Chapter Text
He’d left some of their maps and notes on the corkboard in the office after the fact, but as the months filled up with mysteries, they got papered over and forgotten. Until one day the maps weren’t there anymore—then he noticed an absence.
“Someone’s been in here, Scully,” he told her when she arrived later in the morning to find him overturning drawers and checking the seams for bugs.
She took it in stride, just hung up her coat and booted up her computer. “Let’s hope they’re only recording audio, then.”
It was a perfect opening, but he let it go. “See if you’re missing anything.”
She ignored him and set out her breakfast. “What are you missing? Besides your mind.”
“Ha ha. There were papers on this board that are gone now.”
“Oh—I took them.”
He stopped trying to pry apart a shelving unit. “What?”
“I took them,” she repeated, the full weight of her forbearance breaking over his head like cold water. “Next time ask me before destroying the office, would you?”
“We’re not being bugged?”
“We almost certainly are.” She took a bite of her bagel and started checking her email. “It’s counterespionage 101, Mulder. Don’t go looking for the bugs if you know they’re there. If they know you know, they’ll only take more drastic action.”
She had a point. “All right, well…what did you take?”
“Couple of things.”
“Which couple of things?”
“It’s a surprise.”
He surveyed the mess he’d made and wondered if he could successfully argue that things were easier to find out in the open like this. He really didn’t want to clean up. “You know I hate surprises.”
She snorted. “You love surprises. You just hate not knowing things.”
Touché. “Tell me, then.” He righted a drawer and scooped up random papers and supplies into it. She’ll never go for the open office argument.
“Haven’t you ever heard of the Stanford marshmallow test, Mulder?”
“Oh, sure, now you’re into delayed gratification. I think Jesus had something to say about hypocrites, Scully.”
She hid a smirk behind her coffee cup. “There’s no benefit in delaying my gratification. Biologically speaking.”
“Oh, are we speaking biologically? Because speaking biologically I think your gratification could get very delayed indeed. I think there might be indefinite delays in gratification if you don’t tell me.”
“Don’t threaten me with your own suffering, Mulder. You know how much I enjoy it.”
He abandoned the mess and went to crowd her in her chair. “You think our audience wants a show?” he murmured, leaning over her. How the hell did she always smell this good?
“I think they’re not going to get one.”
“By your logic, they already got several. What’s one more?”
“Mulder, you said you wouldn’t do this again.” Her disapproval was marred somewhat by the way she was digging her nails into the armrest.
“Guess I’m a hypocrite too,” he said, low and rumbling.
There was a sound from the door.
Scully startled, which immediately undermined his own instinctive stillness. Damn it. He was trying to project nonchalance (nothing untoward about this, not at all), but she’d just telegraphed their guilt to (just turn around real casual, don’t rush, nothing to see here)—shit, to their boss.
Skinner cleared his throat in a way that somehow managed to convey utter disappointment and complete indifference at the same time. I don’t care what you’re doing, but stop it.
Mulder straightened as casually as he could, trying and probably failing to convey that it was entirely his idea to get the hell out of Scully’s personal space. “Sir?”
“You’re wrapping up the Gorsky-Evanson case, correct?”
“Yes, sir,” Scully said, and even though she’d managed to keep her voice even there was still a bit of color in her cheeks.
“Consider the paperwork low priority, then. You’re needed in evidence storage.”
“Evidence…storage?” Scully asked.
“Regular evidence storage, or some kind of Lost Ark warehouse you haven’t told us about?” Mulder added hopefully.
Skinner ignored him. “I’ll brief you on the way.” He was walking away even before he finished speaking, and Scully hustled after him, leaving Mulder to shut the door.
Well. This wasn’t as interesting as missing documents—and it definitely wasn’t as interesting as getting laid—but he’d take a reprieve from paperwork. And hey, there were a lot of dark corners in the storage facilities. Maybe he could learn to like surprises.
--
“You were off on assignment when we started handling the Oak Park murders so you won’t necessarily know this, but in the early days there was a theory that the perp was a serial killer.”
“Everybody always wants it to be a serial killer,” Mulder murmured.
Skinner caught the note of sadness underlying his tone and nodded in approval. There was far too much enthusiasm for serial killer sensationalism, and he hated how some of his agents would all but turn into fanboys for the concept. They didn’t like killers, but they all wanted to catch them, and that was nearly as bad. This job is not about getting on Dateline. “Yes. In this instance, though, there was some credibility to the theory, at least at first. Agent Nakamura knew of a closed case with a similar M.O.—three people, similar ages, same setting. But Oak Park turned out to be a drug deal gone wrong, whereas in the cold case they were all killed by strangulation, which is a very odd method for execution when there’s more than one victim present. Why were there no signs of struggle? How did the killer subdue all three victims long enough to enact such a lengthy method of killing? Nakamura asked to continue pursuing the cold case, and he discovered that there was improper storage of evidence. The case was from the early ’80s, and apparently when the files were moved people got sloppy.” Skinner scowled. “There are human remains in with the case files.”
Scully blanched. “What kind—?”
“Just bone. Nothing…perishable,” Skinner told her, not that the assurance helped much. It was an unbelievable level of disrespect, and Mulder could only hope it was the result of incompetence rather than outright indifference. “I need you to sort through the materials and catalog which remains belong to which victims, if in fact they all belong to human victims in the first place.”
“There are other…?” Mulder’s interest sharpened at once.
Skinner sighed again and pinched the bridge of his nose. He felt a migraine coming on. He always felt a migraine coming on around Mulder. “Nothing weird. They collected everything from the park site. Everything. I’m surprised we don’t have entire trees. We do have several animals.”
“Sir, I can do the forensics, but I’m not a naturalist,” Scully said. “If there are non-human specimens that need identification, I’m not sure…”
“Nakamura and Green—his partner—are already in contact with the Smithsonian for that part. I just need you to identify the human remains and go over the initial findings to verify that the original pathologist wasn’t completely off the mark.”
Scully nodded, but Mulder frowned.
“Wait, you just need to identify human remains? Why am I here?” he asked.
“The items are stored in one of the older parts of the building, which were never renovated. There are…certain issues that were never corrected for.” Skinner looked between them meaningfully.
Mulder didn’t get it. “What issues?”
Skinner pursed his lips. “The shelving is too narrow for any OSHA-approved ladders.”
Scully, always better with subtext, explained it more bluntly. “Someone tall needs to get the boxes for me.”
Skinner, relieved to not be forced to make any potentially actionable statements about his employees’ physical limitations, turned to go. These two are enough of an HR nightmare as it is.
He turned back at the elevator, though, waiting for the doors to open. “Oh, and one more thing,” he called over his shoulder. “Nakamura and Green may be in and out to retrieve materials.” He fixed Mulder with a stare as he said it, and Mulder managed to smile blandly in return.
“Are they getting lunch? I like that Mexican place on M Street,” he said.
Skinner turned as the doors closed so that he could be seen pointedly ignoring Mulder’s comment. The moment they shut, Scully turned and groaned into her hands.
“What?”
“He knows,” she wailed.
Mulder shrugged. “He’s known for ages.”
She peeked out from between her fingers. “He has?” She groaned into her hands again. “This is so humiliating.”
“Oh, come on. You were so blasé about our wiretap cheering section.”
“It’s different.” She paused. “Cheering section?”
He trotted out his most shit-eating grin.
“Egomaniac,” she muttered, turning toward the archive.
“Prude,” he riposted. Their exchange had no venom to it; she was already more interested in the new project than the passing embarrassment.
Consulting the file Skinner had handed her, she started examining the row headings. “Subsection J, bay 8…”
“Anyway, I have to take my wins where I can get them. Now that I’ve been demoted to ‘resident tall person.’”
“Bay 8, row 14.3…” Scully continued to herself. “Hey, it beats ‘resident short person,’” she added.
“Yeah, but you know what they say about short guys.”
She started down the aisle. “No. What do they say?”
He made an L with his fingers, first vertical, and then rotated it 90 degrees in a crude approximation of the ratio he was getting at.
Scully raised an eyebrow. “Uh-huh.”
“So that’s not true in your experience?”
Her other eyebrow went up.
“Your professional experience,” he amended. “It’s not something they teach you in med school?”
She located the correct shelving unit and began looking for the right case files. “Surprisingly, no.”
“So you’re saying there could just as easily be a direct correlation between height and size, instead of an indirect one?”
She stopped examining boxes and turned to him, crossing her arms. “I’d say there’s a correlation between height and delusion.”
He pressed an overdramatic hand to his heart. “Ouch. But you didn’t answer my question.” He had inched into her personal space again. Oops. “You have any observations you’d like to share? You know, for science.”
She didn’t step back. Instead, she just met his gaze and pointed at a shelf of boxes. He pulled a face before starting to pull boxes down.
“I have no standards of measurement,” she said.
His dismay became slightly less performative. “Scully, much in the way a woman is expecting only one answer when she asks whether a dress makes her look fat, when a man says that, there’s a certain tacit understanding about the range of responses.”
“Thanks for the tip,” was all she said into the expectant silence.
“So, speaking of the tip—”
She sighed. “I do not understand this irrational obsession with size. Studies show it has no effect on the intensity or duration of male pleasure, and—”
He feigned astonishment. “What studies have you been reading?”
She pressed on doggedly. “—and there is no meaningful correlation between size and female pleasure.”
“Tell that to Liz Potterdam.”
“I don’t know who that is—”
“She was this girl in university who—”
“—and I don’t care,” Scully cut in. “Isn’t it enough that I’m satisfied?”
“Of course,” he said. “I want you to be so completely, ecstatically satisfied that you admit that I’m the pinnacle of masculine perfection you’ve always dreamed of.”
“Mulder, what do you want me to say? That you’re so dramatically bigger than any of my other partners that I have no need for measurements, but also—presumably—not big enough to cause me consistent pain?”
“Yes,” he said. “Say that.”
She looked at him flatly and then just walked away.
“I would also accept that I’ve ruined you for other men forever,” he called after her.
--
Scully set up an impromptu exam area by a far wall and started sifting through boxes as Mulder fetched them.
“This isn’t as bad as I expected,” she said once she’d made decent headway, with neat piles of evidence growing in front of her, including several sections for bones.
“Speak for yourself. I’m filing a workers’ comp claim once we get out of here.”
“I told you to lift with your legs.”
He threw himself into a chair, which actually made things worse. Still, it gave him a better view of the proceedings than trying to peer over her and all the boxes. “Those the victims?”
“Amber Hartwell, Fiona Gatz, and Horace Anders. Yes.” She read their names off a piece of paper and indicated each pile in turn, reverence and sadness swirling on her face. “All in their early twenties. All students at Vermont College. All friends. All strangled. All found within ten feet of each other, arranged in a triangle, facing inward. Signs on the bodies indicate that they had died there, not been moved.”
“They weren’t bound. There weren’t any ligature marks. Why didn’t they run?” Mulder wondered aloud. “Help from an accomplice?”
“No shoe prints or other indications there were more than four people.”
“Did they killer have some kind of hold on them?”
“What kind of threat would keep a person from running after watching two of his or her friends strangled to death?”
“Drugged, then. Or some other kind of control. Hypnosis?”
“No,” Scully said flatly.
He conceded it wasn’t likely. “Cults exert that kind of control over their members.”
“Cults? Really?”
“Plenty of communes up there.” But he conceded that one too. “Probably not a cult, though. They usually start with fraud and abuse, don’t just skip right to murder. And the method of execution is wrong. You’d see collective action, not this successive one-by-one strangulation. Not to mention that strangulation is a slow, unpleasant death. Most cults choose knives or poison—swift or invisible, like an act of God.”
“Mm.” She was frowning at the bone she was examining, and eventually consigned it to a pile on the furthest table.
“Human?” he asked.
“No. Some kind of mammal, but I have no idea what. Raccoon or skunk or something.”
There was probably a joke there somehow, but he couldn’t find it. Besides, the mystery here had its hooks in him now, was dragging him along. He sank into contemplation.
“Oh,” said Scully suddenly, and he surfaced from his thoughts into defensive awareness, his whole body on alert. He’d mirrored her unconsciously: she was vibrating with intensity.
“What? What is it?”
“This is a hyoid.”
He didn’t ask, didn’t press. Just waited for her to find her surety.
“The throat bone. It almost always breaks with strangulation.”
“That one looks broken.”
“Yes,” she said faintly. “As are the three others.”
He caught up immediately. “Four sets of remains. Not three.”
She turned to him, eyes wide. “There’s another victim.”