“Start at the beginning, when you were jogging by the cemetery and you saw the body.” She pointed a knife with a glob of peanut butter on the end at Mulder. “And don’t leave out anything. You barely made any sense when you called last night.”
Mulder took a deep breath, and for the next twenty minutes he described every last detail of the scene—the way Billy Christian’s body was arranged on a bed of dead rose petals, with the black-and-white bird lying on his chest. The arrows sticking out of the bird’s body that made it look like a cross between a compass and a medieval torture device. The white pajamas with the elephants, and the stain that reminded him of a hippo.
“Then I called you,” he said finally.
Phoebe crossed her arms and her T-shirt rode up, exposing a wider sliver of skin. “That’s it? You didn’t do a single thing between last night and thirty minutes ago, when I showed up?”
Gimble coughed and looked away, as if he were the one being grilled, and Phoebe pounced on Mulder. “What are you leaving out?”
He shrugged. “I might have gone to the police station for a few minutes last night.”
She balled up a napkin and threw it at him. “I told you to wait until I got here.”
“I couldn’t.” Mulder pushed his chair away from the table and walked to the counter. He leaned over the sink and counted the water droplets in the aluminum basin. “I had to try.”
“And let me guess. They didn’t take you seriously?” she asked gently.
Gimble peeled the crust off what was left of his sandwich. “It was worse than that. They threw us out. Well, technically, they just kicked Mulder out.”
“Anything else?” she asked, sensing there was more to the story.
Mulder scrubbed his hands over his face. Gimble already knew he’d gone to Blue Hill. Mulder had filled him in when Gimble showed up at the apartment. Now he had to tell Phoebe. He couldn’t hide anything from her—except the way he really felt about her. And he probably wasn’t doing the best job at hiding that, either.
“I went by Billy Christian’s house today,” he admitted. “I wanted to tell his parents how sorry I was, but I couldn’t do it.”
Phoebe nodded. “That was a good call. His parents must be a wreck. To have someone find their child in a crypt, with a dead bird…” She hesitated. “It’s so awful.”
“I didn’t even see them, but an old lady across the street told me about the night Billy was kidnapped.” Mulder stalked around the kitchen. He couldn’t stand still. His body buzzed with nervous energy. “He was playing in the living room when it happened.…” He stopped moving and looked Phoebe in the eye. “The person who kidnapped him just walked in through the front door.”
“Fox…,” she warned.
“What are the odds?”
“It probably doesn’t mean anything. You know that, right?” Her voice wavered.
“That’s the same thing that happened to his sister,” Gimble said.
Phoebe’s eyes darted to Mulder.
“I told him.”
Gimble frowned. “He had to tell me. I’m his best friend.”
“His second-best friend.” Phoebe jutted out her hip.
“You two can fight over me later. Right now I need your combined brainpower and genius-level IQs,” Mulder said. “I spent the afternoon in the library looking up articles about missing kids.”
She shook her head. “Why would you do that to yourself?”
“Because I found six reports of children who disappeared from their homes at night, under what seemed like similar circumstances, in the past five years. Delaware, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania”—Mulder ticked off the states on his fingers—“Connecticut, Virginia, and Massachusetts. And I didn’t include Wendy Kelly or my sister.”
Mulder reached in his back pocket and took out the library card application he’d taken notes on. He didn’t need the notes to recall the information, but he wanted to see the names of the kids and the dates they’d disappeared.
And the other dates.
His stomach clenched when he looked at them again. “These are the dates the kids were taken.” He held up the paper so his friends could see it. “And these are the dates their bodies were discovered. Except for Daniel Tyler, who vanished six months ago from Cookstown, Virginia. The cops never found a body, so he could still be alive.”
She closed her eyes for a second and took a deep breath before opening them again. “Did the article say anything about dead birds with arrows sticking out of their bodies?”
Gimble shook his head and shoulders like a wet puppy. “That’s a disturbing thing to ask.”
She glared at him. “It’s a legitimate question.”
“There was nothing in any of the articles about finding weird stuff with the kids’ bodies, but you do the math.” Mulder handed her the crinkled page. “The kids’ bodies were found nine days after they disappeared, just like Billy’s, which means the killer keeps them alive for eight days.”
“A cult could be killing the kids,” she said. “A group would explain the different locations.”
Mulder didn’t have that part figured out yet. “We don’t have enough information to know for sure.”
“But the police do,” Gimble reminded him. “They’ve got photos of the body and the crime scene. Plus, they take notes.”