�Albert Jethro, but both of them are just �AJ�,� I said with a smile. I felt a twinge of pain in my heart. �This is the first year that Harm and I are both away from DC for little AJ�s birthday. We always throw a big party at the Admiral�s house �cause he lives right between a huge park and the forest. This year Bud and Harriet rented a bunch of horses so we could all go riding �cause AJ�s new thing is �horsies�. He likes how they can go �neigh with the hay�,� I said with a warm smile.
�I�m sorry you�re going to miss all that,� Mulder said as we headed for the conference room.
�Me too,� I said softly. �But it�s the nature of the job, right?�
�Sad but true,� Mulder nodded as he held the door open for me.
The conference room was set up efficiently. One long table with chairs all around it, maps tacked up along one wall, pins sticking out of it showing the attacks in red along with several yellow pins that I assumed were other attacks in the area that may be related but they couldn�t confirm. Along the opposite wall crime scene photos were pinned up in chronological order, the first victim, Belinda Arlette Greisemer, at the far left end of the wall, followed by Rosabella Brenna Cowell, then Jia Vega Chan-Knowles, then finally, Akemi Circe Turner, the only woman of all the known victims that hadn�t survived her attack.
Four women who would had been violated in the worst way by another human being, including one who had been violated the same way, but had fought back harder than the others and had ended up losing her life along with all the other things that her attacker had stolen from her.
I shuddered, trying to reconcile the crime scene photographs, the injury catalogues, and the evidence that had been collected with my dream that I was becoming more and more certain was going to come true in the very near future if something wasn�t done to prevent it.
�You okay?� Mulder asked as we took our seats.
�I�ve worked on four rape cases in my career. It hasn�t gotten any easier,� I admitted softly. Harm would have known the source of my discomfort immediately and wouldn�t have made me voice my problem, but Mulder wasn�t Harm. However I did suspect that he knew the cause of my tension and somewhere in his psychology background he had been informed that talking about what bothers you is a good way to start healing. Perfectly sound advice, really, unless what is bothering you is something that bothers everyone in the world who has a soul and a basic comprehension of what it means for someone to be raped.
�It never does,� Mulder said, that admission telling me that he had worked more rape cases than he cared to count.
The briefing started by introductions being made, since the task force had just doubled in size now that Harm, Mulder, Scully, and I were involved in the investigation. Other than Mulder and myself there were four other people in the room. SAC Angela Cole of the FBI who was in charge of the task force. Detective Davis Janz and his partner Elsie Trainer from the San Diego PD. And, finally, ASAC Eric Maguire, also FBI. It was a small task force, only having eight people�including Harm and Scully�making it up, but I knew part of that was because rape cases are so personal that it�s easier for the victims to develop a rapport with those involved if there are fewer, not to mention there�s less chance of leaks when there area limited number of people privy to the innermost workings of the task force.