[X-Files] Fanfic: Variations on a Theme, Chapter 6 (PG)
Title: Variations on a Theme
Author: colebaltblue
Artist: TLynnfic
Word Count: 21,000 (this chapter 4,400)
Rating: PG
Warnings: no specific ones
Summary: Alternate universe. Dr. Dana Scully is a medical examiner for the city and county of San Francisco when she is assigned the Jane Doe #19292. In Washington, D.C. behavioral sciences unit FBI agent Fox Mulder becomes interested in Jane Doe #19292 and heads out to San Francisco to investigate. The rest, they say, is history.
Author's Notes: Written for the X-Files Big Bang 2010. Many, many, many thanks to Tracy and Cass for their comments, critiques, and corrections.
7:08 pm
August 3, 1993
J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building
Washington, D.C.
With the trail cold on Jennifer Marlowe, the news gone on Emily Sims, no movement on the Jane Does, and the new mystery of Krycek, Mulder had headed back home to Washington to see what he could do from there. He had exchanged a few emails with Scully, but with no new developments and nothing else really in common they had been rather short. Diana had seemed to give up on him again, but he knew that sooner or later she'd try again. He had spent some time with the boys, but that had gotten old too.
As soon as he had arrived back in D.C. he had met with Senator Matheson and had asked him about the X files. For the first time ever he felt as if Matheson was holding back on him. Mulder had requested and had been granted access to a few X files, though, probably due to Matheson's influence. Krycek had been busy and didn't appear to be a half-bad agent if his reports on the pitifully few closed X files were to be believed. Currently, Krycek was investigating a cell of sleepless Vietnam Veterans. Mulder reviewed Krycek's case notes and made the connection between the doctors and the units, but it appeared that Krycek hadn’t yet. This looked like it would be one of the unsolved X files as everyone would probably be dead before Krycek solved it. Mulder had managed to track down an Assistant Director Skinner that Krycek seemed to nominally report to, but he was pretty sure that Skinner wasn't the real head of the X files.
His phone rang. He looked at it, fairly certain it wasn't Diana and the guys never called him.
"Hello?" he said, foregoing his usual greeting including his name and division.
"Hey, it's me," came the female voice over the line. He smiled, recognizing Scully right away.
"Hey."
"I figured you’d still be at work."
"That’s me." Mulder leaned back in his chair, balancing his phone on his shoulder and folding his hands at his waist. "What can I do for you, Doctor Scully?"
"It's probably more what I can do for you."
Mulder was intrigued; he sat up, pulling a notepad and pen towards him.
"The lab work finally came back on a transient that was found at a hotel in town a few days after Jane Doe 19292 was found."
"Oh yeah?" Mulder didn't press her for more information. Scully wouldn't call him unless it was important and since she didn't speculate she had probably made a connection.
"Yeah. He died of acute organ failure. I normally wouldn't have looked much beyond that given his lifestyle, but I decided to run his blood against what we found in Emily's records and Jane Doe's blood work. I'm not sure why I did, but I'm glad I did because his acute organ failure was caused by a similar drug profile, but in much higher doses."
"What?"
"Mulder, those aren't chemical compounds that anyone would think to look for!"
He could tell she was troubled by it, but waited for her to finish knowing she wasn't done yet.
"That wasn't the strangest thing, though," she continued. She sighed before continuing. "Whoever killed him killed Jane Doe and most likely Emily Sims too."
"Scully!" Mulder was shocked at the pronouncement, knowing she didn't speculate, knowing that for her to reach that conclusion, she had to feel confident without a doubt. He grinned, picturing her in this moment.
"The dirt scrapings from underneath his fingernails were the same as the dirt that Jane Doe was buried in," she said. "They've declared the case solved and consider him the murderer. I haven't shared the information about the drug compounds though and I'm fairly certain he didn't kill her - I think he just buried her."
"You think that whoever killed him, killed her," he repeated back, more to just say it out loud to himself than anything else.
"I don't," Scully paused and took a deep breath, collecting herself "Mulder, I just don't know, but I don't know what else to think about it."
They were both silent for a minute, considering the implications of Scully's findings.
"I have to go," Scully said suddenly and she clicked off without saying goodbye. Mulder looked at the now disconnected phone he was holding in his hand, startled at the abrupt end to their conversation. He glanced at the clock and realized she had probably called him from work. He shook his head as he replaced the handset. Scully was smart, forthright, and a damn good medical examiner. She'd make a good FBI agent, he mused to himself as he turned to his computer and opened it to run the program the guys had written for him - to search various law enforcement databases for cases similar to Samantha's and Scully's Jane Doe. He considered sending an email to the guys asking them to add people similar to Scully's transient stiff, but didn't after he realized that the profile would be too large to get any useful information from. They'd have to solve that particular mystery some other way.
The program beeped, letting him know that there had been no knew reports in the week since he last ran it.
7:58 am
August 4, 1993
San Francisco City Medical Examiner's Office
San Francisco, CA
Scully scanned her day's caseload, relieved once again that it didn't contain any John or Jane Does. George had prepared each file last night before he left and she picked them up to scan through them while her computer booted up. She reached for her pen to make a notation in the first case, but it wasn't lying where she left it last night when she had spoken to Mulder on the phone. She scanned her desk, but couldn't tell specifically if anything was out of place. It felt off, nonetheless.
She opened her pencil drawer to grab a pen from the supply she kept in there and looked at where her drawer keys should've been. They weren't there. Frantically, she shuffled things around in her desk. If they were missing then maybe her files were too. She reached for her bottom file drawer; it was unlocked and slid open easily into her hand. With trepidation, she reached back behind the last file and down, reaching for the familiar brush of file folder against her fingertips. All she felt was cold steel drawer.
"Shit," she said, under her breath. She wasn't supposed to have those files in her office and wasn't even supposed to have the Emily Sims or Marin County Jane Doe files, so there wasn't much she could say to her boss. "Shit," she said again, closing the door, trying to decide what to do and wracking her brain as to how they could've gone missing.
Her computer was booted up and she logged on, opening the medical examiner's database program right away. She typed in the transient's John Doe number designation.
File not found.
Puzzled, she checked again and typed it in carefully checking before she hit enter.
File not found appeared again.
She got up and left her office, heading for the file room where the physical files would be. It was a solved case and would've been transferred to storage at this point. She let herself into the room and scanned the file numbers for his. It was gone, she realized. The number belonged to another case now; it wasn't simply missing.
They had only closed the case last night, but they had transported the body a few days after he had come into the morgue to Colma for cremation and burial. She headed across the room to where they kept the transport logs; surely he’d be in there. Currently shipments were being recorded both in the database and on paper. If he had still existed in the electronic records he would've come up in her search, but maybe whoever had deleted the electronic records had forgotten the paper records.
She opened the book to the correct date and scanned the numbers of the bodies transported on the day that her homeless man would have been. When she couldn't find him, she scanned the days before and after his. "It's as if he never existed," she said under her breath when she couldn't find him. She'd call Mulder tonight and let him know what happened, but that didn't solve the problem of her missing files, or how they even went missing.
She headed up the front lobby of the building and the security desk. Smiling in what she hoped was a sweet manner, she had asked if the morgue had any late-night visitors that weren't the night shift dropping off bodies. The young man smiled back. Scully remembered him and was glad for the first time in her life that she always said hello to him whenever she saw him on duty.
"Sure, but just that FBI agent."
"What FBI agent?" Scully asked, knowing that Mulder had been in Washington, D.C. She wasn't aware of any other cases that involved the FBI either right now, and news of those usually traveled.
"Oh, he's been around a few times. Let me pull up the tape for you,"
"Thank you," she said. Waiting as he pulled the tape, put it in the small TV on the desk and started fast forwarding. He stopped at 11:36pm the night before.
"He's never come this late before, but he said he had left something downstairs. I couldn't raise Erik on the radio to come and escort him so I let him go downstairs on his own. I'm not supposed to do that, but I figured since he was FBI…" he trailed off.
Scully watched as a familiar face approached the desk.
"His name sounds Russian, here I have it right here," he pulled the log towards him.
"Krycek," Scully supplied before he had a chance to look at his log.
"Yeah, that's it," he replied looking up at her
"Thank you," Scully said, "I won't say anything."
The security guard smiled sheepishly, "I appreciate it," he said softly.
"Shit," Scully said again, under her breath as she walked away. "Shit," she repeated again for good measure. Although she didn't have any proof she was positive she knew where her files had gone and why her body had disappeared.
11:31 pm
August 4, 1993
Hegel Place
Alexandria, VA
Mulder sat on his couch and stared at the television. He had grown bored with his porn a little while ago and was now watching a program on the Rift Valley in Africa. A baby wildebeest died a particularly gruesome death at the water hole. The sound of a knock at his door caught his attention. It was soft and quick. He saw a shadow move under his door.
There was a nondescript brown folder sitting on the ground just in front of his door and the hallway was empty. It wasn't the first time he had been passed information this way, but usually he had to ask for it first. He picked up the folder and checked the hallway again, curious as to which one of his contacts may have left it for him.
He tore it open as he resettled himself on the couch, muting the television before pulling out the file folder inside. He opened it to a picture of a smiling woman that looked like it had been snapped candidly on the street. She was pretty and her mouth was open in a half-laugh. Her features reminded him of Scully.
He scanned the documents under the folder. There was a medical form on top, but lacked the woman's name - just a medical identification number. It looked like they had been tracking her for a while based on the dates in the file. They stopped about six years ago with what looked like a series of notes regarding her fertility. He looked on the other side of the folder and found notes about other female medical subjects with many of the same notations about blood pressure, temperature, and menstrual cycles. The women were definitely being tracked.
There was no name of a medical facility or a purpose of the documentation on any of the sheets and it didn't appear that anyone was tracked through a pregnancy. He checked the envelope the folder had arrived in, but it was empty. Mulder looked through the folder again trying to decide if he wanted to call Scully or not regarding the file. He had received an email from her earlier today telling him that her files were missing and that she had evidence Krycek was behind it. It was always a sure sign that you were on to something big if people started stealing your research, Mulder had learned. The guys had also emailed him to let him know that they couldn't track down Jennifer Marlowe. Mulder wondered if she'd show up as a Jane Doe somewhere else before too long.
He decided that Scully might be able to make more sense of the file than he or the guys could. The guys had a copy machine and they'd probably want to see the folder. He turned off the TV and stood up. It was late, but they'd still be up, following the conspiracy trail on the Internet.
6:45 pm
August 6, 1993
Scully's house
San Francisco, CA
Scully picked up the package that sat just inside her front door after she let herself in her apartment. She carefully scanned it for signs of tampering before chiding herself for being paranoid. If Krycek was going to look at her mail, he'd probably just steal it outright, she thought to herself. She tore it open.
Mulder had called her yesterday to tell her he was overnighting a package to her house. In it were copies of information someone had passed onto him that he was sure was connected to Emily, Jennifer, and the Jane Does and that to him it looked like something to do with fertility given the data and the dates, but could she look it over for him.
Inside was a handful of papers with a picture on top. She looked at it and grew cold.
"Where did you get this?" She demanded as soon as Mulder picked up the phone.
"What?" he asked, confusedly.
"Where did you get this picture, this file?"
"I told you, someone passed it on, Scully."
"Stop with the obfuscating, Mulder, and tell me how you got this!"
"It was left on my doorstep. I don't know who gave it to me. What's wrong, Scully?"
"Do you know who the woman in the picture is?" Scully was growing calmer and the initial shock of the picture was beginning to wear off.
"No," Mulder replied, then added, "do you?"
"Yes." Scully took a deep breath, realizing, perhaps for the first time, that this went so much further than a dead girl in a park and a missing six year old.
"Who is she?" Mulder was curious.
"Her name is Melissa Scully. She is, was, my sister."
"Scully?" Mulder's shock and compassion was genuine. Scully was relieved to hear it, certain now he wasn't aware of the connection.
"Missy died in January during a home invasion robbery gone bad. She was home, at my house, in the middle of the day when someone broke in. They must've surprised her. I found her just inside the doorway."
"Oh, Scully…"
"Mulder, I've read the file. They were tracking Missy's ovulation cycles. The last bit of data seems to indicate that her eggs were harvested."
"Like a fertility treatment?"
"Yes, but I didn't think Missy was undergoing a fertility treatment seven years ago. Mulder, that's not all. Based on the numbers, if this data is indeed right, they took her eggs. All of her eggs. Missy would've been sterile."
Mulder was silent, processing the information.
"Do you know where this data is from?"
"The guys did some snooping for me today. It's from one of the clinics in San Jose that was listed on Emily Sims's medical records. I think it was for fertility treatments her mother was undergoing," he answered her, still trying to comprehend what she had just told him about her sister.
"Do you think Missy could've been Emily's mother, Mulder?"
"It's possible."
Scully was silent as they both contemplated the implications of the medical records.
"I'm coming out there, Scully. I'm coming out there, I want to know what this is all about."
"Ok," she said softly.
"Scully, do you have somewhere to go? Someone who could stay with you?"
Scully smiled, touched at his concern.
"No, I kicked Ethan out a few days ago. I'll be all right, Mulder."
She hung up and picked up the picture of Missy again. She traced her features and sniffed as she started to cry.
Clutching the picture to her chest she sunk to the kitchen floor, weeping silently for her sister.
2:19 pm
August 7, 1993
San Francisco Medical Examiner's Office
San Francisco, CA
Scully looked up as the phone in autopsy rang. She had just finished an autopsy and was stripping off her gloves. She glanced over at George who was cleaning the table and picked up the phone.
"Autopsy One, this is Doctor Scully," she answered.
"Doctor Scully, I have a phone call for you from an Agent Mulder. He says its urgent," the receptionist on the other end said.
Scully sighed, she didn't particularly want to speak to Mulder right now but she wasn't sure how she could avoid it. "All right," she responded and waited for the click alerting her the call had been transferred.
"Mulder, I don't really have the time-"
"Scully, I'm at the airport, can you come pick me up?"
She pinched the bridge of her nose. She really didn't want to deal with this, with Mulder and the recent revelations about Missy and the wider implications that those connections to her files being stolen meant. She just wanted to go back to a few months ago, before she met an FBI agent named Fox, hell even before she happened to be the one to catch the autopsy of a little girl named Jane Doe.
"Scully?"
"All right," she found herself saying, against her better judgment. "All right, let me take care of a few things here first."
She hung up and could feel George's eyes on her and was thankful for his quiet discretion. He wouldn't ask her what was going on and he wouldn't say anything if she left early.
"George, something has come up, I'm going to leave for the rest of the afternoon. Do you mind?" she gestured to the autopsy.
"No, Doctor Scully," he replied in his soft voice with an equally soft smile. She responded with one of her own. She nodded and then stripped off her smock and put it in the bin, heading for her office.
George would take care of the initial report and just leave it for her to sign in the morning. She shut off her computer and slid her active files into her desk drawer and locked it. George could be trusted, but she wasn't sure she wanted any of her colleagues looking through her desk, or Krycek for that matter if he was still slinking around. She smiled ruefully as she thought about how paranoid she'd become in the last few months. How much more paranoid she probably would become by the time Mulder got to the bottom of his case. Truth is never easy, she thought to herself.
Mulder was standing on the sidewalk with a bag over his shoulder when she drove up. He smiled at her as he got into the car. She couldn't muster one in return.
"Sorry to show up like this, but the news you told me has big implications in my case, Scully. I need to do some more investigation."
"Now, Mulder?"
"Yes, now." He sounded a little puzzled to her.
"Mulder, she may just be a part of your case to you, but she was my sister."
"I know, Scully," he said, with sympathy. “I’m sorry.”
Scully felt her defenses start to crumble. "Do you have some place to stay?"
Mulder shook his head in response and Scully nodded, driving towards her apartment. She was relieved enough that she wasn't even bothered by the presumption. She had woken up this morning on the floor of her kitchen. With a houseguest she'd at least have a reason to hold it all together.
Mulder set his bag down just inside her door when she let them in.
"Can I get you anything? Iced tea, beer, water, coffee?" she asked, remembering her manners.
"Whatever you're having."
Scully nodded, heading into the kitchen. "Why don't you order pizza, Mulder, there's a few places on the counter. They all deliver."
She could hear Mulder on the phone as she clinked ice into two glasses and poured the iced tea. Mulder joined her when he was done.
"What can you tell me about her, Scully?"
Scully examined her eyes floating in the glass. One of the cubes had cracked and she examined the lines of the crack before she answered.
"Missy was everything I was not. And more, I suppose."
Mulder waited for her to continue when she stopped.
"She was always a free spirit. I followed my brothers around, always wanting to belong with them, but Missy always did her own thing. She was pretty and feminine and I was a tomboy with a chip on my shoulder. She had boys sneaking into our window when we were in high school.
"Missy went to college and while she always had time for me, she also had her own life separate from the rest of us. I think my mom was the only one who understood her. Even I didn't, but she loved all of us.
Scully wandered into her living room and settled herself on the couch. Mulder followed her.
"Seven years ago, Missy was in the wrong place at the wrong time. A bank in Portland where she was living at the time. It was held up by a man named Duane Barry who thought he was an alien abductee. He abducted Missy and disappeared. They found him a day later on a remote mountaintop in eastern Oregon with no sign of Missy. He claimed they had taken her instead of him - which I guess had been his plan all along."
Mulder listened. He remembered the case and Duane Barry, but he couldn't remember the details, which is why he probably never connected the Scully name.
"They found her two days later, naked, shivering and alone up on that mountain top. She had no member of what happened, none at all."
Scully played with the condensation on her glass, encouraging large drops to form and fall down the sides. The ice snapped as it melted.
“She may not have remembered, but her subconscious did,” she finally said after minutes of silence. Mulder’s hand drifted to hers and covered it. She didn’t look at them.
“Missy drifted for four years. She’d get a job and settle down somewhere and I’d get a postcard or a phone call from her saying she was doing really great and how happy she was. Then, something would happen and she’d disappear. The first few times it happened, I panicked. I’d do anything to try to find her, anything at all.”
Mulder squeezed her hand.
“Sometimes I’d manage to find her, usually in another town with another job claiming she’d just forgotten to tell me she’d gotten bored and moved on. Sometimes I couldn’t find her, but I could track her movements. I think she’d have psychotic episodes, post-traumatic stress induced episodes. She’d claim to not remember what had happened between her moments of semi-normalness, but I learned enough from trying to find her.”
Scully laced her fingers with Mulder’s.
“My parents would try to get her help, but she’d never stay in the programs they put her in. Bill claimed she was just a drug addict and wouldn’t talk to her. Charlie, well I don’t know about Charlie - he just disconnected. I don’t think anyone understood.”
Scully jerked at the knock on her door. The pizza, she remembered after a second of panic. Mulder got up and quietly paid the delivery girl. He brought it back and set it on the coffee table. She didn’t even have the strength to protest. He handed her a piece and she began to eat it mechanically.
“Three years ago, she showed up on my doorstep. She told me she was sick of running, sick of having to stay one step ahead of them, and was ready to just stay put no matter what happened. I didn’t tell mom and dad she was here, I just let her be.”
Scully smiled as she remembered those times and how Missy slowly came back to her.
“San Francisco was good to her. She joined an art commune, although she still stayed with me off and on. Eventually, she started talking to mom again and for a while, she was the only member of the family Charlie would talk to. She even mended things with dad. She worked for a regression therapist in Berkeley and sold her art here and there and I think she was happy.”
Scully pointed to her wall and Mulder followed her finger to an abstract painting hanging on her wall. He could see a face with a shock of red hair, a coffee cup, and other things circling about like steam from the cup. He smiled at it and looked at Scully. She was looking at him with a soft smile on her face.
“She painted that for me. Called it ‘Dana’s Morning Coffee’. Despite all this, Missy would never talk about what happened. She always said she didn’t remember. I think she was starting to, though, and just wasn’t ready to talk about it.”
“I looked up the report on her murder,” Mulder finally spoke.
Scully nodded, “I figured you might.”
“It’s still unsolved.”
Scully sighed and nodded again.
“Mulder, I’m afraid of what happened to Missy when she was missing. I’m afraid that it has to do with that clinic and with Emily. I’m afraid of what they did to her.”
Chapter 7
Author: colebaltblue
Artist: TLynnfic
Word Count: 21,000 (this chapter 4,400)
Rating: PG
Warnings: no specific ones
Summary: Alternate universe. Dr. Dana Scully is a medical examiner for the city and county of San Francisco when she is assigned the Jane Doe #19292. In Washington, D.C. behavioral sciences unit FBI agent Fox Mulder becomes interested in Jane Doe #19292 and heads out to San Francisco to investigate. The rest, they say, is history.
Author's Notes: Written for the X-Files Big Bang 2010. Many, many, many thanks to Tracy and Cass for their comments, critiques, and corrections.
7:08 pm
August 3, 1993
J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building
Washington, D.C.
With the trail cold on Jennifer Marlowe, the news gone on Emily Sims, no movement on the Jane Does, and the new mystery of Krycek, Mulder had headed back home to Washington to see what he could do from there. He had exchanged a few emails with Scully, but with no new developments and nothing else really in common they had been rather short. Diana had seemed to give up on him again, but he knew that sooner or later she'd try again. He had spent some time with the boys, but that had gotten old too.
As soon as he had arrived back in D.C. he had met with Senator Matheson and had asked him about the X files. For the first time ever he felt as if Matheson was holding back on him. Mulder had requested and had been granted access to a few X files, though, probably due to Matheson's influence. Krycek had been busy and didn't appear to be a half-bad agent if his reports on the pitifully few closed X files were to be believed. Currently, Krycek was investigating a cell of sleepless Vietnam Veterans. Mulder reviewed Krycek's case notes and made the connection between the doctors and the units, but it appeared that Krycek hadn’t yet. This looked like it would be one of the unsolved X files as everyone would probably be dead before Krycek solved it. Mulder had managed to track down an Assistant Director Skinner that Krycek seemed to nominally report to, but he was pretty sure that Skinner wasn't the real head of the X files.
His phone rang. He looked at it, fairly certain it wasn't Diana and the guys never called him.
"Hello?" he said, foregoing his usual greeting including his name and division.
"Hey, it's me," came the female voice over the line. He smiled, recognizing Scully right away.
"Hey."
"I figured you’d still be at work."
"That’s me." Mulder leaned back in his chair, balancing his phone on his shoulder and folding his hands at his waist. "What can I do for you, Doctor Scully?"
"It's probably more what I can do for you."
Mulder was intrigued; he sat up, pulling a notepad and pen towards him.
"The lab work finally came back on a transient that was found at a hotel in town a few days after Jane Doe 19292 was found."
"Oh yeah?" Mulder didn't press her for more information. Scully wouldn't call him unless it was important and since she didn't speculate she had probably made a connection.
"Yeah. He died of acute organ failure. I normally wouldn't have looked much beyond that given his lifestyle, but I decided to run his blood against what we found in Emily's records and Jane Doe's blood work. I'm not sure why I did, but I'm glad I did because his acute organ failure was caused by a similar drug profile, but in much higher doses."
"What?"
"Mulder, those aren't chemical compounds that anyone would think to look for!"
He could tell she was troubled by it, but waited for her to finish knowing she wasn't done yet.
"That wasn't the strangest thing, though," she continued. She sighed before continuing. "Whoever killed him killed Jane Doe and most likely Emily Sims too."
"Scully!" Mulder was shocked at the pronouncement, knowing she didn't speculate, knowing that for her to reach that conclusion, she had to feel confident without a doubt. He grinned, picturing her in this moment.
"The dirt scrapings from underneath his fingernails were the same as the dirt that Jane Doe was buried in," she said. "They've declared the case solved and consider him the murderer. I haven't shared the information about the drug compounds though and I'm fairly certain he didn't kill her - I think he just buried her."
"You think that whoever killed him, killed her," he repeated back, more to just say it out loud to himself than anything else.
"I don't," Scully paused and took a deep breath, collecting herself "Mulder, I just don't know, but I don't know what else to think about it."
They were both silent for a minute, considering the implications of Scully's findings.
"I have to go," Scully said suddenly and she clicked off without saying goodbye. Mulder looked at the now disconnected phone he was holding in his hand, startled at the abrupt end to their conversation. He glanced at the clock and realized she had probably called him from work. He shook his head as he replaced the handset. Scully was smart, forthright, and a damn good medical examiner. She'd make a good FBI agent, he mused to himself as he turned to his computer and opened it to run the program the guys had written for him - to search various law enforcement databases for cases similar to Samantha's and Scully's Jane Doe. He considered sending an email to the guys asking them to add people similar to Scully's transient stiff, but didn't after he realized that the profile would be too large to get any useful information from. They'd have to solve that particular mystery some other way.
The program beeped, letting him know that there had been no knew reports in the week since he last ran it.
7:58 am
August 4, 1993
San Francisco City Medical Examiner's Office
San Francisco, CA
Scully scanned her day's caseload, relieved once again that it didn't contain any John or Jane Does. George had prepared each file last night before he left and she picked them up to scan through them while her computer booted up. She reached for her pen to make a notation in the first case, but it wasn't lying where she left it last night when she had spoken to Mulder on the phone. She scanned her desk, but couldn't tell specifically if anything was out of place. It felt off, nonetheless.
She opened her pencil drawer to grab a pen from the supply she kept in there and looked at where her drawer keys should've been. They weren't there. Frantically, she shuffled things around in her desk. If they were missing then maybe her files were too. She reached for her bottom file drawer; it was unlocked and slid open easily into her hand. With trepidation, she reached back behind the last file and down, reaching for the familiar brush of file folder against her fingertips. All she felt was cold steel drawer.
"Shit," she said, under her breath. She wasn't supposed to have those files in her office and wasn't even supposed to have the Emily Sims or Marin County Jane Doe files, so there wasn't much she could say to her boss. "Shit," she said again, closing the door, trying to decide what to do and wracking her brain as to how they could've gone missing.
Her computer was booted up and she logged on, opening the medical examiner's database program right away. She typed in the transient's John Doe number designation.
File not found.
Puzzled, she checked again and typed it in carefully checking before she hit enter.
File not found appeared again.
She got up and left her office, heading for the file room where the physical files would be. It was a solved case and would've been transferred to storage at this point. She let herself into the room and scanned the file numbers for his. It was gone, she realized. The number belonged to another case now; it wasn't simply missing.
They had only closed the case last night, but they had transported the body a few days after he had come into the morgue to Colma for cremation and burial. She headed across the room to where they kept the transport logs; surely he’d be in there. Currently shipments were being recorded both in the database and on paper. If he had still existed in the electronic records he would've come up in her search, but maybe whoever had deleted the electronic records had forgotten the paper records.
She opened the book to the correct date and scanned the numbers of the bodies transported on the day that her homeless man would have been. When she couldn't find him, she scanned the days before and after his. "It's as if he never existed," she said under her breath when she couldn't find him. She'd call Mulder tonight and let him know what happened, but that didn't solve the problem of her missing files, or how they even went missing.
She headed up the front lobby of the building and the security desk. Smiling in what she hoped was a sweet manner, she had asked if the morgue had any late-night visitors that weren't the night shift dropping off bodies. The young man smiled back. Scully remembered him and was glad for the first time in her life that she always said hello to him whenever she saw him on duty.
"Sure, but just that FBI agent."
"What FBI agent?" Scully asked, knowing that Mulder had been in Washington, D.C. She wasn't aware of any other cases that involved the FBI either right now, and news of those usually traveled.
"Oh, he's been around a few times. Let me pull up the tape for you,"
"Thank you," she said. Waiting as he pulled the tape, put it in the small TV on the desk and started fast forwarding. He stopped at 11:36pm the night before.
"He's never come this late before, but he said he had left something downstairs. I couldn't raise Erik on the radio to come and escort him so I let him go downstairs on his own. I'm not supposed to do that, but I figured since he was FBI…" he trailed off.
Scully watched as a familiar face approached the desk.
"His name sounds Russian, here I have it right here," he pulled the log towards him.
"Krycek," Scully supplied before he had a chance to look at his log.
"Yeah, that's it," he replied looking up at her
"Thank you," Scully said, "I won't say anything."
The security guard smiled sheepishly, "I appreciate it," he said softly.
"Shit," Scully said again, under her breath as she walked away. "Shit," she repeated again for good measure. Although she didn't have any proof she was positive she knew where her files had gone and why her body had disappeared.
11:31 pm
August 4, 1993
Hegel Place
Alexandria, VA
Mulder sat on his couch and stared at the television. He had grown bored with his porn a little while ago and was now watching a program on the Rift Valley in Africa. A baby wildebeest died a particularly gruesome death at the water hole. The sound of a knock at his door caught his attention. It was soft and quick. He saw a shadow move under his door.
There was a nondescript brown folder sitting on the ground just in front of his door and the hallway was empty. It wasn't the first time he had been passed information this way, but usually he had to ask for it first. He picked up the folder and checked the hallway again, curious as to which one of his contacts may have left it for him.
He tore it open as he resettled himself on the couch, muting the television before pulling out the file folder inside. He opened it to a picture of a smiling woman that looked like it had been snapped candidly on the street. She was pretty and her mouth was open in a half-laugh. Her features reminded him of Scully.
He scanned the documents under the folder. There was a medical form on top, but lacked the woman's name - just a medical identification number. It looked like they had been tracking her for a while based on the dates in the file. They stopped about six years ago with what looked like a series of notes regarding her fertility. He looked on the other side of the folder and found notes about other female medical subjects with many of the same notations about blood pressure, temperature, and menstrual cycles. The women were definitely being tracked.
There was no name of a medical facility or a purpose of the documentation on any of the sheets and it didn't appear that anyone was tracked through a pregnancy. He checked the envelope the folder had arrived in, but it was empty. Mulder looked through the folder again trying to decide if he wanted to call Scully or not regarding the file. He had received an email from her earlier today telling him that her files were missing and that she had evidence Krycek was behind it. It was always a sure sign that you were on to something big if people started stealing your research, Mulder had learned. The guys had also emailed him to let him know that they couldn't track down Jennifer Marlowe. Mulder wondered if she'd show up as a Jane Doe somewhere else before too long.
He decided that Scully might be able to make more sense of the file than he or the guys could. The guys had a copy machine and they'd probably want to see the folder. He turned off the TV and stood up. It was late, but they'd still be up, following the conspiracy trail on the Internet.
6:45 pm
August 6, 1993
Scully's house
San Francisco, CA
Scully picked up the package that sat just inside her front door after she let herself in her apartment. She carefully scanned it for signs of tampering before chiding herself for being paranoid. If Krycek was going to look at her mail, he'd probably just steal it outright, she thought to herself. She tore it open.
Mulder had called her yesterday to tell her he was overnighting a package to her house. In it were copies of information someone had passed onto him that he was sure was connected to Emily, Jennifer, and the Jane Does and that to him it looked like something to do with fertility given the data and the dates, but could she look it over for him.
Inside was a handful of papers with a picture on top. She looked at it and grew cold.
"Where did you get this?" She demanded as soon as Mulder picked up the phone.
"What?" he asked, confusedly.
"Where did you get this picture, this file?"
"I told you, someone passed it on, Scully."
"Stop with the obfuscating, Mulder, and tell me how you got this!"
"It was left on my doorstep. I don't know who gave it to me. What's wrong, Scully?"
"Do you know who the woman in the picture is?" Scully was growing calmer and the initial shock of the picture was beginning to wear off.
"No," Mulder replied, then added, "do you?"
"Yes." Scully took a deep breath, realizing, perhaps for the first time, that this went so much further than a dead girl in a park and a missing six year old.
"Who is she?" Mulder was curious.
"Her name is Melissa Scully. She is, was, my sister."
"Scully?" Mulder's shock and compassion was genuine. Scully was relieved to hear it, certain now he wasn't aware of the connection.
"Missy died in January during a home invasion robbery gone bad. She was home, at my house, in the middle of the day when someone broke in. They must've surprised her. I found her just inside the doorway."
"Oh, Scully…"
"Mulder, I've read the file. They were tracking Missy's ovulation cycles. The last bit of data seems to indicate that her eggs were harvested."
"Like a fertility treatment?"
"Yes, but I didn't think Missy was undergoing a fertility treatment seven years ago. Mulder, that's not all. Based on the numbers, if this data is indeed right, they took her eggs. All of her eggs. Missy would've been sterile."
Mulder was silent, processing the information.
"Do you know where this data is from?"
"The guys did some snooping for me today. It's from one of the clinics in San Jose that was listed on Emily Sims's medical records. I think it was for fertility treatments her mother was undergoing," he answered her, still trying to comprehend what she had just told him about her sister.
"Do you think Missy could've been Emily's mother, Mulder?"
"It's possible."
Scully was silent as they both contemplated the implications of the medical records.
"I'm coming out there, Scully. I'm coming out there, I want to know what this is all about."
"Ok," she said softly.
"Scully, do you have somewhere to go? Someone who could stay with you?"
Scully smiled, touched at his concern.
"No, I kicked Ethan out a few days ago. I'll be all right, Mulder."
She hung up and picked up the picture of Missy again. She traced her features and sniffed as she started to cry.
Clutching the picture to her chest she sunk to the kitchen floor, weeping silently for her sister.
2:19 pm
August 7, 1993
San Francisco Medical Examiner's Office
San Francisco, CA
Scully looked up as the phone in autopsy rang. She had just finished an autopsy and was stripping off her gloves. She glanced over at George who was cleaning the table and picked up the phone.
"Autopsy One, this is Doctor Scully," she answered.
"Doctor Scully, I have a phone call for you from an Agent Mulder. He says its urgent," the receptionist on the other end said.
Scully sighed, she didn't particularly want to speak to Mulder right now but she wasn't sure how she could avoid it. "All right," she responded and waited for the click alerting her the call had been transferred.
"Mulder, I don't really have the time-"
"Scully, I'm at the airport, can you come pick me up?"
She pinched the bridge of her nose. She really didn't want to deal with this, with Mulder and the recent revelations about Missy and the wider implications that those connections to her files being stolen meant. She just wanted to go back to a few months ago, before she met an FBI agent named Fox, hell even before she happened to be the one to catch the autopsy of a little girl named Jane Doe.
"Scully?"
"All right," she found herself saying, against her better judgment. "All right, let me take care of a few things here first."
She hung up and could feel George's eyes on her and was thankful for his quiet discretion. He wouldn't ask her what was going on and he wouldn't say anything if she left early.
"George, something has come up, I'm going to leave for the rest of the afternoon. Do you mind?" she gestured to the autopsy.
"No, Doctor Scully," he replied in his soft voice with an equally soft smile. She responded with one of her own. She nodded and then stripped off her smock and put it in the bin, heading for her office.
George would take care of the initial report and just leave it for her to sign in the morning. She shut off her computer and slid her active files into her desk drawer and locked it. George could be trusted, but she wasn't sure she wanted any of her colleagues looking through her desk, or Krycek for that matter if he was still slinking around. She smiled ruefully as she thought about how paranoid she'd become in the last few months. How much more paranoid she probably would become by the time Mulder got to the bottom of his case. Truth is never easy, she thought to herself.
Mulder was standing on the sidewalk with a bag over his shoulder when she drove up. He smiled at her as he got into the car. She couldn't muster one in return.
"Sorry to show up like this, but the news you told me has big implications in my case, Scully. I need to do some more investigation."
"Now, Mulder?"
"Yes, now." He sounded a little puzzled to her.
"Mulder, she may just be a part of your case to you, but she was my sister."
"I know, Scully," he said, with sympathy. “I’m sorry.”
Scully felt her defenses start to crumble. "Do you have some place to stay?"
Mulder shook his head in response and Scully nodded, driving towards her apartment. She was relieved enough that she wasn't even bothered by the presumption. She had woken up this morning on the floor of her kitchen. With a houseguest she'd at least have a reason to hold it all together.
Mulder set his bag down just inside her door when she let them in.
"Can I get you anything? Iced tea, beer, water, coffee?" she asked, remembering her manners.
"Whatever you're having."
Scully nodded, heading into the kitchen. "Why don't you order pizza, Mulder, there's a few places on the counter. They all deliver."
She could hear Mulder on the phone as she clinked ice into two glasses and poured the iced tea. Mulder joined her when he was done.
"What can you tell me about her, Scully?"
Scully examined her eyes floating in the glass. One of the cubes had cracked and she examined the lines of the crack before she answered.
"Missy was everything I was not. And more, I suppose."
Mulder waited for her to continue when she stopped.
"She was always a free spirit. I followed my brothers around, always wanting to belong with them, but Missy always did her own thing. She was pretty and feminine and I was a tomboy with a chip on my shoulder. She had boys sneaking into our window when we were in high school.
"Missy went to college and while she always had time for me, she also had her own life separate from the rest of us. I think my mom was the only one who understood her. Even I didn't, but she loved all of us.
Scully wandered into her living room and settled herself on the couch. Mulder followed her.
"Seven years ago, Missy was in the wrong place at the wrong time. A bank in Portland where she was living at the time. It was held up by a man named Duane Barry who thought he was an alien abductee. He abducted Missy and disappeared. They found him a day later on a remote mountaintop in eastern Oregon with no sign of Missy. He claimed they had taken her instead of him - which I guess had been his plan all along."
Mulder listened. He remembered the case and Duane Barry, but he couldn't remember the details, which is why he probably never connected the Scully name.
"They found her two days later, naked, shivering and alone up on that mountain top. She had no member of what happened, none at all."
Scully played with the condensation on her glass, encouraging large drops to form and fall down the sides. The ice snapped as it melted.
“She may not have remembered, but her subconscious did,” she finally said after minutes of silence. Mulder’s hand drifted to hers and covered it. She didn’t look at them.
“Missy drifted for four years. She’d get a job and settle down somewhere and I’d get a postcard or a phone call from her saying she was doing really great and how happy she was. Then, something would happen and she’d disappear. The first few times it happened, I panicked. I’d do anything to try to find her, anything at all.”
Mulder squeezed her hand.
“Sometimes I’d manage to find her, usually in another town with another job claiming she’d just forgotten to tell me she’d gotten bored and moved on. Sometimes I couldn’t find her, but I could track her movements. I think she’d have psychotic episodes, post-traumatic stress induced episodes. She’d claim to not remember what had happened between her moments of semi-normalness, but I learned enough from trying to find her.”
Scully laced her fingers with Mulder’s.
“My parents would try to get her help, but she’d never stay in the programs they put her in. Bill claimed she was just a drug addict and wouldn’t talk to her. Charlie, well I don’t know about Charlie - he just disconnected. I don’t think anyone understood.”
Scully jerked at the knock on her door. The pizza, she remembered after a second of panic. Mulder got up and quietly paid the delivery girl. He brought it back and set it on the coffee table. She didn’t even have the strength to protest. He handed her a piece and she began to eat it mechanically.
“Three years ago, she showed up on my doorstep. She told me she was sick of running, sick of having to stay one step ahead of them, and was ready to just stay put no matter what happened. I didn’t tell mom and dad she was here, I just let her be.”
Scully smiled as she remembered those times and how Missy slowly came back to her.
“San Francisco was good to her. She joined an art commune, although she still stayed with me off and on. Eventually, she started talking to mom again and for a while, she was the only member of the family Charlie would talk to. She even mended things with dad. She worked for a regression therapist in Berkeley and sold her art here and there and I think she was happy.”
Scully pointed to her wall and Mulder followed her finger to an abstract painting hanging on her wall. He could see a face with a shock of red hair, a coffee cup, and other things circling about like steam from the cup. He smiled at it and looked at Scully. She was looking at him with a soft smile on her face.
“She painted that for me. Called it ‘Dana’s Morning Coffee’. Despite all this, Missy would never talk about what happened. She always said she didn’t remember. I think she was starting to, though, and just wasn’t ready to talk about it.”
“I looked up the report on her murder,” Mulder finally spoke.
Scully nodded, “I figured you might.”
“It’s still unsolved.”
Scully sighed and nodded again.
“Mulder, I’m afraid of what happened to Missy when she was missing. I’m afraid that it has to do with that clinic and with Emily. I’m afraid of what they did to her.”
Chapter 7