Despite the promise she made to the detective, Scully found herself sitting at her kitchen table for almost fifteen minutes before she could nerve herself up to make the phone call. During most of those minutes she wondered what the girl was like. It was easy to paint a mental picture of what a child raised by Diana Fowley would be like - as cold, arrogant, and insufferable as her mother - but it was harder to imagine a child who had only had Diana in her life for the first few years and then had been raised with other influences. Whatever those might have been. Had Kyrie been adopted by a loving family after her mother's demise? It was a nice thought, but she very much doubted it. Because if Kyrie did have a loving family why weren't they at the station with the girl right now?

It was the thought that Kyrie probably didn't have anybody if they were looking for Mulder that finally made Scully pick up the phone and call him. This scared her, though. What was the best case scenario? That the girl would get off on the charges, and come to live with her and Mulder until she started college? She would of course be intelligent enough that college was a reasonable expectation; of all of the things that Scully found objectionable about Diana, a lack of intelligence was never one of them. In fact, she had actually been too damn clever for her own good much of the time.

Dialing Mulder's phone number would set them off on a completely different path. And yet, she had to do it because it was no way around it. It was hard to blame her for doing it with trembling fingers.

"Hey, Scully, what's up?" Mulder asked cheerfully as soon as the call connected. "I thought I was supposed to call you tonight." Apparently he was completely unaware of what the nature of their conversation would be.

How could he know, she asked herself, unless having a daughter isn't a complete surprise... But Diana seemed more likely to successfully keep a secret from everyone than he did from her, so she had to think that he was about to be blindsided. This realization made her cringe, but there was no good way to ease into the topic. "Do you know about Kyrie?" she asked point-blank.

"It's the first word in a two word phrase that approximately translates to 'Lord, have mercy' and is the common name of an important prayer of Christian liturgy," Mulder said promptly.

All doubt she had about his knowledge of the girl was erased with that flippant answer. He had a better poker face than she did, but he wouldn't have reacted like she was asking him for a bit of trivia if he knew his daughter's name.

"Not Latin, Mulder. Kyrie Fowley, age seventeen. She claims to be your daughter," Scully told him without any preamble. She paused only long enough to let him do the mental arithmetic. "Did you know that Diana was pregnant when she left you?"

After a bit of hesitation he finally said, "No. I had no idea." His tone was hard to read, but it wasn't joy that filled his voice. It was more akin to sadness or betrayal, and maybe frustration.

"I didn't think so," she replied, and something tense inside her eased up a bit even though she felt empathy for him. It hadn't seemed likely that he would have hidden the existence of a child from her, but she hadn't really been rational in many of her dealings with Fowley. The thought had crossed her mind that maybe he could have decided against telling her so she wouldn't go off the deep end and finally decide that she had a legitimate reason to kill his ex.

"Did she come to you? Kyrie, I mean," he asked quietly. "If she came to you because she needs something like money for college tuition or place to stay, we'll work it out. I'm not sure how yet but-"

Her heart sank a little more when she heard this. If he thought that the worst case scenario was that his nearly grown daughter had shown up out of the blue seeking support during her final year of high school, he should have thought of things a bit bleaker.

"No," she said, interrupting him before he could say anything else to break her heart with his naïveté. "The police contacted me about her. Actually, they were looking for you, but I got them to tell me what they'd brought her in for."

"What?" he sputtered in confusion. "What do they think she did?"

"Alleged murder and kidnapping," she said miserably. She tried to imagine what it would have been like if she'd learned about Emily only after she'd become a murder suspect. The only upside she could imagine to that was that Emily would have lived long enough to be accused of crimes that serious.

"Where?"

"Alexandria. They want you there." She didn't explain that they 'they' was the police because he had to know that. "They need to have a parent there to question her."

"I'm not going to be able to get there tonight," he told her, as if that needed to be said. "All the news can talk about is flights still being cancelled. They don't even know if they will be able to fly tomorrow yet." There was a very long pause, and then he asked, "If the Alexandria PD agrees to it, could you go there for me?" His unspoken plea was that he didn't want his daughter there alone, which was another thing she didn't need to be told.

The request took her longer to think over than she wanted to admit. "I guess I have to. Hold on a second, the detective who contacted me gave me his direct line for you."

She recited the phone number to him, and wasn't surprised to hear him typing it rather than writing it down. His handwriting was perfectly legible, but he often typed out things that could be handwritten instead. Perhaps, she reflected idly, it was because hard drives were harder to burn than paper files.

As soon as the clicking stopped he said, "Thank you. If they agree, I'll have them call you."

"Right."

"And if they don't," Mulder said uncomfortably. "… I guess she'll just have to hang tough until I can fly home."

"Hopefully they will let me see her," Scully told him, much more for his benefit then because she actually wanted to drive to Alexandria at that time of night.

They hung up then, and unlike usual neither of them said 'I love you.'

Mulder must have called them as soon as he hung up with her, because she heard back from the police department less than forty-five minutes later. They weren't entirely enthusiastic about having her there, and noted that it was an unusual circumstance that allowed it at all, but at least they weren't going to insist that the girl simply be held until Mulder could get back. It made her wonder if they felt bad for Mulder's daughter on some level.

She knew that she certainly did, and this was something that her thoughts kept circling back to on the drive into Alexandria. No matter what the girl had done, she couldn't allow herself to blame her for being Diana's child. If she had been twenty-seven instead of seventeen an argument could be made that she should have contacted her father and let him know of her existence, but she was only a minor. She had no legal right to contact him, even if she wanted to. Even if she knew who he was. More than his name, she reflected. The girl had obviously learned that at some point.

It was obvious that they were waiting for her, because the first thing she heard when she stepped into the station was, "Mrs. Mulder?"

Scully glanced at the person behind the desk before smiling wanly. "Doctor Scully. I kept my own name when I married."

"Of course," the officer said, seemingly slightly flustered. It made her wonder if assertive women were infrequent visitors to the station. "Detective Lybecker asked me to bring you to him as soon as he arrived."

"Lead the way," Scully invited.

Lybecker turned out to be a mid-aged man with a severe buzz cut that only half hid the fact that his otherwise dark hair was graying. Since she was feeling her own age so keenly lately, this made her thankful that her hair hadn't begun to gray, and might not if checkout aisle magazine articles were to be believed. It was clear that the detective had been sizing her up too, because not three seconds after she reached his office he said, "I think I told you that we don't usually allow this sort of thing, but considering the fact that your husband is marooned hundreds of miles away, we made an exception in this case."

"Great," she muttered, not feeling it all flattered that she had been granted this exception. It really would have been much better if Mulder could deal with this, but since he couldn't, she had to. That didn't mean that she had to like it.

Rather than lead her to the girl directly, Lybecker irritated her by asking her to take a seat in his office. She wanted to demand that she be allowed to see Kyrie immediately, but honestly, she could wait.

"Coffee?" Lybecker asked, glancing at the clock. "I'm afraid you're probably in for a long night, and maybe caffeine will help."

A longer night, she thought. Traffic hadn't been with her and it was already quite late. "Thank you," she said with all the politeness she could muster up.

Lybecker stuck his head out into the hallway, and said something indistinctly about coffee, before returning. It must be nice to have people at your beck and call, she thought. Neither she nor Mulder had ever had anybody at the FBI willing to go and bring them anything, not even old files.

"Thank you for contacting your husband so promptly," Lybecker said as he returned to his seat.

"Right." The hour was late and her patience had worn thin, so she immediately demanded to know, "So what exactly are you planning to charge her with?" She was vaguely aware that the knuckles of her hands had gone white as she gripped the arms of the chair she was sitting in herself.

"At this point the charges are just pending," Lybecker began to equivocate.

Scully cut him off with a shake of her head. "Don't give me that run around, I spent the better part of my adult life in the FBI, and you know that I'm not talking about paperwork here."

To his credit, Lybecker didn't will wilt under her glare. "Officers are still looking for enough evidence at the scene to charge her with the murders of the two people we discovered in the house just after we found her and the two children there. Obviously, we have enough evidence that she had the children."

"Legally she still a child herself, you know," Scully snapped. Then she thought a moment. "Were both of the children placed with the same family?"

Lybecker shook his head, and he looked as confused as she felt. "No. They were only the adoptive parents of the older of the two, Nathaniel. The girl claims that she was supposed to bring the baby to them, which is another reason we suspect that he is her child. But…"

She gave him a sharp look when he hesitated. "But what?"

"I know they say that young mothers bounce back more quickly than older women do when they have a baby, but she sure doesn't look like she could have given birth three weeks ago."

"So you're just assuming that she kidnapped the baby?" Scully asked pragmatically.

"I don't know what else to think," Lybecker shot back. "If he's not her baby, he has to be somebody's. If he somebody else's, she must have kidnapped him too."

Scully canted her head as she looked at him. "If you ran across me eating lunch with my twelve-year-old nephew, without my brother or sister-in-law present, would you assume that I had kidnapped him?"

"Of course not."

"Because there are other explanations for why someone else's minor child might be in my company?" she asked. "Such as babysitting, for example."

"This girl would be a pretty poor choice for a babysitter," Lybecker said stubbornly.

"That might be true, but that should have no bearing on whether you charge her with one count of kidnapping or two." Scully frowned slightly when he met her assertion with a barely disguised grimace. "What can you tell me about her?" she asked.

He shrugged. "What do you want to know?"

"A good place to start would be her living arrangements. My husband didn't know she existed and you haven't introduced me to adoptive or foster parents…"

"I don't know," Lybecker said, and he sighed when she shot him a disbelieving look. "The only parent she would say anything about is your husband. She has a valid ID on her, but when we looked up the address, there's nothing there, so that's obviously not where she's living."

"And you didn't think to ask her?"

"We thought to ask her," he grumbled. "She wasn't inclined to answer any questions about where she lives, and her father's name and phone number were all she gave up when we demanded to know who was responsible for her."

Scully could picture how he 'demanded' the information, and she wasn't sure she would have told him more than the bare minimum either. "Do you think she's homeless?" she asked, not really wanting to think about that. It upset her some that the girl really didn't seem to have any adults in her life to turn to.

Not that she didn't want Mulder to have a relationship with her, Scully insisted to herself, but because being on your own at that age was mildly tragic to her, and totally outside her own scope of experience at the same age; Maggie had been there to help her study for her SATs and helped proof-read her college essays. The only time she'd seen her father shed a tear outside of a funeral service or when Charlie had gotten pneumonia at age three was when she and each of her siblings left for their freshmen years of college.

To her slight relief, the detective shook his head. "She's too clean, and too well-dressed. Her clothes might not look like much but I know from having teenage girls myself that they come from the sort of mall stores that put ink packs on everything so you only end up with ruined clothes if you try to shoplift them. She's living somewhere, even if she's closed-mouthed about it."

"Okay." She thought a moment. "Is she in school?"

"Not that I can tell," Lybecker admitted. "She won't say and none of the schools we called around to know anything about her."

Scully nodded slightly. She'd gone to school with a handful of kids that had graduated at seventeen, so maybe that wasn't so unusual. Mulder had never said when Diana had left him, nor had Frohike ever volunteered the information, so she didn't know if the girl was barely seventeen, on the verge of eighteen, or somewhere in between.

"I don't know what to tell you, Mrs. Mulder." He seemed to smirk when she bristled at this. "She hasn't volunteered much, so I'm glad you're here so we can get more out of her."

"I want to see her," Scully announced abruptly.

For second she thought that Lybecker was going to protest, but he seemed to realize that he didn't have any grounds to, so he slowly nodded instead. "Okay, that is why you're here, I guess."

All sorts of icy retorts about how being there wasn't her idea crowded her mouth, but she was careful not to let any escape. The last thing that Mulder's daughter needed was for her to start off by purposely antagonizing anyone on the police force. Even if she didn't feel like she owed the girl more, Mulder wouldn't thank her for it if Kyrie ended up getting extra grief because of something she'd said or did.

Lybecker surprised her when he immediately left the room, leaving her to follow him. Though she had expected him to take his sweet time about leading her to their destination, he actually moved pretty sprightly and with purpose. Maybe he wasn't the only one who was feeling the lateness of the hour. After a short walk, they came to a stop.

"She's in there," Lybecker indicated with a wave towards a window. Scully stepped up to it without hesitation as soon as she recognized it as an interrogation room. She knew very well that there was a mirror on the inside of the room, so the girl wouldn't know that she was being scrutinized.

Kyrie had pulled her knees up and was resting her heels on the seat of the chair. Her arms were wrapped around her jean-clad legs, and Scully felt a brief pang of pity for her. Regardless of whether the accusations against her were true, the only way she could possibly look more miserable would be to actually being crying. The expression on her face said that she was fighting that urge with every fiber of her being, and so far it was a battle that she was winning. As soon as she became conscious of this observation Scully couldn't help but think of the girl's mother, though she tried to push the thought away. It would do neither her nor Kyrie any favors if she kept trying to compare her to the late Diana.

As if in defiance of this conviction a vaguely curious voice asked over her shoulder, "Does she look like your husband or more like her mother?" She didn't bother to turn to look towards him. Instead she continued to look at the girl.

Kyrie was smaller than Scully had imagined that she would be. Mulder was tall, and Diana hadn't been short either. But Kyrie was probably no taller than Scully herself was. Even in the abstract it was hard to imagine a teenage girl managing to overpower and kill two people, and now that she was looking at her, the idea seemed positively ludicrous. If Kyrie was one hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet, she'd eat her hat. No wonder Lybecker had so much trouble believing that she could have given birth to the younger of the two children.

"She looks like her father some," Scully offered after a while. "She has his eyes." But not his nose, she privately noted with some relief. She'd always been fond of that feature of his, but what added character in a man would just be unfortunate on such a delicately built girl. "Both of her parents have dark hair, so it's hard to tell about which gave it to her." The girl's dark hair was down to her shoulders, and even jammed under a plum colored knit beret it was clear that it curled.

"I'm glad she doesn't look just like her mother," Lybecker surprised her by saying. When she raised her eyebrows at this, he didn't look cowed. "I'm just saying, if I found out my wife had a kid by someone I'd known, and obviously hadn't liked much, I'd be happier if I didn't have to see my enemy every time I looked at her boy."

"Diana and I weren't-" Scully paused, and abandoned the obligatory protestation. "We weren't friends. And you're right, it's probably easier on me that she doesn't look like her mother's clone."

"She worked with you?" Lybecker asked, and this made her wonder how much Kyrie had actually been told about her father. And more importantly, by whom. When Diana died, Kyrie had only been in elementary school. Had someone else told her about her father and his work? And if they had... the implications of that were almost worse than the crimes the girl was accused of.

"For a short time. She'd worked with my husband, and had been in a relationship with him, before he and I met. Some project took her to Europe, so she left him behind. And then she returned to the US not terribly long before her death," Scully admitted, and she was happy that this didn't seem like old news to him. Until she wondered if Kyrie herself knew all about it but hadn't shared with the detective.

"I bet you're pissed at her all over again right about now," Lybecker said.

Her curiosity got the best of her. "Why?"

The detective shrugged. "You husband said he didn't know about the kid either, and I believed him. Going away and never telling anyone you had a kid is one thing, but to come back and still keep that from people? That's awfully cold."

"That was Diana for you."

"And yet you don't seem real surprised that she was capable of that level of deception," he noted. "She must have been a real piece of work."

Scully almost opened her mouth to agree, but then all at once she realized that she was falling into a trap. More likely than not Lybecker only playing at being sympathetic. Instead he was trying to establish the fact that Fowley had been a person capable of unthinkable acts... and by extension her daughter probably was too. This realization had her kicking herself, but she tried to remind herself that it was late and she'd gotten a hell of a shock, so it was not too surprising that she'd let her guard down. "Makes me glad that she wasn't the one who raised the girl for long," she said flatly.

Lybecker looked vaguely disappointed, confirming her suspicions about his motives. "Right."

Staring in at the girl it wasn't hard to imagine what she'd looked like a decade earlier, and she felt a renewal of her old hatred of Diana. It was bad enough that she'd left Mulder without telling him that she was pregnant, but she hadn't bothered to tell him when she'd come back, either. It might have been upsetting if Mulder had taken custody of his young daughter only a couple of years after Emily died, but at least she wouldn't have grown up however she had after her mother's murder.

"Can I speak to her now?" Scully asked, but it was less a question than a demand.

"Of course."

Scully gave him a frosty look. "Alone at first. Don't bother with a camera either, I know where to look for it."

"You can have ten minutes alone with her, but then we're going to start questioning her about these crimes," Lybecker informed her.

"Okay." Ten minutes seemed quite long to talk to a kid she'd never met before, but she wasn't going to argue with him about it.

"Go on," he said, waving her towards the door.

She took a deep breath and opened the door.