"Nothing vanishes without a trace."
     Albert Hosteen

"I know that the world is full of predators, just as it has always been. And I know that it is my job to protect people from them. And I have counted on that fact to give me faith in my ability to do what I do. I want that faith back. I need it back."
     Dana Scully
 

WEIGHT OF THE WORLD
By: Jennifer Maurer

Mulder told Scully that he felt "free" after finding out Samantha was not coming home. At the time, it was true. He had felt a great burden lifted from his shoulders when he realized that he could stop looking, that she was at peace now, and had been for years. It was not the end of the X-Files by far, but it was the end of his personal quest.

For awhile, that was enough.

As time went by, however, Mulder felt something missing.

On the surface, things seemed the same: he and Scully investigated cases, debated his "questionable" theories, had their usual differences of opinion. They battled a cyber vixen and ran around Los Angeles with the sheriff's department looking for a monster. Scully arched her eyebrow a lot. Mulder taped their television debut on "Cops" and showed it off to the Lone Gunmen.

Everything should have been hunky fucking dory, he thought. But it wasn't. Not quite.

Their work kept him from thinking about it for awhile. He attributed his listlessness to grief over his mother's death and Samantha's fate. He was sleeping better at night, but still not feeling very rested the next morning. He sometimes distracted himself by trying to amuse Scully while they were out on a case, but she remained stubbornly professional. He tried not to worry about it, assuring himself that he had a lot to get used to, and surely the empty feeling would pass.

About two months after learning Samantha's fate, Mulder found himself alone. He and Scully were between cases when she was invited to a conference on forensic pathology in St. Louis. Skinner had submitted her name and urged her to go. When Mulder realized she was reluctant to go because she didn't want to leave him alone, he called the airline on her behalf and booked her a flight.

"You don't have to take care of me," he told her, "I'll be fine. Go, have fun with the other corpse cutters."

She smiled and patted his arm.

"Call if you need me," she told him.

He assured her he'd keep out of trouble. "Business" was slow; maybe he'd even reorganize the office while she was gone.

"I'll believe that when I see it," she told him with a smirk.

"What is that supposed to mean?" he asked, adopting a wounded look that didn't fool her a bit.

"It means this office looks like it's been spun in a blender. I gave up any hope of organization years ago."

"Ever the skeptic," he sighed as she prepared to go home and pack. "Just wait until you get back."

Scully waved over her shoulder as she left. She shut the office door behind her, and with that sound, Mulder felt truly alone, for the first time in a long time. Scully had always been within contact, even when she was supposed to be on vacation and didn't really want to be contacted. This time he was determined not to call unless it was a bona fide crisis. Being bored doesn't count, he reminded himself. Fire, flood, alien invasion---those are emergencies. Anything else could wait until she got back. He wanted to prove this to himself, as well as to Scully. He was a grown man; he didn't need someone to hold his hand all the time.

True to his word, he spent the rest of that afternoon in the office, moving piles and stacks from one flat surface to another. He was mildly appalled at discovering the true extent of his disorganization. No wonder Scully always asked him to pull the files she needed. Mulder couldn't bring himself to throw anything away, but he did make a sincere attempt at getting it all in some kind of order. He got about halfway done before deciding to quit for the night. He spent the rest of the evening with the Lone Gunmen, munching nachos and watching pirated cable.

Mulder finished the office the next morning, getting done just in time for lunch. He hadn't actually cleaned anything out, he reasoned, but at least it was all put away in folders. And Scully thought he was such a slob. His filing system might be a little left of normal, but she was used to that by now.

He checked the calendar. Okay, he had killed a day. He had two more until she returned. He was determined not to get into any trouble. He decided to surf the Internet and find something interesting for them to investigate when she got back.

That was how Mulder came across the Doe Network, a web site dedicated to "cold cases concerning Unexplained Disappearances and Unidentified Victims from North America and Australia." He had never really bothered with such things before, confident that Samantha's disappearance could not be explained with the typical scenarios. With only one exception, over the years he'd stubbornly ignored requests to identify bodies that resembled his sister, refusing to believe that she was dead. He'd spent all his time looking to the sky for her; in the end, that was where she had been, although not in the manner he'd imagined. Now he found himself turning his gaze back to earth and was shocked by the numbers. Being an FBI agent and investigating crimes one at a time was one thing. Seeing the endless lists of the missing and the dead all at once was somehow different.

He had seen missing children flyers before, of course; when they'd been delivered into his mailbox or on a carton of milk, he had given them a cursory glance, and that was all. When assigned to a case involving a missing child, such as the Amber Lynn LaPierre case, he would give it his full attention, sometimes to the point of his own collapse. But when the case was over, the child found dead or alive, he eventually would manage to move on, leave it behind, and return to concentrating on Samantha. He'd never stopped to think that so many other people had been caught in similar limbos, with even less hope of escape than he'd had.

Mulder spent the rest of that day and all the next poring over the material on the web site. He found himself slipping into his "profiler mode," trying to piece together the often meager information provided on someone's disappearance to get a better picture of what had happened.

He printed flyers of children that looked vaguely familiar to him and started tacking them all over the walls. He wondered why these particular faces called to him. Perhaps, he thought, I've seen them on the street, or while somewhere on a case. Maybe I even caught a glimpse when I met Samantha in the field of starlight. He started to wonder about that more and more as he read the details of some of the more puzzling cases. Children and young adults, vanishing into thin air.

"Nicole Louise Morin, last seen at the West Mall Complex in Etobocoke, ONT, on July 30, 1985. She was wearing a swimsuit and was carrying a towel and a bag; she'd planned to meet a friend and go swimming. Morin stepped onto the Complex's elevator and never arrived to meet her friend. She has never been seen again."

"Martha Leanne Green, last seen in her brother's car at approximately 9:00 PM on April 15, 1987. They stopped on Highway 46 in Dickson, TN. Her brother left the vehicle to buy gasoline for the car; when he returned, his sister was missing. Green was wearing a white sweatshirt, faded jeans, and white tennis shoes at the time of her disappearance."

"Kathleen Ann Shea, last seen walking to school on March 18, 1965. She was traveling north between 15th and 16th streets in Tyrone, PA, when she vanished.  Shea was wearing a brown hat; beige coat with a fur collar; red gloves; red sweater; brown jumper; red tights; and yellow boots. This case has remained unsolved for the past 34 years."

"Amy Gibson, last seen leaving her Greensboro, North Carolina, home on December 17, 1990. She planned to walk up the street for a brief period of time but never returned home. Extensive searches have unearthed few clues as to her whereabouts; she has never been heard from again."

Mulder read through case after case. None of them mentioned the parents having visions of their children dead, but that was something most people would feel foolish mentioning to law enforcement. There were hundreds of cases of suspected or even witnessed abductions, and they were horrifying in their own way. The more mysterious cases were the ones that remained in his mind. Had any of these children been turned to starlight, in order to escape a terrible fate? Had they fallen prey to something else, or perhaps been taken by someone too clever to leave any trace? What had happened to them after that?

Parents were looking for these children: running for the phone every time it rang, taking a second look at every child they passed on the street that resembled their own, spending their days on a terrible pendulum that swung back and forth between hope and dread. Mulder knew what their lives were like; that had been his own life for over 25 years. Samantha had literally vanished without a trace as so many other people had. He had a rudimentary knowledge of crime figures, but these numbers staggered him due to the very fact that they were no longer just numbers. Now he saw beyond mere statistics to the faces of some of the missing, frozen forever at the time when they had last been seen by their loved ones.

He wished now he'd taken a more careful look around the starlit field, in hopes of seeing some of these children. Samantha knew them, perhaps, knew who they had been, but she could not tell him anything from where she was. How maddening to know that the answers so many people sought were out there somewhere, in a place he had been led to only once, and did not know how to reach again.

Mulder finally reached the end of the network's missing person case files and found himself in a different section of the web site: unidentified victims. He thought of Scully as he scrolled slowly down the page, looking at police artist sketches and clay model reconstructions of skeletons and corpses found scattered all around the country. He thought of her skill as a forensic pathologist. He also remembered a time he had been called in to identify a body thought to be hers.

"Unidentified Caucasian Female. Discovered on November 9, 1979, in Caledonia, New York. Approximately 13-19 years old by coroner's estimation. Died as a result of two gunshot wounds on November 8, 1979. The victim was discovered in a cornfield by a passing motorist. Twenty  years after her death, no one has provided any information as to the victim's identity. The case remains open."

"Unidentified Caucasian Female. Died on September 20, 1987, in Dana Point, California. Approximately 18-23 years old by coroner's estimation. Cause of death was suicide. This victim was 5'4 and weighed 127 pounds. She had strawberry blonde hair which fell to the middle of her back in length. She had brown eyes and a fair complexion. Her left ear was pierced twice; her right ear was pierced once. This victim had had a prior pregnancy. The victim was wearing a medium tan dress and blue shoes. She was located on the cliff/beach area below Bluff Road and Site Drive in Dana Point, California. She was carrying no identification on her person at the time of her death."

"Unidentified Caucasian Female Child. Located on December 5, 1982, in Escatawpa, Mississippi. Approximately 2 years old by coroner's estimation. Cause of death was homicide. The victim was 30 inches in height and weighed approximately 20-25 pounds. She had blonde hair and brown or blue eyes. Twelve baby teeth had grown in at the time of her death in 1982. The victim was discovered wearing a Cradle Togs' pink and white dress which buttoned in the back, and a disposable diaper. She was located in the floodwaters of the Escatawpa River. She was apparently thrown off the Interstate 10 bridge 36-48 hours prior to discovery."

The last image on the page held his attention. It was a small picture of a young girl with dark hair, perhaps the age Samantha had been when she'd died. The girl stared into the camera with half-closed eyes. Across her mouth was a piece of dark duct tape.

"Unidentified Caucasian Female. Last seen on June 15, 1989, in Port St. Joe, Florida. Approximately 15-16 years old. This unidentified teenage girl was seen on the beach, accompanied by several older Caucasian males, who appeared to be ordering the girl along the beach front. Investigators are still trying to ascertain the girl's identity, which would allow them to close the case or investigate further. The girl is 5'0 and has brown hair and blue eyes. Neither she nor the males involved have been seen again."

Mulder enlarged the image slightly before printing it out, along with all the other information. At the bottom of the page there was a case number, and he cross referenced that to the FBI database.

The picture had actually been of the girl and a younger boy, both bound and gagged. It was found in a convenience store parking lot near where a white Toyota cargo van with no windows had been parked. The FBI had been called into the investigation when it was thought that the children in the photograph had been kidnapped from New Mexico in 1988; if they had been taken across state lines, that became a federal matter. There was little else in the FBI file: the picture was later determined not to be the children from New Mexico. They remained unidentified. No license plate number. No description of the men. Case remained open and unsolved. The last notation in the file was early 1990. Nothing since then.

Mulder gathered all the information into a red and white striped folder. Case X8906028. In his heart he knew it wasn't an X-File, but he couldn't bear to just toss the papers out. If it had been him, he would have wanted someone to keep looking, even after 11 years. This girl was in trouble, and no one even knew who she was. He tucked the new file into his briefcase and made a mental note to call the Port St. Joe police department first thing in the morning.

He stopped at the Lone Gunmen's on the way home, and asked Frohike to pull vehicle registration information on all white Toyota cargo vans in Florida prior to 1989. He told them he was just sniffing around an old case while waiting for Scully to get back from her conference. Frohike complied without any questions, no longer surprised by his unusual requests.

Mulder thought about showing them the file and decided not to. He found he didn't really want to talk about it. He couldn't explain his fascination with the case to himself, let alone to anyone else. The girl's face stayed in his mind even after he put her picture away. What was the expression in the half-hooded eyes? Despair? Apathy? Anger? She might have been glaring at her captor, or perhaps she was tired and frightened. Had she given up hope of ever being found? Did she know that the picture had fallen out of the van?

Mulder rubbed his eyes. Too many questions.

Frohike startled him by dropping a thick printout on the table in front of him. A large portion of the vans on the list had been turned to scrap metal long ago, Frohike told him. Most had been some kind of commercial vehicle. A few registrations were still active. Whatever he was looking for, it was going to be a needle in a haystack without at least a partial plate number. Mulder took the list and added it to the file. Not enough information, or too much information. He couldn't find a middle ground. He knew his chances of solving this case, when every other law enforcement agency had come up empty, were next to nothing. Still, he couldn't let it go. He thanked Frohike for his help and went home.

He slept poorly that night. He dreamt that he was the one who had found the picture in the parking lot. He stood there under a broiling sun, unable to move, screaming for the van to stop even as it vanished over the horizon. Scully stood next to him, tears running down her cheeks.

"Not another girl, Mulder. How many are we going to lose?" she'd asked him. "Samantha. Emily. When does it end?"

He woke up in tears himself, half expecting to find Scully still next to him. The clock read 4:03. He knew he wouldn't get any more sleep. Might as well get up, he thought. He went for a run, but in his weariness, he only ran a fraction of his usual distance. He shaved, showered, and dressed absent-mindedly. Scully's flight would arrive in the early afternoon, and she'd told him she was planning to come directly to the office. He told himself he'd keep looking until she got back, and then put the case aside. He didn't want to upset her with this new obsession with a case that would in all likelihood never be solved.

When he arrived at the office, Mulder pulled down all the pictures of missing children he'd tacked to the walls and tossed them onto a pile on his desk. He didn't want Scully to see them. Looking at all those faces was just too overwhelming. Other people were looking for those children. He would concentrate on this one girl.

Next, Mulder phoned the Port St. Joe police department. The detective clearly remembered the case and seemed as troubled by it as he was. He told Mulder he didn't have much more information than Mulder already knew, but he would be glad to fax the original police reports. Mulder accepted the offer with thanks, even though he knew it would just be more paper to collect. He couldn't abandon the notion that if he looked over everything, he would find something that everyone else had missed.

He spent the rest of the morning going over the police report and then searching VICAP for other abductions with any similarities. There were a few cases, but there was always something else about them that didn't match. His eyes burned from fatigue. With a sigh, Mulder put his head down on his desk. He was so tired. He would rest his eyes for just a minute, and let his thoughts drift.

He was still asleep when Scully walked into the office two hours later. She set her bag down softly and frowned. Mulder sleeping at his desk was never a good sign. She could count on one hand the number of times he'd done that, and it always meant he'd been working so hard he'd pushed himself to exhaustion. She wondered what he was working on, and if he'd slept in the office last night.

She walked quietly over to his desk, not wanting to startle him. His head was resting on a pile of papers. Scully saw another pile next to it and gently tugged it out from under his elbow to flip through it.

Kelly Jean Harris. Barbara Louise Cotton. Tracy Kroh. Michelle Meredith Mulcahy. Kacey Ann Perry. Amanda Rivera. Posters and flyers for missing girls throughout the country. Some had been missing for 10 years or more.

Towards the bottom of the pile, the posters suddenly changed from searching for the living to identifying the dead.

Unidentified female, age 13-19. Unidentified Caucasian female, age 18-23. Unidentified female, age 10-12. Unidentified Caucasian female, age 2-3. After the last one, Scully sighed, thinking of Emily. The choice of posters didn't have any pattern; Mulder didn't seem to be trying to match any of the missing girls with the unidentified bodies. He was just pulling reports at random...and apparently losing sleep over them.

"Oh, Mulder," she sighed quietly, gently touching his shoulder. He murmured something and lifted his head to blink at the light.

"Oh, you're back," he said, reaching out to squeeze her hand. "How was St. Louis?"

"It was nice. The conference was interesting. I sat around with a bunch of other pathologists and used big words. The kind that make your eyes glaze over when I'm talking to you."

He smiled, and rubbed his eyes. "What a wild woman you are, Scully."

"How about you?" she asked, sitting on the edge of his desk. "What were you up to while I was gone?"

"Oh, you know, the usual," he said, waving his hand in a dismissive gesture. "Sat around my apartment dribbling my basketball. Sat around with the guys grunting at sports events..."

"...Slept at your desk," she said, finishing his sentence. "And doing some pretty heavy reading, I see." She set the sheaf of papers she'd been holding down on his desk. Mulder stared at them for a minute, then looked up at her.

"There are so many, Scully," he said simply.

"And one of them is an X-File?" she asked, indicating the red and white folder in front of him. He shook his head, but handed her the folder to read anyway.

"Not in the usual sense," he replied, trailing off into silence as she became absorbed in the contents of the folder. He saw her wince slightly and knew she was looking at the photo of the young girl with the duct tape across her mouth. Scully carefully read through the rest of the file. When she was finished she closed the folder and rested it in her lap. She didn't say anything, only looked at him and waited for him to continue.

"There's nothing paranormal about it. Just your run-of-the-mill child abduction."

"But?" she asked, knowing there was more.

He found himself at a loss for words for a moment and slapped his palms down on his desk in frustration. He took the file from Scully and flipped it open to the picture, pointing to it.

"They don't know who she is! She's obviously being held against her will. She was taken from somewhere, some family, but no one seems to be looking for her! They don't even know her name!"

"Mulder, I'm sure someone is looking for her," she said soothingly.

"Who, Scully? Whose daughter, sister, cousin is she? What's her name? All this information they have, and they can't even find out who she is."

Mulder's voice fell to a whisper as he ran his fingertips over the picture.

"How would she feel if she knew that no one even knew her name, let alone how to save her?"

Scully slid off the edge of his desk and stepped over to stand next to him, sliding her arm around his shoulders. Weary, he sighed and leaned his head into her side while she stroked his hair with her other hand.

"Mulder, you always feel the need to take the weight of the world upon your shoulders," she told him. "You said you felt free after we found out about Samantha. I was so relieved that you had finally found peace. Don't do this to yourself again."

He leaned back from her embrace to look up at her. She gazed back at him sadly.

"Scully, someone has to look for her. For all of them."

"People *are* looking for them, Mulder. That's what things like this," she gestured, indicating the pictures on his desk, "are all about. Law enforcement may categorize them as 'cold cases,' but out there are families hoping and praying that their children will come home someday, no matter how long it's been since they disappeared. And someday, there may be someone who sees one of these unidentified pictures and recognizes the person, and they will finally be laid to rest with a name."

"I wanted to be one of those people, Scully. Someone with answers. Someone to bring closure."

"You are, Mulder. We found the bodies of the children Ed Truelove killed. It wasn't the answer their families had hoped for, but at least now they can move on."

"I dream about her," he said, indicating the girl in the photo. "Last night I dreamt I was the person who found the photograph in the parking lot. You were there, too; you were crying. When I dozed off here...I dreamt her name was Julie."

"Maybe it is," Scully said, "You've had dreams like this before. They led you to Addy Sparks."

Mulder shivered at the memory, wrapping his arms around his waist.

"That was Roche. It wasn't me," he said hollowly.

"Roche may have been manipulating you, Mulder, but he could only do it because you care so much. Sometimes too much."

Scully collected all the loose papers and stacked them neatly on top of the file. Then she set them down on a corner of the desk and turned back to him, leaning in close.

"It is a terrible thing that so many children are lost, and so many bodies unidentified. The answers may never be found, and that's a hard thing to accept. I know you want to save all of them; I feel that way, too, sometimes. But you can only do so much, Mulder, and you've already done more than most people could ever hope to. Let that be enough."

Scully laid one hand on his shoulder. Mulder looked up into her face, saw the love and concern she felt for him. He nodded, then rose from his chair and gathered everything together.

Opening an unused file drawer, he put the papers away, and felt a measure of his peace return.

~*End*~

Author's Notes:

The Doe Network is real. All the cases mentioned in the story are actual missing people and the circumstances of their disappearances. I came across the site while surfing the web, and spent two days going through it. This may sound like a cliche, but it haunts me.

The Doe Network can be found at: http://www.doenet.org.
Go and take a look. You just might recognize someone.

Other information came from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children:
http://www.ncmec.org

And the nice people who answer the mail at Unsolved Mysteries:
http://www.unsolved.com

I have posted a picture of the girl with the duct tape on my homepage:
http://home.earthlink.net/~jenbird

VICAP stands for Violent Criminal Apprehension Program:
http://www.fbi.gov/programs/vicap/vicap.htm

This story is dedicated to "The Boy in the Box."
You can find out more about him here: http://mysteryboy.virtualave.net/