byjordan
Houston, Texas
Lone Star Motel 11:15PM
Skinner drummed the pencil eraser against the tabletop in Scully's room in an angry tattoo. He had been on hold for ten minutes, after a fifteen minute runaround to find the right person in the Victoria police station to talk to. Yes, Mulder had been there. The girl he had interrogated had committed suicide in her cell. No, no one had seen him after that. He would check the hot sheet for the rental car.
Finally there was a click on the line. "Assistant Director Skinner?"
"Go ahead."
"Sir, we did have a vehicle of that description towed tonight. Well, not us, but the Rosenburg police. It was found on the side of the road, about ten miles north of Rosenburg, locked, with no evidence of foul play."
"An agent is missing, his car is found on the side of the road, locked, and you say there's no evidence of foul play?"
The voice on the line was young, and sarcasm was lost on him. "No, sir."
"Where exactly was it found?"
"Just by the side of the road, sir. According to the report, had gas in it and no mechanical failure."
Skinner hung up abruptly. Asshole.
He glared at the phone and when it rang he almost jumped out of his chair.
"Skinner here."
An official sounding woman's voice said, "Agent Scully?"
"Do I SOUND like Agent--" He took a deep breath. "No, this is Assistant Director Walter Skinner."
"Sir, please hold. I'll patch you through to Houston."
"I'm IN Houst--"
"Mr. Skinner?"
Skinner closed his eyes and let his breath out through his teeth. He wouldn't do Scully any good if he succumbed to a stroke.
"Skinner here."
"Sir. This is Special Agent David Seagram. We met yesterday."
It seemed like a hundred years ago. Skinner said, "Yes."
"Sir. I'm not sure if you're aware of the situation down here in Houston, but an agent was shot and killed this afternoon."
Skinner was locked into position for a second, freeze frame. In that second, he looked down a long, long road into the future. He said hoarsely, "Who--"
Seagram's voice trembled on the name. "It was Special Agent Danson, sir. My partner."
"I'm sorry, Agent Seagram. You have my condolences."
"Yes, sir. Thank you. Agent Scully was with us this afternoon when we were observing what we suspected to be some sort of central clearing house for our abductors. We were ambushed in an alleyway, and the suspects fled in a white late model Cadillac. Scully pursued in our car, a silver 98 Taurus. The Cadillac was later found in a residential area, apparently after being involved in a collision with another vehicle. One man was found dead at the scene, shot twice. At this point in time, it seems that the shots were fired from different weapons. Sir, we have an APB out on our Taurus and your agent. We suspect foul play."
Skinner felt the walls take a slow turn, and end up back in place. Foul play? No wonder this man was an investigator, with instincts like that.
"Do you have any idea at all where Agent Scully might be at this moment?" Skinner asked.
"No, sir."
"And where is the last place you saw her? Exactly?"
Seagram's voice dropped a decibel. "Well...Sir, all our field reports were in the car Agent Scully took in the pursuit. When the ambulance picked up Danson and myself, there was no street address...We can't determine exactly where the clearing house was."
"That," Skinner said, "Is fucking ridiculous."
"Yes, sir."
Skinner reminded himself that Seagram's partner had been killed that very day, and wondered if the man might be in shock. "Can you approximate where it was?"
"Very difficult to say, sir."
Skinner's gaze dropped to something he hadn't noticed until just now: a yellow Post-it pad on the table by the phone. He looked more closely, and saw that someone had written something, and then torn out a page. The imprint of the letters was still impressed into the page he was looking at.
He said, "Could it have been on Main Street? Or North Main?"
Again, a confusion he would not have normally associated with any agent, much less the man he had seen trying to bully Scully.
"I couldn't say, exactly, sir."
Skinner had begun to scribble the pencil lead lightly over the Post-it pad, surprised at the clarity of the address that emerged.
He hung up on Seagram and picked up the phone again to dial Central Dispatch, to ask for a keymap code and directions.
*************************
Houston, Texas
Downtown
"Look in the file and see if they give any directions," Mulder suggested.
Young turned the overhead lamp on in the car and squinted at the papers in the files. "They have lousy handwriting," he said, "And I don't see any case reports in here. Just a lot of scrawled field notes."
Mulder said, "I used to be guilty of that myself, keeping all my notes handwritten until a case was over. Then I got a very Calvinistic partner."
Scully sighed. "First a chauffeur, now a secretary."
Police cars prowled past them, one on every corner. They glanced at the government plates, glanced away again. Scully was beginning to wonder if they were invisible.
Mulder said, "Can you clear this thing up for us, Roger? I don't get it. Why didn't you tell anyone Tanya was your daughter?"
"It's a long story. When my father was first getting into politics, he found out his wife, my mother, was a hopeless alcoholic. His way of dealing with things has always been to sweep them under the rug. He divorced her and spent plenty of money to make sure she was kept out of sight for good. She was in and out of hospitals all her life. Me, I had the Housekeeper Syndrome."
"The what?"
"You know, when a kid is raised by a housekeeper," Young said. "He gets very attached to her. Then one day mom or dad looks around and sees that the kid has way more love for the housekeeper than either of them. So they fire her. The kid is so broken up it's like losing a parent. You can't imagine. But the parents just hire another housekeeper. The kid gradually falls in love with her, you know. Primary caregiver and all that. But then the folks figure out it's happening again, he loves her more than them. So she gets the sack, and the kid has now lost two of the greatest loves of his life, one after the other. In time, he catches on. It isn't safe to love or care for anyone."
"I have heard of that," Scully said. "It's tragic."
"I was only nineteen years old when I met Meg. The love of my life." His voice caught in his throat, and he paused, then went on. "I put all my eggs in that one basket. One last shot at trust. And I got her pregnant, on purpose, so she'd have to marry me."
"And did she?"
"Hell, no. She disappeared, with the baby. I never even saw it. See, the old man didn't want me to drop out of school to get married. Not that I needed to, with the money we had. But he just decided she wouldn't make a fit daughter in law to a future president. Dad, he had plans way, way down the line, you see. So he paid her off, or hired people to scare her away. And the one person in the world I knew would have to love me for her whole life, my child, just vanished into the wind.
"I switched majors in college to law, with a minor in criminal justice. I made my own contacts. I never spoke to my father again, by the way. And he barely mentioned me in his acceptance speeches. I knew my mother had seen the baby, and years later I found out she had tried to get it, tried to adopt it. She loved it as much as I did. But then she died, and that was the end of it. I was never able to find her again. And about that time, my father got married again and had another daughter. Liz Ann. A respectable wife, frigid bitch that she was, a respectable second family. A son somewhere in the FBI. Of course, the minute Liz Ann was old enough, they sent her away to boarding schools so they'd be free to hit the campaign trail. And in the meantime, I never stopped looking for her."
Mulder said, "Liz Ann and Tanya met at school?"
"Yeah. I think the old man must have fixed up the people who adopted Tanya with enough cash to send her to school. So they met, never knowing their relationship. Then Tanya must have just run away. She had a history of it, I found out. Running away."
Young paused and stared out the window at the passing buildings for a few minutes. Scully was cruising slowly down Main Street, past the museum. "Or maybe running to something," Young said softly.
Scully and Mulder glanced at each other.
Young said, "I don't mean to hurt anyone, as God is my witness. When this is over, I just want to take Tanya with me and go away somewhere. I just want my kid. After all this time, I finally found her, and all I want is to take care of her."
There was something about the look on Mulder's face that made Scully feel very uneasy. His eyes were so sad. This couldn't be good. Was it the replay of his own tragedy? No... she knew him too well, and knew that this was something else, something more than sympathy. Something was wrong.
"I've made other people disappear," Young said. "Now I just want to take Tanya and disappear myself."
Mulder said, "Do you know who the Buyer is, Roger?"
Young looked not at him, but at Scully, with a kind of apology. He said, "Baxter told me, or at least hinted at it. He was like the Buyer's right hand man. He had carte blanche, could do anything he wanted and get away with it. He could even hire other men to die for him. It was like he was immortal or something. Until he ran into you two. I can only hope he suffered like hell when he died."
"I shot him," Scully said. She still sometimes saw him fall, lat+e at night, just as she was falling asleep. The spray of gore across the pale yellow wall, and part of his head blown away. But one more second and he would have killed Skinner.
Young said, "Seagram and Danson didn't have a fucking clue. It's no white slave ring. It's nothing like that. The Buyer just likes to...take his pleasure with pretty young virgin girls. Baxter thought it was funny, but even he got kind of sick looking when he told me. Whatever he does to them, he does in groups of five. Baxter called him a soul-eater. That's really all he'd say. But I do know he gets his girls through a middleman, and my bet is that the middleman is right here in Houston now, and that his name is Issie."
************************
Houston, Texas Main/N.Main
First rule of investigation: begin at the beginning.
Skinner, dressed in boots, jeans, a black turtleneck, and a watch cap, splashed the beam of his high powered flashlight in all directions. The row of buildings seemed to stare back at him like the faces on a jury about to announce the death penalty: blank, expressionless, but holding some terrible secret within. The address Scully had written down was 111 Main, which apparently did not exist. There was the old M and M building, which had been converted into a branch university, and beyond that, a myriad of parking lots. He had parked his car in one and set off on foot. Although the streets were fairly well lit, Main went over a bayou and under a freeway, and the shadows there were as ominous as an abandoned bus in Ireland.
There was a short row of brick buildings there, each barred or boarded up at any possible point of entry. Skinner flashed his light along the impassive, impenetrable wall, seeing gang graffitti, the letters RA scrawled in surprisingly elegant patterns.
A patrol car crawled by. Skinner turned towards it defiantly, but the officers were talking to each other and only slowed briefly at the light and then went through it when it changed.
Another car slowed behind it, the indicator light on. Skinner slipped back into the shadow of the building, realizing the car was about to turn. As it did, he saw the driver clearly. A knee- weakening wave of relief went through him when he saw Scully and Mulder in the front seat. He walked behind them and saw they were driving around to the back of the buildings. He could have sworn that there was no opening in the chain link fence, but he must have missed the gate set into the wall.
The car stopped. A slow flush of rage had begun to creep up on Skinner; he was going to give them holy hell for not reporting in for so long. Scully stepped out of the driver's seat. She spotted him at the same time he spotted her handcuffs.
She gave a frightened look behind her. Years of instinct made Skinner duck back out of the light.
"It was right over there," Scully said, in a fairly loud voice.
Then he saw the third man get out of the car, after a handcuffed Mulder. Roger Young.
Roger Young?
The back of the building seemed to be inset, under a sort of hanging roof that divided the floors, like a landing. Something moved up there, and Skinner's gun was in his hand without conscious thought.
Mulder, Scully, and Young all stopped and looked up. What were they staring at? He moved away from the wall, tried to see.
Three basketball shaped orbs were slowly swirling around each other, leaving what looked like a trail of fire, like comet tails.
Any minute now, Skinner thought, this is all going to make sense.
But until it did, he would just have to do the only thing he knew how to do really well. He stepped out into the light, gun raised, and said, "Agent Roger Young."
All three people spun around to face him, though only Scully didn't look shocked. Young had his revolver in his hand, but instead of bringing it up, he stepped behind Scully and pushed the muzzle into her back.
"Drop it, Skinner."
Skinner remained motionless. Mulder said, "Put it down, sir. He'll kill her."
They remained that way for several heartbeats, and in the absolute silence, Skinner heard a tiny click. He thought it was Agent Young, drawing back the hammer on the revolver. Young, hearing the same sound, thought it was the shell jacking into the chamber as Skinner cocked his weapon. Both men readied themselves to fire.
But Scully looked over her shoulder to the wide oak door that started as the click of a latch and a slit of light in the darkness and then began to swing open wider and wider, like a huge mouth full of teeth.
Mulder said softly, "Oh, shit."
click here for chapter 16
