," he paused, hunting for the right term 
before settling on, "disappointing?"

"Disappointing? He's a serial killer - I wasn't expecting Mother 
Teresa. What were you looking for?"

"Monty Props."

"Prison changes people."

Mulder nodded, wondering if that was all there was to it. "He's not 
the same man. His MO - to do what he did - it took power, 
discipline, insight. That man -"

"- is a good actor? He was a professional con man before he decided 
to be a guru. Maybe he's just found a different way to play you."

Maybe.

-----------

1988

There was no way he wanted to move, but his body insisted he take 
some kind of action. He lifted her arm, carefully shifting it from 
his chest and placing it on a pillow, smirking as he rolled away. 
After a week of sixteen-hour working days he had an excuse to be in 
bed at 10:30. Diana Fowley on the other hand only had him to blame.

On the down side, the morning was practically over and Patterson 
was going to kill him. Or not. Humiliate and torture - that was 
more Patterson's style. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes; it was 
still way too early to profile his boss.

Bathroom necessities dealt with, Mulder headed for the kitchen and 
found coffee and supplies. He decided not to wait for an invitation 
to get things under way. He might as well start making himself at 
home; he doubted after last night's performance she was going to be 
in any hurry to throw him out.

Diana had been a revelation. Inevitably, he'd profiled her from her 
published work - academic to the core despite her interest in the 
realms of the extreme possibility. Of course, she had to be. Being 
Spooky in the FBI was one thing; a good enough solve rate and 
they'd forgive anything. Being flaky, female, and hoping to get a 
tenured post at GWU was something else.

But the woman? Ah, she had something more. A little mischief in her 
eyes. A little fire in her soul. A spark that set her apart whether 
she was arguing about a killer's predilection for drug-induced 
transcendence or licking her lover's ear.

Looked like he'd finally got lucky and he really didn't know quite 
how to respond to the idea that this one might be something more 
than a one-night stand. One thing was sure though - he'd better 
wipe the stupid grin off his face before he saw Patterson.

---------

Despite his self-proclaimed good intentions, it wasn't easy to keep 
a secret in the ISU: a dozen of the country's finest profilers, 
trained in linguistic nuance and body language, constantly on 
alert. 

"The kid got laid!" announced Hennessey, his voice loud with mock 
horror and dismay.

Mulder considered it for an instant, shrugged. Turning up at the 
office at noon wasn't actually a triumph for discretion. Maybe he'd 
wanted to get caught? Might as well play to the audience then. Kept 
his voice sultry, his eyes going soft focus as if in sensual 
recall. "I've been getting a little professional help." 

Karen Gardiner shook her head, playing along. "You don't have to 
pay for it, Fox. Any time." A playful bat of the eyelashes got a 
smile in return. "Coffee's fresh," she added, pointing towards the 
pot on the shelf.

Bill Patterson put a damper on proceedings without even opening his 
mouth. A single crooked finger in Mulder's direction.

"Coffee, sir?" 

"Get in here." 

Mulder finished stirring his drink. The other agents nodded their 
condolences as he followed the boss into the office.

Patterson was growling before Mulder even closed the door. "What's 
this about?"

Mulder considered playing dumb but decided that his boss would 
probably see evasion as a sign of weakness. "I overslept. It's 
Sunday."

"Sunday! You think your killer cares about that?"

"Of course."

Momentarily puzzled, Patterson took a few seconds to catch on. It 
was obvious when he did: he looked like he was going to explode. 
The glib reminder of the quasi-religious overtones of the case had 
sneaked right under his defenses and Mulder struggled not to gloat. 
Patterson shook his head. "You wouldn't last five minutes in a 
field office."

Actually, the thought of being the anonymous rookie, griping about 
being sent out for the coffee and doughnuts again, was one of 
Mulder's more harmless fantasies. The realist in him knew he would 
hate it, but the man who woke up at four in the morning with 
another bullet point to add to a profile thought it sounded 
idyllic. Time to get the meeting back on track. 

"I've been talking with Dr. Fowley, the psychologist who suggested 
what the symbols on the third victim might mean."

"You discussed the case with her?"

But Mulder wasn't that easy to trip up. "Not yet, sir - I'd need 
your permission for that."
 
"I hope you learned something."

Did that thing about her having ticklish knees count?

----------

The slide projector was still on the dining table. The sight of it 
tickled her memory and Diana's lips twitched into a sheepish smile. 
How the hell did they get from a slide-show presentation on 
"Temporal Lobe Activity During Mediation" to a tumble of mindless 
pleasure in her bed in less than three hours?

Shaking her head, embarrassed, she put the files away and moved the 
wineglasses into the kitchen. 

Not at all what she'd expected, hence how unprepared she'd been 
when the charm offensive materialized. Or was she just deluding 
herself? Was he exactly the man she'd fantasized he might be? She'd 
seen his photo, read his work, felt slightly ashamed by her own 
fascination with a seemingly smart empathic man who routinely 
carried a gun. With her education, wasn't she supposed to have 
evolved beyond that kind of penis envy game?

It was as if he'd known just what to say. The questions about her 
work that would make her feel appreciated and valued - a mind as 
well as a body. Stretching now to unwind the tired muscles in her 
back, she could feel him still. 

Three hours though! Had he played her? 

By day a hunter, dancing through the minds of murderous sociopaths 
to tell you not only the who and the how, but also the why. By 
night, perhaps he was a predator of a different kind?

She sighed, ashamed by her ability to spoil the pleasure by 
analyzing the motivation. After all, she'd been there too - 
encouraging him every step of the way, maybe even leading him at 
times. Mutual, then. Thoughts of Mutually Assured Destruction came 
to mind.

But still, it occurred to her that they should have held their 
first meeting in the workplace - his office, or hers - and not in 
her apartment. And if time pressure meant he'd needed to combine 
the discussion with a meal, it should have been a working lunch and 
definitely not an informal dinner with wine and a slideshow that 
required the lights to be turned down low. And it shouldn't have 
been on a Saturday night with no pressure to take a taxi home. 

Damn - maybe it was her fault then.

-----------

2000

Scully hadn't changed out of her scrubs. Feet up on the autopsy 
table, head rocking back as she tried to work the kinks out of her 
shoulders. "I hadn't realized how many people he'd killed."

"It's hard to make a case stick when the victims kill themselves. 
Assisting a suicide sounds so innocent, benign even - as if he 
might have been doing them a favor."

Her voice shifted from exhausted to annoyed. "You think it sounds 
innocent?" 

Not that he could fault her for the anger. A healthy twenty two 
year old on the table. The rock and roll dream come true: the kid 
had died and left a good-looking corpse. Scully shifted position, 
staring at the ceiling, avoiding his eyes. He opted not to debate 
the ethics. "The prosecutors only brought the cases we thought we 
might win. If they'd been able to undermine us on one of the 
charges then the whole thing could have come tumbling down."

"It's incredible. A man talks twenty people into killing themselves 
and they take another fifteen people with them."

"And the ten who died in the house fire." The young mom's despair 
over the loss of her husband provided the backdrop to the tragedy - 
her, her parents, the three kids. She'd met Props three times. The 
agents and police officers who'd died with them had given Props his 
finest hour.

"You think there were more, don't you?"

"Maybe. There would have been if we hadn't stopped him."

She pushed herself upright again, her eyes focusing on the sheet 
that covered the body. "And now there are more."

-----------

Later that night, safely back in Mulder's Apartment, they'd entered 
the awkward phase. The point where the desire to be together was in 
almost perfect balance with the need to separate. It took two to 
tangle, but it only needed one to retreat. 

They'd been dancing around one another for years, a steady spiral 
of ever decreasing circles. But now the terrifying intimacy of 
Scully's desire for a child, and her wish that it be theirs, had 
changed the dynamic. When he'd fantasized about a "one day", he'd 
never imagined the day as being quite like this.

Strange passion of their gametes meeting in a test tube, when they 
themselves had scarcely even kissed.

As wild and impossible as their lives. The only thing that made it 
bearable for Mulder was his absolute conviction that when the time 
was right, they would be too.

The time would not be tonight.

It was the sudden stiffness in her posture that warned him, sent 
the room temperature plummeting by about ten degrees. 

She'd been reclining, legs resting on his couch as he slouched with 
his feet up on the coffee table. He'd been rewatching the video 
footage of interviews with Props; one hand a little too close to 
her feet to be coincidence, an offer she'd ignored. The fingers of 
his other hand circled the buttons on the remote. He felt the shift 
in her mood and watched, as with scarcely any change in her basic 
posture, she moved from relaxed to alert. 

"Scully?"

"The psychiatric evaluations on the victims." She'd been reading 
the original files, including all the notes that he'd made back 
when Props was still an unknown subject. Full of nightmare 
material, but no more so than on most of their cases. He tilted his 
head, asking for more information. "Agent Fowley," she finally 
said, shifting uncomfortably against the couch.

Ahh, the F word. First a shadow and now a ghost. An awkwardness 
that still hovered between them. Not surprising perhaps; there were 
things left unaddressed. He promised himself he would try to be 
honest. "She wasn't an agent back then. We're talking pre-Waco, 
before the Solar Temple suicides, before Ephesian. We had 
Jonesville as a reference. We had the Manson Family. But I needed 
someone who had some insight into how cults controlled their 
members."

"Isolation, sleep-deprivation, malnutrition."

"But our victims hadn't been removed from their homes. No one had 
heard some creepy guy waking them up every hour for five minutes 
chanting. But Diana had run EEGs on people who'd been pulled out of 
cults - a kind of before and after deprogramming thing."

Scully shook her head. "Brain waves?" 

"We thought if you could induce the 'cult' pattern without the cult 
infrastructure, then you could, almost literally, get away with 
murder."

"There's a lot of speculation in that sentence."

"Actually Patterson's word for it wasn't speculation."

---------

1988

Bill Patterson was almost purple, a worrying sign in a man known 
for his white knuckles and ice-cold delivery. "What is this 
bullshit, Mulder?"

Mulder really wasn't ready for this conversation, and couldn't 
believe that Hennessey had passed their casual morning coffee chat 
on to their boss without even warning him. He tried to recover a 
little ground. "The UNSUB's MO." The modus operandi of a highly 
sophisticated killer.

"Brainwashing?"

"The victims are intelligent, sensitive people - they fall out of 
the world. It's as if they're in a cult, but without the kind of 
group interaction that makes cults work." He almost made the 
mistake of smiling as he said it, recalling a moment the night 
before when he'd admitted to Diana that Patterson's profiling team 
had a lot of the textbook cult characteristics.

"And what the hell are Boston PD supposed to do with that?"

Now he remembered why he had that fantasy about getting an 
anonymous placement in some hick field office. Patterson was right, 
of course. Two weeks into the case and all Mulder had to show for 
his efforts was a steadily lengthening list of victims. "I can't 
give them anything useful yet. I need to know why the victims are 
listening to him."

"For God's sake, Mulder - listen to yourself! You're supposed to be 
chasing the man who's running the show, and all you're doing is 
thinking warm thoughts about his puppets. We need something for the 
police departments to get their teeth into. They're waiting."

Mulder didn't bother to argue. If Patterson didn't like what he was 
doing he could give the job to somebody else. Sure, if Patterson 
insisted, he could write them a profile today. Absolutely pro-forma 
and one hundred percent accurate. It would open with the words, 
"White, male," and it would be utterly useless. 

Patterson shook his head. "All I've got from you is a treatise on 
brain waves. What the hell is anyone supposed to do with that? How 
many more bodies do you need?"

A cheap shot and Mulder knew it, but then so did Bill, and Mulder 
knew that, too. 

Need someone to get inside the head of a master manipulator? Surely 
Bill was the ideal candidate. Mulder resisted the temptation to 
make the suggestion.

Patterson glared and prowled the office some more. "You've got to 
see them the way he does. Use his eyes. What's he getting out of 
this? Sex, power, control - where's the buzz?"

Mulder bowed his head, unconvinced. From his perspective, Patterson 
couldn't be more wrong. The victims had seen the killer and found 
him so special that they'd accepted a death sentence from him. Yet 
in the midst of it all, their families and friends had seen 
nothing, and that was a more distinctive marker than any number of 
platitudes about domination and alienation. 

The victims were visible, so they were the key. If they were 
puppets, then surely it was just a matter of following the strings? 
If they weren't puppets, then was there even a crime?   

======== 
End of Part 1   

=========

Hennessey was a good sounding board. He pressed; he cajoled; he 
laughed, but he never bullied or demeaned. Which, so far as Mulder 
was concerned, made him dangerous. The man was too damned easy to 
talk to.

The technique worked on hardened cons and nervous witnesses, and 
was just as effective on Fox Mulder. The fact that Hennessey had 
passed Mulder's only half-formed theory onto Patterson was 
infuriating, but it was also inevitable. Hennessey was a good Fed 
as well as a sensible man, and good little G-Men liked to keep 
their bosses in the loop.

"Don't look so pissed about it. I asked what you thought, because I 
wanted to know."

Mulder responded with a shake of the head and a frustrated, "And I 
told you what I thought, because I'm an idiot."

"Fuck that. You need help and you know it."

"I don't need Bill Patterson breathing fire at me every time I walk 
past his office."

"So take another route to the coffee machine."

Despite his irritation, Mulder laughed. Hennessy was just about old 
enough to be his father, but despite jokes about "the kid," 
Hennessey had never treated him as anything but an equal, right 
down to a level of healthy disrespect for his reputation as a 
rising star in the Bureau and an almost comic determination to slam 
him into the floor whenever they played basketball.

"Right," said Hennessey, acknowledging Mulder's change of mood. 
"Now can we get some work done? OK. Back to basics. Our UNSUB 
chooses the suggestible and makes a suggestion. How does he find 
them?"

"Counseling, lonely hearts clubs, prescription drugs, spiritual 
healing groups, magazine subscriptions - I don't know. I've got 
hundreds of possible markers but no solid common links." He pushed 
the checklist across the desk, shrugged as Hennessey shook his head 
in a gesture that said he'd take Mulder's word for it.

"Do they approach him?"

Mulder sighed, closing his eyes as he rocked back in his chair and 
tried to dislodge the cobwebs from the corners of his brain. "I 
think so. But I don't know why."

---------

The Hammond family was past the stage of disbelief. No longer 
caught up in the fantasy that if they could only wake up just right 
then Kate would be alive again. They'd moved on.

Mulder had trouble looking them in the eye.

Hennessey did most of the talking which gave his colleague the 
freedom to explore Kate's room in peace. Back home with a Masters 
degree under her belt, Kate had been looking for the big break that 
would turn her work for the local newspaper from a job into a 
career.

Lonely, too. Old friends now old enough to be married, kids of 
their own, houses and loans. New friends either hundreds of miles 
away, still in school and heading towards their doctorates, or 
scattered even further afield by the hunt for the right work. The 
man she'd once considered her de facto fiance lived on the west 
coast now and, after the first week of their separation, he hadn't 
even bothered to return her calls.

Mom said that, "Just before she did it," they thought she was 
looking happier, more settled, less frustrated by small town life. 
Dad thought that maybe she'd met someone, but couldn't suggest a 
who or a where.

Mulder had heard it all before. He'd interviewed the families of 
two of the other victims. Followed it up with visits to friends and 
colleagues. 

The problem was that nothing they said made the deaths any 
different from thousands of others. The "just when he seemed to be 
getting better" idea was a standard thread in suicides the world 
over. Depression so deep it could lead to death was frequently too 
debilitating to allow such a decisive act. The energy might only 
come once the exhaustion started to lift, perhaps even through 
drugs or therapy.

Yet there was a crime here. Not just in the moral sense, nor even 
simply in the eyes of God. There was the kind of crime that a 
Federal Agent could investigate and the courts could stop. Mulder 
was pretty sure about that.

Troubling though, to be so certain and yet to have no evidence. A 
few doodles in a diary. A pattern for a tattoo. 

And all drawn by the victims' own hands. Skilled artist or not, 
precision graphic or awkward scribble. All their own work.

He'd hoped for better from the tattooed kid, fantasized that the 
obvious answer might be the one that worked. But the man at the 
Body Art shop dug the man's sketch out of the file and shrugged, 
declaring it a customer original. With no links to the other 
victims and no off-notes to make Mulder's skin tingle as they 
spoke, the tattooist had slithered way back down the suspects' 
list.

Or at least he would have done if they'd had any other suspects.

Kate's room was just as frustrating as the discussion that he kept 
hearing snatches of. He returned to the living room to look through 
the shelves that housed more of Kate's books. The conversation made 
Mulder's ears burn. He knew Hennessey's questions before he asked 
them. He could give better replies than her parents did.

What a fucking mess.

"Kate would have never done this."

Mulder mentally added the words "to us" to the statement and tried 
not to sigh. The book titles were as eclectic as they were 
predictable and if it were not for the fact that the woman was 
trying to make a career in journalism then that might have given 
him something to dissect. As it was, there was little here to get 
his teeth into. Dogs and cats. Planes and boats. Wine and beer. 
Unless?

He interrupted the stilted conversation running in the background. 
"Who put the books on the shelves?"

His only reply was in the identical expressions of confusion on 
their faces.

He tried again. "Are they as Kate left them? Did you move them? 
Might someone else have moved them?"

Kate's mother walked across the room to join him. "I think they're 
as she left them. I may have picked up one or two, but mostly. Is 
it important?"

Important enough to take photos of? Yes.

Important enough to save somebody else's life? He had absolutely no 
idea.

"I'm not sure, Mrs. Hammond. Do you have any pictures of her room 
from when she was a child, or from when she was living away from 
home?"

The woman nodded, exhausted and lost, but curious despite it all. 
She headed to another set of shelves, pulling out photo albums and 
looking so fucking hopeful that Mulder had to bite his tongue to 
stop himself from screaming.

--------

2000

The look that Scully was giving him was of dark suspicion combined 
with tightly wound need. Mulder just wished she'd ask the damned 
question and get it over with.

Of course, it was no more possible for her to do that than it was 
for him to answer it of his own free will.

Tangential - that's how this worked. Like their relationship. Like 
their glances.

OK. He could handle it. The least he could do was say Diana's name 
out loud in the vague hope that maybe such familiarity could one 
day breed ease. The contempt was, of course, a done deal, and he 
wasn't going to reopen barely scabbed wounds just to fight about 
that.

"Diana was interested in brain activity, electroencephalograms, 
things like that. She was looking at whether the things we call 
psychotic delusions are the same things that other people call 
ghosts and manifestations -" 

Scully's sniff of dismay told him exactly what she thought of that. 
He could almost hear her reply - of course they're the same thing, 
you don't need an EEG to tell you that! Fine. Would she be quite so 
complacent about his next remark? 

"- including religious manifestations - visions and so on."

Had the heating failed? He glanced up at the thermostat and then 
back at Scully. He'd almost expected her to be crossing herself. 
Naturally, she wasn't. She was shaking her head. "Quackery," she 
said. "Poorly monitored EEG equipment to assess brain activity as a 
gimmick to sell so-called enlightenment machines and spiritual 
training courses. It was discredited. However many alpha waves are 
coming out, it means nothing about the spiritual state of what's 
going on inside."

Could he make it into a joke by asking her if she'd once bought a 
matching set of deep relaxation goggles and earphones, only to 
discover that Mozart and chocolate worked better? He decided 
against; Scully didn't look very receptive. "Diana was one of the 
debunkers."

Oh. Scully looked momentarily thrown by that and Mulder chose not 
to pursue the opportunity to gloat. He waited.

She finally shook her head. "Why did you ask for her help?"

"She was looking at euphoria. Feelings of well-being induced by 
drugs, meditation, religious frenzy. She'd been studying withdrawal 
symptoms in drug addicts and thought that the pattern might be the 
same in people leaving cults. Cold turkey."

"And was it?"

"It's a hard adjustment. The chemical side-effects might be missing 
but the anguish is the same. You take away something that was 
making them feel good and bring them back to reality. Some 
deprogramming regimes were so highly regimented that she felt they 
might be more like drug substitution, soft landings. Understandably 
so."

"Euphoria?" she said, skeptical but not dismissive.

"Joy. Higher brain function suppressed. Freedom."

"Freedom? In a cult?"

"Freedom from responsibility. A simpler world. You live to serve, 
not to question. And in return you get love and a sense of 
belonging."

"You sound envious."

He shrugged. "Who wouldn't be? It's a family. And it looks like a 
family that you chose, though actually it chose you. Which I guess 
is just as good, maybe better."

"A family that removes people from their real families and destroys 
their spirits, their wills, removes their freedom."

"A dysfunctional family." Caution forgotten, he plunged on. "You 
love your family; imagine being asked to go cold turkey tomorrow. 
Not just to stop seeing them, but to stop even thinking about 
them." She shook her head, preparing a riposte, but he didn't give 
her the chance. "Imagine how much harder it would be to be 
extracted from a world where you were immersed in them 24/7, where 
there were no other influences."

"And you're saying that Diana Fowley had some special insight into 
this?"

"She could look at the results of psychological testing and 
determine if the subject was susceptible to cult recruitment, and 
whether deprogramming had worked."

"So how was that supposed to help you catch Monty Props?"

It wasn't. 

--------

1988

They'd spent more than two hours at Kate Hammond's house and Mulder 
and Hennessey hadn't said a word to each other. Not a single query, 
not even a fleeting, "Did you have any questions, Agent Mulder?" 
They'd swapped looks occasionally, checked on each other's relative 
position, ready to watch backs and join forces should the need 
arise. But otherwise they left well enough alone, two men doing two 
jobs, complete faith that the other would intervene if he needed 
to.

While Mulder took pictures of the bookshelves in the living room 
and bedroom, Hennessey chatted with Mrs. Hammond, assuring her that 
just as soon as the Bureau had made the copies they needed, all of 
their photo albums would be returned, safe and sound.

"Do you have children?" she asked.

Hennessey nodded and that seemed to be all the guarantee she 
required.
 
When they finally got back into the Bureau car, Mulder immediately 
suggested a trip to the second victim's home.

"Why?"

"Because the first one's stuff has all been moved out."

Hennessey snorted. "That wasn't what I meant. Maybe I should spell 
it out for you. It's after six o'clock. We've got a two-hour drive 
back to DC. Why would I want to detour?"

"Gee. Maybe because it's your job?"

"And it'll still be there in the morning. I'll pick you up at 
seven." No room for argument in his tone and Mulder was astute 
enough not to try. There were other things he could do tonight. 

The tension in Hennessey's body eased a little and he settled back 
in his seat. He threw Mulder an opening, a consolation prize of 
sorts. "What's with all the photos? What caught your eye?"

"The way she'd placed the books."

"Keep going."

"Sorted by color and then by size."

"As opposed to?"

"Haphazard, by subject, Dewey decimal, something."

"It's as good a system as any." Hennessey paused, as if considering 
it. "Anyway, how do you order your books?"

Mulder shrugged. Hennessey was welcome to come round and take a 
crack at divining his filing system. "They were Kate's books but 
they weren't; they weren't personal. Hers were in her bedroom. 
These were work books, things she'd bought so that she could brush 
up on her general knowledge, so she wouldn't sound like a klutz 
when she went to the State Fair to interview a pumpkin growing 
champion."

"Pumpkin growing champion?"

"So none of the books would be very memorable to her, so you'd 
expect her to group them by functional type - easier to find things 
quickly."

Hennessey nodded. "You know, kid, you are weird."

Mulder didn't really pay much attention to Hennessey for the rest 
of the trip; too busy mulling over the questions he needed to deal 
with tomorrow. He studiously ignored his colleague's lousy tape 
collection and even his Barry White impression, suffered it all in 
silence,

Made car-ride-scratchy, barely legible notes on the new yellow pad. 
He could type them up as soon as he got in and fax them off to all 
the Bureau offices with suspected victims in their territories. A 
demand for better photos of bedrooms, bathroom cabinets, 
bookshelves, ornaments, insides of closets, and anywhere that an 
orderly mind might be at work. Plus a cautionary request to be sure 
to ask if everything was still exactly as the victim had left it.

It was only when Hennessey actually parked outside Diana Fowley's 
apartment and glared at him in some silent demand for action that 
Mulder noticed that they'd driven to the wrong part of town. Just 
because Hennessey had once dropped him off here didn't mean that 
he'd moved home. "Huh?" was the best he could come up with.

"You're having a night off."

"What?"

"Just get out of the fucking car. I'll pick you up at 7 in the 
morning. You've got a change of clothes in the trunk, right? Take 
them with you."

"She doesn't even know I'm coming."

"Jeez - couldn't you even wait until you got up there."

A momentary silence before the quietly building annoyance turned to 
embarrassed amusement. "Oh, fuck you, Hennessey."

"You're not my type. Get out of the damned car."

The shock tactics had worked. Mulder shook his head as he opened 
the door, stunned at what Hennessey had talked him into doing. He 
unloaded his overnight bag from the trunk and headed into the 
building. 

It was only once he was in the elevator that his brain started to 
focus again. He just hoped to God that Diana was going to be 
pleased to see him. He knew she was home; the lights were on. What 
if she was in the tub? What if she was working? Christ, what if 
there was another man in there with her?

He nearly turned around without even knocking. Only the prospect of 
being forced to go taxi hunting on such a miserably damp night and 
the possibility that Hennessey or Diana might catch him in the act 
dissuaded him.

Deep breath. He knocked on her door.

The smile that greeted him knocked him backwards. He didn't think 
he'd ever seen anyone quite so pleased to see him before. He 
experimented with a greeting. "Hi?" 

"I'm glad you came," she said, and didn't really understand it when 
Mulder burst out laughing.

-------

They'd been playing verbal table tennis for a while now; Diana 
supplying the coffee and the nibbles to keep the debate going as 
they pored over the pictures and reference books, categorizing and 
taking notes.

"Your problem is you view everything through FBI-tinted 
spectacles."

Mulder saw no problem with that. "And you think an excuse is the 
same as a reason."

"I see causal links."

"I see lack of control. Greed, selfishness, cruelty. A willingness 
to do unto others, things that they would never want done to them."

"But those things have been done to him."

"My cult leader has already killed himself?"

"Spiritually speaking, yes. Someone has destroyed that part of him 
that made him love life."

Mulder shrugged. "That narrows the suspects list to a few million 
then."

"Cynic."

"FBI-tinted," he said, toasting her with his half empty mug of 
coffee.

Fowley shook her head. "He's calling up visions. The symbols," she 
pointed at the rune-like constructions in the notes, "are used 
during meditation to connect with a higher plane. You focus on the 
intersection points and it transports you to some other place."

"Like watching TV?"

She ignored him. "The objective is to achieve a kind of out-of-body 
experience. The feeling experienced in deep meditation is said to 
be of the spirit freeing itself from the physical, rising above the 
everyday to achieve a sense of perfect clarity."

"And our victims are so horrified by what they see that they'd 
sooner die?"

"It would seem so."

"If showing someone the truth was an offence, we'd have to ban 
mirrors."

"And psychologists," she noted.

"But what if it wasn't the truth? A distorting mirror? Not the 
whole picture?"

"The good things edited out?"

"Hopes and possibilities erased?"

"Bleak."

"Bleak."

Fowley sighed and poured herself a glass of wine. "You shouldn't 
have put my name in that report. Patterson doesn't like me."

"He doesn't even know you."

"But he knows you."

"And thinks you're a bad influence on me?"

"You said it yourself - He's the guru; you're supposed to be his 
tame minion."

He nodded. "Sleep deprivation, malnutrition, controlled 
environment, praise/blame culture, isolation from external 
influences including family and friends."

"Ready for a little more de-programming?"

He smiled, sipping the wine from the glass she was holding to 
moisten his lips before plunging forward to share the taste with 
her.

---------

2000

Scully was replaying the slide show again and Mulder's annoyance 
was starting to flare into something worse. "I asked you not to do 
that."

She glared at him, then turned her attention back to the remote. 
"If it's bothering you so much then why don't you go for a walk?"

Simple geometrical patterns, similar but not identical. Hand drawn 
by the victims. Sharing a common root somewhere along the line, but 
not one they'd been able to link to any other images found in the 
victims' homes nor even to any of the more obvious occult and 
spiritualist writings. The three new ones looked like similarly bad 
imitations of the ones that had gone before.

It was only too familiar and it wasn't something he could fix by 
going for a walk. "They're dangerous." He closed his eyes as she 
forwarded to the next slide. "Not just to me. To anybody." Even to 
you, he wanted to say, but he didn't dare. The last thing he wanted 
was for her to take it as a challenge.

"They're just drawings," she said, as if he needed a reminder.

"Just drawings? Like the pictures of that artifact that put me in 
the hospital were just photocopies?" Ah, if she could only read his 
mind right now, it would save both of them a lot of headaches.

Her next words only made his headache worse. "That was never 
proven."

Enough. Game over, he decided, walking to the wall and pulling out 
the power cord.

"Mulder!"

So she was angry too. So what? Better angry than dead. The fact 
he'd been put through telepathic hell in response to a photocopy of 
God knows what wasn't good enough. Fine. Time to fight dirty. 
"Remember those experiments in Maryland - cable TV with a little 
added bonus action?" He remembered all right. He remembered staring 
down the barrel of Scully's gun while she hallucinated him into 
meetings with cancer man.

"But that was different."

"Why, because you could split it into the color components and 
display it on an oscilloscope? We have no more idea about the 
mechanism there, than we do about why these drawings led people to 
commit suicide."

"Then how do you know that the pictures made them do it?"

"Right. Cause and effect, or just a symptom? You're right: I 
couldn't prove it in court and I can't prove it now. But I'm not 
going to let you risk your life just so you can play guinea pig."

"I need to see those pictures."

"You've seen them."

"You can't stop me from doing my job."

Great. Just great. If that was how she wanted to play it. "I can 
stop it from being your job."

"You'd get me taken off the case?"

"In an instant."

There was a moment of stunned silence before she cracked. Quiet 
fury, more frightening than any explosion because it was a tone she 
reserved for him alone. "How dare you use our personal relationship 
against me."

"This has nothing to do with our relationship." Her look of 
disbelief just made him more determined. "Remember Frank Burst - 
remember Modell killing him because I couldn't get Frank to put the 
damned phone down? You know how often I got to listen to that call 
in my dreams? You think that was personal, too?"

"I think you had a hard time on the Props case."

"Not as hard a time as the people who died."


=========
END of Part 2

=========
   
1988

The latest victim had been born just a few days before Mulder. 
According to colleagues he'd been riding high. Praise, promotion, 
pay raises and plenty of them. Seven years with the NYPD and a man 
tipped to go far.  

Until the day he put his carefully maintained Glock 9mm in his 
mouth and pulled the trigger.

Mulder had expected resistance from the locals. Federal 
interference would normally be seen as an insult. For once though, 
a stronger force was at play. The instinctive desire to close ranks 
and lock out the intruders faded as soon as Mulder started to 
speak.

Friends and fellow cops alike were pleased to hear that the Bureau 
considered Detective Paul Jennings a victim, not just another 
tragic suicide. Absolved from failure to spot the danger signs, 
they were free to talk.

"He had an attitude, you know?" they said, in various ways and with 
differing degrees of comfort. "Not cruel, not arrogant, just sure 
of himself. Rightly, most of the time."

Would Mulder's colleagues say the same of him?

"Escalation?" asked Hennessey as soon as the agents were alone in 
the borrowed office.

A valid point. Was choosing a cop as a victim a mark of the 
killer's rising sophistication or a mark of his lack of control? 
Maybe it was just boring old coincidence? Perhaps the killer didn't 
even care?

Mulder waved a hand to signal that he didn't know. "I think we need 
to know more about Jennings."

"You mean apart from him being a workaholic caffeine addict with a 
chip on his shoulder and no life?"

Mulder reloaded the coffee maker and rested his feet on the desk. 
It was going to be a long night. "That's why he's so good for us. I 
bet we can build a diary for the past month just based on his 
timesheets and expense claims."

The paperwork pile grew as admin staff sought out the relevant 
files and a steady procession of officers made their way into the 
office to talk.

Six hours later, they relocated operations to a motel. Mulder 
turned his collar up to keep the icy bite away as they covered the 
short distance from the car. No leaves on the trees and the first 
glimmers of silver frosting the branches. 

The rooms themselves were only a little warmer and both men kept 
their coats and gloves on as they waited for the inadequate heaters 
to make an impact. Being realists, they ordered a couple of pizzas 
and Hennessey used the delay to check out his own room and grab a 
shower.

By the time he rejoined Mulder, the room was definitely getting 
warmer and the dead detective's day planner was already starting to 
look pretty detailed. 

"Seventy hour weeks," noted Mulder.

"Lazy bastard," agreed Hennessey.

By midnight there weren't many gaps left. Mulder was tapping his 
finger restlessly against the table. "There's hardly room for him 
to breathe in there. I don't see where he'd even meet the guy, 
unless it was while he was working. We're going to need more 
details on the cases he was handling." He started to dig through 
one of the piles of paper.

Hennessey groaned and Mulder offered to make another pot of coffee.

"Don't you have a bed to go to, kid?"

"You ever heard that story about the pot and the kettle?"

"Did the pot slip the kettle some sleeping pills and tie him to the 
mattress?"

"Only in the X-rated version."

"I'm going." Hennessey rose, stretched, yawned, grabbed his coat 
off the back of the chair. "Have fun." He paused in the motel room 
doorway. "Did you eat anything tonight?"

"Good night, mom."

It was a relief when Hennessey left. So much so that Mulder almost 
went running after him to get him back in here. Relieved was not 
how he needed to feel. He frowned at the discarded pizza in the 
trash and ignored the rumble in his stomach.

Cult 101. Private time is dangerous, gives new recruits too much 
space to think. 

Maybe he could call Diana; she'd stop him thinking. The smirk was 
automatic: his brain summarizing an entire imaginary conversation 
and its undignified yet satisfying conclusion in an instant. 
Missing her already. 

Disgusted with himself and more than a little resentful, he picked 
up the phone and dialed his boss's home number. What he needed 
right now was a carefully delivered blow to his self-esteem and a 
midnight assault from Bill Patterson should cover the bases nicely.

---------

2000

Scully was driving and Mulder had to concentrate to stop his foot 
from stamping on the imaginary brake on the floor ahead of him. He 
shouldn't have let her drive when she was so angry.

He smiled, despite the danger that she might catch him at it. He 
probably only gave her the chance to drive when she got angry. When 
he'd do anything to get one less mark against him on her scorecard. 

She'd walked out after he'd abruptly terminated her slideshow. When 
he called her cell phone a couple of hours later, he was relieved 
that she'd replied, fantasized that he might have been forgiven. No 
such luck. Not that he needed forgiveness - he was right and she 
knew it, but there was no way that either of them was going to 
mention it.

Baltimore PD had called this one in, responding to the general 
alert that the Bureau had sent out the week before. Suicide plus 
pictograms? Secure the scene and walk away. The man had died during 
the night. His mother called 911 at 10 a.m. to report that she 
couldn't rouse him, and that she knew he was willing to be roused 
because today was the day when he was going to pick her up at the 
home and take her to visit his father's grave.

The black and white patrol car the dispatcher sent round found a 
neighbor with a key.

The suicide note was illustrated with a boldly geometrical pattern 
that could have been a highly stylized bird or perhaps a bat - 
difficult to tell from a fax. Either way, the image that got sent 
through to Fox Mulder's office was part of the same family as those 
in Scully's slideshow.

"You never found the master image that you say these things derive 
from?"

Mulder tried not to react to her tone, but he was no better at 
being treated like an amateur, than she was at being told that 
sometimes his job was to protect her. He tried to keep the reaction 
out of his voice. "Just lots of instances - no master image. At 
least nothing explicit."

"Yet you're saying that he was using some kind of self-destructing 
Magic Eye puzzle to send subliminal messages to his victims. That 
the meetings and phone calls with the victims were redundant?"

"The meetings and phone calls got us the conviction." Mulder 
paused, reconsidering. "No, actually they just got us to trial. 
What got us the conviction was Props. He freaked everybody in the 
courtroom out. He couldn't turn off the show even for long enough 
to let his attorneys dig holes in our case."

"Two counts of murder?"

"We couldn't nail him on the straight suicides. But we had a couple 
of murder suicides where we could demonstrate the personal 
connection to Props, and we managed to get the jury to buy the idea 
that he'd catalyzed the killings. Ordered them, even."

"Like Charles Manson."

"Same principle. And like Manson he couldn't resist showing off in 
court."

"And that's why you don't think it's Props doing the killings now?"

He shrugged. It just didn't feel like Props. Maybe getting to the 
latest victim while the scene was still fresh would give them what 
they needed to be sure.

The suburb was bland. Mulder corrected the analysis back to normal, 
conventional, comfortable.

Anonymous.

A flash of a badge and they were past the rookie cop standing guard 
at the door. The detective who'd called Mulder was waiting for them 
inside, acknowledged them with a, "Bureau?"

Scully handled the formal introductions, leaving Mulder a couple of 
minutes to acclimatize to the scene. He was grateful for that, 
liked his first impressions to be his alone. No filters, and no 
well-intentioned blinkers being offered just to save him from 
wasting his time.

Birthday cards on the bookshelf. A dangerous time of year. A shiver 
of a reaction at that - thought of Christmas and Thanksgiving - 
reflective times. "He lived alone?" he asked.

"Wife left him last year. Fortieth birthday was on Monday."

Mulder nodded, heading off to explore the rest of the house.

"Bedroom, top of the stairs, first right," shouted the detective.

Mulder looked into the room, saw the body. The man had gone to 
sleep.

He scanned the scene again. Saw nothing more.

No great tussle over life and death. Not even an empty bottle of 
pills left messily on the bedside table to mark the event. He just 
went to sleep.

Pajama bottoms, a tee shirt and a plastic bag.

Mulder sniffed the air. Warm - he'd chosen comfort over economy. 
Better shift the body soon. 

Neat and tidy. 

Too neat and tidy for a man living alone? Mulder shrugged. 
Stereotypes weren't always wrong; he'd have to ask the ex-wife.

Bathroom cabinet then. Prozac, Advil, low dose aspirin - a heart 
condition maybe. Not the best combination he'd ever seen - Scully 
was bound to have something to say about that - but normal. Mundane 
really. Could be any forty something feeling a little under par, 
hoping for a little magic. Anonymous - like the house.

Towels stacked so sweetly. Blue then white, blue then white, blue 
then white - smallest ones on top.

He returned to the bedroom, opening the closet, saw nothing of 
interest.

When he turned, Scully and the detective were standing in the 
doorway. She looked at him as if asking for permission. He nodded, 
inviting them in.

Mulder looked at the detective. "Do you have the note?"

The man handed him a plastic bag with a single sheet of paper 
inside. "My choice. Be happy."

Mulder shook his head. Uncomfortable recognition, not disbelief.

"We've got to talk to his mother, his ex, friends, co-workers. 
Anyone who might have visited the house. Laundry service. Maid. 
Anything like that."

The detective stared at him. "You're saying that this isn't a 
suicide?"

"He didn't act alone."

The body was unlikely to tell them much, except that the man had 
researched death. Fatal overdose achieved quickly and with minimal 
pain. No chance of intervention. No risk of waking up to discover 
that death would still come, albeit more slowly and painfully than 
he'd planned. A glance in the trash filled in the blanks. Neat and 
tidy. Without the note, without the empty drug bottles, without the 
plastic bag, without the photo of wife and son hugged to his chest 
it would be easy to read the scene as natural.

The detective was staring at him and Mulder could only guess that 
he'd asked him a question. Mulder shifted his attention to Scully 
as she moved swiftly and efficiently through all those checks on 
the body that might be termed just-in-case. If the question was 
important, the man would repeat it.

"He seems like a good candidate for it - medication, birthday, 
divorce. How do you know it wasn't a choice?"

"It was a choice. But not his. He was taking action." Scully and 
the detective were both staring at him now. "The Prozac."

"Which means he was depressed."

"Sure - him and tens of millions of other people. But they didn't 
kill themselves last night. It fits the pattern." He paused, looked 
at the bat bird thing on the note again. "We need to know where he 
got that stuff," he waved vaguely towards the empty bottles, "and 
how he chose that combination."

Had he said the temperature was comfortable? He was boiling up in 
here. Time to go and get some air.

-----------

Spooky.

She loathed the term. Yet it was a match. Draped over his body as 
easily as a shroud, fitting him better than the expensive wool of 
those designer suits he wore. Drenching him more thoroughly than 
the falling rain.

Scully opened the umbrella and walked towards the car.

Leaning against the hood, he watched her approach in silence.

She tried to include him in the shade of the umbrella but he just 
shrugged away, standing a little taller and making his intentions 
clear. 

"Get in the car," she said.

"You've got the keys."

Oh, she'd driven here, hadn't she? She put her hand in her pocket 
and pressed the button to unlock the doors. She wasn't surprised 
when he didn't move. She brushed past him to open the driver's 
door, offering him the keys in the vague hope that it might rouse 
him into action. 

Ignoring the suggestion he walked round to the passenger side, but 
still made no move to get in. Determined to end the farce, she 
reached over and opened his door, strapped herself into her seat 
and started the engine.

"Mulder," she said, more insistent now.

Silent, he loaded himself into the car. Painful. Mechanical. As if 
every inch of movement was a conscious effort.

She felt like screaming, enough with the fucking melodrama, Mulder, 
just tell me what the hell's happening. This case was poison and 
she was damned if she was going to let it poison them. How had that 
stupid little scribble killed anyone? Yet Mulder had looked at it 
as if it was carrying plague.

Perhaps it was. A plague on both their houses! 

Now who was being melodramatic?

She'd planned to drive back to Quantico. The body wouldn't be there 
for another couple of hours but that wasn't a problem. There were 
plenty of other things to do to fill in the time, like chat to a 
couple of the guys in Behavioral maybe. Wasn't one of them supposed 
to be an authority on cults, pagan and religious imagery, things 
like that? Mulder might not rate him, but maybe he had contacts who 
knew more? 

Chuck was away, grubbing around in some tombs in Turkey apparently, 
and Mulder had shown no interest in drawing in anyone else. He'd 
even had the nerve to look offended when she'd suggested calling in 
a real expert to explain those symbols. 

Oh God. A tingle of laughter that was closer to hysteria started to 
build, somewhere low in her chest, threatening to escape and that 
would never do. Maybe he'd like to call in a "real" expert to 
autopsy the next dead body they found? 

This was not good. 

The Fowley factor at work? Crazy messed up hormones? She retraced 
her steps. Partners and friends, and oh so close to being something 
else. Circling each other, looking for a way to move forward 
without losing what they had.

Then she'd read those notes in the file citing Fowley's work and 
offering suggestions on the interpretation of the symbols. Words 
that had come from Fowley's lips.

A slideshow. It took a lot to make Mulder scared, but he was scared 
of those pictures. So what had she done? Blasted them onto the 
wall, six feet high and all in perfect technicolor. Run through 
them not once but twice, and going for a third.

Why? As punishment? As a way to prove herself tougher, stronger, 
more professional? And what had she actually done? Freaked him out 
enough to make him pull the plug, first on the slides and now on 
her.

But the sorry wouldn't come without the but and she knew that any 
buts would just infuriate him more. 

A clean slate then. They'd been through worse. No please or thank-
you or sorry required. Just an unspoken agreement to discard the 
past and start again. She could do that. 

"Does it look like the work of Monty Props?"

He looked at her, his hair still dripping, blotchy cheeks where the 
cold and wet had met the heat of the car. "Like. But not the same."

Like those patterns then.

---------

1988

Detective Paul Jennings was honest, ambitious and one of the good 
guys. Boundless energy and a demeanor that could piss off 
colleagues by its political savvy and its blatant disregard for the 
same. They shook their heads as they described the way he seemed to 
be able to weasel his way under defenses and get results. 

A scent of envy in the air as people talked about him, an emotion 
that oscillated between hate and admiration, but that had now 
become pity. No one actually gloated about his death, though some 
wondered if they'd seen it coming. Don't rockets always burn out?

Hennessey's hand on Mulder's shoulder shook him back to reality. 
The police captain across the desk was looking at him with a mix of 
amusement and disgust. Not much time for the FBI and even less for 
prodigy profilers. 

The captain spoke very slowly as if addressing a rather dull child. 
"I - asked - you - why - the - fuck - you - think - this - is - a - 
murder."

"Why not? Didn't you want to kill him?"

Hennessey snorted, but swiftly brought himself back under control, 
turning to glare at Mulder as he did. 

The police boss looked like he was going to explode. "Get out." 

Five minutes later they were standing on the station house steps. 
"Patterson's going to have you gutted," announced Hennessey.

Mulder shrugged. "I don't see what you've got to be pleased about. 
You're supposed to be my babysitter."

"Forget Patterson - I'll kill you myself."

It wasn't going to be a problem. They had enough data. More than 
enough actually. Too damned much if truth be told. Jennings was an 
open book, or could be, if Mulder allowed him to be. 

Did he really want to empathize with a suicidal cop? Like he had an 
option in the matter. "We need to visit his parents."

"Can't you even pretend to feel bad about fucking up?" 

Mulder stared for a moment as if considering Hennessey's question, 
finally coming up with a, "Hmmm, no."

"Asshole."

--------

Paul Jennings' parents looked at Mulder as if they'd seen a ghost. 
Hennessey had raised eyebrows at his choice of a leather jacket, 
rather too like the one their detective son had been wearing the 
night he died, but despite shaking his head to register his 
complaint Hennessey had said nothing. Mulder had been grateful for 
that, the truth was bad enough without him drawing attention to it.

Mulder was gentle in his questioning, provoking watery smiles as 
well as tears as they spoke proudly about their son - his life, his 
loves, his job. Life, love, job - inexorably linked. Too inexorably 
for his fiancee, who'd walked out six months before. "She just 
couldn't share him with the job, you know?" asked Mrs. Jennings. 
She'd been a cop's wife for thirty years and knew all about 
sharing.

Mulder nodded. "It's a tough life."

Paul's father intervened, needing to explain that Paul was tough 
enough, even though the evidence was running against. "He was 
tough. I didn't make him join the department. I thought, when he 
went to college, that he'd decided he wanted something else." He 
smiled then, despite the red eyes. "Join the Bureau maybe!" And his 
mouth quivered, shaky breaths and more almost tears sniffed away.

Mulder pretended he hadn't noticed, played it light. "I wouldn't 
wish the Bureau on anyone. Can you tell me about his friends? How 
he spent his free time?"

Paul's mom was too shaky, memories too near the surface, so his dad 
replied. "Sports mostly, I guess. Basketball, baseball - nothing 
organized. Just when he could."

"Do you know where, who he played with?"

"You think one of them?" The disbelief was obvious.

"No. This was someone new in your son's life. But they may have 
seen something."

Mrs. Jennings swallowed down her tears, just far enough to ask, 
"You don't think he killed himself?"

Dancing with words? Yes, Mrs. Jennings, your son shot himself and 
made a proper job of it. Made dead certain. No, I don't think he 
chose to die. Someone chose him. "I think his death may be linked 
to others that we're investigating."

Another hour and they were back on the road again. Hennessey 
shaking his head. "Just when I think I've understood how big an 
asshole you are, you go and do a thing like that."

This time, Mulder was driving. He kept his eyes locked on the road 
ahead. "Meaning?"

"The leather jacket. I should have stopped you there and then. Then 
you mess with your hair. Ten minutes in and you put on those damned 
glasses. And then, just when I think you can't get any more screwed 
up, you start fucking around with your accent."

"I spent a lot of time in New York."

"Shove it."

"If the jacket had made them uncomfortable, I'd have taken it off."

"They're not suspects who you're trying to throw off balance, 
they're the grieving parents. Victims."

"It worked, didn't it?"

"Shit." Hennessey rubbed his head, as if trying to erase the 
memory. "So now what? You go and fuck with his basketball buddies 
instead?"

Mulder shrugged. Maybe a pickup game or two.

----------

2000

Skinner looked up from the report on his desk. Split decisions from 
the X-Files agents were no surprise, but usually they agreed on one 
thing - what to do next. Scully had proposed a strategy: move Props 
to a new location and control his access to the outside world. 
Mulder hadn't actually rejected the idea but didn't seem to 
consider it particularly relevant.

The AD kept his question open. "You think Props could be doing it 
again? From his prison cell."

Scully replied. "Given the MO in the original case it's possible, 
even from inside jail. Ten years of good conduct - they must find 
the restrictions on his use of the telephone and on mail difficult 
to understand and he does have some computer access. I suspect 
another prisoner may be acting as a go-between, but it could even 
be a guard."

"Agent Mulder?"

"It's possible. But highly unlikely. Props isn't the man he was. 
There was an energy about him - something - that isn't there 
anymore."

"Or that he's learned to hide?" said Skinner.

"I doubt it. He was too proud to hide."

"It's been a long time since you last saw him."

"Not long enough."

Something they could all agree on. A shudder of discomfort in his 
gut and Skinner's misgivings grew. Had Mulder told Scully the whole 
story? They seemed to share so much, but history still appeared to 
have this habit of biting them both on the ass. He'd been brooding 
over it the night before, looking through the files, revisiting 
memories from a decade ago and finding that some of them were still 
painfully raw.

Despite his uncertainty, Skinner decided to keep Scully behind 
after the meeting. On another day Mulder's reaction to that might 
have made him smile - dismayed, through possessive, to curious, and 
then back to professionally indifferent. All achieved in a matter 
of seconds.

Scully, on the other hand, had moved directly to high alert and was 
watching him closely. So closely that, once Mulder left the room, 
Skinner felt obliged to mop a finger over his eyebrow and take a 
sip of water before he started talking. "How much has Mulder told 
you about the Monty Props case?"

"I've seen the files. I know his thoughts on Props." She paused, 
her eyes taking on a colder, more penetrating hue. "But that's not 
what you're asking me, is it?"

"Not really. No." Where to begin? This was Mulder's story to tell, 
but would he tell it? Probably not. OK. Just enough so that she 
could decide what more she needed to hear. "Mulder and Patterson - 
it wasn't just an intellectual clash. Patterson liked to push 
Mulder's buttons. This case pushed Mulder's buttons."

"It was Mulder's profile that got Props."

"And got Mulder committed."

A sharp movement of her head and Skinner knew for certain that this 
was news to her. "On what basis?" she finally asked.

"Suicidal." 

"It's not in his file."

"I just think you should be aware of it."

"Are you saying that he's in danger?"

There was a challenge in her eyes as she spoke and Skinner flinched 
at the sudden recall. John Lee Roche - he'd asked her to play 
watchdog then. The Pincus case - his instructions had placed Mulder 
in restraints - she'd had to go in with her gun blazing to rescue 
him. Mulder confined to another bed, hearing voices, brain on 
overload - she'd traveled across the world looking for the magic 
recipe. When it came right down to it, Scully never could actually 
believe the worst.

He stuck to the point. "I'm saying you should know." This was 
tough. Hard-ass boss he could do - order Mulder off for his own 
good, tell Scully that she was his enforcer and he expected her to 
deliver compliance. Life would be easier. But he knew that Mulder 
couldn't comply and that Scully wouldn't enforce. "Scully. Whatever 
you need, I'll help."

A single tense nod and she was ready to leave.



======= 
END of Part 3   

=========
   

If the knowledge was a Tug-of-War then she was the rope. 

The same fears and hesitations that had kept them apart for years 
were rising inside her again. Mulder and Fowley. Mulder and Props. 
Mulder and suicide.

A partner. A friend. A lover? The dilemma clear. Easy to be one, 
hard to be all three.

Now Skinner had ordered her into another role. Guard? Doctor? Spy? 
Whatever she chose to call it, it came out the same. Mulder was 
apparently at psychological risk and Scully was supposed to be his 
protector. 

She'd called him when she got home. A pre-emptive strike. Fobbed 
him off with words like laundry and bath and tired. He'd teased, 
asked if she needed help with all those bubbles. 

Guard, doctor, spy? How many fantasies did those characters appear 
in? Yet she couldn't imagine a bigger turn-off. She struggled to 
keep it light, wriggled out of the conversation by claiming that 
someone had just arrived at her door.

She needed time to think.

Suicidal? Why wasn't she surprised? 

Because she'd seen him there. Cutting things too fine. Taking too 
many risks. Getting holes drilled in his head. Close to breaking 
point when her cancer had looked too hard to beat. 

Tomorrow? Tomorrow his partner would see him in the office and, if 
necessary, Dr. Scully would be waiting in the wings.

Scully's frustration with her partner was matched only by her 
frustration with herself. She couldn't be jealous of a dead woman. 
She couldn't be angry with Mulder for something that had happened 
before they'd even met.

Except.

Except Mulder hadn't told her about Fowley - the then of her and 
the now of her - and he hadn't told her about being placed on 
suicide watch the first time he chased Props. Past or not, these 
were the things that had made and shaped him and she was entitled 
to know. Wasn't she?

Perhaps not the gory details of his - her thoughts skipped over all 
the various possibilities before settling on the word - 
relationship. 

No. Damn it, she wanted the details too. How long had it taken her 
to become his lover? How long did they stay together? Was she good 
to him? Was he good to her? Did he look at her as if she was the 
center of the universe? Did she worry about it ending in anguished 
words and painful looks before it had even begun?

Why did she leave?

And why had Mulder trusted her when she came back?

She'd called him Fox. Stupid little trivial meaningless detail. 
Fluttering around her head just outside swatting distance, just 
inside her line of sight. Whispering in her ear when she least 
expected it. She swiped away an angry tear from the corner of her 
eye.

Enough.

That was all lover crap. Tomorrow she would be his partner.

---------

Next Morning - X-Files Office

When Scully arrived at work, Mulder was already in a meeting with 
Skinner. By the time he returned, Scully had her speech all lined 
up.

He preempted her words with a single look. "You need to see this," 
he said, pushing a manila file into her hand and practically 
bolting from the office as soon as she took it.

Her body, not so convinced by the word partner as her brain had 
been, tried to follow him. She didn't allow it, just pressed her 
hands against the edge of the desk and forced herself to sit 
quietly in the chair. He'd given her this. It was her duty to 
accept the challenge.

The folder was thin, a note on its cover announced it as a sealed 
file for authorized eyes only and threatened dire consequences to 
anyone who might copy its contents or divulge them in any way. 

Hospital records, names, dates, times and locations. A few brief 
notes on follow-up interviews conducted by a psychiatrist working 
for the Bureau.

On the admission paper - Bill Patterson's name, the words "Actively 
suicidal", and the serial number of Mulder's freshly confiscated 
gun.

On the discharge paper - a reference to Dr. Diana Fowley, who'd 
spoken for him at the competency hearing.

----------

To describe Mulder as furious was to miss the point. He was way 
past furious and coming out the other side into ice-cold 
indifferent.

He'd been angry when he'd seen Skinner of course, though at least 
the AD had done him the courtesy of openly admitting what he'd said 
to Scully the day before. Scully, on the other hand, hadn't told 
him what was bugging her when they'd spoken later that night. Would 
she have ever decided to talk to him about it or was it just going 
to be something else to add to the scorecard?

Would he have ever told her about it of his own free will? Not if 
he could have helped it. Yet why not? She knew him better than 
anyone ever had. Wasn't she entitled to know this? 

He considered it. Opted for a no. However, it was a moot point now. 
She knew the raw facts. If she thought it was relevant to the case, 
then she could ask him for more details. 

And if she thought it was relevant to them, then she was just plain 
wrong.

A few laps of the track and his mood was starting to soften. She'd 
have read the file by now. They would talk about it like two 
adults. A nagging little voice whispered the name Diana Fowley in 
his ear and he told it to shut the fuck up.

Another nagging voice appeared at his side, this one more difficult 
to ignore. Assistant Director Walter Skinner. Mulder turned his 
head to acknowledge the intruder. "Fancy meeting you here, sir."

"I like to take a lunchtime run when I can."

Mulder glanced down at his watch. He'd been out here for nearly two 
hours. He'd pay for this tomorrow. They jogged on together, Mulder 
resisting the urge to sprint away. He was OK now, besides which his 
body probably didn't have a sprint left in it, which would have 
just pissed him off even more. "You needn't have come," Mulder 
finally said.

"I came to apologize."

"She needed to know."

"Which was why I told her."

They ran on in silence. Just a couple of laps. Just enough that 
they could wind down together and walk away. 

Fifteen minutes later, showered and back into suits and ties they 
were sitting in the cafeteria undoing whatever benefit they might 
have received from the exercise. Or at least Mulder was. "Salad 
instead of fries?" Mulder shook his head, looking at his boss's 
plate as if it was sacrilege to put any kind of vegetation so close 
to a burger.

"You've got salad."

"And fries," Mulder insisted. He waved at the tomatoes. "Just 
window-dressing. Force of habit," he said, thinking of Scully's 
clucks of disapproval at his eating patterns. He glanced around the 
room again and the other agents who'd been watching the Spooky and 
Skinner Show quickly ducked their heads and looked away. "Jesus," 
he mumbled. And this was without the contents of that file being 
made public. 

Skinner offered him another opening. "I don't know the whole story 
myself." 

But Mulder only nodded.

---------

1988

Hennessey was marginally cooler now. Perhaps soothed by the brief 
pit-stop for coffee during which Mulder had taken the opportunity 
to comb his hair into its standard parting and then ruffle it up 
into its usual state of slight disarray. He'd changed his tie as 
well, though that would have had its downside as well as its upside 
with Hennessey.

"It's OK, Mulder. You don't have to try so hard. I wasn't planning 
on telling Patterson."

Mulder shrugged, his fingers tapping restlessly on the steering 
wheel, not bothering to defend himself and opting not to offer 
conciliatory lies about understanding now that the senior agent was 
right after all.

"Besides," said Hennessey, "He'd probably give you a medal for it. 
So - next stop - the gym?"

"Yeah." It was almost redundant really; he knew exactly what Paul 
Jennings' friends were going to say. But knowledge and evidence 
were different things and Hennessey deserved to hear it for 
himself.

"What do you think they'll say?"

Mulder smiled. And they called him Spooky. "I don't think they've 
seen him down there for at least three weeks."

"And this would indicate?"

Depression? Apathy? Avoidance? That he'd joined his own cult and 
was adopting all the methods required to brainwash himself? "It'll 
tell us how long ago this thing started."

If the other man was pissed by the non-answer then he didn't show 
it. Hennessey slumped back into silence, doggedly thumbing through 
the sketches, photos and notes, looking for the hundredth time at 
the peculiar graphics and their odd geometry. 

The origin of the images remained a mystery. They'd bounced them 
off a dozen scholars, sent a team of rookie agents to work in 
libraries scouring through books covering everything from Persian 
rugs, through soup labels, to totem poles and Inca masonry. 

The thought amused Mulder a little. Some of the "rookies" had been 
with Bureau longer than he had. 

Even so, he could summarize their results in four words: close but 
no cigar. 

They were like lots of things. But they weren't anything. 

Mulder didn't like looking at them. Something off about them. Like 
sniffing the fish that would have been great to eat yesterday and 
is certainly going in the trash tomorrow. And like the fish, he'd 
pushed the images back into cold storage, despite the fact that 
rationally he knew that the action couldn't possibly improve the 
situation.

Diana had suggested they might be used to help tune a mind for 
meditation, which at first seemed wrong to Mulder - shifting the 
psyche to look outside itself rather than to seek the inner depth. 
But no, Diana had insisted that everything from the Buddha in the 
temple to the singsong rosaries of the Catholic Church had the same 
job to do. Sweeping out the everyday in favor of a different place.

He'd started to think of them as the swinging watch in the 
hypnotist's hand, but even that hadn't told him anything about the 
hypnotist.

Maybe the images were maps? Signposts on a path to inner peace or, 
in this instance, needless death.

He tried that one again. Needless was a value judgment and had no 
place in the analysis he was trying to do here. Everything met a 
need, and everything had a reason. It might not make sense to 
anyone except the perpetrators, but it made sense to them.

Patterson was going to love that. He'd started to describe the 
victims as the perpetrators. Well, they were. They weren't empty 
vessels being acted on. He'd have to get back to that later.

OK. The images then. He didn't get them at all. He glanced down at 
the photo in Hennessey's hand and saw the victim's tattoo, but felt 
no particular recognition beyond the fact of it. They just weren't 
hacking it for him. But then neither did temple Buddhas nor 
Catholic rosaries. Maybe he just didn't have the right spiritual 
wiring in his head to understand it?

He turned towards Hennessey. One eye on the traffic, one eye on the 
man. "Do you believe in God?"

"Of course."

Of course. 

Mulder shifted his attention back to the road.

--------

Diana handed him an iced tea and a banana as soon as he walked 
through her front door.

The effect, he noted, was quite surreal, and he couldn't help but 
wonder if she was going to pull out a magic wand and turn his tie 
into a bunch of flowers. A ta-da would make a lot of sense right 
now.

"I heard your car pull up," she said.

Which explained everything. "Hmmm." He smiled.

She laughed. "Every time you get here, you're thirsty as hell and 
ravenously hungry and I end up feeding you the good wine and the 
cheese sandwiches."

"And?"

"And tonight I'm in the mood for Italian and they do deliver, but 
it takes them at least an hour."

He sighed, mock horrified. "You mean you're not going to go in the 
kitchen and rustle something amazing up?"

"I did. You're holding it."

There was something comforting about being with her like this. 
Something that the vaguely mid-European sounding psychology sound 
track, that supplied a running commentary on his thoughts, 
identified as belonging. 

Normal, he corrected, slightly ashamed of the insight. He loved 
that she made him feel normal and that might not be love but it was 
a fine approximation. He'd grown up on punk love. Fucked his way 
through No More Heroes more than once, which was probably why he'd 
finished up at Oxford.  
 
Did he believe in anything? He'd been asking himself that all day.

"What would you die for?" he asked.

She'd only just finished phoning the order through to the great 
Italian place that would deliver "eventually" but she recovered 
from the shock of the question surprisingly well. "I don't know. I 
don't think anyone knows for sure until they're in that position."

"Could someone make you do it? Kill yourself."

"I guess under torture, perhaps. Something. I don't know."

"And under hypnosis?"

Back on safe ground, her voice became more clinical in its 
certainty. "Hypnosis doesn't really work that way. Suggestible 
isn't the same as empty. But you know all this." 

He did and that's why he was having such a hard time with this 
case. How the hell did this guy make them do it? Mulder had read up 
on Jonestown, played games of compare and contrast with martyred 
saints, the cliffs at Masada, soldiers who'd died heroes' deaths on 
suicide missions. Examples he had in abundance, but nothing that 
seemed to apply.

When he looked up again, Diana was staring at him. She smiled. "I 
asked you why you joined the FBI."

"Not to die."

"Yet the risk is there."

"The risk's there when you cross the road."

"But this risk is one you choose to take, for other people. Why do 
you do it?"

Read too many Sherlock Holmes stories as a kid? Blind faith that it 
could never happen to him? To make him feel better about himself? 
He shrugged. "Because I can?" 

But that still didn't explain what the victims were getting out of 
it. 

----------
2000

Hit and run.

He'd handed her the files and bolted, and she hadn't even had time 
to get angry. Fortunately he'd stayed away for so long that her 
anger was already starting to subside when he walked through the 
door.

Even so, Scully didn't wait for Mulder to sit down. "Why did you 
run?"

He looked at her, momentarily confused. "It clears my head."

The reply was as incongruous and out of place as the sight of his 
crisp designer suit versus the hastily knotted tie, the red cheeks 
and the windblown hair. She did the math. "You went running?"

"With Skinner," he said carefully, as if this was an interrogation 
and he was anxious to get his alibi in place.

"Let's start this conversation over."

"Do we have to?"

Her lips curved upwards, not quite able to maintain the image of 
angry restraint that she'd deemed appropriate. "Are you OK?"

"Apart from the blisters? Which have got nothing to do with 
Skinner, by the way."

"I read the file," she said. He nodded, so she carried on talking. 
"How did you manage to keep it off your record?"

"You read that I got discharged."

"Even so."

"Even so - once is a freak mistake, second time's a pattern, third 
time's a room with no view?" He shrugged. "Friends," he said, and 
she could hear the ironic twist to the word. "More out of spite 
against Patterson than faith in me, I think." 

"And Diana Fowley?"

"Trusted me."

His one in five billion? She shivered at the thought, tried not to 
feel betrayed. 

She picked up the pieces of the puzzle again, opted to play 
partner. "How does it impact the case?"

"It means I'm still the best man for the job."

"Because you tried to kill yourself?"

"Because I didn't." He switched his attention to the other file on 
Scully's desk - the toxicology report on the latest victim. "Does 
it confirm what we found in the trash?"

Instead of being annoyed that he'd changed the subject, she felt 
momentarily grateful. She needed processing time too. "The suicide 
cocktail, as you described it? Yes, it's what we were expecting."

"Have they had any luck chasing down whoever helped him?"

"It seems he sometimes did a little moonlighting - night security."

Mulder guessed what was coming next. "At a pharmacy?"

"Mail order. Did his last shift ten days ago. Someone from VCS is 
looking at computers he had access to, to see if he was researching 
the drugs. Agent Felden is up there doing preliminary interviews 
with the man's friends and family. He's on the lookout for contacts 
with pharmacology or medical knowledge."

Mulder nodded. "We should go back there tomorrow. I want to search 
the house again, his desk at work, his mom's room in that 
residential home, anywhere he may have spent time in the past 
month. I need to talk with his ex-wife." 

His body language told her he was getting ready to make another 
exit. He was leaving at 3 having spent most of the day playing 
hooky on the FBI's favorite running track? "You're going?" she 
asked.

He nodded, already turning towards the door. He paused briefly. 
"You coming over tonight?" 

She didn't want to. Didn't see who she could be if she went over to 
his apartment like that. Said, "Yes," and let him go.



====== 
END of Part 4

=========

1988

It had been nearly a month since Detective Paul Jennings last 
showed up at the gym. Not that anyone had been too concerned. 

"It wasn't like he played for a team."

"He said he was busy."

"I saw him at the station house; he said he'd be back next week."

Looking back, there were danger signs, or so the skeptics said. 
And they were right but the signs were so faint that Mulder wasn't 
sure if they were real or just the product of orderly minds that 
liked to find information in random noise. In any case, they were 
all grateful that the FBI had arrived to grant them absolution and 
warn them of a serial killer who destroyed by stealth. 

Jennings was always in a hurry. Uncomfortable if you tried to slow 
him down. Unwilling to talk about anything but The Job. Always 
capital letters for The Job, Mulder noted.

Not difficult to relate to that.

---------

Bill Patterson was not prone to temper tantrums. Anger would have 
made his aim unsteady, his scalpel less accurate. 

"Another body," he said, a whisper, a scream in Mulder's ears.

Sitting up straight, eyes carefully focused on his boss, Mulder 
said nothing. Excusable to make a mistake in response to a direct 
question. Foolish to slip up if silence was a satisfactory reply.

"Nothing to say, Agent Mulder?"

"Nothing to add to my report."

"Do you like working here, Mulder?"

No?

A flutter of emotion crossed Bill's features. He turned briefly 
towards Hennessey, gesturing with a movement of his head that the 
other agent was to leave immediately. Patterson shifted his eyes 
back to Mulder.

Hennessey accepted Mulder's slight nod in his direction as 
approval and headed out of the room as unobtrusively as he could.

"I asked you a question," reminded Bill.

"Did you expect an answer?"

"This section represents the cream of forensic psychology. The men 
in it are the envy of the whole Bureau. There are agents who'd go 
down on their knees to get your job. Men with more experience. 
Better qualifications. The right attitude. Do you know why you're 
here?"

Some awful crime he'd committed in a previous life maybe? "Because 
of my solve rate?"

There was something oddly freeing about making Patterson react, 
finding the man's hot buttons and pushing them like this. It would 
be expensive of course, Mulder didn't doubt that. Bill would 
undoubtedly return the favor and do it with claws sharpened by 
years of experience and an intimate knowledge of Mulder's 
personnel file.

"Have you ever felt suicidal, Mulder?" A soft purr of a pause. 
"Ever danced with death?" Patterson's voice dropped even lower. 
"Ever think of seeing your sister again?" 

The silence rippled. Electric. Patterson rose, prowling now and 
the hairs on the back of Mulder's neck stood up as the man swooped 
in close. "Tell me about it," he said. "That's an order," he 
added.

The fact that Patterson felt obliged to make the order explicit 
felt like a triumph to Mulder. Enough of a victory to make him 
feel generous. Sure, he could answer the question. Why not? It 
wasn't optional after all. He could either answer now while he was 
on top of the game or he could wait until later, when Bill had 
kicked him to ground. Thought of suicide? "Of course I did."

"Did, Mulder?"

"Do, Bill."

"Then you know what you've got to do to keep up your solve rate."

Of course he did.

----------

A five-mile run hadn't even taken the edge off it. A prolonged 
soak in the shower hadn't made him feel clean. He ignored the 
flashing light on the answering machine and let it pick up another 
call from Diana. According to Patterson, Diana Fowley was part of 
the problem. From Mulder's perspective, she was part of the 
solution, and that was why he couldn't talk to her right now.

Before you look for an answer, you've got to know the question.

It was clear to Mulder that the question was: why die? Get that 
and he'd know why the victims had been chosen. From knowing why, 
it would be just one more step to knowing who was doing the 
killing.

The victim profile was a minefield of assumptions. The lone and 
the lonely, but only because other people said so. Retrospective 
diagnoses in most cases. Something missing in their lives? Them 
and how many million others? Generalities he had in abundance. 
Specifics were what he lacked.

Different races. Different sexes. Different ages.

Their jobs ranging from the not bad to the positively good. He 
referred back to the statistics for suicides, looked at job 
security, longevity, and absenteeism as predictors. They were 
outside the bell curve, on the plus side of the equation. 
Depression tended to destroy employment even before it destroyed 
the life - the factors trading off one another for sure. But 
still, these people didn't seem to be having those kinds of 
problems.

Another hint that whatever had taken them down had taken them 
fast.

"Meditation," he mumbled, closing his eyes. Why had he been 
avoiding it? The common factor was clear to anyone with half a 
mind, or at least to anyone willing to look. Inscribed on one of 
the victim's arms as a tattoo. Scribbled on notepads. Decorating 
diaries.

He sifted through the photos again, picked up a pencil and started 
to draw.

----------

2000

The apartment had been Mulder's choice. Scully could run away if 
she needed to. If he'd gone to her place and things went badly 
then he wouldn't have known how to walk out. Outstaying his 
welcome was a habit, but then so was hiding in a corner to lick 
his wounds. Well, tonight he wasn't going to do either; they'd 
play this however Scully chose.

She sniffed the air as she entered.

"Chili," he said. "Frohike's secret formula. Be very afraid."

She headed directly into the kitchen, removed lids from pans to 
examine the contents.

"You want some latex?" he asked, dipping his hand into his pocket 
as if he had the gloves already waiting.

"Later," she said, and he knew that she'd done it just to make him 
smile.

Eat first or talk first? And where to begin? With Monty Props? 
Diana Fowley? Fox Mulder? Ah, there's the rub.

"It's ready," she announced, as if her single sweep with a wooden 
spoon had transformed the situation.

Bemused, he took over ladle duty. "I'll serve." He suspected that 
a dish like this with all those onions, tomatoes and things was 
positively healthy, but she'd probably demand the label from the 
jar as evidence if he made any such claim.

Despite its relatively wholesome contents, it tasted OK. Better 
than OK actually, which surprised him a little. On a night like 
this, wasn't everything supposed to taste like cardboard and dust?

"That was good," she said, sounding just as surprised.

Her choice, he reminded himself. Wishing they could quit while 
they were ahead, knowing that they couldn't. If he told her 
everything, she wouldn't like what he had to say. If he didn't, 
he'd feel like a liar. Her choice then.

She was watching him. Cat to his mouse. The claws remained 
sheathed. Her words were not the ones he'd expected. "If it's not 
Monty Props who's orchestrating the deaths, then who are we 
looking for?"

He nodded, adjusting fast to being a profiler not a target. 
"That's the problem. Props was a con man. A real talent. Seductive 
and brilliant. He did it all. Started out passing stolen checks, 
moved on into bank fraud. Real estate cons. He graduated to become 
a fake preacher; faith healer; spiritual counselor. The reason we 
couldn't find a link between the victims was because he kept 
switching roles."

"Connected only by his bank accounts."

"Not even that. At least, not in any obvious way. He'd mastered 
identity theft early in his career. Knew how to steal a name and 
how not to be noticed."

"But money was the motivation?"

"For Props. At least initially. But it became a game. He was never 
greedy with the ones he killed. Nothing in a will. No heavy hits 
on a bank account. A few living expenses maybe. But he saved the 
real money making scams for live victims."

"Two kinds of prey."

"Two kinds of predator. The people he killed - he said he was 
freeing them. The others, the ones he robbed - he said they were 
greedy, undeserving, needed to be humbled."

"And our new UNSUB?"

"We need to keep open minds."

She nodded, eyebrows raised in mild amusement. "You mean we still 
don't have a profile."

"Am I that transparent?"

-----------

1988

Ever since Bill Patterson called her, Diana Fowley had been trying 
to get hold of Mulder. Six messages on his answering machine. No 
reaction from his pager. 

When the time came for her to leave to go to Quantico, she still 
had no clue as to why she'd been summoned there or how Mulder 
would want her to play the meeting. She wasn't even sure if he'd 
want her to go. 

But the appointed time was approaching fast and she was stuck with 
it, ready or not. She'd aimed for academic and business-like, but 
even her clothes were giving her away. She glanced down at her 
most demure suit and the smart sensible shoes and shook her head. 
What exactly was it that she'd prepared herself for - a job 
interview?

Presumably Patterson was going to warn her to stay away from 
Mulder. Arrogant bastard.

Patterson greeted her as soon as she entered the ISU offices. He 
checked her over quickly, and apparently deemed her acceptable. At 
least acceptable enough to get admission into the inner office. 
"Dr. Fowley. It's a pleasure."

The feeling wasn't quite mutual. Her defenses were up, and not 
solely because of Mulder's descriptions of his boss. This was 
Patterson's territory. His agenda. His eyes piercing her barriers. 
"It's good to meet you, Dr. Patterson. I've heard so much about 
you."

"Bill," he suggested.

"Diana," she replied.

"I'd like to hear your opinions on these murders that Fox is 
looking at."

Fox? That surprised her. Hadn't he told her that Fox was a 
millstone growing up and a joke at work - that they all called him 
Mulder. That Fox was a bedroom word for a cozy curled up sort of a 
night or a wakeup call sort of a morning? "I'm sure Mulder's 
already briefed you."

"I'd still like to hear your opinion." 

"Of course." She took a deep breath, hoping that she sounded like 
a credible witness not a mystic flake or the resident of an ivory 
tower. "I believe you're dealing with a highly skilled 
manipulator. I think he teaches people a mediation technique that 
reduces their ability to cope with life. I think they lose 
themselves in it. That life and death becomes his choice and not 
theirs."

"Why does he do it?"

"Because he can?"

"You sound envious."

What? 

Patterson was staring at her now, a lightly amused sneer dancing 
on his lips, excitement in his eyes. She should have anticipated 
this. He was the Behavioral guru after all. Skilled manipulator. 
Gets under your skin. Breaks down your defenses. She could almost 
hear Mulder's laughter in her ears; he would have warned her about 
this.

Diana straightened up a little. "Perhaps I am envious."

He leaned forward in his seat. "Of what?"

"I'm a researcher. An experimenter. I monitor. I try to stimulate 
particular responses."

"Whereas this man doesn't just try to stimulate a response - he 
gets it. He gets something so big you don't need EEGs and 
electrodes to measure it. Wouldn't you like to do the same?"

"Force people to kill themselves?"

"Of course not. That takes a particular kind of pathology. But 
let's say it was something else - another response you were able 
to provoke. What if you could stop people from killing?"

"There's no basis for thinking that anyone can do that."

"Yet our entire criminal justice system is predicated around the 
idea. Punishment and rehabilitation as twin arms of the law. 
Besides - up until this case - had you ever thought that it was 
possible to kill like this? Wouldn't it be better for everyone if 
we could stop rapists, wife-beaters and murderers from 
reoffending, and guarantee that society would be safe even 
after their release? Wouldn't you love to be able to do that?"

"There is such a thing as free will," she said. Defensive, angry 
to be under attack by hypothetical questions, particularly ones 
with such ethically treacherous answers.

"Free will for killers versus the lives of innocent? Not much of a 
bargain. You think that makes your morals superior to Mulder's?"

What? Of course not. "No. He's doing an important job."

"And if he succeeds, he'll lock up the perpetrator for the rest of 
his life. Or maybe we'll get a conviction in a state with the 
death penalty. Or perhaps we'll get really lucky and the dumb 
bastard will try to shoot it out with the arresting officers and 
we'll save the expense of a trial. You think that respects free 
will? You think Mulder respects free will for murderers and 
rapists?"

"I don't know what you're trying to prove here."

"That you're just squeamish about getting your hands dirty. That 
your ethics are just an excuse for inaction."

"Why did you really get me to come down here?"

"To tell you not to get in Mulder's way."

"I'm not."

"Good. I wouldn't want you to get hurt."

What the hell was that supposed to mean? Patterson didn't give her 
the chance to ask, immediately shifting the subject to her 
research work and its implications. 

Off-balance and uncomfortable, it was a relief to be back on 
familiar ground. She gratefully accepted the opportunity to talk 
from a position of intellectual strength.

An hour later Patterson suggested that if she was interested in 
applying for a job with the Bureau then he'd be happy to put in a 
good word for her.

----------

The scribbles were piling up thick and fast which bothered Mulder 
a lot. Why hadn't he found trash cans full of discarded drawings 
in the victims' homes? 

Yet, despite their best efforts, the investigators hadn't found 
more than a handful of iterations. Fresh every day? The old ones 
carefully discarded to make way for the new and improved?

He dug through the pile and found the tattooed victim's file. The 
sketch he'd handed to the tattooist, three weeks before his death. 
The tattoo itself - as close to a clone of the image as the tattoo 
artist could deliver given the vagaries of flesh and color 
matching. The image scribbled on the yellow post-it note that had 
been found after the man's death. Different.

Nothing dramatic. The form had remained the same. The big eyes of 
the creature that might have been a bird, or a bat, or a griffin, 
or a gargoyle, or whatever pattern the brain might choose to 
impose on an exercise in style and symmetry.

Certainly it was not a real animal. 

Images side by side, Mulder looked for the differences. Three fast 
lines defining the eyebrow ridge rather than two heavier ones. A 
star at the center of the left pupil rather than a swirl. A 
something, a freshness perhaps, a surety of touch that made the 
final image drawn somehow more potent than what had gone before. 
As if the creature had come to life - escaped from the flat plane 
of the page to find three-dimensional life.

Had that been the reason why the man had asked for the tattoo? An 
attempt to create a living image. Had he been disappointed that it 
was such a good copy of the original?

The basketball bounced against the wall again, monotonous rhythm, 
empty noise. What did it mean?

In a case full of patterns, where the hell was a pattern when you 
wanted one? He'd checked phone records, bank accounts, hobbies, 
magazine subscriptions, vacations and work histories. Gone back to 
childhood, drawn loose grids connecting parents, families and 
friends. Found coincidence and statistical probability guilty on 
all charges and seen nothing to tie the victims together.

Thought of that movie, Manhunter. Patterson's festive gift to his 
profilers last Christmas had been a trip to a private screening. 
Smirked at the idea of discovering that the missing link was the 
photographic shop that had handled all their home movies. 

He looked at the geography again. The timelines. Considered junior 
reporter Kate Hammond and Detective Paul Jennings. Added the 
graphics next to the victims on his charts to see if there was a 
pattern there. Were they getting more complex? Simpler? 

He liked Jennings' drawing best.

Maniacal grin at that idea. What did liking have to do with 
anything?

Did they like what they were drawing? Did they practice and 
practice discarding every false start along the way? In pursuit of 
perfection. Not the perfection of a draughtsman or an artist. 
Something else. Something about the intersection of lines, the 
size of the eyes, the texture of the wings?

He dug into the desk drawer, extracted a set of compasses and a 
protractor, set to work on measurements. Numerology? Had he 
checked birthdays and birthday cards? What about horoscopes? 

Ridiculous - to be overwhelmed like this and clutching at straws. 
What the hell was wrong with him?

He sipped at the glass of milk, disgusted to find that it had been 
sitting on his desk for so long that the milk left a ring on the 
glass and a sour taste in his mouth. 

When all else fails start writing.

The PC bounced to life; the c:\ was welcome and familiar, a 
comfort in the confusion of the strange drawings that lined the 
room. The word processor looked reassuringly confident. The FBI 
profile header information in the blank template document gave him 
something solid and tangible to play with. Boxes to fill in; 
datestamps, names, places, paragraph headings just inviting him to 
write. 

OK. That was more like it.

---------

2000

Nothing had been talked over. Nothing had been fixed. They'd done 
what that they'd always done as partners and put the past on hold 
in favor of cracking the case. 

They'd done what they did as friends. A friendship built on 
respect as Maggie Scully had once described it, and they respected 
each other's boundaries. They spent so much time together, more 
time than most married couples - privacy was a gift and a tradable 
commodity. This was going to cost him; Mulder knew it. 

It was costing them both.

So many traps all around them as they danced. Nothing carefree 
about having to stare at your feet every time you made a move. 
Minefields and no-go zones. Scully's monthly cycles, the hormones 
and trips to the clinic for extra injections that were imposing 
this strange new rhythm on their lives. Another thing they didn't 
talk about. 

If you don't talk about it, it's not real.

And people used to ask him why he'd never gone into practice as a 
psychologist.

Still, they would have to talk about Diana. It was the only way to 
break the spell. He just wished he could think of a way of doing 
it without hurting Scully more.

When Skinner called Mulder up to his office for a pre-meeting 
meeting the AD looked almost apologetic. "We've run out of time. 
The case is attracting press interest. The Bureau's under 
pressure."

Mulder shrugged. "You're forming a task force to handle it."

"You and Agent Scully can return to your normal duties."

"I want to stay on the case."

"There could be a lot of history dredged up."

"Whether I'm there or not."

"And Agent Scully?"

Mulder nodded, acknowledging Skinner's offer and grateful for it, 
even as he rejected it. "I'm not ashamed of what I did."

Skinner sat back, looking momentarily thrown by Mulder's words. 
"There's no reason why you should be." He hesitated, looking 
straight past Mulder for a moment before focusing again. "I'm sure 
the team will benefit from your experience."

Mulder watched his boss, puzzling over the show of nerves. "You're 
more embarrassed than I am."

"I won't mention your hospitalization to them. It's not really 
relevant."

"You mean my emergency committal for psychiatric evaluation? 
You're right. It isn't relevant."

"If you were in trouble, you'd tell someone, wouldn't you? Scully. 
Me. You'd get help."

Fucking hell shit. Skinner didn't trust him. He should have seen 
this coming. 

After Pincus, it had been Skinner who'd dialed 911 and had him 
strapped into a nice quiet hospital bed for the night. After that 
relic showed up, triggering some kind of mind-reading act and 
sending his brain into a tailspin, it had been Skinner who'd 
signed off on all the medical insurance forms that followed. 

Mulder's words came out in a rush, tinged red with anger, bright 
with disbelief. "You know what, sir, I wasn't in trouble then, and 
I'm in less trouble than anyone on this case now. Worry about 
them."


====== 
END of Part 5


=========
1988

Bill Patterson had his chair adjusted to its highest position and 
Mulder had to admit it was working. Sitting here, facing him across 
the desk, Mulder was feeling about as low as they come.

Hennessey looked harassed, uncomfortable, as if he'd sooner 
be anywhere rather than here in Bill Patterson's office. He wouldn't 
meet Mulder's eyes and that bothered Mulder more than anything.

"Three weeks. Three weeks - and you give me this?" Patterson turned 
the profile face down on the desk as if the mere sight of it was an 
insult. "I could have given the case to a classroom full of rookies, 
if this was what I was waiting for. Agent Hennessey, do you have 
anything to add to Agent Mulder's profile?"

Hennessey looked like he was waiting for the ground to swallow him 
up.

Patterson tried again. "Agent Hennessey, do you think Agent Mulder's 
assessment is correct and complete?"

"No."

"Then you're preparing your own behavioral profile for the UNSUB?"

"Yes."

"Good. Then you're dismissed."

Hennessey got up quickly, ignoring Mulder's mumbled "Dave?" as he 
walked out of the room.

Just Patterson and Mulder now and the agent almost flinched as 
Patterson rose from his chair and came to sit in the seat recently 
vacated by Hennessey. "A con man?" Patterson said, as if the profile 
was some kind of bad joke on Mulder's part.

"A con man," agreed Mulder. Well aware that by all the usual 
criteria he was himself one of those rookies who Patterson claimed 
could have come up with the same profile in a fraction of the time.

"High IQ. Over thirty. White collar crime - bank, insurance, real 
estate fraud. Very successful. Been interviewed numerous times by 
law enforcement officers but never convicted and probably not even 
charged. Multiple identities, homes, bank accounts. Disciplined and 
imaginative."

Mulder nodded, ignoring the sarcasm in Patterson's tone. The profile 
was accurate. After three weeks looking for the link between the 
victims Mulder had concluded that the link was the killer and that, 
as he'd never seen the same unknown phone number or heard about the 
same mysterious stranger twice, it was a fair bet that he'd been 
many different people. "And a psychopath," added Mulder, seeing that 
his boss was waiting for some kind of verbal response.

"Why is he killing them?"

"The ultimate rush. Money wasn't doing it for him anymore."

"Multiple identities?"

"Generally he'll live alone. Though he may have told his neighbors 
that it's just a temporary thing - job-related move - wife joining 
him later. There may even be a wife, though she'll only know one, or 
at most two, of his identities."

"Which gets us nowhere. He could be anybody - unostentatious, quiet, 
polite, well-groomed."

Drives a late model sedan, added Mulder, though he was smart enough 
not to say it out loud, suddenly amused and trying not to let 
Patterson see it. Sure, the profile sucked. But it was right. Their 
Unknown Subject was like a giant reflecting mirror ball - no two 
people would see the same man.

"Mulder," snapped Patterson, aware that he'd lost the agent's 
attention. "I asked you - how do we find him?"

"He'll always approach them in the same way. He'll have a routine 
that works. I'm thinking that he meets them at something like a 
trade show or an exhibition. Somewhere busy, where they'll be off 
their guard. Conversation starts on one subject, five minutes later 
he's getting the story of their lives and choosing his targets."

Patterson shook his head, disappointed, tight-lipped. "The art. 
Where's the art? I thought that maybe there was a spark of something 
better in you. That you understood what needs to be done. I don't 
need to hear that someone's painting a picture; I want you to show 
me the artist."

Mulder sat very still, incapable of arguing, but refusing to make 
himself an easier target.

"You're off the case," announced Patterson, standing up suddenly and 
looming over Mulder's chair. Mulder didn't bother to look up. 
"There's a job in San Diego. Somebody cutting up prostitutes, except 
he made a mistake and took the niece of a Federal Judge. They want 
to look like they're doing something. You'll fit right in."

Fuck you, sir.

----------

San Diego felt like a vacation and not just because of the weather 
or the fact that he'd been able to sneak away for the occasional 
stroll along the beach. The profile had taken a couple of hours. The 
strategy had been agreed without so much as a territorial dispute 
between the Police Department and the Bureau. It was the PD's show 
and Mulder was a welcome consultant, an analyst assisting the 
preparation of a shortlist of suspects, and ultimately he would be 
the secret weapon during the interviews.

Which left him plenty of time to sketch bat-like things on the backs 
of envelopes and scrape griffins into the sand. Puzzled over it, 
played with wing shapes and symmetry, studied tangents and 
intersections, sought out depth and life in the eyes of the things. 
Dark magic in the images. He knew it, but still couldn't feel the 
pull. 

He'd chatted to Diana a couple of times, split the call between 
murmured words about empty beds and flippant commentary on Bill 
Patterson's parentage.

The call that bothered him had been the one he'd made to Hennessey. 
So Patterson had asked him to prepare a press release? Time to go 
pro-active. Remind people of those strange drawings. Ask again if 
anyone had seen their like before. 

Mulder called Patterson from his hotel room. "I don't think we 
should be publishing the sketches, sir."

"If we don't then we're allowing people under this guy's thrall to 
die."

"I don't think anyone already under his control will come forward."

"Then it'll give their families the chance to intervene."

"I don't think so. I think we may do more harm than good. I've been 
reviewing the files."

"Really. I thought I told you that you were off the case. I was 
under the impression that we haven't made any arrests in San Diego."

"Detective Paul Jennings, the New York victim - he may not have even 
met the killer. He wasn't working the case but he did ask for a copy 
of the autopsy report on the tattooed victim. I think he may have 
just started obsessing over the deaths from there, studying the 
images. The timing's right. He stopped going to the gym. Looking at 
his car usage, his mileages went down."

"Meaning?"

"I think he used to go driving when he wanted to think, but you 
can't draw and drive at the same time."

"So why did we only find a couple of examples of those things in his 
house?"

"He destroyed any that weren't perfect."

"Do you realize how ridiculous this sounds?"

"Yes."

"Then do your job, and I'll do mine."

"Sir," he said, but it was too late, Patterson had already hung up 
the phone. 

----------

2000

There was an edge to the meeting, a cold snap between Mulder and 
Skinner that made the other agents uncomfortable. Like party guests 
trying not to witness the warring marriage concealed below the 
polite veneer. 

Scully frowned, feeling as if she was supposed to referee. A 
rulebook and a clearly marked playing field might have helped. 

Mulder's rendition of the behavioral profile was delivered without a 
pause for breath or any opportunity for debate. 

Neil Felden, the current cream of the Violent Crimes crop, saw 
straight through it. "You're saying that the killer could be just 
about anyone. And the victims could also be just about anyone."

Mulder smiled, which bothered Scully more than she liked to admit. 
It seemed to bother Skinner too; he tensed, as if preparing to warn 
Felden off. 

But Mulder only nodded. "Don't look behind the curtain," he said. 
"Statistically, the killer's male. Certainly, the killer's very 
sophisticated. He understands police procedures, which is why we're 
coming up blank on the background checks, and he knows the Props 
case inside out."

Felden returned the smile. "So we should arrest you?"

Skinner cleared his throat, dragging the meeting's attention back to 
the whiteboard with a wave of his hand. "I suggest we move on to 
discussing where we go from here. Agent Felden, if you'd write up 
the actions."

----------

1988

Conversations with Patterson, Fowley and Hennessey had just taken 
him round in circles. Except whereas before he'd felt merely 
concerned, now he was starting to feel panic-stricken. Patterson had 
put a continent between him and the action, and it was setting his 
alarm bells ringing.

The bottom line was Patterson didn't want to know. Mulder had made 
it official, confirmed his disapproval of Patterson's plan to 
publish the sketches in writing. He wasn't surprised that Patterson 
didn't care.

Fine. Well he cared; he cared enough to risk his career over it. 
Patterson wasn't going to forgive him for this, but that was OK, 
because if he was right and he ignored it then he would never 
forgive himself. The next memo he wrote to Patterson was firmer, 
possibilities replaced by probabilities, likelihoods replaced by 
certainties, and it was copied to Patterson's boss.

San Diego PD were a blessed relief from the ISU. Maybe he'd get a 
job out here. 

They sent a patrol car to collect him from the motel, which would 
normally annoy him, but today it felt right. Today it got him 
through overcrowded Christmas shopping streets and meant that he 
didn't need to go hunting for a parking spot.

The detective leading the case greeted him as an honored guest. "It 
worked," he said, succinct and to the point. "Coffee?" he added, 
pointing towards the tray that one of the younger officers had just 
brought in.

Mulder smiled, nonplussed by the generosity, and apologized for 
failing to bring the doughnuts.

"At least you didn't bring your posse."

"Sorry?"

"Fibbies show up, all you get is an attitude and a team of twenty 
who think the locals are for walking on. You showed up alone, did 
your job, and kept out of our way."

Ah. Something else for Patterson to lay into him about when he got 
home. Apart from a cursory phone call to the local office on 
arrival, he hadn't been in contact with the Bureau. Apart from a 
profile that had taken a couple of hours to write and present, and 
fielding the occasional enquiry from the local PD, he'd basically 
ignored the reason he'd been sent out here. Patterson was going to 
kill him. Rightly so. 

Mulder nodded, nervous and ashamed, and suddenly feeling very much 
like the kid. "So what have you got for me?"

"You said with the right incentives, we might get this guy to 
confess. Are you ready?"

Oh fuck. He was about 2600 miles away from ready, but he didn't dare 
let it sound that way. Smiling, faking it for the assembled cops. 
"You start the interview. I'll watch. Butt in if I need to." 

He'd given them a three-block radius around one of the crime scenes 
as the likely home of the killer. Suggested a military background 
and a fascination with knives and memorabilia. The only freaky thing 
he'd put in the profile was the observation that it was unlikely 
that the man had been arrested before, but even that came from the 
mundane observation that he was certainly a local resident, and that 
the usual suspects had all been rounded up by the PD long before 
Mulder had received the case.

The detective had asked about that. "From clean record to killer?" 

Mulder had just shaken his head and told them that their man had 
been careful, but he'd never been clean. 

If they'd doubted the diagnosis initially then they didn't when they 
went back to the files and started to reinterview all those 
witnesses and contacts who they'd discounted the first time around. 
One of them was now sitting in the small interrogation room on the 
other side of the mirror.

An hour later, flimsy alibis and weak memories safely on tape for 
the record. The suspect still sounded oddly confident, having 
cheerfully turned down a lawyer in favor of bravado. "You seem 
pretty sharp," he said, smiling at the detectives across the desk, 
"How come you haven't caught this scumbag?" 

That was Mulder's cue to intervene. He picked up three examples from 
the suspect's knife collection, all already booked into evidence, 
all neatly labeled in their plastic bags. The man hadn't hesitated 
to offer them for forensic analysis; he'd just asked for a promise 
that they'd come back to him unharmed. It was a safe bet that they 
hadn't found the murder weapon yet.

Mulder walked into the room. He handed the senior detective a note: 
He wants to tell you about the knives. A brief nod as a reply and 
Mulder left again still carrying his selection of weapons.

"Who's he?"

"Some Fed - says he wants to send those three back to DC - see if 
there's any trace evidence."

"Those knives?" the man said, obviously amused.

"He's some kind of forensics hotshot, thinks those might be the best 
match to the wounds."

"Right!"

The detective acknowledged the mocking tone. "I figure he just 
picked up the three baddest looking mothers. He sends them a 
hundred, and his bosses'll know he's a waste of time."

"He's just scared of them, so he doesn't see. Never used one in his 
life."

"You know better, right? Army?"

"Special Ops."

Mulder smiled. If he'd written the script himself, it couldn't have 
gone better.

Half an hour later, with a tape full of details of the victims' 
wounds and the weapons that had caused them, that the man couldn't 
possibly know unless he'd inflicted them himself, Mulder was hit by 
a revelation.

A soft case. He was here because it was a soft case, not because the 
FBI needed to show the flag. If this was PR then the twenty man team 
with the attitude would be in here, sending out the locals to do the 
scut work and leaving shoe prints on the furniture. 

And he wasn't here because it was too offbeat for the locals to 
handle. Had they really needed his help, his contribution could just 
as easily have been made by phone or fax.

He was here because Patterson wanted him out of town. Patterson 
wanted him alone. Stripped of the support systems. No Hennessey. No 
Fowley. Not even the danger of intervention by the Bureau itself. 
Out of sight, he was supposed to go out of his mind.

Bastard.

Patterson had sent him here to die or at least to get a better 
profile on the suicide killings. Same fucking difference. He knew 
exactly what Bill had meant about studying the art. He was supposed 
to be suicidal by now.

Bastard.

Was Patterson planning on swooping in and rescuing him at the vital 
moment? Or wouldn't he even bother to do that. Provided Mulder sent 
in the right profile would Patterson even care?

Christ. It was tempting to stay out here. Spend a few days catching 
up on some midwinter rays. Maybe he'd even call into the field 
office and see if they needed a spare pair of hands? The PD probably 
had a couple of cold cases on file, if he asked them nicely.

"Agent Mulder."

"Detective Scott."

"I said we've got what we need. Unless you've got any questions for 
him?"

Mulder shook his head. His name wouldn't even appear on the arrest 
report - an invisible week's work. "I'll leave you to it."

"It's been a pleasure. Anytime you're in town..."

"You're welcome."

------

2000

Skinner had joined Mulder and Scully on the second trip to the 
prison, curious to see if he could spot the changes that Mulder had 
described. He'd led the team that had recaptured Props in 1991, 
three years after the original arrest. The first time his path had 
crossed Mulder's.

Mulder had finished up in the hospital that time as well.

Mulder handled the introductions. "You remember Assistant Director 
Skinner?"

"Assistant Director?" Props smiled and went into his show. "It's an 
honor. I thought Fox didn't respect me any more. I underestimated 
you, Fox."

"The AD just wanted to see how far downhill you'd rolled."

"And here was me thinking I had something you wanted."

Skinner stepped in. "Do you?"

"Maybe."

Skinner kept his tone dismissive. "You think you're Hannibal Lecter 
and get to set the terms?"

"Hey, all I know is somebody's been drawing my pictures again. Was 
it you, Fox?"

Mulder nodded. "Yeah, don't you know - the more murders, the better 
the overtime. Who's feeding them the pictures, Monty?"

"What's in it for me?"

Mulder smiled. "The warm glow of controlling whether people live or 
die? You must have missed that feeling."

"Is that why you do it?"

"You don't know anything." Mulder turned and headed for the door. 
Both Skinner and Scully looked at him, asking for guidance, the 
briefest of glances told them that he was expecting them to remain.

"So," mused Props, "Spooky's running away again?"

"Agent Mulder thinks you've had your fifteen minutes of fame."

"And if he's wrong? What's in it for me?"

"Prove to me you've got something worth having, then we'll talk."

"Fair enough. How about a show of good faith. Let's say I give you 
the name of the next victim?"

Skinner waved for him to carry on talking.

------

Mulder had watched the rest of the discussion on a video monitor in 
the comfort of the warden's outer office. By the time Skinner and 
Scully finished the interview and joined him, he was leaning back 
against the wall, head effectively supporting a good slice of his 
body weight. He waited in silence as Skinner swapped notes with 
Scully on how to follow up the information that Props had offered.

Scully pulled him into the debate. "Mulder?" 

"He's playing."

"And the name he gave us?"

"Hasn't even met the killer we're chasing." Mulder sighed. "Though 
we still need to check her out. She's obviously linked to Props."

Which made Scully's next question inevitable. "So do we check her 
out or does somebody else go - Agent Felden maybe?"

"Props won't accept anyone below Assistant Director level now."

"Then we'd better get it over with," said Skinner.

Mulder nodded. "I'll get the background check rolling. See who else 
Props has been talking to."

Skinner was thrown by that. "You aren't coming?"

"I can do more from here."

Scully frowned, trying to read him. "You think we're wasting our 
time on this?"

"That's not what I said."

"Just that it would be a waste of your time?"

Still resting against the wall, Mulder stared up at the ceiling. 
What the hell was he supposed to tell them? That Spooky wasn't just 
a nickname, it was a fact?

Skinner broke the spell. "Agent Scully and I will handle it. Agent 
Mulder, if you find anything on the woman you'll call us."

------------

1988

It would be laughable if it weren't quite so sick. Patterson had 
sent him to San Diego to get suicidal and Mulder had turned it into 
a vacation. 

Congratulations, Bill. 

Mulder toasted the thought with the airplane coffee, trying hard to 
stop the fever of activity in his brain from finding further 
expression in his body language. The passenger in the neighboring 
seat was already nervous enough, though Mulder had been careful to 
skim through only the least graphic of the photos and forensics 
notes in the file. 

Still, a plane was no place for a wild animal and Mulder was 
struggling to play it cool. 

He'd rehearsed the confrontation with his boss so often now that 
every time he closed his eyes it played again. There ought to be 
some pleasure in having dodged Patterson's bullet, in knowing that 
this time he hadn't lived up to the man's profile of him. 

Yet the pleasure wouldn't come, which just made Mulder angrier. He 
could visualize the look of disappointment in Patterson's eyes. To 
make matters worse, he had no way to back up the allegation. A 
delighted police department had expressed its gratitude to the 
Bureau for their support in capturing a killer. In fact, it was a 
safe bet he would be getting a commendation for his week's work - a 
shining example of inter-agency cooperation. Except Mulder knew that 
the case was just the icing and that he'd been sent out there to 
bake a completely different kind of cake.

Bastard. The pencil in his fingers snapped and the passenger in the 
next seat jumped as if he'd been shot.  

The stewardess appeared as if by magic at Mulder's side. "Is 
something wrong, sir?"

"May I borrow a pencil?"

His neighbor flinched and Mulder wanted to tell him that if he was 
going to launch an attack he wouldn't need a freshly sharpened 
pencil as a weapon. So many ways to die. Like you wouldn't believe. 
Actually the man was wearing the same kind of wire-rimmed glasses as 
Bill Patterson did, which was just asking for trouble.

Mulder smiled as the stewardess handed him a pen and moved quickly 
to start filling in a fresh set of answers in the already completed 
crossword puzzle. This time ignoring the clues and focusing on 
getting as many federal crimes as possible to fit into the grid. 
Maybe if he did a good enough job he could sell it to the staff 
magazine?

It was a hell of a long flight.

Wisely, given that it was past midnight when Mulder got back to DC, 
Patterson had switched his home phone over to the answering machine. 
No matter - it would keep. Fury this hot didn't just dissipate 
overnight.

The computer welcomed him. The first two memos he'd sent to 
Patterson had been sharply worded, but the revised profile and 
victimology were now so clear in Mulder's head that he was 
absolutely determined to hammer the point home. The words flowed 
easily.

-------

Next morning in the offices of the ISU Patterson was quiet, very 
quiet, and very, very angry. 

It wasn't so much the contents of the new profile that Mulder had 
prepared, as the fact that it had also been copied to Patterson's 
boss and to Reggie Purdue the Special Agent in Charge of the suicide 
killings case.

"We keep disagreements to ourselves. We show a united front to 
outsiders. It's hard enough to get the work taken seriously without 
you undermining my authority by attacking a fellow profiler."

"I'm disagreeing with a strategy proposal - I'm not attacking 
anyone."

"Nice distinction. How do you think it looks to the Assistant 
Director, to the Deputy Director, because I can guarantee this'll go 
higher? There's no way we can keep this quiet."

"Why would I want it kept quiet?"

"Families protect one another."

"I think you must have misread my personal file, sir."

"I read it. It's why I've always made allowances for you. Glossed 
over your errors, ignored your attitude. I've been wrong. You need 
help, professional help."

"What? You're going to order me into counseling?"

"We're past that. The Bureau counselors help people who are willing 
to help themselves. I'm thinking a formal psych consult would be a 
good thing."

Mulder almost laughed, but didn't, hysteria already too close to 
boiling over. He'd never thought Patterson could do something quite 
that petty. "I disagree with you, so you threaten to haul me up in 
front of a shrink?"

"Problems with authority. Unresolved issues with your childhood. 
Convenient memory gaps surrounding traumatic events. Homicidal 
thoughts. Suicidal tendencies." Patterson pulled a tape machine from 
his desk, smiled as revelation dawned on Mulder's face. "Paranoid 
reactions."

True enough. The paranoia was kicking in full force now. Mulder 
digging deep to remember all the conversations in this office that 
Bill Patterson had so cheerfully encouraged and which no one else 
was ever supposed to hear. 

His brain paraphrased the discussions for him, stacked the odds 
against being able to explain them away in a psychiatrist's office. 
All the role plays and the angry debates as Patterson urged him to 
dig deep to conjure up the things that could drive a man to kill, 
the encouragement to look for the darkness within to understand the 
darkness without.

Have you ever felt suicidal, Mulder? 

Have you ever thought about killing the man who took your sister? 

Did you ever wonder if your memory loss might be masking your own 
guilt?

Do you hate your father?

Of course...

"I never knew you were that petty, Bill."

"This isn't about me. This is about protecting the division. I fall: 
we all fall. And people will die without us. I can't let you destroy 
the respect that's taken years to build."

He had to get out of here. Get out of here now, before Patterson 
managed to get something else on record that Mulder would regret. He 
kept his voice cool. "If one disagreement can destroy it, maybe it's 
not worth protecting." 

"Tell that to the next set of parents who finds their kid's been 
taken in the night. The next big brother who loses his sister."

Enough. He stood up, smoothed the sleeves of his jacket and headed 
for the door. 

Patterson's voice rose a notch as he attempted to reassert control 
over the situation, or perhaps just looking for another entry in his 
tape collection. "Where the hell are you going, Agent?"

"I'm going to talk to Dave." Mulder slammed the door behind him as 
he left the room.



=============
END of Part 6


=========


He looked around the office but Dave Hennessey was nowhere to be 
seen. It was still early but it wasn't that early. Everyone else 
was at their desks. Was Dave out doing interviews or something? He 
glanced up at the day planner but saw nothing to account for the 
man's absence. The chart was an imperfect method but usually a good 
place to start.

Swallowing hard, ignoring the uncomfortable looks on the faces of 
the other profilers, he headed to Karen Gardiner's desk. "Do you 
know where Dave is?"

She shrugged. "I was expecting him in by now. Team meeting at 9. I 
guess something came up. Are you OK, Mulder?"

"When did you last talk to him? Who would have seen him last?"

"Yesterday. Is this about your latest memo on the suicide killer? 
It's a bit late to consult him now, isn't it?"

"I need to see him."

"He's not here!" she said, sounding increasingly exasperated.

Mulder turned to face the other agents. "Does anyone know where 
Dave Hennessey is?"

Blank looks and murmurs about Dave only being a few minutes late 
followed. Mulder picked up the phone; got no reply from Hennessey's 
home. No one over in VCU had seen him either. Reggie Purdue, the 
SAC, assumed that he would be at the ISU team meeting. After all, 
that was what he'd said would be his first job for today. Purdue 
was expecting to see Dave at about midday, but promised Mulder that 
if he showed up earlier then he'd let him know.

The other profilers went into their meeting. Patterson stood at the 
door waiting for Mulder to join them but the agent headed to the 
elevators instead. 

There was nothing, absolutely nothing, wrong. Mulder knew that. He 
repeated the statement as the elevator carried him up out of the 
bowels of the Quantico building and towards daylight. Where the 
hell was he going to go now?

Panic - raw and bloody, burning like acid in his throat, making his 
breathing fail.

A security officer stepped forward, checked his badge so he could 
address him by name. "Agent Mulder, everything OK? Do you need 
medical assistance? Sit down a minute?"

"No, I've got to..."

"Give it a minute. I'll get you some water."

As soon as the guard left his side he was out through the door and 
though he hadn't realized where he was going until he reached his 
car suddenly he knew exactly what he had to do.

He scrambled back through his memory, finally recalling Hennessey's 
address, or at least his apartment block - they'd stopped off there 
one night to pick up a missing file. Why hadn't Hennessey's wife 
protested about him arriving home that late and going straight back 
out again?

Oh God, had they split up? Hennessey had had a wife, kids as well, 
talked about them having a swing in the yard. Talked about a lot of 
things that didn't seem to match the apartment block that Mulder 
had seen him go into. 

So Hennessey had been alone then? Mulder in San Diego. Was that why 
Bill had sent him away? No wonder Patterson had looked so shocked 
when Mulder suggested that the soft case was supposed to drive him 
over the edge. What if it was Hennessey who was Bill's pick? What 
if Hennessey was the man deemed best suited to seeing the art?

Christ. What if Mulder's return bearing memos and arguments had 
twisted the knife a little deeper into Hennessey's gut. "Don't you 
dare die, Dave. Don't you fucking dare."

On Patterson's orders the Quantico guards stopped him at the gate.

Ten furious minutes later and some kid from the VCU was driving Fox 
Mulder and Karen Gardiner to the scene of a car accident.

"They got the driver out but they weren't hopeful," said the 
traffic cop who was supervising the scene, and who took pity on the 
distraught looking Feds, despite them being Feds.

Mulder looked at the driver's seat. The way the steering wheel had 
bent under impact. The fold in the metalwork where the tree had 
stopped the car in an instant.

"We'll be checking out the car of course. Tampering, mechanical 
failure. Unless you want your people to do that. But." The man 
shrugged.

Mulder tried to phrase it as carefully as he could. "You think this 
is driver error?"

"Straight road, good weather, single vehicle accident, no skid 
marks. Heart attack maybe?"

Maybe.

"There's some paperwork in the car," the cop added, "Bureau stuff. 
I've got to bag it and book it in, but if you want to take a look 
first. He waved vaguely at the car.

Mulder stepped forward, knowing exactly what he was going to see. 
Blood. On the passenger's seat, a manila folder, FBI logo and 
casefile number - the suicide killer's art in glorious technicolor 
and tidy black and white. Blood. A postcard sized note fixed on the 
dashboard - a freehand drawing of a bat or maybe a bird. Blood.

"I need a copy of that sketch. As soon as possible." He handed the 
cop a business card.

"I'll get them to fax it through."

"Thanks, Officer," Mulder checked the badge, "Officer Denton. 
Thanks."

The hospital doctors were surprised that Hennessey had made it as 
far as their doors. Head, chest and spinal injuries. The fractured 
femurs and other damage was hardly worth mentioning in the 
circumstances. 

If he made it through surgery. If he ever regained consciousness. 
If he ever breathed for himself again. If he ever did those things 
then maybe, Mulder shivered, the sick feeling all-pervasive now, 
maybe Hennessey would wonder why he hadn't followed Detective Paul 
Jennings example and shot himself. 

Karen was crying. Mulder was too numb even to do that.

He vaguely recognized Hennessey's wife, or was it his ex-wife? 
Anyway he'd seen her before, a smiling face by the basketball court 
a couple of years back. "Mrs. Hennessey? I'm Fox Mulder. I work 
with your husband."

She nodded, almost tumbling into his arms and Mulder held her as 
her head sank down against his chest. The two of them locked 
together in an awkward embrace, waiting it out in silence, rocking 
slightly, leaving Mulder not quite sure if she was leaning on him 
or if he was leaning on her.

The lull lasted for a couple of minutes before another man arrived 
to take charge of Dave's ex. Mulder knew it for certain then, if 
not yet an ex, then she would be soon. One way or another.

He'd have to check the insurance policies. Maybe they didn't pay 
out against suicide? That would explain the car crash.

It explained nothing.

Why did you do it, Dave? What the hell were you thinking? Why 
didn't you call me, you stupid bastard?

Did you solve the case, Dave?

Do you know who did this to you?

You could have left me a fucking note!

The wall was reassuringly solid, the blood decorating Mulder's 
knuckles satisfyingly red. 

Karen was holding his hand now. Dave's wife looked scared. Her 
boyfriend looked like he was getting ready to throw his body into 
battle to protect her.

"It should have been Patterson," Mulder said conversationally to 
Karen as the ER doctor checked his fingers for damage. "It wasn't 
the wall's fault," he added, in case anybody misunderstood what 
should have been Bill Patterson.

"Nothing broken, that I can see," said the doctor. "We'll do an 
X-Ray as a precaution. You'll need to be careful with the stitches. 
There'll be swelling, stiffness; there's a risk of infection." The 
list of dos and don'ts soon passed Mulder's interest threshold.

Karen tried to smile. "Lucky it's not your gun hand, Mulder."

Yeah, how lucky can you get?

----------

Mulder quickly tracked down Officer Denton, who'd been supervising 
the accident site. He passed them directly back to the FBI. "Your 
people showed up about ten minutes after you two left. Took 
everything - car, evidence bags, the lot, back to Quantico."

Of course they had. Not only was Hennessey one of their men, he was 
also the latest victim of a serial killer. Sudden recall of the 
whole damned mess. He should have made that call and secured the 
scene himself. What the hell had he been thinking?

Karen, too.

Patterson was going to have a field day with this. 

He remembered the kid from VCU who'd driven them out there and who 
they'd left behind. Mulder had grabbed the car-keys from him and 
headed to the hospital with Karen joining him seconds later.

The kid! Christ, the man was older than he was. Where the hell had 
he picked up this crap? But still, this had nothing to do with age, 
everything to do with innocence. The innocent had quit accountancy 
for this.

The kid had asked them what to do. 

And Karen had told him to, "Call it in."

Ah, Karen had done her duty then. Figured. One screw up from the 
ISU was bad enough.

When they got back to Quantico, Mulder wasn't surprised that he was 
refused access to the shattered car. He was even less surprised 
that they refused to copy Hennessey's files and documents for him. 
"Patterson's orders."

Bastard.

He tried to sound reasonable and professional when he finally 
caught up with his boss, back in the ISU offices. "May I see the 
items removed from Agent Hennessey's car?"

"Why?"

"They may be pertinent to the case he was working on."

"The case he was working on. You were taken off that case over a 
week ago."

"I'd like to return to the case."

"Put an agent with self-admitted psychological problems on a case 
involving the attempted suicide of a colleague? I don't think that 
would be very appropriate. Need I remind you, you failed to attend 
today's team meeting. I was going to put you on light duties."

"Don't do this, Bill."

"But in the light of your walk-out this morning, I've decided that 
administrative leave pending your psychiatric evaluation will be 
more appropriate. I've made my recommendation to the Assistant 
Director."

Mulder's reply was slow, the words barely audible. "You arrogant 
bastard."

"In the circumstances, I don't think I can ignore such open 
insubordination, Agent Mulder. Abusive language to a superior 
officer qualifies as misconduct, sufficient for me to order your 
immediate suspension from duty pending an appearance before OPR. I 
think the stress of this situation has been too much for you. I'd 
like your badge and your weapon."

"I hope the tape's running. You fucking arrogant bastard. 
Hennessey's one breath away from dying and you want to play games 
with me? Who's your next victim, Bill? Which asshole are you going 
to sucker into it next?"

"Go home, Agent Mulder. Before you say something else that you'll 
regret. Go home, before I ask for that psych evaluation to be done 
on an in-patient basis."

---------

He'd found Hennessey's keys at the hospital. Though found perhaps 
wasn't quite the right word.

Just because he'd popped the contents of Dave's suit pockets into a 
plastic bag and labeled them, it didn't make it right. Even if he 
wasn't suspended, he couldn't legitimately do this. But sometimes 
what he couldn't do was exactly what he had to do.

The apartment was tidy, better than tidy actually. But then that 
might just be the way Hennessey liked it. Clear desk at night, no 
candy wrappers under the car seats - Dave was a neat kind of a guy.

The books on the shelves were just books.

The clothes in the closet were just clothes.

The canned stuff in the kitchen made Mulder smile. Angry rather 
than amused. Gotcha, he observed, seeing patterns in the anarchy. 
Beans next to peaches and that made no sense unless you liked 
disorder, in which case you weren't Dave Hennessey, or unless you 
liked the way the gold label looked next to the green.

So what else had Dave left for him?

He started up the computer, found the past couple of day's files 
and slid them onto a floppy disk without even thinking about it.

He'd almost made it out of the apartment when Reggie Purdue arrived 
with Bill Patterson right behind him.

"You got something for us, Agent Mulder?" questioned Purdue.

Mulder handed him the things he'd taken from Hennessey's pockets at 
the hospital, all still safely inside the carefully labeled 
evidence bag. He started to walk away.

"Breaking and entry?" said Patterson.

"I had a key."

"You mean you had Hennessey's keys?"

Mulder shook his head, pointed at the keys in the bag, dug into his 
own coat to reveal the spare he'd had cut on the way over to 
Hennessey's apartment, and which he'd then carefully added to his 
own key-ring. Hennessey would play along with it if he ever woke 
up. It was in a good cause after all.

Purdue looked at him in amused disbelief. 

Patterson looked almost proud.

--------

It was Reggie Purdue who called Mulder and demanded to know what 
the hell he was supposed to do now.

Which struck Mulder as kind of frightening. The SAC had turned to 
the kid who'd been suspended and who was only roaming the streets 
because Patterson hadn't yet completely given up hope that he was 
going to go crawling back to him on his hands and knees and beg for 
forgiveness. Purdue didn't actually know him at all. 

"I've read the profile, Mulder. The one you wrote. You think we 
should stay away from the press?"

"We keep the pictures and sketches out of the papers. We go public 
with the profile of the conman, the idea he might be working trade 
shows, fairs and so on. We talk about the drawings, like they might 
be some kind of a logo - nothing more."

"And how do we tell them he makes people commit suicide?"

"We don't. We talk about the fraud angle. We talk about people 
being driven to suicide as the only way out. The readers will 
invent the rest of the story."

"And what are you going to do?"

Mulder shrugged, because he didn't really have a plan beyond 
staying alive.

---------

2000

It was a relief to leave Mulder behind at the prison searching 
through records of Props' time behind bars. Which surprised Scully 
almost as much as it disturbed her. There had been safety in their 
status quo. Change was frightening, years worth of patterns to 
forget. As if her desire for a child had upset the balance and now, 
center of gravity still uncertain, they needed to learn how to be 
partners again.

A little time apart was a chance to catch her breath and such a 
relief that, with Skinner driving, she'd fallen asleep practically 
as soon as she strapped herself into the passenger seat. She woke 
up confused and more than a little embarrassed. 

Skinner shrugged her off. "You haven't missed anything."

She glanced up at the road markers. Thirty miles closer to the 
witness but otherwise nothing had changed. At least another hour 
until they arrived at their destination.

They might as well start swapping notes, but first there was that 
other matter. "Has Mulder called?"

"No. You want to try him?"

Inevitably, she only got his voicemail. "Could we -" she started, 
not quite sure what she was going to ask for.

"You want to stop for coffee. Call the prison?"

Thirty minutes and two cups later, they still hadn't tracked him 
down. 

"You're worried?" questioned Skinner, pushing past Scully's 
silence. "About whether we're heading into a trap?"

Scully shook her head; the gesture escaping her before she'd 
spotted the trap in Skinner's words. It wasn't their safety that 
she was worried about and Skinner knew it. "Mulder wouldn't send us 
into danger."

"But he would get us out of the way?"

She didn't need to answer the question. She should have known, had 
known, really. If the job had been for real then he'd have insisted 
on coming along. He'd known it was a hoax. He'd actually told them 
so back at the jail and all that had done was add to effectiveness 
of the con trick. The reason he hadn't sent another agent to see 
the woman was because he'd wanted to get her out of the way and 
that trick wouldn't have worked if Skinner hadn't fallen for it 
too.

Perfect plan.

"We need to get back," she said.

Uncomfortable allies. United in frustration as they drove. They 
started to swap notes, but found little to get their teeth into.

Certainly nothing that offered many clues as to why Mulder was 
playing his cards quite so close to his chest.

Skinner gave her what he could. "After Hennessey, the senior 
profiler on the case, got injured, things get a little confused. 
Mulder reacted badly. Patterson suspended him."

"He carried on working the case unofficially?"

"And the SAC, Reggie Purdue, ran with the profile that Mulder had 
written."

Scully hesitated, wanting to push for more, wondering if she could 
do it without making it sound like it mattered. "Which ultimately 
led them to Props."

"But not before Mulder was committed. Patterson found him with a 
gun in his hand." 

She knew this, but raw facts weren't enough. Did Skinner know more? 
"At Diana Fowley's apartment?"

"Apparently she was working for Bill Patterson."

Oh.

---------

1988

Diana Fowley hadn't really expected Mulder to call every night from 
San Diego. It wasn't that kind of relationship - not yet. It 
certainly wasn't the kind in which she could call him while he was 
working out of town, not even to ask whether she should take 
Patterson up on the offer of a little freelance work.

Patterson pushed. "How do a few scribbles destroy the will to live? 
Tell me that and I'll buy the rest of your agenda."

She tried to keep it professional. "My agenda?"

"Your hypothesis then - that certain psychoses are driven by 
external forces, not by internal ones."

"Let's be honest here. I'm saying that some psychoses aren't 
psychoses at all. They're sane responses to triggers we don't 
understand - things that we now call paranormal, or 
extraterrestrial - things we used to explain with religion and 
witchcraft."

"And you think that by investigating the anomalies you may find 
those susceptible to temptation and inoculate them in some way - to 
protect them from these evil influences?"

"Worried I'll put you out of a job?"

Patterson laughed and Diana went home with something to prove.

Rigging the experiment was simple enough. Dangerous work for a 
guinea pig but not for someone who understood the risks.

There were distinct differences between fear, euphoria and 
relaxation. Tangible things, measurable in the patterns of an EEG. 
Quantifiable in terms of blood pressure, pulse rate, skin 
conductivity and respiration patterns. To Diana, it added up; it 
told a story.

State of the art monitoring and that most basic of safety nets, the 
watchdog, would be her guides. She planned it out. Every hour she 
would rouse herself from the meditation, check all vital signs, 
record her feelings. If she dipped too far, then she would stop. If 
she failed to respond to the watchdog, it would call a work 
colleague to deliver a pre-recorded message asking for help.

She focused on the sketch she'd drawn freehand from memory. Her 
version of the creature. All about the lines and intersections, 
she'd told Mulder. So easy to fall into its eyes. So easy to get 
lost in the swirls of its wings.

When Mulder called her from San Diego, she was feeling good. Better 
than good actually. So good that she didn't spoil it by mentioning 
Patterson's offer of research funding. So good that they chatted 
about warm days, sandy beaches and good food, and scarcely 
mentioned death at all.

Home now, back in DC, he called her again. Bad timing. She was 
getting closer. The first images hadn't worked. Not well enough. 
But the latest one, she could feel the pull of it. Even the 
machines could see it. 

Quantifiable and verifiable.

Joy.

------------

She sounded so happy. So pleased to hear his voice and so fucking 
happy. Too happy for him to bring her down by actually answering 
the question when she asked him how he was feeling.

Far too happy for him to beg her to let him visit, even if he 
didn't want to be alone tonight.

He looked down at his hand, remembered why it hurt so much.

Why everything hurt so much. 

Couldn't believe that Dave would have done a thing like that. No 
one could believe it. They'd have had no problem believing it if 
Mulder had done it, of course. 

Suicidal tendencies.

Like hell. Patterson was going to kill him. Wreck his career. Send 
in some shrink to mess with his head. Push a couple more profilers 
to crash their cars into trees. And then Mulder was going to walk 
into Patterson's office, shoot the bastard through the head and 
bring down the wrath of the entire fucking FBI.



=========
END of Part 7

=========


Hennessey was a mess. Mulder shivered at the understatement. 
Hennessey was practically invisible under the bandages, the 
monitors, the respirator and the IV lines. 

Having lied his way past the ICU staff, Mulder slumped into the 
visitor's chair again. Strictly five minutes. He sighed. There was 
no way they'd believed the lie. Dave looked nothing like Mulder's 
uncle. He looked over the body again - Dave didn't look like 
anybody's uncle. The nurses wanted to believe him though, and that 
was what mattered. They wanted to think that someone cared enough 
to be here.

Unfair. Hennessey's marriage, Mulder now knew, had been over for a 
while before the actual break-up occurred. Hennessey had been in 
that apartment for nearly a year and so far as Mulder could tell, 
he'd said nothing to anyone at the Bureau. Just a change of address 
in his personnel record.

His ex had spent hours at the hospital the night before. She'd 
probably pop in again tomorrow, and this was no place for a couple 
of kids to come to see their dad.

Why hadn't he seen this coming? 

Some fucking profiler he was. He'd driven around with Hennessey for 
weeks and spotted nothing. Wasn't even looking. Too caught up in 
himself, in the case, in Diana - no room for a man crying for help.

Victim of a serial killer, he reminded himself, even though it felt 
like passing the buck. Did that make this attempted murder? 

-------

Diana hadn't answered her phone the last couple of times he'd 
called. 

They hadn't seen her in her office, though that wasn't any big deal 
because she wasn't actually scheduled to do any teaching today. She 
hadn't been in the lab since she picked up a couple of things from 
there a few days ago. 

Nothing to report. Her colleagues would make lousy witnesses.

Though actually, right now, he'd make a lousy investigator. 
Analytical skills having fallen into a black hole somewhere between 
his anger at Patterson and the way his focus kept failing just 
short of anything useful. He'd tried looking at the sketches. 
Really tried. He'd tried drawing them in pencil, charcoal and ink, 
but nothing gelled. 

Unsurprising really - if these were meditation aids then being able 
to sit still for a more than a minute was probably an essential 
element of their charm.

Which was why, despite the lack of an invitation and even though 
she might very well be out for the evening, he found himself 
standing uninvited on Diana Fowley's doorstep again.

He could hear something inside, a buzz of music or something. Not 
loud, but distinct enough not to be just his imagination. She was 
in there, so why wasn't she opening her door?

A hundred and one excellent reasons running the gamut from bath 
time to boyfriend and not a one of them that could calm his nerves 
for more than a few seconds. Minutes had passed and he'd knocked 
loudly enough to drag a couple of her neighbors to their doors.

"Have you seen her?" he said, a little louder than was strictly 
necessary.

"You're the FBI agent, aren't you?" said one of them. When he 
nodded, the woman started talking again. "She's in there. The music 
changes," she added, by way of explanation. "But I haven't seen her 
in a couple of days."

The concierge arrived.

"Do you have a key?"

Encouraged by a wave of a badge and the neighbor who seemed to know 
Mulder, the man obliged, letting them both in and then backing 
quietly out of the room when he saw Diana sitting naked and cross-
legged on the floor. 

"It's OK. Thanks," said Mulder, blocking access to her neighbor and 
pulling the door behind him.

"Diana?"

He moved to kneel in front of her. "Diana. Talk to me."

She was smiling but she said nothing, looked straight through him 
as if he wasn't there. 

A tangle of wires connecting her head to the monitors. In front of 
her, a neatly drawn creature on crisp white paper. By her right 
hand side a notebook with only a datestamp written at the top of 
the page and a tape machine still set to record even though the 
tape had run out long ago. 

It was the knife, the gun and the pills that bothered him more.

"Diana," he said, reaching for her, finding her body unresponsive 
to his touch.

Where was she? What the hell had made her do this? Had she taken 
any of those pills?

Priorities, he reminded himself. Priorities. Clear the immediate 
danger, then call 911.

She flinched slightly as he pulled the gun and the knife away, 
looked briefly puzzled as he took the bottle of pills from her 
side.

He quickly wrapped the knife in a handkerchief, emptied the gun, 
and put the pills in his pocket.

"Oh," she said, and he saw the glitter of tears in her eyes and the 
gentlest of smiles on her lips.

"Diana?"

"I wish you could feel like this, Fox. I can show you now. Sit down 
with me."

He started to pick up the phone. 

"I can explain," she said, smiling, opening her arms to welcome 
him.

He stepped towards her hoping that she was coming out of her 
trance, but halted at her next remark. "It's about being 
transformed."

Which only served to switch the adrenaline rush from panic to fury. 
His mind flicked through images of Hennessey in the hospital bed. 
Anger kicked his reaction into overload. All thoughts of soothing 
her into a response vanished. Was she really hearing him, seeing 
him at all?

Shock tactics now. 

He lifted the gun to his head, flashed on images of Detective Paul 
Jennings and the missing parts of his skull. 

"Amateurs," he said, "do this." He held the gun to the side of his 
ear. "Trouble is, a bit of a wobble on the grip, or a flinch at the 
vital moment and they can end up alive for hours, for years even. 
It takes a pro to do it right. Did I show you the pictures of Paul 
Jennings?"

Seconds ticked by as he repeated his demand for her attention. It 
seemed almost as if it was working, as though she was starting to 
look at him now, really look. Her smile was fading. Her tears were 
starting to fall faster.

OK. Nearly there, the shock tactics were working. "This way," he 
insisted, bringing the gun into position, "even if you hesitate, 
it's hard to miss."

Lips cold against the metal, he watched her as her eyes tried to 
focus on him, as her expression changed slowly from euphoric, first 
to curious and finally to alarmed.

"Put the gun down, Mulder."

Stunned, he turned to face Bill Patterson, lowering the gun 
immediately and relaxing his grip on it as soon as he realized who 
had entered the room. "She needs help. I was just about to call 
911."

"Just put down the weapon and we can talk."

Mulder placed it carefully on the desk, and stared at the Sig Sauer 
in Bill Patterson's hand. "Maybe you could do the same thing, sir."

Patterson shook his head. "I can't do that." He shouted to someone 
in the hallway. "Call 911. Tell them I've got a psychiatric 
emergency. Potentially dangerous. Tell them that he's under the 
control of a Federal agent and poses no immediate risk." He turned 
his attention back to Mulder. "Don't make me shoot you." He threw a 
set of cuffs towards Mulder. "Put them on. I've told them that 
you're under control. We don't need a SWAT team in here."

Trapped, beyond the ability to argue and with no desire to take a 
bullet over a stupid mistake, Mulder did as he was ordered.

Diana ran into the bedroom.

----------

2000

When they finally tracked him down, Mulder was almost exactly where 
they'd left him almost two hours earlier. Except now he was the one 
talking with Props and it was Scully and Skinner who were the ones 
leaning on the walls of the prison warden's outer office.

"We've got the video running," the guard said brightly. "Just like 
he asked."

The he in question, they knew, was Mulder. "How long have they been 
in there?"

"Props asked for him about two minutes after you two left. He's got 
to have had someone tell him you'd gone."

"But he knew Agent Mulder was still here?"

"Oh yeah, he knew all right."

"Did Agent Mulder ask for anything - apart from the video?"

The guard shrugged, only half listening to them, still fascinated 
by the scene on the video monitor. "Coffee - it's cold and in paper 
cups," he waved at the screen, "but he said it was better than 
nothing. And just - don't disturb him."

Scully was practically pawing the ground and that last order nearly 
caused detonation. "Not even to take our phone calls?"

"Sorry, ma'am, he was pretty definite about that. And the Warden 
said to give him full cooperation."

"Do you know what they've been talking about?"

"That's the strange thing," said the guard, shaking his head. 
"They've talked about basketball, pumpkin-growing, the weather, 
just stuff - they haven't really talked about anything."

Skinner frowned, looking at Scully with a question in his eyes. 

They couldn't just go barging in. She knew that. "Could you turn 
the sound up please?"

The guard looked up at her, suddenly remembering his manners. "Oh, 
sure thing. I'll call down for some coffee if you like."

"No, thank you, I'm fine."

The Mulder on the video monitor sounded like he was trying not to 
laugh. "You're full of it, Monty."

"The world's full of cats and dogs. Dogs - whatever you do, however 
badly you treat them - they keeping coming back for more. It's 
imprinted on them, to just keep taking it. You can't really respect 
a dog."

"I thought every dog has its day?"

"And I was supposed to be yours, wasn't I? Admit it, Fox, I've 
hospitalized you twice and still you come back for more."

"Yet you're the one they keep chained up."

Props laughed, raised his manacled hands in mocking salute. "You've 
been such a good boy, I'm going to paint you a picture." He drew 
back his head, pulling forward suddenly to spit on the table. "Good 
dog," he said admiringly, apparently congratulating Mulder on his 
refusal to back away from the mess. The prisoner's fingers skimmed 
quickly across the table top, scribbling something with the 
moisture. "You got that?"

Mulder nodded and Props ran a fast hand across the surface, 
smearing away the pattern.

Mulder pressed the button on the side of the table, causing a 
buzzer to go off if in the monitoring room. He glanced up towards 
the camera. "Guard! Interview's over."

"I'll be seeing you then," said Props.

"Don't hold your breath."

"Hey, you're going - just like that? Where's the gratitude? Where's 
the love?"

"I'll send you a bundt cake."

Mulder wasn't surprised that Scully and Skinner were waiting for 
him when he got out. He was just grateful that they waited until he 
had the video recording in his hand and they were back in the car 
before the interrogation began.

Skinner kicked it off. "Is there any point in visiting the woman 
that Props gave us?"

"I'll go tomorrow."

"It doesn't need an Assistant Director now?"

Ouch. "She'll be happy to kick the dog instead. She's one of Props' 
exes, bigamous of course. She's remarried, which is why I didn't 
recognize the name."

"Her involvement in the current case?"

"Zero - so far, I think. Her new husband was abusive; she's 
divorcing him. Probably still loves Props. She probably blames me 
for taking him away. But she may know something about the original 
MO, something that I don't know."

"And when were you going to tell us about this?"

"I didn't know, not until I started talking to Props."

"And you just guessed that he wanted to talk to you alone?"

"When I left the interview, one of the guards was surprised; he 
said Props had been talking about me."

"And you didn't think you should tell us that?"

"I had to see him alone."

"So you sent us on a wild goose chase?"

"I told you it was a hoax."

"Don't even start on that track."

"I didn't have a choice."

"Nor do I. You're suspended."

Mulder nodded, unsurprised, accepting the inevitability, even 
though it felt like a kick in the teeth.

---------

1988 

The hospital psychiatrist brought in a colleague to handle the 
second session. A man specialized in treating law enforcement 
officers and victims of PTSD.

"Guilt's a powerful motivator."

"So is saving lives."

"And you're saying that's why you work for the FBI?"

"No. I work for the FBI because I enjoy it. Saving lives makes me 
feel good - it adds to the rewards."

"You're very calm about all this. Much calmer than I would be. I've 
got your files, Mr. Mulder. I've got statements from your superior 
officers. I've got a witness who saw you with your gun in your 
mouth."

"Not my gun and it wasn't loaded."

Blinking, the doctor checked the file again. "And the pills and the 
knife were Miss Fowley's as well?"

Calm about it? There was nothing calm about the way he was feeling. 
Paralyzing fear and hyperactive alarm poised in perfect equilibrium 
wasn't the same as calm. "Dr. Fowley's."

"Tell me how you felt when you saw her there. With those things - 
the gun, the knife, the pills."

"Sick?"

"And your first thought?"

"That there was no way she could move fast enough to stop me from 
taking the gun and the knife, and that the pills could wait until 
I'd safely dealt with the other two."

"See - there you are again - so calm. I'm impressed. I'd have been 
panicking." 

"Then maybe you wouldn't enjoy working for the Bureau."

"I see you now, sitting here, all calm. Telling me about this calm 
person who disarmed Dr. Fowley." The doctor paused, leaning forward 
a little in his chair and lowering his voice so Mulder had to 
strain to hear him. "And I'm asking myself, why did the FBI suspend 
you? Why was your boss so worried that he'd already referred you 
for evaluation? Why did the guards at Quantico feel the need to 
detain you? The ICU nurses looking after Mr. Hennessey say that you 
were in tears, making up ridiculous stories about wanting to visit 
your uncle. One of them saw you the night before, getting your hand 
stitched up in the ER."

"A friend of mine tried to kill himself. I was upset."

"The accident report says it was a car crash. And from where I'm 
sitting, the alarm bells were ringing before it, and they kept on 
ringing afterwards."

The balance - fight or flight versus paralysis - was too delicate 
to analyze now. A flutter of tired wings, shifting one feather at a 
time. Mulder pressed back, as carefully as he could. "The fact is, 
to keep me here, you've got to prove that I'm a danger to myself or 
others."

"You think that's unimaginable?"

"I don't think you care what I think."

"Then why would I be talking to you?"

Because you're a fucking sadist? "I'd like to see Dr. Fowley."

"I'm afraid that's not possible."

"Is she OK?"

"We're here to talk about you."

"Is she OK?"

"She's fine."

"Why can't she see me?"

"I believe you saw Mrs. Gardiner yesterday."

"Karen? What about it?"

"The only things you discussed with her related to a case which you 
were removed from almost two weeks ago. A case that brought you 
into close contact with numerous suicide victims. It's not wise for 
someone in your condition to - "

And the calm overbalanced for an instant into the manic, allowing a 
tiny cluster of words to come tumbling out. "Someone in my 
condition!"

"If Dr. Fowley were to come here, what would you talk with her 
about?"

Oh Jesus. Mulder closed his eyes, willing himself back to 
nothingness.

"Mr. Mulder?"

"If she came, I'd ask her about pay scales in the private sector."

------

On judgment day, Diana came. Dr. Fowley, a researcher in 
neuropsychology at GWU, outlined the experiment she was running and 
explained Agent Mulder's critical role in the trial, as both an 
input to the system and as a watchdog in the event of problems.

What Bill Patterson had witnessed was the next logical stage in 
their work.

It was just sheer bad luck that the timing had gone so 
catastrophically wrong.

Even to Mulder, it sounded weak.

Fortunately, Mulder was already on the way to being a hero, which 
meant that the Bureau wanted him out. 

Reggie Purdue had taken Mulder's profile and run. Three days in and 
they'd already had a breakthrough - a nervous sounding realtor who 
thought she'd seen the same man at two property auctions in two 
towns, two hundred miles apart, except the first time he was a 
competitor and the second time he was arranging finance.

They were close and they knew it.

And everyone in VCU knew it, and the Assistant Director knew it, 
and Bill Patterson knew it.

And suddenly Mulder's presence at Quantico wasn't an embarrassment 
but his absence was. Strings were pulled and not only was he home, 
with no recommendation for further monitoring, but the suspension 
had turned into a month's vacation. And no one was ever going to 
talk about it again, on penalty of disciplinary action.




==========
END of Part 8