Disclaimer in Section 0/7
January Sun 6/7: Vivian II
by Justin Glasser and Dawn Pares
***
Stringer’s Warehouse
Outside Bent, North Carolina
9:07 am
Another day, another crime scene. Skinner stood back and let his agents work, surveying from a short distance away, hands in his pockets. He had expected it to be warmer here, down south, but his breath came out in plumes. He could smell the tang of salt on the air although the ocean was almost an hour away, and the smell reminded him of a beach vacation he and Sharon took in their third or fourth year of marriage. He had still been human then, still able to talk to his wife. He wished idly for his gloves.
Christley stood nearby, surveying
the scene like a proud dictator, and Robertson was dutifully reporting the
details he hadn't imparted on the phone that morning.
"… was Carolyn Escher, bank teller, mother of two…" Skinner tried to
look like he was paying attention; he suspected, from Robertson's frequent,
nervous glances at him, that he was failing.
Big surprise.
"Sir?" Scully gestured for him to come closer. They wanted him to look at her, the victim, to see if he recognized her. That was Mulder’s theory—that he was seeing the victims in dreams. Scully hadn’t said anything of the sort over breakfast, hadn’t agreed or disagreed, but he got the feeling she was going with Mulder’s theory for now. The thought did not comfort him. He would look, regardless--he had to--but he knew he wouldn't know the girl. The dreams weren't about knowing, they were just dreams. Just a way to torture him with his own ineptitude. He couldn't help her. He didn't know why he even bothered to try.
But he stepped forward and looked anyway. Dark hair, dark eyes, bruising around the neck, evisceration, no shirt this time, just socks and a pool of blood almost as black as her hair; she was just like the others. Dead.
"A wretch like me," he muttered. Mulder and Scully both turned to look at him.
"What?" Mulder asked.
Skinner shrugged. "Amazing Grace. I woke up with the tune in my head this morning." Scully was staring at him, her brow crinkled in a way he recognized from seeing her scrutinize autopsy reports. He felt like a specimen on a slide. "Amazing Grace, how sweet the taste," he sang rapidly, waving his hand. "The hymn. You’ve heard it."
"How sweet the sound," Mulder said.
"What?" Skinner looked at him. "What'd I say?"
"Mulder," Scully said, standing, peeling off her gloves. Mulder met her gaze, and Skinner, left out of the loop again, felt a sudden overwhelming longing for Sharon and his old house. Somewhere people wouldn’t look around him.
"What is it?" he asked.
By way of answer, Mulder shucked his own gloves, shoving them in his pockets.
Scully turned, her eyes on Mulder, her voice tired but somehow amused.
"Sir," she said. "My dairy products don't have souls."
***
There was a brief, murmured conference with Christley and Robertson. It ended with Christley turning on his heel and stalking off, and Robertson gazing at Mulder with an expression both dubious and strangely impressed. Together, his agents returned to him, looking intent and full of terrible purpose. They walked shoulder to shoulder, and Skinner felt himself obscurely comforted. He ignored the odd impulse to salute when Scully held the car door open for him.
"We saw it on the way into town," she said, twisting in her seat to face him as Mulder started the car.
Skinner shook his head, not believing her. It simply wasn’t true. This was not happening. "And what do you think this has to do with our case, Agent Scully?" he asked. His voice sounded exactly the same as it always did.
"You were mumbling the song in your sleep last night," Mulder said, eyes locked to the flashing lights of the patrol car in front of them.
"Amazing Grace is a popular song, Mulder."
Scully nodded. "But the verse you sang today isn't in the song. ‘How sweet the taste.’ It's from the billboard."
Skinner fought the urge to chuckle. If Scully was buying this bullshit, she would be offended. Nevertheless, the explanation was obvious. "Maybe I saw the billboard on my way in, like you did."
Scully nodded again. "You're right, sir. You could have."
"I still don't understand how this billboard is related to the case."
"Mulder has a theory . . ." Scully began. She turned to look at her partner.
Skinner waited. She wouldn’t postulate herself, he knew. When it came to cockamamie theories, Scully let Mulder do the talking. He was almost relieved. Hearing it from Scully would make it real.
"I’ve adjusted the theory,” Mulder said. He wasn’t looking anywhere but at the flashing lights of the police car in front of them. Somehow that made his words worse, not better. “You’re not dreaming of the victims. I think you've been dreaming Vivian MacElvey's experiences,” Mulder said. “I think you're linked to her telepathically, somehow."
Skinner nodded. This was familiar, the natural last step to the previous theory, the theory Mulder had explained over breakfast this morning. It wasn’t right, of course, but Skinner went with it. “What does that have to do with the billboard?”
"She was the first of all the women to go missing, " Scully explained. "We didn't put her together with the case because we never found the body."
"Until yesterday. Until your dream." Mulder added.
"You aren’t answering my question. You think I'm telepathically linked to one of our victims, fine. But how--"
“She’s not a victim, not yet,” Mulder murmured.
“Mulder, that’s not—“he began, but Scully interrupted, her smooth voice gliding over top of his.
"If Mulder’s right, sir, then your dreams are not about Vivian MacElvey, they’re *from* her. We think she’s at Grace Dairy, the dairy on the billboard.”
Skinner knew his face must have reflected his skepticism when Scully smiled apologetically. “It's the only lead we've got,” she said. "This guy's not giving us much to go on."
"I'm right," Mulder said, shooting her a look.
"Mulder, if you're right--" Skinner began, then stopped, horrified. The dark, the cold bathroom, the pale face in the mirror. From a hundred miles away, he felt Scully's hand on his forearm.
"She's still alive," Skinner whispered. "She's alive." He closed his eyes. This whole time, two weeks, almost three weeks now, he'd been having dreams and Vivian MacElvey had been alive, living the horrors that woke him in the night. The whole time. He felt like screaming.
"You believe this?" he asked, surprised by the coarse rasp of his voice. He flicked his eyes to Scully. She looked away for a second, to Mulder's focused profile, then back.
"I'll tell you when we find her," she said.
***
For a while after they became partners, real partners not just teamed up because the FBI bureaucracy said so, Scully had wondered how long it would be before Mulder's belief stopped outranking hers. She had wondered when she would build up a callous disregard for forever playing the disproved skeptic to Mulder's confirmed believer, how long it would be before she was taken seriously. For a while, bitterness had been her faithful companion, a bad but loyal dog at her heels. Sitting in the car watching Skinner's pale shocked face, she realized she had stopped waiting for that moment.
"Do you believe this?" he'd asked her, and she'd told him the truth. She didn't know whether or not Mulder was right. Scientifically, there was nothing to back her partner up--no serious studies of telepathy or precognition through dreams, no documented evidence to demonstrate that the future or the present could be divined by the dreamer, no way to know whether Skinner was really seeing Vivian MacElvey or if he was haunted by personal demons.
She'd know if and when they found the killer.
Now, as the rental pulled into the broad, circular drive of the Grace Dairy, rain began to spatter across the windshield. The water blurred the outlines of the squat, metallic building and gave it the wavy silhouette of being already underwater. And then the sleet began. *Appropriate,* she thought, glancing at Skinner. His face looked gray in the rainy light.
Through the windshield, Scully could see the thick splash of water congealing with frost, the messy clouds of slush at the heart of each heavy drop. She shivered, tugging at the collar of her overcoat.
"Hey," she heard Mulder say, and he sprang from the car, coatless, before they'd even pulled to a complete stop.
"FBI!"
Skinner was on his heels, weapon drawn, and Scully had a moment of unreasonable jealousy before she, too, caught sight of the small man in a the transparent hooded rain poncho who was scrambling for the door of the building he'd just exited. *Mulder,* she thought, irrationally, before the instinct of the chase overcame her.
***
Skinner bolted through the sudden icy downpour, reassured by the slam of Scully's car door behind him. Mulder would corner the suspect, he would cover Mulder, and Scully would cover him. Even if this guy wasn't their man, he obviously didn't belong here--maybe they could do some good. Mulder was wrong about the dreams, but maybe this suspect could be stopped from some other petty crime, burglary or attempted arson or even trespassing, something which would assuage Skinner's increasing sense of helplessness. The idea gave him a slight sense of satisfaction as he entered the dark hallway, and heard Mulder's running steps loud and echoing in the dark.
She wasn’t alive.
If the day had not grown so overcast, there would have been plenty of light inside the abandoned Grace dairy, a warehouse lined with thick bottle glass windows. As it was, Skinner had the feeling he'd suddenly lost the ability to see in color. The milking room was faded and warped in his vision, a nonsense jumble of pipes and machinery that sorted itself only into varied grayness, a stark and leering gloom. He felt as if he had ran through the warehouse door and into a world of dreams.
Mulder panted ahead of him, footsteps slowing down as he remembered caution. That was good: they didn't know who this fleeing suspect was, no matter what he had dreamed. They could be walking in on a meth lab or a gunrunner's lair for all they knew, and Skinner didn't want to have to jerk Mulder out of the line of fire.
He heard the subdued click of Scully's heels, felt her warm hand light on his shoulder.
He looked at her for second, then jerked his head in the direction that Mulder had gone. She nodded and leaned back, letting him lead.
Where is she? Skinner thought suddenly, and knew he was not thinking of Scully.
***
Mulder eased through the swinging metal doors into a room yellow with lantern light, rich with the copper smell of blood. His feet slipped in it; the stench of old blood brought tears to his eyes.
But out at the edge of his peripheral vision he saw them.
He had her by the hair.
She was bleeding, gasping for breath, trying to keep her feet on the gore-slicked floor as the man dragged her towards him and locked his elbow around her throat.
Before Mulder could remember his voice, he heard Skinner's.
"Let her go!"
Yellow light flickered on the whites of the man's eyes, but his movements were curiously languid. A knife appeared in his hand almost magically, twirled between his forefinger and middle finger like a baton. It wavered back and forth, a snake of silver edged by the lantern’s flicker.
*No thumb,* Mulder thought, eyes glued to the virtuoso performance, feeling his profile fall into place. The marks on the hands . . . no thumb . . . He wanted to kiss Scully, but the man had traded the knife to his good hand and dented the skin of the girl's throat just behind the point of her chin.
"Drop it," Skinner commanded. Mulder glanced back. Skinner and Scully both stood just inside the door, legs apart, weapons raised, elbows slightly bent. They looked like a textbook illustration, and Mulder felt a wave of wholly inappropriate laughter.
"Release her," Scully said. "We will shoot."
The man looked to Mulder, as if expecting confirmation. Mulder nodded slowly, trying to meet the terrified woman's eyes. He wanted to tell her she would live, that everything would be fine, but his words were for the man who held her.
"Put down the knife."
The gunshot thundered in his ears and he knew as the man flung his victim to the floor and fled that Skinner had shot into the floor.
"Scully," Mulder barked, and leapt after the man in the rain poncho.
***
Scully was leaning over the injured woman before Skinner even thought to look for her. Her eyes were laser blue through the curtain of her hair, as she tried to hold the hysterical woman’s matted hair back from her throat.
"Mulder," she reminded,
and Skinner nodded curtly, the world suddenly in color again, suddenly in
motion. Red hair, blue eyes, yellow
light, black blood curdling on the floor, every breath laden with thick copper
rot.
Skinner followed his agent, again lead by his breath and his footsteps.
There was a crash, followed by a sudden wash of gray rain light, pale enough to see by.
*Elvis has left the building,* Skinner thought randomly, as he followed the suspect, followed Mulder through the swinging doors. But Elvis hadn’t left the building, not at all, and Skinner found himself in a nightmare, tile and shiny bone, a room slippery not with blood but with condensation and the smell of mildew.
"Halt, or I'll shoot!" he heard Mulder say.
Abruptly the room flooded with light: the sun must have slipped through the clouds. Skinner thought that once, long ago, he would have liked to work here, to come in the doors of Grace Dairy and see the sunlight. Diamonds dappled the floor, shone on Mulder’s face, on the suspect’s hunched shoulders.
Mulder's eyes were dark, but the side of his face Skinner could see was blinding with improbable sunlight. It struck him dumb, that horrible beauty, made everything silent and motionless. The man spun to face them, and scrabbled underneath the flap of his polo shirt, searching for something.
Then Skinner saw Mulder’s face tighten, and he knew it was over. The man's eyes widened, and beneath the poncho was a smear of red so dark Skinner had to close his eyes against it.
When he opened them again, he found he'd turned his head toward the door, and saw Scully, pale as doves in the doorway, her eyes fastened on Mulder, one bloody hand holding the collar of her coat closed.
"His shots," Skinner told her, and his voice was low and relieved. Together, they watched Mulder stalk towards what Skinner presumed was the suspect's corpse, and prod it with his foot, gun still trained on the fallen man's chest.
And then something occurred to
him.
"Did you find her?"
Scully blinked at him for a moment. Then her eyes widened, and she shook her
head.
"I was with the victim. She's going to need an ambulance. I
haven't--"
Skinner wheeled back toward the swinging door, the stench. *No,* he thought, but he took two steps forward, re-holstering his gun, steeling himself. There was nothing to do but go back, go back and look for her. Then he heard it. A murmur. A song he heard in his dreams.
“ . . . that saved a wretch . . .”
“Vivian?” he shouted. “Vivian MacElvey!” He spun on his heel but saw nothing, only shadows and diamonds of sunlight. “Vivian.”
“Sir?” Scully reached out for his arm, but he shrugged her away.
“That wasn’t her, Scully. It wasn’t her.”
She shook her head. “She might not be here.”
He glared at her. “She’s here. Vivian!”
“ . . . was lost, but now I’m found . . .”
"Vivian? This is the FBI! We're here to help."
The echoes were maddening, multiplied by other agents yelling in other parts of the building. Skinner paused, took a deep breath. He couldn't have killed her, could he? The man hadn't had time to try to kill them both.
"Vivian MacElvey?" he shouted. "Can you hear me? We're here to help you!"
"Help me?" his echo asked, and then it laughed in a woman's voice.
He spun around, peering into a black corner. "Vivian?" he asked. "Vivian MacElvey?"
"I once was lost, but now I'm found," the voice said.
There, theretherethere, in the corner, under the sink, there, there, under there. He was on his knees, suddenly, near the row of sinks, bashing his head on the porcelain ledge. He ignored the pain, closed his eyes against the moment of darkness. “Vivian?” he whispered. Scully was at his shoulder trying to look at his head, and Mulder had come up behind her, but that didn’t matter. She was found. Skinner crept forward until he could see her, a huddled figure handcuffed to a pipe in the corner. She wore an Elvis t-shirt as well, he noticed, and dingy socks, and whenever he put out his hand to touch her, to release the handcuffs, to smooth her tangled hair out of her face, she screamed.
In the end, he had to settle for draping his coat over her and stepping out of Scully’s way.
***
Grace Dairy
Outside Bent, North Carolina
2:48 PM
She was brought out on a stretcher as a matter of form, flanked by Scully and Mulder with his gun still drawn. The last abductee, Elizabeth Prade, was already on her way to the hospital, paramedics having pronounced her scared but unharmed. Skinner had watched her shiver under the orange wool blanket, telling her story to the medics and the cops who clustered around her. He hadn’t gotten close enough to hear what she was saying, but he knew the story: the tears, the relief, the obsequious thanking of God and rescue workers over and over again. He didn’t want to hear it. Elizabeth Prade hadn’t been saved by God, Skinner knew. She had been saved by dumb luck and good timing: she had been taken last.
Vivian MacElvey, on the other hand . . .
She lay thin and trembling under Skinner's coat on the stretcher, her filthy stocking feet pressed together like a little girl's. Skinner stood by the doors of the ambulance, holding on to the cool metal frame, not craning his neck to see her.
He saw her anyway--his position predicated it, and maybe that's what he had wanted when he stopped there, leaning against the ambulance like a boy at a junior high dance. The woman in the picture had been pleasantly round, her smile buoyed by cheeks and the soft smooth flesh an extra ten pounds will give a woman. That woman was gone. This woman, Vivian, was gaunt and pale, her collarbones jutting out of the stretched neck of her too-large t-shirt. Sharon had worn big t-shirts like that to bed, he remembered suddenly. Vivian's hair lay matted like dog fur against the stretcher.
She'd been shuddering and blank eyed when he'd found her. She had screamed when he tried to touch her. She had hummed "Amazing Grace" over and over again while Scully unchained and examined her, until Skinner thought he would go mad himself and left the room to stand here, beside the ambulance because he couldn’t just walk away.
"Vivian," he whispered when her stretcher paused next to him.
Her dark eyes opened, sought him, studied him for a moment, large with something akin to fear.
"You," she said, and one skeleton-thin hand reached out for him. Skinner held still as her fingers skittered across his face as if seeking purchase. "You," she breathed. He did not move.
"I didn't think," she said. Her voice was brittle and rough. "I didn't think I'd live to see . . ." She stopped again, hand trembling against his cheek. Skinner could see her struggling with the words. "What took you so long?"
Then she yanked her hand back as if it had been burned, curling on her side toward Scully, toward someone neither male nor brunette with pretty brown eyes. Toward safety. Skinner understood.
***
Grace Dairy
Outside Bent, North Carolina
7: 47 pm
On TV shows, the important cops always got to go home right after the bad guys were caught, Skinner thought, sipping at a cup of old coffee. Once the victim was rescued and carted off, and the standard witticisms were exchanged, the principals got in their cars and drove off into the sunset of a good meal and a good night's sleep. Skinner thought it was a pity real life didn't work that way.
Instead, he stood here in the gloom of a January dusk, watching a swarm of local law enforcement gather evidence. The man, Harold Bloomfeld according to his driver’s license, was dead, so there would be no trial, but there would be an enquiry for Agent Mulder, and, more important than that administrative formality, there would be the studies of Bloomfeld, psycho- and sociological investigations, profiles and conclusions, and probably a true-crime novel that, if Mulder had any sense at all, he would write himself.
In other words, the evidence had to be gathered and Skinner got to oversee the gatherers. It was either this or talk to the press who had begun to arrive in droves not five minutes after Vivian was taken away. As senior officer on the scene, Skinner was technically the one who should have handled the wolves at the door, but what was a sycophant like Christley good for if not dealing with the press? Skinner had bowed out, citing Christley's familiarity with the local press, and ducked back into the warehouse with a sigh of relief. Later, when he found out that Christley had been the one to name Harold Bloomfeld the CopyCat Killer, that relief would turn to annoyance.
Copying was what Harold had done, Skinner would think, setting the report down on his immaculate green blotter, but instead of copying other killers, he had tried to copy his principal victim, seeking out women as much like Vivian MacElvey as possible, then raping, strangling, and eviscerating them as she was forced to look on. The marks that Scully had found on the victims’ hands, cuts drawn straight across the base of the thumb, would turn out to be another form of copying—Harold’s way of copying his mother’s accident with her young son and an electric carving knife. Despite the appropriateness of the name, however, Skinner would find ‘CopyCat' too childish and deceptively simple a moniker for such a monster.
Blissfully unaware of Christley’s blunder at this point, Skinner watched as Mulder came up next to him, hands in his pockets, head down. It was nice to know that he was still the alpha dog, though he didn’t want to be at the moment. He wanted someone else to take the responsibility, to be in charge, but there was no one else. Only him.
“Congratulations, Mulder,” he said.
He felt the other man’s heavy gaze, but did not meet it.
“Thank you, sir.”
“I would prefer it if you made . . . if my involvement in the case was downplayed in the report.”
Mulder nodded. Skinner did not look toward him, but he felt Mulder move, come so close that their shoulders were almost touching.
“Sir, I just wanted you to know that—“
“Thank you, Mulder,” he said. He met Mulder’s gaze without wavering or blinking. *Thank you,* he thought, but did not say it again. He looked into Mulder’s concerned face and understood what Scully had been saying in the diner. Mulder believed. He believed that what you were experiencing was real and honest, even if it was so crazy you didn’t believe it yourself. With Mulder, it wasn’t you but the world that was insane, and that thought was so tempting, so reassuring, that Skinner’s hands itched with the desire to grab Mulder and pull him close.
“’scuse me,” said Robertson. He stood in front of them, shifting from one foot to the next like a second grader who had to pee.
“What can we do for you?” Skinner asked, almost relieved to be interrupted.
“I was wondering you would be willing to work the room with me, you know, sort of spot me on the follow-up,” he said, talking to Mulder. Mulder glanced at Skinner, who shrugged. No harm, no foul. Robertson would benefit from hearing Mulder’s mind in action. With a dead perp, there was no need to do a profile immediately, but it didn’t hurt to let Robertson work it now, and it didn’t hurt Mulder to have his opinion respected.
Mulder moved to the corner of the room near the sink Vivian MacElvey had been chained to, watching with a slight smile on his lips as Robertson paced in a circle, hands flying. So Robertson paced and Mulder watched him and Skinner watched Mulder, and when Mulder looked up and caught Skinner's eye, he smiled. Skinner tried to smile back.
***end 6/7***
‘Cause you mean everything to me . . .