What it was, she sometimes thought, was an indefinable instinct, a silent signal that let her know that whatever else changed, whatever else happened, Mulder would always be there when he had to be. One way or another.
At that moment she heard a footfall and grinned. “Here he comes.”
Garson looked startled, looked around and saw him walking along one of the stone paths that wound through the courtyard garden. She had to admit he looked strange without his suit. Over his shoulder he carried a denim jacket, not for appearance but to hide the holster he wore on his left hip.
He also looked as frazzled as she felt.
“It’s hot,” he said, dropping onto the bench beside her.
“It’s July, Mulder,” Garson reminded him. “It’s New Mexico. What did you expect?”
“Heat I can get at home. An oven I already have in my apartment.” He scratched through his hair and shook his head as though trying to force himself awake.
“It isn’t for everybody,” Garson admitted, adding without saying so that “everybody” must be crazy if they didn’t instantly fall in love with this part of the country. “And remember, you’re a mile farther up than you were in Washington. Thinner air. Take it easy for a while, understand? You go shooting off in fourteen directions at once, you’re going to drop.”
Mulder grunted, then stood again. “Hey, look.” He headed for the gate.
“Mulder,” Scully called. “We haven’t time—”
He turned, grinning, and pointed to a small dust devil spinning lazily in the road. “We used to get these things at home. Leaves, you know?” He moved closer; it was no higher than his shin. “We’d try to get inside.” His foot inched toward the dervish’s base and apparently broke some unseen barrier. The dust devil fell apart, and Mulder toed the place where it had been.
Scully, who was already feeling the effects of the altitude, let the silence settle for a few seconds before she said, “Mulder, come over here, I think we’d better not waste any more time.” She checked her watch; it was just after four. “I suppose it’s too late to catch Dr. Rios. What about…Patty? Patty Deven. Is she well enough to talk to us?”
Garson stabbed a thumb at her as Mulder rejoined them. “She always like this?”
“We have three people murdered, Red. The altitude didn’t kill them.”
The man nodded, accepting the point and the rebuke without taking offense. “The Devens live about a mile down the road. They’re fixing to head back to Chicago as soon as this is cleared up. I’ll take you over, but I’m telling you now that you won’t be welcome.”
He was right.
Scully caught the instant hostility as soon as Kurt Deven opened the trailer door and saw who it was. When Garson introduced his companions, the man scowled and told them to wait. Then he closed the door. Hard.
Mulder nodded toward the riverline of cottonwood sixty or seventy yards away. “Down there?”
“Yep. The bank slopes sharp right about where you’re looking. It happened a little ways to the right.”
Scully shaded her eyes against the low-hanging sun and tried to see it at night, with little but moon and stars for illumination. The trailer wouldn’t help; it was too far away, and except for the skeleton of an unfinished house beside it, there were no other homes in the immediate area, even though she saw flagged wooden stakes in the ground, marking other lots soon to be developed. The nearest trailer was a good sixty yards away.
The door opened.
The two men stepped aside as a woman stepped down onto the cinder-block steps. She was short and slight, with straight blonde hair that needed a brushing, and a lost, empty look in her eyes. When she spoke, rage and grief made her hoarse:
“She doesn’t want to talk to you again, Mr. Garson.”
Red told her softly he understood, and apologized for the intrusion. “But I have these folks here, Mrs. Deven. All the way from Washington.” He cleared his throat, glanced at the open doorway. “They’re experts in this kind of crime. If anyone can catch the—”
“Nobody has,” she snapped. “It’s been two weeks, and nobody has.”
Scully lifted a hand to draw her attention. “Mrs. Deven?”
The woman took her time: “What?”
Scully kept her voice gentle. “Mrs. Deven, I won’t lie to you. I won’t pretend to know how you feel for your loss, or how your daughter feels. But Agent Mulder and I have done this more times than I ever want to tell you. And if nothing else, I can promise you that we don’t quit. We’re not perfect, but we do not quit.”
Mary Deven’s hands pressed lightly to her stomach, eyes narrowed. “Are you promising me you’ll catch him?”
“No,” Mulder answered, just as gently, just as firmly. “We’re only promising you that we won’t quit. And if you don’t want us to bother you, or your family, you won’t have to worry.”
Mrs. Deven stared at the trees, blinking rapidly, then not at all. “Just don’t take her down there,” she said, barely above a whisper. “You take her down there, I’ll lose her.”
Scully agreed readily, and said nothing when Mulder asked Garson to show him the scene. After all this time, there wouldn’t be anything left of real value—Garson and his men and the local police would have raked it over thoroughly. Mulder, however, had a knack for finding things in barren places, a knack she didn’t pretend to understand as well as she wanted to.
“Agent Scully?”
Wan, painfully thin, Patty Deven was the mirror image of her mother, right down to the haunted look. A fading bruise spread across her right cheek and temple. Her eyes were too large behind her glasses.
They sat on two lawn chairs. There was no shade, and no offer of a drink.
After a long silence, with the girl staring at the knot of fingers in her lap, Scully leaned forward and said, “What did you see, Patty?” Nothing more.
Mulder stood on the bare ground, checked the branches above him, glanced at the shallow river below. “Here?”
“Just about,” Garson said.
But “here” was nothing. The ground was too hard for tracks, and with no direct line of sight to the trailer, there was nothing much to work on. He asked Garson to stand approximately where Patty had been, and scowled.
Dark night, thirty or forty feet away, she wouldn’t have been able to see much of anything.
Flashes of movement that accompanied her brother’s attack and screams.
She saw a ghost because there was nothing true to focus on.
He hunkered down and ran a palm over the ground. “Have you had rain?”
Garson walked back, taking his time. “This is what we call the monsoon season, Mulder. You wouldn’t know to look at it now, but afternoons we get storms in. Big ones. Usually from the west, and they don’t fool around.” He shrugged as Mulder stood. “Trouble is, rain washes the evidence away, and the ground’s like rock again before noon the next day. This is a waste of time.”
Maybe, Mulder thought; maybe not.
He walked north along the bank, gaze shifting slowly from side to side. Ahead, the underbrush was thick, still uncleared by the developers. He saw no signs that anyone had broken through, which meant they had either come from down below, or from the far side of the trees.
It was something, and it was nothing.
By the time he reached the other agent, he was scowling again. “Gangs?”
“Some.” They headed back to the trailer. “This is no gang hit, though. Knives and guns; nothing like this.”
“Cults?”
They left the trees behind, and he felt the temperature already beginning to rise. Scully was still in her lawn chair; she was alone.
“What kind of cults you want, Mulder? We have New Age swamis communing in the desert. We have the Second Coming believers who wander around the mountains and then use their cellulars when they get lost. And we have the flying saucer nuts, who figure Roswell is the key to all intergalactic understanding.” A sideways glance Mulder didn’t miss.
“That’s kind of your territory, isn’t it?”
The only answer was a noncommittal grunt, and Garson was smart enough to leave it alone.
Scully stood as they approached, a brief shake of her head when he looked her a question. At that moment he couldn’t help a yawn, and turned away so the pale face in the trailer window couldn’t see him.
He hoped he had been quick enough.
The one thing Mary Deven didn’t need now was the sight of an FBI agent yawning at the site of her only son’s murder.
Garson saw it, though. “We’re going back,” he told them both, not giving them an option to refuse. “You two get something to eat and get some sleep, or you’re going to be worthless tomorrow.”
“Why? What’s tomorrow?”
He touched his hat brim. “Tomorrow, my friend, you’re going to meet a genuine movie star.”
NINE
Mulder couldn’t sleep.
After a slow, almost lethargic dinner, he listened as Scully told him about the interview with the girl, which hadn’t told her anything new. Patty had seen even less than her statement had implied. Almost as soon as the attack began, the branch club her brother had been holding spiraled out of the dark and struck her on the side of the face. She had fallen, dazed, and in that state thought she might have heard someone whispering, someone else laughing.
But it was all too muddled, and she had passed out shortly afterward.
It was her father who had found the body.
“No ghosts, Scully,” Mulder had said, walking her back to her room. “We’re dealing with people here.”
“You sound disappointed.”
He hadn’t answered then, and he had no answer now as he put on a jacket and left the room, glad now that he had listened to Garson—despite the day’s heat, the desert was downright cold at night.
He walked through a short passageway between the rooms and the main building, and paused.
The back was a garden of cacti and now-closed desert flowers set in random circles ringed by stone, as it was in front. Stone paths wound between them and joined at the back to lead to a half-dozen benches that faced the river. Cottonwoods and willows were illuminated by miniature lanterns hanging amid their leaves, leaving patches of lazy shifting light on the ground.
He wasn’t sure, but he thought he smelled honeysuckle.
When he was sure he was alone, he sat on one of the benches and watched what little water there was flow past his feet, electric lanterns on metal riverbank poles glowing just enough to turn the dark to gray.
The moon was out.
He shoved his hands into his jacket pockets and watched it for a while, thinking of nothing in particular until a slip of a cloud gave the moon a face.
Patty Deven, or her mother, adrift in a darkness they would never be able to escape. Pale, only shadows for expression, only hints of what used to be behind their smiles.
It was an all too easy, and all too painful, jump from there to his sister, gone too many years now. Taken when she was eight, by someone, or something, hiding behind the glare of a light that even now he couldn’t think about without shuddering, or squinting to shut it out.
To try to see what was behind it.
That was the foundation of his pursuit of the truths buried somewhere within the X-Files.
He looked away from the moon and wiped a hand over his face, then absently rubbed the back of his neck.
He would find Samantha, there was no question about it; until then, however, the best he could do would be to find the men who had murdered Patty’s brother.
Again his hand passed over his face. When it slipped into its jacket pocket, though, a brief smile was left behind.
“I’m okay,” he said, shifting over to make room for Scully. “Just thinking.”
“Out here, that’ll get you pneumonia.”
“Is that a doctor’s truth thing?”
She stretched out her legs, folded her hands on her stomach. “No, it’s cold, that’s what it is. God, Mulder, why can’t you ever have a mood someplace warm?”
They said nothing else for a long time, watching the river, listening to the rustle of the trees, once in a while listening to a dog bark or a car roar past the Inn. For a while the garden filled with diners having after-dinner drinks as they strolled among the garden islands, conversation soft, laughter sometimes loud; for a while the evening breeze stopped, and they couldn’t hear a thing but their own breathing.
Then Mulder said, “Scully, has it occurred to you that maybe the people who mutilated those cows weren’t the ones who killed Patty’s brother and that couple?”
“No,” she said at last. She looked over. “Why?”
“The history, Scully, the history. Animal mutilations of this sort aren’t usually tied to murder. Particularly not brutal ones like these. The animals are assaulted, not people.”
He watched her carefully as she looked away. He’d only been thinking aloud, but once the thought had been voiced, he had to make sure.
“No,” she repeated with a slow shake of her head. “Whatever was used, however it was done, the timing’s too close, the similarities too great. From what we’ve been told.” She shifted uneasily. “I’ll know more when I speak to the M.E., but…” She shook her head again. “No.” A quick smile. “Besides, aren’t you the one who told me that there are coincidences, and then there are coincidences? One is real, the other only an illusion?”
He returned the smile. “Yep.”
“Okay. Well, this is no real coincidence, Mulder. The brutality itself is a strong indication of that. All we need to do is find the connection.”
“Right. All we need to do.”
“Then think about this, Scully,” he said quietly. “Why? What’s so damn important out here that both cattle and kids have to die?”
She didn’t respond; he hadn’t expected her to.
But he had a strong feeling, an unpleasant one, that whatever answer they finally uncovered, it would be one neither of them would like.
In the middle of the desert, they had been dropped into a nightmare.
“I am not crazy!” Mike Ostrand insisted from his hospital bed. He glared at Sheriff Sparrow, who returned the look without expression. “I did not imagine the accident. I did not imagine this goddamn cast on my goddamn arm. I did not imagine my brand-new car flipped over and left me hanging there like a goddamn Peking duck!”
Sparrow was patient.
“Okay.” Ostrand shifted uncomfortably, lips pulling away from his teeth in a grimace. “Okay. So I was a little drunk, I admit it. But that’s not why I crashed.”
“No, you crashed because some kind of mysterious vehicle, so low you couldn’t see it out your window, deliberately forced you off the road.”
Ostrand looked at him angrily. “That’s right.”
“And then it tried to kill you when you were hanging from your seatbelt.”
The artist shrugged, winced at the pain that exploded in his shoulder, and sighed capitulation. “Okay, okay, so it was a stupid coyote, okay? So I was so damn scared it scared the hell out of me. It would have scared anybody. But it wasn’t a coyote that ran me off the damn road!”
“Good.” Sparrow nodded sharply. “Now we’re getting somewhere.” He glanced down at the small notepad he held in his left hand, chewed on the eraser end of his pencil for a moment, and said, “Now, about that invisible vehicle…”
The Coronado Bar was unoriginal in both name and decor. As Bernalillo inexorably changed from an outpost on the Rio Grande into an Albuquerque bedroom community, the Coronado just as stubbornly refused to change with it. A long bar on the right-hand wall, tables and booths everywhere else, and a jukebox that muttered country-western all day long. The TV on the wall in back never played anything but sports, minor league baseball tonight from Southern California. Smoke and liquor in the air, as many cigarette butts on the bare floor as in the aluminum ashtrays. It catered neither to the tourists nor the newcomers, and didn’t
much care that business didn’t boom. It did well enough, which was well enough for its regulars.
Indian Territory was at the back.
Although there were a handful of exceptions, most of the men who drove in from the pueblos stuck to the two last booths and three last tables. There was nothing belligerent about it; it just happened that way. Even the Spanish stayed away.
Especially when the Konochine came to town.
Leon Ciola nursed a long-neck beer in the last booth. He was alone, seated under a wall lamp whose bulb he had unscrewed as soon as he’d taken his seat. He didn’t like the light, didn’t like the way the Anglos tried not to stare at the web of scars across his face or the scars on his knuckles.
It was better to sit in shadow.
It was also better to face the entrance, so when the man came in, Ciola would see him first and lift a hand in greeting, before a question could be asked or a voice raised. What he didn’t need tonight was talk, debate—What’s the matter with your people, Leon, don’t they believe in the twentieth century? The time for that was past. The others—Nick Lanaya, Dugan Velador, fools like that they could do their best to keep the talk alive, to deal with Anglo crooks like that Falkner woman and sell the People down the river without an ounce of guilt. Not him. He had plans.
They thought he was beaten. They thought his time away would change him.
He drank, not sipped.
It had.
It had changed him.
It had made him worse.
Just before eleven the man came in, spotted him right away, and dropped heavily into the booth.
Ciola tugged on the beak on his cap, a greeting and an adjustment. “You’re late.”
“Shit truck wouldn’t start. Wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t make the effort.”
Ciola watched him, hiding his distaste by emptying the bottle and waving it over his head, so the waitress, such as she was, would bring him another.
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