Welcome To The Harem
Full Measure Justification by Martha Little
Summary: Deslea's rec: "It's not often that a fic captures the way Byers, Langly and Frohike bounce ideas off one another. This one is just a small glimpse into the everyday inner workings of the Gunmen, but well worth a look."
Rating: PG13 - language Spoilers: The Lone Gunmen (S1), X Files (S6) Classific: S Summary: Three news stories intrigue the Gunmen. Notes: The title is a combination of two typesetting terms, `full measure' and `justify'; I do not know if there is such a notion as `full measure justification'. Thanks to Mel W for introducing me to the concept of spiders. I also make a mention of Sally's unfinished Gunmen prom-queen story. Disclaimer notes: A number of the incidences noted in this fic happened where I live, with the exception of the missing intern. Names have been changed or omitted, and comments made by the characters do not necessarily reflect the aftermath or my opinion of such events. As always, the recognizable characters contained in this fic are the creative property of FOX Broadcasting and 1013 Productions and are used without their permission. Full Measure Justification by Martha marthalgm@yahoo.com Lone Gunmen Headquarters Takoma Park, Maryland Sunday, July 29, 2001 "Sons of bitches!" Frohike's voice reverberated around the area of their warehouse set aside for dining and light reading. Having poured through his share of the morning newspapers looking for - and failing to find - anything worthy of his attention, he had logged onto his laptop to download messages and began grumbling and cursing almost immediately. Byers and Langly were quite used to these outbursts and barely acknowledged the intrusion into their breakfast- cereal-and-newsprint morning ritual. Jimmy, still the new guy to the daily routine at The Lone Gunman offices, was the only one to show any interest in Frohike's displeasure. "What's wrong?" Frohike did not immediately answer, opting instead to reread the message to be sure that he had understood it correctly in the first place. His fist slammed against the table, knocking over several playing pieces from the nearby chess board in the process. "Those bastards at Quinn-Gibbs killed another employee." Byers' interest was finally piqued, as he folded and set aside his newspaper to join him. "Your spider found another one?" "Spiders?" Jimmy wondered out loud and then turned to Langly with a puzzling gaze. "We've got spiders?" Frohike clicked on one of the icons on the desktop to bring up a saved file for reference. "That makes four in nine months that we *know* of. What in the hell is wrong with those people?" "I hate spiders," Jimmy whispered to no one in particular before gathering up his and Byers' abandoned cereal bowls to take back to the kitchen. "Look at this," Frohike pointed to the screen as Byers walked around the table to read over his shoulder. "The guy died five days ago, and now they're saying that it might be arsenic poisoning." Byers began to read the article out loud. "Thomas Woodleaf, 29, an associate chemist with Quinn-Gibbs Pharmaceutical, died earlier this week from what hospital officials initially classified as undetermined causes. After further investigation, officials at the Virginia State Bureau of Investigation are now directing their questioning to the events that led up to Woodleaf's death, including that of previous hospitalizations of the deceased that also involved undetermined causes." "They've been trying to off him for months now," Frohike interrupted. "Why didn't those doctors catch it the first time?" Byers shrugged his shoulders. "Arsenic poisoning is not one of those things that is tested for with every unknown ailment, and the testing itself takes some time to run. Unless you suspect it as a cause . . ." He broke off further comment, being distracted when Jimmy reentered the room and began to noisily push furniture away from the walls. "Jimmy, what are you doing?" Jimmy, now knelt down on the floor with the top half of his body obscured by the couch, raised the hand holding the can of Raid that was usually found underneath the kitchen sink. "I'm getting rid of the spiders." It took Byers about ten seconds to mentally connect the dots and reach Jimmy before the latter started to fumigate the entire building. "No, Jimmy. A spider is a computer program that we use. It looks for stories on newspaper sites that involve a specific company or a particular person and notifies us when it's found one. That way, we don't miss an event that might be of use to us." Jimmy scrambled to his feet. "I thought that's why you guys always have that stack of newspapers to go through every morning. You know, `reading between the lines' for that next big story." "We can't possibly get our hands on every newspaper out there, and there is always that chance that we might miss a story, which is why we rely on our spiders to find those of a particular interest." Having dispensed with the lesson, Byers turned his attention to refilling his empty coffee mug. Jimmy smiled and nodded his head, adding this to his mental scoreboard of the new items that he had learned this past week. Eager to continue his assistantship with `The Lone Gunman', he turned his attention to Frohike. "You say that there've been other deaths?" "Yeah, not that anyone gives a damn." Frohike was still grumbling, unhappy at the lack of enthusiasm from his longtime colleagues to the new developments in his pet project. "I do." Frohike looked up from the laptop to Jimmy's face, bright with puppy-like eagerness and an intellect to match, and thought about dismissing his interest but reconsidered. An audience was an audience, he thought as he took a deep breath to begin. "Okay. About nine months ago, a woman named Sheila Dodds fell from an overpass onto the interstate highway below. She might have survived the fall if she hadn't been run over by a semi. The local police got reports from eyewitnesses that said that a man was seen walking with her just prior to the fall, and they later identified that man as her husband whom neighbors said was verbally abusive towards her. So the police question the guy and, lo and behold, he confesses to pushing her over the side because - get this - a voice told him to do it. "Next up - Lorenzo Maness. Six months ago, Lorenzo stopped his car at a train crossing when the signals started going off. Then, for reasons unknown, Lorenzo puts his car on the tracks just as the train approaches the intersection. The people waiting in the car on the other side of the tracks gave a sworn statement to the police that another car rammed Lorenzo's deliberately to push him into the path of the train, but no one on the train notices this second car. The official cause of death is still listed as suicide. "Then last month, Deanna Moore is found drowned in a motel bathtub. No flags are raised until the autopsy reports come back that showed that she had high levels of something similar to Ecstasy in her bloodstream. Then they just wrote her off as a junkie who got careless." Jimmy stood there, mouth open in disbelief at the strangeness of the story being told. "And all three of these people . . ." "All three of these *dead* people also happen to be employed by Quinn-Gibbs, same as this guy who was poisoned several days ago. Sheila was a secretary, Lorenzo and Deanna were lab assistants, and now this associate chemist. I need to start making some calls to find out what department he worked in. If I can find that they've all been working on the same project, then there's the motive for silencing them all." "Here we go," Langly snorted. He dropped the last of his newspapers to the floor with a thud and scraped the chair across the floor as he got up from the table. "You've been beating this dead horse for months now." "What?" Frohike yelled to Langly's retreating form. "Don't tell me that this is just all coincidence. Four strange deaths within the same company?" Byers reentered the room in the middle of the outburst, passing by Langly who was mimicking their partner with exaggerated face gestures. "Frohike, Quinn-Gibbs has over a thousand employees just at that one location. It *is* just a coincidence." "No it's not. I have the official findings from the train accident that report unaccounted for markings on the rear bumper of Lorenzo's car - like it had been rammed like those witnesses said." "The same report also concluded that those markings might have been made by debris upon impact with the train, and to be fair, only the driver of the other car reported that there might have been another car involved. The passenger said that he saw no other vehicles." Byers returned to the breakfast table, intent upon finishing his portion of the newspapers. Frohike would not take the hint and drop the subject. "*Might* have. And then there's Deanna. Her parents and those who worked closely with her say that she would *never* have taken drugs." "What parent wouldn't say that?" Langly called out from across the room. "And as far as her co-workers go, what do you expect them to say? That they get high together every weekend?" He looked to Byers to finally put the lid on Frohike's speculations about the matter. Byers obliged. "The official autopsy on her showed no signs of bruising or that there was any kind of struggle that would suggest that she was forced to take the drug." Frohike still had a card to play. "Which is why I'm getting her parents to demand a second independent opinion." "Oh, gross, man. You want them to dig her up?" Langly could again taste the bile that appeared when he once viewed a fresh body ready for autopsy and could not imagine having to work on one that had been lying in the ground for several weeks. "Can't you just leave them in peace?" Jimmy had been intently watching the three-way volleying and kept silent until Frohike had finally stormed out of the room in disgust. "Guys, I don't get why you're so down on Frohike about this. Isn't this exactly the kind of odd coincidences that we investigate?" Byers spoke up from behind his newspaper. "If it was any company other than Quinn-Gibbs, I'd say yes, but Frohike has had it in for them for years. He'd love to be able to pin something sinister on them." "Yeah, ever since his story about an AIDS treatment that they were developing blew up in his face, he's had a sore spot where that company's been concerned," Langly further explained. "Frohike found that a number of participants in some clinical trials a few years back were dying at a rate statistically faster than they would have without the pills. He was in the middle of writing the story when Quinn-Gibbs stopped the testing and announced that it was dropping the development of that drug." Jimmy was silent for a moment, pondering the story. "Well, that's a *good* thing, right?" "Not as far as Frohike was concerned. He convinced himself that the company deliberately shut down the testing just to thwart his investigation and made a public announcement to minimize any talk about it." "Yeah, but they stopped it, didn't they?" Jimmy was pleading Frohike's case for them. "I mean, that's what he wanted done, was for those people to stop dying." Byers set aside the section of the paper he had been reading. "Jimmy, they were AIDS patients in the last stages of the disease. Frohike was angry at the company; he thought it gave them false hope and robbed them of what little time they did have left." "It seems to me that's what that company did." Jimmy raised his voice. "We should all be angry." "But not to the point of jumping to a conclusion without any facts to support the story. You see, Frohike went to one of Quinn-Gibbs' shareholders' meetings after it stopped the testing and demanded to know why the company was using patients with only months or even weeks to live. One of its spokespersons told him that the company had an obligation to at least try to help those most in need, and did he want the company to withhold a probable treatment because they were too sick without knowing if it could have helped at all?" Byers paused, making sure that Jimmy was following his story. "The company publicly embarrassed him; that's why he's angry and hell-bent on finding something sinister going on there." "Here." Langly dropped another pile of newspapers on the table and pulled a chair back for Jimmy. "Why don't you go and look through some of these papers? See if you can find some work for the rest of us to do." Langly circled the table, pausing behind Byers and whispered, "That should keep him quiet for a few hours," before heading out of the room to check on his morning mail. The next few hours did pass peacefully, with the exception of Jimmy's foray into the various Sunday comic sections that sent peals of laughter into the various corners of the warehouse. It was not until he got hold of The Philadelphia Inquirer that his shouting got the attention of the others, sending Langly and Byers scurrying back to the dining table. "Hey, guys, you've got to see this." "Okay," Langly replied, slightly out of breath. "Who died now?" Jimmy was surprised by the comment. "Whoa, you must be psychic. Um, Byers, have you ever lived in Philadelphia?" "No, I haven't." Byers was straightening his tie from dash down the stairs at the commotion. "Your birthday's November 22, 1963, isn't it? The day President Kennedy was shot?" "Yes. What's this about?" Jimmy looked back down at the newspaper and then back at Byers. "Do you have a twin brother?" "No, I don't. Why do you ask?" Byers circled behind Jimmy to see the article that had so captured his attention. The picture above the obituary notice stunned him. "Oh, my heavens." Langly had now joined the two at the table. "Good grief, Byers; that's you." "Not exactly," Byers replied, noting that the person in the photo was clean-shaven but acknowledging that there was a strong resemblance. Together, the three of them read the accompanying article: PHILADELPHIA John Fitzgerald Byers, 37, died yesterday of injuries received in an automobile accident. A graduate of Central High School and Lehigh University, he had worked as a systems analyst for the past eleven years. A memorial service will be held Monday at 2:00 pm at the Hawkins Funeral Home at Federal and Market Streets. Born November 22, 1963, he is survived by his parents, Thomas and Brenda Byers; an aunt, Mary Jane Austin; and several cousins. "The service is tomorrow." Byers removed the page from the section of newspaper and looked closely at the photo. "I think that I should go and check this out." "You're just gonna freak out the family, Byers," Langly replied. "Why do that to them?" Jimmy was puzzled. "You don't think it's odd that someone with his name and the same birthdate who looks somewhat like him . . ." "Not somewhat. Just like. We've seen him without the beard." "You have?" Jimmy had understood that Byers had sported a beard since the first time the Gunmen met. "When was this?" "A few years back. Mulder got us to dress up as prom queens for Halloween and . . ." Langly abruptly stopped when Byers flashed a `don't go there' stare. "Never mind. Any chance that guy was related?" Byers shook his head, reading back over the accompanying article. "None of the names look familiar, but anything is possible." "So, you still going?" Jimmy called out as Byers began to exit the room. "Yes," Byers whispered to himself, pausing at the foot of the stairs as he folded up the paper and pocketed it inside his jacket. "I wouldn't miss this for the world." Jimmy beamed at Langly and snapped his fingers. "Nothing to this newspaper thing." Langly scowled at missing out on the small coup to the new guy and pointed at the remaining papers. "Why don't you see if you can find something that would interest me? Emphasis on the word `interest'." Although he was tired from several hours of reading, Jimmy dug into the remaining papers with renewed zeal. And as beginner's luck would have it, he soon had occasion to seek out Langly with a story of possible interest. Jimmy found him at one of the office worktables, replacing a cd drive on a laptop. "Langly?" "Yeah?" "You have a lot of t-shirts of rock bands, right?" Langly still had not looked up to acknowledge him. "You can't borrow any." "No, it's not for me. There's this picture in the paper of an old Grateful Dead t-shirt that was found, and they want to know who it belongs to." "I'm sure that the DC area still has a head shop or two in operation. Maybe you should go track them down and ask. You might get a coherent answer." Langly dropped the old drive into a box under the table. "Why is anyone looking for an owner of an old t-shirt? There could be a million Dead shirts in the back of people's closets as we speak." "Because the guy who was last wearing this shirt was found dead, and he's apparently been dead for some time." Exasperated, Langly finally turned around to face Jimmy. "Why didn't you say so? Give it up." Jimmy clutched the newspaper to his chest. "Hey, I found it. I want to help on this one." "Sure, you can help." Langly got up from the stool, snatched the paper away from Jimmy, and returned to the worktable. "Just let me see the story first." . . . Two hikers in Green Ridge State Forest found a partial skeleton late Wednesday afternoon. The Maryland State Police were immediately notified, and the bones were sent to Annapolis for identification purposes. It was not evident to the two eyewitnesses as to a possible cause of death; according to one of the hikers, "we couldn't be sure if it was a girl or a guy." All that was apparent was that the deceased was wearing jeans and a t-shirt with a Grateful Dead logo. Langly scanned to the top of the page to note the date. "Saturday, huh? The Cumberland News Times. This could be turned into something." He took the paper with him to another workstation and began to log onto several sites. Jimmy followed him. "Hey, you said I could help." "You can. Just don't crowd me, and you can take notes." Langly entered another flurry of keystrokes before finding what he was looking for. "There. We're now logged onto the Mid-Atlantic States' Missing Persons Database, and we're going to do a search for anyone who's gone missing in the past five years who was last seen wearing jeans and a t- shirt." Jimmy looked over Langly's shoulder, watching the number of hits increase. "Wouldn't somebody have done this already?" "You'd think, but most of the law enforcement around here have got their shorts in a twist over a missing intern. Not too many people are gonna care about trying to ID someone who's been dead for a while and certainly not on a weekend." Langly turned to face Jimmy to drive the point home. "See, this is exactly why our paper exists - the officials couldn't care less about investigating something that won't give them some air time but there's a family out there who is still waiting for this person to come home." "Wouldn't the local police know who it was?" "Not likely. If the person was local to the Cumberland area, the paper would have mentioned it as a possible lead. There would have been plenty of time before the Saturday edition for the human interest side of the story that these little towns just lap up. Standard procedure has them sending the body to the state capital for final ID purposes anyway, but chances are that the person was unknown to the local police and they'd just as soon dump off that responsibility to the state level if there isn't a local connection." Jimmy nodded his head along with Langly's explanation. "Okay, then, why are we looking for someone who went missing five years ago? Wouldn't the t-shirt have disintegrated by then?" "Good point, Jimmy, but we have to allow for time for the body to be reduced to just bones. It could have been out there for twenty years, but the search time will be shorter if I break it up into blocks of time." "So they don't catch us on their website?" Jimmy understood that the guys sometimes trespassed where they should not in the interest of getting to the truth. "No problem there. The database is available to almost anyone. Besides, if they run a check, all they'll find are requests for searches by the Allegany County Sheriff's Department." "Oh." It took Jimmy a moment for that comment to register. "Ohhhhhh. Cool." "Damn." Langly swore as he watched the counter continue to ring up hits. "There are nearly four hundred possibles for just the past five years alone. Couldn't these people have walked out the door for the last time in a flannel shirt or something?" "Does this mean that we're not going to check back any further?" "We should but then we'll have almost a thousand profiles to sift through." Langly was beginning to lose enthusiasm in this portion of the story. "Then we're probably still gonna have to wait for the final report on the bones to positively match them to someone and who knows how long that will take." Jimmy, still trying to be helpful, made a suggestion. "Couldn't you use one of those spider things that Frohike was using this morning, you know, to see if there was a story out there?" "Nope, not a spider, but we'll use the next best thing." Langly jumped onto another laptop to begin a second search. "The Newspaper Resource Service. If there's been a story about it in the past fifteen years, it'll be archived here." The two sat, each staring back and forth at the two computers as one racked up hits past a thousand and the other kept searching until a second window opened on the screen. "Damn, that was quick." Langly maximized the window to start reading. "Thomas Brooks . . . age twenty . . . college student from Georgia . . . disappeared after a Grateful Dead concert near Pittsburgh in the summer of 1990. That's so close to Cumberland. And we got the parents' names and address." Langly was quickly gaining steam to begin work on the story. "*Now* we've got a starting point." "But what if it's not him? Like you said earlier, you don't want to spook out the parents." "We can start out with a series, like what about all those other missing persons out there who don't work for congressmen or whose families don't have lawyers or hired spokesmen to speak for them. Who's looking for them?" Langly began copying the data found from both searches for later reference. "Then we can go on to the obscene amount of money and manpower being used to find just one person when no one would've ever spent it looking for Joe Blow down the street. By the time we get to the third issue, the state should have their report on the bones and if it's a close match, then we can break in with a possible for them and be right on the front door of the parents if they confirm. If it doesn't match, we still have a human interest story for our readers - a guy goes to a concert and becomes one of the missing thousands and is anyone still looking for him." "At least it will have a happy ending," Jimmy sadly reasoned. "Or an unhappy one, if you think about it. Unhappy that the kid is dead but happy for the parents to finally know what happened to him but unhappy in that they know he will never come home but happy that he's not out there suffering or in jail or living in the streets but unhappy . . ." Langly cut him short. "Yeah, yeah, yeah, Jimmy. Come on; we've got some work to do." "We?" Jimmy was now all smiles. "Hey, you said `we'. So, where do we start? Do we go to the Cumberland police first? Or how about Georgia? I smell a road trip in the making." "I'm regretting this already." ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Monday, July 30, 2001 Byers had arrived in Philadelphia via Amtrak and was now on the subway taking him downtown. He brought with him only the essentials for an overnight stay. `In case things got interesting,' he had told Langly. He nearly missed his subway stop, being distracted by trying to come up with plausible excuses to stay longer in the City of Brotherly Love. Walking down Market Street, he wondered as to how much longer that they would play these games of placing items in a particular newspaper to set up meetings. It was still a given that most of the emails and phone calls into the office could be monitored by his colleagues. Every time he left for one of these trips, Byers thought that one of the others would finally catch on to his deception, but he was not ready to voluntarily share this portion of his life just yet. His guilt about tricking his friends quickly dissipated upon seeing her at the appointed street corner. She turned at almost the same instant and began to briskly walk to greet him. She fought the urge to run so as to not draw too much attention to themselves but could not resist a quick hug once they did meet. Byers was content to simply stand still and gaze at her face. He was at a loss for conversation after having not seen her for several months but was jolted aware when she tugged on his arm to start making their way across the street. Suddenly, the words of affection that he had planned on using gave way to his thoughts back on the subway. "Susanne, you took a big risk putting that picture in the paper. It's a good thing that only Jimmy and Langly saw it." "I've always wondered what you would look like without the beard," she teased. "Besides, you told me that you monitor The Philadelphia Inquirer." "I usually do, but they beat me to it. If Frohike had seen it . . ." "He didn't, now did he?" "The obit should have been enough. How did you ever get a fake one past the editors? They usually only accept them directly from the funeral homes." "I have a boyfriend who knows a few tricks." Susanne Modeski tilted her head slightly to let him know that she was still teasing. "Come on, there's this Italian restaurant around the corner. If you're hungry and if you have time." The last was spoken as more of a question. "I have time," he decided. end
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