Author: CeilidhO
Summary: What if Scully had accepted the transfer to Salt Lake City? Three years later, she and her new partner are assigned to a bizarre string of kidnappings, with dangerous results. Meanwhile, a serial murderer is at large in Charleston, and Mulder is the only one who can stop him. (Prequel to "Disciple")
Disclaimer: I own nothing, Chris Carter owns everything. (Except the characters I invent.) We all know the drill. Please don't sue me.
* * *
Charleston, South Carolina
August 24, 2001
3:43 pm
Come to Carolina if you want to die. That had been the saying around the time of Civil War, and the hot blanket air and whirring mosquitoes that hung in it like zeppelins seemed to attest to the truth of the words. No breath of wind stirred the city, except on those rare blessed occasions when a faint breeze swept off the ocean, through the Battery to the streets.
Eleven days had passed in an endless procession of background checks and waiting for lab results. Section Chief Guent, director of the Behavioural Sciences Unit, had recalled Agent Fuller on their second day in Charleston and sent him off on some punishment assignment to god knows where. Mulder couldn't really care less. He was alone again; he worked better alone. At least that was what he had been telling himself for the last three years.
The summer heat was worse than any Mulder had ever experienced, and he spent most of his time in the humming air-conditioned bubble of the Police Department, pouring over crime scene photos and endlessly revising his profile. The autopsy of the victim from the alleyway had revealed nothing that they didn't already know, and not a scrap of DNA evidence had been found at either crime scene. The police officers were beginning to resent Mulder's presence; they had been expecting a miracle, an instant solution.
With that in mind, it was half relief and half sick disappointment that filled him when they received a frantic call from a distraught tourist that afternoon- he'd found a body on a plantation. The poor man's description of the corpse matched the other victims, and Mulder and Police Chief Clancy had piled into a cruiser and were now racing down the highway.
Mulder felt excitement course through him. I was so unusual for a profiler to actually be present when the body was found and examined. He was usually only able to work on a case when the police had exhausted every other option and the trail was long cold. He was anxious to see the actual body.
As he watched a strip mall flash by outside the window, he thought about the note that had been left in the alley. Slice, slice! Three down, you to go. It seemed to him an empty, self-aggrandizing move on the part of the killer. He was hoping to become someone like the Zodiac Killer or Jack the Ripper or the Son of Sam, a correspondent, striking fear into the populace with his letters, a constant stream of publicity and ego massage. How incredible a rush, Mulder thought, to know that you have paralysed a city with fear, just by leaving a little note.
The police cruiser pulled through the front gates of Boone Plantation, passing through the manicured gardens and the gaping tourists, through a back field that never made a photo-op, and to the very edge of the forest.
Mulder unfolded himself from the car, slipping his sunglasses off and taking a good look around. Police had cordoned off a rectangle from the edge of the field to about ten feet into the forest itself. The yellow tape hung listless in the broiling air, and the officers milled about, taking statements from the tourist who had found the body, canvassing passers-by, or just enjoying the commotion and break from routine. A sergeant standing nearby gestured Mulder and Police Chief Clancy over to the forest.
"Tourist found the body about nine feet in, but in pretty clear sight. Poor guy almost fainted from the blood. It's pretty bad, I gotta say."
"Thanks, son," Clancy said, clasping his shoulder. "You just go on and call for the morgue van. We'll take it from here."
The sergeant nodded and headed off the other way, and Mulder and Clancy began to walk into trees. A strand of Spanish moss from an overhanging branch brushed Mulder's cheek like a caress. A thick, sludgy trail of blood was clearly visible, pooled all the way to the grassy field- the tourist had said that that was how he had found the body, by following the blood. The two men had only taken a few steps before they saw it too.
It was sprawled across the forest floor, a man about twenty-three years old. He had been stabbed eight times, precisely through the center of different organs: heart, each lung, each kidney, stomach, navel and upper intestine. As well, the left side of his face was missing. Unexpectedly, Mulder felt a lurch deep within his stomach, a surprising throb of nausea and dizziness. He thought he'd seen too much now to ever be sickened by a body again, and the knowledge that maybe he hadn't thrummed inside him like a drumbeat, reverberating unpleasantly in his chest and heart.
"Jesus H. Christ," Clancy breathed. "I saw the last one, but still… It hits you, doesn't it?" He placed a meaty fist over his chest. "You don't expect the sheer violence of it to hit you, after all the cases I've worked, but it does."
"I know… I feel almost physically sick…" Surprisingly, Mulder found himself being honest with the Police Chief, letting his guard done for a split second, but he shoved it back up quickly. "Well, let's take a look."
He moved over to the body, his latex-clad hands moving in the air above the cold flesh. Clancy crouched down beside him. "Tell me about the killer, Agent Mulder. Who is he?"
Subtle… Above all things he is subtle. Every situation twists to his advantage, every person deciding, acting, without even knowing that they are obeying the desire he wheedled into their brain. A slow, steady drip of words and questions falling into their ears like poison on a thread. He loves to watch them do what he wants, unaware of his utter control. They are like ants, hurrying about their pre-determined business, and he is poised above them with a hose of scalding water. He can unleash hell on them at any moment. And yet he waits… savouring…
"Power," Mulder said, half to himself. "Power is his game, his joy. He manipulates everyone he meets, convincing them to do it his way, and they don't even know it. He's that subtle…"
"The wounds, Mulder. Why does he stab them like that?"
Gray's Anatomy on the bedside table, university biology textbooks beneath… Criminology dissertations, True Crime paperbacks from the supermarket. He's read everything he can get his hands on. He's so smug. And the notes…
"He wants to impress us," Mulder continued. "He thinks he's so well read. The stabbings don't mean anything special; it's just to show us that he knows what he's doing. Maybe even to lead us into suspecting a doctor or a med student... Goddamnit, Clancy!" he cried suddenly. "He thinks he's so smart! But he's not. He just… he just reads about what others have done and dreams up ways to improve them. He thinks he's smarter than every one of your officers, smarter than anyone else. He thinks he's leading us in a dance…"
"If he's read it all," Clancy muttered apprehensively. "Than won't he know everything we're going to do?"
Without thinking, Mulder put his hands on the body. The cold flesh was an affront to his senses. It was wrong.
"No," he said. "There's the difference; he wants to be an expert, maybe even a profiler. But I am those things. He is the shadow, and you and I, Clancy; we're what cast it. That is why we will catch him. He is a pale imitation of the real thing." Anger nipping at his heels, Mulder turned and strode away, carrying away the essence of murder under his skin.
From that moment he was consumed.
The clock on the bedside table said three-thirty in the morning, and surrounding the pool of light where Mulder was sequestered the room and windows were pitch black. The thin, yellow light lit on the swirl of bloody images that encircled him, the same photographs he had been studying since that afternoon. A sour taste of scotch lurked in his mouth, and around him the crimson bodies melted into a grotesque phantasmagoria of death and violence.
The case report and ME's report were piled next to him on the floor, but it had been hours since his eyes had grown too dry to read. All that was left was the total submersion of the photographs, the spiralling red abyss that he threw himself into with each new killer.
He knew these brutal men better than they knew themselves; he knew their histories, their psyches, the scars on their big toe. He knew their secrets and their lies, the way they still sometimes woke up wet and warm at night, how sometimes they still pulled the legs of mice for pleasure. He knew if they saw Nazis or little boys or hanging women when they closed their eyes and touched themselves, if they saw their mother or their girlfriend or themselves. He saw through their eyes and burrowed into their brains, and finally he watched as cold iron was strapped around their wrists, and then he knew precisely each thought that ran through their mind as the metal kissed their skin.
No wonder so many of us crack, he thought. We are the men we hunt; prisons madden them and we die a little every day from the things we have seen and done. Our fates are tied from the moment we sit in an office and surround ourselves with their art.
And so Mulder sat, and threw himself deeper and deeper until he felt the unmistakable wriggle of interlocking consciousness, the awakening of that part of his emotional imagination that he switched off to keep himself safe from the possibilities of the understanding that it brought, safe from the renewed onslaught of madness.
"White male, thirty-five to forty years of age," Clancy read out loud a few days later. Mulder stood nearby, braced against the water cooler, his eyes red and hooded, his t-shirt and jeans rumpled. His hair hadn't been brushed since he'd first sat down with the photographs. Clancy cleared his throat and continued. "Lives alone, and is an avid reader of crime fiction and non-fiction. He will have in his possession at least: Gray's Anatomy, a non-fiction criminology paper, a subscription to Law Enforcement Bulletin, and Psychology Today. He will have applied to the FBI and/or the CIA, as well as possibly a pre-med college for pathology or kinesiology. He is well spoken, with excellent written and oral skills, and will be a forcible 'life of the party'. However, will not be liked by peers, who will find him bossy, pushy, unpredictable, irritable and perhaps 'creepy'.
"He will be living alone, and will never have managed a successful sexual relationship, because of his need to be in control of anyone or situation he encounters. He will, however, have rather frequent sexual partners, because of his acute ability for manipulation. His home will be obsessively neat, but there will be a hidden or closed off room that will reflect his true personality: chaotic and violent.
"He will dress well and be reasonably attractive, but nothing outstanding. He will always be ordered and collected, well spoken and well educated, but anyone who crossed him will remember his incredible capacity for sudden and irrational anger. He will be in excellent physical condition, with quite probably a home exercise machine in his living room.
"He will certainly correspond further with police or the press."
Mulder swayed on his feet as the Police Chief finished, and braced himself against the water cooler. "So," he said, his lips dry and voice hoarse. "What do you think? Is it enough? Does it make sense to you?"
Clancy licked his lips, and ran a finger down the page again. "I think," he said, "That I'm going to issue an A.P.B. Good work, Agent Mulder. I can see why they say what they do about you."
"What's that?" Mulder asked, trying to muster the strength to be defensive. "What do they say about me? That I'm spooky? A freak? Making it up?"
Clancy looked up at him openly. "That you're a genius."
Thrown, Mulder mumbled thank you, and turned to leave the room. When his back was turned, Clancy said suddenly:
"I had a little girl, you see. She was kidnapped and sexually assaulted when she was six, in 1982, and the FBI sent a profiler, even though the department wasn't fully functional yet and the FBI had no jurisdiction. I learned later that the profiler took sick leave and came on his own time." Clancy's voice thickened suddenly. "Anyway, this agent did what you did, you know, shut himself up for a few days… And when he came out, he handed me a piece of paper, like you did, and stood right where you are now. I read it, and passed it to my superior, the former Chief of Police, who laughed it off as Freudian mumbo-jumbo." Mulder could only hear the man's voice, which was rapidly growing fainter. Clancy coughed and continued.
"But, despite what the Chief had said, I read it again, and then I asked him: Is this true, is it right? And he looked me right in the eye and said only: Yes. Against my direct orders, I went to that radio and issued an All Points Bulletin for what was on that paper, and three hours later they arrested him trying to cross the border into Canada, on the strength of that bulletin, on that piece of paper. So, I'm what you might call a believer in you and your work, Agent Mulder, and I will never call you a freak."
Stunned, Mulder stayed where he had frozen at Clancy's first words, speechless and pained. "Sir…" he began, but Clancy cut him off brusquely.
"Go back to the hotel, Agent Mulder. Sleep. You deserve it."
And so Mulder continued out of the station, into the heavy Carolina summer, collapsed onto the motel room bed, and slept for hours.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
A/N: So, this is the second to last catch-up chapter. After next Mulder POV chapter, it'll be Scully's turn again, at last. Please let me know what you think of the new chapters, and I'd love some feedback on the how I'm handling writing Mulder. I've never had to write as him for as long before, and I'm not sure I quite have a handle on him. As always, constructive criticism is more than welcome.
Thanks so much, ~ Ceilidh
PS: Thanks to April, who keeps reading my stories even though they scare her and she's never seen an episode of the show in her life.
