The Dare In The Snipe Hunt, 24 A/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 Twenty-Three
Meh. Sick. Sorry for the half-chapter- I messed up my chapter breaks somewhere in here... I'll post the other half and Twenty-Five as well sometime in the morning :-)
*** 24 A***
In his office the next morning, Booth mulls the possibilities, eventually letting his pencil trace the connections for him. A circle for the serial killer. A circle for his powerful brother. A circle for the cemetery. A circle each for Lyons and Ghilley and the Guards and MS-13. Circles for Ghilley’s ex-girl and her SBI husband. After a moment’s deliberation, a circle for the college professor. A line here and a line there.
Reminds himself none of this beyond the I-95 MS-13 corpses is his case. Did the guys in the van really fit into everything else? It all comes back to the Lumbees popping up everywhere. And the circle with the most connections is Ghilley’s ex-girl.
He calls Henson and lays out his supposition, bony framework that it is, and calls Cullen, too, so he can decide who else might want in. Fills out the paperwork and gets a car rolling.
She answers on the third ring. “Brennan.”
“Hey, Bones.”
“Booth.”
“I’m bringing in Kiera Dryden. She’s the missing link.”
“I don’t…” She takes a breath.
He can almost feel the vibration of her frustration against his palm. She tries so hard to get him, but she just can’t quite take that leap. He takes a breath himself, lets it out slow.
“I don’t see that, Booth, but if you do…”
“She’ll be here at ten.”
***
Tempe is standing shoulder to shoulder with Henson and Cullen, her arms folded, watching Booth watch Kiera Dryden as she sits across from him in an FBI interrogation room. This is the one with a window. The blinds are cracked and Kiera’s face is striped with morning sun. She glances over at the mirror every twenty seconds or so, her eyes darting over and then back to Booth.
Booth is kicked back, tapping his pen on the notebook in front of him. There’s a pitcher of water and a tray of glasses and a box of Kleenex. Planned comfort in a hostile environment. “Is that so?” he says.
“Yes,” she says, and frowns. Eyes to the mirror and back. “I don’t know what else to say to you, Agent Booth. I sold Sam Lyons the occasional trinket. I drop-shipped some masks to New York for him. I bought knives from Danny. I don’t know what his activities were, it’s not like I saw him everyday.”
“How often did you see him?”
“Once a month. Usually sometime between the fifth and the fifteenth, he’d show up with whatever he had. Sometimes he had nothing for me. Sometimes we just sat on the front steps and talked. Sometimes we went to lunch.” Her voice catches. She glances over to the mirror and then back to Booth, before looking down at her hands in her lap; swallows hard and brushes her fingertips across her dry cheek.
Booth nudges the tissues closer to her. She ignores him and them.
He lets the silence build and then asks her, “You know Lyons's place in Reston?”
She looks up fast, too fast, Tempe thinks, and doesn’t look at the mirror as she answers. “No.”
“You don’t have an address for him in your records.”
“No. He always came to me. He paid cash or with a credit card. He had a DC zip code.”
“You’ve never been to Reston?”
She doesn’t move her eyes from his.
“Kiera? Have you ever been to Reston?”
She plucks at her upper lip and doesn’t exactly relax, but her posture softens. “Yes. My daughter went to a little camp there for a couple of weeks. My mother kept her, but I went at the end, for Parent’s Day.”
Cullen grunts and Henson turns to check the video feed on the monitor behind them.
Tempe’s not following. “What?”
“She’s trying not to lie. She had to think about it,” Cullen explains.
Henson says, “She knew we might find that out, talk to her mom, so she had to own up, but she tried to lie.”
“Why?”
“That’s the twenty-four thousand dollar question, Dr. Brennan.”
She doesn’t know why he chose that denomination, but she doesn’t bother to ask. She’s figured out that when she doesn’t get a reference, it’s sure to be from some obscure pop culture thing that won’t matter fifty years from now.
…meet Lyons there?” Booth is saying.
Kiera hesitates. “Yes. Actually, I took him three drums and a feather mask.”
“Where did you meet?”
“Just there, at the park, near the camp. It was off Seneca Road, named after an explorer or something. He said... he said he volunteered there.”
Booth sits up, both feet square on the floor and leans towards Kiera. “I need to remind you that this is an official investigative interview. You do have the right to have a lawyer present.”
Kiera nods and glances at the mirror.
“Do you need a lawyer assigned to you?”
She looks confused. “I’m being arrested?”
“No, no. You just appear to be withholding information.”
She shakes her head, her long hair falling forward over both her shoulders. She looks down at her hands.
“What are you not saying?” Booth pushes.
“Danny was there,” she says to her hands. “I saw him near the water fountains when I took my daughter to the rest room.”
“Did you speak to him?”
“No.”
Temperance can see her eyes are bright under the artificial light when she brings her head up. She sniffs and swallows and finally reaches for a Kleenex. Tempe wonders why Booth is waiting for her to pull herself together instead of pushing her again.
But then Kiera continues on her own. “He saw me, I’m sure. But he stepped around the corner and disappeared. Later when I was pulling out, I saw him in a beat-up truck, with another man from Pembroke. I think they were tracking Lyons.”
Tempe says it aloud along with Booth. “Tracking?” Cullen and Henson both turn to her.
“Y’know,” Kiera says. “Following him. It looked like they were following. Danny didn’t see me.”
“Do you hunt Kiera?”
Tempe smiles.
Cullen sighs.
Henson shifts his weight. “Does he always interview like this? It seems kinda random to me.”
“It’s what makes him one of our best, Agent,” Cullen answers.
“He’s very intuitive,” Temperance says. “He reads people very well. Her use of the word ‘tracking’ indicates she has some experience not common to the average twenty-six year old American female. Since she comes from a tradition that allows the teaching of hunting skills to both male and female progeny, Agent Booth deduced she may have hunting skills, which may include the use of crossbows, the use of which has recently been employed to stymie the technologically advanced techniques used by the FBI.”
“I know, I was there,” Henson drawls.
“Knives can be made using several different combinations of metal, and Danny Ghilley made knives. The Jeffersonian has been unable to determine the weapons that were used to kill the men found in Kiera Dryden's van nor the two men and the woman buried at the Douglas Point cemetery…”
“Are they connected?”
Temperance shrugs. “Their wounds are extremely similar. We’re analyzing the available evidence to uncover any connection to a possible assailant or assailants. All we can say right now is that they were definitely murdered, probably all within a similar time frame.”
Henson makes a face. “Yeah, yeah. That’s the same thing you told me three days ago.”
“When we know more, I’ll let you know. The point is, the weapons may have been crossbow bolts, but we’ve been unable to match a manufacturer to the bore size that caused the fatal wounds.”
Henson looks around her to Cullen. Temperance sees that Booth is standing. She shoulders past Cullen and meets Booth in the hallway.
“Did you get that?” he says.
“Yes. She has hunting skills; she may use a crossbow. Ghilley may have made crossbow bolts in addition to knives.”
“Uh, good thought. No, I meant that she can describe the man with Ghilley at the park in Reston, but she doesn’t know his name.”
“Oh. No, we were discussing Henson’s case.”
Booth rolls his eyes. “I want to bring her to the lab, get Angela to work with her. She’s better than the artist we’ve got right now.”
“Okay. What about the crossbow bolts?”
“What about them?”
“We need to find Ghilley’s cabin, see if he made bolts. The puncture wounds we’ve found don’t correspond to standard bolt sizes, but every other marker indicates that’s what caused them.”
From behind her, Cullen says, “We already have field agents trying to locate it, Dr. Brennan. He lived somewhere north of Pembroke in unincorporated Robeson County. We’ve narrowed it down, but he lived below the radar, very simply. There’s nothing in his name. Didn’t even own a car.”
“At least not legally,” Henson mutters.
“Kiera doesn’t know where?” Temperance asks. She must know.
“If she does, she won’t say,” Booth says.
Temperance thinks of the man that could be Booth’s brother, hunched over on the bus stop bench, hands loose. About the scar on his face and the agility of his leap into action, and the blood on his hands. He was proud to be a Lumbee. He had no official connections to the world beyond his military service. “Ghilley didn’t think of himself as an U.S. citizen. The Guard, if it exists, operates outside U.S. law.”
Booth nods. “And there’s enough of them to require organization, training. They’d need privacy.”
As she hears it out loud, the thought becomes clearer and she says with more confidence, “Look for private property, anything larger than say, a thousand acres, within twenty miles of Pembroke.”
Head down, Booth is jingling the change in his pocket as he thinks. “I doubt it’s on any sort of actual road.”
“Why?”
“Because,” he says, looking up at her. “If I were him? I’d be so buried in those woods, you’d need pack animals to get in.”
He hears himself and grins when she does.
Henson says, “Shit. I gotta go make calls,” and goes striding down the hall.
Cullen looks from her to Booth and back again with the slightest of frowns forming a crease between his brows. He nods once and says, “Good work.” He tilts his head toward the interrogation room. “What are we doing with Ms. Dryden?”
Part Twenty-Four B, Twenty-Five
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 Twenty-Three
Meh. Sick. Sorry for the half-chapter- I messed up my chapter breaks somewhere in here... I'll post the other half and Twenty-Five as well sometime in the morning :-)
*** 24 A***
In his office the next morning, Booth mulls the possibilities, eventually letting his pencil trace the connections for him. A circle for the serial killer. A circle for his powerful brother. A circle for the cemetery. A circle each for Lyons and Ghilley and the Guards and MS-13. Circles for Ghilley’s ex-girl and her SBI husband. After a moment’s deliberation, a circle for the college professor. A line here and a line there.
Reminds himself none of this beyond the I-95 MS-13 corpses is his case. Did the guys in the van really fit into everything else? It all comes back to the Lumbees popping up everywhere. And the circle with the most connections is Ghilley’s ex-girl.
He calls Henson and lays out his supposition, bony framework that it is, and calls Cullen, too, so he can decide who else might want in. Fills out the paperwork and gets a car rolling.
She answers on the third ring. “Brennan.”
“Hey, Bones.”
“Booth.”
“I’m bringing in Kiera Dryden. She’s the missing link.”
“I don’t…” She takes a breath.
He can almost feel the vibration of her frustration against his palm. She tries so hard to get him, but she just can’t quite take that leap. He takes a breath himself, lets it out slow.
“I don’t see that, Booth, but if you do…”
“She’ll be here at ten.”
***
Tempe is standing shoulder to shoulder with Henson and Cullen, her arms folded, watching Booth watch Kiera Dryden as she sits across from him in an FBI interrogation room. This is the one with a window. The blinds are cracked and Kiera’s face is striped with morning sun. She glances over at the mirror every twenty seconds or so, her eyes darting over and then back to Booth.
Booth is kicked back, tapping his pen on the notebook in front of him. There’s a pitcher of water and a tray of glasses and a box of Kleenex. Planned comfort in a hostile environment. “Is that so?” he says.
“Yes,” she says, and frowns. Eyes to the mirror and back. “I don’t know what else to say to you, Agent Booth. I sold Sam Lyons the occasional trinket. I drop-shipped some masks to New York for him. I bought knives from Danny. I don’t know what his activities were, it’s not like I saw him everyday.”
“How often did you see him?”
“Once a month. Usually sometime between the fifth and the fifteenth, he’d show up with whatever he had. Sometimes he had nothing for me. Sometimes we just sat on the front steps and talked. Sometimes we went to lunch.” Her voice catches. She glances over to the mirror and then back to Booth, before looking down at her hands in her lap; swallows hard and brushes her fingertips across her dry cheek.
Booth nudges the tissues closer to her. She ignores him and them.
He lets the silence build and then asks her, “You know Lyons's place in Reston?”
She looks up fast, too fast, Tempe thinks, and doesn’t look at the mirror as she answers. “No.”
“You don’t have an address for him in your records.”
“No. He always came to me. He paid cash or with a credit card. He had a DC zip code.”
“You’ve never been to Reston?”
She doesn’t move her eyes from his.
“Kiera? Have you ever been to Reston?”
She plucks at her upper lip and doesn’t exactly relax, but her posture softens. “Yes. My daughter went to a little camp there for a couple of weeks. My mother kept her, but I went at the end, for Parent’s Day.”
Cullen grunts and Henson turns to check the video feed on the monitor behind them.
Tempe’s not following. “What?”
“She’s trying not to lie. She had to think about it,” Cullen explains.
Henson says, “She knew we might find that out, talk to her mom, so she had to own up, but she tried to lie.”
“Why?”
“That’s the twenty-four thousand dollar question, Dr. Brennan.”
She doesn’t know why he chose that denomination, but she doesn’t bother to ask. She’s figured out that when she doesn’t get a reference, it’s sure to be from some obscure pop culture thing that won’t matter fifty years from now.
…meet Lyons there?” Booth is saying.
Kiera hesitates. “Yes. Actually, I took him three drums and a feather mask.”
“Where did you meet?”
“Just there, at the park, near the camp. It was off Seneca Road, named after an explorer or something. He said... he said he volunteered there.”
Booth sits up, both feet square on the floor and leans towards Kiera. “I need to remind you that this is an official investigative interview. You do have the right to have a lawyer present.”
Kiera nods and glances at the mirror.
“Do you need a lawyer assigned to you?”
She looks confused. “I’m being arrested?”
“No, no. You just appear to be withholding information.”
She shakes her head, her long hair falling forward over both her shoulders. She looks down at her hands.
“What are you not saying?” Booth pushes.
“Danny was there,” she says to her hands. “I saw him near the water fountains when I took my daughter to the rest room.”
“Did you speak to him?”
“No.”
Temperance can see her eyes are bright under the artificial light when she brings her head up. She sniffs and swallows and finally reaches for a Kleenex. Tempe wonders why Booth is waiting for her to pull herself together instead of pushing her again.
But then Kiera continues on her own. “He saw me, I’m sure. But he stepped around the corner and disappeared. Later when I was pulling out, I saw him in a beat-up truck, with another man from Pembroke. I think they were tracking Lyons.”
Tempe says it aloud along with Booth. “Tracking?” Cullen and Henson both turn to her.
“Y’know,” Kiera says. “Following him. It looked like they were following. Danny didn’t see me.”
“Do you hunt Kiera?”
Tempe smiles.
Cullen sighs.
Henson shifts his weight. “Does he always interview like this? It seems kinda random to me.”
“It’s what makes him one of our best, Agent,” Cullen answers.
“He’s very intuitive,” Temperance says. “He reads people very well. Her use of the word ‘tracking’ indicates she has some experience not common to the average twenty-six year old American female. Since she comes from a tradition that allows the teaching of hunting skills to both male and female progeny, Agent Booth deduced she may have hunting skills, which may include the use of crossbows, the use of which has recently been employed to stymie the technologically advanced techniques used by the FBI.”
“I know, I was there,” Henson drawls.
“Knives can be made using several different combinations of metal, and Danny Ghilley made knives. The Jeffersonian has been unable to determine the weapons that were used to kill the men found in Kiera Dryden's van nor the two men and the woman buried at the Douglas Point cemetery…”
“Are they connected?”
Temperance shrugs. “Their wounds are extremely similar. We’re analyzing the available evidence to uncover any connection to a possible assailant or assailants. All we can say right now is that they were definitely murdered, probably all within a similar time frame.”
Henson makes a face. “Yeah, yeah. That’s the same thing you told me three days ago.”
“When we know more, I’ll let you know. The point is, the weapons may have been crossbow bolts, but we’ve been unable to match a manufacturer to the bore size that caused the fatal wounds.”
Henson looks around her to Cullen. Temperance sees that Booth is standing. She shoulders past Cullen and meets Booth in the hallway.
“Did you get that?” he says.
“Yes. She has hunting skills; she may use a crossbow. Ghilley may have made crossbow bolts in addition to knives.”
“Uh, good thought. No, I meant that she can describe the man with Ghilley at the park in Reston, but she doesn’t know his name.”
“Oh. No, we were discussing Henson’s case.”
Booth rolls his eyes. “I want to bring her to the lab, get Angela to work with her. She’s better than the artist we’ve got right now.”
“Okay. What about the crossbow bolts?”
“What about them?”
“We need to find Ghilley’s cabin, see if he made bolts. The puncture wounds we’ve found don’t correspond to standard bolt sizes, but every other marker indicates that’s what caused them.”
From behind her, Cullen says, “We already have field agents trying to locate it, Dr. Brennan. He lived somewhere north of Pembroke in unincorporated Robeson County. We’ve narrowed it down, but he lived below the radar, very simply. There’s nothing in his name. Didn’t even own a car.”
“At least not legally,” Henson mutters.
“Kiera doesn’t know where?” Temperance asks. She must know.
“If she does, she won’t say,” Booth says.
Temperance thinks of the man that could be Booth’s brother, hunched over on the bus stop bench, hands loose. About the scar on his face and the agility of his leap into action, and the blood on his hands. He was proud to be a Lumbee. He had no official connections to the world beyond his military service. “Ghilley didn’t think of himself as an U.S. citizen. The Guard, if it exists, operates outside U.S. law.”
Booth nods. “And there’s enough of them to require organization, training. They’d need privacy.”
As she hears it out loud, the thought becomes clearer and she says with more confidence, “Look for private property, anything larger than say, a thousand acres, within twenty miles of Pembroke.”
Head down, Booth is jingling the change in his pocket as he thinks. “I doubt it’s on any sort of actual road.”
“Why?”
“Because,” he says, looking up at her. “If I were him? I’d be so buried in those woods, you’d need pack animals to get in.”
He hears himself and grins when she does.
Henson says, “Shit. I gotta go make calls,” and goes striding down the hall.
Cullen looks from her to Booth and back again with the slightest of frowns forming a crease between his brows. He nods once and says, “Good work.” He tilts his head toward the interrogation room. “What are we doing with Ms. Dryden?”
Part Twenty-Four B, Twenty-Five