



It's post Fight the Future, and Scully has moved to Utah. Unfortunately for her, the X-Files followed her there. She must not have noticed that the state emblem is a big old beehive. Poor Scully. When will she learn?

Tags: NC-17, mytharc, casefile, M/O, S/O, MSR, chipfic, Samantha, horribly absent & hugely apologetic author

Feel free to yell at me at syn_tax6@yahoo.com

Complete text file is HERE.

















Chapter One

The man with the cigarette was lying to her, but in her line of work, Dottie pretty much took that for a given. If liars had a Mecca, it'd be Vegas, where everyone was shining you on about something all of the time. Hell, she was the only woman left on her block with real tits, that's how it was.

But Mr. Jameson was certainly admiring the view from across her desk, which was one reason she knew he couldn't possibly be telling the truth about his beloved missing wife. She picked up the picture again - it showed an unsmiling but very pretty brunette. "You say she came here with a female friend of hers?"

"That's what I understood, yes. Cynthia Daniels, her friend from Cornell. They were going to have a...girls' weekend away, just the two of them."

Damn if the old bastard didn't have a gleam in his eye, imagining it. "But Cynthia didn't actually go."

"No, when my wife didn't come home and I couldn't reach her by phone, I immediately got in touch with Cynthia. She had no idea what I was talking about and hadn't seen Stephanie in almost a week."

"So what makes you so sure your wife is here?"

"I checked with the airline. She was on the plane."

"The airlines don't just give that information out to just anybody."

He gave her a thin smile and took a drag on his cigarette. "I'm not just anybody. I'm a man who desperately wants to find his wife, and I'm hoping you can help me."

"You seem to be doing pretty well on your own so far."

"I need someone here in town who knows the ins and outs. Can you find her? If you say yes, I'm prepared to offer a handsome sum. If you say no, I can find someone else to take my money."

"I can find her for you, sure." Pretty rich lady like that was probably holed up with her pool boy in one of the Bellagio suites. "You might not like what I find. In my experience, people don't come here to be alone, if you know what I'm saying. Your wife may have left her friend behind but it's likely she's got a new one."

"I don't care about that.” He flicked aside a bit of ash. “I just want to know she's safe. I want her to come home. Can you make that happen?"

He pulled out a clip full of hundred dollar bills and ticked off ten in a row without blinking an eye. She hesitated just a moment. Her gut said this guy wasn't just looking to kiss and make up, and she wasn't about to track down the sad woman in the picture just so he could use her as a punching bag. But Benji was on his third pair of sneakers this year and the car payment was already two days late. Better she find this Stephanie Jameson before her husband caught up with her. If it turned out to be a silly tryst, no harm, no foul, but if she was really on the run, Dot could warn her to cover her tracks a damn sight better. What Mr. Jameson didn't know wouldn't hurt him. "I can take your case."

"Excellent." He handed her the money and a business card. "That number is my mobile phone, so you can reach me anytime. I expect you'll have a progress report for me within twenty-four hours."

"You mind if I keep this?" She waved the picture at him, but he was distracted by Scotty walking in, clanging the cow bell over the door.

"Hey, did you see there's a town car parked outside?" Scotty said, stopping short at the sight of their latest client. "Whoa, sorry to interrupt."

"Keep the picture," said Mr. Jameson, turning around with that creepy smile of his again. "I have plenty." He stubbed out his butt in the ashtray she used for clients and walked past Scotty without an acknowledgement.

As the bell clanged for Jameson's exit, Scotty went to the old table he used as a desk and set down his laptop. "Was that business I smelled under all that tobacco smoke?"

"Yep, we've got a case. Wife off in Vegas for a little slap- and-tickle and the husband wants her home." He turned around from setting up and gave her a broad grin. You need a haircut, she thought.

"Slap and tickle? Sounds like fun. I call 'tickle' and you can be 'slap.'"

"Damn right I'm slap. You want coffee?" She got up to get a second cup as he bent over to plug in his computer.

"No, I'm good," he answered as she paused to appreciate his low-slung jeans. He stopped working and waggled his ass.

"You like what you see there, woman? There's more where that came from."

She snorted with laughter and went to the coffee pot. "You'd better watch it 'cause one day I'm gonna take you up on that offer."

"I wish you would," he said. "You know it's true."

"No," she replied firmly. "I've got a policy."

"No dating co-workers?"

"No pedophila. I've got a ten year-old and you ARE a ten-year old."

"Dot, I'm twenty-seven. You've seen my driver's license."

"I've also seen how good you fake an ID. Not to mention that you haven't even got a car. You ride around on a ratty old bicycle."

"Yeah, but you'd fit great on my handlebars."

Dammit if he didn't give her that grin again. "Quit sassing me and get to work. We need to find out if Stephanie Jameson checked into any hotels around here."

She showed him the picture and he let out a low whistle. "So start with the nice places, eh?"

"Yeah, start there. But I wouldn't be too surprised if that ain't where we end up. In my experience, these types come out here to live two kinds of fantasies. One is the satin sheets, overpriced shows, and swanky restaurants, but the other... let's just say if this lady has the same kind of money as her husband, she can buy anything - or anyone - she wants."

***

Scully was already awake when the phone rang. She didn't sleep much anymore, had convinced herself she didn't need it. She spent most nights half dozing in the living room chair with a novel in her lap and a bright light shining down, as if in an interrogation of her fractured dreams. It was his phone, ringing at his bedside, and she still did not answer it, not even after a year of living together. That he knew not to answer hers was one of the reasons they fit so well. She heard his muffled, sleepy answer and set her book aside, prepared to make him coffee and kiss him goodbye. The machine was perking away in no time, filling their small kitchen with sound and smell of caffeine-in-waiting, but he had yet to emerge from the bedroom. She found him sitting in his boxers, head in hands, with the white sheet still tangled about his waist. "Ruben? Is everything okay?"

He looked up. "That was the Las Vegas coroner's office on the phone. They need me to come identify a body."

"What?" She closed her robe and went to sit next to him on the bed.

"They think it's my sister. They won't tell me anything else over the phone. I asked if they'd been in touch with her husband but apparently she still has me listed as next of kin. Or maybe she changed it back after the divorce, I don't know." He ran a hand through his thick, spiky hair. "What the hell was she doing in Las Vegas? I need to book a flight."

"I'll go with you." He didn't seem to hear her; he got up and started rifling through the top drawer of his dresser. "They wanted me to bring a recent picture. Why would they want that?"

She knew, of course, having seen too many bodies destroyed beyond recognition. "I'm so sorry," she murmured. The muscles in his back rippled in the soft light as he emptied the contents of the drawer out onto the dresser top.

"I don't think I even have a recent picture. I haven’t talked to Annie in three years – I only know what my parents have told me." He had told her he had a sister who was not biologically related to him, that they both had been adopted by the same foster family years ago. She knew they weren't close anymore but had not pressed him for details. Maybe, she thought, she hadn't wanted to know. It was a bit of a relief to have a man who didn't want to talk about his sister.

What about your desk?" she asked, rising from the bed. "I can look there." It was a somewhat ridiculous offer. She had never met the sister and wouldn't know her photograph. She imagined a female Ruben, with long limbs, caramel skin and a single dimple on the right cheek. But of course there was no reason to think there was a family resemblance.

"No, I'll do it," he said. "Can you check the flights? Maybe it would be better to drive. God, what about her two kids? Who's going to tell them their mother is dead?"

"I didn't know she had children."

"A boy and a girl. I hope to hell they're with their dad right now. He might've been a bastard to Annie, but I know he loves those kids." Scully went to her office and powered up her computer to search for flights. Outside, the black wall of night hid the Orquinnh Mountains. As a child of the sea, it had taken her some time to get used to their omnipresent bulk but now she felt safer in their shadow. Only when the sun caught the stone at just the right angle, turning it to D.C. gleaming white, did she catch her breath anew.

Ruben appeared, still not dressed, his half-naked reflection caught in the window glass. "I can't find even one photograph," he said, his voice cracking. "It's like she never existed."

She left the computer and went to encircle him. His breath was hot with grief, his hands grabbing at the silky folds of her robe. She rested her cheek against his warm skin and thought of Melissa's photograph in her wallet, slowly fading away.

Losing a sister meant losing part of your childhood. She and Melissa had argued over every sweater, cassette tape and square inch of space in the half-dozen tiny bedrooms they had shared. But each time they had to pick up and move, Melissa was the one to reassure her in the dark: don’t worry, it will be like home again soon. Now Melissa was gone, and there was no one left on earth who knew about the desperate crush she’d had on Danny Trevecchio in the sixth grade.

She’d left Melissa behind now, silent as her grave, along with everything and everyone else from the past she had abandoned in order to become this new person, the one she might have been all along. Sometimes, she almost believed it was true. But just then, as she held him, her gaze wandered the room beyond his quivering shoulder, and she realized: there were no pictures of her, either.

* * * *

"What are you doing here?" he asked, and from his couch, Diana gave a wry smile. This was his standard greeting for her, it seemed; no matter where she happened to be, he always questioned her right to be there. He'd been running, another constant these days.

"I brought dinner," she said, nodding towards the Chinese food containers sitting in his kitchen. "I imagine you've worked up quite an appetite."

He ducked into the bathroom and she heard the tap running. When he emerged, he was toweling off his damp head and frowning at her. "I'd love to, but I still have to get the paperwork done on the McEckerson background check. If it's not done by tomorrow, Kersh is going to want to know what exactly I've been doing with my time."

"Look, if it's a problem for you, I can stop bringing you in on our cases. Spender would be grateful, I think, to have the X-Files office pared down to its official two-person staff. You can spend here to eternity doing background checks."

She said it because she knew the words were hollow; he knew it too because he didn't bother to argue. That he could be so cavalier now rankled her. Fox Mulder liked to piss and moan about the things he had sacrificed for the X-files, but she had become a different person so that his search could continue. "I thought the plan was to get Spender out."

He walked to the kitchen and took out two bottles of beer, wordlessly offering her one. She accepted. "It's still the plan, but these things take time."

"It's been almost two years. I'm beginning to think you like the little weasel." He paused to take a long drink of beer. "Or maybe, you just like being the boss of me. You get to call all the shots in this arrangement."

"Not all of them." She stepped closer and ran a hand over his chest, the T-shirt still warm and damp with sweat. She'd swear he liked the sex as much as she did, but sometimes he said no anyway, probably just to prove he could. He extracted himself from her embrace and drained the last of his bottle.

"You were handed the X-files as a punishment to me, not because you earned them."

"Oh, I earned them," she said in such a tone that he snapped to attention. "I was there at the beginning. I was there when things went to hell, and I damned sure helped put your Humpty Dumpty back together again."

His shoulders drooped, the fight leaving him. He reached one long finger and touched her chest through her blouse, right where the bullet had left its mark. "I'm going crazy," he murmured. "I'll go out of my skin if something doesn't change soon. I can't live like this forever."

"So you'll what...quit your job? Move to Utah? How would that help your cause, exactly?" He pulled back his hand as if burned and she knew she'd gone too far. Utah was a place they did not talk about, ever, although she sometimes caught him staring at his US map and wondered what he was thinking.

"I won't be your back alley consultant forever," he said. You need to find a way to fix it or I will. If that means leaving the FBI for Utah or Kansas or outer Zimbabwe, then that's what I'll do."

***

It was still dark when they took to the sky, dawn just threatening to break the clouds. Scully still traveled for work on occasion, but it had been a long time since she was on a flight like this, with dread waiting on the other end. Ruben took her hand and leaned his head back against the seat. Dry-eyed and world-weary, he looked much as he had the night they'd met, over a dead ten year-old boy. Her job was to establish the manner and cause of death - homicide by drowning - and his was to prosecute the killer. But the boy had no name and the cops could never find the guilty party. So Scully's part was over while Ruben's remained unfinished, a sad file tucked in his desk drawer.

"I should have tried harder," he said, startling her from her memory. "After the divorce, it must have been so hard for her, a single mom with two kids, but I know she must have been killing herself to make it up to them. When we were little she used to take in stray animals -- half dead birds, the cat with one eye. Our parents finally said enough but that just meant Annie had to sneak them food out in the back yard. God, she was the sweetest little thing back then."

"When was the last time you saw her?"

"Four years ago." He reached out to fiddle with the latch on the tray table. "I drove out to see her, Jack, and the kids, and she was acting funny the whole time. She'd started seeing some shrink who apparently thought she needed to explore her past – something about repressed memories of what had happened to her when she was a kid. Jack said she'd started having nightmares, but she wouldn't talk to me about it. I guess, uh, I guess you could say I wasn’t very supportive. What the hell was the point of dredging up her past, especially if it was just making her crazy? We argued about it, and I decided to give her some space, figuring she'd come around again. But she never did."

"I'm sorry," she said, covering her hand with his.

"I wish I could say that to her," he replied. "Just one more time."

He sighed and squeezed her hand. "Thanks for coming with me, Dana. It means a lot. You're the closest thing to family I've got around these parts." She smiled but then looked away. More and more, he'd been talking about family with her, about children and a future, and she knew she had to find a way to tell him - she wasn't sure they could have either.

By the time they arrived at the morgue, the sun was climbing the sky, on its way to a sizzling summer day. Scully hid behind her dark glasses as they exited the rental car and prepared herself for the ugliness she knew was inside.

A balding man in a gray suit was waiting to greet them. He smelled like spearmint gum but he wasn't chewing it. "Ruben Cetera? I'm Sheriff Mike Holloway. Thanks for coming down so quickly."

"Of course," Ruben said, turning to her. "This is Dana Scully."

"Ma'am," Holloway replied. "Can I get you folks anything to drink? Coffee? Water, soda?"

"No, thank you," said Ruben. "I'd just like to get this over with if that's okay."

"Certainly. Come this way. The elevator is back here."

"Can you tell me what happened?" Ruben asked as they waited.

"Why don't we save that conversation for a little bit later? I promise I'll tell you all I can."

They stood in awkward silence in the stainless steel cage as it descended into the bowels of the building. "I'll just go let them know you're here," Holloway said. "Be back in a moment, okay?"

Scully rubbed Ruben's arm as he took a deep breath. "I can wait outside if you like. Your call."

"I'd like you to come in, if that's okay. You're more used to this than I am. Maybe you can see something I won't." He forced a grimace. "And I'm not liable to hear anything past 'is this your sister?'"

She gave a quick mental ‘thank you’ that she had never had to endure this with Melissa. "Mr. Cetera? We're ready when you are." Holloway held open the door at the end of the hall. Ruben reached the threshold first and then slowly entered the room. She felt him stiffen and heard his smothered gasp. "Oh, God," he breathed. "Annie." He froze, blocking her view, and she was forced to step out around him.

Across the room, perhaps 15 feet away, lay a woman with half her face swollen beyond recognition. Scully saw long, dark hair and a single white arm sticking out from under the sheet. She took a step forward, and the movement seemed to awaken Ruben.

"That's her," he said, approaching the body. "That's my sister. What the hell happened to you, baby?"

Scully walked around to see the woman from the other side, and yes, she was clearly Caucasian, with skin so pale it was almost translucent. "We're so sorry for your loss," someone said.

"No," Scully murmured as she looked again, and woman’s face came fully into view. It just couldn't be. She crept a little closer and made herself look. You're seeing things, she told herself. It's not possible.

"Dana?"

The face from the bridge, she realized as she folded over on a gasp. As cold and as scared as she'd been, Scully would never forget it. Even half gone, one side purpled with bruises, the features were unmistakable. Dimly, she was aware she was making a scene, but her heart was threatening to claw its way out of her throat. She couldn't speak. "We should get her out of here."

Someone grabbed her by the arm and she felt herself moving but she couldn't tear her gaze from the body. "No," she managed, fighting them off.

"Dana, it's okay." Ruben tried to pull her against his chest.

"I know her." She was shaking now, and her knees had locked to keep her upright. "I know that woman."

"You know Annie?"

"Annie?” said a disembodied voice. “I thought her name was Samantha.”

Chapter Two

They sat in a small windowless office in the basement, each with a half-drunk cup of water, silent under the heavy churn of the air conditioning unit. The noise vibrated Scully's bones and she longed for the peace and quiet of her previous basement, where the thick concrete walls generally kept the summer heat at bay. The scar in her neck itched, the way it always did when she was nervous; or maybe it burned, like a homing device, because she surely was back home again, despite being two thousand miles away from the place where she had started.

Ruben hadn't really looked at her since they'd entered the room, content instead to destroy the waxy rim of his paper cup using one stubby fingernail. "So," he said finally, "what was that all about back there? Are you going to tell me how you knew Annie?"

Here, away from the body, she could almost make it not true. The woman's face looked like hamburger meat, almost unrecognizable. It had been more than four years since that terrible night on the bridge. The woman could be anyone, except of course, for the name. Scully swallowed with difficulty. "They said her name was Samantha."

"Samantha was her first name, but growing up, she liked to be called by her middle name, Ann. You still haven't answered my question."

"I was once on a case that involved a woman who looked very much like her, a woman who also called herself Samantha."

"What case? When? You're saying Annie's been in trouble before?"

Scully shook her head. "The resemblance is striking but it's not...it can’t be the same person."

"How can you be sure?"

"The other woman died, Ruben. She...drowned." And then melted. Scully cast a look at the door and wondered if she should warn the men on the other side that their victim might start emitting a noxious green gas at any moment.

The blood was real, she told herself. You saw it. This is not the same thing. But Mulder's voice, after all this time, rang clear in her head: clones, Scully, there were at least five of them, maybe more. The one in the river wasn't her, but somewhere there's got to be the original. She cleared her throat, ignoring her hot cheeks and the buzzing in her ears. She forced herself to say the words that had gotten her into so much trouble before. "Tell me more about your sister."

"I don't really know where to begin. She was already living with the Ceteras when I got there and they adopted us both about a year later. She used to hang off my top bunk bed like it was a jungle gym but I let her sleep up there anyway because she sometimes had nightmares. She didn't like to talk about her first home and our Mom said it was because she'd been abused there. She said that's why we should call her Annie, like she asked, because she was making a new life for herself and a fresh start called for a new name." His face crumpled and he sniffed hard to control himself. "You think maybe she had a sister?" he asked. "Possibly a twin, even, and that's the woman from your previous case?"

Scully was saved from answering by the reappearance of Detective Holloway. "Sorry to interrupt you folks but I have some questions I need to ask Mr. Cetera." Ruben crushed the remnants of his paper cup with one hand and made an easy toss into a dented metal wastebasket.

"I'll answer your questions but I don't know how much help I can be. I haven't talked to her in almost three years now."

"You mind if I ask why that is?"

"We were already busy, you know, leading separate lives – me in Salt Lake City, and her with her family in L.A.. But we talked on the phone sometimes, and she’d send me pictures of her kids, that sort of thing. Then one day she called up and asked for my help. She wanted to find her first family, the ones who had abused her and landed in her foster care to begin with. I said there was no way I was going to help her go back down that path. Do you know how many kids get adopted at our age? Two preteens with a ton of baggage? The odds are less than one in a hundred. We had two parents who loved us, and she wanted to throw that back in their faces." His face flushed. Scully could see how angry he was about this imagined betrayal even now, and Holloway didn't miss it either.

"I see," he said, making a couple of notes. "And do you know if her search was successful?"

"Last I heard, it wasn't, at least that's what she told our parents. But I didn't ask for regular updates on that particular topic. Why? Do you think she found them and that's who did this to her?"

"I've no reason to believe so at the moment. What can you tell me about her ex-husband?"

"They split last year. Jack always seemed like a nice guy to me, though I gather from my parents that he was kind of a dick to Annie during the divorce. He's a fibbie, like Dana here, but I suppose you know that already."

Holloway raised bushy eyebrows at her. "You're FBI?"

"Uh, yes. Forensic pathology."

"And you say you knew the victim?"

Scully hesitated and smoothed a non-existent wrinkle from her pants. "No, I was mistaken," she said. "She strongly resembles a woman I knew back when I worked in Washington, but that woman is deceased."

He waited a beat, his pen poised on the pad. "I can see why you were startled then. Listen, Agent Scully, would you mind giving me some time to talk with Mr. Cetera alone?"

Scully met his gaze and he gave her a slight nod, almost like a secret signal between two law enforcement officers. I’ll be the good cop this time.

She wasn't sure if she was being removed due to her personal connection with Ruben or her professional connection to the dead woman's husband, but she wanted to try to get another look at the body anyway. "I'll just be outside," she said, laying a hand on Ruben's arm. He patted her distractedly, as his attention was still focused on Holloway.

"Are you looking at Jack for this? Is that why he's not here?"

"We've spoken to him and he's on his way," was the last thing Scully heard as she closed the door on her way out.

It had been years since she'd pushed her way into a morgue uninvited and perhaps she was a bit rusty. The ME, a heavyset man wearing a plastic apron and goggles, looked up in alarm the second she stepped through the doors. "You can't be in here," he told her.

She saw the body had been cleaned for autopsy. "I'm a pathologist with the FBI," she said as she took out her identification. The ME didn't so much as glance at it.

"I don't care if you're J. Edgar himself dressed in drag," he said. "Get the hell out of here."

So Scully was sitting on a bench in the hallway when a tall man came crashing through the doors. He wore sunglasses and expensive looking clothes that reeked of cigarette smoke. "Who are you?" he demanded when he saw her.

"Special Agent Dana Scully," she said, trying her identification again.

He removed the sunglasses and stepped closer, towering over her. It was then she noticed his holster. "FBI? Who sent you?" She got up and around him to reclaim her personal space.

"No one sent me. You are?"

He flashed his own ID. "Jack Milgram, LA Bureau. They told me to talk to a Detective Holloway about my wife. She was brought here sometime last night."

"Your wife," Scully repeated, though she could guess already who he was.

"Samantha Milgram. Is she here? I want to see her."

"I wouldn't..."

But he was already charging through the doors. "Hey!" She heard the ME yell and figured she'd take advantage of the confusion to steal another look.

"This isn't a sideshow and I ain't selling tickets. I'm telling you like I told her -- get the hell out of here."

"That's my wife." Jack Milgram had stopped short in the middle of the room, sunglasses still dangling from one hand.

"Oh, hey, I'm sorry," the ME said, his demeanor softening somewhat. "But you still can't be here right now."

"He's right, Agent Milgram," Scully said. "You don't want to see this."

A bitter divorce, an apparent hot temper - she was fairly certain Milgram would be needing a good alibi. "Who the hell are you people to tell me what I want? This is the mother of my children, for Christ's sake, and someone has slaughtered her like a common animal. I damn sure need some answers."

"You'll get your answers," the ME told him. "But not until I do my work and that isn't happening until you get the heck out of here."

Milgram turned and looked her up and down. "You look like you've been around the block a few times. What's your beat at the Bureau?"

"Forensic pathology."

"Perfect." He waved his sunglasses at her. "I'll go, but she's staying."

"The hell she is."

"I want someone from the agency at least observing this autopsy. No offense, Doctor, I'm sure you're perfectly skilled, but she's my wife and I'm calling the shots."

"You've got no authority here."

"Don't worry, I can get it." He was already on his cell phone. "Don't you let her body out of your sight," he said to Scully. "Tony, it's Milgram. I need your help with something."

"Your friend is charming," the ME said as he went to get a fresh pair of gloves.

"We’re not friends. I've known him for all of five minutes." He gave her a skeptical look from the far side of the body.

"You're really a forensic pathologist?"

"Trained at Quantico."

"With Gil Riley?"

"The very same."

"Gil's pretty sharp," he replied grudgingly. "If you talk to him, tell him Bob Bartleby said hi, ok? I guess it can't hurt to let you watch, but just stay out of the way."

Scully put on a gown, goggles and gloves and took her place silently. Up close, there was no denying it. This was the same face from the night at the bridge. She recalled Mulder's words as they had pulled the previous Samantha from the cold Potomac waters: "I think she's still alive."

"The deceased has been identified as Samantha Milgram, age 36 years old. Height is five foot five, weight at one hundred and twenty-five pounds." Scully walked to the end of the body to view it from a new angle. Outside of the violent beating, there was nothing out of the ordinary. She had contusions on both forearms, probably from trying to defend herself from the attacker. But there was nothing to suggest she was a clone. Of course, since cloned humans didn't actually exist to her knowledge, there was nothing in the medical literature about how to spot one. She leaned down to study the part of the face that was still there. Samantha Milgram had remarkably clear skin, with very little sun damage. That could indicate good genes or a reduced period of exposure.

"Excuse me," Bartleby said pointedly, and she stood aside. "Cause of death is blunt force trauma to the head, resulting in a left orbital fracture and three separate skull fractures."

"Any idea about the weapon?" Scully asked.

"Something heavy, swung with a lot of force. I haven't pulled any splinters out of her hair so I would guess we're not looking at a wooden weapon. Maybe a pipe or an aluminum bat, something of that nature. I'm sure you're used to seeing more exotic homicides given your work with the Bureau."

She'd frozen everything, left her old life just like that, with burns on her face and a dim memory of Mulder behind a wall of ice yelling her name. Only in her dreams did she thaw, painful crystals dissolving at last as she remembered the warmth of his palm against her face.

Life on the X-files had brought a mutant a minute, but it turned out that when you weren't looking for it, you didn't see monster men come crawling out of the sewers or regrow heads or disappear into a pile of ash on the carpet. Dana Scully, M.D., looked at the body before her and saw a grisly but ordinary murder. She could walk away and let the local boys clean up after this one.

But Special Agent Scully was already talking, the script familiar but the words distasteful. "We should scan the body for imbedded metal."

Bartleby widened his eyes behind the thick goggles. "There's no evidence of a gunshot here."

"I'm not suggesting she's been shot. I think you should check both the nasal pharyngeal passages and the base of her neck for a computer chip."

"Look, I don't know what sort of game you're playing here..."

"Fine, I can do it myself." She moved to ready the X-ray, but he grabbed her arm.

"The hell you will. You're just an observer here, remember? I can still have you tossed out on your keister, FBI or no FBI. You're in my house now and I make the rules."

"X-ray the body." She met and held his gaze, and something he saw in her eyes made him let her go.

"It will just take a second," she said. "I'm sure Agent Milgram would appreciate your cooperation."

He threw up his hands in defeat. "Fine. You want an X-ray? We can check out all her fillings."

He performed the test and together they studied the film. Samantha Milgram had two fillings in her back molars and a small, oblong piece of metal lodged in her left sinus cavity. Bartleby's face was ashen in the eerie white light. "Who the hell are you again?"

"Do me a favor," she said. "Don't tell anyone about this. Not Detective Holloway, not even Agent Milgram."

"What is this thing? You said it was a computer chip? Should I remove it?"

"Leave it for now," she said, already walking away. "I'll be back."

"Hey! Hey, you can't just leave now!"

She took out her cell phone and went back to the quiet hallway, where she leaned against the cold wall and took several deep breaths. Ruben said there was nothing to be gained from mucking around in your past, but hers was rising up to meet her like quicksand. She braced herself and dialed the number.

"Mom," she said with relief when the call rang through. "It's me."

"Dana!" Maggie Scully sounded both pleased and surprised to hear from her. "How are you?"

Scully halted, momentarily thrown off her game. When had her mother stopped asking, "Is everything all right?" at the start of every phone call. "Mom, I need you to do me a favor. You remember that letter I gave you? I need you to send to me right away, same day express mail if possible." She checked her watch and saw it was still only nine-thirty in the morning back east. There was a long pause on the other end.

"You said not to give it back to you."

"That was before. I need it now. I need you to have it sent to the Las Vegas Coroner's office."

"Las Vegas? Dana, what's going on? Are you all right?"

"I'm fine, Mom. I just need you to send the letter."

"The one from Fox Mulder." As if there could ever be another.

Scully waited a beat, felt the world slipping away. "Yes," she said as she eyed the doors to the morgue. "The one from Mulder."

***

In his short-sleeved, button-down and khaki shorts, Scotty Griffith looked more like a tourist than a local, but that suited him just fine as he mixed among the scattered afternoon crowd at the MGM Grand. The ostentatious adult funhouses all strove to be bigger and brighter on the outside, but down in the belly they were all alike: dark carpeting, no windows, and a maze of one-armed bandits with the same electronic siren call. The law now demanded the casinos provide smoke-free rooms, but the stale smell of years gone by clung to every draped corner. Two years of working with Dot had taught him to keep his eyes open, so he checked out every face as he walked by; a pair of old ladies in velvet track suits gossiped as they worked the video poker; a balding man with a faded Lakers T-shirt cussed out the dollar slots. Scott saw college kids, tourists from the deep South - "honey, yew've got to come try this mahchine; it's based on Gilligan's Island!" - and a bride and groom ignoring each other in favor of a Keno game.

No one matched the photo in his pocket. "Excuse me," he said as he stopped a waitress carrying a tray of empty glasses. "Have you seen this woman in here at all?"

"Nope, sorry," she said after barely a glance. "Lost your girlfriend, did ya?"

"Something like that. Thanks." He'd pulled the picture in and out so many times it was starting to look a little worn around the edges. Dot had said it was possible this lady didn't want to be found, and so far, his investigation was backing that up.

He went to the front desk and was glad to see Marty Warren was working. "Go away, we don't want any," Marty said without looking up, but he was smiling. Scotty leaned over the counter like an overgrown kid.

"Marty, how's it going?" "Man, you would not believe what happened ot me last night. I was playing this fish and he's on full tilt, right? Bet a pair of fives with a nine kicker, I shit you not. So next hand I draw a big slick and damned if the same dude isn't re-raising me like he's sitting on the rainbow and its pot of gold. I go all in and the asshole has a backdoor straight."

"Better to be lucky than good," Scotty said.

"What the shit you know about it? You ain't either. Hey, you up for a game tomorrow night? One of our regulars is out-of-town courtesy of the LVPD."

"No, thanks. I'm working a case."

"Figured as much. Who's shagging who now?"

"This woman is missing," Scotty said, offering up the picture. "Her name is Stephanie Jameson and I'm trying to find out if she stayed here."

"She don't look familiar to me, but let me check with the computer." He hit a few keys and shook his head.

"No, man, I'm sorry. We've got no Jamesons here now or in the last week."

"Thanks for trying. Keep your eyes and ears out, huh? I've got a bad feeling about this one."

"Will do, Scotty." Outside, the sun was frying the strip into a shimmering mirage, heat radiating back off the concrete and drying everyone's eyeballs. The local thermometer threatened to break one hundred and fifteen today. Scotty paused to put on his sunglasses, not eager to leave the cool mister that sprayed the valets and bellhops every few seconds.

"Feels like you're in a goddamn hot house, don't it?" The doorman tugged at the collar of his shirt. "I don't care how dry they say the heat is. Once you get over one-ten, you might as well be cooking from the inside out."

"Don't I know it," Scotty said. "I've been to seven hotels today and each one it's harder to leave the air conditioning behind."

"Seven hotels? You must be really particular about your room."

"No, I'm a PI. I'm looking for this woman. You haven't seen her by any chance? We got a lead she might be checked in to one of the strip hotels."

The doorman took a long look at the picture. "You know, she looks real familiar. I know I've seen her someplace."

"Do you remember where? Or when?"

"It wasn't too recent. I don't think she was a guest here..." He stopped and grinned. "Oh, yeah, I got her now. I didn't recognize her with her clothes on. She's a stripper. Works out of the Foxy Lady, I'm pretty sure."

***

They lay fully clothed on top of the bedspread, curtains drawn and one small lamp illuminated. "It's not even six yet," Ruben said. "I shouldn't be this tired."

"You didn't get much sleep last night," Scully reminded him. "And it's been a long day."

"June twenty-eighth," he mused. "Not far from the longest day of the year. They're not even sure yet which day she died, whether it was early yesterday or late the day before. What do you put on the headstone in cases like that?" Scully had no answer.

"Have you called your parents yet?"

"No, I had better do that. I just can't imagine how to tell them. They used to wait up for us when we were teenagers. The car would pull up in the drive and their bedroom light would go out. Kids were home, time to get some sleep. My father pretty much yawned through Annie's junior year of high school. This is just going to kill them."

She reached for his hand and squeezed it. "I'm sorry." It was an apology in advance, for what she had to do.

"I'm glad you're here," he told her with a half-smile. "I'm glad Jack had you watch the autopsy to make sure nothing was overlooked. Thank you for doing that."

She withdrew her hand. "You don't need to thank me."

"At least you can be of use here. Holloway must have asked me a couple of hundred questions and I couldn't answer half of them. We both know how this works, Dana. If someone got close enough to do that to Annie, it was personal. She probably knew the guy. The cops want to know as much as possible about her life and all I can tell them is what she was doing three years ago. If I'd stayed in touch more..."

"Don't. You can't blame yourself."

"Absent any evidence to the contrary, I certainly can. At best, I'm guilty of negligence. I walked away from her at time she could have used my support."

"Sometimes you have to walk away."

"That's bullshit. I am not going to be one of those guys who feeds himself a load of crap excuses. I'm going to face what I've done and try to make it up to her the only way I can, by helping catch the animal who did this to her." He rolled off the bed and started unbuttoning his shirt with quick, angry motions. "I'm going to take a shower and then...call my folks, I guess. I wish there were some way to tell them in person, but I can't ask them to get on a plane, knowing there is terrible news at the other end and not knowing what it is. Maybe if I stand under the hot water long enough, the right words will come to me."

He closed the bathroom door behind him with a quiet click, and Scully lay alone in the empty room. It was nicer than any of the ones she ever stayed at with Mulder, with soft sheets, heavy drapes, and a working thermostat. Unbidden, came a memory from their first year together, the early days where they always seemed to be sharing a too-small umbrella. He'd smelled like wet cotton and sun-flower seed salt, towering over her in his great black coat. One day he'd pushed her too far and they'd eaten dinner in their separate gray motel rooms. Then after dark, just as she'd turned out the light, came the knock on their shared wall: shave-and-a- hair-cut. That he'd been there, watching light from under her door, made her smile. She'd answered back: two bits.

The letter was in her suitcase now, inside a Fed Ex envelope from her mother. Scully retrieved it with shaking hands and paused to look at the closed bathroom door where Ruben had gone. The sound of the rushing shower gave her cover as she tore open the weak cardboard package. Attached was a slip of paper with the letterhead: from the desk of Margaret Scully. "Be sure you really want this. Some doors, once opened, cannot be shut again. Love, Mom."

Underneath was a sealed white envelope with no writing on the outside. He hadn't even given it to her in person. Instead, she'd found it slipped under her front door the morning of her departure. Fox Mulder was not one for drawn-out good- byes. She'd looked for him at the airport, waited for her phone to ring; for months she'd held her breath at every sound outside her apartment, certain he'd come to object, but he never had. Her mother probably thought she'd been dying for the letter all this time. In truth, she hadn't wanted to know, hadn't wanted to give him the last word. She didn't need to read the letter; she could get what she needed without knowing the contents. But once it was in her hands...

She caught her breath at the familiar script and nearly fumbled the pages away. There was no salutation, just a slim piece of paper taped to the top with the message: Only half of what you know is true.

Then Mulder's handwriting continued: I got this in a fortune cookie the day before you were assigned to work with me. I didn't even realize I'd kept it until about six months later, when I found it with a Wintergreen Lifesaver at the bottom of my coat pocket. I thought it was crap, and particularly useless crap, because what is the point in knowing that half of your knowledge is wrong if you don't know which half? Then you came along and your assessment seemed much lower. If you believed 10 percent of what I said, we were having a good day. So I kept saving it because I thought it was funny. It took years of arguing, but I want you to know I finally understand the point. You don't have to know which half is right -- the point is to question everything. There was a time when I didn't think I could do this job with you at my side. Then quickly there was a time when I thought the opposite. Now I don't know what to think, but maybe, at last, I can finally accept that as a good thing. M.

She swiped at the tears in her eyes and shoved the letter back in her bag. The envelope she took with her. She paused to write a vague note to Ruben and drove their rental car to the morgue. As she had imagined, Bartleby was still there.

"I need another favor," she said.

"Not until I get some answers."

"That's what I'm trying to attain." She handed him the envelope. "I need to test the DNA on this against Samantha Milgram's, and I need it in a hurry."

"That's an expensive proposition."

"It's important, and I'd prefer not to go through the Bureau on this."

"If I do this for you, I'm going to need some answers."

She folded her arms. "Such as?"

"Such as what the hell is with that metal implant and how did you know to even look for it?"

"I've seen similar cases before. As to the implant's purpose, I can only speculate. Some think it's a tracking device. Others suggest it's involved in mind control."

"Mind control? Are you shitting me?"

"And you might want to consider moving Samantha Milgram to an unmarked location."

"Why would I want to do that?" "Because the people who put that implant there just might want it back. Run the test, and put a rush on it." God help her if there wasn't a match. God help them all if there was.

Chapter Three

In a town famous for oddities, they were still a most unlikely party of three: the ex-husband, the ex-brother, and Scully, who had never met the dead woman but perhaps knew more about her than either of the two men. Scully and Jack Milgram each had black coffee, mostly untouched, while Ruben's emptied packets of cream and sugar littered the table in front of them. Ruben liked coffee only in theory, Scully had said more than once. The closer it got to coffee ice cream, the happier he was; Scully often teased that he should just order the mocha latte full fat whipped cream with sprinkles girly drink since that's what he really wanted anyway. Ruben always retorted that real men didn't order sprinkles on their coffee.

"I did some checking on my own," Milgram said, "and they had another murder last month that showed a number of similarities. A woman about Sam's age, alone in her motel room, strangled not beaten, with nothing else disturbed and no signs of struggle or forced entry. The case is cold already but this might get it back on the fire. I'm going to push for Bureau involvement and see if I can't get things moving."

"I don't understand what she was doing here in the first place," Ruben said.

"Yeah, well, she hadn't been herself in some time. She used to be the perfect mom. The kids were clean, well-dressed, and happy. She lived for them. Then she took up with that shrink, and her behavior became erratic. Missed appointments. Drinking wine with dinner and then finishing the bottle afterward, you know what I mean? Then a few months ago they start coming back to me wearing the same clothes I sent them off in. I ask them, 'how's your mom?' and they make excuses for her. She's busy, she's tired. I showed up there once to pick them up and they were parked in front of the TV, watching The Godfather of all things, and Samantha was nowhere to be found. She arrived ten minutes later saying she just had to run to the store but she'd told a neighbor to look in on them."

"She's a single mom now," Ruben said. "Things maybe aren't so easy for her. If you hadn't have left..."

"She didn't have any groceries with her," Milgram interrupted. "If she went to the store, where were the damned groceries?"

"That's why you were trying to take the kids from her? Over some missing groceries?"

"Ruben," Scully said, laying a hand on his arm. He shook her off.

"No, my parents told me the whole story. He's the one who was cheating. He's the one who ran out on her, and then he wanted the kids too. No wonder she was going out of her mind."

"You don't know what you're talking about. Your parents heard only what Sam wanted to tell them, and she was probably feeding them the same line of bull I was getting." He stood abruptly, chair skidding over the faux tile floor. "Excuse me, Agent Scully, but I need some air." He had his cigarettes out before he'd cleared the door, and she watched as he paced and smoked along the outside of the storefront.

Ruben sat back, nearly upending their table, and ran both hands through his hair. "Annie loved those kids, Dana. She never would have done anything to hurt them, and it would have killed her if Jack took them away for good. This person that Jack is describing, that wasn’t Annie."

She thought of waking up in a burn unit with singed eyebrows and no memory of the people who had gone up in flames around her. "You said yourself you hadn't talked to her in a while," she said to Ruben. "It's possible she was going through something you didn't understand."

"No. No, I won't believe that. You didn't know her. She would never hurt her kids."

Her cell phone rang and when she saw the ID read LV Coroner, she turned her back to Ruben to answer it. "This is Scully."

"Agent Scully, this is Dr. Bartleby. I have the results of the PCR test you requested. Samples show twenty-seven percent of alleles in common."

"Wait, did you say a twenty-seven percent match?"

"I ran it twice. Then I ran them both through CODIS and came up empty. Now do you want to tell me what the hell is going on here?"

"I will," she said. "But there is someone else I have to tell first."

*******

Mulder clicked through the computerized file on Michael Caufield, forcing himself to pay attention. This was his job now, reading other people's field reports to determine which of these yahoos might pose a risk to national security. Most of the information was collected by junior agents, but frankly, he thought they got the better end of the deal. At least they got to leave the building on occasion. His cell phone rang from inside the jacket he had draped over the back of his chair. He removed it, only to fumble when he saw the glowing little box on the front read D. Scully. The phone hit the floor and spun off under his desk.

"Shit," Mulder muttered as it continued to ring. He flailed around with one arm until he made contact, and his answer was breathless, "Hello?"

"Mulder?" She sounded unsure, despite the fact that she had called him.

"Uh, yeah," he replied as he sank back down into his chair. He managed to upend a container of pencils in the process.

"It's me. I mean, it's Dana Scully. Is this a bad time?"

"No, no, of course not." He felt out-of-time, actually, floating and strange. His mouth went dry and his heart hammered against his breastbone. "What, uh, what's up, Scully?"

"You changed your phone number. I had to go through the Bureau to get the new one."

"You always did know how to find me."

There was a long beat of silence on her end, during which he only heard the pounding of his heart. "Mulder,” she said finally, “I don't know quite how to say this. I'm in Las Vegas and there's a case here that I'm afraid may involve you."

"An X-file?"

"I'm not entirely sure yet. A woman has been murdered but the cause of death looks straightforward at the moment. However, I have my suspicions about whether that will hold up with closer examination."

"Well, give me the details. Maybe I can help."

"I'd rather not talk on the phone."

"You want me to get a secure line?"

"No." She hesitated for what seemed like a million years. "I think you should come out here, Mulder."

"Come...to you?"

"I wouldn't ask if I didn't think it was important."

"No, I know. It's just that, well, I don't know if you ever heard but I'm not actually on the X-files."

"Oh?" So many layers in one small word. Go ahead, he thought, let me have it. But instead she said, "It doesn't matter. Your interest in this case is potentially more personal than professional anyway."

"Personal? And you can't tell me anything more? I don't hear from you in two years, and then all of a sudden you ask me to jump on a plane, no questions asked."

"The fact that it's been two years and I am the one making this phone call should tell you how important this is."

"Can I get a hint at least? This dead woman, does she have a name?"

There was a long pause on the other end. "She's identified as Samantha Milgram."

"Her name is Samantha?"

"Just get here when you can, okay? I'll explain everything then."

He sat back in his chair, dazed. "All right, I'll be there as soon as I can."

They never said good-bye. Mulder was already in motion, shutting down his computer with one hand as he grabbed his suit coat with the other. Diana and Spender were coming in the main doors, back from whatever adventure did not include him, and Diana stopped him with a touch on the arm. "You look like you're in a hurry."

"I'm going out of town," he said as he pulled free. Spender watched the whole interaction with bored eyes.

"Where?" she asked. "Do you have some kind of assignment?"

"Vegas. It's not for work."

"Don't tell me you've taken up gambling."

He thought of how many Samanthas he had chased in his lifetime and considered the long odds that this one would come up lucky. "Something like that."

She grabbed hold of him again. "Well, if you wait a bit, maybe I can arrange to go with you. I have a little vacation time saved up."

"No." He broke her grasp and headed for the door. "This is something I need to do alone."

******

Dot knew several of the girls working out of the Foxy Lady so odds were good she'd find a familiar face even at six in the evening. She should be home putting dinner on the table but when Scotty said their missing rich woman had a job stripping in the sleaziest joint in town, well, Dot had to see that for herself.

The Foxy Lady hadn't changed since the eighties, with its blue lights, brass bars and black vinyl seating. It was perpetually dark in the windowless lounge where a scattered group of men watched Marcy Cravitz play peek-a-boo with her underwear. Dot took a seat at the bar and placed a twenty where Marcy could see it. Sure enough, the girl came dancing her way. "Hey, Dot haven't seen you around here in a while."

"No offense, but I already got what you're selling." Marcy leaned down to retrieve the twenty, showing off her big tits and her platinum wig. Dot tried not to notice the needle marks on the girl's arm.

"How's Benji?"

"He's good. He took a wipeout on his bike last month and broke his arm. He's driving me crazy about when the cast comes off."

"Poor baby!" She raised a leg and gave Dot a money shot she hadn't really needed.

The bald fat man from the corner looked up from his cigarette and sports page. "Hey, I don't pay you for talking!"

Marcy gave a shrug, what can you do, but Dot flashed her another twenty. "I could use your help. You on break any time soon?"

The girl cast an eye toward the fat man. "He's supposed to let me off at six-thirty when Kim gets in, but she's been showing up late."

"I can hang around." Forty for Marcy plus the overtime she'd owe the sitter. Good thing the man with the fancy car paid well. "Meet me at the McDonald's down the street."

Benji might forgive her if she showed up with a happy meal. McDonald's made rotten coffee but she needed a reason to take up space in the corner booth. She washed it down with an apple pie that had been nuked nearly to death. Marcy didn't show until nearly seven. The wig was gone, revealing her naturally stringy brown hair, but the thick makeup remained.

"You want anything to eat?" Dot asked her as she slid into the booth.

"Here? No way. Fat and calories in this stuff is like poison."

This time Dot did look pointedly at the needle marks.

"If you say so."

"Don't you start with me too."

"I didn't say anything. Look, I need to know if you recognize this woman. We heard she might be working at the Foxy Lady. Have you seen her before?"

Marcy barely needed a glance. "Cheryl? Yeah, I've seen her. She works weekends sometimes. Not real friendly. Why, what's she in some kind of trouble?"

"You tell me. When's the last time you saw her?"

"God, I don't know. Couple of weeks ago, I guess. Like I said, we're real close. She's kind of a tight-ass, acts like she's better than the rest of us. What’s she to you?"

"A man came into my office saying he was her husband and he's looking for her."

"Husband? She never said anything about being married. I didn't see no wedding ring."

"He says her name is Stephanie Jameson. Does that name sound familiar?"

"Nah, I never heard it before. A husband, seriously? I can't imagine being married and still working in that dump. You get a man to get out, you know what I'm saying? What's he like?"

"Older guy, well-dressed, about six feet tall. Likes his cigarettes."

"A smoker? No kidding. Funny you should say that. There was a guy who used to come in and watch Cheryl dance. Kind of creepy if you ask me, but he seemed real into her. I never saw the guy without a cigarette. The other girls and I used to call him Old Smokey. Cheryl didn't seem to mind him, though. In fact, Shaniqua told me she saw them talking in the back alley one night. Said Old Smokey seemed to be trying to close the deal."

So the missing wife story was a line of bull, but that didn't explain the picture of the woman with expensive pearls and a nice sweater set. From the sound of things, Old Smokey had a pretty good idea of where to look for Stephanie Jameson, but for some reason hadn't pointed her in the right direction. Or then again maybe he had. He was paying her too much money for it to be a wild goose chase, so wherever this woman was, she had to be long gone from the Foxy Lady.

"If she married that guy, good luck to her," Marcy said with a shudder. "I still say there are easier ways to earn a quick buck."

******

On the plane, Mulder sat in the back and waited for takeoff. The other passengers were still boarding, jostling each other with overstuffed luggage. He took out his phone and called up her name again just to make sure it was true. Scully had left quickly for Utah, for which he was grateful, but the traces she left behind disappeared much more slowly. He'd had her voice on his answering machine for three months before he'd accidentally deleted it. Handwritten Post-It notes – Mulder, sign this before Skinner has us banished to a sub-basement office – cropped up among his files.

That first winter, Diana had picked at the arm of his black wool coat. "You have a bit of lint," she'd said, and he'd turned just in time to watch a red strand of hair sail into the breeze. And now, suddenly, here she was again, D. Scully, 555-201- 5973.

He shut his eyes and probed for the memory. It was waiting, loose and worn, like a much-loved novel. No matter how many times he replayed it, the ending was always the same...

He is back home with his lonely furniture and a wizened tomato slowly decaying in the fridge. It's so hot the air forgets to move. His T-shirt sticks like a second skin, and it doesn't seem possible that he nearly froze to death on the far end of the world only a few weeks earlier, when Scully had saved him after he had rescued her. Or maybe it was the other way around; he is never sure where to start the running tab.

They live in a semi-permanent state of déjà vu; stakeouts and small towns, all ordinary except for the man-beast-deadly-virus-shape-shifting alien treachery taking place in the background. Villains perish as evidence disappears, and Mulder and Scully always end up right where they started, their case solved but nothing explained. So he's not surprised to see her come walking right out of his memory, with the same untucked shirt and deadened look in her eyes. Only this time he has no one to blame but himself.

"The door was open," she says, a hint of disapproval in her voice, as if a single locked door made a damn bit of difference.

"The A/C is out and I'm trying to get a breeze," he answers with a gesture toward the open windows, where the limp curtains made mockery of his plans. "Hottest day of the year so far and of course this building has no air conditioning. This place is a dump, Scully. I should move."

She chuffs a dark laugh because she knows he never will. He is pathologically unable to move on, even when he knows he should. She's still standing near the door, poised for flight, and a trickle of sweat runs down the back of his neck. "Mulder, I..."

He sits up abruptly to cut her off. He stopped her from leaving once, and it's just possible fate will intervene again. "I have cold beer in the kitchen. You want a beer, Scully?"

If she's drinking, she can't say the words. She closes her mouth and then shrugs. "Why the hell not?"

She slips out of her shoes, becoming one Scully smaller, and follows him silently to the kitchen. The lights are off to keep the heat down and he decides to leave them that way. He uses the counter edge to pop open her beer, the lid skittering into his microwave and ricocheting to the floor. When Scully doesn't pick it up, he knows he is in trouble.

Her mind is already elsewhere, a place he cannot follow. He stoops to retrieve the cap and then presses the jagged teeth into the soft flesh of his thumb. "Where were you today?" she asks around a swallow of beer. "You disappeared on me."

This is almost funny, coming from her, the woman who has several times vanished on him like the magician's rabbit; he knows if they go on like this one day he will not be able to abra-cadabra her back into existence again. "Baseball," he tells her, because it's not a lie. "Yankees- Orioles. The guys bought tickets a few weeks ago to try to cheer me up."

"I thought you looked as though you'd gotten some sun."

He touches the rim of his pinkened ear. In the dark, he can't see the freezer burns that still marked her face. "The Yanks won, seven to two. Seven, coincidentally, is also the number of hotdogs that Frohike ate."

"You missed an interesting staff meeting, interesting enough that I suspect you knew the agenda ahead of time." The light streaming in street lamp catches part of her hair, a flash of red in his otherwise black-and-white kitchen. "I don't think this was so much a jaunt to the ballpark as a Fox Mulder staged protest. You must have known this was coming but you never said a word. Were you ever going to tell me?"

She sounds defeated, not angry. "I just found out for sure this morning."

"From Diana."

He hesitates to confirm, but eventually nods. "They told her she would be getting the X-files appointment, so she gave me a courtesy call."

"How nice of her. Did she also tell you the division has been structured so that it falls under the direction of Alvin Kersh now? Skinner's out."

"What?"

"Ah, so she didn't tell you everything. Apparently someone upstairs was not happy with the amount of latitude granted us under Skinner, and they believe Kersh will run a tighter ship. They are keeping two agents within the division, however, although I'm quite sure you know that part."

He flushes and is glad for the cover of darkness. "Diana did mention."

"The short list includes both you and Jeffrey Spender. You're an obvious choice, of course, but I couldn't figure how Spender merited inclusion given his meager experience and relative lack of interest in the subject matter. I wondered if maybe he was Kersh's nominee, or perhaps a choice dictated from on-high. Imagine my surprise when I talked to Skinner after the meeting."

"Scully, listen..."

She raises her voice, cutting him off. "Skinner said the list was your idea. You specifically recommended for Spender and against me. Skinner was guessing that Spender is just a straw man to make sure you get the assignment. Is that why you left me off, Mulder? Afraid of a little competition? Only one agent can win the X-files raffle and it had better be you, is that it?"

"I did it for your own good."

"Pardon me if I don't recall putting you in charge of my life."

He’s not in charge, not at all, not of anything, ever. Everything always shattered to pieces around him and then he scrabbled in the dirt for the scraps. “You made it pretty clear you were willing to risk your life, but that doesn't mean I have to let you. I don't want to stand around and watch you die."

"Then maybe your name is the one that should be left off the list. You don't get to make my career decisions for me, Mulder. You have no right."

At his age, Mulder's father had two kids, two houses, a wife and a high-powered job. Mulder has the X-files and Scully. To keep one he has to lose the other and there is only one choice he can make.

"There is no guarantee I'll get the slot," he says, "and then maintaining the work gets seriously complicated. No budget, no protection from Skinner, no following whatever cases we want on FBI time. We'd be just shy of committing treason again."

"We've done it before."

"And remember what happened then." He still has nightmares about the cable car ride up Skyland Mountain, can feel the paint chipping away under his nails as he struggled to hold on. "I won't go down that road again, Scully. I can't."

"You're saying I'm a liability to you. Thanks very much. What happened to 'Scully, I can't do this job without you?' You have her now so that makes me expendable?"

An ache starts in his throat, forcing him to swallow several times. "No, of course not."

"I felt like a fool at that meeting, Mulder. I was practically fired in public view and to find out you're the one behind it all... You stabbed me in the back today and the worst part is you still think you did me a favor."

She turns and stalks out, leaving him to scramble after her. "Scully, wait."

"Go to hell." She is shoving her feet back into her shoes.

"You don't understand." He tries to grab her but she breaks free and starts for the door.

“I understand perfectly! You screwed me to get what you want. Men do it to women all the time, but I never expected you to do it to me." She opens the door but he reaches over her head to slam it shut again, leaving her trapped, tense and angry. "Let me go."

"Listen to me." He has to say it to the top of her head. She will not turn around. "I am sorry it had to be this way. I shouldn't have let you walk into that meeting unprepared, but I am not sorry for protecting you. You don't have the sense to get out when the getting's good, so yeah, I am going to go ahead and make that decision for you."

"God, you are so damned arrogant sometimes! Why is my life so much more precious than yours?" She wiggles around to look him in the eye. "The risk is okay for you but not for me?"

"I'm not the one they've abducted! Not once, but twice. The cancer, the chip in your neck, now this latest adventure in Antarctica ­– how many chances do you want to give them? Don't you ever just want to say 'enough'?"

Her eyes well up. "Of course, yes. A thousand times. But Mulder, I wanted to be the one to say it."

He touches her cheek below the fiery red marks. "The thing is, Scully, I knew you never would."

She leaves without a word, warm skin slipping away from his hand, and he doesn't chase this time, doesn't watch; instead, he leans his head against the door and listens to the sound of her footsteps grow quieter with the distance.

"Sir, you need to turn that off now," said the flight attendant, rousing him from the past. He closed his phone and tucked it into his shirt pocket, where it sat warm against his heart.

****

She found Ruben on their tiny balcony with the warm breeze in his face and a scotch on the rocks slowly melting its glass. He was leaning over the edge, staring out at the neon jungle, and did not seem to hear her approach. "Mind if I join you?" she asked, and he startled, the ice clinking against his glass.

"You? Anytime." He extended his arm and she settled into his side. The sun had set long ago but it was still very hot, too hot for snuggling, so she pulled back after a moment. Mulder's plane was going to land soon, and there was no way she wanted Ruben unprepared.

But once again she had a rock-hard conversation in front of her and no opening to chisel her way in. "Thinking about Annie?" she asked him quietly, and he shook his head.

"Actually I was thinking about how we met, about the boy who was drowned and left on the side of the road. It's been almost two years, and there's still no one to answer for that boy's death. We don't even have any leads. What if that happens with Annie? What if they never catch the guy?"

Scully considered her answer for a long time. "I can't lie and say it's not a possibility. We both know it happens. And not knowing is agonizing. I waited more than a year to find the man who shot my sister and there were times I was sure it was never going to happen. But we did eventually catch him. The cops care, Ruben, I promise you. They won't forget and they won't stop trying to solve this case."

"I guess you would know," he replied, looking into his drink. "You're the one who worked all those cold cases, right?"

She bit her lip. This was one of his fundamental misconceptions about her history that she had never desired to correct. But a big correction was coming, at a speed of approximately five hundred and twenty-eight miles per hour. "Ruben..."

"I was just thinking maybe Jack is right about getting you involved with the case. I mean, at least you know every angle to look for. You can make sure the local guys aren't missing anything. I know you busted guys years after the fact but I've got to think that it's easier to catch them now when the trail is still warm."

"Ruben, about that. My job wasn't specifically to investigate cold cases, although many of them were classified that way. We took on unusual cases – those that had failed to be resolved by traditional investigation."

"Like what kind of cases? Special victims?"

She followed the intense beam of light from the top of the Luxor to the night sky. "In a way, but it was more than that. They were cases with possible paranormal involvement."

He frowned at her for a moment. "What? You mean like UFOs and ghosts?"

"In a manner of speaking, but the reality was much more complicated."

"Are you kidding me? You were seriously working National Enquirer headlines like they were actual cases? I can't believe you'd waste ten minutes on that stuff, let alone years. Aliens don't kill people; people kill people."

"And more often than not, we ended up with a person behind bars, but along the way, we uncovered elements in each case that were difficult to explain with traditional science."

He was looking at her like she was a new person. He shook his head and rubbed the back of his neck. “Why are you telling me this now?”

"My partner was a man named Fox Mulder. He lobbied the Bureau to establish the X-files division shortly before I came on board. The root of his interests was intensely personal. Mulder's little sister was abducted from their family home one night when the children were alone." She hesitated. She didn't want to lay Mulder bare quite yet. She would make him sound like a fruitcake and herself crazy by association. "Mulder founded the X-files as way to pursue all avenues of investigation into his sister's disappearance."

Ruben took a deep breath. "And I feel for the guy, believe me. That sounds awful. But it wasn't an alien or a ghost who took that girl. Surely you must have pointed that out to him."

"I know it sounds ridiculous. That's what I thought too at first."

"At first! You're saying you believe this crap? ET is going around snatching children from their homes?"

"Listen to me. Mulder may not have been one hundred percent right about everything, but he wasn't entirely wrong either. Alien or not, there are forces at work outside the government conducting secretive medical testing."

He glared at her and swallowed the rest of his scotch. "I don't know why you are spouting this off at me right now. I really don't have the energy to deal with crazy shit at the moment, Dana. Please help me understand where all this is suddenly coming from."

She backed off. Give him something more concrete, she told herself. That's how you always approached this stuff. "Mulder's sister's name was Samantha," she said.

Ruben was a smart man. His mind didn't leap like Mulder's but a couple of scotches didn't even slow it down. "The morgue, when you said you recognized her..."

"I've seen pictures." She hedged her bets, not mentioning the clones.

"You said she was little when she disappeared. You've seen pictures of a little girl! Just because the name is the same, that doesn't mean anything."

"I had the lab run a DNA test."

"No," he said, already denying it. “No way.”

"It's a match, Ruben."

"That's crazy! She's not his sister. Annie wasn't abducted by aliens or ghosts or the Bogeyman. She had parents who beat her like a drum and that's why the state took her away. If this Mulder guy is her family, why the hell didn't he help her? She can't have been that hard to find."

"He's been looking for her most of his life," she said, ignoring the rest of it.

"And you think you've found her. Well, I think you're wrong,” he turned away and crunched an ice cube in his mouth. “Run the test again." Scully said nothing, and he glanced at her. "Wait a second, you've already told him, haven't you? That was the reason for all your secret phone calls today."

"He's on his way. It was the only fair thing to do."

"Fair! What the hell in this situation is fair?" He clutched the glass as though he intended to throw it over the edge but then stopped himself. "I don't care what the DNA says. She's nothing to him. Her name was Samantha Ann Milgram and she lived in Los Angeles with her two children. She had a mother and a father in Denver who took her in and loved her like she was their own. What happened before that is irrelevant."

"Not to her. You said yourself that she wanted answers."

"And look where it got her! She's in the morgue with half her face missing, and now you're telling me some FBI guy is going to come in here and tell me aliens did it. Well, pardon my French, Dana, but fuck that - I don't believe in aliens, but I'm damn sure if they existed, they would have more sophisticated ways of killing a person than beating them to death."

"You wanted my professional opinion on this case," she said. "And here it is. The local police may be able to give you answers about how she died. But Mulder may be the only one who can give you answers as to why."

******

Diana was alone in her office when the phone rang, disturbing the quiet. She knew who it was before even answering. "What did you find?" she asked, prepared to take notes.

"The sheets in Vegas don't show much. You've got three missing persons and two unsolved homicides in the last twenty-four hours."

"Give me the homicides."

"One's vehicular manslaughter, a hit-and-run. The victim's name is Harry Posner. The other is a woman beaten to death in a motel room. Victim is ID'ed as Samantha Milgram."

Diana stopped writing. "Fax me what you have on the Milgram case. I want the pictures first."

"You got it." She paced by the machine, waiting. The picture was slow coming through but she knew before it was half done who it was. She used her cell phone to call the number he'd given her for emergency purposes only. Of course it was just a voice mailbox with no identified party attached. At this point, she didn't care. "Mulder's gone to Vegas," she said. "I just got the information on the Samantha Milgram case. Just what the hell have you done now?"





Chapter Four

The air conditioning at McCarran was turned to high frost, so Scully ordered hot coffee just to keep her hands warm as she waited. She didn't dare drink it, churned as she was at the middle. His flight was due to land in mere minutes. From her view near the window, she could see the planes approaching in the distance, lined up like giant fireflies over the desert. It felt like preparing to meet him again for the first time, back when she was new and he was a punch-line with a basement office. They call him Spooky Mulder, her friends had said. He thinks he's better than the rest of us. She'd found him pompous, witty, exasperating and thoroughly deserving of his schizophrenic reputation for greatness and madness. Only later had he become a complete person, a Mulder who loathed beets, adored treacly movies, and left a trail of sunflower seed shells in rented cars across America. He snored when drunk and had beautiful, long toes. He could button his shirt one handed. West-coast Yankee tours rendered him bleary-eyed but happy because he loved beating the A's and their "stupid white shoes." He never remembered birthdays, not even his own, because there was only one date in history that mattered to him anymore.

He didn't say hello when he called because he fully expected her to keep up with the conversation, even if he was starting in the middle of it, and he didn't say good-bye, not when it mattered, because for Mulder things were never truly over. Once upon a time she'd known him better than he knew himself, and now here he was poised to walk through the door as a stranger.

She saw the plane roll up to the gate, so she ditched the coffee and wiped her hands on her pants suit. There was nowhere to hide in the thin crowd as people started tramping down the gangway. Hi, Mulder. How've you been? A man with a briefcase passed her, stinking of alcohol. Next was a haggard mom trying to corral three small children. She tried leaning against one of the chairs, but it was too low to be practical. The passengers straggled off in clumps, the minutes ticking by, until she started to wonder if Mulder was on the plane at all. She forgot her nerves and approached the counter, peering down the concourse. No one approached.

"May I help you?" asked one of the attendants.

"I, uh... is everyone off the plane?" She fumbled in her pocket for her ID in case she had to explain further.

"Scully?" She jerked her head up and there he was, sporting a too-short haircut and a rumpled suit jacket, standing in her personal space just like he had never left.

"Mulder."

"You didn't have to come all the way out here to pick me up."

They'd lived half their time together in airports, and she'd wanted to meet him on familiar territory. "It was no trouble."

He jostled into her as the last passengers filed out behind him, and she sucked in a surprised breath at the sudden contact. "Sorry."

"Did you bring any luggage?" she asked as they moved out of the way.

"I came as-is." He smiled a bit, and she noticed the crinkles around his eyes had deepened just slightly. "You look good, Scully. The desert agrees with you."

"The car is this way," she said, and they fell into step easily.

"Las Vegas translates as ‘The Meadows,' did you know that?" he asked as they walked. "It's a pretty strange name for a desert when you think about it, but I guess there was more water here back when the Spaniards first showed up. Maybe that's how it seemed like a good idea to squeeze one point eight million people into an area that gets around four inches of rain each year."

"Mulder..."

"Still, I never figured you for the Sin City type, Scully. Of course, I never imagined you'd go for Mormons either, but I guess there's always a degree of freedom in these equations. You and the Man Upstairs always seemed to share a certain simpatico, though, even if the specifics differed - but you and Vegas? Tell me you're not all mobbed up."

"Mulder."

"But all that neon sure is impressive," he said as they stepped outside. "I don't know how the pilot managed to find the landing strip."

She stopped walking, and he continued on without her, getting three cars deep into the parking lot before he noticed she was missing. He halted with his back to her and was quiet for a long time. "I need to know," he said without turning around. His voice echoed in the half-empty garage. "Is it her?"

"Why don't we go someplace where we can talk? I can explain everything there."

"Scully, please." He faced her and she could just make out his features in the dim light. "I've been on a plane for four hours. I've waited twenty-six years. Don't make me wait any longer. Is it her?"

She hesitated a moment before giving a tiny nod. "It looks that way." She took slow steps until she joined him in the shadows. “I’m so sorry, Mulder.”

"Thanks," he said, laying a hand on her shoulder. "For coming to get me."

*****

Scotty stood under her porch light, hovering like a giant moth. "What the hell are you doing ringing my bell at this time of night?" Dot asked him through her screen door. "Benji's got school in the morning."

"Sorry, I saw your light on."

"This isn't the red light district. Call next time, okay?"

"Sorry. I found out something I thought you might want to see right away."

She noticed he had a large envelope in hand. "Come on in. Don't slam the door."

"I didn't mean to wake you," he said, carefully closing the door behind him. "I'm always up. It's too damn hot to sleep."

"Your AC on the fritz again? I can take a look at it if you want."

"I put the good one in Benji's room and I'm buying a new one tomorrow. Old Smokey's money is good for something, huh? You want a beer or something?"

"If you're having one."

"I passed one a long time ago," she said from behind the refrigerator door. "Helps me forget about the heat." She tossed him a can and he sat down on her ratty orange sofa.

"Funny you should mention Old Smokey," he said. "He's kind of the reason I'm here."

"You have a lead on Stephanie Jameson?"

He braced the can between his knees and cracked it open one-handed. "I was thinking about what you were saying, how she might be on the run from someone, possibly Old Smokey himself. I got to thinking maybe we should put feelers out at the morgue, so I talked with my boy Don. I told him to be on the lookout for a white woman, mid-30s, brown hair, from out-of-town. He tells me they've already got such a woman."

"You're kidding me."

"He managed to get me a photo. It's not pretty." He gave her the envelope and she withdrew the single photograph within; it showed a once-pretty woman with half of her face missing.

Dot let out a low whistle. "Someone sure did a number on this lady."

"That's her, right? That's Stephanie Jameson."

"Sure looks it. They ID her yet?"

"That's the interesting part. She's been identified as Samantha Milgram, an L.A. native who was staying over at the Mayfield Inn, which, coincidentally, is where she was murdered two nights ago."

"Old Smokey was on our doorstep four days ago. You think he got to her first? Could explain why he hasn't been calling us every ten minutes for an update like the clients usually do."

"Possible. But get this," he said, leaning closer to her. "Don says the vic has a husband, some FBI guy who's in town mucking around in the investigation. Old Smokey didn't really seem like the government type to me. And why say her name was Stephanie Jameson? If the object was to find her, a fake name isn't going to help."

"Yeah, I get that, but he was paying us an awful lot of money for a wild goose chase. I still think he wanted the woman found. Maybe they're twins, Stephanie and Samantha."

"One dead and the other missing? I could see that." He took a long sip of beer.

"Or it's one woman leading two very different lives," Dot suggested.

"Hard to keep one husband in L.A. and the other in Connecticut. Maybe that's why she gave Old Smokey the tall tale about coming out here with her friend. Maybe the friend's been covering for her all this time."

"We should talk to her. If one husband found out about the other, it could explain how her face ended up looking like hamburger meat." She finished the last of her beer. "I’ll tell you what – you track down the friend. I want to talk to Smokey again."

Scott froze with the beer almost at his lips. "You sure you want to do that? There's a good chance he killed that girl. Maybe we should go to the cops with what we know and let them take it from here."

"I took his money. I promised to find her." She looked down at the gruesome picture again. "If he did this, I want to be sure he's going to pay. Right now all we have is a hinky client who hired us to look for a woman, who may or may not be his wife, who may or may not be dead. We can go to the cops when we manage to fill in some of the blanks."

"Yeah, well, I just don't want us to end up blanked in the process."

******

It was after midnight, and the Coroner's office was closed so they went to the hotel bar instead. Mulder ordered a beer while Scully opted for soda water and lime. She looked so much like his memory, with her pale skin and steady blue eyes,that he almost wondered if he had conjured her up himself like a desert mirage.

"So I am drinking alone?” he asked as he fingered the edge of the blue cocktail napkin. “Want to keep your wits about you, is that it?”

"It's been a long day." She leaned down and retrieved a folder from her briefcase. "Bear in mind I'm not supposed to be showing you any of this," she said as she handed it to him. "I'm not even supposed to have it myself."

"I thought this was your case."

"Not officially."

He held the slim folder in his hands but did not open it. "I don't understand. Then how did you find out about this?"

"Read the file."





He flipped it open and there was the autopsy report. "Cause of death, blunt force trauma. Someone beat her to death?"

"She sustained fractures to both arms," Scully said. "Whoever did this, she fought them hard."

He held his breath and flipped the pages until he reached the photographs. These were no soft-focus glamour shots; they were designed to document the horror of her injuries, close-ups of her bloodied face and broken bones; each individual gash its own private gallery. These were the pictures a jury would see, if anyone ever answered for the crime. Mulder let them fall to the table in front of him, the images fanning out.

"No leads?" he whispered. Scully shook her head slowly.

"Not yet. I'm so sorry, Mulder."

"I've seen a half dozen of these women now," he said, picking up a random shot. "What makes you think this one is real?"

"I was present at the autopsy. Samantha Milgram was a flesh and blood woman; no evidence of the toxic green substance we've encountered before."

His face startled to crumple then, but he forced himself back under control. "So this is her? Really?"

Scully reached for another folder. "I took the liberty of running a DNA test comparing her sample to one of yours. These are the results."

In the dim light, he could barely make out the tiny print. "What does this mean, twenty-seven percent of alleles in common? Shouldn't it be half?"

"Full siblings share half their DNA, yes." She cleared her throat. "These findings mean you share one parent in common."

He could still call up the memory of a summer day, with hazy sunshine and water that seemed to stretch forever. His mother laughing as she sat on the dune, round as a beach ball. "Fox, come and feel, your brother or sister is kicking!" He'd gotten sandy handprints all over her white top but she had not yelled a bit.

"Jesus," he breathed, sitting back in the booth. “No wonder he sent her away.” The folder tipped forward into his lap, sending the photos sprawling. He tried to gather them but they kept slipping through his hands. Scully joined him under the table to help him pick up the pieces. He paused, his head bumping the surface, and Scully winced for him.

"Careful, that’s a delicate instrument there," she murmured with a small smile. She smoothed the pictures into an even pile again.

"It doesn’t matter to me,” he said as crouched together in the narrow space. He could smell her perfume, unchanged in their time apart. “I don’t care if she wasn’t his. She was mine and that's what matters."

"I'm sorry," she said again, her voice tender and soft, the way she used to speak to him back when she was tender and soft herself. She let go of the pictures long enough to squeeze his hand, and he squeezed back.

She withdrew gently and they climbed back into the booth again, on opposite sides, as always. "How is your mother doing these days?" she asked when they had resettled.

"She's dead."

Shock and then embarrassment colored Scully's features. "I hadn't heard," she murmured.

"No, I guess you wouldn't." He swallowed the rest of his beer. "Mom had another stroke last year and didn't survive long enough for me to make it to the hospital this time. The doctors told me she was trying to talk but they couldn't understand what she was saying. I guess now maybe I have some idea of what her secret might have been."

"You think she knew?"

"That she was screwing another man behind my father's back? Yeah, I'd say she had a pretty good idea."

"I meant about Samantha's paternity."

He thought of the vicious, whispered fights during the summer before Samantha disappeared. "I think they both knew," he said. "And all those years afterward, neither one of them ever said a godamned thing."

"Maybe after all these years they considered it immaterial. Like you were saying, it didn't matter where she came from. What mattered is what happened to her."

"Somehow I think the two are inextricable." He picked up a stray photo, one that showed the body from its good side, if death indeed could have such a thing. "You still haven't told me how you got involved in this case to begin with. It's a bit of a kick, wouldn't you say? We spend six years together looking for my sister and you leave only to stumble across her in a Vegas motel room?"

She took a deep breath and slid the part of the report back to him. "Read the part at the bottom," she said.

He picked it up. "Positive identification by Ruben Cetera," he read flatly. "Relationship to deceased: sibling." He looked up in surprise. "She had a brother?"

"Adopted brother. He was listed as her next-of-kin and so the Sheriff called him to make the identification. He's a special prosecutor in Salt Lake City, and I made the trip down here with him, as a friend."

"A friend."

She avoided his eyes for a moment. "We live together," she said at last.

"Well, he must be an awfully good friend, then."

"He has been." She met his eyes, challenging him to disagree. There had been other men at first, when he met her. He had vague recollections of her laughing into the phone, peering into the passenger side mirror to her make-up at the end of the day. She'd mentioned the odd name to him but he'd never bothered to learn any of them. Jim, John, Steve, whatever ­– as long as she showed up at work each day and gave him her full attention, he didn't much care what, or who, she did on her off hours. Then came Philadelphia and suddenly she had *his* full attention. There were no more dates after that.

It took some time, years even, but she'd begun putting on make-up at the end of the day again. God, how many weeks had it taken him to realize this time it was for him? "Uh, that's good, Scully," he told her finally. She searched his face as if not quite believing him. "I'm happy for you. Really."

She snorted and leaned back in the booth, shaking her head.

"The 'really' was overkill, huh? I thought I sold it pretty good."

"You're a miserable liar."

"Nah," he said, brushing the photos aside. "Just miserable. Listen, the men who took Samantha twenty-six years ago wouldn't do this. They'd use a sniper or a toxin or they'd just whisk her away like last time. They wouldn't leave her in a Vegas motel room for everyone to find. These people have blood on their hands metaphorically, but they haven't shown a penchant for the real thing, if you know what I mean."

"She has a chip," Scully told him quietly.

"What? Where?" He scrambled for the photos again.

"Left sinus cavity. It's not in the report. I had the ME leave that part out for now. As you might imagine, he has a lot of questions that I don't really feel like answering. I don't know how much longer I can keep him quiet."

"If she's got the chip, then they know she's dead. Even money they'll be around to clean up the evidence."

"I thought of that," she said. "That's why I had the ME store the body, unmarked, in an older part of the morgue."

Mulder managed a smile. "That's my girl," he said, and for the first time since he’d landed, Scully smiled back.

****

She undressed in the dark, quiet so as not to wake Ruben. The air conditioning hummed, and the water in the sink seemed overly loud as she hurriedly brushed her teeth. The bathroom smelled like his shampoo. Ruben was like a silent mountain under the covers, his back to her as she slipped in beside him. When he spoke, it was with a clear, strong voice that indicated he had been awake the whole time. "You picked him up at the airport?"

"Yes." She tried to rub his arm with affection but he shrugged her off.

"Took long enough."

"We had a drink downstairs. I filled him in on the investigation so far."

"That must have taken all of ten minutes. What did you talk about for the rest of the time?"

"It was a rather lot to absorb, Ruben. He's been looking for his sister for more than twenty years."

He rolled over onto his back and looked at the ceiling. "How'd he take the news?"

"I don't know. He seemed numb more than anything." She hesitated, unsure of how much to give away. "He's found other women before who turned out not to be the real thing. I think maybe he's afraid to believe it this time."

"You showed him pictures of her body?"

"Yes."

"Trust me. He doesn't want to believe you."

He turned his back to her again and didn't say another word.

*****

They were eating a breakfast of black coffee and bagels when Mulder appeared at the table. "I had to go out and buy a new suit," he said by way of introduction. "Flying sans luggage is freeing to the soul but expensive to the wallet."

Scully put her napkin aside. "Ruben, this is Fox Mulder. Mulder, Ruben Cetera."

“I’ve been hearing a lot about you.” Ruben half-rose from his seat to shake Mulder's hand. "Join us for breakfast?" he asked.

Mulder shook his head. "No, I want to get down to the Coroner's office. I called ahead and Bartleby said he'd meet me there."

"I'll go with you," Scully offered.

"No, thanks. This is something I need to do alone." He looked at Scully. "I'd like to see the rest of the reports on the crime scene if at all possible."

"We're heading over to the Sheriff's office right after this," she replied. "I'll see what I can do to smooth the way."

Mulder's gaze flickered over Ruben. "Scully tells me you were her brother."

Ruben's lips tightened. “She tells me the same thing about you.” He paused and ducked his head. "We were adopted at the same time. She said... she said her previous family hadn't treated her very well." The accusation hung in the air, and Mulder went very still.

"I'm not so sure she was wrong about that," he said softly.

He tapped the tablecloth with his fingers. "I'll see you both later, ok?"

"Agent Mulder, wait!" Ruben was half out of his chair again when Mulder turned around. He walked back to the table so he and Ruben were inches from one another.

"What is it?"

"Annie, that is, Samantha, she was trying to track down her past. I said she should leave well enough alone but she wanted to find her family and find out why they gave her up. She wanted her birth certificate and stuff like that, said she had to find out for her kids' sake. Do you think... do you think her efforts figure out what happened to her as a little girl could have gotten her killed?"

Mulder considered the question a long time. "It's nearly done me in a time or two."

"You're sure then. You're very sure Annie was your sister who was taken?" Mulder looked at her, asking silently how much Ruben knew. Scully shook her head very slightly. "If it's her, you must know," Ruben continued. "You must have some idea who could have done this to her."

"I don't. Not yet. But I promise you that I intend to find out." He left and Ruben stood, watching him go.

"He's my age," Ruben said when Mulder had disappeared entirely. He was still watching the archway where Mulder had exited. "When you told me he had been looking for his sister for more than twenty years, I expected someone much older."

"He was twelve when she vanished," Scully said simply. "He's been looking ever since."

*****

When Scully and Ruben arrived at the Sheriff's office they found Jack Milgram on the front steps with a cigarette in one hand and a paper cup of coffee in the other. "Breakfast of champions," he remarked dryly as he took a puff. "Listen, Agent Scully, I got some more information on that unsolved homicide last month. The victim was Lisa Sanchez, a dancer who apparently turned tricks on the side. She was killed across town but also beaten to death in a motel room – weapon has not been recovered. I'm going to push Holloway for more Bureau involvement. I want to see all the files on the Sanchez homicide and I was hoping you'd back me up."

"I'll do what I can."

"Thanks. Appreciate it. I know it's not a dead-on match to Samantha's case but there are enough similarities that I think it's worth a closer look."

As they left him to enter the building, Ruben bent closer to her. "Did you tell him about Mulder yet?"

"Not yet. First I have to figure out how to explain everything to Sheriff Holloway."

Holloway was frowning but seemed glad to see them anyway. "Agent Scully, Mr. Cetera, please come in," he said, welcoming them to his office. "I wish I had good news to report but I can assure you we're still working round the clock on your case."

"No leads at all?" Ruben asked.

"The lab has recovered seventy-two different prints from the motel room and we're processing them now. Unfortunately, cleaning does not appear to be a high priority at the Mayfield Inn. It's going to take a while to sort through them all. Do you have that list of your sister's friends I asked for?"

"Yeah, I've got it right here." Ruben took out a folded piece of paper from his coat pocket. "I wish I could say it was up-to-date, but as I mentioned, we hadn't spoken for some time."

"It's a start. Thank you. Mr. Cetera, would you mind terribly if I spoke to Agent Scully alone for just a moment?"

Ruben looked at her with some surprise. "If it's about my sister, I'd just as soon stay."

"It's FBI-related, sir, and I'd prefer to err on the side of discretion given that it's not my department. If Agent Scully sees fit to relay the conversation afterward, then I'd have no objection."

Scully gripped the sides of her chair a bit tighter. Here it comes, she thought. He's been talking to Bartleby. "It's fine," she said aloud to Ruben.

Holloway started ushering Ruben out the door. "Mary at the desk can set you up with coffee or a soda if you like. This won't take long." He shut the door behind Ruben and looked at Scully. "Please don't repeat what I'm about to tell you."

This was not at all what she'd been expecting. Cautious, she said, "Tell me what?"

"I can count on your discretion?"

"Of course."

He returned to his seat behind the desk and leaned back in it. "Jack Milgram's outside having a smoke. How well do you know him?"

"I met him when you did. I can't claim to know him at all."

"I did a little checking. Seems he has a bit of a reputation in the Bureau for being a hothead. There was at least one lawsuit against him for unnecessary force but the case was settled out-of-court, documents sealed."

"I don't know anything about that."

"What's your read on him so far?"

"He seems very determined to find the person who murdered his wife. Beyond that, I can't say much. He did stop me outside and say he wants more Bureau involvement on the case. He has discovered an unsolved homicide from last month that he believes might be connected."

"The Sanchez case. Yeah, we're looking into it but so far it looks like a dead end to me. Tell you what. I'm inclined to give him the information he wants and let him run with it. At least that way I know what he's up to."

"Pardon me for asking," Scully said, "but do you have some reason to suspect Milgram in his wife's death?"





"Outside of the acrimonious divorce and some unsettled custody issues? Turns out he was in Las Vegas last month. Took a shuttle flight in and out the same day, and the motel records indicate his wife was here 