Title: Gutless (4/16) Author: Magdeleine See Prologue for full headers; all posted chapters can be found at http://shannono.simplenet.com/gutless GUTLESS Chapter 4 117 Franklin Street 10:25 PM Joshua Schmidt was about eighteen years old, tall, dark-haired, and pimply. And dead. Really, most sincerely dead. Like Marjorie Bailey and the two victims before her, Joshua was face-up on his own bed, staring at the ceiling, his jaw slack and mouth agape. Like the other victims, he was dressed conservatively for bed -- in this case, a faded t-shirt and a pair of flannel pajama bottoms. Joshua's mother, father, and two younger sisters were huddled outside the bedroom door, too stunned and confused for tears. They stubbornly resisted the awkward efforts of the two deputies to move them to a more convenient location, like the living room, so that the body could be examined without further trauma to the family. Mulder hated situations like this. On the one hand, he felt an instinctual need to protect the grieving family from seeing Joshua handled by impersonal hands. On the other hand, it was after midnight, he had been up since five A.M. -- four, if he accounted for the different time zone -- and his body was clamoring for sleep, exhaustion weighing him down and rooting his feet to the floor. Under any other circumstances, he would have tried to help the deputies soothe the family and guide them away, but the weary ache in his head was making him impatient with their grief and he couldn't think of any other words than Will You Just Get The Hell Out Of Here, Please? Not the kind of thing the FBI advised in these situations. But hedging around like this, standing in a corner with your thumb up your ass because the goddamn family had some kind of religious reason for not letting the corpse out of their sight -- that couldn't be proper etiquette, either. If he didn't know better, Mulder would have sworn this was the guest bedroom, rather than the lair of a high school senior. It was spotless. No posters. No sports memorabilia. The dirty laundry was neatly stowed in a wicker basket in the corner by the dresser. One small bookshelf, with a few lonely books on it. The desk was uncluttered, except for a worn grammar textbook and a pad of paper. There was a crucifix hanging on the wall above the bed, and a well-thumbed Bible with a red faux-leather cover on a tiny bedside table. The place gave Mulder the creeps. When *he* was eighteen, the only time his room had looked half this clean had been when company was coming over and his mother had roused herself enough to decree that This Mess Must Go. Joshua Schmidt's room didn't have the polished feel of order imposed by a mother's hands; this room felt almost sterile. Scully was standing near the bed, speaking with Jean Denison in a low voice. Mulder couldn't hear the conversation -- he was keeping well away from Dr. Denison, thank you very much -- but Scully's body language and gestures told him that she was talking about the similarity of this corpse to the others they had seen. He could also see that Scully didn't like Jean very much, although she was keeping it well hidden under her usual air of cool professionalism; to Mulder, though, it was obvious from the angle of her spine, the faint line between her eyebrows, the occasional unconscious clenching of one fist, and the impatient way she pushed her hair back from her eyes. Her hair. The rumpled state of Scully's hair made Mulder grin, despite his efforts to keep a straight face. She hadn't said anything about it, but she must have been just out of the shower when Volney called her; her hair had still been only towel-dry when she'd dragged Mulder out of the diner. It had been brushed down flat against her skull, but when Scully's hair air- dried, it had a mind of its own -- defying any attempts at control, curling every which way and refusing to stay neatly tucked behind her ear. Hair that was just as stubborn as the woman beneath it. Perfect. Sheriff Volney had finished taking the crime scene photographs almost ten minutes ago; he'd been more leisurely with the back-up Polaroids, snapping shots of every square inch of the room. He stood near the desk, fanning himself with the latest couple of developing prints, glancing at them every once in a while to check their readiness. He looked every bit as itchy and ill-at-ease as Mulder felt. Mulder didn't like Volney. The man was grumpy and stubborn and too damn self-important. For some reason, his direct copper-colored stare and southern-Kansas drawl made Mulder feel like he was ten years old again, sitting on the bench outside the principal's office: defensive, keyed-up, and irritated at himself for feeling that way. Then again, the family showed no signs of budging, and Mulder couldn't go talk to Scully while Jean Denison was over there. God, no. The only thing left to do was to strike up a conversation with Volney. Mulder glanced over at the sheriff, making eye contact. Volney raised one bristly eyebrow -- an expression Mulder wasn't used to getting from anyone but Scully, anymore -- and tilted his head to one side in invitation. Mulder crossed to the desk, standing next to Volney; both men kept a casual eye on the proceedings in the hallway. "Poor kid," Mulder offered. Volney made a snorting sound beneath his moustache. "Yeah, poor kid," he muttered, pitching his voice low. "Home schooled." He seemed to expect some kind of response to this; Mulder nodded sagely and made a noncommittal "hmmm." "Wouldn't'a been so bad," Volney continued, "except that this bunch doesn't know what the hell they're doing when it comes to education. Ninety percent Jesus and ten percent everything else. Damn near nobody raised like that has a snowball's chance in hell of coming out normal." He shook his head, a frown drawing long vertical creases on either side of his mouth. "Poor kid." Mulder couldn't think of a thing to say. He settled for nodding again, feeling slightly foolish. Across the room, Jean Denison raised her hands in some kind of surrender and left the room, rubbing the back of her bony neck. Scully turned back to the corpse, scribbling in that little notebook of hers. "You religious, Agent Mulder?" "No, not really." "Hmm." Volney blew air through his moustache and considered this. "I'm Methodist, m'self. Mostly a Sunday morning Christian, if you catch my meaning. I got nothing against people practicing whatever kind of religion they want, but these kind of cloistered Bible nuts get me a touch concerned. Don't talk to anybody else, won't send their kids to school, all that jazz -- and that damn crazy uncle Fred of theirs comes to every damn city council meeting and rants about how Jesus is gonna come down from heaven and smite every last one of us if we build that new dike to keep the river from flooding the damn baseball field." He cast a surreptitious look in Mulder's direction. "That sort of shit makes me want to start checking out the place for a secret cache of Uzis, know what I'm saying?" "Yeah." Mulder took another look around the Spartan room, imagining the life that Joshua Schmidt must have led. "I've seen that kind of thing a few times." For a moment, a memory of twisted lines of bodies at a Tennessee farm flashed behind his eyes; he dispelled it with a shake of his head. "It ... never ends well." Volney nodded slowly, gazing vaguely toward the door, his lips pursed slightly in a soundless whistle. It almost seemed as though he hadn't heard Mulder at all, but when he turned his head a moment later there was a gleam of something approaching respect in his eyes. "Nope," he said, and turned back to the door. "GET YOUR HANDS OFF ME!!!" The voice was unbelievably loud in the tiny room, echoing like the roar of an avalanche. Mulder's gaze shot toward the doorway. The two deputies were struggling with a skinny short man in his late fifties, bald except for a few colorless puffs around his ears. He was wearing polyester pants and a yellowed dress shirt with perspiration stains that showed as he brandished a Bible over his head with both hands. "DO NOT HINDER THOSE WHO WORK FOR THE LORD THY GOD!" Volney sucked in his breath on a mild obscenity and made for the door with surprising speed, his head lowering like a bull charging a red cape. "Fred, will you cut it *out*? This is not the time for your horsecrap!" The little computer in the back of Mulder's brain sprang to life, spitting out the answer to this mystery man's identity. Fred. Crazy uncle Fred, the one who came to meetings and yelled about smiting. This certainly promised to make the proceedings more interesting. Fred's yelling took on a sing-song quality, the kind that Mulder identified with televangelists and auctioneers. "For behold, the day COMeth, BURNing like an oven, when ALL the ARROGANT and all the evilDOERS will be stubble, the DAY that comes shall burn them UP, says the LORD of Hosts --" The rest of the family shrank away, inching towards the living room; it seemed that the appearance of Crazy Uncle Fred moved them more than all the efforts of the two deputies. Volney held up a warning hand. "Fred, if you don't settle down, I'm gonna have to get you locked up again!" Fred was starting to foam a little at the mouth. "The Lord will SMITE thee with the boils of EGYPT, and with the ULCERS and the SCURVY and the ITCH, of which thou canst NOT BE HEALED! We must PURIFY the boy, CLEANSE him of the unclean spirit --" To his credit, Volney did attempt to handle the man gently, but after Fred twisted away and brandished the oversized Bible at the sheriff, Fred ended up pinned against the wall, one of Volney's big hands holding him in place. "Now Fred," Volney chided, "I warned you. It looks like another spell at the hospital for you, now doesn't it?" He slapped a pair of handcuffs on Fred, gesturing down the hall in disgust. "You know the drill, boys. Take him away." Fred continued to hold forth as he was led off. "The unclean SPIRIT is the ENEMY OF THE LORD. We must CLEANSE the boy lest he lose his IMMORTAL SOUL to the agent of SATAN, to the succubus LILITH --" Mercifully, Fred's voice faded as the distance increased. Mulder exchanged a glance across the room with Scully, who raised her eyebrows in an amused facial shrug. He rolled his eyes in the direction of the hallway with a wry grin, and was rewarded for his efforts with a rare half-smile from his partner. "Goddamn Fred." Volney absent-mindedly wiped his hands on the sides of his pants, as though just touching the man had put him at risk for a communicable disease. "Damn crazy lunatic sonovabitch. Of all the times for him to sound off, I swear." Scully cleared her throat delicately, drawing Volney's attention. "Does this happen often, Sheriff?" "Often enough. About once every month or so we have to haul him off to the psych ward at Bryan Memorial; the family goes up and gets him out once he calms down." Volney shrugged philosophically. "Nothing much we can do about keeping him there, and we can't incarcerate him forever just on account of being a public pain in the ass, so ..." "What --" The word came out of Mulder's mouth involuntarily. He was vaguely aware of everyone turning to look at him, but the question forming in his mind took up most of his attention. "What did he mean when he said that he needed to *cleanse* the boy?" "Oh." Volney looked uncomfortable. "That was before you got here. Fred started raving about being attacked by a demon and staving it off with a prayer and some cross-waving; I guess he thinks that's what happened to Joshua, too." Volney shook his head. "Everyone in this family is a little cracked, but Fred takes the cake. I'm not too surprised that he's messed up about the kid dying; those two were good buddies. Josh was even starting to act a bit like Fred, last I heard." Scully had her professional face on again, frowning faintly. Her hair spoiled the hard-boiled image, though; it was difficult for Mulder to take Scully seriously when she had to keep swiping a particularly stubborn curl out of her eyes. "Act like him? In what way?" Volney seemed to give this question a great deal of thought. "Just certain things he'd do. Mannerisms. Nothing you can really lay a finger on, it's just that Fred tends to make people feel a bit disturbed, and lately Josh's been much the same way, not to speak ill of the dead ... Sort of a spooky kid, real geeky." Scully looked over at Mulder, tipping up an ironic eyebrow. Mulder ignored her. Volney hesitated, chewing on his moustache, then added, "The kid was following my daughter around, past couple weeks." "Do you mean he was stalking her?" Mulder was still a little stung from the 'spooky geek' comment and having a hard time picturing this kid as the stalking kind. "Are you sure that he wasn't just trying to ask her out on a date?" The sheriff fixed Mulder with an icy glare. "He was ghosting around after her for more'n a month, mister. She was scared. I finally had to step in a few days ago and tell him to leave her the hell alone." "Sheriff?" One of the deputies was standing hesitantly in the doorway. "We have a problem." Volney made a noise halfway between a chuckle and a groan. "Great. What now?" Jean Denison appeared beside the deputy. "Sheriff Mike --" The sheriff gave Mulder a long-suffering look. "What *is* it, Jean?" Jean balled her hands into fists. "They don't want to let us do the autopsy." Mulder half-expected her to start hopping up and down and shooting steam from her ears like Yosemite Sam. Scully blinked. "I was under the impression that the medical examiner is required by law to investigate any death under unusual circumstances. Is that not the case in Kansas?" Jean shook her head vigorously. "No, no, law's the same, we're on safe ground there, it's just these people don't take kindly to having their dead ones cut open. Religious objections." Volney stroked his moustache. "They don't have a legal leg to stand on, but they can make a big stink about it." He tossed his hands in the air, surrendering. "Aw, hell. I'll go talk to them." "Need any help?" Mulder offered, automatically. "Nah," Volney said, "you two stay here. I'll be right back." He gave the ceiling a pained look and exited; Jean and the deputy followed closely behind him like baby ducks toddling after their mother. Mulder waited until they'd rounded the corner before he smiled at his partner. "So, Scully, whaddaya think of Uncle Fred?" "Obviously delusional." Scully crossed to the bed, snapping on a pair of latex gloves. "Reminds me a little of someone I know." "Frohike?" "Close, but not quite." "Maybe it's Skinner." Mulder followed her across the room, enjoying the banter. Scully's bad mood seemed to be over, thank God. He mentally crossed his fingers and hoped it would last. "Hmm, no, but he *is* in the FBI ..." Scully smiled faintly as she checked through the black bag that Jean had brought in from the coroner's van. "Aha." She brought out a wicked-looking pair of steel scissors and deftly cut the t-shirt off the body of Joshua Schmidt. As she peeled back the thin pieces of cloth, Mulder got a good view of the vivid red mark covering most of the sunken torso. Scully pressed gently below the sternum; the skin sank beneath her fingers like the stretchy rubber of a deflating balloon. "He's still warm. I'd say he's only been dead an hour or two. I'll have a better idea once I get the rectal temperature." "That's okay," Mulder said hastily, warding off the idea with one hand, "I don't really need to know." Scully moved up to the face, pulling back one eyelid. "Cornea's clear ..." Mulder had always prided himself on having a strong stomach. After all, he'd faced down Eugene Tooms in a mess of bile; he'd seen people who had been devoured by mutant fungi; he'd seen so much blood in his career that it almost failed to surprise him anymore. For some reason, though, watching Scully finger a dead boy's eyeball was making him feel a little queasy. Ugh. "Mulder, take a look at this." Scully pulled the corpse's mouth open, peeling back the top lip with one hand and pointing with the other. There was a kind of cloudy slime clinging to the teeth, pooling a little around the tongue. "That looks like the same residue we found around Marjorie Bailey's mouth." She made a little face. "Except this is much fresher." "Fresh, not frozen. Just like you get at the farmer's market." Mulder turned his attention to the ceiling, hoping to see some kind of stain or at least a discoloration directly above the bed; no such luck. So much for spontaneous combustion. This close to the corpse, though, Mulder was starting to smell something. It wasn't a familiar crime-scene smell -- blood, or rotting flesh, or even excrement -- this was something else. Two something elses, in fact; a ripe, sticky smell and a scent that he had dismissed vaguely as the lingering scent of dinner. Baked ham, or something like that, except that this smell was stronger near the corpse. He looked again at the angry red mark on the body. Not baked ham; baked Joshua. The thought made Mulder feel even queasier. He was too tired for this shit; he just wanted to go back to the motel, get some sleep, and think of a new theory in the morning. Scully continued her cursory examination of the corpse, which, based upon the words 'rectal temperature,' was nothing that Mulder particularly wanted to observe. To distract himself, he started snooping around the room as discreetly as possible, not touching anything out of respect for the integrity of the crime scene. There wasn't much to see. Hell, it looked like the kid had even *dusted* regularly. This was no fun at all. "Air temperature, seventy-one degrees Fahrenheit; body temperature ... ninety-four point five. Time of death was no earlier than eight-thirty or so ... You know," Scully said conversationally, "this looks pretty routine. I think if I get a good sample of this substance in his mouth, I could probably let Jean do the main part of the autopsy by herself." "Oh, really?" Mulder had half an eye on the grammar textbook. Diagramming sentences. Christ, what a way to spend your last evening on earth. Scully pushed her hair out of her eyes delicately with one wrist. "She's capable of handling it. I could check in on it later. It'd give me a chance to sleep in a little instead of being up to my elbows in a corpse at six in the morning." She did something to the body that produced a strange squishy sound; Mulder kept his eyes on the textbook. There were some things that man was just not meant to know. Scully didn't seem to pay any attention to the noise; she kept on talking as though it hadn't happened. "I thought we could do an interview with Jim Taymor. Maybe track down Sheriff Volney's daughter, too, while we're at it, and get the story on what sort of 'stalking' Joshua did." Whatever the noise had been, it did not repeat itself. Heartened by this, Mulder ventured back near the bed. It was a plain bed with a solid wooden headboard, running clear to the floor; Mulder idly glanced behind it. "Well, hello there ..." he said, half to himself, and knelt down to take a better look. "What is it?" Scully, still engrossed in her work, cocked an eyebrow in his direction. "Looks like good old Joshua had a hidey-hole behind the bed." Mulder pulled a pair of latex gloves from his suit pocket and snapped them on. He reached between the headboard and the wall, easing out the object of his attention -- a Tehtonka High yearbook with a dark green cover. He held it up triumphantly. "Jackpot." "A yearbook," Scully said flatly, unimpressed. "He's a high school student, Mulder. High school students have been known to have yearbooks." "Ah, ah, ah ..." Mulder wagged a finger at her. "*Normal* high school students have yearbooks. Joshua Schmidt was home schooled. Explain to me why a home schooled student would have a yearbook for a school he doesn't attend? Better yet, why does he have it hidden behind his bed?" "I don't know." "Neither do I," Mulder murmured, checking the yearbook over. The spine was broken towards the back of the book, rather than the middle, where one would expect it; he experimentally opened the book, letting the pages flip open along the break. Black and white pictures of last year's junior class smiled up at him in all their teenage gawkiness. He scanned the names, hoping something would pop out. "Wait a minute, maybe I do know." "What?" Scully asked, walking over to him. She pulled off her gloves and pushed back that curly strand of hair with one talcum-dusted hand. "What'd you find, Mulder?" He extended the yearbook toward her in explanation. She sighed, pulled a fresh glove out of her pocket, and snapped it on, accepting half the book in her gloved hand so that she and Mulder supported the weight of it together, as though they were sharing a hymnal at a church service. "Check it out," Mulder said, tapping at a black-and-white picture of a pretty, dark-haired girl. The caption off to the side gave her name: Amber Volney. "It could be a coincidence." Mulder ruffled through the pages of the yearbook. He stopped at a worn, dog-eared page, pressing the book open, and scanned the pictures. "Here." He pointed at a full-body picture of a dark-haired cheerleader in mid-jump, pompoms flying -- Amber Volney. A few pages later, another dog-eared page; this one had a shot of Amber Volney in the school play. The next dog-eared page had a shot of several girls posing for the camera together; despite the fact that the caption did not give the names, the face of one girl was completely familiar -- Amber Volney. There were three or four other pages in the book that were dog-eared from repeated viewing; a quick check confirmed that Amber Volney was the only girl who was on every page. "Well, there you go," Mulder said, grinning at Scully. "Looks like Joshua was in luuuuve." Scully raised an eyebrow. "I somehow doubt the sheriff will see it that way." "Scully, are you mocking a young man's tender feelings for the girl of his dreams?" "No," she said, "but I believe the word 'obsession' fits those tender feelings to a 'T.'" The little computer in the back of Mulder's brain was still chittering away, but he was so tired that it took real effort to focus on what it was bringing up. Pictures. Obsession. Pictures at the bedside. It all coalesced so suddenly, he could almost hear the *click*. "Hang on, didn't you say that Marjorie Bailey had a picture beside her bed?" Scully looked up at him. "Yes, of her boss ... Jim Taymor. What about it?" "What was it you said -- you thought they were having an affair?" "Well ..." Scully twisted her mouth, her typical reaction when Mulder had caught her in the middle of a half-formulated theory. "I said that it was possible. Jean doesn't seem to think so, but secretaries have been known to become ... infatuated with their superiors, and that might be the case with Marjorie and Jim Taymor." "So ..." Mulder looked down at his partner's rumpled hair and lowered his voice to a more flirtatious tone. "We could be talking about another case of unrequited love." "Could be ..." The hell with it, this was a golden opportunity. Mulder let his voice slide even lower, into a dark chocolate rumble. "Or possibly just ... unrequited lust." Scully went abruptly still, her eyes narrowing. She dropped her side of the yearbook, causing Mulder to fumble and make a less-than-graceful grab at the book to save it from plummeting to the floor. She crossed back to her original place near the bed, carefully packing instruments into the black leather case. "Maybe we ought to interview Amber Volney, too, just to make sure." Her back was to him, her tone cool. "You think they were dating behind the Sheriff's back?" Mulder asked, frowning faintly, less concerned with the dating rituals of teenagers than with the sudden return of Scully's bad mood. "It's not impossible. Perhaps Amber broke off the relationship and Joshua wasn't ready to let go," Scully said, sounding slightly agitated. She continued to tidy, dropping the used latex gloves into a baggie to dispose of later. Mulder still couldn't see her face. "So he stalked her, and she told her daddy a big lie so he'd threaten Joshua, is that what you're saying?" Mulder stared at the back of Scully's head and watched her swipe at that red curl as it fell into her eyes again. What had set her off this time? He'd flirted a little. So what? It hadn't even been a particularly good flirt. He hadn't had the spare brainpower to come up with a good double entendre for at least a half hour now. Was she pissed off because he'd flirted? Mulder wished he wasn't so tired. Attempting to profile Scully on a good day was a workout, but after twenty hours on his feet and, if the truth be known, with a touch of indigestion from all that apple pie, profiling Scully was gaining him very little except a dull ache at the base of his skull. "That's a little extreme, don't you think?" he added, just to see if she'd turn around. She faced him, completely expressionless. Whatever anger she was feeling was tucked neatly behind that calm exterior; Mulder couldn't get a read on it at all. "I'm saying it's possible, Mulder, that's all." Hell. He was too tired for this. "Agent Scully? Agent Mulder?" Jean Denison was in the doorway. "Could you come out here for a minute?" Andrew Schmidt and his wife Marty were both tall and dark-haired, traits they had obviously passed on to their children -- Joshua's younger sisters, Esther and Deborah, were both dark and gawky girls in their early teens. The girls were bustled out onto the front porch to "pray with your father," leaving Marty Schmidt in charge. It quickly became obvious to Scully that Marty was the head of the household, an iron-fisted ruler who might have been quite successful in a military career. Jean Denison, it seemed, had met her match in Marty Schmidt, and was not at all happy about it. The moment that Jean reentered with Mulder and Scully in tow, Marty had turned and glared at Jean with piercing green eyes until Jean dropped her gaze, turning away from Marty and seeming to shrink in on herself; Jean looked daggers at Marty the moment Marty's attention was diverted, but didn't do anything else to challenge her authority. It was like something straight off The Learning Channel. No question about who was the alpha bitch *here*. Sheriff Volney motioned for Scully to come forward; she did so, not without the vague feeling that she was Alice in Wonderland being introduced to the Queen of Hearts. Mulder started to follow; Volney frowned at him and shook his head, and Mulder stopped in his tracks. Scully had to admit she was happy that Mulder wouldn't be in such close proximity for a few minutes, at least. She'd been thinking that maybe this Mulder-Awareness Day was over, after her shower this evening ... she'd even relaxed enough to joke with Mulder a little. And then, at the first little flirtatious move on his part, she'd felt her body chemistry shift once again. This was turning out to be a very long day. "Marty," Volney said politely, "this is Agent Scully. She's the one we were telling you about." Marty looked Scully over carefully, tilting her head to one side so that her dark hair waterfalled over her shoulder. Scully stood still and kept her expression neutral, quelling the illogical expectation that the tall woman was about to come over and sniff at her like a dog. At last Marty focused in on some spot directly below Scully's chin; Scully realized with a start that the point of interest was the gold cross around her neck. "Yes," Marty announced suddenly, meeting Scully's eyes at last, "you are a believer. I can tell. You have the hand of the Lord upon you, Agent Scully." Scully was at a loss. She had been mentally running through condolences, trying to pick one that was at once professional and compassionate; this, however, was a scenario for which she was completely unprepared. Nonetheless, she extended a hand to Marty. "Mrs. Schmidt." Marty took Scully's hand, but instead of shaking it, she clasped it in both of her own and held it firmly, keeping Scully too close for comfort and with no avenue of escape. "Agent Scully, I can't tell you what a comfort this is to us. Jean has told me that you are close to the Lord, and I can see it on you." Scully shot a look at Jean, who turned red. This was getting irritating. She hadn't spoken to Jean about issues of faith during any of their time together; she could only assume that Jean had plucked this story out of thin air, making a guess based on Scully's demeanor and her cross necklace. "I'm glad to be of help, Mrs. Schmidt," Scully said, wishing the woman would let go of her; Marty had large sweaty hands and the whole handshake was starting to feel very humid. "It means a *great deal* to us that Joshua will be in the hands of a woman of faith. We know you will handle him with respect and dignity." Scully blinked. "I beg your pardon?" Marty pressed Scully's hands even harder, boring into her with those vivid green eyes. "We would *never* let anyone touch our Joshua unless we knew they were acting as the hands of the Lord." This was starting to make sense, but Scully didn't like it. "Mrs. Schmidt, I think there's been some kind of mistake --" Volney made a sharp gesture behind Marty's back. Scully focused on him; he lowered his eyebrows and shook his head gravely. Oh God. It was all making sense now. This was the way out; this was the way to get the family to peacefully agree to let Joshua be autopsied. This was the straw that everyone was grasping at, looking to Scully to play along and not say anything. She felt like screaming in frustration. The very idea of using her identity as a Christian to get a family to agree to an autopsy was fundamentally abhorrent to her, almost as repugnant as the idea of sleeping with someone to get a job, or a promotion. Under any other circumstances she would gladly do the autopsy, but she was irked by being accepted as a doctor because of her faith instead of because of her abilities. It was like being back at the naval base, being catered to because her father was respected rather than on her own merit. It had infuriated her then; it infuriated her now. But the look on Volney's face, and on Jean's, and on the faces of the two deputies at the door, was a uniform expression of exhaustion and desperate hope. And Mulder, still hanging back in the hallway, looked like he was about to fall asleep on his feet. It was late. If she broke this last straw, it would only get later. Marty Schmidt's hands trembled, and Scully's perception of the woman flipped sideways, from ice-cold woman to a deeply grieving mother whose control of the situation was the last link to her dead son. It was so easy to forget, sometimes, that these were people with lives of their own, lives that did not begin and end with their involvement in an FBI case, lives that had been irrevocably changed. Scully could deal with death because she could act upon it, investigate it, explain it. These people could not. Scully pressed her left hand on top of Marty's and gave her a gentle smile. "Mrs. Schmidt," she said, putting as much sincerity into her voice as she could, "rest assured, I'll do the best I can to give your son the care he deserves." End of Chapter 4 (4/16) Feedback to playwrtrx@aol.com All posted chapters can be found at http://shannono.simplenet.com/gutless