Adam's Mark Hotel, Houston, Texas, 10:13 am
They had a meeting with Senator Young at nine o'clock, for which they were over an hour late. It turned out that the Adam's Mark Hotel was nowhere near downtown Houston, and the morning traffic was so slow that bicyclists streaked past them as they crawled down Westheimer looking for the Beltway.
The Senator's room would have housed their entire motel building quite comfortably, Scully decided, as she looked around the luxuriously appointed suite. He came to greet them, gracious and forgiving, while his staff flapped around uselessly. They went onto the terrace to have breakfast, sent up by room service.
Senator Young had come to Houston ostensibly to deliver a speech, but his real reason was that detectives had traced his daughter to the city. He was a silver haired man, small and neatly built, with a bass voice that seemed to have been turned down a notch by depression and weariness. He had deep set wrinkles and sagging eyelids, presumably bespeaking the wisdom of his age, but close up they proved to be the signs of a heavy drinker and smoker. For whatever reason, there was a certain muted quality about him that made him seem as fragile as a very old man.
Then as they were shaking hands, Scully looked straight into those heavy lidded eyes and saw something there that was like looking into a mirror. Staggered, she made some excuse and walked to the railing, pretending to admire the skyline, while she struggled for self control.
What she had seen there was the universal look of the grieving parent, a sadness from which there would never be a complete recovery, but only a kind of reconciliation with life, a truce that tacitly admitted that everything in the universe had darkened, and things had been altered irrevocably for the worse.
No one, no human being who has not experienced, can ever imagine what it is like to live with the loss of a child. But those who have only need to look into each others' eyes for a moment to share the unspoken communion that transcends all other differences: gender, economics, age, nationality. Scully had buried an empty coffin, and this man had only an empty place where his daughter had been in the world. It was a common bond, but a terrible one.
The spasm of grief passed, resolving into a steely determination. Scully was suddenly into this case just as much as Mulder. She turned and came back to the table and sat down, feeling a renewed sense of purpose that somehow went beyond the task of finding this man's child.
Mulder gave her a brief, curious look, but he had laid the pictures out on the table and was pointing at the one they'd stayed up half the night arguing over.
"Do you know this girl, sir?"
Young searched the photo intently, then shook his head. "I don't believe I do."
"You don't know her?" Mulder's disappointment was evident.
One of the ubiquitous aides hovering around Young spoke up. "Sir, I believe I know who that girl is."
Young blinked up at him. "Smith. I forgot you were still here."
"She was a close friend of Liz Ann's, in Virginia," Smith said. "I believe her name was Anna...No, Tanya. I didn't know her last name. She was into aromatherapy or something to do with crystals, sort of a free spirit. But she disappeared and no one had heard of her for a long time before Liz Ann left."
Mulder said, "How close were they? Best friends?"
"Oh, yes," Smith said. "When she went away, Liz Ann was heartbroken."
"Enough so that she might go looking for her?" Scully asked.
Young said, "Was that the girl who came up missing from school? I do remember now. Elizabeth was always going on about her. But from what she said, I gathered the girl was a bit wild. Not surprising she'd run off somewhere; you know how adventurous young girls can be."
Scully and Mulder exchanged a look that said, "Get a clue," but only to each other. Then as Mulder was about to ask another question, his eyes went strange. He jerked his chin a fraction of an inch, but Scully, who knew him better than any other living soul, understood. The jolt that ran through him ran through her, too, although she didn't understand what it meant, beyond the fact that he had suddenly fit two or more pieces of the puzzle together.
But was it about Liz Ann, or Tanya, who he was convinced he had seen on the road to Houston? (Come ON, Mulder. Let's just focus on this case.) Scully forced herself to be patient, to sit still. (In the night, lying in bed alone, she had finally found something to think about besides Skinner. Mulder definitely had seen something on the highway. God knew what; he was not crazy, and there had been someone or something there. But he must have seen this picture somewhere before, filed it away in his subconscious mind, and then later superimposed it over whatever was really on the road last night. Two images had simply gotten crosswired in his brain. She'd done it before herself, been thinking of someone so hard she thought she saw him in the rear view mirror of her car, but of course when she turned around to look, the apparition was gone. The difference was, she could admit her own mistake, and understand that her mind had just played a very convincing trick on her. Whereas Mulder would go to his grave believing in some sort of spiritual energy riding around in the back of a Buick. Or in a pawnshop, or walking down a highway, for that matter. Geez.)
She had to wait until they were in the hotel lobby to find out. Then as soon as they got off the elevator he seized her arm and hauled her into a corner, bursting with his revelation. "My God, Scully, we're such idiots!" He actually did hit himself in the forehead with the palm of his hand. "Why did neither of us realize this before?"
She waved her hands vaguely for him to go on.
"Senator Dolf Young. Did you see that cleft in his chin? Did you notice the way his ears stuck out? Or the widow's peak?"
Scully had no idea where he was headed.
"Young, Young, YOUNG," Mulder groaned. "Remember the ears on Roger Young? Like a car with its doors left open?"
Scully felt the jolt again, as before, and said, "Oh, my God, Mulder. You're right! He looks so much like Agent Young they could be--"
"We assumed he disappeared because of some particularly thorough spook cleaning up behind Antoine Baxter. But what if Young is somehow involved in this missing person thing?"
"Mulder, Agent Young IS a missing person."
"My point exactly." He strode away, and Scully had to hustle to catch up with him.
In the car they scoured the files. Mulder said, "Okay, listen to this. Dolf Young says he had a son by a former marriage-- Roger Daniel Young."
"Then it IS him! Why didn't the Senator mention this?"
"Why didn't anyone know Roger was Young's son? It doesn't make any sense. Unless..."
"What?"
"What if the Senator doesn't know his son is missing?"
"But the Bureau would have contacted him by now. Skinner would have called him."
Mulder's voice was thoughtful. "You'd think so, wouldn't you?"
"Maybe Skinner doesn't know."
"One way to find out." Mulder dug into his coat and pulled out his cellular. He punched numbers in with his thumb as he started the car and pulled out into traffic. Then he thrust the phone at Scully. "You ask him."
Scully spluttered and glared, but Mulder was busy dodging a schoolbus with dozens of tiny faces pressed to the windows, all in various stages of contortion. She held the phone to her ear, reaching out with her free hand to cuff the back of Mulder's head as he stuck his tongue out at the children, egging them on.
Marge answered with her "Office of the Assistant Director" line, and suddenly Scully's mouth went dry.
"This is Agent Scully. Is Mr. Skinner available?"
"He's in a meeting just now. I--"
"Hello?"
Scully was not prepared for the effect his voice would have on her.
"Scully?"
Or the note of deep concern in it. She said, "Sir, this is Agent Scully."
"We've established that. Where are you?"
"We're in Houston, sir. We've found something out that we need you to help us with."
"What is it?"
"Sir, are you aware that Agent Roger Young is the son of Senator Young?"
A long silence that could have been embarrassment at being caught or could have been a dumbfounded disbelief.
"Wait a minute." Skinner's voice was muffled. "Let me just..."
She envisioned him punching up the keyboard of his computer to call up Young's file.
"What's he saying?" Mulder asked.
"He's looking it up, I think."
"Then he didn't know?"
Skinner came back on the line. "Young's father is listed as Anders Young. His mother is deceased; her name is Karen."
Scully looked through the file they had on the Senator's family. "Maiden name Canny?"
Muffled again: "Shit!"
Scully said, "Senator Young never mentioned Roger at all today. Does he know that his son is missing? Did anyone contact him?"
"Technically, no."
"What does technically mean?"
"No queries have been made about Agent Young. We still don't know what happened to him, and he had no family listed to contact. The situation is still hanging fire."
"Well, sir, someone did erase some of our records of people who had anything to do with Antoine Baxter."
"Do you think this thing with the Senator has something to do with Baxter?"
"No, sir. I don't."
"Scully, let me look into this and call you back. Where are you staying?"
She gave him the name of their motel and then he said, "You say Senator Young never mentioned his son was missing, or asked any questions about him?"
"No, sir."
"Find out why."
"Yes, sir."
She punched the end button and handed the phone back to Mulder. "He wants us to find out why Young didn't mention his son was missing."
"Actually, that's the question we wanted HIM to answer for US."
"Okay," she said. "But how are we going to find out this information without revealing anything? I mean, if he doesn't know, then asking him will be telling him. We can't just say, �Senator, did you know your son was dead?' Because if he says no, I did not know my son was dead, we can't just say, �Well, he's not.'"
Mulder chuckled. "I say we get one of the aides to ask him."
Scully rubbed her forehead, feeling a headache coming on. She said, "Not that I blame Roger Young. I mean, would you tell people at the Bureau your father was a Senator? No one would let you forget it."
"Still." Mulder turned onto the freeway. "I don't think Roger Young is dead."
"No? Why not?"
He shrugged. "Call it a hunch."
"I'll tell you what I'd like to call it. Hey--where are we going?" "We need to meet those two Houston police officers, Fernandez and Buckland. They're our liaisons in the pawnshop division of Burglary and Theft."
"There's a pawnshop division?"
"Apparently so."
Reisner Street was almost as hard to find as the hotel had been. They finally followed the bailbond office signs to the main police station, identified themselves at the desk, and waited for the officers in the lobby.
Fernandez and Buckland turned out to be women, younger, cuter versions of Cagney and Lacy. Both officers wore plain clothes, severe dark business suits with holster bulges evident under the jackets and badges on their belts in prominent view. They carried automatics, signifying their time on the force (rookies had to carry revolvers until they had five years of service) and their experience. They greeted Mulder and Scully politely, shaking hands all the way around, all business as they signed out and walked out of the police station to their unmarked car, both the epitome of professionalism.
For about ten minutes.
Even as they were walking out of the building, the two women fell back to flank Scully, scoping out Mulder with obvious appreciation and smiling and nodding their approval at her. She tried not to smile. Well, he did have a cute ass, and their eye- rolling and heavy panting were in good humor.
Buckland, who drove, looked at Scully in the rear view mirror and said, "We heard you were a doctor. That's really cool."
Scully and Mulder exchanged amused looks in the back seat. Fernandez said, "We're going to take a little tour down Washington Avenue. There's a guy down there who knows everything about pawn shops, and we need to do some business with him anyway."
Buckland pointed at one of the many pawnshops they passed on the way. "We caught a guy there with an elephant tusk he was trying to pawn. Turned out the creep had killed some circus elephant and had hired a taxidermist to cut it up and make the parts into ashtrays and boots and umbrella stands. We still come up with a piece of that poor old elephant every now and again."
She glanced back at Scully with a totally disarming smile. "I like your hair," she said.
Scully smiled back. Mulder winked at her and formed the words with his lips, Me too.
Well, Scully reflected, there was a down side to Texas and also an up side. The open friendliness of the two officers was a relief after some of the people they'd had to work with in the past.
"So do you guys know anything about pawn shops?" Fernandez asked.
Mulder said, "Not much. We were hoping you'd give us the full tour."
The women looked at each other and laughed. "You got a year or so?" Fernandez asked. "I mean, we can only cover a few dozen a week." "And then there's the ones in South Houston, and Pasadena, and Deer Park, and the Clear Lake area," Buckland said. "But they all have their own police departments."
Mulder gave a frustrated sigh. He was obviously charmed by the two women, but his quest was going nowhere.
Buckland said, "Here's how we do it. You want to set up a pawnshop, you have to lay out a hundred and fifty thousand dollars of unleveraged cash. That means it can't be a loan. Then you have to pass a really stringent background investigation--FBI, so I guess you know about that--and so do all of your employees."
"We just fined a guy three hundred dollars a day for a week for each of his high school helpers," Fernandez said. "The guy just wrote out a check for it, no sweat."
"So then after you set up business," Buckland went on, "You have to check out everyone who comes in to pawn something. They fill out a triplicate form, in white, pink, and yellow."
Fernandez held up a broad briefcase. "We take the yellow tickets, and check them against lists of stolen merchandise."
Mulder said, "You get them from every pawn shop in town?"
"Well, we don't; I mean, our division has lots of people out there. But yes, every shop has to be checked on a regular basis. It is a highly regulated business." Buckland glanced at her partner and admitted, "It does get kind of backed up sometimes."
"How backed up?" Scully asked.
"Sometimes a shop can go for as long as a few weeks without us picking up the tickets," Fernandez admitted. "But that doesn't happen very often. If we're looking for something in particular, like a gun, or some missing jewellery, we crack down, assign extra people to the detail. Then between times, we aren't quite so stringent."
Buckland said, "But the point is, no one can just open a pawn shop without a big bunch of paperwork, and the HPD knows every single shop in this town."
"So how can this shop just go unnoticed?" Mulder handed Fernandez the photograph over the back seat.
"Beats me," she said. She studied it for a moment and said, "I'm thinking this was taken somewhere around North Main, just where Main Street turns into it. Right around the downtown campus of University of Houston."
Buckland glanced over at the snapshot and shook her head. "One of the WAR streets, I'm thinking." She looked back at Scully and said, "Westheimer, Alabama, and Richmond."
Mulder said, "This is hopeless. We're never going to find this place."
"Sure we will, big guy." Fernandez cut her eyes at him shamelessly, and Mulder had to smile. She said, "We're going to talk to a guy right now who's big in the National Pawnbroker's Association. He'll be able to tell us if anyone's set up shop recently."
Scully sighed. Mulder had his heart set on this pawn shop thing, when she wanted to go back and sniff around Young to see if he had any news on Roger. The problem was, she'd seen Mulder come up with even crazier ideas that had turned out to be accurate. And if Liz Ann really was in that place, then all of this was important to their investigation.
The pawnshop they stopped at was called Brother John's. No one was in the shop except an elderly black man in a baseball hat who was tucked into a folding chair behind the glass counter, his feet up on a desk, reading a newspaper.
"Ladies." He nudged his hat back half an inch by way of greeting. "Is it that time again already?"
Buckland introduced the agents and laid her briefcase on the counter over a row of gleaming weapons, from antique guns to Bowie knives to throwing stars. She said, "John, we need to ask you if you know anything about a shop called Issie's."
"Ain't no such place in this town," he said.
Mulder put the picture on the counter in front of him. The old man grunted with effort as he got out of the chair and limped over to look at it.
Fernandez gestured at the swinging door leading into the cashier's cage, and John pushed a button to let her in. Buckland began to walk up and down the rows, her concentration like a shopper with an incredibly sharp eye for a bargain.
"Here's your problem," John said, looking at the photo. "This ain't no pawn shop." Mulder and Scully stared at him. Mulder said, "What about these three balls, then?"
John shrugged. "Don't know, son. But this here is no pawn shop."
"I thought the three balls symbolized a pawnshop," he said, puzzled.
Scully said, "Well, they symbolize money lenders. They come from the crest of the Medici's in medieval Europe, when the Italian Lombards and the Medicis were the biggest money lenders in the world. The three balls represent three sacks of rocks used to slay a giant by one of the Medici family under Charles the Great."
Both officers and Mulder were staring at her. Scully flushed a little, and Mulder leaned forward. "Scully, are you trying to turn me on here or what?"
She faced him smugly. "I also know that the song �Pop goes the weasel' comes from pawnbroking. A weasel was the name of a shoemaker's tool, and to �pop' is to pawn. In medieval times when shoemakers needed money, they pawned their tools, like welders and mechanics do today. That's where the line comes from, �That's the way the money goes: Pop goes the weasel."
"Son of a gun," John said, delighted. "I got to tell my boy that one."
"I thought it was a monkey chasing a weasel," Mulder said.
Buckland said, "What would a monkey want with a weasel?"
"A weasel could take a monkey in a fight," Fernandez contributed, scribbling the numbers from a gun to her note pad.
"Bullshit," Buckland said. "Well...I guess it would depend on the kind of monkey. I mean, maybe a gorilla..."
"A gorilla isn't a monkey, you doof. It's an ape."
Scully, sorry she had started this whole thing, said, "People, can we focus here?"
For lack of anything else to divert everyone from the monkey/weasel debate, which she was certain Mulder was about to enter, she put the pictures she had on the counter and said, "Sir, could you tell me if you've seen any of these girls?"
John nodded down at them. "Oh, sure," he said. "I seen this one just the other day."
***********************************
It had taken Mulder and Scully approximately two hours to run the prints on the diamond bracelet the girl had pawned through the local FBI registry to make a positive I.D. She was Tanya McClean, fingerprinted in 1995 when she went to work for a Foley's warehouse as a counter assistant. There was no other information on her. No missing person's report had been filed, and no other photos were available. The yellow ticket had been filled out accurately, but with fake identification; the DMV showed no license registered to her.
Buckland and Fernandez took them to lunch at a Mexican restaurant to cheer them up.
"Damn, I am sick of these dead ends," Mulder said, poking at the food on his plate irritably.
The diamond bracelet had been identified by Fernandez, after a long search, as one reported stolen in a house theft in 1955. It was part of a whole collection of jewellery stolen from a single owner so long ago that most of the other information had simply been lost.
"The good news is that if she pawned this on the eighteenth, she's probably still around town somewhere," Buckland pointed out. "She may be hitting other shops. I mean, she only got a couple of hundred dollars for this piece."
"What's the bad news?" Mulder asked.
Since both officers finished their shift at three, they were off for the day, eating fajitas and drinking beer with as much energy as if they had just come on duty and were preparing for another day of work. Fernandez took a bite of a coiled tortilla and said, "The bad news is that now you've got to deal with Bobby Jo Danson and Carl Seagram."
Buckland made a face. "They're FBI, and we don't want to speak out of turn, but we've worked with these guys before."
Fernandez took a long pull from her beer mug and shook her head. "Bad boys, bad boys" she said. "But whatcha gonna do?"
"Well, it could just be us," Buckland pointed out. "They really don't deal well with women."
"Great," Scully said. "We're meeting with them tomorrow morning."
"Good luck!" Fernandez said, raising her beer mug in a toast.
*****************************
Back at the motel, Mulder followed Scully into her room.
"Go away," she told him. "I need to take a shower and let all this sink in."
"Tell me something honestly, though," he said.
"If I tell you, will you leave me alone?"
"Promise."
She turned to him, her fists on her hips, waiting for the nickel to drop. "Do you really think a monkey could take a weasel in a fair fight?" he asked.
"Only if the monkey pulled a gun on him," she said. "Now get out."
****************************
