Title: Gutless (Chapter 2 of 16) Author: Magdeleine See Prologue for full headers; all posted chapters can be found at http://shannono.simplenet.com/gutless GUTLESS Chapter 2 936 Lakeshore Drive 5:32 PM The house was yellow and low to the ground. The man guarding the front porch was gray and built like a tank, sporting a thick steel-colored mustache and a nose like a car wreck. He stepped forward before Mulder and Scully reached the stairs, glowering down at them with copper-colored eyes. "You the FBI agents?" Scully pulled her ID out of her pocket. "Agents Scully and Mulder," she said, holding it up for inspection; Mulder followed suit an instant later. "And you are ...?" "Sheriff Michael Volney." He motioned with his hand as he turned toward the door. "Come on in. Watch out, the boards are a bit warped." Scully climbed the three steps with appropriate caution, Mulder following behind. As they reached the top of the stairs his hand settled at the small of her back, just like it always did. She shivered. "Cold, Scully?" Mulder murmured, practically at her ear. She shook her head and sped up, pulling away from his touch. Volney was just inside, holding the door open for them. "About damn time you two showed up," he growled, puffing humid, salami-scented breath directly into Scully's face. "We've been waiting all day." Scully tried not to flinch away. "Sheriff, I apologize for any inconvenience, but we took the earliest available flight from --" "Sorry is one thing, Agent Scully, but I've got lab people all the way in from Wichita." Volney leaned in to emphasize his point, his salami breath fluffing his mustache. "They've been here all damn day, on a Sunday, and every single one of them has a family to get back to, and they can't do that until the coroner takes the body back to Leotie. Which, by the way, she would love to do sometime this week, if you two would just --" Mulder stepped up behind Scully, the hem of his trench coat brushing against her calf. He was so close behind her, she could feel the heat from his body all along her back. Her skin began to tingle as though she'd stuck her finger in a light socket. "Excuse me, Sheriff," he said, "but my partner and I were called in on extremely short notice. We appreciate the courtesy of keeping the crime scene largely intact for us --" "I sure hope you do," Volney snapped, taking a step forward, "because I was promised federal assistance in this matter almost four days ago. It took a third murder in this community to inspire the Bureau to keep that promise, and that fact does not make me a happy man. We have better things to--" Claustrophobia reared up and clutched at Scully's throat. "All right," she announced, pushing out from between the two men. "Sheriff, the file we received didn't include a copy of the witness deposition. If you could brief us on the details of how the body was discovered ..." "Hmph." Volney chewed on his mustache and squinted at her as though gauging her authority. Apparently she passed muster, because the sheriff shrugged and complied. "We got the call about six P.M., Saturday. A friend of Marjorie's, name of Karen Schaeffer, came over and couldn't get an answer at the door, so she looked in through the bedroom window and saw Marjorie just lying there. Called us from her car phone." "Was the door locked?" Mulder asked. Volney glared, and Scully remembered the controversy on the news over whether or not the door in the Gruber case had been locked. "Yes," he gritted out. "We checked." Mulder shrugged and went back to nosing around the dead woman's living room, his hands clasped behind him like a rookie cop who has to remind himself not to touch anything. Volney glowered at him for a moment and turned to face Scully. "No sign of forced entry or burglary. 'Course," he added, indicating the cluttered room with a nod of his head, "God only knows what all's supposed to be in here. Hard to tell." "Have they determined the time of death?" Scully asked "Oh, sometime Friday night is what they're thinking. Nine, ten o'clock. Gives me the creeps, truth to tell. Ten o'clock I'm home watching the news and waiting for my daughter to come home from the movies, and across town a woman's gettin' murdered. Coulda been my kid." He blew out a long breath, fluttering his mustache, and cocked an eye at Scully. "You're the medical one, right? You wanna take a look?" "Of course. You said the body was in the bedroom?" "Sure is." Volney crossed the living room, waving at a tiny hallway. "Right this way," he said, wrinkling that unfortunate nose. "Might want to hold your breath." Scully glanced up at Mulder. He looked back down at her, reading the implicit question. "You go ahead, Scully. I'll be there in a minute." Mulder waited until he was sure that Scully wasn't coming back, and took a quick survey of the room. A shelf full of Reader's Digest Condensed Books, a small herd of little china cows, Princess Diana dolls, a set of Elvis plates, throw pillows embroidered with the images of Disney characters, ugly glassware everywhere ... it looked like the Home Shopping Channel had exploded. He walked over to a little curio cabinet and gazed through the glass doors at a collection of thimbles. Each thimble apparently represented a certain state; the little area for each one was neatly labeled with the state's name. Rhode Island was missing. Continuing past the thimbles, he found himself face-to-face with a blonde, surprised-looking Cabbage Patch Kid of indeterminate gender, hanging from the wall by a small cord around its neck. Mulder's lips twitched upward. "Hey," he informed the doll, "who says culture in the Midwest is dead?" "DEAD!" Mulder jumped back a step and stared at the Cabbage Patch Kid. The Kid stared back. "DEAD!" the voice repeated, and whistled. This time Mulder tracked the voice by slowly turning toward the kitchen. The kitchen lights were off, the saloon-style doors segmenting the shadows inside. "Hello?" he asked, pitching his voice to carry as he edged to the side of the doorway. "HELLO!" Whoever it was -- whatever it was -- it smelled. He eased his semiautomatic out of its holster, holding it next to his shoulder with the muzzle pointed up, and gingerly pushed one of the doors open, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dim light. The same voice emitted a loud scream. "AAAAWK!" Mulder's eyes finally dilated properly, and that was when he saw the birdcage next to the refrigerator. A big damn birdcage. With a big damn bird. It was a parrot. A gray one, with a blood-red tail. Mulder crossed the room as he holstered his weapon, and stared at the bird. The bird stared right back at him, tilting its head to one side, then the other. Apparently, neither one of them could believe what they were seeing. Mulder reached out to tap on the cage, took another look at that vicious beak and turned it into a little wave instead. "Hey there, birdie." "HELLO!" The parrot fluffed its wings and blinked. "WHO ARE YOU?" Mulder glanced over his shoulder, feeling self-conscious. He considered briefly, shrugged, flipped his ID open and held it up in his best G-man style. "Mulder. FBI." "MULDER FBI! MULDER FBI!" The parrot let out an ear-piercing shriek and flapped its wings with gusto. "HELLO!" And without further ado, the parrot burst into song. "WHEN THE MOON HITS YOUR EYE LIKE A BIG-A PIZZA PIE THAT'S AMORE ..." Mulder's jaw dropped. "WHEN THE WORLD SEEMS TO SHINE LIKE-A YOU'VE HAD TOO MUCH WINE THAT'S AMORE ..." "Holy cow," Mulder muttered, grinning from ear to ear. "Scully is just going to *love* this." The corpse was female, Caucasian, in her late twenties; about five-foot- four, one hundred sixty pounds. Just forty-eight hours dead. She was dressed neatly in a nightgown made of oatmeal-colored flannel, fuzzy socks, and, as Scully noted when she pushed aside the unbuttoned sides of the nightgown, simple cotton underwear with little rosebuds printed on them. The corpse was lying face-up on the twin bed, mouth slack and tongue protruding slightly, arms at her sides, hands already enclosed in paper bags. There were no lacerations, no puncture wounds or gunshot wounds, no blood splashed about. There was only one mark on the body: a huge scarlet blemish on the chest and abdomen, running from collarbone to pelvis, fading out along the sides like bloody fingers trailing along the woman's ribcage. The skin colored by this blemish was slightly roughened, the epidermis flaking off at Scully's latex-gloved touch. What was really intriguing, though, was the appearance of the torso. Scully's first, irrational thought was that someone had already performed the autopsy; the entire trunk seemed to be collapsed, flattened, as though it were a football that had been punctured and stepped on during a particularly rough game. When Scully prodded at the cool skin of the abdomen, it sank beneath her fingers. The prodding caused a tiny hint of air to ooze out of the corpse. Scully caught a whiff of it and was violently reminded of an autopsy she'd done a few weeks earlier, a near-evisceration. All the organs and their contents had been mangled together into a soupy mix, but the wound had bizarrely suctioned itself back together again and held the goop inside like the world's most disgusting jelly doughnut. This smelled like that -- like bile and gastric acid and vomitus and feces, all mixed together -- but this scent was lower, subtler, an olfactory clue rather than the thing itself. Scully found herself looking at the dead woman's underwear, at the pink rosebuds. Rosebuds that, if Scully's guess was right, nobody besides Marjorie Bailey had seen since the day they were purchased. Something she thought was pretty, maybe. They looked like something a little girl would wear. Death and dead bodies, Scully was used to, could deal with; the rosebuds, however, had a kind of mute pathos that struck at her. She blocked it off, drew a wide black magic-marker line to separate the curious pathologist from the horrified human being. "... just this week," the coroner was saying. "They're all like that." "Hmm?" Scully looked up, trying to figure out what she'd missed. The local coroner, Jean Denison, was a tall, bony-looking woman, about fifty years old, with a thick Okie accent and big hair. Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt under her lab coat, she struck Scully as a woman in denial about her age; to add to that impression, Dr. Denison had been chattering at Scully nonstop, apparently assuming she had found a new best friend. Dr. Denison was much mistaken. Unfortunately, Scully was in no position to set her straight; she would be dealing with this woman for several days and could not afford to antagonize her at the outset. "Not a scratch on any of 'em," the coroner continued, leaning in closer. This was not news to Scully, but she let it go. "I can't be positive until we open this one up, but I'm pretty sure the viscera are missing, just like in the others." "Doctor Denison --" "Oh, call me Jean, honey." Jean leaned over, lowering her voice confidentially. "I tell you, Agent Scully, I hope to hell you and your partner can help us out, because I have *never* seen anything like this before. Well, except for the two other ones we got stuck in the cooler over in Leotie, you know what I mean, we got a bunch of 'em but that don't make this one any more normal." Scully looked up at her and forced a smile. Sheriff Volney had left, moments ago, to check on the fingerprint experts who were smoking cigarettes outside the perimeter tape, waiting to begin their work; Scully was stuck with the present company. It was a relief to be without Mulder for a few minutes, but this woman was really beginning to grate on her nerves. "Dr. Denison --" "Jean, honey; call me Jean." The older woman grinned engagingly at Scully, revealing a set of remarkably large teeth, stained yellow with nicotine. "Jean." Scully's own smile was making her jaw ache. "Was the nightgown buttoned or unbuttoned when the body was discovered?" "Buttoned. The pictures are still being developed, but we've got the Polaroids around here somewhere if you want to see ..." "Yes, please." That fake smile was slipping; to cover it up, Scully glanced down at the bedside table while Jean ruffled through an envelope. The table, unlike everything else in the house, was relatively free of clutter; the only things on it were a watch, a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and a photograph in a heavy silver picture frame. Curious, Scully leaned in for a closer look at the picture: a candid shot of a handsome man in his late thirties, holding a drink by a Christmas tree. It looked like something from an office Christmas party; certainly nothing that rated such an expensive looking frame. "These are the ones you want, I think." A pair of Polaroids were abruptly shoved into Scully's line of vision. Startled, Scully looked up; Jean was standing over her, her hand extended in offering. "Well, go on, honey, they won't bite you." "Thank you." Scully accepted the Polaroids. She gestured at the picture in the silver frame. "Who's this?" "Oh *that*. That's Jim Taymor, Marjorie's boss." "Was he Marjorie's ..." Scully couldn't think of an appropriately delicate term. "... boyfriend?" "Her WHAT?" Jean let out a startled shriek of laughter. "No, no, honey, Jim's married." "Could they have been having an affair?" "Oh no. No, I don't think so. Not to speak ill of the dead ..." Jean's eyes flickered briefly towards the corpse. "... but Marjorie really wasn't Jim's type." Scully followed Jean's eyes. True enough; even allowing for the discoloration and distortion that had come with death, it was obvious that Marjorie Bailey had never won any beauty contests. The thought made Scully feel bizarrely disloyal, as though she had been listening to unflattering gossip about a close friend. She looked involuntarily at the rosebuds again and shut her eyes. <*Not to speak ill ...*> There was a light knock on the door frame; Scully looked up to find Mulder standing just outside the door, his eyes crinkled in amusement. "Scully," he said, "you are not going to believe what I found in the kitchen." "Are you going to tell me, or are we going to play a round of Twenty Questions?" Jean's eyes lit up as she spotted Mulder. "Oh, you must have found the parrot." She strode to Mulder, stripping the latex glove off her right hand and extending it toward him for a handshake. "Jean Denison. I'm the Medical Examiner." "Special Agent Mulder." He shook her hand, although the look on his face told Scully that he was irritated at this woman for spoiling his fun. "I take it you've met my partner. And the parrot." "Are you kidding? That's all we listened to for *hours* until Sheriff Mike had the idea to put it in the kitchen. Nearly bit him twice, he told me, and it *did* bite that young lady deputy of his. Sharon, or Shannon, whatever her name is." Jean waved one hand in a distracted manner. Fiddle-dee-dee. "Sheriff Mike has been threatening to shoot the damn bird all day and I don't half blame him." "Sheriff Mike?" Mulder asked politely. "You met him, Volney. He lets me call him Sheriff Mike as a kind of a pet name, I guess. He acts all gruff, but he's a big teddy bear at heart." Jean rolled her eyes heavenward. "You men. You think if you act all macho nobody'll notice you're human, but what you don't know is that women can tell what's underneath." She hadn't released her hold on Mulder's hand yet, and as her eyes flicked over him she smiled coyly. "I'll bet you're plenty human, aren't you?" "The jury's still out on that." Mulder's smile was strained. His eyes flickered from the middle-aged coroner towards Scully, his gaze holding hers for a moment, and she fought down laughter. The message couldn't be any clearer if he'd held up a big cartoony sign reading HELP. "Uh ... what were you saying about the parrot?" "Well, we don't know what we're gonna do with the damn thing," Jean continued, still smiling that big-toothed smile at Mulder. "The next of kin lives out of state and won't be here for three days. Can't just leave the bird at the crime scene once we go, but nobody wants to take him home with them. Hell, I can't blame 'em, can you?" Oh, this was delicious. Scully gave in to that smile and let it spread across her face; if she'd tried to keep it in any longer, her jaw muscles would surely have snapped. Poor Mulder. So uncomfortable. So trapped. She let the situation continue, just to see how he'd manage to get out of it. "Ahem." Sheriff Volney was standing in the doorway, scratching his ear. Jean released Mulder and turned her bright-eyed attention on the sheriff. "Well, hello there, Sheriff Mike! We were just talking about you." The sheriff ignored her, focusing on Scully. "You about done in here? The fingerprint people want to start dusting the place." A pair of lab technicians flanked the big man, peering around him like children examining a stranger from behind their mother. "That is, if we can haul off the body." All eyes went to Scully. Scully stood up, peeling off her gloves. "Yes, I'm finished here." "Good." Volney moved aside and ushered the lab technicians through the door. Mulder glanced over at Scully and tipped his head towards the door, raising his eyebrows slightly in a question. She nodded slightly and followed him into the living room. "What do you think?" he asked in a low voice, coming to a halt and glancing back at the doorway. "Any ideas?" "I don't know, Mulder. I'm going to drive to Leotie with Dr. Denison and get the autopsy done before dinner, so while you have all this free time it might be a good idea to get an interview with the woman who found the body." He nodded. "Anything in particular you're looking for?" "You might want to ask her about the victim's social life," she said. "Try and find out about a man named Jim Taymor." Mulder rummaged in his pocket and came up with a pen; another pocket yielded a crumpled receipt. He smoothed the receipt on one big hand, turned it back-side-up, and poised the pen over it. "Is that just with an A or with an A-Y?" "A-Y, I think." For some reason she found herself looking at the way the base of his thumb curved into his wrist. The strong line of the metacarpal bones along the back of his hand. The way the muscle along the side flexed as he scribbled the name on the receipt. The texture of his skin. She blinked, and concentrated very hard on her left shoe. "... over dinner, okay?" It dawned on her that he was asking some kind of question. She looked back up. "What?" "I said, we can compare notes over dinner, if that's all right with you." "Oh." Scully blinked again. "Yeah. That's fine." Mulder's brow creased. "Are you sure you're all right?" Just then, Jean Denison emerged from the bedroom, patting delicately at her hair. "All right, the boys from the removal service'll be here in a few minutes to take care of the body." She focused on Scully. "Are you gonna need a ride? Or ..." Her gaze shifted to Mulder, roaming over his body before focusing on his face. "Or is ... Agent Mulder coming along?" Mulder shifted his weight uncomfortably. "I ..." He looked down at Scully, desperation in his eyes. Scully came to the rescue. "Unfortunately, Agent Mulder has to interview Karen Shaeffer tonight, so he won't be coming along." "Too bad." Jean raked Mulder with her eyes again, far from subtly. "Yeah," Mulder said, edging behind Scully. "It's a real shame." Scully smothered a grin. Served him right. Jean shrugged. "All right, then, honey, I'm gonna go get the car started. It's the blue Chevy." "I'll be right there." Scully turned to face Mulder, intending to say a quick goodbye and follow Jean out the door. Her plan, however, did not cover her reaction to finding Mulder inches away, his eyes searching her face. She would have said something, but for some reason she couldn't remember how to breathe. Oh God. What was he doing? "Scully." His voice was a low rumble, resonating in her bones. His eyes never left hers as he leaned towards her, impossibly close already and getting closer every moment... OhGodohGodohGod -- Unconsciously, irresistably, she swayed forward a few millimeters. Mulder veered slightly to one side, his cheek brushing against a wisp of her hair, his breath caressing her ear for a tantalizing moment before he spoke. "I think we should take the parrot." It took a moment for the words to work their way through the hormonal haze obscuring her thoughts -- a moment for the realization to kick in that he wasn't going to kiss her, after all; a moment to maneuver her thoughts back on track and for her to assimilate what he'd just said. She pulled back, staring up at him in openmouthed shock. "Excuse me?" "I think we should take the parrot with us." Mulder had that innocent look on his face, but she wasn't buying it for a moment. "Mulder, I don't -- you just can't --" She stopped herself, and took a deep breath. "We're not taking the parrot with us." "Scully --" "Forget it." She could feel her face getting hot from embarrassment and anger, and it made her even more pissed off. "Just listen to me for a minute." He put a hand on her shoulder, distracting her enough to let him continue. "Scully, that parrot may be a witness to the murder." She waited for him to crack, to smile and admit he was joking. He didn't. "Mulder. It's a *bird*." "Not just any bird, Scully, a *parrot*." He grinned, looking insufferably knowing and smug. Scully couldn't decide whether she wanted to laugh in his face or punch him in the stomach. "I know it's a parrot, Mulder. You already told me that." "Think, Scully." He squeezed her shoulder to emphasize his point. "This is the only house pet on the planet that can mimic the spoken word. If it heard something on the night of the murder --" She jerked away. "Do you have any idea how long it takes to teach a parrot to say even a simple phrase? There are tapes to play for them that repeat a phrase over and over and over again, just so their owners don't have to spend all their free time saying 'Polly want a cracker.'" He grinned again. "Believe me, Scully, this is one smart parrot." "No matter how smart, the chances of a parrot hearing something a single time and being able to repeat it later are ... are infinitesimal." Despite her intentions to keep this conversation quiet, Scully could hear her voice getting louder. She didn't care. "It's just not going to happen." "Scully --" "Dammit, Mulder --!" "MULDER FBI! MULDER FBI! AAAWK!" Scully's head swung toward the voice in the kitchen, her eyes widening in disbelief. She took a deep breath before she slowly turned her head to look up at Mulder, and found him grinning down at her. His smart- ass grin. The really, really insufferable one. The one he always got when he was right. Alone in the kitchen, the parrot began to sing again. "DANKE SHÖEN ... DARLING ..." Scully chewed on the inside of her cheek for a long moment. "All right," she finally said, her jaw clenched. "I admit ... you just ... might ... have a point." "Gee, don't go out on a limb for my sake, Scully." She gave him the eyebrow. "Don't press your luck, Mulder." End of Chapter 2 (3 / 17 sections) Feedback to playwrtrx@aol.com All posted chapters can be found at http://shannono.simplenet.com/gutless