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Authors: Ben Mezrich
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his pocket.
An anticipatory tremor moved through his shoulders.
Then he grinned, his high, brown cheeks pulling at his 66
Skin
mask. For him, the task ahead was more than an act of loyalty, or of duty—it was an act of nearly erotic pleasure.
His fingers curled together as he followed the two FBI agents out into the hospital hallway.
67
4
X Forty minutes later, Mulder shivered against a sudden blast of refrigerated air as he pursued the ample ME’s assistant into the cold-storage room lodged deep in the basement of New York Hospital. It had been a relatively easy task to trace the skin graft back across the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, but in the process he and Scully had run into the first sign that their investigation was not going to take a simple route—and at the same time, the first strike against Scully’s growing belief that the case would soon be explained by a conventional medical query. As Mulder had predicted, Stanton’s transformation would not be solved through a quick trip to the New York Fire Department Skin Bank.
“Missing,” Scully had said, hanging up the phone as she and Mulder had exited through the Jamaica Hospital 68
Skin
ER. “They’re unable to locate the six trays of harvested skin from which Stanton’s transplant was taken.” The administrator of the skin bank had assured Scully that the FBI would be notified the minute the missing trays had been located. He had also insisted that this was not a matter for alarm; the grossly understaffed and underfunded skin bank dealt with hundreds of pounds of skin on a weekly basis, and mistakes like this were not uncommon. And although he hadn’t been able to find the harvested skin, the administrator had been able to give Scully the name and location of the donor corpse: Derrick Kaplan, a current inhabitant of the New York Hospital morgue.
While Scully had accepted the administrator’s comments at face value, Mulder had felt his own suspicions rising. He didn’t believe Stanton’s behavior could be explained by any known microbe—and the missing skin seemed like too much of a coincidence. Still, he and Scully had been left with a lead to follow. While the NYPD continued their search for Perry Stanton, he and Scully would follow the skin graft back to its source.
After Scully had hung up on the skin bank, she and Mulder headed directly to New York Hospital. After a short stop at the front desk, they had located the ME’s assistant half-asleep in his office two elevator stops below the ER. Short, unkempt, with curly blond hair and thick lips, Leif Eckleman was exactly the type of man Mulder had expected to find working the basement war-ren of a hospital morgue. Likewise, Mulder hadn’t been 69
THE X-FILES
surprised to see the neck of a half-empty fifth of Jack Daniel’s sticking out of the open top drawer of the man’s cluttered desk; alcohol went with the territory. Mulder tried not to pass any judgments.
“The two kids from the med school got here late Friday night,” Eckleman mumbled, as he crossed the rectangular room to a set of filing cabinets standing flush against a cinder-block wall. His words were slightly slurred, but Mulder couldn’t tell whether it was the alcohol or the fact that he had just been awakened from a deep sleep. “Josh Kemper, and a buddy of his—Mike, I think his name was. Used OR Six, upstairs in the surgical ward. Cleaned it up pretty good afterward. No complaints from the surgeons.”
Eckleman pulled open one of the cabinets and began to search through the manila folders inside. Mulder watched Scully amble across the center of the room, her low heels clicking against the tiled floor. Her gaze was pinned to the wall of body drawers that stretched the entire length of the room. Mulder counted at least sixty—and he knew that this was only one of eight similar cold-storage rooms that made up the hospital’s morgue. Even so, New York was a big city; hard to find an apartment, and probably
An anticipatory tremor moved through his shoulders.
Then he grinned, his high, brown cheeks pulling at his 66
Skin
mask. For him, the task ahead was more than an act of loyalty, or of duty—it was an act of nearly erotic pleasure.
His fingers curled together as he followed the two FBI agents out into the hospital hallway.
67
4
X Forty minutes later, Mulder shivered against a sudden blast of refrigerated air as he pursued the ample ME’s assistant into the cold-storage room lodged deep in the basement of New York Hospital. It had been a relatively easy task to trace the skin graft back across the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, but in the process he and Scully had run into the first sign that their investigation was not going to take a simple route—and at the same time, the first strike against Scully’s growing belief that the case would soon be explained by a conventional medical query. As Mulder had predicted, Stanton’s transformation would not be solved through a quick trip to the New York Fire Department Skin Bank.
“Missing,” Scully had said, hanging up the phone as she and Mulder had exited through the Jamaica Hospital 68
Skin
ER. “They’re unable to locate the six trays of harvested skin from which Stanton’s transplant was taken.” The administrator of the skin bank had assured Scully that the FBI would be notified the minute the missing trays had been located. He had also insisted that this was not a matter for alarm; the grossly understaffed and underfunded skin bank dealt with hundreds of pounds of skin on a weekly basis, and mistakes like this were not uncommon. And although he hadn’t been able to find the harvested skin, the administrator had been able to give Scully the name and location of the donor corpse: Derrick Kaplan, a current inhabitant of the New York Hospital morgue.
While Scully had accepted the administrator’s comments at face value, Mulder had felt his own suspicions rising. He didn’t believe Stanton’s behavior could be explained by any known microbe—and the missing skin seemed like too much of a coincidence. Still, he and Scully had been left with a lead to follow. While the NYPD continued their search for Perry Stanton, he and Scully would follow the skin graft back to its source.
After Scully had hung up on the skin bank, she and Mulder headed directly to New York Hospital. After a short stop at the front desk, they had located the ME’s assistant half-asleep in his office two elevator stops below the ER. Short, unkempt, with curly blond hair and thick lips, Leif Eckleman was exactly the type of man Mulder had expected to find working the basement war-ren of a hospital morgue. Likewise, Mulder hadn’t been 69
THE X-FILES
surprised to see the neck of a half-empty fifth of Jack Daniel’s sticking out of the open top drawer of the man’s cluttered desk; alcohol went with the territory. Mulder tried not to pass any judgments.
“The two kids from the med school got here late Friday night,” Eckleman mumbled, as he crossed the rectangular room to a set of filing cabinets standing flush against a cinder-block wall. His words were slightly slurred, but Mulder couldn’t tell whether it was the alcohol or the fact that he had just been awakened from a deep sleep. “Josh Kemper, and a buddy of his—Mike, I think his name was. Used OR Six, upstairs in the surgical ward. Cleaned it up pretty good afterward. No complaints from the surgeons.”
Eckleman pulled open one of the cabinets and began to search through the manila folders inside. Mulder watched Scully amble across the center of the room, her low heels clicking against the tiled floor. Her gaze was pinned to the wall of body drawers that stretched the entire length of the room. Mulder counted at least sixty—and he knew that this was only one of eight similar cold-storage rooms that made up the hospital’s morgue. Even so, New York was a big city; hard to find an apartment, and probably
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