what_wings_dare | 🅧 Please explain to me the scientific nature of 'the whammy'

That's a start. Mulder cuts his eyes over to her for a moment and finds her giving him a sharp, steady gaze. His lip twitches. "It wasn't clear to me, either. A couple of G-men were sent out here after the police couldn't get to the bottom of it - but after a week of absorbing the local color and expensing seafood dinners, the Bureau recalled them."

What else? There's at least one other thing he's hoping she spotted, but he's not about to give her a hint. Instead, he reaches blindly for a few sunflower seeds and pops them in his mouth.

"Hmn."

Not much to go on there-- which is curious. It's possible they just made no headway, but that's an awfully quick investigation to give up on. Which makes her suspect there's some other factor-- the likeliest, and worst option being, someone with influence deciding to bury it.

But here they are for take two. She tries again, light and casual.

"I didn't find much on the obvious suspect."

Which is to say, I suspect somebody. Now he's really intrigued - the last set who came out here didn't leave any particular persons of interest behind. Whatever's going on in her head is pure Scully.

"Who's that?" he asks - but don't answer until he's spit his mouthful of seed shells out the window.

"The medical examiner," she answers, pulling the folder back out of her bag. "A Dr... Nemman, who did the first three autopsies-- which did not mention unidentified substances or marks on the lower back. The last victim was autopsied by someone else."

She glances up at him.

"Which makes me think we may be looking at an all-too-human cover-up," she finishes.

Don't smile too bright. Don't get too excited. She's still a mole, and she still doubts. But he doesn't sound at all upset when he says, "That's pretty good, Scully."

"Almost like I'm an FBI agent." She's in good humors, though. "The reports otherwise seemed competent-- I suppose it's possible he missed it, but I suspect it's an intentional omission."

Which makes him the first, likeliest suspect.

"So-- where are we starting?"

"The grave." Dramatic, a little spooky. Flippant. "I've arranged to have another of the bodies exhumed - you're going to see if you can find anything the medical examiner couldn't. Similar tissue samples, ideally."

Which should be fine, since she's a medical doctor in the FBI. This is the kind of assignment she ought to expect. All the same, he can't help but ask: "You're not squeamish about that kind of thing, are you?"

"Exhumation? It's a first." She doesn't love it-- the dead deserve some peace, and so do their families-- but scientifically it makes a fair amount of sense. "My work is usually done long before the burial."

She halfway wonders if it'll bother him that it doesn't bother her. Some people aren't comfortable with the notion of being comfortable with death; he wouldn't be the first.

It's ideal, really, that she doesn't mind working with material that's a little past its sell-by date. He certainly can't do the job with any accuracy - and this might be a problem they run into again.

If she's still here in a week or two, that is. He's not convinced she will be.

"It's my first, too," he admits, and maybe he'd go on to make an even worse joke, but the radio scrambles. And it scrambles loudly, going across stations and making an awful racket, no matter what dial he turns.

It's unbearable and unfixable - until he pulls onto the shoulder and turns off the car. And it's notable. Time to get out and grab the spray paint.

"What--"

She winces, but doesn't have time to try and fiddle with it or even cover her ears until he's pulling over. She hops out as soon as the car comes to a stop, looking at him over the roof of it as he... goes around to the trunk?

"What was that?" Also what the hell is he doing??

That's where the spray paint is, obviously. One big pink X goes on the pavement, right where they encountered the radio

"Do you want the stubbornly rational answer?" he asks, capping the paint can before tossing it back into the trunk. "Or the more theoretical option?"

"I'm interested in both," she answers, with raised eyebrows and her arms folded across her chest. Theoretical is probably not plausible, with Agent Mulder, but she can't come up with a rational option that makes much sense either.

"Rationally speaking," he says, walking back over to the driver's side door, "it's probably nothing. Sometimes radio waves do weird things - maybe this was the automotive equivalent of picking up signals through your fillings."

And if it's obvious he doesn't believe that...well, it's not his fault that it's an inadequate explanation.

"On the other hand," and he's got them on the road again, "you saw the radio clock go crazy. Temporal distortion is widely reported among abductees."

Agent Scully, shockingly, does not like either of these explanations; she frowns, deep in thought as she climbs back into the car. She doesn't want to point out that nothing happened, because obviously something happened; but nothing that seems indicative of alien abduction. They're still firmly on Earth.

"I understand that you try to stay open to.... extreme possibilities." And she's trying not to hold that against him, though she's polite enough not to say so. "But it seems like there are still a number of more mundane possibilities you're skipping over, here."

"Okay," he says, taking them around a curve. If she has ideas to contribute, he wants to hear them - however mundane, however incomplete. "Lay out some alternatives for the class."

"Assuming Dr. Nemman isn't responsible? Whoever is has enough power to pay him off." She looks out the window, considering it. There are plenty of far-out possibilities, even, without going off the planet. "And maybe friends who can exert pressure on the Bureau to have the previous investigation closed. I wouldn't call it likely, but it seems more plausible than Martians."

He'd been hoping she wanted to keep discussing the radio, not the case - the mundane solutions to the latter are a lot more visible than the former. But he'll take any conversation, at the moment. It's strangely gratifying, to get to try his theories out on someone, even when the result is doubt.

"How do we incorporate the deaths outside the state?" he asks, curious to see her explanation. "I'm not convinced Nemman's trips out of town line up."

"It's hard to say," she agrees. "But he doesn't have to be personally responsible to be involved. It could be related, or coincidental-- if we knew more about the substance I might be able to venture a better guess."

Organ-stealing rings, maybe? That sounds like an urban legend, but still more likely than aliens.

"Could be as simple as a novel street drug overdose, though I admit it's unlikely."

"That depends on how many street drugs you can get out here." There's probably nothing better to do in a one-horse town - plenty of kids smoked grass back on the Vineyard - but anything exotic seems more likely to pop up in cities first. They're looking at rural deaths in fairly rural states. "Of course, in that case, we'd probably have to hand it over to the DEA."

"We would. But it would still be an explanation." And isn't that what matters? Figuring it out. Finding justice. He shouldn't be disappointed, right?

"I don't know how that would tie in to the radio interference, though." She offers a tight smile, not that he's looking. "I suppose that's why we're here."

"I suppose it is." They're pulling into the local cemetery, which makes arguing the issue further a moot point - for now. Mulder has no doubt that'll change as they gather more evidence. Right here, right now, he's hoping to find something significant.

They park near the grave in question, and he turns in his seat to look at her. No apparent squeamishness yet. "We're on."

The truth is she's a bit doubtful that they'll find anything-- not because she disbelieves the connection, but considering the process of decomposition even embalmed bodies undergo, and the potential volatility of an unknown organic compound... If Agent Mulder has thought this through, she doesn't have to tell him, and if he hasn't, he'll have the not-so-pleasant surprise once they get the victim to the morgue.

"Which body is it?"

She opens her folder again for a quick refresher.

"Ray Soames." He's already getting out of the car. "C'mon, I'll introduce you."

Terrible jokes for what's kind of an exciting afternoon. There's something to be said for exhuming a body - all the potential discoveries that await them. And, it turns out, all the fury of the local ME getting territorial. They have it out while his daughter tries to get him to leave, and eventually the daughter wins.

Then it's just Mulder and Scully and a cemetery full of uncracked coffins. Mulder leads them up the hill toward the gravesite. "What'd you think of the cause of death on Soames?"

It's far more eventful than she was expecting, and they haven't even really started.

"I'll admit, it seemed suspicious when I was reviewing the file," she admits. "After that..."

Whatever else may or may not be true-- she doesn't trust Nemman as far as she could throw him. She's more curious than ever about what they'll find-- whether there's enough evidence to figure out what he's hiding.

"Given the time, I'm not sure how much we'll be able to tell," she admits. "But this is the best we can do..."

"We'll find something," he says, and if confidence sounds a little like faith, that's your lying ears hearing what isn't there.

He watches with a mix of approval and fascination as the crane pulls the casket from the earth. Easy, easy - and then there's a startling crash as the harness snaps. The casket goes skidding down the hill, and Mulder's running down after it, trusting that Scully's going to follow.

[ n a m e ; ]	Dana Katherine Scully
[ c a n o n ; ]	The X-Files
[ g a m e ; ]	spicy times in noctiumrp

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