National Children's Medical Centre

Friday

31st December 7.40PM

An officer led Scully up to the ward that had been closed off for the CSU. She stepped beneath the caution tape and crossed the wide empty room to the bed where the latest victim lay. It was a young girl she guessed to be aged around 17. Her hair was splayed out on the crisp white pillow but the sheets she was lying on were stained with blood that had flown from her damaged wrists. Across her neck was the bruising that had been left behind by hands or rope, Scully couldn't tell yet.

"Who found her?"

"A duty nurse last night. She was doing a midnight check on all the patients."

"Wait, all the patients?" Scully looked around the room and noticed that even though there were no other beds in the room remnants of patients and equipment was evident. Stray leads from EKG machines and tubes from IV lines were curled up on various windows and papers from patient reports were strewn on the floor. "There were people in here when she was killed?"

"At 9.30 last night Maria Cochise made her last round for medications and the girl, Jessica King, was awake and reading." The cop pulled the page out of his folder and passed it over to Scully. It was the medical report that should have been clipped to the end of Jessica's bed. "Then when the same nurse came round for a midnight check she was dead."

"She was in for asthma?"

"She is from a shelter down town. The operator called an ambulance two nights ago when she was having an attack and she's been in here since."

"Do you have her records?" Scully took the file the officer held out then read through it as she circled the bed.

"Footage from the CCTV in the hospital shows something…something strange."

Scully looked up from the file and frowned at his chosen words. "Strange?"

"Someone and I use the term lightly," he gestured over to a side room that was the nurse's station but now housed a bundle of security officers. "Someone walked across the room as the girl knelt on her bed and it looks like they sat next to her on the bed. We can't get a clear picture of him and there is no sign of him in the hallway before or after he is by the bed."

The policeman nudged one of the security officers who were manning the controls of the video station. He nodded curtly and pressed a few keys on the console then sat back.

Scully watched as the girl sat up abruptly on the screen then held her arms out in front of her. The picture too dark so Scully couldn't make out her face but it was plain to see who it was. However from the side of the screen a shadow crossed the room, as the video moved with 3 second intervals. Scully leant closer to the screen as if it would help bring it into focus but it was no help.

"Who is that?" she muttered half to herself.

"We can't tell. The nurse was in here for the night. The cameras in the hall show no movement and the only entrance was into the nurse's station. This station, but as you can see," Officer Clark gestured around the room to a small window that wasn't big enough to fit through. "There's no way he came or went through there."

"Did the CSU go through this station?" she asked glancing out the window where there was a 40ft drop.

"With a fine tooth comb before they let us back in."

"And the drop zone outside?"

"Of course."

"Any footage in the other corridors that come close to matching this guy?" she asked the security man.

"No. I've been through the whole day's footage as well as the night tapes just to make sure he wasn't around all day.. .. I got nothing."

"What have you got?"

Scully spun to see David hovering in the door way, his notebook in his hand and his eyes on the screen. He refused to meet her eyes and she felt the unfamiliar tingle of anger well up inside her. The police officer looked from Scully to Mc Lane and wondered if he was going to have to go through the scene again but thankfully, Scully took the initiative and walked David through it.

He knelt by the bed and checked beneath it as she told him about the victim. He knew there'd be nothing there but he had to make the effort, had to keep up appearances. From his vantage point on the floor he could watch her without her noticing. Her arms were crossed over her chest and she was grasping the file in one hand as she looked around the room. David couldn't hold back his smile as he thought about the night he had planned.

The phone ringing in his pocket startled him away from his wandering thoughts as he stood, pulling it out of his jacket pocket.

"Yeah." Scully turned to him and he gestured for her to follow him out into the hallway. He listened on the phone for a while. "Wait for us. We'll be there in 15 minutes. Do not make a move without me." Then he hung it up without speaking again. "That was Detective Ellis. He's found a connection."

"What is it?" she asked when he failed to continue.

"They were all under the care of Dr Robert Nielson. He is a counselor that worked for the state a couple of years ago, working with street kids who were being rehoused."

"This was on state records?" Scully said frowning as she flipped open Jessica's file. "Shouldn't this have been seen before?"

"All of the victims were street kids. Who were in hospital for various illnesses and then rehoused into foster care." David said as he took her elbow and led her away from the crime scene. "While in foster care they each required hospitalization again and shortly afterwards were dead."

"This doesn't make sense." Scully reached into her pocket for her phone but David steered her into the elevator and pressed the button for the ground floor. On her phone display she watched the network bars disappear.

"Det. Ellis told me they are about to make an assault on Dr Nielsen's house but I told him to hold off until we get there."

"David, wait." Scully turned to face him and he watched her, waiting for her confusion to manifest itself in inane questions he didn't want to answer yet. "Where did Ellis get the warrant? This is an FBI investigation. He has no jurisdiction on this case at the moment and had no authority to request a warrant for a raid."

"Look Dana, we have him. We are close to the end of this so let's just go talk to Ellis and see what he has to say."

Scully wasn't convinced but with the end of this investigation so close she decided a few words with Ellis wouldn't hurt. They hurried out of the hospital and into the darkened parking lot, straight for David's car. She sat in the passenger seat and was reaching around for her seatbelt when the large swab of cotton closed over her nose and mouth. Even as her eyes watered and her hands fought at the fingers that held the swab tightly over her face she recognized the smell of ether.

David checked over his shoulder to make sure they weren't being watched then let her slackened body rest against the seat before climbing in, shutting the door behind him and tearing out of the car park.

Mulder's Apartment

Friday

31st December 9.30PM

Mulder glanced around the room at the spartan furniture and turned the TV a little. He glanced at to the overstuffed armchair and then back to the TV, then turned it a little bit more. The kitchen was a mess of shopping sacks discarded after the grocery trip he'd taken with Scully. After having dinner in her apartment they dressed and left for the grocery store to stock up on essentials for his new place. She helped him put the food away and then went about hanging his clothes up in the small closet in the bedroom.

She'd made up the bed with fresh sheets and was in the middle of vacuuming the living room as he carried the TV and VCR up from her car and tuned them in, when her cell rang. The look in her eyes as she left made him want to hold on and not let go, keep her at his apartment and toss her phone out of the 3rd storey window but instead he let her go. Now sitting alone in his new home he wandered about moving furniture until he could get it looking right and exhausted, found himself falling into the solitary armchair with a whoosh.

The cable hadn't been connected yet and he had no videos unpacked to watch so he just sat alone in the semi-darkness his mind rehashing the session he'd had with Keith earlier that day. Scully was supposed to be coming back later with a bottle of wine for them to share, but he remembered how a case could swallow you up into a cocoon of timeless hours.

In the kitchen the soft buzzing of his phone vibrating on the counter brought him back to the present and he ambled into answer it. He figured it was Scully telling him that she was going to be late so he hesitated to connect the call.

"Hello?"

"Mulder?" It was David. Mulder's heart skipped a beat and he immediately felt his defenses rising up. "Something has happened."

"What? What's going on? Where's Scully?" Mulder stammered and he was already racing into the bedroom to grab some clothes after changing into shorts for the clean up.

"She's been taken. He took her." David's voice broke as he spoke. "I promised the AD I wouldn't call you but I had to…I know you'd want to…"

"Where is she?" Mulder was already wearing his sweats and a hoodie and was grabbing his keys.

"I'm at Patuxent River Park. East of the 3rd and south of Highway 50."

"Yeah I know it."

"I followed the car and I called for back up but I'm going in."

"David wait," Mulder didn't care for David and certainly had no altruistic reasons to keep him alive but the thought of one man storming a hideout, where Scully was being held captive as more than he could bear. "Wait for back up, wait for me!" he yelled but the phone was dead.