Skin : the X-files (5 page)

“What is it?” Mulder asked, trying to read her unread-able eyes. He had requested the entire NYPD case file, and he had no way of knowing what Scully had stumbled upon.

“It’s the preliminary autopsy report on the murdered nurse,” Scully responded. “There’s obviously been some sort of error.”

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Mulder waited in silence, as Scully continued reading the report. Finally, she looked up from the pages in her hands. “According to this autopsy report, Teri Nestor’s skull was crushed with the approximate force of two vehicles moving at more than thirty miles per hour.” Mulder felt a chill move down his back. His instincts had been correct. Despite Scully’s reservations, he had a feeling they weren’t heading back to Washington just yet.

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3

X Two hours later, Dana Scully watched her own reflection shimmer against the steel double doors of a carpeted elevator, as glowing circular numbers ticked upward above her head. Mulder was standing a few feet to her left, testing his jaw with his right hand as his left foot tapped an incomprehensible rhythm against the elevator floor. Behind him, a medical student in blue-green surgical scrubs leaned heavily against the back wall, his eyes half-closed from exhaustion. Scully knew exactly how he felt.
The whole world dancing on your shoulders, and all you want to do is sleep.

She threw a glance at Mulder, noticing the energy behind his features, the bright glint in his hazel eyes.

Scully was amazed at her partner’s stamina; it was already close to ten, and they had both been on their feet 40

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since 6:00 A.M. Scully felt ready to collapse—and she wasn’t the one who had been hit in the face with a shovel less than eight hours ago.

Then again, she knew how Mulder’s mind worked.

The minute he had turned his focus toward the potential X-File, everything else had vanished. He had barely spoken about anything else during the long drive into Manhattan, and Scully had been forced to shelve the follow-up paperwork on the Bandez drug-distribution ring—at least for the time being. Inside, she doubted that she and Mulder would be sojourning in Manhattan for more than a few days. The findings reported in Teri Nestor’s autopsy file were alarming—

but Scully had no doubt there would be a simple, scientific explanation.

“Miracles of violence,” Mulder intoned, continuing the suspended line of conversation they had begun in upstate New York. “Interesting choice of words, Scully.

You think Perry Stanton is a miracle worker?”

“It was a figure of speech,” Scully responded, keeping her voice low to prevent the med student in the back of the elevator from overhearing. “I merely meant that the human body is capable of amazing feats of strength.

I’m sure you’ve heard the stories of mothers lifting cars to save their babies, or karate experts breaking bricks with their bare hands. There’s no real magic involved; it’s actually a matter of pure physics. Angles of impact, leverage, velocity. At the right speed, even a drop of water can shatter a brick.”

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“Or a skull?” Mulder asked, as the elevator slowed to a stop.

Scully shrugged. She had been mulling this over for the past few hours. Her initial shock at the details of the Stanton case had subsided, and she had already begun to analyze the situation as a scientist. “Perry Stanton is significantly bigger than a drop of water. The autopsy report, on its own, is inconclusive. I don’t know how her head was crushed with such force—but I do know that it’s within the realm of physics.” Before Mulder had a chance to respond, the double doors whiffed open, and Scully stepped out into a long hallway with shiny white walls. Mulder followed a few feet behind, his hands clasped behind his back. “Physics didn’t kill Teri Nestor. Neither did a karate expert or a woman protecting a baby.”

They turned an abrupt corner and continued down a similar hallway, moving deeper into the recovery ward.

The air carried a familiar, antiseptic smell, and the sounds of hospital machinery trickled into Scully’s ears: the steady thumping of respirators, the metallic beeps of EKG monitors, the vibrating whir of adjustable hospital beds. The sounds sparked a mixture of emotions in her; she had spent much of her adult life inside hospitals—

first during the years of her medical training, then more recently during her near-fatal battle with cancer. As a scientist, she found comfort in a setting guided by the rigid laws of cause and effect. At the same time, she couldn’t help but associate her surroundings with her past illness; 42

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as she passed the closed doors of a half dozen private rooms, she wondered how many patients were struggling in silence a few feet away, praying for the light of just one more morning.

“Here we are,” Mulder interrupted, pointing. “The scene of the miracle.”

Scully squared her shoulders as they approached the group of uniformed officers standing in front of yellow police tape. She counted at least three men and two women, all wearing NYPD insignia. One of the officers was interviewing a nurse in a pink uniform, while two others spoke to a young woman in jeans and a white, paint-stained T-shirt. The officers looked up as Scully and Mulder advanced the last few steps. Scully quickly slipped her ID out of her jacket pocket. “FBI. I’m Special Agent Dana Scully, this is my partner, Agent Mulder.

We’re looking for the detective in charge of the Stanton case.”

The nearest officer looked Scully over with dark eyes.

He was a large man, perhaps six-five, with scruffy black hair and a puggish nose. He gestured with his head toward the yellow tape. The door behind the tape was half-open, and Scully could just make out the hand-shaped indentation in the center of the wood. She kept her eyes on the indentation as she stepped gingerly through a break in the police tape. As she held the tape up for Mulder, he whispered his own evaluation into her ear. “I’d like to see the physics behind that, Scully.” Scully shrugged. “Give me a computer, a forensics lab, 43

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and a week—and I’m sure I could show you, Mulder.” They paused in the room’s entrance. Scully’s gaze was drawn first to the huge sheets of yellow paper taped over the shattered picture windows. To the right of the windows was a contorted steel shelving unit, in front of which sat the upended, demolished television set. The warped hospital bed sat in the center of the room, the torn mattress sticking straight out of the deformed steel frame. Two men in white jumpsuits were leaning over the mattress with handheld vacuums, collecting hair and fiber evidence. Behind the hospital bed, another man focused an oversize camera on the IV rack still embedded in the wall. His flash went off like a strobe light, making the scene even more gritty and at the same time surreal, like a Quentin Tarantino movie. Scully was surprised to see the forensics people still collecting evidence so long after the incident, another testament to the bizarre nature of the crime. The degree of damage was exactly as Mulder had described it from the CNN report. It certainly didn’t look like the work of one man.

Scully felt Mulder’s hand on her shoulder and followed his eyes to the floor just in front of where they stood. The chalk outline started somewhere beneath a corner of the bed frame, twisting violently through a circular patch of dried blood.
Teri Nestor’s blood.

“Judging from the suits, I presume you’re the two FBI agents your Manhattan office warned us about,” a gravelly voice erupted from behind the contorted shelving 44

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unit. Scully watched as a heavyset woman in a dark gray suit stepped into view. She was quite tall—perhaps six feet—with wide, muscular shoulders and frizzy dark hair. She had a clipboard in her gloved hands, and there were dark bags under her dull blue eyes. “Detective Jennifer Barrett, NYPD.”

Scully made the introductions, noting the strength of the detective’s handshake:
Those were paws, not hands.

Barrett towered over her concise, five-foot-three frame, and though the detective looked to be in her late forties, she had obviously spent a lot of time in the gym. Her intimidating size was aggravated by her unkempt hair and the largeness of her facial features. Scully wondered if Barrett suffered from some sort of genetic pituitary problem; she could tell from the look on Mulder’s face that he was thinking along similar lines.

Scully broke the silence before it became awkward, and after a few pleasantries, turned the focus toward the case at hand. “It’s our understanding that Perry Stanton is the only suspect in the murder. Is that based on the forensic evidence?”

Barrett nodded, gesturing toward the two jumpsuited men still huddled over the mattress. “From what we’ve gathered so far, Stanton was alone with the nurse when the murder took place. According to the plastic surgeon—Dr. Alec Bernstein—they were in the room for less than five minutes, with the door shut, when the violence started. Hair, fiber, and fingerprint surveys concur with Bernstein’s story. Nobody entered the room through the 45

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door—and the windows are more than twenty feet above the parking lot.”

“A long way up,” Mulder commented from a crouch in front of the door. “And an equally long way down.” Scully glanced at him. He had his hand out in front of the indentation in the wood, his fingers mimicking the deep marks from a few inches away. Scully turned away from him and watched as Barrett crossed to the shattered windows. The detective pulled up a corner of the yellow paper. “The way down’s a lot easier than the way up.

The trick is in the landing. Stanton got lucky and hit some shrubs at the edge of the parking lot. We found torn pieces of his hospital smock in the branches, along with more of Teri Nestor’s blood. Our manhunt is progressing rapidly through the borough—but so far, we’ve been unable to pick up his trail.”

“So the professor woke up from an operation,” Mulder said out of the corner of his mouth. “Tore up a hospital room. Crushed his nurse’s skull. Then fell out of a second-story window into a shrub. And he’s still managing to evade a police search?”

Mulder had aimed the question at Scully, but it was obvious from the red blotches spreading across Barrett’s face that she had misinterpreted Mulder’s tone. She turned away from the window, crossed her thick arms against her chest, and set her mouth in an angry grimace.

A heavy Brooklyn accent suddenly dribbled down the edges of her consonants. “Hey, you want to bring in your own forensics people? I’d be happy to hear an alternative 46

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story. Because the media’s already crawling up my ass on this one. We’ve got the pathologist redoing the autopsy, we’ve had the fingerprint team in here a dozen times—

and it’s still coming up the same. One perp, one dead nurse, one manhunt. And I don’t care how fancy you fibbies think you are—you’re not going to find anything different.”

Scully stared at the woman, stunned by her altered tone.

Frustration was one thing—but this was outright hostility.

Barrett obviously had issues with control and a temper to match her size.
Not a pretty combination.
Scully decided to intervene before Mulder could aggravate her further.

“We’re not here to get in the way of your manhunt, Detective Barrett—just to assist in catching the perp. As for Professor Stanton—is there anything in his history that could explain the sudden outbreak of violence?” Barrett grunted, her anger slowly diffusing. “Model citizen up until the transplant procedure. No priors, not even a speeding ticket. Married sixteen years until his wife died last February. Teaches European history at Jamaica University, volunteers two days a week at the public library in midtown—an adult-literacy program.”

“No history of alcohol or drugs?” Scully asked.

“An occasional glass of wine on weekends, according to his daughter, Emily Kysdale, a twenty-six-year-old kindergarten teacher who lives in Brooklyn. According to Mrs. Kysdale, her father is a shy but happy man. He is most content in the basement library of the university—

which is where he got burned in the boiler accident.” 47

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“Certainly doesn’t fit the psychotic profile,” Mulder commented. He was standing by the horizontal IV rack, trying to gauge how deeply it was embedded in the wall.

“According to the police report, he is five-four, weighs one hundred and eighteen pounds. Scully, how much do you think this IV rack weighs? Or that mattress?” Scully ignored Mulder’s questions for the moment.

She couldn’t tell whether he was baiting the detective—

or merely curious. She nodded toward the clipboard in Barrett’s hands. She recognized the hospital-style pages under the heavy metal clip. “Is that Stanton’s medical chart?”

Barrett nodded, her eyes on Mulder as she handed over the chart. “The plastic surgeon—Dr. Bernstein—has gone through this with me a few times already. He says there was nothing medically abnormal about Stanton—and nothing that he thought would have provoked a psychotic episode. But something I’ve learned working homicide in New York for the past twenty years—people crack for no good reason.”

The chart was six pages long, full of scrawled medical descriptions and evaluations. Stanton had arrived at Jamaica’s emergency room with a full-thickness third-degree steam burn on his right thigh. He had also been complaining of difficulty breathing, and had been given IV Solumedol, a strong steroid. After his breathing had stabilized, he had been prepped and wheeled into an operating room. Dr. Bernstein had performed an escharotomy—cutting away the damaged skin around 48

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the burn to prepare it for transplant—and had then attached a section of donor skin over the burn site.

The procedure had gone off without a snag; Stanton had awakened in the recovery room, complaining only of mild discomfort. If all had gone well, the temporary graft would have remained over the area of the burn for two weeks, at which time Stanton would have received a permanent matched graft from another part of his body, most likely his lower back.

Although Scully wasn’t a plastic surgeon, there didn’t seem to be anything about the transplant procedure itself that would have caused Stanton’s violent reaction. But there was something in the chart that struck Scully as a possible explanation.