Skull and Cross Bones - Chapter 2: The Loser in the Limelight
The walk to the interrogation rooms seemed endless and Scully felt the tension in her jaw wind a little tighter with every passing second.
“So…” Mulder hedged and she shook her head quickly.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she told him.
He cleared his throat.
“Well in about two minutes you’re going to be talking about it with silent H himself, so don’t you think we should…”
“Nope,” she said honestly. “I would like to prolong the inevitable for as long as humanly possible.”
So then there was silence.
Until, from the corner of the elevator, Booth cleared his throat.
“Uh, what’s going on? Is there something I should know about?” he asked from behind them, audibly unenthused.
Mulder and Scully declined to comment.
**
The heating system was working in this area of the FBI building, but Mulder found his own body temperature ratcheting up so that he really didn’t need the warmth seeping out of the vents on the floor.
Agent Booth had vanished into the observation room with a tall lanky kid who looked a little familiar and Mulder was left standing beside Scully, his hands in his pants pockets and his brain pulsing inside of his skull so his temples felt like wounds beside his eyes. He tipped his head to the side, trying to crack his neck and alleviate some of the tension. Scully gave him a withering and discouraging glance to which he did not respond.
He was thinking that this was probably on the top ten list of things the two of them didn’t need right now.
He hadn’t even realized Eddie was out of jail.
“Let’s just get this over-with,” Scully mumbled angrily as she pushed through the door with her shoulder, her heels click-clacking in Scully-rhythm against the polished tiled floor.
Eddie was seated at the interrogation table like an image from one of Mulder’s recurring nightmares, and his squat squirrelly form went motionless when the two of them entered the room, his face frozen in a look of relief that made Mulder kind of sick to his stomach.
“Thank God,” Eddie murmured and Scully pursed her lips as she paced the floor and pretended to read the case file in her hand.
Mulder sat down across from Eddie and gave him a long hard look.
“How’s it going, Ed? We hear you’ve been busy,” he started, his smooth transition into questioning an easy one as it had always been.
“I’m not in jail anymore, if that’s what you mean,” Eddie responded in that self-dejected tone that Mulder had learned to hate so much.
“That’s not what he means,” Scully answered from her position, now stagnant and leaning against the wall in the shadowed corner of the room - a defensive stance, distanced with arms crossed and the least amount of visibility possible. Mulder recognized the psychological implications of her choice.
He tried not to remember exactly why Scully might feel defensive, and he tried not to have the same old debate with himself about which of them had been more afflicted by Eddie’s insensitivity and intrusion into their carefully constructed routine.
He failed in his attempt at self-inflicted long-term-memory-loss when Eddie’s facial expression shifted to include the slightest leer that might normally have gone undetected if it weren’t Mulder who happened to be watching. The tilt of Eddie’s brows made Mulder lick his lips in discomfort and made him recall instantly the moment he had burst through Scully’s door to find her practically naked with Fox Mulder 2.0.
Mulder wished he hadn’t spent so many hours studying the contours of this guy’s face, because then maybe he wouldn’t have recognized that oh so upsetting facial expression for exactly what it was - lust.
“You look good, Agent Scully. Just as beautiful as I remembered,” Blundht complimented and Mulder heard the faint sounds of Scully shifting her weight in discomfort behind him.
“Shut up, Blun-hut,” Mulder ordered, deliberately pronouncing the ‘h’ in a childish attempt to bully his adversary into silence. Eddie glared at him from the other side of the table.
“Listen, you should be nicer to me,” he warned and Mulder let out a calculated chuckle. “I didn’t do anything they’re saying I did!” Eddie argued, defensive and adamant. “And I can help you figure out who’s doing this stuff, because there aren’t very many people like me out there and I have a sneaking suspicion of who’s behind all of this.”
“If you say Eddie Senior I will actually cross this table and kill you,” Mulder warned in a flat and sardonic tone of voice.
“My father was never smart enough to pull something like this off,” Eddie assured them. “This takes brains and there’s only one person I know that fits the bill.”
“Come off it, Eddie,” Scully interrupted. “We’ve got you on three separate security cameras in three separate cemeteries where three separate bodies were exhumed without permission and left in a basement downtown to rot,” she spat, her consonants crisp between her straight white teeth. Mulder sat immobile, silent, letting her do her thing as she slammed one still shot after another down onto the table in front of Eddie. “Take a look. There you are on August 14th, September 2nd, and October 13th. Can you explain that to me? Be careful because I don’t like you very much and there’s no telling what I’ll do if you lie to me.”
“Wha…I’m not lying. Have I lied to you?” Eddie responded defensively.
“Is that a joke?” Mulder asked, again flat and lacking in emotion and Eddie eyed him angrily before sitting back and deflating a little in resignation.
Once more the body language was familiar and Mulder was unfortunately reminded of things he’d rather forget.
“Look, I’m not the guy you’re looking for. Do you understand me? This isn’t me,” he promised, pointing at the pictures and tugging at his shirt sleeve.
“Once a criminal, always a criminal, right Eddie?” Scully accused and Eddie seemed genuinely hurt.
“Hey, I got out on good behavior. I did very well in group therapy after the first year,” he whined. Mulder had that sick kind of feeling in his stomach like he might puke at any moment from the amount of displeasure he felt at even being in the same room as this guy.
“Why did you dig up these bodies, Eddie? Didn’t they teach you in health class that corpses don’t procreate?” Mulder offered.
“This isn’t ME!” Eddie insisted.
“It sure looks a lot like you,” Mulder countered.
“I agree,” Eddie responded, “but looks can be deceiving.” He blinked slowly and studied the images for a moment before he picked his head up and planted a hard-hitting kind of stare over Mulder’s shoulder. “Isn’t that right, Agent Scully?”
**
“What the hell is this about?” Booth demanded, turning from the one-sided mirror and glaring at Sweets as if he were the one in there with Van Blundht having cryptic conversations.
Sweets shrugged helplessly.
“Didn’t you look at their files on the guy?” Sweets wondered.
“They said it’s classified,” Booth responded dejectedly.
“It seems to me this isn’t a consultation. They’re taking over this case - is that right Agent Booth?”
“No! No this is open and shut, we have the guy on camera, we just…Caroline told Hacker she thought we needed to get a confession out of him because the camera footage isn’t enough, but he wasn’t talking, so we brought in these two that he’s been asking for,” Booth defended stubbornly and Sweets nodded, crossing his arms and considering it. Booth hated when he did that. Mostly because Booth could literally crush Sweets with his bare hands and in moments like this he thought Sweets kind of forgot that fact.
“You’re also lacking a motive,” Sweets declared, “None of this fits with this guy’s personality, his M.O., his prior behavior according to our file on him. He’s a convicted sexual assault criminal who basically drugged married women into having sex with him. He’s cowardly and has low self-esteem and that might normally be a really great recipe for a serial killer, but I don’t see it, and I don’t’ think you see it either. This kind of guy doesn’t suddenly turn into a grave robber slash murderer with a lair in downtown D.C. without a little coaxing from an outside source,” Sweets argued sensibly.
These were things Booth knew already.
Booth knew all of this.
He needed someone to make sense of it who wasn’t a twelve year old.
He was restless and again he felt that lightening bolt of empty regret that had the face of Temperance Brennan attached and he shook his head in irritation. Habits learned over a year in combat died pretty hard, he was finding. And he was having a hard time staying on his game. He felt himself slipping and getting sloppy and he was worried this was about to become an uncontrollable downhill slide for his career.
Pool tables and poker chips had been haunting his dreams a little…
“Why isn’t Doctor Brennan here?” Sweets questioned.
Booth’s stomach tightened at how well Sweets seemed to be able to read him, and pinned him with an angry unmoving stare.
“Leave it alone, kid, I mean it,” Booth warned after a few moments of tense silence, and with that he left the room and slammed the door behind him.
All eyes in the interrogation room lifted when Booth stepped in, winded and a little disheveled.
“Enough coded spooky talk. Mind explaining to me what the hell is going on?”
**
“Striated muscle tissue.”
Brennan’s face was a blank stare. “I’m sorry?” she questioned, and Cam shook her head in confusion while still trying to explain.
“I don’t know, this body - the exhumed mummified body we found in the basement with the others seems to have…I could be going crazy but I think the skin is covering an entire layer of what appears to be striated muscle tissue,” Cam explained, her gloved hands hanging in the air, one clutching a scalpel in immobilized bewilderment.
“That is highly unlikely. I would like to examine the body myself to provide a valid and trusted second opinion,” Brennan announced.
Cam had honestly hoped she would say that, because part of her feared she was losing her mind and in moments such as that, Temperance Brennan was a great person to have around because she would tell you so. To your face. With very little tact.
As Brennan pulled gloves on Cam stepped aside, gesturing that she should go ahead and handing over the scalpel without hesitation.
It was almost an hour later that they were both rosy-cheeked with disbelief and on speaker phone with the head of the Jeffersonian, declaring an amazing find, an anomaly of excessive striated muscle tissue and what seemed to be a detached tail.
**
“So you’re telling me that this guy can just,” Booth snapped his finger and Scully tried to stop herself from rolling her eyes as he continued, “change his face, like that?”
“No, he can’t anymore. Or he’s not supposed to be able to. His doctor should be prescribing a muscle relaxant that is injected by a nurse on a weekly basis,” Scully explained, “which is why we think he’s resorted to committing crimes without a disguise.”
“He was never the brightest bulb in the drawer,” Mulder added.
“And why have you withheld this information until now?” Booth demanded.
Mulder shrugged and Scully again had to stop herself from rolling her eyes.
“Because the file you were given had clearly been crafted to deliberately leave it out,” she sighed.
“It gets tiresome trying to explain these kinds of things to agents like you,” Mulder finished. “No disrespect intended.”
Scully watched Booth shift on his feet and step back away from them just slightly.
“Don’t worry about it,” he answered on cue, in a terse tone of irritation.
“We’re sorry,” Scully offered. “We didn’t realize it would become an issue.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s a lie, Agent Scully,” Booth accused, which was an accurate assessment, Scully thought, “And I’d like to know the full story before we continue investigating this case so I can avoid looking like a complete idiot in the future. Assuming this line of bullshit about stretchy muscle tissue is true, by the way,” he tacked on belatedly and Mulder cleared his throat beside Scully. “Which in my opinion, doesn’t seem likely.”
“It’s called striated muscle tissue,” Scully corrected without thinking and Booth gave her a cold, unfeeling stare in response. Raising her eyebrows in resignation, Scully continued with her best explanation of events: “Blundht impersonated the husbands of four women and the…cinematic hero of a fifth, impregnating all five. He then, during the course of our investigation, kidnapped Agent Mulder and attempted to impersonate him as well.” She wondered if her Irish skin was giving away the truth of how well Eddie had impersonated Mulder, and who exactly he had planned to seduce in that scenario. She certainly hoped not, as that was not part of the story she planned to divulge. She went on: “However, luckily Mulder was able to escape, and we were able to apprehend Van Blundht somewhat easily, at which point he was imprisoned with strict instructions from me that he be given a muscle relaxant.”
There was a long and heavy pause as Booth just stood there.
“You realize how ridiculous this sounds, right?” Booth eventually wondered.
“I thought you might say something like that,” Mulder responded.
**
The lab was cool and so quiet that Booth felt like he should hold his breath.
Or, he was mostly sure it was the quiet that had him holding his breath. It was the quiet along with his proximity to all things lab related…mummies…squints…Bones…
He watched Cam register the aloof and cocky demeanor of Fox Mulder and the unapologetic and unaffected stance of Dana Scully and tried to keep himself from laughing at the way Cam was so obviously not pleased with either one of these people. She squinted at them and frowned, leaning against the silver railing behind her.
“You’re claiming a major medical abnormality was edited out of this man’s file?” she asked. Mulder and Scully simply stood there with silence as their unified reaction. Clever, Booth thought in irritation, neither confirm nor deny and everybody stays out of trouble. He was not the kind of guy to fall party to that mentality. “I don’t think that seems likely, agents,” she told them honestly.
“It is highly likely, Doctor Saroyan,” Mulder assured her in his flat annoying too-good-for-everything tone, “Happens all the time.”
Scully was not saying anything at all, her arms crossed and her lips pursed. Booth noticed she spent very little time engaged in the actual conversation as she mostly seemed to study the mirror-like calm professionalism of Temperance Brennan, patiently standing beside the mummified corpse.
“The United States Government wants to avoid a stir at all costs,” Mulder added with sarcastic undertones.
“Too bad Hodgins isn’t here,” Booth mumbled, Bones making eye contact with him as an all too brief reward for his humor. Eye contact was a rare thing for them these days, and so he enjoyed it when he could, trying to practice looking at her without feeling the sizzle of electricity in the root of his spine. He reminded himself to think of his blonde-bombshell girlfriend what’s-her-name and felt himself start to fidget, pushing his hands into his pants pockets.
“Mulder’s opinions about the U.S. government aside,” Scully finally chimed in, “I can tell you that I read over the case report you have on Eddie Van Blundht and it is not the report that I wrote. The only drug involved in Eddie’s seduction of women was alcohol, which was what I reported but is not what appears in your file. I also very clearly documented my findings regarding the striated muscle tissue of both Eddie and his father, as well as the events during which I witnessed Eddie physically alter his appearance using said muscle tissue,” she commented coolly and it crossed Booth’s mind that she should be very much in her element here with the overly-wordy squint squad.
“You documented most of the events during which you witnessed him physically alter his appearance,” Mulder added quietly and Scully shot him a glare that might actually freeze water if given the chance.
“I documented the relevant events,” she corrected, her cheeks turning rosy and her voice dipping down deep into its amber tones.
Booth was tired of their half-sentences and hidden meanings and let out an audible groan, followed immediately by an outburst: “Ok so whether the files were doctored or not, can we get a confession from this loser and wrap this thing up, or what?”
“No,” Mulder spat, his temper evident in his posture and expression.
“No? Why the hell not?” Booth challenged.
“Because he didn’t do anything,” came Mulder’s reply, and Booth decided legend or not - he was totally starting to hate this guy.