Chapter 2
CENTRAL CITY PD
9:18 A.M.
In all the years that Mulder and Scully had been dealing with local law enforcement, even considering what had happened in Star City just a few weeks earlier, neither had experienced a reaction like this one.
"I can't tell you how glad we are that there's finally someone from the feds who can help us deal with the shit we've been mired in the last two years," Lieutenant Larkin told them as they walked through the police department. "I mean, don't get me wrong, we're grateful The Flash has chosen this city as home, but ever since the particle accelerator went up, we have been drowning."
"You seriously don't mind the Feds setting up an operation here?" Mulder couldn't help but ask.
"By my own calculation, I spent the better part of a month last year on the phone with every federal agency I thought might have somebody involved who could help us with the metahumans that seem to have decided to set up shop here," Larkin told them. "God help me, I even spent an afternoon on the phone with Fish & Wildlife."
This may have been the first time in all their years with the Bureau that someone seemed to be actively begging for their help. "We've only been back on the job a couple of months," Scully told them. "And to be fair, we've been rather busy."
"Oh sure, I get it," Larkin said, "and I realize that stopping an alien invasion – I'm actually using that phrase in a sentence – has to take top priority over local matters. That being said, any additional help you can give us would be hugely appreciated."
This was even more remarkable, in some ways, that getting incontrovertible proof of alien life. "We're going to be fairly mobile from this point on," Mulder said.
"I know. I saw the report that came out. This isn't the only city that'll need your help," Joe broke in.
"In all honesty, Central City was a lesser concern," Mulder said.
Barry looked at them. "I thought the report said crime was up nearly three percent in those cities."
"You obviously just got the summary," Mulder told them. "Central City was actually an outlier. It's the only one where the crime rate has actually decreased since the arrival of The Flash."
"Seriously?" Larkin looked at them. "I know the report's been discredited, but is there any chance I could get a copy? Might finally get the Mayor of our backs."
Just then, one of his officer motioned for him, and the Lieutenant excused himself. Once he was out of earshot, Barry lowered his voice. "You're telling the truth on that?"
"You know how rarely I get to give good news in this job?" Mulder lowered his voice. "Fish and Wildlife?"
"That must have been one of the times Grodd showed up," Barry said.
"What is a Grodd?" Scully asked.
"A super-intelligent gorilla bent on taking over the world," Joe said deadpan. "And we've had to beat him back twice, so there's that."
"Well, that is a new one," Mulder admitted. "I guess I didn't put into perspective how difficult it would be for law enforcement to be dealing with this kind of threat when I was drawing up my stats."
"There are some variables you just can't account for," Barry told them.
"But the thing is, I should've known better than anyone," Mulder told them. "The picture of Scully and myself is that we were on the front lines of a lot of what is now part of the daily news cycle. But what Cat Grant conveniently left out was the fact how many times we utterly failed at our jobs."
"You were doing a job that nobody believed could be done or was equipped to do," Joe pointed out. "Hell, Barry and the rest of us have pretty much had to draw everything up from scratch when all this started."
"And from what I've read in those files so far, you didn't even have the support of your own agency," Barry reminded them. "I'm actually impressed you managed to keep your jobs as long as you did."
"From what I hear, there was a lot of wasted energy spent trying to kill you or discredit you," Joe told them. "Considering how much of your work was either unsolved or unexplained, they could've just shut you down as being not able to produce results."
"They were trying that just before I was abducted," Mulder admitted. "Given the alternative, I probably could've lived with the bureaucracy shutting us down."
Neither Joe nor Barry quite wanted to ask what the alternative had been. Given that it had ended with Mulder spending three months underground – literally – they had an idea that it wasn't pretty. They still didn't know them well enough to ask for the gory details.
"West!" A uniform walked up to them. "You're catching right?"
"What's on the menu?"
"Henderson Labs. Possible B & E, double homicide."
Joe looked at Mulder and Scully. "You want to get your feet wet? Now's the time."
"I didn't hear any evidence of the paranormal in that description," Mulder said.
"They tend to call on Joe when there's something out of the ordinary," Barry said. "I have to get back in the field myself. You guys go ahead; I'll get my kit."
"Take your time," Mulder said with a smile. "I have a feeling you'll meet us there anyway.
HENDERSON LABS
10:04 AM
"What kind of materials does this lab deal with?" Joe asked the tech involved.
"Our main field of study is cryotechnology," Dr. Wallach was looking particularly nervous, which was understandable considering that the place had been trashed.
"So, you're dealing with cold storage, preservation of life and human organs?" Scully asked.
"You're on the right track, but the truth of the matter is we're still in the theoretical phase," Wallach sounded a bit calmer discussing his field of inquiry. "There've been a lot of advancements in the past few years, but we're still five, maybe ten years away from any major breakthroughs."
"I know at least one acquaintance who would make to differ," Joe said in a sotto voice to Mulder and Scully. "Do you have any idea what's been taken or what the thieves might have been looking for?"
Wallach shook his head. "Most of our data's on the computers. We're in the process of looking, but it doesn't look like anything's been downloaded."
"What's the security footage say?" Scully asked.
Wallach hesitated. "That's the odd part. Our video is top of the line, but for some reason, but when we checked the time, we had some…glitches that just shouldn't have happened."
"That might be the kind of weird stuff you're qualified for," Joe told Mulder and Scully in a louder voice. "You want to take a look?"
"You go ahead," Mulder said. "I'll check with Barry on the condition of our victims. See what he's found."
Scully raised an eyebrow. This was exactly the kind of thing she had gone to med school for. "You sure about that?" she asked.
"I've got an inkling about this," Joe said.
"Mulder, when you get inklings, I have to sew up your stitches," she reminded him.
"Consider who I'm going to be in the room with," Mulder countered. "Besides, this is not going to be one of those occasions where I ditch you."
"Doesn't matter if you did. That's why there are GPS devices on cell phones now," Scully said with a smile.
Mulder walked into the main room. The two victims were security guards. So far, Mulder had managed to get the gist of what had happened. At 3:17 am that morning, the silent alarm had been tripped. One of the guards had gone in to see what had happened. For whatever reason, his comrade had followed him into the labs five minutes later. When the lab had been opened that morning they had found both victims.
By comparison to most X-Files (and from what he understood, a lot of Central City cases) this seemed positively normal. The only thing so far that made Mulder think this might have some paranormal connection was where they were standing. Maybe the bodies would reveal the mystery.
"You know, if we just walked in on a case of industrial espionage mixed with murder, I'm fine with it," Mulder told Barry. "No reason to go full conspiracy on Day 1."
"Well, there is something odd here," Barry said. "I'm just not sure whether it's paranormal yet. Let's start with victim number 1. There's no obvious cause of death. No bullet wound, no stab wounds, no sign of strangulation. Which leads me to suspect some kind of poisoning."
"So you're looking for an injection sight," Mulder said.
"Actually, I just found it." Barry turned over the guard's left wrist. "We won't be able to tell what kind of poison until a formal autopsy is done, but based on the rigor, I'm guessing that it has to be something that acted very quickly."
"Can you estimate time of death?"
"Hard to tell, but based on what I'm seeing, he was dead by the time the second guard entered the room. These two men died within minutes of each other." Barry told him. "That in itself wouldn't make this odd. What does is that whoever our killer was, they didn't use the same method of murder with the guard who came in next."
The second guard was, in fact, closer to the entrance of the room than the first one. Mulder could already tell there had been a change of method. There was a very small pool of blood right beneath the body.
"It's not just that the security guard was stabbed, because it wasn't that blunt." Barry gently turned over the body. "I'm sure you've seen killings like this before."
"That's almost a surgical incision." Mulder was thoughtful now.
"Surgical is right. Again, we'd have to get him on the table to know for sure, but it's almost like something was cut out of this man and that it was extracted post-mortem."
Mulder thought for a moment. "Can I see the fingers on the hands of this man?"
If Barry was puzzled, he gave no sign of it. He picked them up. "What are you looking for?"
"A relic of a bygone era," Mulder said. "You don't see many people these days with fingertips that yellowed."
Barry may have been a CSI of the new millennium, but he'd seen enough people whose fingers were stained with nicotine. "All right. This guy was a smoker. Maybe even two packs a day. I'm pretty sure that cancer didn't kill him."
"Actually it did. Just not in the way it usually does." Mulder knelt down. "We could run a background check on our victim's hospital stays, but there are just as many occasions when people don't go in to see a doctor for lung cancer. Hell, maybe he just didn't care."
"You're going to have to make this a little clearer," Barry said.
"This guard wasn't killed because he found our perpetrator," Mulder told Barry. "Indeed, I have a feeling that after he killed the first guard, he knew damn well he had to get out of here. The reason he stay was because he could tell just how bad off the second guard was. And that he had something he needed."
Barry Allen was a quick study who had seen a lot of impossible things even before he'd become the Flash. Still, it took him a minute to try and get his mind around what Mulder was saying. "Wait a minute. You're telling me that our thief and murderer killed and took this man's cancer."
"And he might not have even have wanted to do it," Mulder said sorrowfully. "This is not exactly the kind of case that I had hoped would be our first crime in Central City."
"You think the perp is someone you've dealt with before," Mulder said.
"I'm not sure," Mulder admitted. "Scully killed him nearly twenty years ago, but there is a pretty good chance he'd been able to recover from that minor inconvenience before."
"It's kind of common these days," Barry said. "How do you want to handle this?"
Mulder still wasn't used to being taken this seriously this quickly. "Can you arrange for Scully to do an autopsy on the first body? It's not that I don't trust your ME…"
"You want your best people on it. I feel the same way." Barry acknowledged. "What about the second?"
"Check local hospital records. See if they can confirm my diagnosis," Mulder told him. "Then get on the horn to STAR Labs. Ask them to pull up anything they can find from, January '97. I'm pretty sure that's when the original case was."
"What exactly are we up against?"
"The actual perp may not be much of a threat. What concerns me is, if this is the same guy or not, why he was committed these crimes in the first place."
"I don't understand. If he's in the X-Files, isn't he dangerous?"
"That was true eighty-five, ninety percent of the time," Mulder said thoughtfully. "This guy was one of the exceptions. Which makes me wonder if it's him or if someone with the same abilities. Either way, this won't be pleasant."
"We've dealt with worse," Barry told him.
Mulder sighed. "I meant for Scully."
STAR LABS
2:32 PM
It had been a long time since Mulder had led a group meeting of any kind, much less one that was full of people inclined to listen to him. Joe was the most skeptical, and even he didn't know what to make of the video.
The picture on the video feed had been absolutely perfect – until the twenty minutes the crimes had taken place. Then there had been some kind of distortion in the picture that hadn't been anywhere else, and only seemed to cover the area where the perpetrator had been. Joe thought, quite logically, that someone had doctored the film in order to cover up the killer's identity, a possibility that even Mulder was willing to admit was very reasonable.
Scully had done a chem. Scan on the first body and had found even of digitalis, a drug used to treat heart conditions in moderate doses that could be lethal in a large one. "You sure our killer isn't a pair of ten year old clones?" she had asked.
"We should be so lucky," Mulder told her. "Very early case," he told the rest of them.
"It's okay. I've always found ten year old girls creepy myself," Cisco said. "So I went through the files, and it didn't take much digging to find the one you're after. That said, anything you and Scully know that could flesh this out would help?"
"The strange thing was, this particular X-File didn't start with an actual crime," Mulder told them. "And there wasn't one until halfway through the investigation. An ambulance in Pittsburgh gets involved in a head-on collision. The driver and the patient are fine, but the EMT, one Leonard Morris Betts is decapitated. Body goes to the morgue. And three hours later, the attendant is knocked unconscious and Betts' headless body has left the building. I was curious, so Scully and I catch the train." He paused. "In retrospect, maybe I should have held off."
Scully was a little pale, but she nodded. "In a way, I owe him a favor." She looked at them. "I thought this was nothing more than body theft disguised as a practical joke. In a fact, we actually found the head in the hospital's biological waste department a few hours later."
"And I had to go fishing for it," Mulder said, looking a little nauseated.
"You had the longer arms." Scully was smiling now.
They described the case, which even by the standards of their division had been weird. A head that seemed to blink when it was examined, the fact that the video covering the morgue was blurred, and that an examination of the body had shown Betts had been so riddled with cancer Scully had been amazed he had lived that long.
Cisco spoke up. "File says you said had Chuck Burks work the case," he said unusually quietly.
Both agents smiled. "I took a slice of Betts' head, and he took one of his pictures of it to try and map its aura. He wasn't shocked when he saw that the head had an aura of shoulders and a chest, but he was when I told them that it had been decapitated." Mulder said warmly. "He told me it made his month."
"He has that photo framed in his office," Cisco said fondly. "Never quite gave me the details. Just said it was your work."
Scully smiled. "He still out there working in his twisted little alley?" she said.
"He's more in academia but yeah."
"We should reach out to him," Mulder said. "Hell, we might even be able to give a stipend for his work this time."
"How'd you get his help before?" Joe asked.
"Orioles tickets," Mulder said. "He'd been a fan since the O's swept the Dodgers in '66. Anyway, just after we handle him, Betts finally does something that requires our presence. The driver of the ambulance sees him in a parking lot and tries to find out what's going on. He kills her," pause, "by injecting her. A security guard finds him standing over her body. Cuffs him to his car and goes for backup. He comes back five minutes later; Betts' is gone." Another pause. "Well, most of him."
"We found a thumb hanging from the cuff. Mulder's theory was that he had broken it off in order to free himself." Scully said.
"Alright," Caitlin said. "This was already weird. Now it's just getting gross."
"We've reached neither the pinnacle of weirdness nor grossness," Scully said. "Remember Mulder had theorized the reason Betts was still around was that he had managed to grow his head back. A theory that the guard had confirmed. So by extension…"
"… he broke his thumb off, because he knew he could grow himself another one," Barry said slowly. "All right, I have to admit, that's a new one."
"The final piece of the weirdness came when we popped the trunk of his car, because it was his car," Mulder said. "Inside we found just about every kind of cancerous growth and tumor you could imagine. Which led to be theorize that cancer wasn't killing Betts, it was actually keeping him alive, and that these tumors…"
"…his personal crate of Lunchables," Cisco shook his head. "You know, I've seen some weird shit the last two years, and there's some weird shit in these files. This is bizarro world even by our standards." He paused. "Too bad you guys used Cancer Man as a nickname for your biggest filling, because that really fits Betts."
"You could always call him The Regenerator,:" Mulder said.
The group looked at each other. "Well played, Agent Mulder," Cisco admitted.
"But its all fun and games until it gets personal," Scully said slowly. She described the chase for Betts and how she had ridden in the ambulance with his mother to the hospital. Then he had surprised her in the ambulance, and stood over her.
"I'll never forget what he said," Scully said slowly. "'I'm very sorry, but you've got something I need.'"
It clicked very suddenly for all of them. They hadn't read the files that closely, but they had known from the story that as part of the experiments the shadow government had performed, many had been given cancer. And Scully had been an abductee.
"You didn't know you had it," Joe said slowly.
"I should've known," Scully said sadly. "A little more than a year earlier, I had visited a group of women at the Allentown chapter of MUFON. It was a support group for women who had been abducted by aliens. One of them said she recognized me from the tests. All of them had implants like me, and all of them said they were dying of cancer. As Mulder will testify, however reluctantly, I was in complete denial about my entire abduction. So I ignored it." She shook her head. "After we stopped him, I didn't have the courage to tell Mulder what Betts had said. Then that night, I coughed up blood."
Mulder put his hand on his partner's shoulders. "I didn't want to admit the possibility either."
"I'm a doctor, Mulder," Scully said gently. "I knew better. Anyway, as you can see it worked out."
Barry thought that they might have to come back to this at some point, but he decided to let it slide. It wasn't like this part of the saga was vital to their current circumstances. "How did you stop Betts?" he asked instead.
"I took a defibrillator and shocked his head," Scully told him. "Mulder told me that he was dead, and I was so distracted by what he had told me I let it slide. Are you certain that Betts was dead?"
"I saw his body in the morgue, and I had two coroners pronounce him," Mulder told them. "But considering that he had previously survived a decapitation and a car crash, I think it's safe to say that it could've just been temporary. As for could he still be alive, he was only thirty four when he died the first time. It's not like old age would be the kind of thing that could slow him down."
"All right. Let's assume for the sake of argument that Betts is our guy." Joe was assuming the professional mode again. "Based on what you guys told us, he sounded like he killed more for survival than out of any criminal instinct. Why would he have become what amounts to a common criminal after being off the radar for so long?"
"It's been nearly twenty years. I don't have to tell you how much can change in that time," Mulder reminded them. "Hell, if it is him, we don't know if he's working of his own free will. Maybe he's been trying to live a normal life all this time, and someone threatened him with exposure."
"What was taken from Henderson Labs in the first place?" Scully was back to trying to come up with a rational solution. To be fair, they needed to know anyway."
"The people at Henderson Labs haven't exactly been wild to tell us what was taken," Barry told them. "They seem to be hiding behind the corporate veil."
"The most they were willing tell us is that they took a lot of data on some of their more recent research," Joe told them. "Beyond that, they've been hiding behind their lawyers."
Mulder turned to Cisco and Caitlin. "How much would it go against your ethics to hack in to their files and see if you can get an idea what they were working on?"
"To catch a metahuman who killed two people? Not at all," Cisco said. "But thank you for having the courtesy to ask."
Scully looked at Barry and Joe. "If it is Leonard Betts – and that's a big if at this juncture – we're not going to get anywhere on the video. Whatever abilities he had, one of them was the power to cloud security footage. "
"Given that you guys exposed him in the first place, he'd been using a new identity anyway," Barry reminded them. "I'll run up to Pennsylvania, see if I can confirm he's actually dead."
Mulder shook his head. "Even if you find a body that won't prove anything, remember? I think our best bet is to operate under the assumption that he is in Central City, and try to find him there."
"The whole reason Betts was working at a hospital before was so he'd have access to the tumors he needed to stay alive," Scully looked at Caitlin. "Check local hospitals, particularly oncology wards. Recent hires in particular, though for all we know, he could have been at one for years."
Mulder turned his attention back to Barry. "Betts was an alias to begin with. His real name was Albert Tanner. And unlike the majority of our X-Files, he had a family. Let's see if Marjorie Tanner is still alive."
"She'd be in her early eighties", Barry countered. "And it's not like her health was great then. Betts extracted a tumor from her the night she died."
"It's a longshot, but it is still our best bet," Joe said. "I'll check in with the Pittsburgh PD; see if she's still alive or if she passed."
"What are you guys going to do?" Cisco asked.
Mulder thought for it. "I'll check in with Pittsburgh. I think you and Joe should handle a different angle." He turned to Caitlin. "Print out the mug shot we have for Betts."
Caitlin looked at Joe and Barry. Barry nodded. "You've got a better idea?"
"If this is Betts', he's got to have a residence somewhere in Central City," Scully said slowly. "You and Barry know this city. We don't. And even given our recent celebrity, they might still respond better to local cops then to the feds. Not to mention…"
She trailed off. "What Scully's trying not to say is that Barry could get through the search faster than we could," Mulder admitted.
"Kind of seemed like a pedestrian way of using the Fastest Man Alive," Scully hedged. "Little bit like using Supergirl to clean up a messy street."
Barry shrugged. "Like Cisco said, we're trying to catch a killer," he assured them. "It's one of the reasons I started this in the first place. Admittedly, a stranger one than usual but still."
"And if by some chance you find him," Mulder told them. "Call us in first. By the standards of the X-Files, Betts was never a very dangerous subject. There were human killers that were actually far more dangerous then him in the files. We need to bring him in, and find out what he was doing in Henderson Labs in the first place."
Joe nodded. "There's something a lot bigger going on here than just corporate espionage. No one hires a metahuman for something they could've gotten someone off the street to do for less."
"True." Mulder paused. "Though I have known people who have used aliens to get it done."
"You don't think this ties in to your conspiracy, do you?" Barry asked.
"I don't have evidence of that," Mulder admitted. "I'm just giving you my personal experience. Just as you and your friends would no doubt share yours the same way."
9:48 P.M.
By this point, Barry knew better than to run up to Joe with knowledge. He stopped about fifty feet away, then walked the rest of it. "Another apartment complex covered," he told him. "No sign of Betts or any name he's going under."
"Well, the good news we may have a sign that we're on the right track," Joe told him. "Caitlin just got to back to me. Finally may have hit pay dirt at Reynolds Memorial. Apparently, a month ago they hired a registered nurse in their oncology ward. Goes by the name Albert Morris. She's uploading the data to our phones now."
Barry took a look at the digitized photo. Morris did resemble an older version of what they had on Betts, but there was something that seemed off. "Is it just me or does Morris look a lot less healthy than the one in the picture?"
"It's been nearly twenty years, but I see what you mean," Joe agreed. "This isn't just getting older; his face is a lot thinner. And why would was someone who can regenerate body parts be that sick?"
"That's why we've got to find him and ask him," Barry asked. "Where does 'Morris' live?"
"According to the address that he gave, in the middle of the reservoir, " Joe told him. "That's odd, too. According to Mulder and Scully, this guy was a lot better at covering his tracks before."
"Especially on something a rookie cop would see," Barry agreed. "What if it's not quite a lie? Let's say he is new to Central City. He doesn't want to give his exact address away, so he chooses one that sounds close to where he actually lives."
Joe nodded. "The warehouses on the docks. Maybe he's slumming."
"I'll check it out. Call STAR Labs; see if there are any security cameras they can check out."
"They have got to do something about the infrastructure in our city," Cisco grumbled to Caitlin. "These cameras haven't been upgraded since Blockbuster went out of business."
"Probably would've had better footage there too," Caitlin agreed. "Barry, we're clearing up the picture as best we can, but no guarantees you'll get anything worth a damn."
"Well, if it is our guy, he blurs security footage as a matter of course, so don't blame yourselves too much," Barry said.
"How nice to have a metahuman to cover for our sloppy work," Cisco said. "Okay, there are at least three people in that warehouse. Beyond the footage is way too grainy. Just take a look."
Barry moved slowly around the place and stopped about a hundred yards away.
"You disappoint me, Mr. Betts," the voice said. "You were supposed to be subtle, not leave a bloodbath."
"The guards surprised me," The voice was raspy and weak.
"If I'd wanted excuses, I'd have gone with my usual class of flunkies," Something was familiar about this voice. Something very familiar. "Did you at least manage to decode what was on it?"
"I did…what you told me," There was something desperate about it. "Now…the serum."
"I'm sorry, Mr. Betts. But first, you've got something I need."
And then, Barry knew who it was. Even before he got close enough to see the tall figure, who still looked arrogant and patrician, even with his left hand got.
"Tell Joe to get every cop in the city here," he heard himself saying. "I've found Betts and I know who he did the job for."
"So do we." Cisco said. "Can't anybody in our world just stay dead?"
The man who was standing with Leonard Betts was Malcolm Merlyn.
