Sorry about the massive delay on this, and all my other stories. Writers block is a bitch, and my personal life hasn't been making things much easier for me. Unfortunately I don't see my situation getting any better anytime soon (my writers block is going away but my personal life is just getting worse and worse) so updates will probably be hard to come by. Six days ago my grandfather slipped into a coma after yelling at the hospital staff and everyone around him for almost five months. Adding to the already shitty day, only two hours after my grandmother called me to let me know about my grandfather she called again to tell me that her housekeeper had taken her dog, Sheba, for a walk and that Sheba had gotten lost. I spent the last week searching the forest that the housekeeper lost Sheba in, but the area is known for bears and cougars, not to mention the insanity that is highway traffic, so it's pretty much a given that Sheba isn't coming home. On top of all this I am on medication that helps me sleep 'cause I've been suffering from insomnia since I was about 15, and my 'scrip ran out almost two weeks ago but I haven't had the chance to get a refill and so my body is essentially 'drying out' with all the fun sideaffects that come with it. Shaking, headaches, nausea, irritablity, et cetera... the whole nine yards. Writing has always been an escape for me, though, so maybe with all the crap I'm dealing with I'll be able to move onward and upward in my stories.
In the words of Paris Geller from Gilmore Girls "(Journalism) is an art. Great art can only be made under oppression..."
Okay, now it's time to try out that 'onward and upward' thing I was talking about earlier...
I didn't get the chance to get anymore actual sleep after returning from the fruitless excursion brought on by my dreams, but Harm was kind enough to run out and get some high-quality coffee while I showered and tried to wake myself up a little bit. I was still in the shower when Harm returned and he came into the bathroom and sat on the countertop until I was done. That, alone, was a testament to how worried about me he was. Since we were forced to spend so much time apart neither one of us was willing to let something as simple as a morning shower separate us further. The only times I seemed to bathe on my own anymore were the nights we were on assignment or the scant few nights while we're at home when work forces us to remain physically separate—usually if we've been assigned to opposite sides of a case.
Harm held out a towel and a cup of coffee. I took the coffee eagerly, leaving the towel in his hands until I had taken several sips of the beverage. It was strong and hot, heavily sugared but without cream. Just the way I like it.
Slightly more energized I dried off and got dressed while Harm took his shower. We packed up our things, reluctant to go back to the rooms we had been provided with on the base, and I checked out while Harm loaded our things into the car.
After stopping at the base only long enough to drop off our things and check to see if any messages had been left for us in the office, Harm and I headed out to the FBI's field station where we were greeted by an angry Scully and a determined Mulder.
"Damn it, Mulder, one of these days you're going to get yourself killed when you go running off because one of these anonymous tips you always seem to get," Scully said angrily. She dragged her fingers through her hair and took a deep breath and then said, "Did you at least get a name from your source? Something we can check out—something tangible that we can verify and show to the higher ups? They're already bugging our office. Do you really want them tapping our phones, too?"
I tensed up and Harm put a hand on the small of my back, urging me to either relax or come forward, and whichever option I chose, to do it quick. I had two options. Leave Mulder to his partner's obvious anger, or risk getting Scully angry at me and making her think I'm insane to top it off.
Choosing the chicken's way out, I said nothing, which turned out to be fine because Mulder handed the situation with the grace of someone who was, if not used to, then artful in dealing with the wrath of Dana Scully.
"Look, Scully, I went out for a run last night and I met up with Meg. We went to grab some coffee and I got a call with a tip. She joined me and we checked out the park. We were both armed and, as you can see, we're both very much alive," Mulder said. I would have preferred he left me out of it completely, but I could see why he said what he did. Strength in number and all that.
Of course, he was altering the truth greatly, almost to the point of outright lying, but Scully didn't seem to catch that, and if she did she didn't let it on. I'm pretty sure that she didn't catch it, though, because she didn't seem like she was in the most magnanimous of moods.
Scully turned to me and raised her eyebrow questioningly and, unable to verbally lie, I simply nodded my head. That seemed to be enough to placate Scully and she sighed heavily, silently following Harm, Mulder, and myself, into the building where we were promptly checked for credentials and then directed to an elevator.
Once we got to the appropriate floor Scully motioned for Harm to follow her aside. I could hear everything they were saying from the desk Mulder told me to sit at and I felt incredibly guilty for putting Harm in the situation he was in.
"Harm, we've known each other for a long time and I know you won't lie to me," Scully said, her voice barely more than a whisper. "How well do you really know your partner?"
"What do you mean?" Harm frowned.
"I mean that I find it odd that she was out in the middle of the night when the base locks down at midnight while night flight ops are running unless dispensation is given," Scully hissed.
Harm and I both tensed up, but Harm reacted before I could jump in and explain everything away with the truth, which was my intent. I really suck at the whole lying thing. "Dana, stay out of this," Harm said firmly. "I'm serious. Leave Meg alone," he said, his voice dangerously low.
"Harm, I just think that there are things she isn't sharing," Scully insisted.
This time I reacted before Harm could. I got up and grabbed her arm, pulling her into the break room. Harm followed us, as did Mulder who looked torn between defending his partner and allowing me to keep his partner away from him, and the door was closed and Harm leaned back against it to ensure that no one came in. "Look, Agent Scully, I made it clear to you that I worry about my partner, and I'm sure that you feel the same concern for Agent Mulder, but if you pursue this… this line of questioning against me… my career, and Harm's, will be over."
It only took Scully a second to figure out what I meant.
"How long?" she asked.
She had figured out that Harm and I had crossed the invisible but very real line between partners and something more. I had to give her credit for that. The people we work with day in and day out, all investigators who are highly skilled at reading people, still haven't caught on.
"Sixteen months," I replied.
"We're engaged," Harm put in.
"I wondered about the rock," Mulder said. I had put my ring on as soon as we left the base and I had forgotten to take it off when I went to meet Mulder, but he hadn't said anything so I thought he hadn't noticed. Obviously he had. I once again made a mental note about telling the Admiral. Telling him ourselves would make things much easier for us than we would have it if someone caught us when we made one of the slip-ups that were becoming more and more common of late and scuttlebutt got back to the Admiral about our extra-curricular activities.
Scully shot her partner an icy glare and he held up his hands innocently, backing away from the conversation.
Harm moved a little closer to me and then said, "We needed some time alone so we got a hotel away from the base for the night."
Scully took a moment to absorb this information and then she turned to Harm, her expression a mask that, apparently, Harm and Mulder could both see through. They both looked a little scared. There was obviously more to Dana Scully than I had originally thought.
"What the hell are you thinking, Harm? Do you think anyone's going to care that you're in love? No. You're going to get Court Marshalled and you're going to lose your career," Scully said, her tone low and dangerous. "Then what are you going to do? This won't be like going from flying to being a lawyer. You'll be kicked out of the Navy completely. And the Navy is all you've ever known."
"Dana, back off," Harm said firmly. I could see he was getting angry and, truth be told, so was I. But he, as the old friend, could do something about it, whereas I had my hands tied. If I stood up against Scully I risked pissing her off further and, though I doubted she was the type to stoop to something so petty, I couldn't risk her going to someone like the SecNav with details about my relationship with Harm. "Meg and I both knew the risks going into this. We're handling it."
I wasn't so sure that was the truth, especially since we had arrived in San Diego, but I knew that we needed to present a united front. The truth was that one of the main reasons we had kept our relationship a secret for so long was that neither one of us could think of a way that we could get married and still work together. Logically we knew that one of us could get a transfer to another billet in Washington or Virginia—Harm had been fielding offers from several Senators and either one of us could find a staff Judge Advocate position somewhere close to home—or one of us could go into private practise, either join an existing firm—there were always offers coming in—or start one of our own, probably in DC since that's heaven for lawyers, but we both still had this naïve glimmer of hope that we could work it out so that neither one of us had to leave JAG.
"Is that so?" Scully asked. "Then why the secrecy?"
"I said we are handing it," Harm said firmly. I hated that he was in the position he was in—defending our relationship to someone who clearly meant a lot to him. "Right now we're just waiting for our CO to get back to us on what he can do to keep us both at JAG."
This was a boldfaced lie, and I was almost positive I cringed when he uttered the words. Harm wasn't even bending the truth anymore. He was lying. He had, in the entire time I had known him, never lied to anyone he cared about.
It as obvious that this was just going to get uglier, so I broke in with an abrupt change of subject.
"Agent Scully, you should probably know that the tip that Mulder got early this morning didn't come from some anonymous source. It came from me," I said. "Though I would prefer if no one else were to find out about that fact," I added, hoping that she would be as amenable to keeping my secret as her partner was.
"Explain," Scully said. Apparently this new revelation was enough to get her mind off of charges of fraternization, which was a good thing, but it did put me on the spot, which I hadn't thought of when I broke in to the conversation—argument—between her and Harm.
I told her about my dream, and Harm backed me up with some examples from the past where our dreams and 'visions' had led to a huge break in a case we were working. Mulder confirmed that I had called him and that we had met for coffee before going to the park, and I noticed that he didn't apologize for lying to Scully earlier. "I promised Meg I wouldn't tell anyone where I got the tip," was all Mulder said that could possibly be construed as an apology. Scully seemed to find that acceptable, though, so I got the impression that a promise from Mulder was about as iron-clad as a promise from Harm.
"How certain are you that your 'vision' wasn't just a vivid dream brought on by exposure to the case files? Maybe in combination with spicy food," Scully questioned.
"I'm positive that this is more than just a dream about case files," I said with a certainty that I wasn't sure I truly felt. "And I didn't have any spicy food yesterday—not that it would have mattered if I had. I was raised on spicy food and it's never affected me."
"Dana, you know how I feel about things that can't be proven. But Meg has… abilities… that I can't explain. Haven't you ever seen something that you can't explain with your science and logic?" Harm asked.
Mulder chuckled loudly and I bit back a smile. I'd hard enough stories about the X-Files to know that Scully was hardly a stranger to things that went beyond conventional explanation.
"Fine. I'll go along with this—for now. But we keep this quiet until we have hard evidence to give to the SAC," Scully said. It was clear she wasn't pleased, but at least she wasn't going to have me committed.
Yet.
"Fine by me," I said because, honestly, I didn't want to have to try to explain myself to people who were probably less inclined to give my particular brand of weirdness the benefit of the doubt.
Scully checked her watch. "I have to get to the lab to pick up the results from yesterday. Mulder, I believe you have a profile to hand in."
"Already copied and collated," Mulder nodded, holding up the thick file that he held in his hand. Last night he had said that he didn't have a clear picture on the UNSUB's specifics yet, yet this morning he had everything taken care of. I idly wondered if Special Agent Fox Mulder ever slept.
Scully nodded and shot Harm a look before turning to Mulder. "Stay out of trouble," she said before leaving the room.
Mulder sighed and shook his head. "You'd think I go out of my way to find trouble," he said, rolling his eyes.
"The way I hear it, you do," I pointed out. Mulder frowned but didn't fight me on the point.
The briefing was about to start, and people were beginning to file into the conference room down the hall. "I should get back to the base. I figured I'd check the gate records," Harm said.
"Good idea. Maybe there's a common denominator," I said, flashing Harm a smile.
"What are you doing?" Mulder frowned.
I had assumed that Mulder would know about the logs. FBI agents train at Quantico and the Marines have the same regulations for base security as the Navy. "The Navy requires that the guards at the gate keep a record of who enters and exits the base and at what time. You and Agent Scully had to fill out a similar log for non-military visitors when you were there yesterday," I explained. "If there are any names that pop up for all of the attacks…"
"You've narrowed the list of potential suspects," Mulder nodded. "I don't think this guy is military, though. For the record."
"The SecNav will be glad to hear it," Harm said. He reached over and gently brushed his fingers over my hand before turning to leave. It was a subtle farewell that we had perfected since we got together. Not as good as a goodbye kiss, but it kept us within regulations. "Make sure you call Chegwidden after the briefing. He's probably getting chewed out by the SecNav on an hourly basis. It might be nice for him to have something to share the next time he gets a call."
"You're the senior investigator. You should be making the call," I protested. Harm knew I hated dealing with the Admiral when he was getting heat from the higher-ups.
"But I won't be at the briefing," Harm said, flashing me one of his knee-melting smiles before leaving the room. I scowled. Sometimes Harm can be so infuriating. I love him, but sometimes I really want to wring his neck.
"Sounds like your CO is as bad as my AD," Mulder said with a hint of a smile gracing his pouty lips.
I shook my head. "Admiral Chegwidden is great. But when he starts getting pushed around by politicians he tends to start acting like a cornered animal. His first instinct is to attack anyone that is unlucky enough to be around him," I said as I went about making a cup of tea, having downed so much coffee that I felt jittery. "Overall, though, he's one of the best CO's there is. I'm going to ask him to give me away when Harm and I get married."
"I can't imagine asking Skinner to actually be involved in my wedding," Mulder chuckled, shaking his head at the thought. "Sounds like you Navy lawyers are a tight bunch."
"It's like this huge, dysfunctional family," I said with a smile. "Harm, the Admiral, and Bud—Lieutenant Roberts, another lawyer we work with—go out for drinks all the time. Harm and I are Bud's son's godparents, and Bud and his wife, Harriet—she's the office manager at JAG—named little AJ after the Admiral who delivered little AJ on the floor in his office."
"AJ? What's it stand for?" Mulder asked.
"Albert Jethro, but both of them are just 'AJ'," I said with a smile. I felt a twinge of pain in my heart. "This is the first year that Harm and I are both away from DC for little AJ's birthday. We always throw a big party at the Admiral's house 'cause he lives right between a huge park and the forest. This year Bud and Harriet rented a bunch of horses so we could all go riding 'cause AJ's new thing is 'horsies'. He likes how they can go 'neigh with the hay'," I said with a warm smile.
"I'm sorry you're going to miss all that," Mulder said as we headed for the conference room.
"Me too," I said softly. "But it's the nature of the job, right?"
"Sad but true," Mulder nodded as he held the door open for me.
The conference room was set up efficiently. One long table with chairs all around it, maps tacked up along one wall, pins sticking out of it showing the attacks in red along with several yellow pins that I assumed were other attacks in the area that may be related but they couldn't confirm. Along the opposite wall crime scene photos were pinned up in chronological order, the first victim, Belinda Arlette Greisemer, at the far left end of the wall, followed by Rosabella Brenna Cowell, then Jia Vega Chan-Knowles, then finally, Akemi Circe Turner, the only woman of all the known victims that hadn't survived her attack.
Four women who would had been violated in the worst way by another human being, including one who had been violated the same way, but had fought back harder than the others and had ended up losing her life along with all the other things that her attacker had stolen from her.
I shuddered, trying to reconcile the crime scene photographs, the injury catalogues, and the evidence that had been collected with my dream that I was becoming more and more certain was going to come true in the very near future if something wasn't done to prevent it.
"You okay?" Mulder asked as we took our seats.
"I've worked on four rape cases in my career. It hasn't gotten any easier," I admitted softly. Harm would have known the source of my discomfort immediately and wouldn't have made me voice my problem, but Mulder wasn't Harm. However I did suspect that he knew the cause of my tension and somewhere in his psychology background he had been informed that talking about what bothers you is a good way to start healing. Perfectly sound advice, really, unless what is bothering you is something that bothers everyone in the world who has a soul and a basic comprehension of what it means for someone to be raped.
"It never does," Mulder said, that admission telling me that he had worked more rape cases than he cared to count.
The briefing started by introductions being made, since the task force had just doubled in size now that Harm, Mulder, Scully, and I were involved in the investigation. Other than Mulder and myself there were four other people in the room. SAC Angela Cole of the FBI who was in charge of the task force. Detective Davis Janz and his partner Elsie Trainer from the San Diego PD. And, finally, ASAC Eric Maguire, also FBI. It was a small task force, only having eight people—including Harm and Scully—making it up, but I knew part of that was because rape cases are so personal that it's easier for the victims to develop a rapport with those involved if there are fewer, not to mention there's less chance of leaks when there area limited number of people privy to the innermost workings of the task force.
"Where are… Special Agent Dana Scully and Commander Harmon Rabb, Jr?" ASAC Maguire asked, pronouncing 'Dana' 'Daa-nuh' and 'Harmon' 'Herr-moon'.
"Special Agent Dana Scully," Mulder said, emphasizing 'Dana', "is at the lab picking up the results from the autopsy on Lesedi Turner. And Commander Harmon Rabb," he continued, correcting the pronunciation of Harm's name, "had to get back to the base to follow up on a potential lead concerning the theory that the UNSUB is with the military in some capacity."
"What lead is that?" Janz asked.
Mulder turned his chair slightly so that he was facing me more directly and I let out an inaudible sigh. "Any person, military or not, who enters and exits the base has to sign a log. Commander Rabb is collecting the logs for the dates of the attacks to see if there are any names that pop up every time," I said. My explanation was received by thoughtful nods.
"Have any of the victims remembered anything?" Janz asked.
"Not that they're admitting," SAC Cole replied. "But it is entirely possible that the trauma is just too fresh for the memories to come out, let alone for the victims to talk about."
That was one of the things that I hated about my job. People no longer had names. They were victims, defendants, witnesses, attorneys, and collateral damage. Once you found yourself involved in a case, especially one as emotional as a rape case—or, worse, a serial rape case—everyone lost their identities and were slid into neat little categories that kept human emotion from creeping through the tense façades that we were all forced to develop and maintain.
"What about a connection between the victims?" Maguire asked. "Have we been able to pin anything down there?"
Elise Trainer shook her head sadly. "Greisemer is a teacher at some private school; Cowell is a lawyer with a small firm that handles small civil disputes; Chan-Knowles is a student at Michigan State who came down for her boyfriend's sister's wedding, and Tuner was a pastry chef at one of those places that would cost me two car payments for an appetiser. They don't run in the same circles, haven't been to any of the same restaurants or stores recently, and, as far as they can remember, they've never seen each other before in their lives. Greisemer is married, Cowell is single, Chan-Knowles has a boyfriend that she has been with for almost five years, and Tuner was single but had a teenaged daughter from a past marriage. None of them are the same age—they range from twenty to forty-eight. Their races are different, and religion is not a commonality, either, since Greisemer is Catholic, Cowell is agnostic, Chan-Knowles is Buddhist, and Turner was atheist according to her daughter, Serena. None of them look anything alike, which is odd because that is usually a common marker for sickos like this. They're all very different women, but no so different as to make that the common denominator."
"Is it possible he's choosing these women at random?" Maguire suggested.
"I doubt it," Mulder said. "Something about these women draws him in. The brutality of the attacks, especially on Akemi Turner, suggests that they remind him of someone in his past that hurt him, physically—probably sexually—and he is now able to get his revenge, possibly. He's been incapable of this before due to incarceration or because he lacked the physical strength required to overpower theses women without drugging them. He has probably started building muscle tone as a way to protect himself from further harm from the woman or women in his past, but somewhere along the line it became an asset to his revenge. The fact that he redresses them after he's finished suggests that he cares for them, maybe even loves them, despite the perceived wrong they perpetrated against him. Leaving them in areas that are public during the day but are relatively empty at night—the playground, the mall parking lot, the picnic area, the beach—implies that he wants them to be found before the elements can get to these women, which is another sign that he cares for them. If he didn't care for these women in some way, no matter how obscure, he wouldn't make it so easy for them to be found."
"Do you think he's attacked women before Belinda Greisemer?" I asked.
"Undoubtedly. Serials are not made overnight. While the pathology is quite different depending on what the UNSUB does, that is always the truth. He has attacked women before. Probably not as viciously. It likely started out as a penchant for dominance during sex that escalated," Mulder said. "Maybe he met a woman who didn't want to be rough, at least not to the extent that he does, and she fought him on it, making things more exciting for him. Rape would be the ultimate sign of dominance for him. Once he achieved that high… anything else just wouldn't get the job done."
"Meaning he needs a woman to be completely powerless to get it up?" Maguire asked.
"That would be the most basic interpretation of the profile, yes," Mulder said. I could tell he wasn't impressed with the locals, and, to be perfectly honest, neither was I. "It is a lot more complicated than that, though."
"Obviously," Maguire said quickly, as if that would help cover for his complete and utter misunderstanding of what Mulder was trying convey.
"What about the markings? Any clue what the hell they mean?" Janz asked.
"What markings?" I asked.
"Each woman had a symbol etched into her skin," Mulder said. I frowned. Nowhere in any of the files had there been note of any markings that weren't consistent with the rape itself. "That fact wasn't in the files you received, was it?" he asked. I shook my head. "Damnit," he said, turning toward the rest of the group with a look a fury on his usually passive face. "How the hell do you expect this task force to find this guy if you don't share crucial details with everyone involved?" he demanded.
"We didn't feel it was prudent to share every detail with the Commanders, Agent Mulder, simply because we need to keep details like that away from the press to keep the risk of copy-cats coming out of the woodwork," Cole replied coolly.
Suddenly I was grateful that Harm wasn't at the briefing. He wouldn't be able to remain as calm as I had been. Even if Harm managed to keep his cool in the room, once he got out he would call Admiral Chegwidden and I knew that once the Admiral found out about the FBI's tactics—and I knew that he would find out because there was no way I was going to cover their suit-clad asses—SAC Cole and her team would be keelhauled, and not in the verbal-only definition of the term.
Normally I would have been able to remain calm in situations that ended up with others insulting me, but not this time. "Commander Rabb and I were brought in specifically to keep the press from catching any of the details of this case—we were only asked to aid in the actual investigation as an afterthought. But we are involved, which means that Commander Rabb and myself require all information that has been gathered thus far. The fact that we're both trained investigators as well as attorneys and are required to keep secret the details of cases we work should only be another reason for you to trust us, Agent Cole," I said, praying that I was able to keep my voice level instead of letting on the fury that was taking over my very being. "What else have you kept back because you didn't feel it was 'prudent to share every detail' with us? How many clues have we overlooked already because you didn't fully disclose the facts of the investigation before we arrived?" I demanded.
Silence was the only response I got to my question.
Since it's used so often on both JAG and NCIS it bothered me that I didn't know exactly what KEELHAUL meant.It seems prettybasic, but I wanted to check it out to make sure I was using the term correctly becauseso many authors don't and it drives me crazy. So, curtesy of Merrium-Webster's online dictionary, I found this:
Main Entry: keel·haul
Pronunciation: -"hol
Function: transitive verb
Etymology: Dutch kielhalen, from kiel keel + halen to haul
1 to haul under the keel of a ship as punishment or torture
2 to rebuke severely