***

"No, no, we have no need for camera here," the heavyset man behind the counter said in a heavy Middle Eastern accent. "Good neighborhood, we know most people, good people."

"So you've never had any type of trouble?" Mulder said, leaning one hip against the counter.

"Trouble? Yeah, trouble sometimes, drunks wanting to buy booze and kids shoplifting," he told Mulder. "Nothing more than that, though."

"How often did you see Mrs. van Adal?" Scully asked.

"The nice lady the police show me picture of? I see her often, usually for milk, bread, butter, that sort of thing, sometimes just to buy candy bar or gum, rarely cigarettes, never lottery or booze," the shopkeeper said, shaking his head. "People here, they don't understand lottery, you know what I call lottery?"

She knew Mulder couldn't resist and sure enough he rose to the bait. "What's that?"

"Tax for people who no do math," the man said, then bellowed a laugh. "We make no money off lottery, either, it just to get people in there, and they want it."

They both smiled politely, then Mulder said, "Did, ah, did she seem to be acting odd at all that day?"

"No, police ask me same, I tell them same," he said. "Got customer. Excuse me."

As the heavyset man moved over to help someone at the counter Mulder turned to her. "Well, it was a good idea but no such luck," he said, then glanced at his watch. "We should get back, you can drop me at the Hoover and head on to Quantico."

"Didn't you want to stand in on the autopsy?" she asked.

"Ah, no, I have some, er, paperwork to do," he said, not looking at her.

"Yeah, I don't blame you, it's going to be a gooey one," she sighed as she put her notebook away.

***

"Well, those were definitely not human bite marks," Scully announced as she entered the office then saw that Mulder wasn't alone; a tall, dark-suited figure sat with its back to her in the chair in front of the desk. "And there were some other anomalies—Oh, I'm sorry for interr—"

"It's just me, Agent Scully," their boss said, turning around in his seat briefly. "Which case is this regarding?"

"Crista van Adal," Mulder said, pushing a folder across the desk towards him. "Suburban Baltimore woman killed two weeks ago and dumped in an abandoned house in the city, found yesterday by a couple of kids who chased their dog into the house then ran screaming down the street. Scully just finished the autopsy, right?"

She gave him The Look while Skinner was busy with the file as she shed her trench coat and hung it on the coat rack behind the door. "That's correct. The local M.E. had already done one but I wanted to look her over for myself, not that I found much more than he did," she admitted. "But I did examine the bites like you asked, Mulder, and none of them are human or even close although the teeth pattern does seem vaguely similar to a gorilla although without elongated canines. Vaguely. And the bite strength is closer to that of a crocodile than a hominid."

"No fangs, but a meat eater," Mulder mused.

"So what made them?" Skinner asked, looking up from the file as she went to perch on the edge of the counter beside and slightly behind Mulder's chair.

She shrugged, folding her arms. "The jury's still out on that, but whatever it was had fairly strong jaws and sharp teeth," she said. "Even after two weeks of decomposition the sheer rage of whomever or whatever did that to her was clear. They hated her."

"Or she was just exceptionally tasty," Mulder said. The room was eerily silent for a few beats before he added, "Now we get to figure out why someone who lived such a quiet, normal life was so hated."

Scully shook her head. "Mulder, the one thing we've consistently discovered over the years is that the more normal they look, the less normal most people are."

Mulder turned to glance at her and Skinner saw the look that passed between them. It was the same type of look that he'd been seeing for the past eight years when they shared an unspoken idea which often seemed to solve the case. With that look any worries he might have had about their partnership were allayed; there was nothing more than the job on their minds. Had he known about their afternoon break, however, he might not have been so relieved.

***

"Okay, now I'm officially confused," Mulder said, looking back and forth between the two pieces of paper. "Are you sure we're talking about the same woman here?"

"I'm pretty sure," Scully said, leaning next to his shoulder and pointing at her neatly-typed copy that had just come out of the printer. "Crista van Adal nee Cooper, age forty-four, birthdate March twelfth in Detroit, Michigan. Height, five-seven, weight at time of death, one-sixty. Muscular; she worked out, jogged, walked. Married for twenty-six years to Maitlin van Adal, no children, no known problems in the marriage. Husband makes upward of two hundred thou per year so she doesn't have to work. Graduated valedictorian of her inner-city high school class, attended two semesters of community college on a full scholarship before dropping out, apparently to get married. No police record other than juvenile and that was mostly for panhandling and petty theft. Worked a series of temporary seasonal jobs over the years, apparently for pin money, and volunteered for quite a few charities though animal ones seemed to be her primary focus."

"And yet she was found wearing raggedy old clothes that you'd except to see on a street person but with Victoria's Secret underwear underneath, a three-thousand-dollar Omega watch, and real sapphire earrings roughly valued at around five hundred dollars all intact," Mulder said, pointing at his handwritten notes. "And there was no evidence of sexual assault unless you count the bites taken out of her breasts and thighs on top of the general ravaging of her corpse."

"And don't forget her gluteus maximus," Scully said.

"Well, how could I—according to you they were mostly missing," he said, glancing sideways at her. "Talk about taking a bite out of your ass."

She deliberately ignored his gallows humor. "So, we have a fairly wealthy, respected matron who volunteered at charities yet apparently wandered around at times wearing dirty old clothes over expensive underwear and thousands of dollars worth of jewelry," Scully summed up. "I simply can't believe no one noticed her dressed that way."

"Mr. Naveedi—our helpful shopkeeper—told me that she wasn't wearing those clothes when she was in the store that day nor had he ever seen her dressed like that," he said, moving his finger down on the paper. "He doesn't remember what she was wearing but he's sure it wasn't a stained sweatshirt and ragged jeans."

Scully moved one of the pages aside to show a picture of Crista van Adal taken just days before her death. In it she was sitting at a white wrought-iron table on what appeared to be a deck over a wide expanse of blue water, smiling happily at the camera with a wineglass raised to it as well. Though she could only be seen from the waist up, she was wearing a multicolored silk blouse with a gold, diamond-encrusted heart pendant around her neck. Her earrings couldn't be seen due to her thick jet-black hair, which was neatly coiffed in a style similar to Scully's pageboy but long enough that it fell just past her shoulders and brushed the sides of her face. It was lightly streaked with grey, the only sign of her age; she looked to be maybe thirty-two, tops, rather than her true age of over ten years older.

"I can't believe that this is the same woman I autopsied," she said with sadness clear in her voice. "If I didn't know better I'd have thought the woman on the table was a vagrant who'd lived on the streets most of her life. But both fingerprints and dental records match; that was her."

"Her prints were in the system?"

"She volunteered for the city of Aldridge's animal shelter which is through the police department and they did a background check and fingerprinted her," Scully explained. "In fact she was very highly regarded there and affectionately known as the Cat Lady. She came in three or four times a week to work with the cats, getting them ready for adoption and even cleaning cat boxes when it was needed. Apparently her husband is allergic to cat hair and this was how she managed to be around them."

"Pretty thorough, there, Agent Scully," he said, bumping her shoulder with his. Only when he was sitting and she leaning over the desk like this could he do that.

"Mulder, be serious. I think our next step is to map out the nearest street people hangouts around her neighborhood and show them her picture and see if any of them have seen her recently. If she was masquerading as a vagrant for whatever reason, that's the next logical place to look."

"We should probably show them her autopsy photo," Mulder mused. "I doubt they'd recognize her like that," he said, gesturing to the picture on the desk. "From what you said, you didn't."

"I had considered having us go in as her friends looking for her," Scully said slowly, "But we can't show that autopsy picture around dressed like this. They'd know we're cops."

"Why not do both?"

She looked at him and raised her brows. "I guess we could at that," she said. "But who goes which way?"

"Who has more and better grungies?" he grinned down at her as he stood up and stretched. "Despite your swiping my favorite Knicks shirt as a nightgown, I'm sure a check of our dresser drawers would yield the answer to that fairly quickly."

She huffed, but instead of arguing began to gather together the file. "First thing tomorrow morning?"

"I guess—why not tonight?" he said as he moved away.

"Because it's nearly six and I want to get going. Don't forget, grocery shopping tomorrow night."

"But—but—"

"But me no buts, Mulder. You promised."

"I know someone who has no butt if that helps."

This time she did grab the nearest item at hand and threw a pencil at him. She was certain that no jury in the land would have convicted her had it stuck in him somewhere but luckily he dodged out of its way just in time.