Rowan Tree, North Carolina
September 16 3:50 p.m.
To say missing-girl cases cut close was not fair, Mulder thought.
He carried them a little heavier because of what happened to his sister—that was just basic psychology—but any case cut close enough if you let it. There was no reason that the disappearance of a pretty woman should carry more moral and emotional weight than, say, the sudden death of a prominent scientist. Not in the grand scheme of things.
Scully wasn't in danger. In fact, she was probably learning more than he was about this mess. Scully was an American citizen and a cop; whoever-it-was couldn't sit on her forever. In fact, the clock would probably run out in less than seventy-two hours. They'd have to let her go. It didn't matter if it was the State Department, the CIA, or the President of the United States. She was probably in some small anonymous cell somewhere, facing, at worst, death from boredom.
Right?
The place to start here was with Wickham. If Wickham was working on some kind of weird new Manhattan project, and if he had been murdered, then the case was squarely in federal jurisdiction. Fox Mulder wouldn't be anyone's first choice to solve a politically sensitive national security murder, but he wouldn't have to fight for the case. Even after the many disgraces and indignities of the last few years, he could still lean on his golden-boy rep if he wanted to catch any crime that interested him.
And it did interest him.
Still it wasn't Wickham's death that had drawn him out, and Mulder didn't prepare himself to match wits with a poisoner. He hadn't even gone back to the FBI to file for the case. In fact, in an administrative sense, he'd just abandoned his job without approval or permission. He'd let Skinner off at the mall and broke several speeding laws before he'd even crossed the Beltway. And it wasn't Wickham that consumed his focus or activated his professional instincts. Maybe if he let the line out on it. But to do that he'd have to clear the static. Get out of his own head. That meant he'd have to talk to someone.
And his dance card only had one name on it.
He pulled off the highway at a rural roadside stop. It barely even a real town. He filled the Buick with premium gas, and then went inside, jangling his keys in his hand. At the station he bought a cup of weak coffee for a dollar. The attendant was a tired-looking black man, north of sixty.
Mulder said, "You got any cameras in here?"
The man sized Mulder up and took him-correctly-for a cop. "Security cameras?"
"The little tourist ones," said Mulder.
"Yeah, sure."
"And a map."
Mulder held up two fingers, and the man put two cameras and a thick road map of North Carolina into a paper bag. Not for a poisoner. You used cameras to fight an altogether different evil.
The man said, "Seventeen dollars."
Mulder took a twenty out of his wallet. He waited for the change. Then had to ask, because where this town was, because of its strategic location off the highway, because he was here and life was full of coincidences. "Were you here early this morning?"
The attendant scoffed. "Four a.m. every damn day of my life."
"You see a pretty redhead come through here this morning?"
The man smiled. "I wish."
Mulder nodded solemnly. He wished, too.
"Hey," said the guy, "what's the matter? You lose your wife or something?"
"Or something," Mulder said.
It wasn't that the case cut especially close. It was just that everything else in the universe suddenly seemed so far away.
#
Police Headquarters - Downtown District
Raleigh, NC
4:45 p.m.
The duty sergeant was a big, thick guy, like a bouncer or a football player, a couple of years past his prime. He took one look at Mulder, with his moderately cheap suit and his clean fingernails, all tired and edgy and wrinkled from the drive down from D.C., and formed instantaneous territorial suspicions. Like when a lion and a lynx meet each other at the watering hole. Different species of the same kind of animal. The corners of the sergeant's mouth turned down, and he sighed.
In a lot of these city police stations they were going modern, with high technology like telephones, but the revolution hadn't yet reached the Raleigh PD. The sergeant pivoted a half-turn and bellowed. "Hey, Winn, it's one of your feds!"
"Jesus Christ." A petite detective with close-cropped brown hair looked at Mulder from her desk, in the cramped bullpen behind the sergeant's desk. She wore a huge silver revolver under her arm, a .44, like Dirty Harry's. Uncharitably, Mulder wondered how she got her little hand around it. He guessed that she was Winn, last name, and not, Win, short for Winifred. She was attractive, in a lean, hard way, but she had flint in her eyes and the kind of expression that didn't suffer fools.
She closed her fists on her hips. "What the hell is it with you people today? Did I lose a contest?"
Southern hospitality, Mulder thought. Nothing like it.
"Is there someone here who knows Walter Skinner?" Mulder asked. "Anyone."
Winn softened two degrees. "Walt sent you?"
Walt? Mulder spread his hands. "Call him if you want." He held out his cell phone. "Number 6 on the speed dial."
She pursed her lips, then beckoned. "You'd better come back here."
Mulder stepped behind the gate and watched awkwardly while Winn cleared stacks of papers from a folding chair beside her desk. She had high cheekbones and a little triangle chin and her face was smattered with freckles. She was in good shape, like a long-distance runner. She wore jeans and a t-shirt and a flannel overshirt, with her gold badge hanging around her neck on a chain. No make-up. Not even lip gloss.
"You got down here pretty quick. What was that, door-to-door? Four hours? Five? You must have hauled ass." She was about twenty-four, high-energy, a bit prickly. The thing with the .44 was cool, but it also suggested a bit of insecurity, a struggle to keep ahead of something. Whether it was the men in her squad or the brutality of the job or something else-like a childhood trauma-Mulder didn't know. But it was something. Of course, you could say that for almost every beat detective and more than one FBI agent. "I wish the IRS handled claims that fast."
Having made space for him, she dropped into her own office chair. She was small enough that she could draw her knees up, folding herself into it. She put her chin on her knees. "It's a territorial thing, right?" She smiled acidly. "State peed in the FBI's pond, so they got the FBI with the strongest chin and the saddest eyes to come down here and sort it out."
"Yeah," said Mulder, perching on the edge of the folding chair. "That's what happened."
"Well, I hope Walt appreciates my snitching," said Winn. "I didn't have to call. I've had enough feds up my nose today."
She seemed incapable of staying still, and after a moment of staring at him, she threw open a desk drawer and took a battered packet of Morleys out of it. She pulled one out of the packet with her teeth and struck it with a silver Zippo, a practiced, anxious gesture. She took in a deep breath of smoke, closing her eyes for a moment to savor it. Then, reading some kind of judgment or assessment in Mulder's eyes, she shrugged. "They're an herbal remedy." She leaned forward and glared daggers at something over Mulder's shoulder. "Get back to work, Chapman," she called. "This isn't performance art."
Mulder looked over his shoulder and met eyes with the duty sergeant. The man turned back to his work.
Winn rolled her eyes, tapped the ash from her cigarette, then sighed. "I'm real sorry you came all the way down here. I can't tell you much more than I told Walt over the phone." She took another hard drag, then gestured elaborately at Mulder with it. "Soon as the stiff's prints hit AFIS, I've got these suits all up in my personal business. They cleaned us out. They took my case notes. Even my witness. I mean, the other FBI. What was it? Scully. It was professional as hell. They even took the damn tape from the security cameras. Like they were cleaning up after a UFO crash or something." She raised an eyebrow.
Mulder tipped his head. "Were they?"
"Yeah," said Winn, looking at him like he was nuts. "Totally."
"Is there a prevailing theory?"
"Lots," said Winn, shrugging. "You know what cops are like."
"What do you think happened?" She seemed bright enough. Maybe she knew.
"Me?" As if nobody had ever asked her that before. "I have no theories. I really don't. I'm going home in twenty minutes and I'm going to try forget this ever happened." Her eyes welled up, and she tucked her face into her elbow and sneezed. "Sorry." She waved it away. "It's 'flu season."
"Why did you call us?" Mulder wondered.
"It's not right, what they did," said Winn. "Someone dies, there ought to be a record. They shouldn't just disappear. It was spooky." She shivered. "Plus, these guys were assholes. I mean, most feds aren't exactly dazzling personalities, but this was like a rock band in a hotel room. I mean, it's a bad job anyway. Learn some manners, for Christ's sake." She dropped the cigarette butt in a half-empty coffee cup. It sizzled.
"OK," said Mulder.
He took out the picture of Chandler Wickham. Winn had seen it before and knew what it was. To her credit, she leaned over and studied it again, committing it to memory. The dusky cheeks, the bloodshot desperation in the eyes. She looked up, giving Mulder a grim and empathetic look. Her eyes said, it's a terrible world we live in, isn't it?
"Have you ever seen someone die like that before?" Mulder asked.
"I was a beat cop before I got this job," said Winn. "I've seen just about everything before."
"So what was it?" Mulder wondered. "The last time?"
Winn leaned over the photo again. She grimaced and lit another cigarette. "Strychnine. A woman did it." She closed the manila file with a finger, her brown eyes going still and far-away. "She put it in the guy's oatmeal." And then she seemed to snap the hymnal closed. She shook her head and sneezed in her sleeve again. "Is that all? Cause it's getting around to five, and I've got a boyfriend and a dog and a nice baby waiting for me at at home."
Mulder didn't know if she was serious or joking. There were no pictures on her desk, and she wore no rings.
"One more question," said Mulder. "You said they came right after you filed the fingerprints with AFIS."
"Yeah?"
"How long is 'right after'?"
She shrugged. "Half an hour."
So they were from here. Raleigh guys. "OK," said Mulder. He gathered up Wickham's file. "Give the dog a Milk Bone for me."
"Yeah, sure," said Winn, cracking another sharp smile. "Can I ask what you're gonna do now?"
"Me?" said Mulder. He checked his watch. "I need to go see a man about a bomb."
Winn was unfazed. She turned back to a stack of paperwork. She paused and blinked for a moment, then shook it off. "Just keep it out of my jurisdiction, FBI."
Mulder stepped into a cool September evening. A lot to like there, he thought. But for someone else. She exhausted him.