She goes to the bathroom, takes a shower, comes out and puts on fresh clothes. Sweet welcome relief. Her head is still muzzy and it's time to do something, but now she feels like she can face the world in clean underwear.
Eleven thirty. Don't they have a meeting? She calls down for messages. There are none.
Disappointed, she sits back on her bed and lets thought sluice through the lint ball that seems to have replaced her brain. Well, what did she expect? Mulder is still gone. Gone, gone, gone. There must be a song to express it. But there is no music in her head this morning. Or rather, this afternoon.
A tap on the door. It must be Skinner. Scully weighs the pressure of knuckles against wood, measures the distance between the raps, and knows it means he's going to be all business again.
She lets him in. He has a look that tells her nothing is going to be any good today. He doesn't even come in right away. He leans against the door frame, as if hesitant to drag the bad news behind him when he comes to her. He's wearing a suit, and it's perfectly pressed, but there's something about it that makes it look slept in. There's something about HIM that doesn't seem like him at all, a tiny blur like a smear in her vision. But she blinks it away.
He's making her nervous. "Did I miss the meeting?"
"You didn't miss much," he says, "or you missed it all, depending on how you look at it."
Scully looks up at him and waits, wishing he would hurry and tell her because she hates anticipation.
"Agents Nelson and Franz - as one of the couples posing as big winners at the Luxor--broke the case early this morning when they were approached by a man in the casino. They made the bust within an hour. It turns out a group of four to six people set up an operation to fleece winners out of their money, but something went wrong with the first couple they tried to scam, and then they found out it was a lot easier to kill people than to go to all the trouble of covering their tracks. They actually said that, like it was a defense: we didn't mean to kill them."
Scully stares at him while he goes through the details, scam artists at their artistic best, posing as the IRS, as security guards, as bankers, an elaborate setup designed to get victims' cash electronically transferred into bank accounts quickly, then use their credit cards to take it back out, leaving a bug behind in the program to "fix" any computer-perceived glitches. Winnings that had been sent to home banks and then immediately withdrawn again had looked to the computers like glitches in the system and "fixed," leaving the accounts with the same monthly balance as before the victims had come to Vegas. Nothing would show up on the end of the month printout as changed due to that perfectly balanced transaction and a line or two of code telling the computer to disregard any positive=negative events. Until some very clever agent had figured out that anyone coming to Vegas would withdraw a substantial amount of money from their account, so she took a closer look at why all the monthly balances weren't lower and found the No Transactions Recorded bug. Ingenious. But no X-File.
All Scully can think is, They won't justify our staying here now. I'll have to take a leave of absence to look for Mulder myself.
Skinner pauses in what he's saying, realizing she's not listening to him. She blinks quickly, and focuses her eyes on his face again.
He says, "Only two bodies have been found, both buried in the desert. Both were women. But we're pretty sure all the rest are going to be found dead, too."
Scully wonders bleakly how many bodies have been buried in the barren countryside around Vegas over the years. "They won't find Mulder." Skinner comes into the room and closes the door behind him. He stands looking down at her, his characteristic scowl in place. "No, they won't," he says. "Because Mulder's not dead. How do we know that?"
"Because he…" No, that's not right. "Because…"
"And they won't find the boy, because he and Tracy Buckland had nothing to do with the casino killings. And neither did that maid. But she IS dead." Skinner manages to sound convinced and skeptical at the same time. "Somehow those things are tied together."
A furrow appears between Scully's eyes above the bridge of her nose and she frowns at a button on the front of Skinner's shirt. "I know."
Scully only knows that it's a certainty in her, that Mulder isn't HERE, but neither is he THERE. One leg in, one leg out. She can't FEEL Mulder; in fact, she can feel his absence, the nonMulderness of the world. It's like a vacuum left in his wake, but it makes her all the more certain he isn't dead. And how she knows is…like something she once heard and then forgot, like information she can't access, but knows it exists, like trying to recall details from a dream.
"Where do we go from here?" she asks.
The unspoken question hovers in the air between them: Are you with me or not?
Skinner can choose whether or not to be a gentleman with her, and he can choose to restrain himself from saying and doing certain things that might endanger his professionalism. But there is no choice to make in this. Whatever it means to her, whatever it means to him, they are in this together.
"To the only person who might know anything about what happened to Mulder," he says. "Tracy Buckland."
********
