August 16th

2:52 PM

Outside Police Station

The old saying about all roads leading seemed especially poignantly with the police station in mind, and Mulder was certain glad to find so quickly. When he set out he had stopped off at Jeff's Gas and Guzzle, picking up a Coca-Cola and a sandwich just in case it took some time. he kept thinking that the day would be a long one and that he would need to prepare. Oddly, the roads here were in great shape and the path was easily followed and it didn't take long to locate his quarry. Now, sitting in the parking lot staring at his sandwich, it was almost as if it were singing him a siren's tune on the fine art of deli meats. He looked at it longingly for just a second longer.

Mulder put it in the glove box and his mind said its sad goodbyes, switching gears almost immediately.

As Mulder walked toward the police department, his mind raced. There were all sorts of things he wanted to know and all sorts of questions he wanted answered. The only way to accomplish this was to go back to the beginning, and that was always tricky. Knowing what the start was sometimes required an equal amount of skill and luck, and finding both was sometimes difficult. Equally tricky was deciding which of his hunches to play out and which one to brush to the side, knowing many of them had a way of either proving or disproving themselves. It took time to figure those things out and time, unfortunately, was one of those commodities he rarely had in stock.

The way Mulder figured things, this was something that perhaps just started taking victims but had its roots somewhere in the past. You only had to probe and pry before all the pieces started coming unhinged. Mulder did not want to hazard too many guesses, knowing that forming an hypothesis sometimes tripped up good minds.

Mulder stopped for a moment to look at the building and its amazing backdrop, taking a second to adjust his breathing to a calmer pace before entering. The trees were there once more, the whole of the state seemed like it was a landscaper's dream factory, and he lost himself for a moment staring into the nothing. He was accustomed to the hustle and bustle of life in the fast lane and he drew in slow breaths, knowing he had to try and breath and match everyone's pace here.

Looking at individuals moving in and out of the building, Mulder noted that the pace here was lax and indifferent. The uniformed officers seemed bored, high-tech toys and low-tech resolve both setting unused on and around desks, with many people just standing and talking instead of moving around. There were some nice computers here and there, some new and some old, and he used this as a guide to avoid conversation, locating where the hub of the office happened to be and where he should go.

Mulder felt comfortable here and made himself at home.

One thing he found amazing about this place was just how invisible he sometimes felt. He could walk right up to their evidence lockers and rifle through much of their inventory and nobody seemed to notice - or care. There files he wanted, the items he needed, they were all available without a fight. If the X-files were always like this then he would be out of work. He wondered if it had to do with the suit or perhaps his look or a combination of the two.

Mulder scribbled down a mental note to see if he could find an answer to that sometime, if only for curiosity's sake.

Mulder had been inside the building for almost thirty minutes before someone asked him to see some identification, and twenty more minutes passed by before a Detective Ludlow popped in to see how things were going. He had already made himself at home before that time and asked if he could stay where he was. He was told yes and that made him happy. Mulder then asked where to find some files to get him start and was told that it would be a minute.

Another two hours passed before Mulder found the groundwork for the two cases he had been looking for, and another hour before he noticed some variations in the pictures he saw.

There were little things here and there that did not seem to fit into the equation, and more bizarre pieces of the puzzle that seemed straight out of some Twilight Zone marathon. Things ran together when investigating, sometimes forcing a person to take a second glance, and Mulder was on his sixteenth by them. The items were starting to form a string of questions that looked like dominoes that sort of fall into place.

For one, the marks on the first body were far worse than anyone had managed to pass on. In the photographs he first looked over, there were lines that went diagonally across the skin, hacking in at certain angles but leaving questions about what the weapon could be in others. now, the answers seemed much more perplexing because the weapon did not seem like something he recognized. The way the patterns rose and then fell, crisscrossing themselves, it seemed like the victim had been more than assaulted. It looked like they had been fed to a gargantuan cat and like someone had let them play with the body for hours.

While a mess and staging is oftentimes the result of a killer, this seemed to have the markings of someone discarding the prey in a violent struggle and yet causing massive trauma in ways that were normally reserved for car crashers or machine accidents. They normally did not involve other people and they certainly didn't just happen up a set of stairs.

There were also the little pieces of something that was scattered all around the and a little something extra, not seen in the first group of pictures. Mulder tried to examine more of whatever it was, but the evidence locker only contained so much and, apparently, nobody thought to bring in any of whatever he could see. Examining the picture, it looked like a piece of fingernail, only larger, scattered all over the floor. f a person lost that much of their own nails, they would be immediately recognizable because they would have lost all their nails and some of their finger in the process, not to mention flecks of bone and blood.

Along with that there was another something pressed on the walls that looked almost cooked, like something had been left on the stove long enough for it to turn to ash. As Mulder poured over it he saw it a few more times but the places it popped up in seemed to change, like it only lasted a little while and then disappeared. He wondered if that meant it was environmental, biological, or something different but had no answers.

He wrote it down in a little notebook he was carrying, wanting to answer that one later.

Along with that were also were also signs of marring on the door in the first bedroom as well, like there had been something across at least one of the doors in the home keeping it from opening. From what he could see, he would have guessed that the marks looked like teeth and like teeth from a bear or something larger. The person that took the photographs had taken a lot of instrumental pictures of that area itself, hoping to show the gravity of the marks, and Mulder noticed a lot of strange things about them like the jaw would have had to be almost humanlike but the teeth seemed like something out of a bad dream.

In ten other examples the strange ash was also on the door, and there were small indentation in the kitchen that seemed to suggest that something - large - had been in the house. One of the counters was crushed, the couch had what looked to be a footprint embedded in it, and three distinct impressions of something clawed dragging across the walls was visible.

If another person saw all of this, they might have screamed "staged." To Mulder it only verified he was on the right case.

Intrigued, Mulder thanked a few officers, picked up a beverage and a doughnut, and walked out. He had a house to look into an a Hall of Records to visit afterward.

Today was going to be a very busy day.