The Dare In The Snipe Hunt, 23/30
Title: The Dare In The Snipe Hunt
Author: Landrews
Fandom: Bones, Casefic
Spoilers:Set S1 between 'The Soldier On The Grave' and 'Woman In Limbo', though not based on airdates- the time's a little too stretchy for that :-) and Cullen's still working while his fill-ins transition.
Rating: Adult - some sex/violence, Booth and Brennan canon friendship, Brennan/David, Booth/OFC
Summary: Bones and Booth are kidnapped from the site of a mass burial which contains the victims of a serial killer... or does it? They are thrown into a modern day web of cowboys against indians. Can they figure out who is who in time to stop the killing spree as snipers blanket Washington?
Disclaimers: No profit, 'Bones' and it's characters owned by Hart Hanson/Fox/et al - no offense or statements intended regarding the Lumbee nation or Mara Salvatrucha -
CHAPTERS: One Two and Three Four Five Six and Seven Eight and Nine Ten Eleven Twelve and Thirteen Fourteen Fifteen Sixteen Seventeen Eighteen and Nineteen Twenty and Twenty-One Twenty-Two
*** 23 ***
They’re in the lab. With one hand, Hodgins is stirring brownish goop in an eighty cc beaker over a little fire burning directly on his granite worktop and with the other he’s dropping maggots and cocoons into a bowl of boiling water, only just before they hit, they hatch, and a cloud of flies and moths rise in a steady spiral into the greenery of the roof.
Tempe swipes at a moth that flutters into her cheek. It’s sunset. Jack knows that, but he’s just standing there stirring. “Hurry up,” she says. He opens the skull on the worktop, scoops flies and moths into it and sets the cap back onto the ridged brow bone. Male. Caucasian. Thirty-seven years old.
“He wouldn’t understand,” Jack says gravely, handing her the skull.
“Gravely, that’s good, Jack, I understand that.”
She’s walking. The steps off the platform are a grassy knoll. She looks over her shoulder, and Jack winks and waves. Grassy knoll. That’s pretty funny, actually. She turns left at the Space Lab and climbs a ladder straight up, the skull balanced on her head. She thinks she’s headed for the roof, but climbs out into a limestone cave. Water drips from the ceiling. Ferns pass their delicate, cool fingers over her face.
When she takes the skull from her head, the moths and flies fluttering within and waiting along the edges of its foramina and sutures are colored; they are bright specks and rainbow wings, dotted and spotted and splashed. En masse, they fly from the skull’s optic and nasal cavities, an endless streaming spiral into the vines enveloping the cave. The vines droop and touch her as she goes until she’s brushing them aside. It’s dark in Guatemala at night.
She looks down at the skull in her hands, to watch the moths emerging. Her wrists are bound in duct tape. She nearly drops the skull as she twists her hands. It scrapes her knuckles as it rolls, but she doesn't drop him. Booth. She can’t drop him. With her fingers hooked in the eye sockets, the moths are blocked. They beat against her bruised knuckles, her bloody knuckles beat against the door in front of her, above her. She screams in the dark, enraged, and slams her fists up, and up and up. “Let me out! Let me out! Let me out!”
And wakes, sweat beading her lip, heart pounding so hard her stomach porpoise-rolls. Tempe turns onto her side, hangs her head off the bed and retches, but manages to keep the floor dry. She swallows and gasps and fights with her sheets until she’s upright in the damp darkness of her silent room.
*
Later, she wakes in a pool of sunlight, surprised she’s overslept the dawn. She rolls over and picks up her phone. No messages, but for some reason, it feels like the world has moved on this morning without her. She makes coffee and showers, pulls on jeans and a blue tee and chooses one of her chunky necklaces. The wooden beads are satin-smooth with tiny painted lines of red and yellow, which remind her of the flowering vines she admired in South America.
When she opens her door, Booth is standing on the other side, his fist raised to knock.
“Hi,” she says.
“We got a warrant on the house in Reston.”
“How?”
“Suspicious activity call.” Booth glances at his feet. “Three suspects seen fleeing the scene by a bona fide good citizen janitor working across the street, who called it in. The locals found the door, uh, broken. Down. No trace of the owner.”
“Really.”
“There’s a body inside,” he offers. “Several, actually.” Something in the way he delivers this news is… ‘so two hours ago’, she hears Angela say in her head. “Henson called Caber to take possession, but she’s on another scene, so he’s asking for you.”
“And…”
“No and.”
“What condition are they in?”
He grins. “They’re in blue Rubbermaid tubs.”
“Booth...”
“The responding officers found three empty tubs with a single human bone sitting on top of each lid. Three bones with teeny-little case numbers and your initials. I can’t believe you got away with that.”
She can’t either. Her brain’s frozen and she just looks at him. She risked his life, making those little marks, thinking someday it might be the only clue to their disappearance for others to follow. She can’t tell if he understands that as he stands there in her hallway looking back at her.
“Good going, Bones.” It’s almost a whisper, it feels like a caress.
She steps forward and Booth steps back, giving her room to turn and lock up. She pops her phone open as they start down.
“Zach’s already on his way,” Booth tells her. “He’s bringing Angela’s reconstructions on the guys from I-95 and Hodgin’s report.”
She closes her phone. No wonder she’d felt left behind, she had been. Her team is spectacular. She must remember to vocally praise them. Two uniforms stand down the hall, one at the elevator and one at the stairwell.
“The I-95 guys were positively identified as three members of MS-13. The younger two out of Philly and the older from New York. He’s majorly connected and we’ve already linked him indirectly to Turner Colvin through surveillance photos taken last year in another investigation. The New York office is trying to pick up the link right now.”
*
At the house on South Irwin, a tech swarm is in progress. Federal and State vans are pulled up like puppies huddled in the shadow of the Jeffersonian Mobile, which sits cock-eyed in the center of the yard. Locals claim the driveway and control the street, detouring traffic around the block. There’s plenty of gawkers up along the roof, though, across the street, where Danny Ghilley died forty-eight hours ago.
Shielding her eyes from the sun, she can see four or five bulky silhouettes at high vantage points.
Booth takes her arm. “They secured the perimeter hours ago.” She thinks she hears approval in his tone- that she’s noticed, that she actually looked up at her surroundings, which makes her feel both warm and irritated. She nods.
Henson’s on the porch, pow-wowing with a gaggle of cops. He flicks a finger her way as she and Booth pass by and walk through the open front door. The house is dim inside, and the walls loom close in the narrow hall that bisects it from front door to rear door. A 'shotgun' architecture. The rear door is open as well, with movement flickering by outside it, and a CSI in an FBI sweatshirt inside, dusting the frame.
Booth’s fingers press lightly into her lower back, steering her past deep rooms on the right and left, filled with wooden packing crates, stacks of flat cardboard boxes, rolls of bubble wrap, books and books and baskets and little stone statues and carved wooden totems and drums and feathery things. A CSI is writing on a clipboard, a camera slung around her neck. There is the gleam of glass eyes in various sizes and shiny rocks and an entire pegboard of cloudy, colored, bead necklaces. One corner is set up with a clean wooden table, with rolls of tape and labels in easy reach, looping off a small printer. A skull is sitting next to it, a little plastic, numbered marker next to it.
Booth crowds into her, moving them left, through an small, arched foyer dominated by the open door at the top of a flight of stairs that descend into what she assumes is a basement. There’s a splash of light below and the murmur of voices. She glances at the narrow doors to the left and right.
“Bedrooms,” Booth says. “The tubs were blocking the basement door. They were empty except for the single marked bones on each. No prints on any of them.”
Dust and mold tickle her nose and sinuses as she tramps down, Booth close behind her. The air temperature drops ten or fifteen degrees as they go. She can hear a fan running. Since the air is relatively dry, she guesses de-humidifier. Zach is crouched between two shoulder-high rows of metal shelving filled with blue and green tubs. There are two more beyond him.
“How many bodies, Booth?” Her tone is sharper than she intended. Both the other agents in the room turn to her.
“Zach’s counting,” he says. When she looks over her shoulder, he shrugs at her. “He's counting something. I think some of the boxes are filled with just one type of bone.”
Someone clatters half-way down the stairs, calling, “Agent Booth!”
“If you need me,” he says, turning away already.
“Yeah,” she says. She pats her pockets and pulls out her gloves.
***
As he comes out onto the porch, Booth blinks against the brightness of the day. On the porch and in the yard, everyone’s talking at once and radios are squawking with static and dispatchers. A chopper swings low, and Booth ducks reflexively. He’s not alone, he notes. “Shit,” Booth says to Henson, who’s standing alone on the top step, looking at reports. “What’s going on?”
“Someone told the media we have a stack of human bones here,” Henson says. “Here.” He shoves the pile of folders in his hands at Booth, who takes them, and pulls a wrinkled box of Winstons from his suit jacket.
Booth raises his brows, but Henson ignores him, looking now for a light, so Booth turns his attention to the contents of the top folder. Pink carbons. Invoices. He scans the dates, all within the past year. All for beads and other native American items. Most are notated with “repro”, which he assumes means “reproduction”. A few are marked “authentic” or “certified” and have an extra alpha-numeric code hand-written on them.
“Look at the next one,” Henson says with disgust.
Booth shuffles the top folder down and opens the next. He skims through the first three invoices and then stares out into the yard. Two news vans have arrived down the street and their crews are cranking their dishes up. Local’s already setting sawhorses along the perimeter in anticipation of a macabre loving crowd forming.
“Yeah,” Henson says.
Booth ruffles through the rest of the invoices, maybe thirty tissue-thin slips of paper documenting the purchases of human bone. “It could take months to trace all these invoices for legitimacy.”
“And a dozen different cases to open along the way. And it probably doesn’t have jack-shit to do with Jack Stratton. You know how many years I’ve spent on him already, Booth?”
Booth nods, but he’s thinking of how MS-13 will do anything for money. “You got copying capability on site? The squints can start matching invoices to bones as they move them out, give us a head start on what lines up and what doesn’t.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He takes the folders and hands them off to a young kid who’s been watching them and steps smartly to when Henson beckons. “Make sure Alvarez logged these, then make copies and see that they get to Special Agent Booth here. ASAP.”
The kid trots off the porch and into the throng, headed to one of the vans.
“You going to talk to the media?” Booth asks.
“Fuck-no. My SAC called Cullen. He’s sending a spokesperson. No way I’m going to be the one to tell the media it’s perfectly legal to buy and sell human bones.”
“Dr. Brennan’s good, Mike. She can verify the bones marked with her signature are legitimate, and Native American. And that they’re from the Douglas Point site. In Maryland, that’s a crime. Think how happy the state boys will be to get a piece of this mess.”
“Heard about your mess; MS-13 cadavers in a Lumbee store owner's van?”
“Aside from Ghilley, I never met another Lumbee until Stratton, and now I can't turn around without bumping into one.”
Staring at nothing, Henson takes a long drag on his cigarette and then lets it out slow. “That informant? The one that helped crack Stratton?”
Booth waves the smoke away. “Yeah?”
“He was MS-13.”
“Was?”
“He's dead. Sliced last week in the showers.” He slides his gaze to Booth, and tilts his head ruefully. “I wanted Jack Stratton, Booth.” His eyes are dark and he raises his fists; his cigarette is squashed and quivering between his index and middle fingers. “I want to go to hell and I want to rip his scrawny little head off his scrawny fucking neck and be done with him.”
Booth hears Danny Ghilley say “Right on,” in his head but says nothing. Some things are never done with and Booth figures for Henson, Jack Stratton will be one of those things, a pit of resentment lodged in his gut until he’s sitting on a barstool next to Satan himself.
***
Zach creaks to standing. Tempe cranes her neck to peer up at him. His eyes have unusally dark circles beneath them. “Is that it, Zach?” she says.
“Most of these bones are not identifiable. They’re too old. There’s no supporting evidence.”
“That is correct.”
“They’ll be relegated to storage, until we have time for them.”
There’s perhaps thousands of remains in storage in the Jeffersonian, awaiting examination. The ones needing confirmation of presumed identity, many of them soldiers; the long-buried unidentified victims of possible foul play that are shipped from locations worldwide for a whole variety of reasons, along with whatever was found on or around them; and many like these, cleaned and whitened bones, decades or centuries old, stripped of everything but their framework: sex, racial traits, height, age of death. More can be inferred, but there just isn’t time for that. Someday some grad student will collect all the thigh bones of a certain age and study nutrition, or place tissue markers on a dozen skulls and find their faces.
“Yes, Zach. As scientists, we have to set our priorities. Most of these bones…” she sweeps her hand across the orderly rows of tubs, each now bearing Jeffersonian file numbers and clear document holders containing a basic information form and, on a few, a copy of a matching invoice from the evidence being collected upstairs. “…are not our concern anymore.”
“Which ones are our concern, Bones?” Booth says from the bottom of the stairs. He’s in the way of a tech trying to move tubs up the stairs, but makes no effort to move. The tech squeezes around him with a dirty look. Booth is oblivious.
“The Native American bones can begin the reparitriation process. Drs. Sonjay and Patrick will process them at the Jeffersonian. Some of the loose bones have drilled holes, those are probably museum or medical specimens.”
Booth makes a circular, move on gesture, a sour grimace on his face.
Tempe frowns at him. “There are three skulls that are less than ten years old. We found two scapulas and a humerus that may or may not be related.”
“Most of these bones are cleaned, how can you tell how long ago… you know.”
To Tempe’s ear, he sounds genuinely curious, not skeptical, so she answers him. “Ceramic fillings.”
His mouth opens as his eyebrows rise. “Oh,” he says. His lips twist closed.
“And the bones I marked. Can the Jeffersonian take possession, or does that compromise our case?”
“I’ll find out, Bones.”
She unclips her cell phone, holding it out to him. “I’ve got Agent Baker’s number saved.”
“I don’t need Baker, Bones. I’ll take care of it.” He stomps back upstairs.
Tempe glances at Zach, who shrugs, seeming as mystified as she about Booth’s reaction.
Thanks for the copy edit, fauxmaven!
Part Twenty-Four A
Author: Landrews
Fandom: Bones, Casefic
Spoilers:Set S1 between 'The Soldier On The Grave' and 'Woman In Limbo', though not based on airdates- the time's a little too stretchy for that :-) and Cullen's still working while his fill-ins transition.
Rating: Adult - some sex/violence, Booth and Brennan canon friendship, Brennan/David, Booth/OFC
Summary: Bones and Booth are kidnapped from the site of a mass burial which contains the victims of a serial killer... or does it? They are thrown into a modern day web of cowboys against indians. Can they figure out who is who in time to stop the killing spree as snipers blanket Washington?
Disclaimers: No profit, 'Bones' and it's characters owned by Hart Hanson/Fox/et al - no offense or statements intended regarding the Lumbee nation or Mara Salvatrucha -
CHAPTERS: One Two and Three Four Five Six and Seven Eight and Nine Ten Eleven Twelve and Thirteen Fourteen Fifteen Sixteen Seventeen Eighteen and Nineteen Twenty and Twenty-One Twenty-Two
*** 23 ***
They’re in the lab. With one hand, Hodgins is stirring brownish goop in an eighty cc beaker over a little fire burning directly on his granite worktop and with the other he’s dropping maggots and cocoons into a bowl of boiling water, only just before they hit, they hatch, and a cloud of flies and moths rise in a steady spiral into the greenery of the roof.
Tempe swipes at a moth that flutters into her cheek. It’s sunset. Jack knows that, but he’s just standing there stirring. “Hurry up,” she says. He opens the skull on the worktop, scoops flies and moths into it and sets the cap back onto the ridged brow bone. Male. Caucasian. Thirty-seven years old.
“He wouldn’t understand,” Jack says gravely, handing her the skull.
“Gravely, that’s good, Jack, I understand that.”
She’s walking. The steps off the platform are a grassy knoll. She looks over her shoulder, and Jack winks and waves. Grassy knoll. That’s pretty funny, actually. She turns left at the Space Lab and climbs a ladder straight up, the skull balanced on her head. She thinks she’s headed for the roof, but climbs out into a limestone cave. Water drips from the ceiling. Ferns pass their delicate, cool fingers over her face.
When she takes the skull from her head, the moths and flies fluttering within and waiting along the edges of its foramina and sutures are colored; they are bright specks and rainbow wings, dotted and spotted and splashed. En masse, they fly from the skull’s optic and nasal cavities, an endless streaming spiral into the vines enveloping the cave. The vines droop and touch her as she goes until she’s brushing them aside. It’s dark in Guatemala at night.
She looks down at the skull in her hands, to watch the moths emerging. Her wrists are bound in duct tape. She nearly drops the skull as she twists her hands. It scrapes her knuckles as it rolls, but she doesn't drop him. Booth. She can’t drop him. With her fingers hooked in the eye sockets, the moths are blocked. They beat against her bruised knuckles, her bloody knuckles beat against the door in front of her, above her. She screams in the dark, enraged, and slams her fists up, and up and up. “Let me out! Let me out! Let me out!”
And wakes, sweat beading her lip, heart pounding so hard her stomach porpoise-rolls. Tempe turns onto her side, hangs her head off the bed and retches, but manages to keep the floor dry. She swallows and gasps and fights with her sheets until she’s upright in the damp darkness of her silent room.
*
Later, she wakes in a pool of sunlight, surprised she’s overslept the dawn. She rolls over and picks up her phone. No messages, but for some reason, it feels like the world has moved on this morning without her. She makes coffee and showers, pulls on jeans and a blue tee and chooses one of her chunky necklaces. The wooden beads are satin-smooth with tiny painted lines of red and yellow, which remind her of the flowering vines she admired in South America.
When she opens her door, Booth is standing on the other side, his fist raised to knock.
“Hi,” she says.
“We got a warrant on the house in Reston.”
“How?”
“Suspicious activity call.” Booth glances at his feet. “Three suspects seen fleeing the scene by a bona fide good citizen janitor working across the street, who called it in. The locals found the door, uh, broken. Down. No trace of the owner.”
“Really.”
“There’s a body inside,” he offers. “Several, actually.” Something in the way he delivers this news is… ‘so two hours ago’, she hears Angela say in her head. “Henson called Caber to take possession, but she’s on another scene, so he’s asking for you.”
“And…”
“No and.”
“What condition are they in?”
He grins. “They’re in blue Rubbermaid tubs.”
“Booth...”
“The responding officers found three empty tubs with a single human bone sitting on top of each lid. Three bones with teeny-little case numbers and your initials. I can’t believe you got away with that.”
She can’t either. Her brain’s frozen and she just looks at him. She risked his life, making those little marks, thinking someday it might be the only clue to their disappearance for others to follow. She can’t tell if he understands that as he stands there in her hallway looking back at her.
“Good going, Bones.” It’s almost a whisper, it feels like a caress.
She steps forward and Booth steps back, giving her room to turn and lock up. She pops her phone open as they start down.
“Zach’s already on his way,” Booth tells her. “He’s bringing Angela’s reconstructions on the guys from I-95 and Hodgin’s report.”
She closes her phone. No wonder she’d felt left behind, she had been. Her team is spectacular. She must remember to vocally praise them. Two uniforms stand down the hall, one at the elevator and one at the stairwell.
“The I-95 guys were positively identified as three members of MS-13. The younger two out of Philly and the older from New York. He’s majorly connected and we’ve already linked him indirectly to Turner Colvin through surveillance photos taken last year in another investigation. The New York office is trying to pick up the link right now.”
*
At the house on South Irwin, a tech swarm is in progress. Federal and State vans are pulled up like puppies huddled in the shadow of the Jeffersonian Mobile, which sits cock-eyed in the center of the yard. Locals claim the driveway and control the street, detouring traffic around the block. There’s plenty of gawkers up along the roof, though, across the street, where Danny Ghilley died forty-eight hours ago.
Shielding her eyes from the sun, she can see four or five bulky silhouettes at high vantage points.
Booth takes her arm. “They secured the perimeter hours ago.” She thinks she hears approval in his tone- that she’s noticed, that she actually looked up at her surroundings, which makes her feel both warm and irritated. She nods.
Henson’s on the porch, pow-wowing with a gaggle of cops. He flicks a finger her way as she and Booth pass by and walk through the open front door. The house is dim inside, and the walls loom close in the narrow hall that bisects it from front door to rear door. A 'shotgun' architecture. The rear door is open as well, with movement flickering by outside it, and a CSI in an FBI sweatshirt inside, dusting the frame.
Booth’s fingers press lightly into her lower back, steering her past deep rooms on the right and left, filled with wooden packing crates, stacks of flat cardboard boxes, rolls of bubble wrap, books and books and baskets and little stone statues and carved wooden totems and drums and feathery things. A CSI is writing on a clipboard, a camera slung around her neck. There is the gleam of glass eyes in various sizes and shiny rocks and an entire pegboard of cloudy, colored, bead necklaces. One corner is set up with a clean wooden table, with rolls of tape and labels in easy reach, looping off a small printer. A skull is sitting next to it, a little plastic, numbered marker next to it.
Booth crowds into her, moving them left, through an small, arched foyer dominated by the open door at the top of a flight of stairs that descend into what she assumes is a basement. There’s a splash of light below and the murmur of voices. She glances at the narrow doors to the left and right.
“Bedrooms,” Booth says. “The tubs were blocking the basement door. They were empty except for the single marked bones on each. No prints on any of them.”
Dust and mold tickle her nose and sinuses as she tramps down, Booth close behind her. The air temperature drops ten or fifteen degrees as they go. She can hear a fan running. Since the air is relatively dry, she guesses de-humidifier. Zach is crouched between two shoulder-high rows of metal shelving filled with blue and green tubs. There are two more beyond him.
“How many bodies, Booth?” Her tone is sharper than she intended. Both the other agents in the room turn to her.
“Zach’s counting,” he says. When she looks over her shoulder, he shrugs at her. “He's counting something. I think some of the boxes are filled with just one type of bone.”
Someone clatters half-way down the stairs, calling, “Agent Booth!”
“If you need me,” he says, turning away already.
“Yeah,” she says. She pats her pockets and pulls out her gloves.
***
As he comes out onto the porch, Booth blinks against the brightness of the day. On the porch and in the yard, everyone’s talking at once and radios are squawking with static and dispatchers. A chopper swings low, and Booth ducks reflexively. He’s not alone, he notes. “Shit,” Booth says to Henson, who’s standing alone on the top step, looking at reports. “What’s going on?”
“Someone told the media we have a stack of human bones here,” Henson says. “Here.” He shoves the pile of folders in his hands at Booth, who takes them, and pulls a wrinkled box of Winstons from his suit jacket.
Booth raises his brows, but Henson ignores him, looking now for a light, so Booth turns his attention to the contents of the top folder. Pink carbons. Invoices. He scans the dates, all within the past year. All for beads and other native American items. Most are notated with “repro”, which he assumes means “reproduction”. A few are marked “authentic” or “certified” and have an extra alpha-numeric code hand-written on them.
“Look at the next one,” Henson says with disgust.
Booth shuffles the top folder down and opens the next. He skims through the first three invoices and then stares out into the yard. Two news vans have arrived down the street and their crews are cranking their dishes up. Local’s already setting sawhorses along the perimeter in anticipation of a macabre loving crowd forming.
“Yeah,” Henson says.
Booth ruffles through the rest of the invoices, maybe thirty tissue-thin slips of paper documenting the purchases of human bone. “It could take months to trace all these invoices for legitimacy.”
“And a dozen different cases to open along the way. And it probably doesn’t have jack-shit to do with Jack Stratton. You know how many years I’ve spent on him already, Booth?”
Booth nods, but he’s thinking of how MS-13 will do anything for money. “You got copying capability on site? The squints can start matching invoices to bones as they move them out, give us a head start on what lines up and what doesn’t.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He takes the folders and hands them off to a young kid who’s been watching them and steps smartly to when Henson beckons. “Make sure Alvarez logged these, then make copies and see that they get to Special Agent Booth here. ASAP.”
The kid trots off the porch and into the throng, headed to one of the vans.
“You going to talk to the media?” Booth asks.
“Fuck-no. My SAC called Cullen. He’s sending a spokesperson. No way I’m going to be the one to tell the media it’s perfectly legal to buy and sell human bones.”
“Dr. Brennan’s good, Mike. She can verify the bones marked with her signature are legitimate, and Native American. And that they’re from the Douglas Point site. In Maryland, that’s a crime. Think how happy the state boys will be to get a piece of this mess.”
“Heard about your mess; MS-13 cadavers in a Lumbee store owner's van?”
“Aside from Ghilley, I never met another Lumbee until Stratton, and now I can't turn around without bumping into one.”
Staring at nothing, Henson takes a long drag on his cigarette and then lets it out slow. “That informant? The one that helped crack Stratton?”
Booth waves the smoke away. “Yeah?”
“He was MS-13.”
“Was?”
“He's dead. Sliced last week in the showers.” He slides his gaze to Booth, and tilts his head ruefully. “I wanted Jack Stratton, Booth.” His eyes are dark and he raises his fists; his cigarette is squashed and quivering between his index and middle fingers. “I want to go to hell and I want to rip his scrawny little head off his scrawny fucking neck and be done with him.”
Booth hears Danny Ghilley say “Right on,” in his head but says nothing. Some things are never done with and Booth figures for Henson, Jack Stratton will be one of those things, a pit of resentment lodged in his gut until he’s sitting on a barstool next to Satan himself.
***
Zach creaks to standing. Tempe cranes her neck to peer up at him. His eyes have unusally dark circles beneath them. “Is that it, Zach?” she says.
“Most of these bones are not identifiable. They’re too old. There’s no supporting evidence.”
“That is correct.”
“They’ll be relegated to storage, until we have time for them.”
There’s perhaps thousands of remains in storage in the Jeffersonian, awaiting examination. The ones needing confirmation of presumed identity, many of them soldiers; the long-buried unidentified victims of possible foul play that are shipped from locations worldwide for a whole variety of reasons, along with whatever was found on or around them; and many like these, cleaned and whitened bones, decades or centuries old, stripped of everything but their framework: sex, racial traits, height, age of death. More can be inferred, but there just isn’t time for that. Someday some grad student will collect all the thigh bones of a certain age and study nutrition, or place tissue markers on a dozen skulls and find their faces.
“Yes, Zach. As scientists, we have to set our priorities. Most of these bones…” she sweeps her hand across the orderly rows of tubs, each now bearing Jeffersonian file numbers and clear document holders containing a basic information form and, on a few, a copy of a matching invoice from the evidence being collected upstairs. “…are not our concern anymore.”
“Which ones are our concern, Bones?” Booth says from the bottom of the stairs. He’s in the way of a tech trying to move tubs up the stairs, but makes no effort to move. The tech squeezes around him with a dirty look. Booth is oblivious.
“The Native American bones can begin the reparitriation process. Drs. Sonjay and Patrick will process them at the Jeffersonian. Some of the loose bones have drilled holes, those are probably museum or medical specimens.”
Booth makes a circular, move on gesture, a sour grimace on his face.
Tempe frowns at him. “There are three skulls that are less than ten years old. We found two scapulas and a humerus that may or may not be related.”
“Most of these bones are cleaned, how can you tell how long ago… you know.”
To Tempe’s ear, he sounds genuinely curious, not skeptical, so she answers him. “Ceramic fillings.”
His mouth opens as his eyebrows rise. “Oh,” he says. His lips twist closed.
“And the bones I marked. Can the Jeffersonian take possession, or does that compromise our case?”
“I’ll find out, Bones.”
She unclips her cell phone, holding it out to him. “I’ve got Agent Baker’s number saved.”
“I don’t need Baker, Bones. I’ll take care of it.” He stomps back upstairs.
Tempe glances at Zach, who shrugs, seeming as mystified as she about Booth’s reaction.
Thanks for the copy edit, fauxmaven!
Part Twenty-Four A