The boundary between life and death.
Mulder had written of this in his initial profile on Bright Eyes, and the more he contemplated this insight, the more it allowed him to see.
What would this UNSUB have fixated on before turning to the murders of pregnant women? That was a high-reward activity for him—but high-risk too. He’d warmed up first. Gotten his feet wet.
Mulder had gone straight from the Erin Koss crime scene to the office; both he and Scully knew, without having to discuss it, that she would join him there shortly. He was grateful for the chance to immerse himself completely, to follow his instincts without having to explain them. His mind could attempt to shape itself to the UNSUB’s, unfettered by civility or procedure, guided solely by instinct.
He’ll have started on animals, Mulder thought. This was not uncommon training ground for future serial murderers. Most of the time, the impulse to maim and kill smaller creatures arose from a pathetic desire for control, so warped that it could look upon the death of a defenseless animal and believe it a triumph. (So telling was this behavior that, during Mulder’s long absence from the Bureau, the FBI had created a nationwide database of animal-cruelty cases—their perpetrators likely suspects for later crimes.) But in this case, the UNSUB wasn’t motivated by sadism. His victims hadn’t been tortured, or even killed particularly slowly. Their deaths were only means to an end.
He pulled up the database to search through Virginia, Maryland, and DC animal-cruelty cases. This would cast a depressingly wide net, and the files were unlikely to categorize the crimes in the way Mulder needed. Going through them one by one would take some time, but it was at least a burden he could lift from Scully’s shoulders.
“You realize I dissected a fetal pig in premed,” she said when he told her this a couple of hours later, just after her arrival.
“So you’ve mentioned pretty much every time we’ve eaten barbecue in the past thirty years.” Mulder took the bag Scully had placed on his desk, which contained a potential olive branch in the form of curly fries. (For a person with a medical degree, she could be surprisingly vulnerable to junk food. A career that contained endless airports, highway service stations, and stakeouts would do that to you.) “Still. You’re queasier than usual at the moment. It’s the least I can do.”
“What is it you’re searching for that won’t already be flagged?”
“I’m looking for two things: One, animals that were killed with no apparent signs of sadism or torture. Quick kills designed to damage the body as little as possible. These are a minority of such cases. Two, animals killed either while pregnant or shortly after giving birth. Even rarer. My guess is such deaths are less likely to be noticed, or may be mistaken for accidental deaths.”
“Any hits?”
“Two killings so far match both criteria,” Mulder said, switching the images of his screen from pictures of dead animals to rap sheets. “One, we have Lyle Ragsdill of Frederick, Maryland. Thirty-one, lived with his grandmother until grandma was down one cat. Since then he’s been living with his mother. Two is Garett Upshaw of Gaithersburg, Maryland, who still lives in the house next door to the neighbors whose dog he killed. I’m guessing he doesn’t get a plate of the Christmas fudge.”
Scully folded her arms across her chest, considering. “Do either of them show up on our earlier searches? Protesters at abortion clinics, or frequent power outages?”
Mulder shook his head. “We haven’t received responses from all the mobile networks, so we might still get a hit there, but so far, nothing.”
“Their living situations—those are both individuals who don’t have much in the way of privacy,” Scully pointed out. “They wouldn’t be able to bring the body back, take their time studying the remains. Bright Eyes does everything on-site. They both fit the profile.”
“I should keep going through this,” Mulder said. “More candidates may shake out. But if you’d like to check out these guys? Upshaw works in a shipping warehouse and Ragsdill’s a sales clerk at a big-box electronics store, which happens to be not very far from Omega Hospital. I’ll pull the addresses for you.”
“Thanks.”
When they split up on a case, it was more common for Scully to remain in place while Mulder did the fieldwork, mostly because many of Scully’s tasks (blood tests, autopsies) needed to take place in a controlled setting. That said, they’d done the reverse often enough. But it was different now. “Listen. Maybe I should come with you.”
“I’ve got this, Mulder.”
“Of course you do. This isn’t about that. We both know Bright Eyes may be stalking you personally. That raises the risks exponentially.”
“If one of these guys is the perpetrator, he’s not going to attack me in the middle of his workplace. I’ll save any questioning at their homes until we can go together. Better?”
“Better,” he said. “Be careful.”
“I will.”
With that she was out the door, and Mulder had lost his chance to address their conflict the night before. Scully was able to focus as intensely as anyone he had ever known; in the heat of the hunt, her thoughts and will could become as sharply targeted as a missile. This trait made her an excellent agent but, at times, an elusive life partner. It was one of the few ways in which they were very much alike. So often, when one of them was finally ready to speak, the other was unready to hear.
Mulder’s apologies would have to wait. He looked down at the rapidly disappearing curly fries. Was that small gift a sign she was no longer angry? Proof that she was at least willing to hear him out? Or merely something she’d picked up on her own food run, mostly out of habit?
Stop scrying meaning from a bag of fries, he told himself. Get back to work.
His disquiet remained; it merely changed shape as he sank once more into the case. There wasn’t as much separation between his work and his life as Mulder would have wished. His conviction that Bright Eyes had seen Scully, had registered her pregnancy, only grew stronger. If so, a confrontation between the two of them would be…volatile. Unpredictable.
But there wasn’t much Scully couldn’t handle.
Mulder went back to his desk to continue going through the files. There was every chance he could shake out another couple of suspects. The more he flushed out from the underbrush, the greater opportunity they’d have to stop this creep immediately. This was the best way for him to ensure Scully’s safety—even if it didn’t feel like it at the moment.
Scully’s first trip took her to the shipping warehouse, where her badge earned her the information that Upshaw wouldn’t start his shift until six p.m. “I’ll circle back,” she said. “I’d appreciate your discretion about the Bureau’s inquiries.”
“So Garett doesn’t cut and run,” the manager said with a weirdly gleeful grin. “I’m totally on it.”
“Thanks.”
The popularity of true crime had, in many ways, made the job of an FBI agent more difficult: Now thousands of people fancied themselves sleuths, never realizing their own ham-handed “investigations” often muddied the waters for law enforcement. Scully had noticed, however, an uptick in the kind of compliance she currently needed: People were more likely these days to avoid tipping off suspects. Maybe they’d come to understand how harmful that could be, but she thought it more likely that they just wanted to witness a real live arrest for themselves. She very much intended to bring in Bright Eyes as quickly as possible; if that meant putting on a show for his coworkers, Scully would be happy to oblige.
Her next stop was the big-box electronics store, cavernous even by the usual gargantuan standards of such places. Scully walked in through what seemed like a tunnel of overlarge TV screens, each of them showing the same clip: brilliantly colored hot-air balloons flying over a spectacular canyon. Obviously not everyone had given up like Scully, who watched nearly everything on her laptop. Her goal was to find the manager and ask him about Lyle Ragsdill.
As it turned out, the manager was Lyle Ragsdill. When she found him in the sound department, he proved eager to answer questions. “Nana’s cat really was an accident,” he said. “I was looking forward to the kittens. But she wouldn’t listen—Nana, I mean. She pressed charges anyway. It really ticked my mom off.”
Scully was not wholly convinced by these denials; the judicial system does not prosecute at the whims of angry grandmothers. However, she noted that Lyle betrayed no sign of having seen her before. He seemed to believe the questions were only regarding animal cruelty, revealing no awareness of Bright Eyes’s crimes. And—most convincing of all—he never once glanced down toward her belly. Lyle wasn’t their killer.
“Thank you, Mr. Ragsdill,” she finally said. “We’ll be in touch if we have further questions.”
“Absolutely, ma’am. I’ll be around.”
Scully walked out of Ragsdill’s office back onto the store floor. She glanced up to look at the hot-air balloons, but the video had changed to a scene of tropical fish darting around a bright coral reef. Her extensive experience watching Pixar movies with her nephews when they were small automatically drew her eyes to the clownfish. Just as her brain supplied the name Nemo, the screen blinked.
The same kind of blink happened all the time—perhaps no more than a random surge—but she couldn’t write it off. It was as though a needle of adrenaline had been jabbed directly into Scully’s heart. The hair stood up on her head, along her arms. Sure enough, several of the other screens began to blink too.
He’s here.
She continued walking at the same pace, all the way down the long aisle, until she could get a bead on who might be following her.
Several paces back stood a man probably in his early thirties. He was half turned from Scully—seemingly engrossed in comparing different models—so she couldn’t get a good look at his face. He had a sturdy build, hair thinning on top. Roughly five foot eleven, white. All of this aligned with the imperfect view she’d had of Bright Eyes in the maternity store, before his attack on Blair Stawarski. And there was something about the way he never once looked in Scully’s direction while he kept sidling after her, bit by bit.
You’re being paranoid, Scully told herself. By way of a test, she walked toward the appliances section, trying to take the slightly aimless steps of a browser, fighting to reveal none of the heightening anxiety within. She’d examined a dishwasher for nearly five minutes before she glimpsed the same man nearby, studying a refrigerator. Scully only glanced at him for a moment before turning her head away. She tried to tell herself it might have been nothing—
But at that instant, one of the television sets showing the tropical fish blinked again, blinked once more, became striated and pixelated. Then another screen went. They all glowed brighter for an instant, lighting up the store so much that a few people yelped and whooped.
Scully made sure her back wasn’t exposed as she hastily texted Mulder: At Ragsdill work—not Ragsdill but UNSUB appears to be here—TVs malfunctioning.
The message came back instantly: On my way. BE CAREFUL.
And then her phone became hot, too hot to hold, the screen brightening to white and erasing Mulder’s words. She winced as she dropped it into the pocket of her coat, the pocket beneath her holster. Scully clutched the grip of her service weapon, but did not yet pull it. She didn’t want to panic other shoppers unnecessarily, and he had as yet made no overtly hostile moves. Bright Eyes was probably a risk to no one else present.
Only Scully herself.
Did he follow me here? Was it just an unlucky coincidence? The store wasn’t that far from Omega Hospital, after all, and they already knew Bright Eyes had staked out that hospital before. The overhead lights fluttered; a few shoppers groaned in dismay before the illumination steadied—for the moment, at least. Scully took advantage of the light while they had it and looked to the side, hoping to get a better view of his face this time. He wasn’t there.
Scully turned back and saw the man heading toward the front door. He must have realized she was onto him.
Enough pretending. “Back it up,” she called, loudly enough that a few other customers turned to look. She pulled her weapon but kept it at her side; she couldn’t safely aim with so many other people around, potentially in the line of fire. “Slowly. I’m a federal agent, and I am armed. I want you to put your hands—”
Before she could finish, the sound from every expensive speaker and sound bar became louder—blaring, painful—and she saw other shoppers cover their ears or wince in dismay. Her own ears were ringing, but she didn’t need to be able to hear Bright Eyes. She only needed to stop him, if she could.
But at that instant, he ran for the door.
Damn it! Scully took off after him.
The store was too crowded to take the shot. Scully pushed herself harder—she was fast for a little short-legged thing, as Mulder had once said—but running had been easier when she was in her twenties and not pregnant. Still, Bright Eyes ran like a guy who never ran at all. Scully thought she might take him yet.
But then the screens and monitors overhead began to explode in showers of sparks. Every loud pop made people shriek; some must have assumed it was gunfire, because they dropped to the ground. One mammoth television nearly the size of a movie screen came crashing down, and Scully had to hurl herself sideways to avoid being crushed beneath it. She landed hard, and not far enough clear not to be struck—pain lanced through her leg and elbow, making her curse. Instantly Scully scrambled to her feet, but Bright Eyes was nowhere to be seen. The automatic doors were sliding shut.
She ran to the parking lot, not in time to stop him—but his truck was peeling out, burning rubber. Her trained gaze took it all in and focused on the license plate in the split second it remained near enough to read: Ford F150, red, Virginia plate ending in M1B, first letter may be a V.
Bright Eyes was gone. But running that plate would change everything.
For a few seconds she stood there, panting, hugging her sore arm to her side. Her pants were torn, and she could feel the warmth of blood on her leg.
In the distance she sighted the red-and-blue whirl of police lights; Mulder had sent the DC cops immediately. He’d arrive soon too. When he did, she’d be able to tell him about the license plate. Maybe that good news would dull the inevitable conclusion…that there no longer could be any question that Bright Eyes was stalking her.
Which meant he wasn’t done yet.