02x23 - Soft Light

[bunniefuu]

Morris?

Morris, I need to talk to you!

Morris, it's me. Are you in there?

Morris?

Morris, if you're in there, open the damn door!

Morris! Morris, open up!

Morris, I need to talk to you!

Gail Anne is dead. It was my fault.

Morris!

Morris, I need to talk to you.

Come to the door, Morris, please. Answer the door, dammit!

Oh, no!

No.

Oh, God, no! No, God!

God, no.

No, no, no, no, no.

Please, no. Please!

Two apparent abductions in a month, then this one.

My contact says the Richmond PD's hit a brick wall, so I said we'd have a look.

Who's your contact? Kelly Ryan.

She was one of my students at the academy.

She's been bumped up to detective,...

..and she's nervous about her supervisor finding out the FBI are involved.

Kelly? Agent Scully.

Hi. This is Agent Mulder. Hi. Thank you for coming.

You're welcome. Heard a lot about you.

We'll talk later.

The missing man is Patrick Newirth, aged 52.

He's a top executive with Morley Tobacco, up here for a meeting.

He arrived by train. How do you know he's missing?

He set a wake-up call for 6 a.m. The operator tried, but got no answer.

Mm. Scotch. It looks like he barely touched it.

Needless to say, he missed his meeting. After three hours, they sent hotel security up.

The door was locked, security chain fastened. And when they broke in, no Patrick Newirth.

Windows? Locked from the inside.

We're six storeys up, no fire escape. No way in or out of this room.

Agent Scully, what are you lookin' at? Uh, the heat register.

You think anyone could squeeze in there? You never know.

You guys turn up any forensics evidence? Uh, just this.

Scully, look at this. What is it?

We don't know. The hotel claims it wasn't here before Mr Newirth checked in.

There were similar burn marks at the previous crime scenes.

Was Patrick Newirth a smoker? No. His wife says he loathed cigarettes.

Yet he worked for a tobacco company. Did you run a test on it?

Yes, sir. Mostly carbon, with some potassium and trace minerals.

Could be residue from burnt human flesh. Does this look like an arm to anybody?

An arm? What are you thinkin', Mulder?

This burn mark is right where I'd stand to answer the door, right?

Yes. And I'd only look out the peephole...

..if there was something to look at, right? That makes sense.

Could you have this bulb dusted for prints? Of course.

And can you run those against Mr Newirth's? Do you have his prints?

From his toiletries and check-in slip.

Check them against all hotel employees and guests.

Anything else? What's the name of the last missing person?

That would be Margaret Wysnecki.

Thanks. This should do it.

Is this your first case, Detective?

Yes, sir. Any idea why they gave it to you?

No one else wanted it.

Because of the lack of evidence, this is still a missing persons case,...

..not likely to end up on the front pages.

I wouldn't be so sure about that.

Can I ask what you think may have happened?

At first blush? Spontaneous human combustion.

You're doing just fine.

Having a little fun? What do you mean?

Spontaneous human combustion? I have case files of bodies reduced to ash...

..with no attendant burning or melting. Rapid oxidation without heat.

Let's forget that there's no scientific theory to support it.

OK.

Hey, Scully. Can you spare a prophylactic?

What are the odds of that, huh?

Darkness covers a multitude of sins.

Check this out. My newest tool in the fight against crime.

$49.95 at your local hardware store.

Neat trick. For your birthday, I'll buy you a utility belt.

Look at this, Mulder. Hm. What do we know about the victim?

Margaret Wysnecki, aged 66.

Widowed, retired from Laramie Tobacco, where she worked for 36 years.

Tobacco? Patrick Newirth worked for Morley Tobacco.

Half of Richmond earns their paycheck making cancer sticks.

Could be just a coincidence. Yeah, probably.

The first missing person, Gail Anne Lambert, worked for Polarity Magnetics Inc.

They didn't find any prints. Why should the prints on the bulb mean anything?

I don't know.

Oh, look at this, Scully. Someone forgot to empty the trash.

M Wysnecki, round trip to Hampton Roads, Virginia. Return train dated March 17th.

The day she disappeared. Patrick Newirth came by train.

And Gail Anne Lambert...

Uh, no. Nothing here puts her near the train station.

Maybe that detail was overlooked. What's the significance?

Maybe these people are being hunted, and the hunter's working the train station.

What about spontaneous human combustion?

Maybe it's not spontaneous. Call your young detective,...

..and tell her to get a detail down to the train station.

Suspicious male in the alley behind the station. I'm gonna check him out.

Roger that, 64. I 'm on my way.

Sir, could I speak with you?

Hold on! I only wanna ask you a couple of questions!

All right, stop right there. Don't move. Just hold it.

Put your hands in the air, sir.

Stay... away from me.

What do you think you're doin'? Come on outta there.

We just wanna talk to you.

Stay away from me. I don't wanna hurt you.

Move it. Hands where we can see them.

Please... I'm warning you.

I'm a dangerous man. Keep movin', pal, out where we can see ya.

All right. I want you to lie face down on the ground.

Don't... come any closer.

Get down on the ground, sir. Now!

Please! You don't understand.

Oh, God! No! Barney?

Don't! No! Stay away!

Oh, God!

Oh, God! Not again!

No! No! No! No!

What happened here, Kelly? I sent two patrolmen down here.

They lost radio contact with them just after midnight.

All they found was two more scorch marks. Nothing else?

No. Suddenly this could be a cop-k*ller case, and I'm indirectly responsible.

You were just doing your job. They wanna know why I sent these men.

If I tell them I've involved you, they'll snap. Those prints?

I ran it against all the hotel staff and guests,...

..then through the national databases. No match.

Some first case, huh? Make sure you hang on to this case.

I'm sure something will turn up.

These ideas of yours. Care to share them? Not yet.

You don't have a clue, do you? He was here, Scully. I was right about that.

So where does this leave us? Maybe with enough to identify the k*ller.

How? He was here last night.

He was also probably here on March 17th and March 31st.

The days that the other two people disappeared.

That leaves us with three days of station video tapes to check...

..and hopefully find out who this guy is. That's assuming we're looking for a guy.

Either way, the security camera's our only witness.

It could be any one of these people, Mulder.

Or none of them.

We've gone through the entire week and I'm still not sure how to find him.

That's it for March 22nd on the arrival deck.

Let's go back to the terminal tape. Again?

He's gotta be on at least one tape.

Chances are he's not carrying a sign with an arrow on it.

There you go.

See this guy, right here? He's always here.

What's he doing?

Looking at the floor. Why's he doin' that?

Probably the same reason he spends his whole afternoon in the train station.

Can you freeze this and blow it up 200%? Sure.

OK. Can you reframe and blow it up some more?

See, he's got something on his jacket.

Let's see if I can pull it up.

Polarity Magnetics. That's where the first victim worked.

Looks like it's been closed up.

Yes? We're Agents Mulder and Scully, FBI.

We're looking for a man who may have worked here.

When was this taken? March 22nd. Do you know him?

Sure I know him. Dr Chester Banton.

He was my business partner. You mean he's not any more?

I don't know. I would assume not.

This is the first I've seen of him in five weeks.

I wondered if he wasn't gonna turn up dead. How's that?

Chester was involved in a terrible accident here.

Polarity Magnetics does, or did, primarily two kinds of research.

Mostly we designed maglev applications - people movers, b*llet trains.

But, for Chester, that just paid the bills for the theoretical stuff he was interested in.

Which was what? Researching dark matter.

Quantum particles, neutrinos, gluons, mesons, quarks.

Subatomic particles. The mysteries of the universe.

The very building blocks of reality. Except no one knows if they exist.

Chester was sure they did.

So sure, he bet his life on it.

This is where it happened. Chester was working to isolate a new particle.

He'd been working on it for a year. This is a particle accelerator.

One fifth the power of the Texas Supercollider in the space of a Wal-Mart.

Powered by what? A couple of billion megawatts.

Virginia Power loved us. Exactly what happened here?

The work involved bombarding beta particles with an alpha target,...

..negative against positive.

Chester had started the countdown when he realised he'd made a mistake.

Something needed readjusting in the target room.

Except you can't stop the countdown once you've begun.

There was time to safely make the change,...

..but I had left the room for a minute when Chester decided to go in.

I didn't realise until it was too late that the door had locked behind him.

Look at this.

As far as I can tell, it b*rned Chester's shadow right into the wall.

How did he survive? All I can figure is,...

..the quanta liberated off the target have virtually no mass.

They slid right through his body. Like getting an X-ray.

A two-billion-megawatt X-ray.

When I saw on the monitor what was happening,...

..that Chester was trapped in here, I panicked.

I cut the power, but it was too late.

I remember looking, and... seeing Chester.

He was perfectly calm,...

..almost like he wanted it to happen.

Like he was finally going to experience the dark matter he had theorised...

..in some kind of physical way.

As if the truth might come into him.

Excuse me.

What do you think, Scully?

Well, this looks like the same kind of material found at the other crime scenes.

Maybe it is some kind of spontaneous human combustion.

I'm less convinced of that now.

What do you think it is? I don't know.

Whatever it is, it's connected to the person of Dr Chester Banton. Maybe even part of him.

Well, whatever it is, we have to find him.

I know of only one place to start lookin'.

There's no sign of him, Mulder. Maybe he's moved on.

What are you looking at? On the tape, he kept staring at the floor.

I'm trying to figure out what he might have been looking at.

Maybe the exposure affected his mind.

Nonsensical repetitive behaviour is common in mental illness.

You trying to tell me something?

I called Detective Ryan. She's having the prints on the bulbs checked against Banton's.

Did you tell her about his accident?

No. I only told her he was a possible suspect, and that it was too early to get her hopes up.

And that we have more questions than answers.

Like? Like a motive. Like a m*rder w*apon.

Like... What if Dr Banton...

Look here. There are hardly any shadows cast.

What do you mean? The lighting in here is diffused.

Soft light. What if that's what Dr Banton was looking for?

Looking for his shadow?

Dr Banton.

Stop right there!

Dr Banton!

Please... just leave me alone.

We're federal agents, Dr Banton.

You don't understand. You're making a big mistake.

Stay away from me.

Wait!

It'll k*ll you. It doesn't care who you are.

Oh, thank God!

I thought he was to be kept in the dark. He insisted on soft light.

It's the only way he'd let us open the door.

How can you even... begin to understand what it's like?

We're trying to understand. Living in a train station day and night.

Living like a bum.

Afraid to fall asleep because of what might happen.

The accident in the lab, the quantum bombardment.

You believe that altered you physically?

You could... You could say that.

Can you tell us how?

Even if I could, you wouldn't understand.

But it has something to do with dark matter. It has everything to do with dark matter.

My shadow...

..isn't mine.

It's... It's like a black hole.

It splits molecules into component atoms.

It unzips electrons from their orbits, reduces matter into pure energy.

That's how you k*lled Gail Anne Lambert? It wasn't me.

Gail Anne was my colleague.

She...

The night after the accident, I went to see her.

I was just standing in the doorway.

I was... I was looking right at her.

And then she was gone.

You have no control over it?

If I could control it, do you think I would let it go around k*lling people?

All I can do is...

..study it.

Try and divine its... its true nature before they do.

They?

The government.

They're after me.

And when they find me,...

..they're going to do the brain suck they've just been dying to do.

"Brain suck"? For the purpose of?

For the purpose of stealing what has taken me years to accomplish.

And don't think they wouldn't k*ll to get it.

But if they k*lled you, wouldn't your shadow just...

Disappear? Who knows?

That's why you have to get me out of here.

If I die... there could be nothing left to tether this thing.

Excuse me.

I'm gonna have to ask you to discontinue interrogating the suspect.

This is Detective Barron, the primary on this case.

I was wondering what your involvement is. We caught the guy.

I appreciate that. But no one seems to recall inviting the FBI in on this case.

Agent Mulder and I are here in an unofficial capacity.

Then who brought you in?

We were curious about the unexplained nature of the case.

Banton's prints place him at two of the crime scenes.

And Transit Authority tapes show him in the vicinity of two of the most recent victims.

I'd say this case is pretty much explained. Really? Have you talked to Dr Banton?

Don't try to interrogate me, Agent Mulder. I'm not the suspect.

You know nothing about this case, so you stuck it with Detective Ryan.

Let her decide how to proceed. She is handling this case. She's done well.

I see no reason not to let her prosecute it once the prisoner has been transferred.

Transferred? Where?

To the city jail, for his arraignment.

I don't think you appreciate the danger that he poses.

I don't think you have the authority to tell me or anyone else in my unit how to do our job.

I think we can handle it from here, Agent Mulder.

We'll call you if there's anything more you can do.

Come on, Mulder. Let's go.

Soft light. He needs soft light.

I hope you know what you're doing, putting Detective Ryan's ambition over good sense.

Ambition? She's a woman trying to survive the boys' club.

Believe me, I know how she feels. You never put yourself ahead of your work.

And that's what's happening here.

Look, the fact is, we have no jurisdiction here. We were called in as a favour.

And we just handed the A-b*mb to the Boy Scouts.

I'm sure precautions will be taken.

I'm sure Robert Oppenheimer heard that from the same government Dr Banton is afraid of.

You believe this paranoia about brain sucking?

That man is scared, and not just of his own shadow.

As brilliant as Dr Banton may be, he is also clearly delusional.

He shows almost every textbook indicator. We've both seen the physical evidence.

Look, I don't know how to explain it. But that's not our job.

I don't know what else we should do.

I think I do.

All you've given me is a name. Chester Ray Banton.

Dr Chester Ray Banton. Do you know him? No. Should I?

He's being held by the police in connection with several bizarre murders.

He's a physicist, researching quarks, gluons... Dark matter.

He thinks the government is out to get him. It's tax season. So do most Americans.

He believes his life is in danger. Is he a dangerous man?

Yes.

Where is he being held? Yaloff Psychiatric Hospital.

But not for long. I'm afraid I can't help you.

Why? Last time I helped you, I bloodied my fist...

..and regrettably exposed my identity to associates of yours.

Yes, I know. And you can trust them as you trust me, I promise.

Dead men can't keep promises.

The next time, the blood and regret could be yours.

I'm not at your beck and call, Agent Mulder.

I have nothing to gain and everything to lose by helping you.

Promise you won't contact me again unless absolutely necessary.

I promise.

Frank, are your lights on? Ours just went...

Hi. We're here to transfer Chester Ray Banton.

I have orders he's being transferred tomorrow.

Due to the power outage, there's been a change of plans.

No one's supposed to go in there!

Here.

Quickly.

Who are you?

No. Don't do this.

Please, no. No, don't. Leave me alone.

What did you find out, Scully? Richmond PD had two officers outside.

They didn't see anybody come in. The nurse said there were three men.

Three?

The power was disconnected at a substation two blocks away.

Somebody posing as a city engineer.

Somebody who knew how to take it off the grid without affecting surrounding facilities.

Somebody from the government coming for Dr Banton?

Being paranoid doesn't mean he's wrong.

But my guess is they failed, and Dr Banton's on the loose.

That's what Detective Ryan thinks. I just saw her.

She was in charge of his transfer and arraignment. She's in some pretty hot water.

Maybe that was an appointment he wasn't meant to keep. Let's go.

Where? Mulder, wait. Where are we going? You heard what Dr Banton said last night.

He said a lot of things. Put yourself in his head.

He hasn't k*lled himself only because he's afraid of releasing the dark matter.

That's just a theory, and a pretty wild one at that.

Whether or not Dr Banton is actually telling the truth, he believes he is.

And so does whoever tried to take him last night.

All he's tried to do is control this thing.

He'll go to the one place where he thinks he can do that. And we gotta get there first.

Don't turn on the light, Chris, unless you wanna die.

Chester, what the hell is going on?

The FBI are looking for you. Where have you been?

There's no time to explain. Just come with me.

What's this about? Talk to me. We found the dark matter, Chris. It's real.

What are you talking about? Don't you understand? I'm it.

It's... It's in me. The accident?

They're coming for me. We have to destroy this thing before they get here.

No! You can't go back in there!

Police! I'm placing you under arrest, Dr Banton.

A lot of people will die if you do this. Step against the wall, sir.

I'm begging you. I don't wanna hurt you.

I said step against the wall.

Now!

I'm sorry.

Let's go. We don't have much time.

Chester! No matter what they say to you later,...

..you're doing the right thing.

Lock it up, Chris.

All right. Let's get the accelerator on line.

I'm afraid not, Chester.

You can do it, Chris. I can.

But I'm not.

No! Chris, tell me you're not working for them.

Wish I could, Chester. You son of a bitch!

Careful. We don't want you to hurt yourself. I'll die before I'll let them use me!

You're lightning in a bottle, Chester. We're not about to let you die.

Chris, don't do this. Listen to me!

This is wrong!

You're making a terrible mistake!

I've got him. He's not goin' anywhere till you pick him up.

Chris!

Chris? Chris! What's happening?

Chris! Chris...

Mulder, that's Detective Ryan's car. I was afraid of this.

Mulder.

Dammit.

What's that noise?

It's the accelerator.

Mulder!

Scully, look at this.

He must have k*lled her and then k*lled himself.

He couldn't have. This chamber's been sealed from the outside.

By who?

Agent Mulder.

I thought you agreed not to contact me again about this.

You lied to me. About?

About Chester Ray Banton. You knew who he was.

And you used me to lead you to him. You contacted me, Agent Mulder.

I won't be your stalking-horse, or the government's.

You seem to be mistaken about how much control you exercise over this arrangement.

You k*lled Dr Banton!

Have you lost your mind? The nurse identified you.

A young detective is dead because of you.

Who do you answer to?!

Despite my loyalty to my predecessor,...

..I've never made you any promises.

All right. Promise me somethin' right now.

Promise me this'll be our last meeting. We're finished.

You're choosing a dangerous time to go it alone, Agent Mulder.

Mulder!

I didn't k*ll him.

The mourners are invited to pay their respects to the family at the Ryan home.

How are you doin'? I'm not sure how to feel about this, Mulder.

She was my student, and she came to me for help.

I know it must be hard. This shouldn't have happened.

This never should have happened.

I'm sorry I'm late. I got hung up at the Richmond PD.

Doing what? A missing-person report was filed...

..by a Dr Morris West, a physicist affiliated with Polarity Magnetics.

I'm not sure I follow you.

Dr Christopher Davey hasn't been seen or heard from since Banton disappeared.

Do they have any leads? No. None.

But you do?

What if it wasn't Banton we saw in the particle accelerator?

Well, if Banton's not dead, then where is he?

Dr Davey would have been helpful to us.

We'll be studying this man for a long time.

I made this!