FBI TRAINING FACILITY,
QUANTICO, VIRGINIA.
With her usual methodical efficiency, FBI agent Dr Dana Scully had carried out a full post mortem examination of the two bodies that had been shipped to the morgue here at Quantico. Her partner, FBI agent Fox Mulder, had asked her to do the autopsies so he clearly thought there was something out of the ordinary here, something worthy of being an X-file, but she hadn't found anything weird. The women were both in their mid-twenties, had both been in excellent physical health, and were both now dead, one by drowning and one from a blunt force trauma in the shape of a blow to the head. The first woman had been dead a minimum of five days, the second about three weeks. One had almost certainly been murdered, while the death of the other could have been accidental. The only thing at all unusual was that they were identical twins.
"OK, Mulder," she said as she left the autopsy room and started pulling off her scrubs, "what do you know that I don't?"
"You really shouldn't feed me straight lines like that." he said, a twinkle in his eye.
"Mulder!"
"OK, OK. The weirdness here doesn't lie in how they died but in how they lived. Take a look at this."
He handed her a folder. Inside were fingerprint sheets and the results of dental examinations of the two women. It took Scully a few seconds to register their significance.
"This can't be. It's impossible!"
"And yet it's true. Both women have had identical work done on their teeth and have absolutely identical fingerprints."
"But even identical twins don't have matching fingerprints. And no two people, even if they began with identical teeth, could possibly subject them to wear and tear so identical as to need identical work done on them, and no dentist could do identical work, either."
"Interesting, isn't it?"
"Yes, though what we're seeing here could just be a statistical anomaly, a one in a million occurrence."
Mulder raised an eyebrow at that. He believed in a lot of things the average person would scoff at, but he had never been a big believer in coincidence.
"Then this might interest you."
He handed Scully another file, this time containing an arrest report by a Sheriff Dan Turton of Conner Cove, Maine. The photograph clipped to the report showed one of the dead women, full face and side view. She was holding up a board with a number on it. The sheriff had written her name in the report as 'Lucy Prince', but this had then been crossed out with a ballpoint pen. Another name had not been added in its place.
"It says this woman, whatever her name is, was discovered digging up a buried body...four days ago. Mulder, both those women on the slab in there were already dead four days ago."
"It gets better. The body she was discovered digging up is one of those on the slab, the one bludgeoned to death. Now look at her fingerprints."
Scully compared the fingerprints on the arrest report to those taken from the two corpses. All three sets were identical. She was beginning to feel faint. This defied all logic.
"So, one of these women is Lucy Prince?" she asked.
"No. Lucy Prince is neither dead nor incarcerated. As far as I know, she's currently at home in Conner Cove with her husband, Greg. Here's a photo of them taken a few months ago"
Scully took the picture. It showed a tall, and she thought rather handsome man with his arm around the waist of a pretty young woman in her mid-twenties. She was a dead ringer for the other three women.
"So now I suppose we're off to Maine to try and find out what the heck is going on?"
"Yes, and also to investigate the disappearance of Sheriff Turton, who seems to have vanished without trace."