by Tim Lebbon
A short teenaged Latina woman suddenly let loose with a barrage of Spanish. Colt was rusty, but he recalled enough of the language to know that she was doing the same thing as the man in the cowboy hat: pointing at Colt and saying that he did it.
“What the hell?”
All the witnesses now were screaming and crying and pointing fingers right at Colt.
“That’s him!”
“He’s the killer!”
“Arrest that bastard, now!”
“Ay dios, el asesino!”
Johnson glared at the trio, then said to Mulder, “Get him the hell outta here!”
Colt was just staring at the people who all looked at him with fear and loathing. “I don’t—”
He felt Mulder’s surprisingly strong grip on his arm. “Let’s go.”
But Colt just stood there, staring incomprehensibly. “How can they think that I—”
“Jack,” Mulder said forcefully, and the nutjob’s use of his first name finally snapped him out of it. “We have to go.”
“Yeah, of course.” He let Mulder lead him through the crowd, which was quickly mutating into an angry mob, calling for the head of Jack Colt.
*****
EL PASO POLICE DEPARTMENT HEADQUARTERS, CITY HALL
EL PASO, TEXAS
APRIL 8
“Quite a view.”
Colt turned away from the magnificent sight of the sun rising over the Franklin Mountains to see Scully standing behind him at the east-facing window of the police HQ section of El Paso’s City Hall. She was still wearing blue scrubs from her all-night autopsy of Koogler, though she wasn’t wearing the cap, gloves, or goggles.
While Colt shared Scully’s understated appreciation of the view, he had bigger fish to fry. “What the hell’s going on, Agent Scully?”
“I’m afraid there isn’t a lot of good news,” she said slowly. “The trace evidence is exactly the same as the other victims, but we’re no closer to knowing what the inert material is or where they’re getting ground-up bones from to put in the mouth. The only other biological trace we found belongs to the victim.” She had been staring off to the side for a bit, but now she looked up to face Colt directly. “In addition, eight eyewitnesses describe the person who dumped the body in the cemetery as you. With two exceptions, that being a pair of sisters, none of the eight know each other, and didn’t meet until they were brought here last night.”
“They’re crazy!” Colt took a deep breath to keep himself from getting hysterical. He’d been up all night. “Look, Dana, I didn’t do this.”
“I know you didn’t, but these witnesses are sure that the perpetrator at least looked a lot like you.” Scully blew out a breath. “I need you to account for your whereabouts yesterday.”
Colt rolled his eyes. “You know my whereabouts.”
“No, Jack,” Scully said intently, “I don’t. You’ve spent the last several days avoiding Mulder and me, keeping us away from you. Yesterday, we didn’t see you at all until seven o’clock last night in the hotel, and only heard from you when I called you to check in first thing in the morning. That’s an entire day—during which a murder happened and you were sighted dumping the body—where Agent Mulder and I can’t back you up. And to make matters worse, you’re familiar with the MO of the murders and you’re a trained federal agent, so you have the means.”
“All right, all right.” He thought back over the day. “I was making phone calls from the hotel room, trying to find a hole in Hobloch’s alibi.”
“From the hotel phone?” Scully asked hopefully.
Colt shook his head. “No, I used my cellular. It’s easier to keep all the calls there, easier on the expense reporting.” He sighed. “And the reception was for crap, so I walked around outside until I could find three bars. I honestly have no idea where I went, I don’t really know my way around this town.”
“This isn’t good, Jack.”
“Yeah.” He sighed. “I need a Coke.” He wandered back down the hallway toward a vending machine. Reaching into his pants pocket, he was shocked to find nothing in the back left pocket. “Oh, for God’s sake. I don’t have my wallet.”
“What happened to it?” Scully asked.
Colt thought back over the previous night. “I took it out to pay you guys for the Mexican food, and I must’ve left it on the desk when we got called to the cemetery.” Relieved for so quotidian an explanation, he then turned to Scully. “I don’t suppose I can borrow fifty cents for a Coke?”
“Unfortunately, scrubs don’t have pockets.” Scully actually smiled a little. The whole situation was absurd, and he was very grateful that she was the one talking to him. If it was Mulder, he’d be hip-deep in nonsense about shapeshifters.
Speaking of whom, Mulder turned the corner and said, “Scully, Colt, there you are. EPPD just got an anonymous tip that the killer is in a house on La Luz Avenue.”
“Let’s go,” Colt said, eager to find something that would give them a proper break in this case—and one that didn’t put his head on the chopping block.
“I’ll meet you there,” Scully said, heading to the women’s room, no doubt to change out of her scrubs.
Colt and Mulder went downstairs to the motor pool to find Johnson and his partner Detective Martinez putting on Kevlar vests. Martinez silently handed one to Mulder, but Johnson was staring at Colt. “You ain’t goin’, Jack.”
“Oh, come off it, Martin, I’m the lead investigator.”
“You’re a suspect, Jack. I can’t—”
Holding up a hand, Colt said, “Stop it right there, Detective. Until I’m given instructions by someone a helluva lot higher up in the food chain than you, this is still my case. So either arrest me on the flimsy-ass evidence you have, or give me a damn Kevlar.”
There was a brief, ugly pause, and then Johnson nodded at Martinez, who slowly reached into the trunk of the car and pulled out another vest.
By the time Colt had velcro’d himself into his, Scully had arrived and got a vest of her own.
As they sat in the back of the EPPD Chevy Cavalier, Mulder whispered to Colt, “You do realize that a shapeshifter would explain both how Hobloch could be in two places at once and how someone who looks just like you could kill Koogler, right?”
“Shut up, Mulder,” Colt muttered.
They arrived at a one-story house on La Luz, the only one on the block that had the driveway gate shut and padlocked. The padlock itself had plenty of rust, too.
An EPPD SWAT team went in first, clearing the house, which didn’t take too long, as the house looked abandoned.
Colt, Mulder, and Scully went in once the SWAT leader gave the all-clear. The place was all hardwood floors, with laminate that was starting to wear off, and the floor was covered in blood spatter at varying levels of dryness. No furniture at all, not even internal doors on any of the hinges.
But lots and lots of blood stains.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Colt said with a smile, “I think we may have us a crime scene.”
“We’ve got more than that,” Mulder said.
Turning Colt saw the agent going for a wallet that was sitting on a windowsill. “God, he left his wallet? Whoever called in the tip must’ve spooked him.”
But Mulder was looking through the wallet with a haunted expression.
Colt stared at him. “What is it, Mulder?”
The wallet looked a lot like Colt’s own, a simple brown leather fold-over, with clear plastic cardholders inside.
Mulder held the outermost cardholder, which revealed a very familiar Maryland driver’s license.
Colt felt his stomach rumble, and he suddenly found himself short of breath. “That—that can’t be my wallet.”
“Unless there’s another Jackson P. Colt living in Gaithersburg, who has a Platinum American Express card and a membership to Blockbuster Video...” Mulder looked up, stricken. “I’m sorry, Agent Colt.”
“So’m I,” Johnson said, grabbing Colt by the arms. “Jackso
n Colt, you are under arrest for the murder of Julianne Koogler. You have the right to remain silent...”
*****
EL PASO COUNTY JAIL
EL PASO, TEXAS
APRIL 9
“I’m sorry, Jack.”
Colt found Mulder’s words to be the coldest of comforts as he sat in the jail cell. He’d never been inside one of these when it was locked before. Visually, it wasn’t all that much different from what it was like when the door was open, but psychologically, the difference was vast. Colt had never been claustrophobic, but it wasn’t difficult to get such pangs now knowing that he was fully restricted to this tiny space.
There were six cells on this floor, but his was the only one occupied. A uniformed officer sat at a desk on the far end of the room, a TV monitor on the desk that showed that officer images of each of the cells.
He’d been arraigned within a few hours of being arrested. The prosecutor provided affidavits from Johnson and Martinez, the bastards, who said that Colt was surly and unstable and unpleasant and insulting, and then he said that Colt was a flight risk because of his FBI ties. And then he mentioned Barry and how his ex-partner’s recent death while in FBI custody might have unhinged him.
“I called Skinner—well, actually, Scully called him. But he said the Bureau can’t do anything officially except cooperate with local authorities.”
The judge was all too eager to remand him without bail until trial. After all, another judge had just granted Frank Nobilis an appeal hearing based on the reasonable doubt created by the murders of Dona Alvarez, Eleanor Underwood, and Julianne Koogler while Nobilis was incarcerated.
“For what it’s worth, I think this just lends support to the shapeshifter theory. I believe the inert matter is the skin cells of the shapeshifter. Scully said it was DNA that they couldn’t identify, and it would make sense that we wouldn’t know what to look for in this kind of DNA profile.”
Colt was barely paying attention to Mulder. None of it made any sense. How could Hobloch be in two places at once? How could someone who looked enough like Colt that eight different people swore it was him exist without his knowing about it? How could so much evidence point to so many different people who weren’t the El Paso Ripper?
“Great,” he muttered, “now I’m calling him the El Paso Ripper.”
“What was that?” Mulder asked.
“Nothing.” He shook his head. His life was falling apart, and all he could do was castigate himself for using a stupid nickname.
Mulder looked nonplussed for a second, then continued. “Well, anyhow, Agent Scully and I plan to—”
“Go home,” interrupted the voice of Martin Johnson. The man himself was coming through the door. Scully came in behind him, looking annoyed.
“Excuse me?” Mulder got nonplussed again.
“The FBI has been uninvited from participating in this investigation, Agent Mulder,” Johnson said formally. “This is a crime that ain’t crossed state lines, so y’all are only here by our invitation. That invitation’s been revoked.”
“Detective, there’s still a case to be solved here,” Mulder started, but Johnson held a hand up.
“I don’t wanna hear it, Agent Mulder. I’m sorry I flew to Washington, and I’m sorry this all happened. I want you an’ Agent Scully outta my jurisdiction by tomorrow mornin’.” He turned to look at Colt. Johnson’s eyes were haggard and sad, Colt noticed, though he was hardly about to sympathize with the detective given his own position. “As for you, Jack—you’ll be stayin’ here in regular lockup. You’ll get this floor to yourself. I ain’t about to put no federal agent in a max security prison, your life wouldn’t be worth a wooden peso. So you’ll stay here until trial.”
Mulder stared at Johnson. “You’re making a mistake, Detective. The killer’s still out there, he can look like anybody, and he’ll kill again.”
Colt rolled his eyes and lay down on the wafer-thin mattress on the rickety bunk. Count on good old Spooky Mulder to keep hammering the nonsense.
But was it nonsense? As he watched Mulder and Scully reluctantly leave the floor, each giving him an encouraging look before departing, Colt wondered if Mulder’s notion was so crazy. After all, somebody was on that hospital video footage, and somebody dropped Koogler’s body in the cemetery.
Johnson gave him a sympathetic look of his own, but while Colt was willing to accept such from Scully and Mulder, he had no interest in doing so with the one who put cuffs on him. “Get the hell out of here, Martin.”
“I’m sorry ’bout this, Jack—but you said it yourself, the evidence don’t lie.”
With that, Colt was left alone with his thoughts.
No, not quite alone. There was the guard at the desk. About thirty seconds after Johnson left, the guard got up and walked over to the cell.
“I’m really sorry about all this, Agent Colt. If it makes you feel any better, they don’t have any evidence supporting the notion that you killed any of the others. Just Miss Koogler. She was a sweet lady, I didn’t particularly want to kill her like I did the others, but I needed to set you up.”
Colt looked at the guard, whose nameplate read NIVEN. “What are you—”
“See, you were getting too close. Well, you weren’t, Mulder and Scully were. Those two are good. Mulder actually colors outside the lines every once in a while, and Scully’s brilliant. Between the two of them, they probably would’ve tracked me down. Hell, Mulder’s the only one who recognized the corpse dust. I figured somebody from around these parts would get the reference, but no such luck. Anyhow, I couldn’t afford to let you feds get too close, so I found a brunette to fit the profile, killed her in the usual way, and then framed you for her murder.”
Now Colt was staring openly at Niven. “This can’t be.”
“Oh, it is. It was fun there for a while, watching Detective Johnson and then you run around like hamsters on a wheel. But now they’re sending in the big guns. I can’t have that, so I’m done. I’m leaving El Paso—probably won’t even kill anymore. Honestly, the thrill of that was going away anyhow. I’ll just go somewhere else, find another hobby to occupy myself.”
Finally, Colt realized what was happening. “All right, Officer Niven, very funny, but I’m not in the mood for jokes.”
“Oh, this is no joke, Agent Colt.” He sighed. “Fine, I’ll prove it to you.”
To Colt’s horror, Niven’s features began to shift and move and undulate. Colt’s stomach rumbled, and bile rose in his throat as Niven’s eyes changed position, his nose shrunk, his mouth widened, his skin tone altered.
“It can’t be,” he whispered. Mulder’s nonsense was just that: the deranged ramblings of a brilliant mind that had been twisted by trauma, just like every third serial killer out there. Mulder’s sister had gone missing when he was a kid, and he concocted some fantasy about aliens because that was easier for him to believe than his sister running away from home.
But that whole shapechanger garbage was just that: garbage. Things like that and aliens and werewolves and things that went bump in the night weren’t real. Colt knew that.
Yet a different person stood before him now, wearing Officer Niven’s uniform.
“You’ll forgive me,” this new person said with Niven’s voice, “if I don’t do that again. It hurts. S’why I usually only change shape once a year or so. But I wanted you to know the truth. I figured you deserved that much, since I went and ruined your life and all.”
Colt continued his incredulous stare. “This isn’t possible.”
Niven shrugged his new shoulders. “Fine, don’t believe it. Makes no difference to me one way or the other. Like I said, I’m leaving El Paso. Good luck with the trial.”
Then Niven—or whoever he was now—just turned and left.
Colt was now alone on the floor.
Mulder was right.
The El Paso Ripper was still out there.
And he would never catch him.
Jack Colt screamed.
&n
bsp; *****
REPORT FILED BY SPECIAL AGENT DANA SCULLY ON THE “EL PASO RIPPER” CASE
APRIL 11
S.A. Jackson Colt was found dead in his cell this morning, an apparent suicide. Officer Darren Niven of the El Paso Police Department, who was assigned to be guarding S.A. Colt’s cell, has gone missing.
S.A. Colt’s suicide has led to the murder of Julianne Koogler being closed, but the murders of Dona Alvarez and Eleanor Underwood are still open, since S.A. Colt was here in Washington when those murders took place. Detective Martin Johnson of the EPPD has stated that he intends to search for an accomplice of S.A. Colt’s who might still be operating in El Paso. In a press conference, Detective Johnson stated unequivocally that Frank Nobilis remains the guilty party for all previous “El Paso Ripper” murders, with S.A. Colt and his theoretical accomplice responsible for the three copycats.
S.A. Mulder’s hypothesis that the perpetrator might be a shapechanger is unsupported by any evidence, although there has yet to be a proper explanation for the duplicate of Orville Hobloch who appeared on the Bliss Private Hospital videotape surveillance.
It is also my belief that S.A. Colt is not guilty of the crime for which he was arrested. I do not believe that S.A. Colt is capable of this act. However, his suicide, the evidence against him, and the lack of evidence supporting any other perpetrator leaves any alternative avenue of investigation closed.
This is, sadly, another X-File that remains an open case for the bureau.
The End
Paranormal Quest
By Ray Garton
REDDING, CALIFORNIA
2nd DECEMBER, 1997, 9:37 a.m.
“They’re all pretty much the same wherever you go,” Fox Mulder whispered as he and Dana Scully were led into the refrigerated room.
“What’s that?” Scully said.
“Morgues.”
The man leading them was Dr. Oliver Copper, Chief Medical Examiner with the Shasta County Coroner’s office, a tall, pear-shaped man in his fifties with a fringe of silvering black hair around his bald spot and stubble on his jowls.
“I’ve found that the occupants don’t mind the uniformity,” Dr. Copper said over his shoulder as he led them around a corner. “In fact, they never bring it up.”