Free Skin : the X-files by Ben Mezrich Page A

Eckleman hovered over the toe tag. “Derrick Kaplan. It’s him. But this doesn’t make any sense.” Mulder looked over the man’s shoulder. The corpse was staring straight up, blue eyes wide-open. Mulder heard Scully exhale as she joined him next to the drawer.
    It was immediately obvious what was wrong with the body.
    Derrick Kaplan wasn’t missing any skin.
    “Damn it,” Eckleman said, again rubbing at his watery lips. “The little vultures must have skinned the wrong body.”
    “The wrong body?” Mulder asked.
    Eckleman didn’t respond. Instead, he bent down and began pulling open the bottom row of steel drawers: the empties. Each time he stared into another blank box, he 73

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    cursed, each profanity more colorful and obscene than the last. “Can’t blame this on me. No way can they blame this one on me. I didn’t skin anybody. I wasn’t even in here—”
    Eckleman stopped, as he suddenly realized that he had reached the last drawer. “Well, son of a bitch. Unless they double-stacked it in one of the other drawers, it’s not here.”
    Mulder looked at the row of open, empty drawers. He didn’t know whether to be frustrated or intrigued. “Can we at least figure out which body is missing?”
    “Probably the one that was originally slated for this drawer,” Scully answered, pointing at Derrick Kaplan’s corpse. “Didn’t you say this was supposed to contain one of the seven brought in that same Friday night?” Eckleman nodded, returning to the stack of folders he had dropped on the floor. His stubby fingers were trembling by the time he found the correct file. “A John Doe.
    Brought into the ER from the scene of the big car accident I told you about. Also blond, blue eyes—but mid- to early twenties. With a dragon tattoo on his right shoulder.”
    “Was the John Doe a trauma victim?” Scully asked.
    “Did he die from injuries sustained in the accident?” There was a pause as Eckleman read through the file.
    Then he shook his head. “Actually, no. There were no signs of external injuries. The two interns who worked on him didn’t know what killed him. He was scheduled for an autopsy at eight tomorrow morning.” 74

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    Mulder and Scully exchanged looks. A missing body, an autopsy less than five hours away. The trail was getting more circuitous—and, despite their efforts, they still hadn’t found an ounce of the original skin.
    “I better go report this,” Eckleman grumbled, heading toward the door. “Administrator Cavanaugh is going to have my ass for dinner. But I tell you, it isn’t my fault. I didn’t skin the wrong damn body.” Mulder watched him trudge out of the cold-storage room. Then he turned back toward Scully. She was looking through the John Doe’s file. “These are big institu-tions we’re dealing with—and it’s very late at night. At two in the morning, things get lost. At eight in the morning, they tend to turn up. In the meantime, we have to speak to those med students. If something was transmitted from this John Doe to Perry Stanton—they’re the obvious link.”
    With the John Doe’s body missing and Perry Stanton still at large, the two med students were the only link.
    Mulder felt his pulse quicken as he glanced back at the empty storage drawer. Somehow, he found the steel rectangle more foreboding without a corpse inside. It was like digging in a graveyard and finding an empty coffin.
    Despite Scully’s words, Mulder did not believe the missing corpse was a coincidence. He was certain the John Doe’s skin held the key to the tragedy in the recovery room. And he would not accept any explanation that did not expose what had really happened to Perry Stanton—no matter how rational it seemed.
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    X The broken glass glittered like an emerald carpet in the triangle of light, jagged green shards spread out across the black asphalt in the shape of a bloated July moon. Perry Stanton stood beneath a streetlamp at the edge of the curb, his