Mulder felt a shiver of unease when he returned to the basement office and saw the note jotted on his pad—both because Casey Spradlin apparently still had concerns about Skinner’s care, and because Scully had taken the message. He immediately braced himself for the seemingly inevitable question, but it was prevented by Scully’s timely discovery of another Shadow attack.
“He’s hit Credit Dauphine before, in the Zurich home office,” Scully said, surrounded by their stacks of files (still, despite their best efforts and intentions, only about one-third organized). Rather than cross the chaos, she simply texted him the link. From NZZ—“Freak Accident Claims Life of Banker.”
“Accident? Is that what they’re calling it these days?” Mulder clicked and saw what was probably the victim’s headshot from the company website. He left behind a wife and one child. “And the bank said nothing when they lost a second employee. Sounds like a cover-up to me.”
“That wouldn’t be surprising even if the Shadow Killer weren’t involved. Credit Dauphine remains one of the more secretive Swiss banks.” Scully had begun pulling up financial records; the last time they’d thoroughly checked out the Syndicate’s money trail had, they’d thought, been the true last time. Instead, the Inheritors had resurrected too much—including hidden accounts. “But Swiss laws aren’t what they used to be. As of the 2018 treaty, there’s hardly any untaxed money left in the country.”
“That’s what they want you to think,” Mulder said, half serious. “Still. Fewer barriers has to be a good thing, right?”
“Unless the new Swiss openness just drove the Inheritors further underground.”
“If it didn’t, the Shadow’s vendetta just might.”
They had divided their labor without discussion, each playing to their strengths. Scully would sort through the thick layers of financial minutiae that might reveal the tracks of the mysterious Inheritors, while Mulder sought out more odd and unusual deaths or other incidents that might link to the Shadow Killer. Morrison would be pleased, no doubt, which kicked up certain rebellious feelings Mulder had always possessed—but he did the work almost by rote, his mind still distracted by Scully and the strange phenomenon now affecting her.
If Scully’s new relationship to electricity stemmed, as Mulder suspected, from DNA-rewriting viruses overseen by the Inheritors, then that made the Inheritors an even higher priority. If they could be located, might they hold the keys to controlling Scully’s ability? That, more than anything else, could defend her against Bright Eyes.
What does Bright Eyes make of the electrical disturbances that have accompanied his known attacks? Mulder wondered. It’s possible the killer believes himself to be the one empowered—if so, that weakness can be exploited—
He stopped himself. Time to find the Shadow.
In the early days of the X-Files, Mulder had done a great deal of his searching for the weird and unusual by reading more local newspapers than, he suspected, anyone else in the United States. He often worked state by state, going in alphabetical order over and over again, delving into all the small newspapers of, say, Mississippi (the Quitman County Democrat, the Itawamba County Times), then Missouri (the Bland Courier, the Hopkins Journal ), and so on, one after the other. Larger newspapers generally had stricter standards of credibility; many tiny papers, on the other hand, reported what was being said by locals, even if that happened to be somewhat fantastical. If you were looking for Bigfoot, you wanted to look in the smallest newspaper you could find.
However, the eight years of Mulder’s full engagement with the X-Files had been the years that saw the rise of mass use of the internet, i.e., the beginning of the end of print media’s long domination of public discourse. Many newspapers had died, and all but a handful of the survivors had shrunk precipitously, filled primarily by wire service copy. In other words, Mulder’s old hunting grounds had all but dried up and blown away.
(His loss had been the rest of the FBI’s gain, at least in terms of the caseload, because the absence of a vigorous local press had led to an increase in local corruption. People thought they could get away with a lot more. All too often, they were correct.)
For a while, particularly in the late 1990s and early 2000s, searching out stories of the unexplained had been so much easier online. Mulder had felt as though a great sea change was coming, one that would allow almost the entire nation to see what he had seen, to encounter the evidence for so many previously discounted phenomena. He had long ago weaned himself of any need for total public vindication—but the thought that it might arrive had nonetheless cheered him. And if the Syndicate’s cover was finally exposed, their lies and manipulations brought to light, their power would dissolve into nothingness.
Instead, the proliferation of information online brought into being too many sources, too little clarity on which of those sources were reliable and which were not. Mulder had always been a skeptic of the “official version” of events, whatever that version might be; however, his wariness had been attuned to liars of any size or stripe. He could smell a fake post a mile off. This was a talent that the public at large did not seem to possess. The internet became more and more crowded, infinitely noisier, and unsearchable by any one being. Real stories of the unexplained were repeated in bad faith, or edited to the point of uselessness. False stories were repeated in good faith, which made deception more difficult to detect. A postmodern approach to fiction meant that layers of seemingly authentic evidence were often constructed as part of a narrative. So on, so forth. In short, Mulder’s hunt for truth had been devastated by the very tool he had once believed in.
Man, do I miss the Lone Gunmen. He smiled slightly as he imagined Frohike earnestly explaining how to tell a genuine tale of the paranormal from a creepypasta. What would they make of what the world online had become? They’d have identified some prime candidates for Slenderman years ago.
Mulder had already trawled the best-moderated Reddit fora, as well as some other message boards. This time, he’d have to search the cesspit known as the dark web.
He knew where to search for killers and thieves for hire, for those who advertised the ability to bypass security through unorthodox means. Mulder hoped that the Shadow had at some point advertised his particular services. After all, the Inheritors had found this guy somehow; Mulder just had to attempt to replicate their process.
Obviously, he found plenty of hits. Also obviously, most of them weren’t legit. Just small men trying to feel big. More than one called himself a ronin—shades of Robert Patrick Modell—but offered few promises that suggested talents anything like the Shadow’s. A couple, Mulder suspected, might actually be real hit men but not the one he sought; those he flagged for other agents in the Bureau.
When he instead looked for tales of a man who turned to smoke, his discoveries naturally became stranger. Turned out this was a bit of a fetish for some people—unrealizable most of the time—but hey, he figured, if the Shadow ever wants company, he’ll find some willing candidates. A few urban legends sounded similar, though these spoke about ghosts or spirits who frightened people, not an actual person who killed them.
Then finally he came across a story from the United Kingdom—“approximately ten years back,” according to the thread’s OP, which in Mulder’s experience could mean anything from three to twenty-five years prior—about a family annihilator.
Did this story correlate with anything he could find records of? He felt the usual rush of discovery when he saw that, yes, it did.
“Okay,” he said out loud. Scully lifted her head from her set of financial records. “Get this. In July 2007, in Manchester, England, a family of four—two parents, one kid, one grandparent—was the subject of an unsolved attack. All the adult family members were killed, viciously stabbed, multiple wounds for each victim, apparently inflicted in their sleep.”
“The adult family members only? What happened to the child?”
“That’s the interesting part. Not only was the eight-year-old kid fine, he was found down the block from his house, hiding in the back room of a nearby store. The back room, and the store, and the kid’s house, were all locked up tight as a drum. Nobody knew how the boy could’ve been taken from the house or put into the store, nor why the killer would both spare the child and hide him in that location. Every store employee was questioned extensively, but all four had rock-solid alibis and no known motive to kill anyone in that family, let alone nearly all of them. No acquaintance between any of these individuals. Insofar as questioning could determine, the family had never even shopped there. The police asked the family’s neighbors if they’d noticed anything strange the night before, when the murders had to have taken place. No odd individuals were seen hanging around, but the folks across the street had seen smoke rising from the windows. They nearly called the fire department, but the smoke vanished as soon as it had appeared. No signs of fire at the scene, no smoke damage, nothing.”
“None of that is conclusive,” Scully said, “but it’s worth following up on. Why do you think the assailant—or assailants—spared the boy?”
“That’s the thing, Scully. When I looked up the family, I found that both the father and the grandmother had previous citations for child abuse. This kid had been taken out of their custody before but returned. If you’re looking for motive—there it is.”
She understood him now. “2007—that’s long enough ago for the boy to have become an adult. You’re saying that you think he himself was the murderer.”
“These days Junior is all grown-up, and quite possibly in business, working for the Inheritors.”
“Do you have a name?”
“The family surname was Vane. The boy’s first name isn’t in these news accounts, but a separate search…” Mulder’s voice trailed off as he looked through his findings. “…suggests the first name might be Robin.”
Scully frowned in deep concentration. “Alien DNA had begun circulating through the human population by 2007, certainly. Robin Vane might be an early example of the kind of phenomenon we’re now seeing on a broader scale.”
“Might be.” Mulder had learned to allow a little uncertainty; Scully responded better to that.
“If Vane’s British, that means many of his crimes may have taken place outside FBI jurisdiction,” Scully continued. “There’s no reason to assume that Morrison gave us everything. Vane could be guilty of far more than we’d realized.”
He nodded. It was possible that even Morrison didn’t know everything this Robin Vane had been up to. But now that they had a name, it was time to find out.