Agent of Chaos (The X-Files: Origins #1)(26)
“No, Derek. You were leaving.” The older cop handed Racca a pencil. “And now you’re staying. See how that works?”
Ouch.
Mulder felt bad for the guy.
Satisfied that he’d made his point, the older cop walked away, leaving Mulder and Phoebe with the awkward task of deciding whether they should make small talk.
“Come on back,” Officer Racca said before Mulder thought of anything to say. He led them toward a cluster of desks on the opposite side of the room. He grabbed a stray chair and dragged it over to a desk piled high with crooked stacks of files. He flipped the chair around and slid it next to another one in front of the desk, and gestured at the empty chairs. “Sit.”
Phoebe sat down next to Mulder, toying with the hair sticking out of her buns.
Officer Racca took a seat behind his desk, and the plastic hula dancer next to his phone jiggled. Pushing aside the mountain of manila folders, he reached for a white notepad and flipped to a new page. “So what have you got to tell me?”
“We saw a man hanging around in Blue Hill the night Billy Christian was kidnapped,” Phoebe explained.
“Do you two live over there?”
“Yes, sir,” Mulder said, watching him scribble something on the pad.
“What time?” the cop asked.
“About eight thirty.” Phoebe didn’t sound the least bit nervous.
He wrote down the information. “Let me get your names.”
“Ellen Presley and Will Kirk,” she said, without even a twitch of a smile. It was probably her only shot at sharing Elvis’s last name.
But Will Kirk? Phoebe was putting a lot of faith in her either-or theory about Star Trek versus Battlestar Galactica. Mulder hoped Officer Racca wasn’t a Trekkie.
“The man you saw … Can you describe him?” The cop didn’t look up from the pad.
Mulder scanned the room. He noticed a hallway on the left side. Maybe the cops kept files and evidence down there?
Phoebe followed his gaze. “Actually, I got a better look at the man,” she said. “He was your height, or a little taller.”
“Excuse me, Officer Racca, but can I use the restroom?” Mulder asked.
Racca pointed with the end of his pencil. “Straight down that hallway. You can’t miss it.”
As Mulder walked away, Phoebe picked up where she left off. “Like I was saying, the man was about your height.…”
Mulder passed two cops hunched over a car magazine on one of their desks. He stared straight ahead, his heart pounding. It felt like everyone in the precinct knew he was up to something.
In the hallway, the fluorescent ceiling lights made him feel more exposed. He caught a glimpse of someone coming toward him—a tall man with an Afro and a bushy mustache, wearing black pants and a gray sharkskin button-down shirt. He couldn’t see the man’s badge, but he had a cool undercover-cop vibe.
“Looking for the bathroom?” he asked Mulder. “Fourth door on the right.”
“Thanks.” All the rooms Mulder passed were unmarked, and none of them had windows cut into the doors, so he couldn’t tell if they were empty. The last thing he wanted to do was open the wrong door and walk in on a bunch of cops. The bathroom was a good place to plan his next move. He followed the curve of the hallway to the fourth door on the right, which was unmarked like the others.
The moment Mulder opened the door, he realized he wasn’t in the restroom. He was standing in what looked like a war room—the place where Solano and Walker had laid out the clues and evidence related to the Billy Christian case. Photos of Billy, his parents, the family home, and the living room—the last place the boy was seen alive—were tacked on the wall along with files and handwritten notes.
One of the crime scene photos caught his eye. A shot of the body—Billy wearing Sarah’s pajamas; the black-and-white bird, a magpie according to the label next to it, with eight arrows protruding from its body. A close-up revealed something Mulder hadn’t seen before. An iridescent black stone rested inside the child’s cupped hands, labeled NUUMMITE: METAMORPHIC ROCK.
Everything on the walls pointed to the occult.
And a serial killer.
The sound of footsteps in the hallway startled him. He couldn’t stay in there long. He scanned the detectives’ notes and the photocopied files on the wall, knowing he would remember them later. Words and phrases jumped out at him: magpie, ritualistic, toxicology findings, arrows were carved from human bones.
Mulder stared at the last phrase as if it were typed in a foreign language.
Human bones.
* * *
The at-scene investigation included the following personnel:
The victim is a male, 8 years of age, identified as Billy Barlow Christian, who was reported missing on March 22nd. According to Christian’s mother, the child disappeared from his home in Northeast Washington, DC. Mother reported leaving her son alone in the living room while she answered the phone. When she returned, her son was gone, and the front door was open (Case #22-915).
Victim’s body was discovered on March 31, 1979, at 9:09 a.m., in Rock Creek Cemetery, inside a mausoleum (plot #1861). The victim was dressed in a pair of footed pajamas (mother noted they did not belong to the victim), and the body was arranged on a bed of dead rose petals (white), in a ritualistic manner. Child’s hands were cupped, and he was holding a black stone (identified as nuummite, mineral native to Greenland). A small black-and-white bird was lying on the child’s chest. Coroner identified the bird as a magpie. Bird’s body was pierced with eight arrows, arranged in a radial symmetrical pattern.