Vital Fluids An "X-Files" Story by LoneGunGuy Standing in the well-maintained Washington apartment of a curvaceous pseudohermaphrodite who now lay zipped, drained of all blood, within a black vinyl body bag, Fox Mulder held a bedsheet up to the light and examined the life-size image of a nude and slightly irregular female torso that had apparently been printed onto the ivory-colored linen through an obscure chemical process involving pancreatic enzymes and, well, urine. He was suddenly struck by the irony of the situation. The sheet had been tucked into the cushions of the living room couch to keep the upholstery clean -- but it was now stigmatized with this stain, this large and rather disturbing stain, recently-appeared, still sticky and smelling faintly of urea. Piss-yellow with a touch of amber, it formed the distinct outline of a woman's body, superimposed onto the fabric with vague contours of breasts, areolae, the shadow of a thigh, a shoulder, even the outline of a hand -- thumb and four splayed fingers -- pressed convulsively against the belly. Emphasis on the convulsively: there were second-hand signs of rigor mortis. But the body that had left the impression was not that of the woman-with-no-ovaries who had been found sprawled bloodlessly in the kitchen of this fourth-floor flat. The proportions were all wrong. This dead girl-who-was-not-a-girl had a model's figure; the bedsheet silhouette, on the other hand, described a big-boned female with thick hands and a large fleshy abdomen. No: this urinary photograph of a corpse, etched indelibly onto the cotton, was not that of the victim -- but it might be that of the murderer. An unusual enough situation to catch even Mulder's interest. * * * But to begin at the beginning: At precisely 5:37 that morning, Mulder had been awakened by a slightly incoherent telephone call from a Homicide detective, one Peter Halasz, who spelled his last name twice and muttered something about vampires and the Shroud of Turin. Upon inquiry, Mulder assimilated the pertinent facts: a young woman had been found dead in her downtown District of Columbia apartment, lying partially clothed on the linoleum kitchenette floor and sporting shallow defense wounds along her palms, a deep lateral cut across her left wrist...and a singular lack of vital fluids. Translation: she was drained. Completely. Skin parchment-white, veins empty. Someone had sucked her dry. There were other disturbing circumstances, other things that Halasz had to say...but this was the one which made Mulder sit up suddenly in bed, check his calendar -- the seventeenth of May -- and make the connection. He gripped the handset a fraction tighter. "Let me ask you a question," he said. "Did you find any blood in the woman's shower?" "Yep," Halasz tersely responded. "Was it hers?" "No sir. Just got the results myself, actually: the blood in the shower was type AB, but the victim was type A. We found a few driblets of type A blood on the kitchen floor, but nowhere else. The rest is missing. At least five quarts gone. Hell of a thing." "Yeah." Mulder's vision suddenly blurred with a rush of excitement. He fought it down, cleared his throat, said, "I'm on my way. Keep things tight until I get there." "You got it. Tighter than a co-ed's quim." Halasz hung up. Settling the receiver back into the cradle, Mulder quickly rose with an uneasy crackling of joints, flinging open the window and staring out at the mulatto dawn that cradled the rooftops. A tense gray morning. The sidewalks four floors below looked like veins of hard-frozen vanilla ice cream, and the clouds were clotted with melanin. So: half an hour later, Mulder picked up a rather sleepy-looking Dana Scully and explained the situation. As she got into the car, he tossed her a Snapple and an eclair and asked, "Are you suffering from post-Kaczynski inferiority syndrome?" "Please clarify," Scully said, biting into the pastry. Revving the engine and easing onto New Hampshire Avenue, Mulder said, "You know what I mean. Ted Kaczynski is apprehended; the long-maligned Unabomber division of the FBI is given free reign to party down. Half the Bureau goes out and gets drunk. The other half feels jealous, wants a big case of its own to crack. Sound familiar?" "You tell me -- you're the covetous one." Scully tried to take a sip from the bottle, spilling some as the car jounced to a red-lit stop. "Anyway, why? Do you have something interesting?" "Maybe," said Mulder, drumming his fingers staccato on the steering wheel. "Judging from what I've heard so far, we may be on our way to the scene of the latest homicide in a little-known series of killings that stretch back to the Eisenhower administration. Since 1958. If we resolve it, it means commendations and alcoholic lechery a-plenty. Feel up to it?" "1958? How many murders are we talking about?" "Forty-three, as of today." Mulder broke into a small ironic grin. She found his glee incongruous. "Any copycats?" she asked. "The circumstances of the killings are singular enough to rule out that possibility. These are coordinated homicides. Check the casefile." Scully opened the folder, glancing at the contents. Crime scene reports, carbons, photographs, newspaper clippings. Her eyes lit upon one particularly gruesome Polaroid, and the eclair seemed suddenly to catch in her throat. "Well...judging from the timeline...there appears to have been one murder a year committed for the last thirty-eight years. Always in the month of May. Always in an East coast city. This would be the third -- no, the fourth Washington case." "One murder a year...until three years ago," Mulder said, beginning to drive again. "Then, suddenly, three killings took place in 1993. All within a week or two of each other. Since then, there have been triads of homicides on an annual basis." "All with the same characteristics," Scully said, wiping her mouth with a napkin. "The victims are always white, always female, under twenty-five years of age. Usually physically attractive. They're always found at home with a wrist slashed." "Which wrist?" Mulder asked. "That's an important matter." "Well...the right wrist. In the first thirty-four cases, at least. Suddenly, through, starting in '93, the killer switched wrists, slashing the left brachial artery of a nineteen-year-old college student in Vermont on the eleventh of May, followed by two more killed in the usual right-handed manner on the twelfth and thirteenth. Since then, annually, there have always been two right-slashers and one lefty. A total of three each year." "Intriguing, no? Keep going." "The victims are always discovered bloodless. They're usually knocked unconscious beforehand, and some kind of intravenous tube is used to drain them while they're still breathing...Also, in nearly half of all cases, traces of blood -- someone else's blood, according to typing and DNA tests -- have been found in a nearby shower or bathtub. The blood found in the bathrooms, oddly enough, always seems to genetically match the blood of the previous victim who was killed the year before." Scully frowned. "As if the killer held onto the blood for a year before disposing of it." "In the next victim's bathtub, no less." He glanced over at her. "So what do you think?" "A fetishist, perhaps?" She shut the folder. "A collector? A cult?" "You've discounted the obvious possibility, I see," responded Mulder, grinning. Scully rolled her eyes. "Is that why you're so worked up about this?" Gazing out the window, she hazarded a second sip of her drink, the watery kiwi-strawberry sweetness painfully cold on her throat. "I get it. It isn't just the thought of apprehending a mass murderer that sparks your libido. You want to go after the vampire angle again." "Pardon me for being an optimist." "You're the only non-necrophiliac I know who gets so enthused by this sort of thing." "Me and the rats. Here we are." Mulder turned onto a brownish-toned Foggy Bottom neighborhood, pulling up past a quorum of police cars to the scene of the crime: the facade of Barth Apartments, stern and foreboding, tan sandstone with white windowsills. Stepping out of the car, Mulder leaned back and studied the building. "Detective Halasz said that the victim lived on the top floor. A window was jimmied. I'm assuming that the killer took the fire escape." "Not necessarily," Scully said, slipping the casefile into her valise and slamming the car door. "Barring the involvement of vampirism -- which implies everything from batwings to levitation -- he might have gone up to the rooftop and lowered himself down." "Herself," Mulder replied absently. "Halasz says that there's good evidence that the killer was female." "A female serial killer -- you don't see that every day. But why the past tense?" "Well, the killer is probably dead," Mulder called over his shoulder, heading up the concrete steps. "Died along with her victim. But there's only one body in the apartment. Which points to the presence of an accomplice. Someone who spirited the second corpse out of the building." "How did the attacker die? How do they know?" Scully asked, following him. The morning air licked coldly at her ankles. "There are some signs of a struggle, but they aren't sure what really happened. I'll let Halasz show you the evidence himself." Mulder flung open the building doors and stepped into a hermetic lobby lined with tile and mailboxes. He found the pertinent name pasted beneath one of the cubbyholes and read the apartment number aloud: "Julianna Blackburn -- 5D. That's our victim." "Julianna Blackburn? The name sounds familiar..." "I'm rather surprised you recognize it," Mulder said, his shoes clicking down the empty hallway. "Ms. Blackburn was an off-and-on actress and model. A few television spots, commercials, occasionally seen draped over some famous arm -- not enough, apparently, to keep her out of this fifth-story walkup, but she didn't do too badly. Her previous claim to fame was as an October '93 Playboy Playmate. I have the issue." "Do you?" Scully smiled. "Well, it had an interview with Budd Hopkins," Mulder said defensively, "the premiere expert on alien abductions. I needed it for my files." Scully chose not to contest this statement. The apartment elevator was out of order, so they passed on to the stairwell, clanging up the pea-green steps; Mulder took all five stories without stopping, talking as he climbed. "Anyway, Halasz mentioned that there was something else unusual about this homicide." "Which was...?" "I'm not quite sure. He mentioned something about the Shroud of Turin, actually. Something about an anomalous image, some kind of imprint that he thought was bizarre..." He reached the fifth floor and found apartment 5D, nestled in among its dormitory brethren in a threadbare hallway, the paint the same hue as the stairs. Faint gangrene, misted with cigarette smoke. He rapped on the door with his knuckles, saying to his partner, "But I have a feeling that we can close this file. Make this the last murder." "We'd better hurry, then," Scully said. "Even if this killer is dead, the evidence points to more than one psycho at work." "Yeah," Mulder concurred. "Provided that the killings still come in threes, more will be on the way within the week. If we don't act soon, we'll have two more corpses on our hands." * * * "Okay, think about it. You want to slash my wrist. So you knock me unconscious with a blunt instrument, a blow to the temple or forehead or the back of the neck. Now, my body sags -- I go limp. I collapse to the floor. You bend over me, you naturally roll me onto my back, facing up, and you have the blade in your hand. A six-inch straight razor with a notched edge, well-sharpened and oiled; you unclasp it. Which hand do you hold it in? Your dominant hand, of course. Assume that you're right-handed. Gripping the blade, you cut my wrist. Slashing motion, stroke-stroke. Which of my wrists do you cut? The right one, of course, because that allows you to grip my forearm with your left hand while slashing it with your right. You do the deed. Simple. And if you're left-handed, the opposite holds true." Detective Peter Halasz spoke with animation. He was tall, blonde-haired, with a sunburn and a mild cold, gesturing with a wadded handkerchief as he talked. He strode through Julianna Blackburn's apartment, stepping over the white outline laid down on the kitchen floor: legs and arms crooked, head twisted, crumpled and cartoonishly dead. There were spots of blood alongside the outlines; a few techies were busy siphoning them up with eyedroppers, labeling and initialing the bottles. Mulder and Scully followed close behind him. "It's obvious, then," Mulder said, taking a quick peek into the cabinets over Blackburn's stove, "that prior to 1993 only one individual was committing these crimes. Only one murder per year, always in May, always with the right wrist slashed. Very consistent M.O." "Right," Halasz agreed, sneezing. "But then, suddenly, three murders start being committed at a time. At least one of them apparently the work of a left-handed killer." "Which implies accomplices," said Scully. "Recently recruited." "Yep," Halasz coughed. "So, for some reason or another, three individuals have been periodically -- and cyclically -- killing young women and taking their blood, only to dump the plasma at the next victim's bathroom a year later. Uncoagulated." "That isn't necessarily unusual," Scully said. "Postmortem blood often reliquefies after a certain period of time; even if it doesn't, anticoagulation agents are readily available." "True. But look at the specifics of this case." Halasz stepped into the small dining room at the far end of the kitchen. It was well-lit with an electric candelabra, suspended above a refinished oaken table and wicker chairs of surprisingly subdued design: indeed, Julianna Blackburn's entire apartment testified to a mute economy brought about by both necessity and good taste. In sharp contrast with the drabness of the surrounding complex, her flat was well cared-for, modern but not ostentatious; looking around at the furnishings, Scully felt a strange kinship with the dead girl, a mutual understanding. There were Chinese rice-paper paintings on the walls. Stained-glass squares hung in the window. On the oak table lay Julianna Blackburn's body. A balding ME squatted at one end of the table, examining the inside of Blackburn's mouth with a flashlight, shifting her tongue to one side. Even in death, even without blood, Blackburn was markedly beautiful; indeed, the absence of hemoglobin gave her skin an eerie alabaster quality, made her lips bluish, her eyes closed and slightly sunken. An angry gash ran along her left wrist; bruises discolored her face and temples. A bit of mascara was smeared down the line of her cheekbone. She was unusually tall. Scully reached down and pulled up one of Blackburn's eyelids, exposing a dull bluish sheen. "Sclera's dry. Skin at room temperature. She's been dead for at least a day." "That was my conclusion," Halasz said. He coughed once. "She was scheduled for a sunrise photo shoot today at the Monument -- some kind of new phallic Calvin Klein campaign -- and her friend arrived here at 4:30 to pick her up. She found the body when she came inside." "She had a key?" Mulder asked, thumping Blackburn's shoulder, checking for rigor. "Nope. The door was unlocked." "I thought that the killer made the entrance through the window," Scully objected. "Well, yes," Halasz admitted, sniffing, "but we're still trying to piece together what happened. It's difficult. I mean, look around." He silently gestured at it all. Scully's eyes skirted the apartment, tallying the evidence. First: the dining room window had been jimmied rudely upward. A splintered groove -- the mark of a crowbar -- was still darkly impressed on the frame. Second: there was a single black footprint on the windowsill, made in roofing tar, a small shoe with a waffled sole. Third: beneath the window, a chair lay overturned, the wicker frame misshapen where the killer had leapt down. Fourth: several yards away was the first drop of blood, dime-sized and nearly dry. Many other droplets followed, maroon constellations that traced a path from the edge of the linoleum to where the body-shaped outline lay sprawled on the floor. Fifth: a thick length of aluminum piping, matted with blood and a few strands of hair, sat on the kitchen counter. Obvious blunt instrument, stained with bits of Julianna Blackburn. There were small smears of fingerprint powder scattered around the pipe, but the grim look on Halasz's face told Scully that no latents had been discovered. She moved on, passing through the living room, the bedroom, arriving finally in the bathroom. She peeked inside. In the bathtub lay at least a dozen bottles of shampoo and conditioner, many of them inverted, along with bars of soap, moisturizers, perfumes, foundation, cold cream, brushes, cosmetic sponges, acetone. The shower nozzle hung loosely down like some skeletal instrument of torture. Scully leaned down, looked within the tub. A small washrag had fallen over the drain, partially blocking it and preventing the dampness at the bottom from trickling out -- leaving the bathtub streaked with wide finger-like ropes of blood, moister than those on the kitchen floor. Some had swirled down the drain, leaving scarlet circles on the porcelain. Lab technicians would soon remove the plumbing from the bathroom, checking for coagulations in the pipes. One of the towels that hung over the edge of the shower had a smeared bloody handprint stamped upon it. Back to the living room. There was another spot of blood by the telephone. A pair of gloves had fallen next to the end table on which the phone stood, large leather gardening gloves, turned half inside-out. Both were darkly stained. And then there was that other thing. With some trepidation, Scully approached the living room couch. It was gray, with velvet-textured upholstery, and the cushions had been draped with a bedsheet to keep them clean. This bedsheet had once been white. Now, though... She murmured, "I haven't seen anything like this in years." The sheet had been imprinted with the unmistakable image of a female body. It was absolutely remarkable. A clear outline with breasts, belly, hand and thighs completely distinguishable. Almost airbrushed in yellow: nude, dead, now missing. Mulder moved by her side. "You don't know what it is?" "No, I know what it is -- I just haven't seen it outside the literature before. It's a very rare phenomenon." Scully knelt to examine the image more closely. The torso printed on the sheet was slightly distorted, pulled out of shape, the length of the fingers exaggerated. Despite the contortion, however, two things were evident: the impression was not that of Julianna Blackburn, and it was definitely the image of a corpse. "First of all, the urine necessary to make this outline," Scully said, sniffing demurely at the linen, "would probably be produced by the posthumous loosening of the bladder and bowels. Someone -- not Blackburn -- died lying on this sheet. The picture would have taken hours to form; no living individual could remain motionless for so long." "So this is...?" "A medical anomaly. Not unprecedented, though. The most famous case occurred in England, in 1981: an elderly man named Les, who had been convalescing at a hospital from cancer of the pancreas, died in the middle of the night -- his body wasn't discovered until morning. When the nurses stripped his bed, they found a stain on the mattress cover, a stain forming the image of Les' shoulders, buttocks, back and thighs. Eerie. Even part of his face was recognizable. It took five years for pathologists to determine the cause of the mysterious apparition." "What had happened?" "As far as it could be determined, Les was incontinent. Due to the condition of his pancreas, alkaline fluids and enzymes had been released in his urine, which then collected in the hollows of the mattress following his death. After they dried, they left behind a dark yellowish outline, one which reproduced the contours of Les' body almost exactly. It was a sensational case; I remember it well. Shroud of Turin devotees had a field day with it." "And this is the same phenomenon?" "On the surface, it certainly appears to be. I won't be sure until I analyze the image spectrometrically to see what enzymes are there." Scully stood. "Still, that's something we ought to bear in mind: our killer possibly had some irregular pancreatic function." "That should be easy to pick out of a lineup." "Or a morgue, if need be. But here's something else," Scully said. "Take a look at this." She pointed to an area just above the abdomen of the printed torso. Visible on the sheet was a twisted half-moon scar, the mark of a scalpel. The area surrounding this groove appeared to be almost inflamed, bulging out from the rest of the sternum in a small fleshy mound, a few centimeters high, like a misplaced gestation. "This is fairly strange." "Fairly," Mulder said. He straightened up, stretched, moved languidly to the other end of the room. There was a small brick fireplace set into wall, gilt-framed photographs and birthday cards bedecking the mantelpiece; at least half of the former appeared to be clipped from advertisements, magazine pages, photo spreads and society snapshots. In these pictures, Julianna Blackburn swung a tennis racket, smoked a cigarette, reclined on a French sofa wearing a bra and a pair of trendy cotton trousers, appeared in an Amnesty International ad with brown-rouged cheekbones and hollow eyes, drank, kissed, seduced the camera. Celluloid epitaphs, set in zinc oxide. Enough to make him uneasy at the prospect of looking on as Scully sliced this twenty-three-year-old girl open at today's autopsy. "All right," he said levelly. "Here's the scenario. Someone breaks into Blackburn's apartment through the dining room window. Julianna enters the kitchen to investigate the commotion and the intruder smashes her head in with a pipe, drains her blood, and somehow stashes it so that only a few droplets remain at the scene. I imagine canning jars would do the trick. Or milk jugs. With the use of some kind of sucking apparatus -- a catheter or IV, perhaps. Then, the killer has evidently kept the blood from last year's killing and brought it along with her; she strips naked, steps into the shower and dumps most of that blood down the drain. We know that it isn't her blood because no trail has been left to or from the bathtub. Then, however, something unforeseen happens. Our killer is suddenly stricken. Begins dying, perhaps from internal injuries suffered during her attack on Blackburn. She staggers back into the living room. Collapses on the sofa. Dies. Soils herself. Hours later, an image forms. But," Mulder said, whirling around, "the corpse isn't here. And the door was found open. Which means that someone took our attacker's body out after the fact -- along with most of Julianna Blackburn's blood." "But the killer died alone," Scully said, "because the body needed to lie on the couch for hours in order to produce the impression. No one was here when she expired." "Which means that our killer reached out and touched someone just before she went." Mulder glanced up at Halasz, who leaned against the door that led into the kitchen, arms folded. "Did you do a trace of the last call made on this line?" Mulder asked, gesturing towards the phone on the end table. "Yep," said the detective, blowing his nose with a tattered shred of Kleenex. "It's a Boston area code; we're still waiting for positive identification." "Boston," Mulder said, nodding his head slowly. "A six hour drive. Long enough for the image to form?" he asked his partner. Scully concurred. "Convenient. We're finally starting to get some answers." She turned to Halasz. "I'd like your permission to do a quick examination of Blackburn's body. Right now. I just want to inspect her wounds for some indication of how the veins were emptied, and check her for sexual assault." Upon his contention that the ME had that aspect of the investigation well in hand, she replied, "I'm sorry, but I'd rather look for myself. Don't worry, I won't take too long; I don't think there are many more surprises left here." A few minutes later, she discovered just how wrong she was. * * * Scully made the finding while kneeling with her face only inches away from Julianna Blackburn's bloodless labia. Probing carefully, clinically, with a cotton-tipped tongue depressor, she found that the balsa blade would go no further than a few inches. Further inspection with a small flashlight revealed the truth: put bluntly, Blackburn's vagina was the physiological equivalent to a cul-de-sac. A blind alley, leading nowhere. "Good God," she muttered. So far as Scully could determine, the pale victim lying askew on the kitchen table lacked a uterus, fallopian tubes, or any substantial birth canal. Enough to bring serious doubt on Julianna Blackburn's apparent claim to womanhood. Rising slightly, Scully reexamined the overall picture. Blackburn had been found wearing only panties and a white T-shirt stenciled with the profile of Mickey Mouse; the fabric was thin, diaphanous, and through the cloth could be glimpsed the forms of Blackburn's obvious femininity. Hourglass figure. Classical ratio between bust, waist and hips. Charms -- frankly admitted -- more than comparable to Scully's own. Indeed, the only aspect of Blackburn's appearance which did not conform precisely to the stereotypical ideal of beauty was her height: an inch over six feet from crown to foot, allowing for post-leaching shrinkage. Scully counted off the other indications. Unusually long legs, well-developed breasts, flawless complexion, added height, a complete lack of female reproductive apparatus -- and she was willing to bet that an autopsy would reveal testes buried in the flesh of Blackburn's groin, complete with normal levels of testosterone. Simply put... "By the way, Julianna Blackburn was a pseudohermaphrodite," Scully mentioned as Mulder passed by. "Come again?" "She was a genetic male with the visible sexual apparatus of a woman. Surprised?" Mulder opened his mouth, then closed it. Opened it again. "I wouldn't have guessed," he said finally. "Of course not -- neither did Playboy. Or Calvin Klein. Or our murderers, for that matter, who prey exclusively upon females. Up until now, that is." "Julianna Blackburn wasn't female," Mulder mused. "You're positive?" "Feel like double-checking?" Scully rhetorically asked. "No womb, ovaries, oviducts... You make the call." "Gimmee the jargon." "The evidence indicates that 'she' was actually a male pseudohermaphrodite with a defective androgen receptor. Simply put, her body was biochemically unable to respond to testosterone. She was born an apparent girl, but with hidden testes. Although the formation of a uterus and tubes was prevented, the usual male genitalia and secondary sex characteristics didn't develop. The female route was taken by default." "But she's really a man." "Genetically speaking, yes. XY chromosomes, the whole bit. I'll need a blood test to be sure, but -- " "No blood," Mulder reminded her. "I'll make do. The real question is whether this is important from an investigative standpoint." "Do you think so?" "I'd say no. Whoever killed Blackburn did so thinking that she was a woman. This is just wildly improbable coincidence -- although these abnormalities are more frequent than you might suspect. Especially in the fashion industry; more than one professional beauty owes her looks to a defective androgen receptor. Given a biochemical testosterone block, Mulder, you too might be a leggy fashion model." "So Blackburn's hermaphroditism doesn't have any bearing on our investigation." "Probably not. The killer certainly treated her as a normal woman." Scully slipped off the latex gloves and dropped them in the wastebasket. "Unfortunately for her." * * * The next revelation was somewhat less surprising. Halasz leaned into the dining room and calmly announced, "We got a specific on the phone trace." He handed Scully a piece of paper, folded twice. "The last call made on Julianna Blackburn's telephone -- at approximately 3:35 yesterday night -- was to an office in downtown Boston, part of a big research firm. Chifeno Laboratories. Here's the number." "Chifeno?" Scully said. "I've heard of them. What are they, some kind of pharmaceutical company?" "Not exactly." Halasz affected a significant pause. "I hear that they work on blood diseases. Mostly hemophilia." "How very expected," said Mulder. "Yep," Halasz said. "We'd done a canvass of blood product firms before, of course, on the assumption that our killer had a fetish for living plasma. Chifeno was on the list, although we never turned up anything conclusive." "This is pretty conclusive, I'd say," Mulder said. "A connection, at least. A lead. More than anyone's had in the past thirty-eight years." "That's the kicker," said Scully, sitting in one of Blackburn's wicker chairs, leafing through the casefile. "I'm beginning to wonder why so many anomalies tend to converge on this one case. Look at the files of the previous murders. With the exception of the recent switch in wrists slashed and annual number of victims, every aspect of these crimes has been remarkably consistent over the decades. No outstanding elements in any particular homicide." She fingered the papers within the folder. "But today, what have we got? A dead supermodel who happens to be a pseudohermaphrodite. The apparent death of her killer. An incredibly rare apparition -- comparable to the Shroud of Turin! -- on the living room sofa. You explain it." Mulder shrugged. "Synchronicity? Chaos theory? Sunspots?" "Who cares?" asked Halasz. "We've got the lead. Chifeno. The rest shall follow." He checked his watch. "Dulles has flights leaving for Boston every hour; we'll be on the next one." * * * Fifty miles away, at one edge of the main floor of the First National Bank of Annapolis, there was an alcove -- a niche, really -- that was perhaps twelve feet across, just large enough to accomodate a large circular Formica table, bordered by chairs. This table was usually crowded with briefcases and checkbooks, scattered legal pads and ball-point pens, receipts. It sat a dozen yards away from the row of tellers' cages that flanked the north side of the bank, and was intended for the use of the bank's customers. Practically speaking, however, anyone off the street could walk onto the floor and into the secluded circle, papers in hand, to work in the air-conditioned coolness. Many often did. Plants surrounded the alcove. Leafy green ferns and philodendrons pressed close against the backs of the chairs, extending limp mossy talons. They tickled the nape of one's neck. Very natural, lush, a generic herbarium of the late twentieth-century bank variety. These plants hid the alcove from the rest of the bank. One could sit there and silently observe the passing of finances, the comings and goings of the trustees and cashiers, the exchange of currency -- without being seen. From the third chair -- counting clockwise around the table from the entrance -- one could look through a break in the circle of leaves and stems that otherwise surrounded the area; a teller's cage was visible through the gap. The occupant of that cage varied with the hours. However, between eight and two o' clock from Tuesday to Saturday, one could count upon a particular individual being there. A woman. Someone watched her from between the leaves. The watcher's eye kept returning to her obvious physical characteristics: shapely form, great foaming curls of blonde hair, good posture, fine bone structure. When she reached into the cash drawer to complete a transaction, the sleeve of her gray blazer pulled back to reveal a milky wrist. Stunning. At two o' clock, the woman passed close to the gap in the ferns, a paperback book tucked under her arm, purse in her hand. Straining, one could even see the embossed letters on her nametag: Deborah Hardy. She was even more alluring up close: a fine ruddy facial complexion, lightly freckled nose, soft blushing cheekbones. Indicative of good blood. * * * Chifeno Laboratories seemed simultaneously modern and old-fashioned. No paradox: it was simply the product of two generations' worth of architectural design, welded together like incompatible Siamese twins. The older half of the building was reddish stone with Art Deco sculptings and friezes, dating from the turn of the century: monumental, near-Gothic, with high windows and porticos at ground level, Corinthian vining bordering the roof. Sixty years later, its southwest flank had sprouted a great glass-and-metal edifice, built during the waterfront reconstruction of the late seventies. It gleamed in the sunlight, zigzagged by an aluminum fire escape, reflecting the velvet sky. A bizarre pair. One squat structure, the color of a scab, conjoined to its diametric opposite, a sunny, open paean to glasswork. CHIFENO was inscribed on an onyx sign that straddled both. "Who's Mr. Chifeno, anyway?" asked Mulder, staring up at the laboratory complex, hands in his pockets. "Chifeno isn't a man, it's a pun," replied Scully. "The formula for the chemical heme is CHFeNO," she said, spelling it out. "It's what makes blood red." "Charming," Halasz said, blowing his nose. Passing beneath the hard grayness of the sign, they found themselves on a thin concrete path which snaked down between the two buildings. Parts of this path were broken and uprooted, with construction barriers halfheartedly erected nearby, as the crumbling old pavement, which obviously dated from the days of the older building, was torn up and replaced by new. Wooden slats crisscrossed the ground as frames for the as-yet unpoured cement. They picked their way through the deserted mess carefully, and moved closer to the main body of the labs. Each half of the Chifeno complex was not entirely conjoined to the other, they saw; a narrow corridor ran between them, ten feet from brick to glass, a transparent walkway strung above the passage. Beyond, there was a small natural habitat with benches and fir trees and stepping stones. A few men and women in lab coats strode quickly through the sunlight, carrying clipboards and plump plastic bags. Mulder found the entrance to the older building and stepped inside. More contrasts. Much of the interior had apparently been stripped and refurbished sometime in the last ten years, set with tile and fluorescent lights, gray cubicles, a nice waiting room with receptionist and framed Escher prints. Color televisions gleamed down from each corner of the ceiling, playing, in an endless loop, a publicity video for the labs, depicting smiling scientists and gratefully convalescent hemophiliacs receiving genetically processed blood. The video ended as he watched it, concluding with a white-on-blue motto which the monitor displayed for several seconds before beginning again: CHIFENO LABORATORIES -- WORKING TOWARDS TOMORROW. "Bet it took them a while to come up with that one," Mulder said quietly to Scully. The trio produced identification, flustering the red-haired receptionist. "I'm only a temp," she said, rising halfway from her desk. "You'll want someone else to talk to..." Her eyes searched the hallways beyond the anteroom, saw a balding man in jeans and cotton shirt step out from a doorway holding a small cage. "Excuse me," she hesitantly said, waving her hand slightly, "excuse me, Dr. Chan?" He did not seem to see them. The receptionist whispered, "Dr. Chan is a trifle deaf..." "Dr. Chan?" Mulder called. "Sir?" Inclining his head slightly, Chan finally noticed them and approached quicksteppingly. As he drew near, Scully saw that his cage held a medium-sized white rat, tagged, nibbling at a pellet; there was a green spot on the fur behind its ears, apparently made by a felt-tip pen. Chan himself was very dark-skinned, Korean, at least sixty years old. His hands were wrinkled and small. "Hi," Chan said, loudly, after the receptionist had explained the circumstances. "What seems to be the trouble?" Halasz spoke, identifying himself. "Dr. Chan. Sir. My colleagues and I are investigating a murder that took place in Washington the night before last. We have reason to believe that the killer phoned an office in these labs after committing the crime." Chan's dark eyes widened slightly. "An office? Whose?" Scully handed him the slip of paper. "Recognize this phone number?" Taking it, he read the first few digits aloud -- then trailed off. His brow wrinkled. "Well, yes. This is my office." "Were you here at half past three, yesterday night?" Mulder asked quietly. Chan shifted the cage in his hands, stirring the rat. It blinked its eyes sleepily and dropped the pellet it had been chewing. "No...of course not. Why would I be?" "Do you remember where you were that night?" asked Scully, taking back the slip of paper. She kept her eyes on the rat, oddly fascinated. The fleshy portion of its belly had been shaved, and a quick longitudinal incision -- now little more than a scratch, a scar long healed -- ran from rodent breastbone to navel. Its small pink nose quivered, digging down into the sawdusty loam that dusted the bottom of its cage. "I was asleep at home, of course. My wife can vouch for that." Chan, following Scully's gaze, glanced down at the rat in his arms. He again shifted his grip on the cage. Spurred by this movement, the rat overturned its plastic food dish in a quick flash of paws, spilling small seeds along the breadth of its confinement. "Silly rattus," he muttered. "Bad Onan!" "Is that the rat's name?" Mulder asked. "Onan?" "Pardon? Oh -- yes. We call him Onan because he spills his seed on the ground." "Funny," said Halasz. "Almost as good as that Chifeno acrostic. Tell me, do you know anyone else who might have been in your office late that night?" "No one," Chan said. "We don't operate on deadlines here. No overtime is allowed. Company policy. We're required to keep strict eight hour days in order to maintain the quality of our work." "Sometimes I wish that the FBI had similar standards," Mulder said lightly. "Is it okay if we look around your office?" "Sure, I -- " "One other thing," said Scully. "Are any of your co-workers missing? Especially female co-workers? Unaccounted for since yesterday night?" Chan shook his head. "No, none. Well actually, I don't really know, I wasn't even here yesterday. Had to have a medical checkup..." He made a small resigned gesture, holding Onan's cage firmly in his other hand -- and Mulder suddenly noticed that a thin section of white gauze was wrapped around Chan's left wrist. A small spot of blood stood out sharply against the bandage, pinker than Onan's eye. "I'll show you to my office," the doctor said finally. "It's just across from the factor VIII labs, which is where I'm headed with Onan; he's overdue for a checkup himself." "A checkup for what?" Mulder asked. He, Scully and Halasz followed the doctor as he stepped past them and through the door, plunging into the sunlight beyond. The four of them briskly walked towards the main entrance of the modern half of the Chifeno complex, passing through a small grove of spindly trees, feeling the sun beat down from above. Scully tripped over a piece of broken concrete from the path and caught herself just in time. Chan glanced at Mulder. "Excuse me?" he asked, cupping his ear. "What was that?" "What are you checking Onan for?" Mulder repeated more distinctly. Arriving at the glass-and-metal building, they mounted the steps and waited as Chan swept a thin identification cord down the doorknob slit. The doors slid open. "Neat, huh?" he said. He turned to Mulder. "Well, Onan is a very special rat. One of eight dozen special rats, actually. But we've had our eyes on him for quite a while now. Him and two others, Cubby and Annette." They stepped inside. It was, surprisingly, rather warmer than within the older structure; the modernistic aluminum joists that ran across the ceiling exuded a feverish glow. "Air-conditioning's out. All we've got are big fans," Chan explained, pointing to one large circular thrumming beast, plugged in at the end of the hall, blades rotating like mad. "But we've been working in pretty febrile conditions for the past few days." "You were saying?" Mulder said. "About the rats?" "The three of them might just hold the key for curing one of the greatest scourges in human history. I mean hemophilia." Scully nodded. "Chifeno has been fighting against that disease for years." "Sure. We were pioneers in the field. Hell, our scientists were the first to isolate the defective gene for factor VIII -- the protein that's necessary for blood to clot. Most hemophiliacs lack it. Have faulty genes." Chan turned a corner, found an elevator, stepped inside. The others entered. "To avoid bleeding to death, hemophiliacs have to periodically inject themselves with the protein, either from donated blood or bacterial cultures. A nasty, difficult business. Especially in the AIDS era." "No doubt," Scully said. "We used to make factor VIII ourselves. Genetically engineered, or culled from donated plasma. After a while, it became too expensive. But there's a better way to supply the factor than injecting it time and again. That's where Onan comes in." "And the solution...?" Halasz asked, fishing a tissue out of his pocket. "I'll show you when we get there," Chan said, exiting the elevator at the fourth floor. Mulder gazed down the hallway that unfolded before them. Ridiculously long, it was lengthy enough so that the far walls of the corridor seemed to converge some distance away, although the paleness of the tiles made this difficult to judge; except for smudged footprints on the floor, the hall was spotless white, lined with doors of frosted glass. Chan passed five of these before stopping at a point halfway down where two doors faced each other; one had his name printed upon it in black letters -- his first name, Mulder noted, was Oswald -- while the other was inscribed with the uncomplicated legend RAT ROOM. Stepping into the latter, Chan beckoned them inside. The first thing that caught Mulder's eye was yet another television playing the Chifeno infomercial in a continuous loop. More smiling hemophiliacs lined the screen, each receiving a token of Chifeno's ground-breaking gene therapy, clutching IV bags to their hearts like rosaries. Beneath the monitor, the room was lined with cages. Literally. Each cage held a single albino occupant, small-eared, plump-cheeked, seemingly squirming in unison, a kind of oceanic fuzz of rodentia. There was a subtle undercurrent of twittering. Five hundred cold pink eyes stared their way past Mulder's parietal bones as he followed Chan into the room -- and nearly all of the rats had scarred bellies. "Jeez," Mulder said. "Aren't they cute?" said Scully. He would have half-heartedly agreed -- but at that precise moment his eyes lifted casually back to the monitor, looking at the television image of a hospital scene, a white-coated lab scientist discussing factor VIII therapy with small precise hand movements, his name and academic degrees listed on the screen beneath him, along with the small green and red Chifeno logo in the lower right hand corner. He stood in a purported emergency room. It was obviously faked; the patients lying in the beds behind him sported wounds and intravenous venation that were too obviously symmetrical, their bedsheets neatly pressed. Just beyond the scientist, a young woman stirred beneath the covers as he explained how she was benefiting from Chifeno's research. The camera zoomed in for a close-up; opening her eyes, the strikingly beautiful hemophilia patient smiled softly at an unseen audience. It was Julianna Blackburn. * * * "Let me get this straight," Halasz said, pacing among the rats, a crumpled Kleenex in his hand. "Three months ago, Chifeno Labs had an open casting call to find attractive hemophiliacs." "No, not exactly," said Chan. "We were casting anyone. Just models or actors in need of a day's work. Simplest acting assignment imaginable: lie in a bed and look sick and wanly pretty. Ali McGraw's disease. Ms. Blackburn applied and was cast." "Why didn't you use real hemophiliacs in the promo?" Scully asked. "You ever meet a real hemophiliac? Pale, sickly. Hardly photogenic." "That's a stereotype." "Maybe. Don't bother me about it; I'm not the one who makes these decisions. I'm just a lab grunt." "This could be extremely important," Mulder said to Halasz. Turning back to the doctor, he asked, "The video was filmed here in the complex, right?" "Yessir, right down the hall. Three doors down, the outpatient reception area." "Suggestive, isn't it?" said Mulder. "The scenario presents itself. An employee of Chifeno Labs happened to see Blackburn during the making of the promo, became infatuated with her, tracked her down as a prospective victim and killed her three months later. Tidy." "So the killer was almost certainly an employee," Halasz said. "Or a former employee. Someone who was working here at least three months back -- and someone who would call these labs, for some reason, with her dying breath." "We'll need a roster," Scully told Chan. "A list of all employees who have worked here since February. And anyone who's been sick or on vacation or otherwise unaccounted for over the past week or so." Chan shrugged. "I wouldn't know how to get it, or who to ask; I don't really deal with the administrative portion of the facility. I just work with rats." "So we've gathered," Scully said. "Who would know?" "Well, you could ask Dita -- that's my assistant, Perdita Dogar; she should be back from lunch any minute now..." He moved over to a cluttered counter which lay in the center of the room, clearing a space among the papers and setting Onan down. "That poor girl. Julianna, you said she was called? Lovely name. So young..." Reaching within the cage, Chan lifted the rat with one tender hand, its chubby hind legs scrabbling air. He moved over to the bank of cages set against the far wall of the room, thumbed the latch on the door of an empty cubicle and slipped Onan inside. A minor squeak. Scully noticed that all of the other rats along that wall were marked with green dots, just like Onan himself; they were identical, white, the color of soap suds. Chan patted the rat affectionately and closed the door. "He's a good boy, Onan is. Producing synthetic factor VIII like a..." He paused and glanced towards the doorway. A diffused shadow fell across the tiled floor of the Rat Room, with the clicking of heels: someone stepped quickly inside. Looking over Scully's shoulder, the doctor broke into a wide grin, his aged Asian face crinkling like a topographic map: "Dita," he said, "these people need to talk to you." Scully turned. Facing her was an attractive Hispanic woman, perhaps twenty-six or twenty-seven, with a moon-shaped face and round glasses -- she moved rapidly past her, setting a damp plastic bag on the central table, alongside Onan's empty cage. "Hold that thought," Perdita Dogar said briskly. "Gotta do a collagen martini." "A collagen...?" With a flourish, Dogar produced two bottles -- each containing a clear fluid -- from a voluminous pocket, a beaker from another, and placed them on the table with a soft clink. "Testing pseudo-organs for the factor," she said. "Won't take more than a second." She poured the contents of one bottle into the flask, swirling the chemical gently. "Looks a little like vermouth, huh?" Unsnapping the baggie, she reached gingerly within with a pair of tweezers and removed a dime-sized gray disk, spongy and moist, resembling a withered olive. Dogar plopped it into the beaker, added a jigger of the second liquid and watched with satisfaction as the mixture turned vermilion. "Sweet," she said. "A viable design?" Chan asked. "You betcha. Putting out magic number eight like a fire hydrant." Dogar spoke slowly for Chan's benefit. She looked up, an expression of satisfaction on her face -- and finally seemed to notice the investigative trio. "Hi," she said. "How may I be of service?" "These people are from the police," Chan answered. "They need a list of absent employees for this week. And a roster of all Chifeno employees of the past three months." "I can get that easily," said Dogar. "Why?" Mulder opened his mouth to respond, but Chan jumped in quickly: "There's been a murder," the scientist said. "A real murder! They think that someone who worked at Chifeno is the killer -- someone called my office from the victim's house, can you imagine that? -- and the victim was one of those pretty models who worked on that video last winter, remember?" Dogar raised her eyebrows. "Really?" She carefully emptied the beaker, resealed the gray disk within the polyethylene and dropped it into the trash. Halasz tossed in a wadded tissue of his own. "Was the murder around here?" she asked with some concern. "This is one of the better areas of the waterfront, I always thought..." "Actually," Mulder interjected, introducing himself, "it happened in the District of Columbia. Not to take up much of your time, but the Chifeno connection is the only real lead we have at the moment. We'd appreciate it if you could get us that list." "Sure," Dogar said. "Just give me a second to record these results." She pulled a clipboard from a drawer tucked beneath the counter and began to rapidly check off a succession of boxes along a standardized form. Chan explained. "This is all part of Chifeno's alternative program for hemophilia treatment. Instead of requiring continual factor VIII injections, we actually give hemophiliacs the missing gene necessary to produce the protein." He nodded towards the wastebasket where the gray disk had been tossed. "That's a pseudo-organ -- made of human skin cells and collagen. We grow a clump of cells from a donor -- skin cells, usually, because they're easy to collect and culture -- and genetically alter them so that they contain the factor VIII gene. Then we try and introduce them into the hemophiliac, so that they can produce the factor themselves, and therefore have normal blood." Finishing her annotations, Dogar recapped her pen and walked towards the door, saying, "We tried injecting the cells directly into the bloodstream, but they didn't survive..." She left the room, her voice echoing down the hall: "Be right back with the roster." "So what we did," Chan said, continuing, "was sculpt the cells into an organ." He went to the wall of cages, fished Onan from the furthest depths of the cubicle, and returned to the counter. Chan inverted the rat and ran a finger along the scar on its belly. "We just implant the cells. They're more likely to survive within the body that way." Halasz bent over Chan's shoulder to examine the rat. "How do you make an organ, anyway?" "Simple recipe," said Chan, pulling a syringe from a drawer. "Take fifty million genetically-altered skin cells, arrange them in layers, alternate them with sheets of collagen, and you're done. The collagen automatically pulls the cells into a disk shape, very tight." Holding the rat gently between his fingers, Chan inserted the needle and withdrew a few cc's of rodent blood. Onan squeaked once and was silent. "We implant the pseudo-organ in the gut or buttocks -- anyplace with lots of capillaries -- and it works like a charm. In rats, anyway. Onan here -- if all goes well -- will produce ten times more factor VIII than he needs." He squirted the blood into a small vial and capped it tightly. "That's why I need to test him periodically. We're still in the design phase of the treatment, trying to find the smallest, most compact pseudo-organ that will provide sufficient amounts of protein for hemophiliacs." "Have there been any tests on human subjects?" Scully asked. "Not yet, although we remain optimistic; immune rejection remains the primary difficulty. Ideally, though, we'll soon reach the point where we can take some skin cells from a hemophiliac, grow them for a few weeks, genetically insert the factor VIII gene and reimplant the altered cells, guaranteeing a lifetime supply of the factor. A boon to humanity, and all that." "Definitely," Scully said. Some minutes passed. Chan continued with the blood tests, returning Onan to his cage and mixing the plasma with a few drops of chemical indicator, which immediately turned kelly green, prompting a smack of satisfaction from the scientist's lips. "Nice," he said. Scully observed his work with some interest; Halasz and Mulder preferred to watch the rats, peering through the mesh and staring eye to pink eye, listening to Scully and Chan talk about the factor VIII treatment, occasionally pausing to ask a question. Mulder noticed that there were several ampoules of morphine set on top of one of the Rat Room shelves. Enough to kill a small mammal -- or even a large one -- for purposes of clean dissection. A moment later, Dita Dogar returned with a computer printout in hand and a troubled expression on her face. She handed it to Scully, saying, "Here's the list of absent employees over the past ten days. I asked the receptionist to print out the roster of employees since February; it shouldn't take her more than a few minutes." "Thanks," said Scully, taking the printout. She moved over to the window at the far end of the Rat Room -- a broad sliding window, large enough to provide entry to the fire escape beneath -- where the light was better, and pored over the roster. A total of twenty-nine Chifeno employees had been out for one reason or another since the end of April, roughly half on vacation, others sick or on leave. Although she had requested the records for the past ten days, this was merely to provide a window for her inquiries; Scully quickly focused in on those who had been gone yesterday and the day before, especially those who had yet to return. She rapidly isolated a total of seven employees who could have been in Washington on the day of Julianna Blackburn's death. Four -- including Chan, who claimed that he had been on unspecified medical leave yesterday -- had since returned to work; the other three were still missing. No one in this first group could have left the impression on Blackburn's bedsheet, since that required a female corpse -- and Scully assumed that whoever had returned to Chifeno in subsequent days would not be dead. However, they were still under suspicion as possible accomplices. Including Chan himself. Someone in the second group, though -- one of those three who had not yet returned -- might be Julianna Blackburn's killer, who had presumably murdered the young model and then died on her sofa, leaving the urinary impression of a nude female body. Which explained why the killer might fail to return to work. One of the missing was a man -- she crossed him off the list of possible killers, but retained him as an accomplice suspect. Two names remained. "Joanne Chumley and Valerie Lee," Scully said, making a note. "They were gone yesterday and still aren't back." "So it's possible that one of them left the impression on Blackburn's couch," said Halasz, sniffing. "Possibly. They aren't here right now. Which means that they're the only Chifeno employees who might conceivably be dead." At that statement, both Chan and Dogar seemed to jump. The scientist glanced quickly at his assistant, whose worried look deepened. "One of those women -- Valerie Lee -- works just next door to here," Dogar said to Scully. "Right next to Dr. Chan's office. And she wasn't at work yesterday." Scully folded up the employee roster and pocketed it. "Can we look inside Lee's office?" "Sure -- I don't think it's locked." Dogar stepped into the hall. Following her, Scully saw that the door which displayed Valerie Lee's name was only two yards down from the Rat Room -- a rather extreme coincidence, given the size of the Chifeno complex. Checking the knob, which turned easily, Dogar hesitantly opened Lee's office and stepped inside. Scully, Halasz and Chan quickly crowded behind, scanning the cramped room for any obvious clues. A large desk took up most of the floor space. Papers were scattered along its surface. There was a Boston newspaper spread to a central page, a pair of scissors still slicing partway up an article on cystic fibrosis research, as if whoever had begun to clip it had left before finishing. Halasz picked up the scissors and looked at them curiously, frowning. "Val works on the genetic engineering sector of the therapy," Dogar explained. "Using retroviruses to splice the genes. Nothing very groundbreaking." Scully moved towards the far end of the room. A photograph was taped to the side of one of the filing cabinets at the far wall: a sun-hatted Asian woman, big-boned, grinned into the Kodachrome. "Is this Lee?" she asked. "Yes, that's Val," said Dogar. Scully looked at the picture more closely. Although it was difficult to judge, Lee certainly appeared to have the same build and general shape as the torso that had been found printed on the Blackburn bedsheet. Suggestive. After asking permission, Scully peeled the photo away from the metal, carefully, and tucked it into her briefcase. She then asked for Lee's home number; Dogar jotted it down on a sheet of paper. Mulder turned to her and Chan. "Thanks for your help. I think we've got enough to work on now..." He tacitly asked Scully for agreement. She provided it. "Yes. We may return later for further questioning, though. Do either of you have any idea where Valerie Lee might be?" she asked the researchers. "None," said Chan and Dogar simultaneously. Smiling weakly, Chan explained, "Valerie's a very private person. She sometimes opens up to us, but she usually keeps to herself." He added, "Personally, though, I'd never suspect her in anything out of the ordinary. Least of all murder. Trust me." Chan bent back to his work. As the three investigators left, he and Dogar were busy bleeding more samples from a legion of genetically altered rats: a chorus of small pathetic rodent snifflings soon filled the air, along with the quick snuck-snuck of the syringe. Stopping only to retrieve the list of employees from the receptionist, Halasz, Scully and Mulder left Chifeno Laboratories. Outside, it was painfully sunny. As the three of them exited the building, Halasz asked, "So what do you two think?" "Well, Chan might be a suspect," Scully said. "Not as Blackburn's killer, but possibly as an accomplice. It was his office which was called, after all." "Yes, and I forgot to ask him why he wasn't here yesterday," said Halasz. "Medical reasons? We'll need to verify that." "He's certainly old enough to have committed those murders starting in 1958," Mulder said, sidestepping the uprooted concrete path. "Dogar's too young, although she might also be involved -- one of the later recruits, perhaps. And did you notice Chan's left wrist? He had a bandage on it." "But this is all idle speculation," said Scully, walking over to their car. "The most important thing is to check on all those employees who are still missing." "Especially Valerie Lee," Halasz said, opening the door and sliding into the driver's seat. "You know that newspaper on her desk? The one that had been partially clipped?" "What about it?" "It was cut with left-handed scissors." * * * Two hours later, Scully finally finished going down the short list of employees who had been absent from work the day before, calling them up one by one, chasing them down, getting their whereabouts. It was uncomplicated but tedious work. A few of them -- the four who had since returned to Chifeno -- were easy to locate. That left the three who were still missing. One of them, the man, was at home with the flu; the veracity of his story was proven over the phone by a sudden fit of sneezing. The other woman, Joanne Chumley, was vacationing in California; it took nearly an hour to locate her hotel room in Anaheim. Her story, too, was verified. Both were crossed off the list. Which left Valerie Lee. Still missing. Still unaccounted for. Unable to be found. No one answered her home phone; none of her relatives -- a mother in New York, a sister in Toronto -- seemed to know where she was; she had left no messages for acquaintances or co-workers. Valerie Lee had disappeared. Dusk came sooner than Scully had expected. They found a motel. Halasz and Mulder took one bedroom, Scully the other. She lay quietly in the dead of night, staring up at the ceiling, unable to sleep, the darkness bearing down on her open eyes. It was around one o' clock that she realized something. Belatedly. Scrambling out of bed, she reached over to her nightstand, flipping on the overhead light and bringing out the list that Dita Dogar had given her. Twenty-nine names. Next to each were printed three things: a reason for absence, an office phone number and a title of position. Of the twenty-nine employees, exactly twenty were research personnel, like Chan and Dogar; six belonged to the business end of Chifeno Labs, situated in the upper floors of the sandstone half of the complex; two to the janitorial staff; one to groundskeeping. All of them accounted for. But there was something wrong, Scully realized. The receptionist at Chifeno had said she was a temp. Which meant that she was substituting for someone else. Someone who wasn't on the list. "Hell," Scully said. * * * At that very moment, Deborah Hardy lay quietly in bed, dreaming a vague dream of warm pinks and yellows. Her cheek lay against the smoothness of her pillow. Although the light was dim, it was evident that Deborah Hardy was blonde and pretty and had a fine ruddy facial complexion, indicative of good blood; she curled up slightly between the sheets, one bare foot poking out from beneath the down comforter, and muttered something in her sleep. Shifting her leg, her foot lightly brushed the pantsuit loosely draped over the end of her bed, those conservative gray slacks and blazer she wore as a teller at the First National Bank of Annapolis. A sound -- a quiet creaking of floorboards -- came from the living room. She half-opened one eye, not fully awake, then dismissed it, snuggling more deeply down into the covers. Smiled slightly. There was silence. Then the whisper of a razor unsheathed. * * * "Deborah Hardy fit the pattern perfectly," Mulder said, his voice expressionless. "Twenty-four years old. Good-looking. Lived on the east coast." He rapped a pencil without rhythm on the dashboard of the car, holding it loosely between thumb and forefinger, the eraser thumping against the glove compartment in grim percussion. "They found her at two o' clock last night. A neighbor heard a slight commotion, spotted someone climbing out of her bedroom window. No ID, no specifics -- just a silhouette. When police checked it out, they found the body still lying in bed, the right wrist slashed, completely drained as usual. Hair and Fibers found some brown hairs, Caucasian, in the bed. The victim was blonde. No blood in the shower, although there were some water droplets -- the killer apparently used the shower stall as usual, but took the time to wash the blood cleanly down the drain." Mulder miscalculated his drumming and the pencil flew from his hand, landing in the back seat, prompting a small "Hey!" from Halasz. Scully, driving, glanced over her shoulder. The detective was busy speaking into the cellular phone, quiet but intense, trying to glean details regarding this newest crime. Annapolis. He was to leave later that day to attend the autopsy; Scully and Mulder had elected to stay behind and further investigate the Chifeno connection. "If there is a connection," Scully said. "I mean, granted, there's ample evidence to indicate that all three killers are linked with Chifeno Labs -- maybe this Valerie Lee, maybe this missing receptionist, maybe even Chan or Dogar." "That's still mostly unsubstantiated," Mulder said. "Right. And although it's possible that one of them flew to Annapolis to kill this latest one -- we'll need to get alibis -- it's unlikely, in my opinion." "Try as I might," Mulder said, "I can't seem to find a pattern in the location of killings. I mean, okay, they're all on the east coast. Fine. But beyond that, there's no rhyme or reason. It seems deliberately random to me, as if whoever commits these crimes goes out of their way to make sure their victims are from out of town." "A crude way of keeping police off the scent," Scully said. "But the bizarre nature of these slayings makes the connections obvious." "So maybe there's a different sort of pattern," said Mulder. "Maybe the killers have a very specific victim selection method. They take a vacation from work for two or three days, go to some large populous city that isn't too close to Boston, and select candidates based on certain criteria: youth, beauty, relative isolation -- none of the victims have been married -- and maybe place of residence. That's the way things usually go. But in some cases, it seems -- such as that of Julianna Blackburn -- the prospective victim practically falls into their laps." "Good point," Scully said, turning onto the street where the Chifeno complex was located. "But why are the killings always grouped together? All the murders take place within a week of each other. A bit silly. It would be much easier and less obtrusive if they spread the killings, evenly spaced, over the course of a year. Why bunch them together?" She pulled up in front of the twin Chifeno buildings and stopped the car. Stepping outside, she noticed that the sandstone half of the building seemed somehow darker and dingier in the early morning, as if nighttime mildew had gathered beneath the buttresses and along the Corinthian shadings, staining the facade a darker hue. She climbed quickly onto the sidewalk and up the concrete path, Halasz and Mulder behind her. Mulder said, "Maybe the killers follow some kind of stimulus that makes them kill during the month of May. Something exotic -- like the moon, perhaps -- or more prosaic -- like corporate vacation schedules -- that makes this month more fitting or more convenient. We'll check that out, too." They entered the old building and saw that the temporary receptionist still sat behind her desk. The televisions had ceased their endless repetition of the Chifeno infomercial; now they just stared down, blank and blue, like alien eyes. Scully questioned the receptionist with no preliminaries. "You're a temp. So who usually works this desk?" The receptionist scrunched her forehead in concern. "Ummm... Well, I never met her, but I think it's Rachel something. I don't know her last name; people would just come up to me and say, 'Oh, is Rachel out today?' You can ask anyone around here; they'll know." "Thanks," Scully said brusquely. "Hold on a second." She quickly walked to the receptionist's side of the desk and began yanking the drawers open, riffling through their contents. Nothing especially incriminating came into view -- luckily, Mulder supposed, given Massachusetts' strict search-and-seizure laws -- but she did, however, find a business card with Rachel Saunders printed upon it in gold, along with two phone numbers. "Good," Scully said. "Let me use your phone." The receptionist's telephone was a complicated thing, covered with buttons, and it took a moment of fumbling before Scully managed to get an outside line. She dialed the home number printed on Rachel Saunders' card and waited. It rang five, eight, a dozen times. No response. Scully hung up and turned to her partner. "I could try tracking Saunders down." "Later," Mulder said, looking past her, towards the steel-and-glass half of the complex outside. "Right now, I feel like asking Dr. Chan a few more questions." "Ummm..." The receptionist raised her hand timidly. "Actually, Dr. Chan phoned earlier today," she ventured. "He -- ahem -- said he wasn't going to be in until ten or eleven." "Really," Mulder said flatly. He checked his watch. Eight-thirty. A delay of two hours -- just enough to make a difference in the five hour drive from Annapolis to Boston, if the murder had been completed in the early morning. "Did Dr. Chan mention where he was?" "He said it was a follow-up to the medical treatment he had the other day." "And what treatment was that? He never told us." "Something for his hearing loss, I think. Deafness therapy," the temp said. "I mentioned that to you, didn't I?" "We noticed it on our own," Mulder said. He glanced at the receptionist. Remembering that discretion was the name of the game, he motioned for Scully and Halasz to follow him to the far end of the waiting room, where more privacy might be found. "We want to avoid spreading rumors," he explained quietly once they had transferred themselves. "Don't encourage gossip. If Chan is truly innocent -- and there isn't any hard evidence to link him to these crimes -- we don't want to affect his reputation by mentioning his name in the same sentence as 'killer' or 'murderer.' Okay?" "A bit too late for that," Halasz said. "Maybe you're right. In any case, we'll need to tighten up this investigation. First thing is to verify Chan's story. Next, we try to track down Valerie Lee and this receptionist, Rachel Saunders. Plus, we don't know what evidence we might find at this latest killing -- what's her name, Deborah Hardy, the bank teller." "Right," Halasz said. "We could use such hard evidence. At the moment, we're basing our suspicions on simple failure to show up for work. Weak stuff." "Agreed," said Scully. "But speaking of evidence -- they found foreign hairs in Hardy's bed, right?" "Yeah, brown hairs. Why?" Scully held up a thin dark strand of hair between her fingertips, curled like a fine question mark. "I took this from Saunders' desk; I assume it's hers. Take this along for comparison purposes when you go to Annapolis today. Just in case." "All right," Halasz said, sealing the hair within an evidence envelope. "We should also get samples from Chan, and from Lee's office. Maybe Dogar, too." He grew suddenly silent, examining the plastic envelope with brooding concentration, that twist of brown filament snaking down the smoothness. "We'd better put down this case soon," Halasz finally said. "That bank teller is one casualty too many." He looked up. "From now on, we work twenty-four hours a day to prevent a third murder. District and Boston PD will provide all the manpower you need, believe me." Mulder met Halasz's gaze evenly. "We don't need to be reminded of the importance of speed." "Good," Halasz responded. He blew his nose contemplatively. "Conceivably, then," he said, "the two of you could wrap up this case before I get back from Annapolis. With a little luck." Scully thought of Deborah Hardy, that twenty-four-year-old woman with a straightlaced job at a Maryland bank, lying in bed like an effigy of crucifixion, ragged laceration gaping up from her wrist, dust gathering on her open eyes. She had been found with her sheets adhering stiffly to her skin with blood. The ME had peeled her like a banana, careful not to rip the epidermis. "Luck makes the world go round," Scully responded simply. * * * An hour later, Scully found herself in the Chifeno women's lavatory, eye to eye with a familiar-looking rat. It was Onan. His cage sat alongside the metal container which hung over the sink, dispensing the powdery pink soap with which Scully scrubbed. She scrubbed carefully and well. A few minutes ago, after the receptionist had let them into the glass-and-steel half of the complex with her card, they had gone to Dr. Chan's office and proceeded to conduct a very unofficial in-plain-sight search of the premises. While digging casually through the Rat Room wastebasket, Scully'd accidentally brushed against one of Detective Halasz's used tissues, deposited there the previous day. The inevitable happened. Her fingers sticky, she'd excused herself to the bathroom. For her benefit, Mulder had stifled his giggles until after her departure. Now, though, there was this rat to consider. Onan seemed to grin up at her as he rooted through the sawdust on the floor of his cage, his seeds and pellets -- as eponymously usual -- scattered across the ground, nose and tail twitching in unison. Healthy little vermin. The factor VIII pseudo-organ obviously wasn't affecting his constitution. Of course, if Onan was here... The door to a toilet stall behind Scully opened; out came Perdita Dogar. She saw Scully and smiled in recognition. "Hi!" she said, coming over to the sinks and tossing a tampon wrapper into the trash. "Hello," Scully said, drying her hands. "How's the research going?" "The usual," Dogar said, turning on the taps. "Take blood, check for the factor, maybe reengineer another pseudo-organ. Just the daily grind." "Do you expect Dr. Chan to be back soon?" "Oh, he's out this morning. Getting his hearing loss treated. Didn't you know that?" She shut off the water and tore a paper towel from the dispenser. "Yes, I did, actually." Second-hand confirmation of Chan's story. Good. "Are you on your way back to the labs?" "To the old building, actually," Dogar said, rubbing her hands with the towel. "We keep some sophisticated equipment in the basement, to test the composition of extracellular fluid; I'm taking Onan there now for his evaluation. You and your partners caught us at a busy time, you see -- poor Onan is so sore from tests that he can barely sit down! -- but in a day or two we'll be done with this phase of the testing, and things will settle back to normal." "Good," Scully said. "At least for the sake of Onan's disposition." "Hey, we pamper the little bastard four weeks out of five." She opened the rat's cage and lined it with a clean folded paper towel. "The fifth week, though, is murder on his gluteus." Dogar stepped out of the bathroom with Scully close behind. "I need to ask you a few more questions." "Really? What about?" "Well, there was another homicide last night." Dogar stopped short. "Another murder? My God..." she murmured. "Who was it?" "An Annapolis bank teller named Deborah Hardy. Sound familiar?" "No...no, I've never heard of her." Dogar hesitated. "The same killer?" "Maybe. Probably not. An accomplice, most likely." Scully debated briefly over telling Dogar more, then decided against it; even if she wasn't directly connected with the murders, she was in close contact with individuals -- Valerie Lee and Dr. Chan -- at whom some small degree of evidence already pointed; best to keep things ambiguous. As they began walking again, Scully said vaguely, "The circumstances of the killing were similar to Julianna Blackburn's death; I can't really give you any details, but..." "Oh, I understand," Dogar quickly said. "I don't think I want to know the specifics." She shook her head from side to side, striding quickly down the hall. "I see enough blood every day -- in bags and tubes and vials, in basins up to my wrist -- without worrying about the murder of someone I've never met." Dogar paused. "I suppose that sounds heartless." "Not really. I know exactly how you feel." Scully smiled. "I used to enjoy gory horror movies, at least to an extent -- you know that part in The Shining where the hotel lobby fills with blood? Great stuff -- but not any more. After my dozenth autopsy, I decided that the morgue was where bodies and entrails belonged. Nowadays, I line up for Jane Campion films and consider myself blessed." "Blood belongs in veins," Dogar said. "That's why hemophilia is an unholy disease. It's the slow leak, the tiny cut that protracts the agony. No platelets means no end to the bleeding." She grinned bitterly. "I once attended the postmortem of a hemophiliac who died from a paper cut -- from a page of her Bible. I remember the page, too: Psalm one-nineteen. That was the day I stopped being religious." Again, she shook her head. "You can't trust God to do the right thing. Hemophilia is the disease of the holy and powerful, the popes and kings and inbreeders. There is no eternal life, not in the Christian sense -- but there just might be a scientific answer to immortality. There's real power in what I'm doing; hopefully, once this therapy is completed, we can implant a little bundle of skin cells -- no bigger than a wafer of the Eucharist -- and give a normal life to someone who might otherwise be doomed to convalescence. That's salvation." They stepped outside. The day was hotter than the day before, the sun glaring down in mute ultraviolet immolation, but the shadows beneath the trees were cool and serrated, like row after row of shading incisors. Walking beneath the coolness, Dogar continued to talk. They took the shattered concrete path, stepping carefully among the shards of cement. Some of it had been cleared since the day before, but a few large chunks remained, lying against the ground like bloated parietal bones, bits of a giant's skull. "You sound devoted to your work," Scully said. "It's all I've got, sometimes," said Dogar. "I mean, you're a professional woman -- you know the feeling, right? You strive for success, working like mad, always expecting that when the breakthrough comes and your effort is vindicated that you'll earn some well-deserved R&R; but after a while, you start to doubt that this vindication will ever come. Eventually, the work becomes an end in itself." "I definitely know what you mean." "You know, when -- ohshit." Dogar tripped over a piece of concrete, fell forward a few feet, brought her leg quickly forward to regain her balance -- and dropped Onan's cage. It hit the ground and burst open, the plastic hinges of the door hitting the pavement at an angle and snapping. A white and pink flash scrabbled on the rough surface, squirming quickly from the broken confines of the cage and falling to the cement. Onan gathered himself, ran, paused for an instant, rethought his direction and soon hurtled himself into the grasses that bordered the path. "Damn!" Dogar cried, running after him. Scully scooped up the remains of the cage and hurried behind. Although invisible, Onan's body made a whispery depression in the lawn, a rustling indentation that sped meanderingly across the habitat. He seemed indecisive for a few seconds, then suddenly settled on a destination; Onan flashed sharply white through gaps in the sea of grass. Scully and Dogar followed as best they could. After a minute of fruitless chasing, they managed to corner the rat in a small grove of trees near the old Chifeno building. Beyond the trees was a wide bare patch of dirt, shaded beneath the overhanging stone roof. It was devoid of vegetation, mostly loose soil and dust, and the rat's white plumpness soon came into view, standing out sharply against the drab ground. For a few seconds, Onan held still, sitting on his haunches, nose quivering like mad. They slowed their pursuit, keeping their footfalls soft; Dogar muttered a quiet stream of profanities, her hands outstretched. "Stupid bloodydamn rat," she said, creeping near. The hairs of Onan's thighs and belly were matted with grime. "Just a little bit closer..." Dogar bit down on her lip, flushed. Nose pressed low, Onan's ears twitched, his body tensing -- and he began to dig in the dirt. His forepaws scratched the soil quickly; dust clouded around his head; the thin patter of grit against humus was clearly audible. A bowl-shaped depression appeared, the depth of a centimeter and growing. Scully touched Dogar's shoulder. "Don't grab him just yet," she said. "Why?" Dogar asked. "Just wait a second." She went closer, watching the rat claw through the soil. Onan continued to dig, ignoring her, concentrating entirely on the dirt, his ears and cheeks covered with light filth. What had Mulder said to her the previous day? Just a tossed off comment -- but how did it go? He'd been excited over the circumstances of Julianna Blackburn's death, anxious to apprehend this serial killer who had gone unidentified for nearly four decades. You're the only non-necrophiliac I know who gets so enthused by this sort of thing, she'd said on the way to Blackburn's apartment. And what had his response been? Me and the rats, he'd said. Me and the rats. With a quick flick of the wrist, Scully scooped Onan up from the ground and handed him to Dogar, who plopped him back into his cage with a light scolding and carefully closed the broken lid. Dogar made as to leave, but Scully did not move, keeping her gaze concentrated on the dirt patch alongside the building. She knelt, dusting the knees of her slacks with soil. Looking more closely, she saw that the entire area of dirt -- measuring perhaps fourteen feet by six -- was lightly depressed, concave, as if it had been recently disturbed. The disruption had been carefully hidden, and was near-invisible beneath the shade of the roof -- but it was there. Tracing a line in the dust with her finger, Scully began to brush away the topsoil with both hands. She spread the dirt away, digging rapidly, going deep, grime gathering beneath her fingernails. "What -- what are you doing?" Dogar asked, clutching Onan's cage. Scully -- following an impulse as inexplicable as it was sudden -- did not answer. She continued to probe the dirt, penetrated six, seven inches beneath the surface, a molehill rising around the shallow dimple she created. Another inch; nothing. She began to doubt her instinct, began to slow her digging. Her fingertips brushed plastic. Her breath became suddenly shallow and excited. Now Dogar knelt, began to assist her, as their hands traced the outline of a large lumpy package, smoothly wrapped, that had been buried alongside the building. Scully's fingers found a seam, a lip sealed with duct tape, pulled. It came loosely up out of the dirt, grit sliding down the black surface. She used one of her nails to puncture the membrane, making a small hole and pulling it wide, stretching the plastic and distorting the thickness of the bag. She tore it open. A flash of pale ivory flesh revealed itself. Her hands reached down of their own accord. Scully felt a broken, bruised body; the cadaver's joints had been cracked like those of a slaughtered deer. She wriggled down into the bag, up to her elbows. Her forefinger located a moist crevice, a loose flap of tissue she recognized as a tongue, and she used it as a handhold, gripping the jaw, wrenching the corpse's head out of the hole. The lifeless spine arched itself like a sine curve. Dusty stringy bits of hair emerged, then a leeringly cut forehead, a pair of filthy almond eyes crusted with dirt, one punctured and deflated. It was recognizably the face of Valerie Lee. With a sigh of disgust, Scully removed her fingers from Lee's gaping mouth. She turned her head, looked at Dogar. The researcher's eyes were bulging, her face pale. Onan's cage fell from her hands onto the soil, where it collided with a soft chuck and broke open again; after a longer pause, the rat wriggled out and fell onto the back of Lee's neck, where he stayed with fur bristling and ears erect. Glancing down at her hand, Scully noticed that she was bleeding slightly, the first joint of her forefinger lightly scratched. Lee's corpse had bitten her. "Here," Dogar said quaveringly, handing her the paper towel from Onan's cage. "I think you'd better wash your hands again." * * * Mulder and Halasz waited for Scully to return, idly leaning on the counter of the Rat Room, playing mind games with the rodents. Halasz tried calling Dr. Chan at home several times, but got no answer -- "Still getting his ears treated, I suppose," he said, leaving the more tempting interpretation of Chan's absence unuttered. He sneezed. After a while, they began to talk. "You know," Halasz said, "I've been wondering why our killer slashes wrists. Out of all possible places." "Well, it's a fairly accessible artery," said Mulder. "Plus, it's been popularized, especially as a suicide method." "Maybe," said Halasz. "But people who slit their wrists usually aren't serious about suicide. It's rarely successful, you know. Inefficient. They just want the scars, the grand gesture of killing themselves." Halasz stuck his finger through the bars of the nearest cage, pulling it back and grinning when the rat came to investigate. "Or maybe there's another explanation," Halasz said. "You ever hear of the perinatal level of the brain?" Mulder shrugged. "It's the part of the brain that supposedly stores 'memories' of birth." "Right. But I think that these memories also influence our reactions to death -- more specifically, the way we kill. Murder or suicide, it's the same thing; both are influenced by perinatal memories." "Give me an example." "Sure. There's a statistical correlation between circumstances of birth and one's preferred method of suicide. Individuals who were delivered by forceps, for example, shoot themselves in the head." "I find that hard to believe." "Believe it. It's gotten so that I routinely check the birth records of every suicide I investigate. The connections are all there. If I find someone who hung or asphyxiated himself, nine times out of ten, I discover that they were deprived of oxygen at birth. If your mother was anesthetized for delivery, there's a good chance that you'll OD on drugs to kill yourself; the incidence of sleeping pill overdoses has declined in proportion with the rise of natural childbirth. Isn't that sweet?" "And wrist-slitters -- " " -- were delivered through Cesarean section," Halasz finished. "Yep. Point for point, a near-perfect relation." "How about hara-kiri? The Cesarean rate among samurai wasn't especially marked." "An anomaly. Overall, though, a similar psychological rule applies to those who murder and kill -- to a lesser degree, of course; most murders are done on the spur of the moment, not premeditated and brooded over the way suicides are, and the killers tend to use whatever is within reach. But when the murderer operates at leisure, the choice of weapon tends to reflect the perinatal." Halasz blew his nose. "So I'll give you even odds that our serial killer was a Cesarean baby." Mulder's cell phone rang. He answered it, listened carefully, his eyebrows arching once, then moved to the Rat Room window. "Yeah, Scully, I can see you," he said, peering through the blinds. "I'll get Boston PD here right away. You lucky duck." He hung up, turned to Halasz. "What happened?" "They located Valerie Lee." "Where? Can she be brought in for questioning?" Mulder hesitated only a second. "Not likely." * * * Scully accompanied the ambulance to the Boston Morgue. The bag had carefully been lifted from the ground, cut away to reveal the pathetic sight of Lee's nude body, curled and contorted like an origami frog: her knees and elbows and shoulders and thigh joints had been cleanly broken, allowing her arms and legs to be folded close to her torso and strapped there, making a relatively small package that fitted without much stretching into an economy-sized garbage bag. Quick on-site measurements had indicated that Lee's body was indeed the one that had made the urinary impression on Blackburn's bedsheet. Allowing for distortion, the proportions matched exactly. Lee had been trussed with smooth nylon cord, giving Scully some hope for fingerprints, but dusting with powder had revealed nothing: whoever had bundled the corpse had been wearing gloves, probably latex. So Lee was carted away. Halasz and Mulder elected to remain behind to conduct a more thorough search of her office. Dogar stayed with them, biting her lip, her arms crossed and trembly with concern. "Jeez," she kept saying softly. "Jeez, jeez." Now fully warranted, their search could go deep into her filing cabinets, her desk, her papers. They emptied drawers, sifted through the detritus of a life spent in research: journals, magazines, articles on gene splicing and bacterial engineering, textbooks, professional manuals, spiral-bound notebooks. There were meticulously detailed summaries of her work with the factor VIII gene, some of which Mulder took for later examination, along with some of Lee's photographs and left-handed scissors. It was Halasz, however, who discovered the true bombshell. Tucked deeply within the confines of the lowest filing cabinet was a yellowed and brittle newspaper clipping from the Boston Herald of May 3, 1958. There was a grainy picture of bystanders surrounding a police boundary, staring down at something half-hidden by grass, but Halasz only glanced at the photograph; his gaze was riveted by the headline, which he unfolded and held up for Mulder to see. In thirty-point type, tucked within the pages of some long-ago news section, the headline read: BODY FOUND IN GRISLY SLASHER KILLING. "The first murder," Mulder said simply. "It was here in Boston, thirty-eight years ago. They found a female drifter on the outskirts of the city, veins empty. Mostly, anyway. Some blood was still in her legs and feet; our killer hadn't begun using the intravenous tube yet." "And Lee has the clipping," said Halasz, pocketing it. "That pretty much clinches it." "She couldn't have been the killer, though," Mulder said. "Too young." "Definitely connected, though," said Halasz. "After I get back from Annapolis tomorrow, I'll check up on -- " He stopped. Dr. Chan entered the room. He saw the three of them, extended his hand to each investigator in turn -- and Mulder noticed that Chan's left wrist, again, was freshly bandaged. "Hey there," the doctor said amicably. "Back so soon?" "Yep," said Halasz. Without hesitation, with affected casualness, he asked, "So where have you been?" "Hearing therapy," Chan said. "Just like the other day." "Is that why your wrist is bandaged?" Mulder asked. "To treat your deafness?" "This, you mean?" He pulled back the cuff of his lab coat, exposing the gauze. "I've been seeing an acupuncturist. He's got some interesting ideas; instead of needles, he implants catgut sutures at the acupuncture point, for continuous stimulation. This is the wai-kuan point, two inches above the wrist, on the shou t'ai-yang hsiao-ch'ang ching meridian. It's used to treat deafness." "I don't mean to doubt you," Mulder said, "but I hope you'll understand if I ask you for your acupuncturist's name..." "Certainly. Dr. Dave Han." Chan recited a phone number, which Mulder noted. Dogar spoke for the first time. "Dr. Chan, something's happened to Val..." She trailed off, apparently uncertain over how to proceed. Glancing at each other, Halasz and Mulder rapidly filled in the details. When they were done, Chan had gone a shade whiter and more flustered. "Goodness," he said, tugging at the sleeve of his coat, toying with the gauze, eyes down. "Goodness. Poor Val." He looked up. "So you think that she did it? That she was some kind of serial killer?" Chan's throat seemed to catch on the last two words. "It certainly appears that way," Halasz said. "Evidence is mostly circumstantial, but it's pretty solid." He told Chan briefly about the urinary photograph. "That clears up most of our doubts -- Lim's body exactly matched the impression in Blackburn's apartment. We're sorry." "Yeah," said Chan. "Sorry. This is a pretty sorry business overall." He looked back down at his wrist, worrying the bandage. Almost imperceptibly, a droplet of blood spread across the cotton like a rising sun; Chan's eyes mirrored its melancholy expansion, moist and tired and curiously old. "So," the doctor said finally. "Where is Valerie now?" * * * Valerie Lee was peeled and cored. Scully made the first incision, recording her observations. Dead skin is tough and stretchy, and it took several firm swipes of the scalpel before she completed the first arm of the famous Y-shaped tattoo across Lee's chest. A bit of coagulated blood pushed its way out of the cut like a reddish larva. Preliminary observations had already been completed. After literally unfolding Lee's body over the perforated steel, it became obvious that her knees, elbows, shoulders and thigh-bones had been broken after death with several blows of a short blunt instrument -- which, judging from the thin parallel red lines left on the epidermis, was probably the same threaded aluminum pipe that had been used to bash in Julianna Blackburn's head. Afterwards, her limbs had been bound carefully to torso and neck with printless nylon cord, leaving marks on the backs of the calves and forearms. Tied with a bowline hitch. The body had then been stuffed into the garbage bag and sealed with silvery duct tape. This tape had already been routed to Hair and Fibers in the hopes that some telltale identifiable debris had adhered to the sticky side, but Scully was not overly optimistic. There were some signs that the body had been transported after death. The bluish discolorations of livor mortis were spotty, difficult to gauge, although it was safe to say that the body had been in several different positions following Lee's demise. Then there were the gross physical characteristics. Scully tried not to look directly at Lee's face, which bore many obvious disfiguring marks of being buried in a shallow grave for several days, but carefully went over the rest of the cadaver. To all appearances, it was the same body that had left the bedsheet impression. The most interesting characteristic, certainly, was the scar just above the abdomen, which had also been evident in the urinary photograph: moonshaped, rather like an appendectomy scar, it was raised, slightly bulging. Pressing down lightly on the bulge, Scully felt the mound give slightly, spongy but firm. Not muscle, or fatty tissue, or a tumor. Odd. Parenthetically, she also noted that Valerie Lee's left hand and arm were slightly more muscular and developed than her right -- confirming Lee's rumored handedness, and providing another piece of circumstantial evidence. Not that it mattered, anyway. Scully reminded herself of this as she sliced into Lee, cut away flaps of skin and pulled them back, exposing the chestular cavity, getting her gloved hands slimy as she did so. She immediately saw what made the bulge in Lee's stomach. "Great," she murmured. "First a pseudohermaphrodite, and now this." What came to mind, inevitably, was Onan. Him and those other rats. All of whom had been surgically implanted with a gray dime-sized pseudo-organ that allowed them to produce artificially high amounts of factor VIII hormone. She wondered why she hadn't seen the connection before. Those scars on their bellies. The scar on the urinary photograph. Obvious in retrospect. A pseudo-organ had been implanted within Valerie Lee. Gray-colored, the size of a jellyfish, it clung to the area just beneath the curve of her ribcage, held there with strands of surgical thread. There was something vaguely obscene about the organ, divided in two halves by a thin seam, rather like a scrotum. From its top extended a thin tube, no thicker than one of Scully's fingers, worming its way up into Lee's esophagus, where it was conjoined with more stitches. With some revulsion, Scully touched the pseudo-organ. It squished slightly beneath her finger, displacing fluid with a light chuckling gwish -- and a thin stream of straw-colored pus oozed from the corners of Lee's mouth. The pus dribbled down the corpse's cheeks and disappeared down the perforations of the table. Scully left the autopsy room and returned with a Polaroid camera. She took picture after picture of the moist gray sac -- because that was what it was, some kind of monstrous skin-and-collagen sac, attached to Lee's digestive system, implanted, sitting there like a parasite. After taking five photos, she began the dissection. It took her an hour's hard work, peeling away layer after layer of velvety drab skin cells, documenting the position of the capillaries that ran across the sac's inner surface, charting the course of that tube, finding where it terminated. At the end of the tube, where it joined the esophagus, was a small round sphincter, half open, clotted with more of the yellowish pus. Strands of blood were swirled in with the yellow. It reminded her, bizarrely, of melted French vanilla ice cream to which strawberries at been added, leaving thin traces of red at the bottom of the bowl. When she was done, there were more questions than answers. She circled the steel-tiled autopsy room for a few moments, gathering her thoughts, trying to find some organized way of presenting what she'd found. Then she phoned Mulder. After he answered, she quickly explained what she'd discovered. "It's some kind of pseudo-organ," she said. "Far more sophisticated than anything they're putting into those mice, though. It's lined with capillaries, for one thing, very thickly, and it has its own set of contractive muscles..." "Is it for treating hemophilia?" Mulder asked. "No -- definitely not. I haven't examined these cells carefully yet, but they appear to be unengineered, and Lee's blood doesn't contain abnormal levels of factor VIII." "So what is this pseudo-organ for?" She tried to find the right words. "Well, listen to its characteristics and draw your own conclusions. This organ is rich in blood vessels, incredibly rich -- almost like a placenta. It should be able to absorb fluid -- water, lymph, plasma -- very rapidly." Mulder was getting excited; she could feel his eagerness over the phone, and it was contagious. "And...?" he asked. "The organ connects directly to Lee's body in three places. First, there's a tube and sphincter connecting the sac to the base of her esophagus. It's all artificial, of course, with muscle transplanted from elsewhere, but it seems as if she was able to open and close the tube at will -- or perhaps it was some side effect of peristalsis, affected only at certain times -- the month of May, perhaps. "Second," Scully continued, "the sac joins the inferior vena cava -- the vein that empties into the right atrium of the heart. The capillaries seem to form a kind of web around the venated tissue, attaching it to Lee's circulatory system." "Which means that anything that was dumped into the sac could conceivably enter her bloodstream," Mulder said. "Third," said Scully, moving on, "there's a second tube descending from the bottom of the sac, moving down past Lee's large intestine to the opening of her cervix. It looks like an exocrine duct to me -- something could empty the sac. Periodically. It's bordered by involuntary muscles; some kind of spasm would force fluid down through the tube." She could sense Mulder's grin over the phone. "All right," he said. "I want to hear you say it. Say what this pseudo-organ was used for." Instead of replying immediately, Scully held one of her Polaroids up to the light, looking at it carefully. The picture showed the lowermost duct of the pseudo-organ, illuminated with a flashlight that highlighted the pattern of capillaries that crossed the tissue. They were gorged, tight, like a hare's ears. Crudely woven, highly patterned, they were definitely artificial, the work of man. "I believe," Scully said slowly, "that this pseudo-organ was implanted within Valerie Lee to allow her to consume and incorporate the blood of other human beings into her own circulatory system. Judging from the opening in the esophagus, I'd say that Lee drank Julianna Blackburn's blood and allowed it to pass into the sac, where it was absorbed by the capillaries into the inferior vena cava. Simultaneously, Lee's own blood slowly filled the pseudo-organ, routed there by a second set of capillaries, and this blood was somehow excreted through the second duct, flowing out of Lee's body. Happy?" "In other words...?" "Valerie Lee was a vampire," Scully said. "A scientifically-engineered vampire. The pseudo-organ was designed so that she could periodically absorb the blood of others and drain her old blood out through an opening in the cervix. Thus acquiring fresh plasma in her veins." "Like changing your car's oil," Mulder said. "Does the technology exist for such an implant?" "Well, it obviously does now," Scully said. "There's no overriding theoretical opposition to such a system. The only truly difficult part would be controlling the muscular contractions necessary for it to function, although I imagine that rerouting peristaltic reflexes might work. It would take a genius, though. Or better." "Did Lee have the scientific background necessary to do such a thing?" "No. She studied things at the microscopic level; a large bioengineering project like this would have been unthinkable." Scully paused. "But Chan might be able to do it. Or even Dogar." "Well, the first murder -- which evidently involved a system just like this one -- took place in 1958; Dogar wasn't even born back then. Chan would have been twenty or thirty at the time, just out of graduate school -- but still, would it have been possible to orchestrate such a project in the fifties?" "Apparently it was," Scully said. "I don't know how..." "Do you know why?" Mulder asked. "What would the purpose of such an alteration be?" "I don't know. I really don't know. Why would anyone want to do this?" "I'm not sure. Still..." Mulder laughed excitedly, filled with heady exhilaration. "It reminds me of a joke: what do you say to someone who's just become a vampire?" Scully'd heard that one before. "'Coagulations!' I suppose." * * * Five hours later, Detective Peter Halasz left the house of Deborah Hardy, marching down the wooden steps that led away from Hardy's door, his eyes clouded with thoughts and half-formed deductions. He clutched a tissue loosely in his right hand. Halasz stopped at the sidewalk. Turning, he looked back at the house. It was an attractive little bungalow, white, with green trim: too expensive for a bank teller's salary, but Hardy'd had some wealthy parents -- her father owned the bank. Only the broken living room window tarnished the view from the outside, the lowermost pane shattered and the latch unhooked to make entry easy. The flowers beneath the sill were trampled; an impression of a shoe had been left in the soft soil, but it was too smudged to be of any real use. The detective walked away from the death house. Night had already fallen on Annapolis. The street was dark. He'd arrived three hours before and had spent the entire time probing the evidence in Hardy's bedroom and bathroom, watching as the ME pointed out this patch of blood, this fragment of hair, this sign of a struggle, this smear of cerebrospinal fluid. After a while, it became too much. Hardy's body was gone but her outline was still redly visible on her sheets. It reminded him of the urinary photograph at Blackburn's apartment, and made him laugh. There were other things, too. Medical records indicated that Deborah Hardy had donated blood at work two months ago; these records could have been accessed from the Chifeno database. And the hair that Scully had taken from Rachel Saunders' desk had matched the hair found in Hardy's bed. He kept walking. He always parked far away from murder scenes. Halasz didn't know why; it was just a habit, to ease his car into a space a block or two away from his final destination, allowing him a minute's walk to and from the carnage. Time to think, and to brood. On the way to scenes he rarely thought of the bloody mess he was about to see; he would think of his wife, or his two-year-old daughter, or the outcome of the Bulls-Knicks game last night. On the way back, however, there was little else to think about. It burned him. Another unnecessary killing. What had Agent Scully said? Luck makes the world go round. Hardy's house lay at the very edge of the residential sector, and Halasz soon moved into a shifting maze of dark businesses, some closed for the night, others -- delicatessens, doughnut shops, a copy store -- blazing brightly out into the night. He passed these facades with a squint, felt his nose begin to itch. Photic reflex. Bright lights made him sneeze. He bent his head, dug into his pocket for a fresh Kleenex, moved quickly into a darker part of the street. He felt the familiar tickle along the bulge of his sinus and braced for the spasm. It came -- but from the wrong direction. Something crashed down on the base of his skull. The world exploded into bright flares of red and yellow and pain. Halasz crumpled and fell. There was a pause, long enough to dimly feel the coldness of the cement, half-conscious. Then someone dragging him, shirt scratching against the pavement. Blackness. He dreamt that someone went through his pockets, dreamt that he heard the rapid snick-snick of a straight razor being unsheathed and flicked open. A ringing like cool steel. Quick pain across his wrist. His groin. His arm and leg flooded with warmth, stickiness coursing down his hand and fingers. Sticky. He made a fist and felt the pad of his thumb slither wetly against clenched palm. In this dream, he opened his eyes a crack, saw a hooded shape crouched two feet away from him, pocketing something, unfolding something else, a piece of paper. The world was sticky with blood. Wetness dripping across his arm, he drew his pistol and fired six shots into the darkness. Thick smell of cordite. Thud of body hitting sidewalk. He marveled at the lucidity of this dream, the concreteness of the details. Halasz lay back, muttering something that not even he understood. After a while, the dream began to change. * * * Scully burst into Mulder's hotel room, a sheaf of photographs in her hand. "I just realized something," she began excitedly. "Because of its position, the pseudo-organ in Valerie Lee's body would have pressed down on the pancreas, right above the duct leading to the small intestine -- so, conceivably, it might have caused irregular enzyme release, leading to an abnormal discharge in her urine. Which would explain the image on Blackburn's bedsheet. Lee didn't have pancreatic cancer, but she did have irregular pancreatic functioning. So, like Les, her urine would have contained the necessary chemicals to produce the bedsheet impression." She stopped, finally realizing that something was wrong. Mulder sat at the edge of his bed, his cell phone in his hands, staring at it in quiet disbelief. He blinked twice, slowly, and said, "That was Annapolis PD. Halasz is dead." "Oh God. What..." "It was Rachel Saunders," Mulder said. "They found her body nearby -- Halasz shot her just before he died. Apparently, she clubbed him over the head with a blunt instrument and slit his wrists while he was unconscious..." "Oh God," Scully said again. She let the photographs slip from her hands, tumbling softly to the floor. Moving to the bed, she sat down beside Mulder, her mind reeling with shock. "Saunders searched through his pockets for something. She took his wallet and a newspaper clipping that he'd removed from Lee's office -- that clipping of the 1958 homicide -- and was examining them nearby when he managed to draw his gun. The noise of the shots attracted some help from a nearby business, but by then it was to late. Saunders apparently slashed his femoral artery as well, to save time. He didn't have a chance." "The body..." Scully began. "Saunders' body. Did she have the pseudo-organ?" Mulder shook his head. "It's impossible to tell. Halasz emptied six rounds into her chest at point blank range. There's nothing left but hamburger." He tossed his phone across the bed. "She was waiting for him, though. She knew he was on his way." "So Saunders was definitely the second killer." "Yes. It was her hair in Hardy's bed, and Annapolis PD just finished doing a check of the security tapes of the bank where Hardy worked -- Saunders shows up on a bunch of them, sitting in some kind of paperwork alcove, watching the tellers. It was her and Valerie Lee. Two down -- but both were too young to have been responsible for the earliest murders. Our original vampire is still at large." "Any ideas?" "Well, both Dogar and Chan knew that Halasz was going to Annapolis. Either of them could have phoned ahead and told Saunders to be on the lookout -- and told her to retrieve the newspaper clipping. For some reason, that clipping is important." Mulder tweezed his nose between two fingers, thinking. He continued, "The only problem -- besides the fact that Dogar is obviously too young to be our original killer -- is that their alibis check out for Blackburn's killing. According to the employee roster, Dogar was working that day, and both Chan's wife and his acupuncturist vouch for his whereabouts. So neither of them could have been the one who took Lee's body from Blackburn's apartment." "Chan's wife could be lying. We only talked to her over the phone." "True. For some reason, everything points at him." Mulder stood. "I'm going to ask that his house be placed under surveillance. Dogar's house, too, just to be safe. In the meanwhile, Annapolis said that they'd modem me a copy of that newspaper clipping as soon as they could; I'll need to borrow your laptop. Maybe there's something there that I'm just not seeing." "All right. I'm going to go over my Lee autopsy notes one more time. Make sure that I'm not missing anything." She left, returned briefly to retrieve her photographs and give Mulder her Powerbook -- he thanked her absently, busy phoning the Boston dispatcher to have unmarked cars sent to Chan and Dogar's homes -- and went back to her room. Time to work. Sketches, photos, transcripts and notes from the Lee postmortem were spread along the surface of the small desk that sat across from the bed; she sat down, pulled a pad of hotel stationery from the desk drawer, and began to jot down more impressions. It took a few minutes before she was able to concentrate efficiently; thoughts of Detective Halasz and his unnecessary death kept clouding her brain, making her wonder whether she and Mulder had truly done all they could to prevent such a tragedy. Scully's eyes closed, lids heavy. Self-blame always made her sleepy. But the nature of the problem before her prevented such a luxury as rest. Or pity. Scully rechecked everything. The pseudo-organ, the folded corpse. There were other unusual factors, too. Lee's uterine lining had been sloughing off. And her blood had been type A. DNA tests had already been commissioned; although it always took several days to get results, she was fairly certain that the genome within those erythrocytes would test positive for Julianna Blackburn. Strange stuff. Almost strange enough to keep her from realizing that she lacked the most important thing of all: a cause of death. After all her work, all her examination, all her autopsying, she still didn't know why Valerie Lee had collapsed and died in Blackburn's apartment. It was a frustrating problem. Assuming that Lee had successfully committed some of the previous blood-draining murders, her demise wasn't due to any imperfections in the vampire apparatus. The pseudo-organ worked; Scully was sure of that. Her death might have been a result of the continual pressure the organ exerted on her pancreas, but there was none of the obvious inflammation to be expected from such a sudden attack. It wasn't a coronary, or a stroke. She hadn't fallen in the shower. All of her wounds had been inflicted postmortem, to facilitate folding. Scully rechecked her photographs of the pseudo-organ. A thin network of capillaries, stretched along the inner surface of the sac. Filled with coagulations -- stiff with it. Gorged with thick blood. Tight with the blood. Like a hare's ears, she remembered. Slowly, inexorably, an idea began to form -- a seductively logical hypothesis. "Think," Scully muttered to herself. "You've got these blood vessels. Pseudohermaphrodite...artificial capillaries...primary polycythemia..." Her eyes widened. "That's it," she said. In the next room, at the same instant, Mulder watched as the digitized image of the Boston Herald newspaper clipping scrolled down the computer screen; his eyes flickered, reflecting the pixellated light. He passed over that same lurid headline -- BODY FOUND IN GRISLY SLASHER KILLING -- and quickly scanned the text, looking for obvious connections, something that Rachel Saunders could be persuaded to kill over. Nothing stood out. It was simple, sensationalistic reporting of a simple, sensationalistic case: the female drifter had been found lying among the tall dandelions and thistles of this outer Boston field, her hair lightly dusted with pollen. Coroners estimated that she had been dead for at least two days, meaning that she had been killed on or near May Day. Her right wrist had been slit, with copious blood on the surrounding grasses -- it had been a sloppy job, a first effort by a killer who would later become silent and efficient and absolutely clean. A few seconds passed. The photograph that had accompanied the story appeared, ensconced in its own window, taking up a quarter of the screen. Fuzzy, grainy picture of bystanders standing near police tape, looking down at the drifter's body, which was little more than a gray-toned blob along the lower border of the frame. There was nothing to be found here. Mulder put his hands to the keyboard and pressed Command-W to close the onscreen window. It didn't close. Instead, the news photograph expanded to fill the entire Macintosh screen, quadrupled in size. Apparently Command-W was the keyboard command to increase the window to the full dimensions of the screen, not to close it; Mulder sighed in mild annoyance, and was about to manually click the window shut when he saw the face. He wouldn't have noticed it if the picture hadn't been enlarged. Standing in the crowd like yet another bystander, a familiar face stared back at him from the screen, frozen in time. Despite the separation of thirty-eight years, it was instantly recognizable. Ridiculously recognizable. It was blurred, harsh black-and-white, only half-glimpsed through the thickness of shoulders and waving hands -- but it was there. Mulder stood, ran to the door. In the other room, Scully stood, ran to the door. They met in the doorway, each dizzy with the scope of their own discovery. "It's Dogar," they simultaneously said. * * * Police surveillance is a cushy job, where "overtime" is the name of the game, especially on a Saturday night -- and Officer Huey "Pickles" Donovan had nowhere else to be. Pudgy, with a complexion like raw dough, Donovan hadn't been on a date since January 17, 1995, a personal record-breaker of sixteen celibate months; therefore, when the call came for some unmarked cars to be sent to two addresses in the downtown area, he quickly persuaded his partner and best friend, Jerome Dancer, to join him for some male bonding in the front seat of a Chevy Camaro. He'd provide the cigarettes. They were an inseparable pair. Pickles Donovan was a chubby Celtics fan with asthma and a fondness for imported cheeses; Jerry Dancer was thin, dark and taciturn to the point of utter irrelevance. They sat smoking, glancing now and then through the windshield at the house across the street, its windows dark and shuttered. Donovan kept the more direct watch on the house; Dancer flipped idly through the entertainment section of a Boston rag, leaning the paper against the dashboard. He muttered something unintelligible through the newsprint. "What's that?" "I said that 'Mission: Impossible' is coming out next week," said Dancer, refolding the paper. "Wanna go see it?" "Really? With whadayacall, Tom Cruise?" Donovan snuffed his cigarette out on the steering wheel. "Feh, big deal. But Brian De Palma's directing it." "Who?" "You know. De Palma. He did 'The Untouchables.' My favorite movie of all time." "Never saw it." "Blasphemer." Dancer set down the newspaper, lit another smoke, shook out the flame. He used the smoldering match to gesture towards the house across the street. "What's this all about, anyway? What're we watching this place for?" "Not sure. We're supposed to keep a lookout for this girl." He held up a photograph. "Not sure whether we're supposed to be guarding her or keeping her from escaping." "Not a bad looker, really," Dancer said, taking the picture from Donovan and examining it appreciatively. "Yeah, I like those Hispanic types. Dark hair, and those hooked noses. Christ, it's hot in here." Donovan leaned over and rolled down his window, telling Dancer to do the same; a refreshing waft of cooler night air drifted in, and the cigarette smoke began to diffuse outward. He took back the photo and looked at it again. "Yeah, she's pretty. 'Cept for the glasses, maybe." "I like glasses," Dancer said lamely. He checked his watch. "How much longer do we have to stay here?" "Until we hear otherwise. Relax, enjoy it. We can play some poker, maybe; there's cards in the glove compartment." Dancer flipped the compartment open. The bulb revealed only the driver's manual and registration. "There aren't any cards here." Frowning, Donovan said, "Maybe they're in back. The boys in Narcotics sometimes play rummy off the back fender while they're waiting for a sting; they just toss 'em in the trunk when they're done. Hold on; I'll get 'em." Donovan stepped out of the car, slammed the door and walked around back. Dancer shifted in his seat and glanced into the passenger's side mirror. His partner came into view at the rear of the Chevy, cheeks pink in the night air, fumbling with the keys and inserting the correct one into the lock. Grunting, Dancer looked away from the mirror and opened his paper again. He skimmed the gossip and sex columns and finally turned to the comics. There was a dull thud -- and Dancer's eyes flicked back up to the mirror. He set the newspaper down and leaned his head partway out the window, squinting back into the darkness. Donovan was gone. The trunk jutted open like a large metallic tongue. "Pickles?" called Dancer, half-suspecting that some retarded practical joke was currently being brought into action. When no answer came, he decided to play along. Unbuckling his safety belt -- what the hell was he still doing with it on, anyway? -- he opened the car door and stepped outside. To investigate. * * * Looking at the photograph in disbelief, Scully said, "This is amazing. This photo was taken thirty-eight years ago, and Dogar looks eighteen or nineteen in the picture -- which means that she's got to be at least fifty-six years old." "But there's no mistaking it," said Mulder, throwing on his coat. "That's definitely Dita Dogar in the background of that photograph." He flung open the hotel room door and plunged outside, moving down the hallway to the stairs. "Dogar was at the scene of the first murder in 1958 -- and I have reason to believe that she was in Julianna Blackburn's apartment the day before yesterday." "But the transcript of employee absences didn't have her name on it." "Scully, who gave us that transcript? Dogar did, altering the roster to omit any mention of her absence on May sixteenth. Meanwhile, she played along with our investigation, even helping us from time to time; she didn't try to cover for Valerie Lee, who was already dead, but kept us in the dark regarding Saunders, who she also omitted from the roster." Mulder took the stairs two at a time, moving as quickly as he could to the lobby and outside to the parking lot; Scully had to jog to keep up with him. "What happened, obviously," he continued, walking fast, "was this. Lee selected Julianna Blackburn as a potential victim after seeing her shoot the video in February. Perhaps Blackburn also donated blood while at Chifeno; Lee could have used the database to ascertain that Blackburn was of a compatible blood type and didn't have AIDS." "Rachel Saunders could have done the same thing with Deborah Hardy," Scully said. "Three months later," Mulder continued, "Lim tracked Blackburn down, notified Dogar, and flew to Washington. After killing Blackburn and drinking her blood, Lee made the transference of fluids as usual, as she had in previous years. But something went wrong." Mulder stopped at their car, opened the passenger side door and tossed Scully the keys. "Lim felt herself dying," he said, sliding inside. "She staggered out of the shower and phoned Dogar at Chifeno, using Dr. Chan's office number." "Why did she do that?" Scully asked, firing up the engine. She shifted into reverse and backed out of the parking lot. "Obviously, Dogar waited in Chan's office that night in case something went wrong; that way, the phone trace wouldn't implicate her. She got the call and drove to Washington, arriving there in mid-morning. Before dying and collapsing on Blackburn's sofa, Lee had opened the door to allow Dogar's entry. Dogar went inside and realized what had happened. She folded Lee's body into a tight package, stuffed it into the trunk of her car, and drove back to Boston. That night, she removed the corpse and buried it in the Chifeno natural habitat -- presumably because that was a convenient place. I have the feeling that Dogar often lurks in the labs after hours, contrary to Chifeno policy; perhaps she does her own research late at night -- the research necessary to design and assemble a pseudo-organ of the type you found in Lee's chest." He paused for breath. "After we began to investigate the Chifeno connection," Mulder continued, "Dogar began to get nervous, but not excessively so. Dogar's a good actress. She gave us the faulty employee roster, disguising the fact that both she and Rachel Saunders were missing from work the previous day, and wasted no time in making us suspect Chan. When she saw Halasz pocket the newspaper clipping, though, she knew that he held a piece of evidence that could potentially implicate her in these killings. Halasz carelessly mentioned that he was going to Annapolis later that day, so she telephoned Saunders -- who had meanwhile killed Deborah Hardy and remained in Maryland -- and told her to murder Halasz and take the clipping. But it backfired; Halasz shot Saunders to death before expiring from blood loss." Mulder checked his pistol, cocked it. "So Dogar's going to be panicking now." Scully didn't know what to say. "But how can this be, really? If Dogar is our original killer, why isn't she an old woman?" "Think about it: that's the reason for vampirism," Mulder said. "This periodic ingestion and sloughing of blood must somehow serve as an immortality factor, slowing the process of aging to a standstill. It's the only explanation that I can see." He looked at his partner. "But Scully...you seemed to know that Dogar was the killer at the same time I did. What tipped you off?" "It was just something I realized," she said. "Hold on -- what's Dogar's home address?" Mulder named it. "It's about three miles from here -- just turn on this overpass," he said, indicating a green sign with the barrel of his gun. Then, prodding her recollection: "Something you realized...?" "Yes. I'd been going over my autopsy notes, trying to figure out the cause of Valerie Lee's death, why she died in Blackburn's apartment. It kept eating at me; I was positive that the answer was right there, right in front of my face. As it turned out, it was. I got to wondering whether Lee's pseudo-organ apparatus had any obvious flaws." "Flaws?" "Flaws. Sophisticated as it might be, it's an artificial organ, and the medical track record for such enhancements isn't very good. Early prototypes have shortcomings, problems that aren't obvious right away. I wondered: 'Are there any obvious difficulties with this particular setup?' Finally, I looked back at my photographs, especially the pictures I'd taken of the capillary bed on the inside of the sac. And it came to me." "What?" "That pseudo-organ could only handle female blood. The capillaries are made of synthetic collagen, very inflexible, very sensitive; blood that was too viscous or thick or sticky would clog the vessels, leading to a blockage." "And male blood is thicker than female blood." "Technically, yes. Testosterone causes the body to produce large quantities of erythrocytes, red cells, which naturally increase the viscousness of the blood, making male blood denser and more sluggish. Which is why all of our killers' victims have been female: the blood of a woman is the only type that their pseudo-organs can handle. Testosterone-laced blood would screw up the works, so they stayed carefully away from men." "Until Julianna Blackburn." "Right. Although she certainly looked like a woman, Blackburn was a pseudohermaphrodite, a genetic male with female characteristics, meaning that her blood was just as thick as that of a regular man." Scully turned off the overpass, drawing closer to Dogar's street. "When Valerie Lee drank Blackburn's blood, it choked the pseudo-organ and indirectly affected her circulatory system, causing primary polycythemia, slow circulation of blood. Her vessels became completely engorged -- and that killed her." Mulder said, "I guess that food poisoning is a risk we all run now and then." "So I concluded that all the killers had to be female," Scully finished, ignoring him, "because the pseudo-organ wouldn't function properly within a male circulatory system. So Chan was out as a suspect -- and Dogar was the only one left." "Good," said Mulder. "As long as we're in agreement." He held his gun loosely in his right hand, peering out the window at street signs. "There," he said. "That's her street." They turned the corner and found themselves in a typical Boston neighborhood, two-story brick houses crowding in against the street, small lawns, sloping sidewalks. Streetlamps sprouted from the corners, casting a thin halo of light for twenty or thirty feet -- but they left the remainder of the street and houses in darkness, except for the occasional flicker of a television set from a residential window. In the glare of headlights, however, Mulder immediately spotted the unmarked car. It was parked across from Dogar's house, a squat Chevy Camaro. The trunk and one door was open. The inside lights were still on. No officers were to be seen. "Oh Christ no," Mulder said, motioning for Scully to stop. She eased the car to a standstill in the middle of the street, the engine still running, and the two of them leapt out. Mulder immediately ran sideways towards the Camaro, pistol out and held stiffly before him, eyes rapidly probing the pitch-black darkness around the Chevy. He glanced quickly over his shoulder, jumped onto the sidewalk -- and slipped. It would have been funny if it hadn't been so acutely horrible; Mulder lost his footing, sliding like a novice ice-skater on a melting rink, and pinwheeled his arms to keep his balance: "Whoa-oh-oh," he sputtered, falling heavily against the side of the car, bashing his elbow on the fender. "Christ," he said, trying to get back on his feet -- and slipped again, falling to one hand. The sidewalk was wet and runny with liquid. Mulder grimaced, pulling himself up against the Camaro -- and noticed that he was leaving bloody handprints on the trunk. He looked down at the ground. Saw what he had slipped in. Groaned. "They're underneath the car," Scully said quietly from behind. More carefully now, Mulder bent down and peered beneath the chassis. His heart began to pound. Two. One was dark, wiry, a cigarette clamped convulsively between his thin lips, burnt nearly down to the butt, scorching the dead flesh; the other was flabby and pale, a deck of cards clutched in one plump hand. Both of them had been sliced in the usual places, and then some; a severed human ear lay just beneath the muffler. He turned away. "She's gotten more savage," he said, wiping his mouth with the heel of his unbloodied hand. "She's scared." Scully's eyes were wide. "Let's check the house." They crossed the street and barreled up Dogar's front stops. Mulder knocked and waited for precisely three seconds before blowing away the lock with one well-aimed pistol blast, pushing the door open and stepping inside. It was dark within, lined with vague shadowy shapes, and they sped through each of the rooms in turn, flinging open closets, kicking down doors in lieu of using the knob. A runnel of sweat ran into Mulder's eye; he wiped it away with a nervous hand, leaving blood on his face. They met in Dogar's living room a minute later. "She isn't here," said Scully, breathing heavily. "All right," said Mulder, reholstering his gun. "We'll need to -- " The phone rang, cutting him short. They stared at it for a few seconds, minds blank, until it rang again; Scully reached for the receiver, hesitated, then answered it with a decisive gesture. "Yes?" She recognized the voice immediately. "Hello -- who is this?" it began, sounding confused. "Agent Scully?" "Yes, Dr. Chan, it's me. Listen -- we need your help," she said, checking her watch. "We're trying to track down Dita Dogar; she isn't here, and we think that she may have gone to the Chifeno Labs. Can you meet us there in ten minutes?" "Yes, but -- " "Good. Bring your ID card so we can get inside," Scully said, hanging up. She turned to Mulder. "Chan's on his way. He'll meet us at Chifeno." "So I heard." They went down the steps and across the way to their car, which was still parked in the middle of the street, alongside the Camaro with the corpses stuffed underneath. "I'd better notify Boston PD of the two casualties," Scully said, pulling out her cell phone and dialing the dispatch number. "By the way," she said, waiting for someone to pick up, "we've got to take Dogar alive. If worse comes to worse and we need to exchange fire, aim away from her chest area -- disable her with an arm or shoulder wound. If you shoot to kill, go for the forebrain," she said, pointing to the spot between her eyes. "Why the caution?" "I want to preserve her pseudo-organ -- make sure it doesn't get blasted to smithereens like Saunders' did. I want to see this thing in action -- see how it works -- get a working, living model. I need Dogar's body intact." Mulder grinned hollowly, the smear of blood still standing out harshly against his cheekbone. "I never knew you could be so cold." "Me and the rats, I guess." Scully laughed. It was a high, shaky sound. * * * It wasn't until they began the drive to Chifeno that Mulder realized how completely covered he was with blood. The legs of his trousers, one sleeve and lapel of his coat, his right hand and elbow were all slimed with red, rubbing off on his gun and his doorhandle and the seat of the car. "So much for the security deposit," he grumbled. "What's that?" asked Scully. "Nothing." He lapsed into silence, the image of those two dead officers still burned into his brain. He thought of how slippery the pavement had been. How completely they had been drained. "She definitely used an intravenous tube on them," he said musingly. "But she didn't drink the blood." "Because they were men." "Yes. But she's going to be thirsty for female blood soon," he said. "That's the pattern. You can see how she's getting edgier, more desperate as the time comes for her to rejuvenate -- she butchered those officers, Scully, more than she needed to. I wouldn't want to be the Boston ME tonight. She slaughtered them." Scully frowned and said something -- something so ridiculous and out of context that Mulder's strained mind didn't even register it at first; he heard the words but couldn't grasp their meaning. "What?" he asked. "What did you say?" "I said that maybe she's got PMS," she repeated. "You're joking." "No -- I wish I were. Think about it. This whole cycle of vampirism -- the sloughing and reabsorbing of blood in tissue -- is essentially menstruation on a larger scale. The two processes are linked in other ways, as well; during the autopsy, I noticed that Lee's uterine lining had been halfway shed -- and when I saw Dogar in the bathroom today, she was throwing away a tampon wrapper. This connection clears up a lot of things. It explains, for example, why all of the murders tend to converge on the month of May, when it would be more convenient if they'd spread them across the year: hormonal synchronicity. You've heard of it, right?" "I haven't, actually." "I'm not surprised; it probably doesn't affect your life very much. Basically, though, it means that women who live or work together often find that their periods fall into sync. They menstruate within a week of each other, or even more closely, even if they'd begun their acquaintance with widely divergent cycles. The mechanism isn't very well understood; it probably has something to do with hormonal changes and the subsequent release of pheromones, which cause their periods to converge." "So you think that this pseudo-organ is controlled by similar hormones -- which would then be subject to this sychronicity." "Right. These women don't have a choice over when to kill; their bodies tell them. So, as her time draws near, Dita Dogar will get more and more hungry for blood -- and more violent -- which means that she'll probably strike again tonight." "And afterwards," said Mulder, "she'll take on a new identity and move to another city." Scully agreed. "Eternal youth does pose some social problems. Dogar has probably spent her life moving from one place to another, changing her name and history as she goes to keep anyone from noticing that she doesn't age; she can't stay in one place for more than a decade or so; she skips across the east coast, selecting her victims randomly from large cities to keep investigators off the track." They pulled up in front of the Chifeno complex. Now, in the dead of night, the two buildings loomed like mausoleums: the weary sculpted face of the stone pitted and wrinkled with shadows, the gleaming glass-and-steel portion looking runny and cold in the moonlight, both peering down in aloof silence, sterile and decaying at the same time. Scully shivered. The night wasn't especially cold, but goosebumps prickled like pebbles along the back of her neck, her forearms and along her spine, flesh clammy and too tight. Mulder looked even worse, she thought, covered with dead man's blood and grinning nervously. Chan already stood by the door of the modern half. He was dressed oddly; Scully was used to seeing him in his lab whites and jeans, but now he was wearing gray sweatpants and a parka, the drawstring dangling limply from the tight hood. His face seemed all edges and harsh shapes. He greeted them hollowly, turned to the door and slid his ID card down the slot. It slid open silently. Hushed, the three of them stepped inside. The hall, with its white tiles and exposed aluminum joists, was cool and dark and frighteningly silent; the large circular fan that stood at one end of the hall was still, the great motionless blades contorted like insect wings or great hungry teeth. Chan moved into the shadows ahead of them, asking softly, "Why are you looking for Dita?" Scully briefly explained the circumstances, holding back from some of the more audacious aspects, such as the full ramifications of the pseudo-organ and the possibility of eternal youth, but her story shocked Chan nonetheless. "My...my goodness," he said finally, resorting to this most banal of expressions. "And you think that Dita might be here at Chifeno?" He stopped walking, casting uneasy glances left and right, fear flitting over his face. She couldn't blame him. "Yes," Scully said. "She obviously used Chifeno's resources to gather data for her pseudo-organ design; I'm guessing that she perfected a crude system back in 1958, used it on herself, and refined it over subsequent decades until she reached the point that she could try it on others..." They turned a corner onto another empty hallway. Dark, foreboding. The elevator stood temptingly against one wall, but they decided to forego it for the silence of the stairs; finding the entrance to the stairwell, they entered it -- it was very dim, in almost complete darkness -- and began to mount the steps one by one, moving slowly and quietly, hands sliding along the rails. Scully spoke quietly in the dark. "Dogar probably has notes, documents, even tissue samples here in the labs. She won't skip town without trying to regain them." "Where would such notes be kept?" Mulder asked. "Probably in her office," said Chan, mounting the steps slowly. "On the fourth floor." "One more story." They climbed in silence for some moments more -- Scully automatically kept track of the number of steps -- and then stopped when she whispered, "Here." A pale line of grayness was visible beneath the door at the end of the stairs. Mulder pushed it open carefully, gun drawn. More darkness. They were at the far end of the long hallway, a dozen yards away from the elevator doors and two dozen away from the Rat Room. Mulder crept slowly along the hall. Scully -- her pistol unholstered -- followed in his path, with Chan bringing up the rear. The soft clink of their footsteps on the tile seemed unbearably loud to her, patterings of noise that broke the silence and announced their presence from far away; the weight of her pistol was large and reassuring, though, and she gripped it more tightly as they approached Dogar's office. It was a few doors down from the Rat Room -- and, as they drew close, Scully heard the rustling. It whispered out from behind the closed doors, a restless shifting of fur against plastic, of thin nails and claws, of sniffling noses, of naked tails, of scarred and heavy bellies; there were squeaks, high-pitched and unearthly, as if the rats never slept but kept nocturnal watch over the after-hours deadness. It chilled her. She could hear the rats pacing their cages, back and forth, sharp teeth sliding together. Even as Mulder and Chan continued down the hall to Dogar's office, Scully lingered behind. She hesitated, watching out of the corner of her eye as Mulder opened the door with gun drawn and strode inside, pistol jutting ahead of him like a metallic snout, his footsteps echoing as he circled Dogar's desk. There was silence, a pause. Then, nothing. The office was empty. Scully turned back to the Rat Room. Her hand reached forward, turned the knob, let the door swing open on silent hinges. She stepped inside -- and was confronted by a hundred pairs of coldly reflecting pink eyes, peering at her through the bars of their cages, grinning with alien compassion, shining, albino pupils red as blood. She saw Onan in his cubicle. The little rat who had climbed across Valerie Lee's neck was no more than a shadow now, squeaking softly in tandem with the rest. Then -- before she could react to anything -- a shadow flickered and a straight razor was pressed to her throat. She froze. The pressure on the blade increased a fraction, hurting her, drawing blood. Sharp pain, intense -- a small cut. A bead of redness trickled down the curve of her throat and nestled itself in her clavicle. Dita Dogar's voice. A whisper in her ear, words punctuated by sharpness. "Gun on table. Now." She obeyed the instructions mutely, setting her pistol onto the counter, where Dogar picked it up, the blade still pressing against the junction between her larynx and trachea, right above where the carotid artery beat hotly near the surface. Dogar withdrew the razor; Scully exhaled with relief, her throat aching. The gun was pointed at her heart. There was no opportunity to scream or resist. Dogar kept the barrel level, pocketed the knife, and pulled something thick and round from behind her back -- a roll of duct tape, Scully realized. She unpeeled a strip, six feet long, and tore it with her teeth. Moving quickly, she wound it around Scully's left forearm several times and, gripping Scully's hand and pressing it to hers, joined it to her own. Flexible bondage. Now the two of them were bound, wrist to wrist, by the silvery tape. The gun was still pointed directly at Scully's chest, safety off. She didn't dare struggle as Dogar flitted around the room, dragging her along behind as she scooped up a sheaf of papers from the counter, reached up to a high shelf and brought down a small cylindrical object, which she pocketed: Scully recognized it as a syringe of morphine. Then she was hauled to the window. The cages continued in their whispering murmur around them; only thirty seconds had elapsed since she had entered the Rat Room. Mulder's voice, as if from far away: "Scully?" A quick burst of hope -- but then Dogar was sliding open the window, letting in the night air, the coolness. Muttered: "Fire escape. Move fast." She leapt to the sill with an eerie feline quality and lowered herself out onto the metal frame with clinking steps. She pulled roughly on the tape that joined them, yanking at Scully's arm, and motioned with the gun for her to follow. Clumsily, Scully climbed over the edge of the sill and onto the escape, where she nearly fell, legs buckling beneath her. Four stories up, the ground tottered underneath. Voice fading, from the hallway: "Scully?" Hearing it, Dogar hurriedly led the way, one eye on Scully, one eye on the fire escape stairs, gun still pointed at midsection. The two of them clambered down, Scully pulled along leash-like. Dogar's face was dark with blood and anger. They moved fast, feet clattering on the metal. Making enough noise, hopefully, for Mulder to hear them...but before Scully knew it they were on the ground and in the shadows, far beyond view from any window, speeding between the two Chifeno buildings and into the natural habitat. Scully was tugged over the broken path like a rag doll. She tripped once, falling to her knees on the splintered cement, but Dogar shoved her back to her feet and propelled her further into the grove of trees. Scully knew what was coming next. There was another circular bulge outlined against Dogar's coat pocket, not the duct tape, and she recognized it instantly: it was a wound length of intravenous tubing, coiled and rubber-banded together. It frightened her and gave her hope at the same time: Dogar meant to kill her, but not until they had reached a place where the killing might be achieved in privacy, leaving enough time to absorb vital fluids and be drained of spent blood. So she had a chance. She tried to think. Mulder would be on his way downstairs by now, outside, followed by Chan; he would have seen the open window, have guessed that Dogar would go through the natural habitat. They reached the end of the grove and stopped. Dogar looked right, left, apparently uncertain of how to proceed. Finally, she moved to the left, doubling back behind the old Chifeno building, heading toward the stretch of residential houses that lay beyond. Her breathing was harsh and ragged. Scully tried to speak, to stall her. "Where are you going?" "Nowhere," Dogar said. She kept the gun steady, leaving Scully no chance for escape. She tried again. "We know everything, Dita. The pseudo-organs inside Valerie Lee and Rachel Saunders. The vampirism. The immortality factor." Dogar laughed. "That's a nice name for it." The two of them moved along the sidewalk, not stopping for breath but pressing onward into the darkness, past unlit houses and dim streetlamps that jutted up from the concrete like bony fingers. Dogar made a sudden move to the right, cutting across a series of sparse lawns, and Scully found herself within a small fenced-off area, bordered by shrubs, a willow tree sprouting in the center. The willow drooped and caressed the nighttime air, swaying softly in the breeze as they neared it and stopped beneath its branches. Forcing Scully to the ground next to the tree, Dogar brought out the straight razor and slit their bonds. She tore off more duct tape and wound it around and around Scully and the tree trunk, binding her tightly to the willow, placing a hand on her forehead and pressing her head roughly against the bark. It dug into the back of her skull. When it was over, Scully was strapped to the trunk in crouching position, unable to move her arms, her legs pinned beneath her, looking up as Dogar brought the intravenous tube out from her pocket and began to unwind it. The needle at the end glittered. Something fell from Dogar's pocket. It had been jolted from place when she removed the tubing, and plopped soundlessly to the lawn. It was shiny, cylindrical: the syringe of morphine from the Rat Room shelf. Dogar didn't notice that she had dropped it. Scully felt fear coursing through her like ice. Individual sensations stood out and became monumental: glitter of needle, roughness of bark, cool air, damp grass, blood on her throat, syringe in the grass. Her left leg was all pins and needles. She tried speaking. "Why does it work?" she asked, voice shaky. "Why haven't you aged for thirty-eight years?" Dogar, concentrating on smoothing out the spiraling coils of the intravenous tube, allowed some seconds to pass. Scully was about to try again when she finally spoke. "But I have aged," she said, flicking open the razor, testing its edge against the tubing. "Did you see the photo in the paper?" Scully nodded, her eyes riveted to the blade. She tugged lightly at her bonds, the tape. Thought of the morphine. The syringe had fallen eight inches from her left hand, lying on the ground with its needle encased in a sterile wrapper. She hazarded a glance directly at it, saw the size of the ampoule lying among the blades of grass. The hypodermic contained enough drug to kill a full-grown woman nearly instantly. Why had Dogar brought it? Scully wondered. Using it to kill her would only contaminate the blood supply. Then she realized that Dogar had intended it as a last-second measure -- if she was forced to kill and run. But Dogar was speaking again. "I was nineteen years old when that happened," she said, looking down at Scully with an expression of mingled hunger and nostalgia. "In the last four decades I've aged maybe ten years. But I've still aged; it only slows the degradation of the flesh, halts nothing." Scully wrinkled her forehead in confusion, mostly genuine. She inched her hand towards the syringe. Only six inches to go. "But if you were only nineteen years old when you started...rejuvenating," she said carefully, "how did you manage to design and construct a pseudo-organ for yourself?" Dogar laughed. She laughed and laughed and laughed. Then, shrugging off her coat with a theatrical gesture, she undid the four lowermost buttons of her blouse, pushing the fabric aside to reveal the pale skin beneath. Scully goggled. There was no scar -- but Dogar's belly did slope outward, bulging ever so slightly, the flesh swollen and tender. "Do you see?" she said softly. "I didn't need to implant anything. I was born like this -- I was born with the organ already in place. I was born a freak." Her face grew distant and introspective, the tubing and razor dangling from her hands. "It was a difficult birth. I was aligned all wrong in the birth canal -- they needed a Cesarean to get me out -- and when they removed me they found this." She gestured towards the bulge in her belly. "An anomaly, they called it. A residual organ, functionless, like an appendix. Gross tissue, purposeless. They would have removed it then and there, but my parents were poor, and our insurance didn't cover such surgery -- so I was permitted to keep my stigmata, even if it deformed me and made life misery. I would look into the mirror and see only this." Her expression became dreamy and subtly murderous, looking down at her prisoner. "Then came the first urges," she said. "They started in pubescence. I fought them for a decade before giving in." "The drifter," Scully said. Her fingertips were two inches away from the hypodermic in the grass. "The drifter," Dogar agreed. "It was a trance. I saw a shadow standing in the midst of a field; I felt the surge through my veins; a minute later I had blood in my mouth, and I drank it down...I felt a portal in my throat open, felt her warmth fill me...a minute later, the blood was coursing down my thighs. My blood. I bled and bled and bled. I took my own blood, covered it with dirt, buried it deep in the ground. They never found it; I went back to the field two years later and saw that dandelions had sprouted from the spot." She looked down at Scully. "After that, I knew. I was special. I would never die -- I alone was unique in this world." "Why Valerie Lee, then?" Scully asked. "Why Rachel Saunders?" Dogar's face darkened. She was impatient to get on with the kill, but obviously willing to speak: "By 1991, I knew that the aging process hadn't stopped completely. Someday -- not soon, a century or two from now, but eventually -- I too would be old and wrinkled and dying. So I did my own research. Used what I knew about my own body; searched for ways to perfect the system, make it flawless." Her eyes narrowed. "What I told you this morning is still true. I have looked long and hard into the depths of my own soul, the darkness that lies within, and know that there is no eternal life in the Christian sense -- but that science and mutation have resulted in the next closest thing. I was the mutation; now it was up to me to find the science. I was in no hurry -- I reckoned that I had another two hundred years to work at the problem -- and Chifeno provided a means. I worked on hemophilia research during the day, but at night I returned to the labs and searched the blood donor database, worked on pseudo-organs." "And Lee...?" "Discovered the truth. Somehow, somewhere, she found the newspaper clipping with my picture in it, the article on the drifter's death. She recognized me instantly, figured things out, demanded that I share my secret, give her eternal life as well. I would have killed her then and there, but she claimed that she'd placed a duplicate clipping in a safe deposit box to be opened in event of her death, along with a full explanation. I had no choice. She and Saunders were chummy -- friends, lovers, maybe -- and she requested that I give Rachel the treatment, too." "And you were able to?" "My research had progressed more rapidly than I'd imagined. I already had crude prototypes of my own organ, facsimiles with the same faults, rough approximations of the working apparatus. What could I do? I implanted the pseudo-organs, and we became unwilling conspirators." One inch away. Scully's fingertips brushed the plunger of the hypo. "But how does it work?" she asked, trying to disguise her effort. "How have you managed to live for so long?" Dogar cocked her head to one side. "Should I question my fortune? Do good Catholics question the transubstantiation? Wine becomes the blood of God, and to drink of it is to taste eternal life; that's all they need to know." She sighed wearily. "If pressed, I'd probably say something about free radicals." Another millimeter... "Particles of oxygen with a missing electron," Scully said, trying to concentrate on the words, her fingers straining. Stall. Stall. "Free radicals are found everywhere in the body. They're a result of metabolic processes. If left unchecked, they can rupture cell nuclei, mutate and destroy DNA, deform the mitochondria, wreak havoc. They cause aging." Dogar shrugged. "They're also produced by the actions of the immune system. The white blood cells. Theoretically, then, periodically purging the body of blood and lymph fluid should reduce the numbers of free radicals and slow the process of cellular corruption. Allow eternal youth." She brought the knife up, the thin six-inch straight razor with the notched edge and black handle, letting it shine in the moonlight. "Vital fluids, Agent Scully," she said. "That's what it all amounts to: vital fluids." She knelt down and brought the razor back to slash. "Wait!" Scully said, the words toppling out one after another: "You can't kill me -- how do you know that my blood type is right, that I don't have AIDS?" Just a fraction more -- she strained -- just a fraction further to the hypo. Smiling, Dogar said, "You cut your finger when you unearthed Lee, remember? I did a test of the paper towel you used to wipe away the blood." Her smile broadened. "So I know that your fluids are right." Scully tugged at the bonds an iota harder -- and gripped the syringe. She found the plunger, turned it around in her hand, stripped off the sterile wrapping. Held it ready. She could bring it up and plunge it into Dogar's exposed abdomen. "Now," Dogar said. Her arm moved down. The razor flashed. Scully yanked her hands free of the tape, still halfway-pinned to the tree, stabbed up with the needle -- it slid neatly into Dogar's belly -- and slammed the plunger home. Dogar fell back, eyes bulging. The syringe was pulled from Scully's grasp. Dogar loosened her grasp on the razor, reeled, looked down at the needle that jutted obscenely from her stomach, a thin stream of blood oozing from the puncture. She clenched her teeth, closed her eyes. A thin exhalation whistled from her nose, a bubble of blood filming her mouth. Tumbled over onto the grass, the hand holding the razor working convulsively. She slashed at herself, her abdomen, drawing blood in thin ropes -- a seizure of hara-kiri, slicing angry lines across her midriff and spilling fluids all along the ground. She jerked twice, blouse soaked with blood. Whispered: "There's nothing." Eyes clouded with death. She lay still. Scully, lashed to the tree, staring at the body, began to shudder. The spasms racked her body, the terror finally bubbling to the surface as she stared at Dogar's lacerated belly and unlined face: she shook and shook as if she were dying, as if she might never stop. * * * "I wouldn't have pegged Halasz as an Episcopalian," Mulder said, stepping out of the church into the sunshine. He reached into his pocket for a pair of round sunglasses, putting them on and hiding his eyes behind black circles. They shone. "Subdued funeral, I thought," said Scully. Her throat was bandaged, still sore, and her wrists -- chafed from the duct tape -- were wrapped with cotton. "I saw his widow and children in the front row. I think they're still inside." "Probably." Mulder turned around, leaned back to gaze up at the church steeple behind them. It was angular and jutting, slicing away at the blueness of the sky with wooden crucifix and red stained glass, dull maroon from the outside, like dried blood, but scarlet and streaming with light from within. It depicted a heart pierced with thorns, encircled by a scroll written in Greek, set ominously into the window. An image of death that promised eternal life. It bothered him. He said, "You know, victims of crucifixion are usually depicted as being pierced through the palms of the hands, but they were probably nailed to the cross through their wrists. Otherwise, the nails wouldn't hold. They've done experiments with cadavers. And that's the way the Shroud of Turin depicts them." "The Shroud of Turin is a forgery," Scully said. "Maybe. But even false images can contain a grain of truth." Mulder stuffed his hands into his pockets and turned his back to the church. Said mildly to Scully, "Look who's here." She followed his gaze. It was Dr. Chan, dressed all in black, a small package beneath his arm, moving mincingly across the church lawn. He saw them and quickened his pace, meeting them at the steps, his face flushed and sad. "Hiya," he said, subdued, shaking their hands in turn. A light sheen of sweat filmed his forehead. "Good afternoon, Dr. Chan," Mulder said. "Hm? What's that?" He cupped his ear in a familiar gesture. "I said hello." "Oh." Chan frowned, his brow furrowed. He tilted his head back and squinted up at the cross that towered above them, silhouetted against the clouds. Shifted the package in his grasp. "Did I miss the eulogy?" "You missed the entire funeral," said Scully, looking back at the people filing out of the church. "The wake just ended." Mulder peered at Chan from behind his sunglasses. "Why are you here in Washington, anyway?" he asked. "Just wanted to pay my respects to Detective Halasz. I'm flying back to Boston this afternoon, for, um, for..." "For Perdita Dogar's funeral?" Scully said. "Yeah." He let the topic drop. The burden of Dogar's demise lay between them like death itself. Then, brightening, Chan took the package from beneath his arm and presented it to Scully, extending the parcel expectantly. She took the box with some confusion, then saw the air holes punched into the top and understood even before she removed the lid. Onan lay crouched inside, nose sniffling the sawdust, seeds scattered along the bottom of the carton. The rat looked up at her plaintively, his small pink eyes staring into her own with minor intensity and longing. She smiled. "I'd like you to have him," Chan said. "I don't know why, but I thought you might appreciate the gesture. Chifeno's shutting down the pseudo-organ research, you see, and all the rats are useless now; they'll either be put to death or given away. It'd be nice if you'd take him for me." "Why is the research being discontinued?" she asked, lightly stroking Onan's fur. "They say that we've already proven our point, shown conclusively that this factor VIII therapy is a viable treatment for hemophilia. Further refinements can be done by government corporations. They say." He coughed. "But I know that it's really about Dita." Awkwardness lingered between them for a few moments. "What are you going to do now?" Mulder asked. "Retire, I suppose. I can look back on my career with some satisfaction." He shrugged his shoulders, his clear brown eyes suddenly grown old and sad and tired. "I couldn't go back there, anyway," he said. "You understand." Chan grinned wistfully, his hair fluttering in the breeze. Then, as quickly as he had appeared, he bobbed his head and departed the way he came. Mulder watched him leave, then looked back at Onan uneasily. "Well, at least you've got another pet," he said to Scully. "Of some kind." "Don't be so negative. You and Onan have quite a bit in common." For some reason, Mulder blushed slightly -- and Scully belatedly realized the double-entendre nature of her comment: Genesis 38:9. "So," she said hastily, "how's that post-Kaczynski inferiority syndrome coming? Are you in the mood for some commendations and alcoholic lechery a-plenty?" Her partner remained silent, hands in pockets. His sunglasses concealed his eyes, made them alien. Mulder's thoughts circled around Dita Dogar, Julianna Blackburn, Deborah Hardy, Rachel Saunders, Valerie Lee -- and Peter Halasz. He thought of blood and lymph and urinary photographs and pancreatic enzymes and factor VIII and spilled seed and vital fluids, thought of razors and tubing, life and death and immortality. He looked at the cross that stretched above them, its parallel arms promising a New Jerusalem built upon one man's suffering and passion, and realized that Scully was right. He and Onan had a lot in common. Scully, too, although she'd never admit it; he remembered finally finding her lashed to that willow tree, Dogar's blood oozing into the ground less than three feet away from where she sat -- and her first words to him had been, "Damn. She sliced up her chest. She sliced up the organ. I can't learn anything from her now." She hadn't. The notes that Dogar had removed from the lab weren't even related to the pseudo-organ transplants -- mostly cribsheets of her work with the factor VIII mice -- and no other record of her modifications on Lee or Saunders had been found. Scully had been furious. Impatient, she repeated her query. Was he in the mood for celebration? Mulder never got around to answering. Return to "X-Files" by LoneGunGuy