XxXxX Chapter Ten XxXxX Richard Arkin met Mulder and Scully at the airport, where the Ohio storm had preceded them in the form of steady rain. In the car, he paused before starting the engine, turning to scrutinize Mulder. "How did you know?" he asked. "How did you know where to find him?" "We haven't found him yet," was Mulder's reply. Arkin nodded once in agreement. "He hasn't checked in for parole in two months. Grenier's got the city turned upside down, but so far there's been no sign of the sonofabitch. Him or the girl, either." Scully felt a rush of relief. She'd been picturing Vee broken and bruised, with bare feet and unseeing eyes. "That means she's probably still alive." They drove into town with rain snakes slithering down the windows as Arkin filled them in on the latest developments. "The most recent vic's name is Ellen Cavanaugh. Age twenty- seven, last seen at a late dinner meeting around nine p.m. last night. Her colleagues say she was going to go back to the office for her briefcase and then catch a cab home. At one a.m., her fiancé reported her missing. The search team found her body down by the river about six hours later. Russell's got men canvassing over there for witnesses now, but so far nothing has panned out." "What about Carl Quentin?" Mulder asked. Arkin apparently was not the type to need notes, either. "Carl Allen Quentin," he quoted, "age thirty-six. Born in Canton, Ohio. Mother's deceased, father is unknown. He was released from Maryland State Prison in September after serving eleven years on a sentence of twenty-five to life." "What were the charges?" Scully asked, leaning forward towards the front seats. "Quentin was arrested July 13, 1988 in Beltsville, Maryland for attacking a woman in a local park. A local officer walking his regular beat caught the animal red-handed in the bushes. Three weeks later, Quentin was charged and convicted of assault, attempted robbery and attempted murder in the first degree." "Robbery?" Mulder said, twisting around in his seat. "That doesn't quite fit." "I had the same thought," Arkin agreed. "So I did a little checking. Talked to both the vic and the Beltsville PD officers who caught the case." "And?" "And Quentin had a knife when he attacked her. He snapped her purse off her shoulder and tossed it into the bushes, but no one can swear that he was ever after her money. It was just another charge to stick him with and run up his sentence." "So they think the true motive was..." "Rape. The asshole strangled her until she passed out. By the time the foot patrol happened by, Quentin had her shoes and tights off. He was..." Arkin paused and cleared his throat. "He was sucking on her toes." XxXxX The dour clouds brought night out early, leaving only a weak, flickering street lamp to illuminate the outside of Carl's ramshackle home. Mulder peered out the car window as Scully pulled to a stop in front of the building. He could feel a tingling in his fingers and toes that had nothing to do with his tangled, amputated neurons; it was the sense that he was close, that the evil he was chasing was now near enough to touch. He was about to walk the steps of a murderer. Mulder glanced at Scully, and found her staring that the shadowed, run-down old building, too. What had once been the pride of some upstanding family was now a crumbling front porch, a peeling shingled wall, a boarded-up front window. "Just like the movies," he said. "Yeah." Scully ducked farther down, her eyes on the rickety, slanting roof. "Why do I feel we're at that part when the entire audience is yelling, 'Don't go in there!'" His heart was drumming, his hand already on the door, but Mulder stopped at something in her tone. He'd heard echoes of it before, on cases where the investigating officers suddenly realized that when they caught the monster, they would have to see it. To know it. Dale Guthrie, he remembered, had said it best. The old Alabama cop had come along on a bust twelve years ago, when they grabbed a man who had been murdering little boys, boiling their limbs and then polishing their bones for his collection. In the crackling excitement, amid the swishing of the kevlar, only Dale was quiet and standing still. "I want this SOB's balls roasted on a stick," he'd said when Mulder had asked if he was okay. "I wish I could make him live out thirteen deaths of his own. But I'm not sure I want to know the kind of thing that takes apart little children." He had shaken his head. "I don't think a person could ever unknow that kind of evil." You can't, Mulder thought then and now. Instead you know it over and over again, horrifying each and every time. He grazed the back of Scully's hand with his finger. "You okay?" he asked. She straightened immediately. "Yes," she said, but to him it sounded like she was testing her answer. He waited, watching the pale outline of her cheek, until she met his eyes. "He's not even here, Mulder, and the surveillance team is just across the street. Let's just get this over with." They made their way toward the dilapidated house, Scully walking ahead and Mulder listening to the even sound of her heels on the wet pavement. The front door remained unlocked from earlier in the day, when Grenier had served the initial search and seizure warrant. Scully pushed it open and stepped inside. "Leave the lights off," he murmured behind her. "If he's coming back here, we don't want him to know we're on to him." Scully withdrew her flashlight and glanced the beam around the living room, illuminating the opened desk drawers, the displaced sofa cushions and the scattered papers. "He's going to know the instant he walks through the door," she observed. "This place has been tossed upside down." "We're not staying," Mulder said, turning on his flashlight and pushing past her. "I just want to see." "See what?" she asked as she followed. The floors creaked under their weight. Mulder navigated a careful path through the overturned chairs and the scattered books, the powerful beam of his flashlight catching the tattered green drapes and the faded paisley wallpaper. In the dining room, there was a velvet painting of a basset hound hanging on the wall. He paused as some newspaper crinkled under his feet. "This is where interior decorators go to commit suicide, Scully." Her gentle snort floated back to him in the darkness. "Did you see the ceramic frog in the corner?" They walked through the kitchen, where Mulder stopped to check the open drawers. "No silverware," he noted. "If there were knives here, Grenier must have bagged them earlier." Scully peeked into the pantry, then opened several of the overhead cabinets. "Not much in the way of groceries. Just a few cans of soup and a box of Cheerios." "Let me see that." He shone his beam over the empty, dusty shelves. "The bedroom must be upstairs," he said a moment later. He led the way up the narrow staircase, using the worn wooden banister as a guide. "What are you looking for?" Scully asked over his shoulder. "I don't think he brings them here, Scully." "What?" They reached the bedroom, and both trained their flashlight beams inside, criss-crossing over the rumpled bed and dishevled piles of clothes. "Where are the shoes?" Mulder asked softly. "There was no mention of them in Grenier's report." "You think he's learned not to keep them? Eleven years in prison could have taught him not to hold on to the evidence." "He wouldn't be able to help himself." Mulder shook his head, stepping into the room. "No food, no shoes...look how few clothes there are here. The drawers are completely empty, but there's only one pair of pants on the floor." He went over to the closet, which emitted a whine as he opened it. Inside, bare metal hangers waved with the slight breeze. "Check it out," he said, motioning to her. She joined him at the door, and he pointed out the empty shoe rack. "Not even one pair." "He doesn't live here," Scully murmured in realization. "I don't think so, no. I think it may have been a convenient address to give the parole officer his first couple of weeks outside, but this street is crammed with houses. There's no way he could bring the women here." "So much for the surveillance out front," she said. Mulder cast his beam toward the cracked ceiling. "It couldn't hurt. He's been here before and might have some reason to show up again, but I think we'd do better to figure out where he's headed next." "Well," said Scully. "We know that part. We just don't know where she is." Vee, he remembered. Their reluctant witness. "She must be getting ready to come in from the cold by now," he said. "I assume Grenier has some people watching her house." "And Jimmy's place," Scully answered as they left the bedroom. "But it's a bigger waste of time than the van we've got outside of this place." Mulder stopped on the stairs to turn and look at her. "Why do you say that?" "Because there is no way she'd lead this guy back to someone she loved." "Well, then...has she got any enemies?" Scully answered with a trace of smile. "Now that you mention it, Detective Johnson might want to watch his back." They took one last look around the apartment, Mulder standing in the middle of the living room as Scully lingered in the front doorway. "Mulder? Are you coming?" "Yeah." His feet felt glued to the floor even as his mind raced ahead, sorting what he knew so far. There was something else that hadn't turned up at the house -- the mask. It nagged at him, grinding the gears in his head, but he couldn't quite grasp *why* this bit of information seemed so crucial. "Mulder?" She shone her flashlight at his knees. The invisible tethers snapped loose, jolting him back to the present. "Yeah," he said again. "I'm coming." One foot in front of the other, he followed his partner's light back into the open air. XxXxX The soft white of her hallway walls blurred before Scully as she yawned on her way to her front door. Her ankles hurt from standing, and the weight of her briefcase seemed to multiply with every step. At her door, she yawned again, automatically raising the leaden briefcase so she her mouth with her elbow, despite the fact that no sane person would be awake and wandering the halls at one fifty-six a.m.. I'm too old, she thought, contemplating the white-paneled door with slow blinks, to always be waking up in one state and going to bed in another. But then she remembered where she had awakened, with Mulder's hands whispering over her thighs and the gentle scrape of his stubbly cheek against her shoulder. They'd had only ten minutes, her eyes on the clock as his long fingers stroked between her legs. Thinking oh-I-can't-can't-come-this-fast- but-please-oh-don't-stop-oh. Her skin flashed hot at the memory, tingling away her fatigue. Flushed, she glanced around at the empty hallway, thankful there had been no one there to catch her standing, eyes closed and mouth open, clutching her keys in front of her own door. The door. There was something different about it, she realized now that she was more alert. She frowned and bent to study the lock. Faint scratches in the metal made her set aside her briefcase and draw out her gun. All traces of fatigue gone, her heart picked up speed as she slowly inserted the key into the lock. The click of the tumblers pierced the silence, and Scully winced, sliding the door open without further sound. Her living room was dark, but she could make out something black and rumpled on her couch. She inched towards it, her finger already poised on the trigger. Peering over the edge of the sofa, she saw it was... ...a coat. She lowered the gun and cocked her head, listening. There were muffled sounds coming from her bedroom. She walked to the short hall and found blue light slanting through the cracked door. The adrenaline rush that had gripped her in the living room began to fade. With a small sigh, she switched her gun to her left hand and pushed the door all the way open with her palm. Vee startled on the bed, nearly upsetting the can of Coke she had in her hand. "Hi," she said. "I didn't really think you'd be in the book. Nice place." Scully folded her arms, gun and all, and said nothing. Vee looked sheepish. "I didn't know where else to go," she said after a moment. She stretched a pizza box across the bed. "Pizza?" Scully narrowed her eyes, then leaned out for an experimental sniff. "What kind?" XxXxX He hadn't eaten in two days. At night, he saw her face in fitful dreams. The voice inside him said, "She will be your ruin," and he would clench his hands to strangle the voice until all was silent again. He went to the park. Mud clogged his boots as he stood in the dripping bushes, watching her tree. He had not come this far to fail now. XxXxX End chapter ten. Continued in chapter eleven. Syn_tax6@yahoo.com