As much as I hated keeping things from Harm I had no intention of calling him and telling him that I was going after a serial rapist with a man I had known for all of ten hours and had spoken to for maybe an hour total since we met. Harm would insist that I either come back to the hotel or wait for him to come to me. Which, honestly, didn�t sound wholly unappealing, except I knew that we didn�t have the time to wait for Harm to get from the hotel to the coffee shop on foot and I had the car. I reached for the map and started scanning the area around the base. Thankfully it was a detailed map and I found the park a minute later. I told Mulder where to go and he went forty over the speed limit in the light traffic.
�Don�t you think you�re going a little fast?� I asked, looking over my shoulder to see if there were any cops following us.
�We�re in pursuit of a violent offender, correct?� Mulder asked, not taking his eyes off the road.
�Yes,� I said.
�Then it�s official Bureau business,� Mulder said.
I wrapped my fingers around the arm rests and hung on tight, praying that this actually turned out to be something and not just more proof that my imagination has a tendency to take an idea and run with it.
The sun was rising as I pulled the car back into the parking space allotted for us at the hotel. It had taken much longer than anticipated to cover all the ground, and it turned out there were two baseball diamonds on opposite corners of the park and, as I hadn�t seen any real landmarks, I didn�t even know which one we were looking for, so we checked both thoroughly.
Even before I slipped the cardkey in the door I knew Harm was awake. I was exhausted, aching, and emotionally strung out. Mulder and I had spent three hours combing the park and finding nothing to indicate that my dream had come true. That didn�t mean that it wouldn�t, as Mulder had pointed out on the ride back to the coffee shop to pick up my car. He was going to check with the Parks Board to see if the baseball diamond was rented out by a high school league for their playoffs and, if it was, when the first day was scheduled.
While we scoured the park Mulder had told me about the other crime scenes and the potential clues that Scully had found during her autopsy that afternoon. He told me about how most of the victims had retreated into themselves completely, unable to do anything other than waste away in fear. He recounted the conversation he had had with the first victim, the only woman who wasn�t essentially catatonic, and he told me how she had told him, with horrifying clarity, everything this monster had done to her.
Mulder had promised to keep me out of it, he had made it clear that he wasn�t just going to sit on the information�or potential information�that I had offered him. I agreed, knowing that any lead would be welcome in this case, but I did make him swear that he wouldn�t tell anyone where he got the information.