I don't know how much more of this I can take, Scully
thought angrily. She felt like she was
going to explode and burst into a million bits and just die right there. Aki was her daughter, where on earth
was the girl?
The bored baseball
security guard seemed not to care much. "Describe her again, ma'am, please."
"I've
described her twelve times!" Scully said angrily.
Agent Kim
placed a reassuring hand on Scully's shoulder. "Now, Agent Scully, let's be
courteous," she said quietly.
Scully took
a deep breath in and imagined herself blowing all of her distractions to the
wind. "She's four-foot-seven-and-a-half, and she was wearing jeans and a blue
shirt."
"What color of blue?"
"Sky blue."
"Thank
you. Anything else?"
"She has dark
hair, it's in a braid. She has a
talking box."
"Excuse me, a what?"
the security guard questioned.
"A talking
box," Scully repeated. "She's autistic and can't talk, so she has a mechanical
box that will do the talking for her."
"Ah," the
security guard said slowly. He wrote
that down, too. "Did you see anyone suspicious around the girl?"
"Well, it's
rather hard to explain," Agent Kim said. "We work for the FBI, and we brought
our client, Lena Fisher, here because she needed a distraction. While Lena was absorbed in the baseball
game, she saw someone suspicious that she thought she knew. When Agent Scully and I went to investigate,
Agents Mulder and Doggett took Lena out of the field. As Agent Scully and I returned to our seats, Aki was missing."
"That's not
what happened," Scully said. "Lena saw someone suspicious, the man she believed
had killed her husband. Mulder and
Doggett went out to secure the perimeter. Kim, Reyes, and I were ordered to bring Lena and Aki to the van in
twenty-seven minutes, as soon as we were certain the perimeter was secured. Agent Reyes took the lead with Lena. I was supposed to go in the middle with Aki,
and Kim to bring up the rear. When we
turned around, Aki was gone. As we
looked up to the balcony, we saw that the man Lena had pointed out had Aki by
the arm."
"Ah," Agent
Kim said, a trifle embarrassed.
"We'll keep
a lookout," the security guard promised.
As Kim and
Scully headed from the field, Scully knew that there was nothing the security
guard could do now. It was all up to
her.
"Where's
Aki?" Mulder asked as Scully and Kim arrived at the van.
"She's
gone," Scully answered simply.
"What?"
Reyes asked.
"Gone,"
Scully repeated.
Lena
nodded, her eyes serious. "That man took her, didn't he? The man I saw, right?"
"We don't
know anything for sure," Agent Kim said crisply. "It would do Agent Scully a
lot of good if we could stop asking her meaningless questions and get on with
life."
"Aye, aye,
Captain," Doggett punned, but got into the van anyway.
