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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

    THE X-FILES
    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

    Skin
    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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