eta: Cleaned these sections a bit on 2/24/10 to clear up a couple of details that may not have been clear :-)
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 Twenty-Four A Twenty-Four B and Twenty-Five Twenty-Six Twenty-Seven Twenty-Eight Twenty-Nine I'm back! Got the wi-fi working earlier, but just had no time to run through and copy-edit before now. I also caught copy-edit errors in Twenty-Nine- like a wrong road name and two missing sentences :headdesk: I had Chapter 30 labeled as Chapter 27, so I guess that's where I got frigged. I'll have to re-label these or do a master post, however one does that :-) I wish I'd gotten this up for the weekend. The Florida Power and Light guy gave us a rave review regarding our energy savings on Saturday, yayz! And double yayz, the power actually went out when he was here! He was kinda appalled at how often our power flickers- sometimes two or three times a day and how often it's out altogether for several hours, about once a month and after medium-sized storms. He says he's on it... we'll see. We had lightning blow up the box last year and we had a fire eat up the box this year. WE say the wiring to the junction box in our backyard is done incorrectly, in response, they usually send contractors who haven't a clue. This guy was good :-)
On the flipside of the coin, got a bad report on Creek's healing leg on Saturday. It just isn't staying stable enough to heal. Since she's crated 23 hours and fifty minutes a day and we're carrying her out to pee (and have to hold her down for a minute when we set her on the ground because she wants to RUN and BOUNCE and PLAY tug-of-war), I don't know anything else I can do to 'keep her quiet'. She's a seven month old puppy!
Onward to the fic!!! :addsCOMPLETEDtag: Yay! I'll add sources and stuff tomorrow :-)
I hope ya'll like it :-)
*** 30 ***
It's a courtyard motel off the beltway, one of the old ones, single story, concrete block, with wavy glass windows peeking from behind rusting bars. The cars in the lot that aren't law-enforcement related are American-made in the eighties and nineties. Yellow tape's already been strung and there's a beer-toting crowd from the neon-lit club next door keeping tabs on the operation.
Henson talked non-stop on the ride. He can't believe he didn't think of the informant earlier and he hopes Baker can get Sarah to spill about the players at Douglas Point, whether they were MS-13 gangmembers or professional help that Lyons hired, or both. The more information and names they have, the more leads they'll have into locating Booth.
Two teams are working off Tempe's original assumption that Kiera was after more of the remains stolen by Lyons, and assuming Booth and the imposter he was with met up with her. They're correlating the Douglas Point, Stratton, Ghilley, Lyons, and Dryden cases and working with Watkins. A third team's working his disappearance from ground zero - where he left Tempe in the Crown Vic- and started with the abandoned FBI-issue Yukon, which had stolen plates, and a sanded spot where the VIN should've been. They also turned up a witness who saw a panel-sided white van pull out of the drive on the property at the right time. A fourth team is working from Booth's own reports, sifting for connections that might not otherwise be spotted.
Apparently, with combined knowledge of the concurrent cases, Cullen and the other agents watching gleaned more from the stilted conversation between Tempe and Sarah Martel than Tempe did. She supposes it's the same as when she dissects information and intent from a skeleton that other examiners have missed- an ability to use experience and what may at first seem to be inconconsquential facts to form a bigger picture. And it's also the way she works with Booth.
Her eyes are drawn to the man hunkered down against the wall outside the room involved as Henson wheels his car around and parks it sidelong to everybody else's. She and Booth, they interlock; like the separate information being processed on both sides of the one-way glass of the interview room; like Yin and Yang.
Even though she's only met him once, and his head is down, his hands resting on the back of his neck, she knows the man against the wall is Robert Dryden. And if any couple physically embodies the concept of Yin and Yang more than Dryden and his wife, Tempe hasn't met them, yet.
Like he's been jumpstarted, Samuels lets his breath go when Tempe opens her door, letting in the scene's frentic pulse of activity and noise, from the bass beat booming out of the club's open doors to the police scanners blaring through open car windows. “That's a lot of blood,” Samuels says from the back seat.
“Objectively speaking,” Tempe says, eyeing Dryden. “It's not. It just goes a long way.”
“It's a lot of blood,” Henson reassures Samuels. “And when it's in your hair like that?” He shudders dramatically.
Tempe shrugs and clambers out ahead of them, curious to see what state Eppy Sandoval is in. Dryden's shaggy blonde hair is bloody because he ran his hand through it. Ditto his neck and cheek as he swiped at them. His boots and jeans to the knee are from kneeling on the floor to vomit, said vomitus in evidence as she holds up her ID and enters the room, accepting the booties the local hands her as she does.
The corpse on the blood soaked floor is, without a doubt, Eppy Sandoval, if the skinned face draped over a mounded pillow at the head of one bed goes with it. Tempe sincerely hopes the FBI lab does their due diligence. Wide strips of skin, in no particular order as to their origin, are laid out across both beds, which are unmade. Yellow tags are propped over each, up to number forty-three.
Two open duffles and a pile of clothes are strewn across the standard motel chest of drawers and the half-counter by the sink in the back. A tagged rifle rests against the counter, butt on the floor.
“M40-03,” Henson says over her shoulder. “Might be what took Stratton and Ghilley down.”
“Hmmm,” Tempe says, thinking of carbon-fiber art, Ghilly-made blades. “Did you find the knife?”
“No, ma'am,” the nearest tech answers. “No weapons but the rifle. Had to be a darn sharp blade, though. Or a bagful of scapels.”
“Estimated time of death?”
“Within hours, Dr. Brennan, he's still warm.”
Tempe slides the booties on and then steps over Sandoval's feet and crouches between the beds to inspect him. He was standing when his throat was slit. She suspects he was strangled as well, from the mangled look of the drying tissue, and the pieces of shattered lamp scattered all around him. He fought back.
***
When the van stops after an eternity of driving and then clatter-banging for what must have been miles down an unpaved road, Booth doesn't fight back as he's unceremoniously dragged to sitting by the front of his shirt. If they were going to really hurt him, they'd have done so long before now.
His head is worthless after the ride, but his face isn't as swollen as it could be, thanks to the pain Kiera did make him endure. They stand him up. His ears fill up with static and his legs go hollow.
“Don't go down, son,” the man to his left mutters.
“I just hope he don't die 'afore the feds get here,” the other says.
“He's fine,” Kiera says.
Who are you people, Booth thinks. Salt spray wafts on a humid breeze through his open mouth and onto his tongue. Fuck. If he weren't so exhausted, he'd be worried.
They walk him down a steep, pitch-black set of stone stairs at the edge of a grassy bunker, letting him work it out, step-by-step. They have a flashlight, he's pretty sure, but it's weak and totally useless to him. He tries to back pedal at the door when it occurs to him where they are exactly.
The guys drag him into the damp dark and sit him down and here he is again, in the same fucking little cell. He lets his pounding head fall back against the wall, swallows the trickle of blood seeping down the inside of his throat, and breathes the wet ocean air in through his mouth.
Above, the van door slams. Other noises filter down, a curse, something heavy thumps. He can feel her watching him. He swallows again, that image coming to him of a slashed throat. “If Sarah didn't know,” he wheezes. “There was a guy Stratton told. MS-13. He's dead already.”
The men are stumbling down the stairs. They wrestle something bulky through the door and drop it. Booth ignores it and them.
“That's Sarah's,” Kiera says. “Tell my husband I love him.”
“No,” Booth says and means it.
***
“Kiera called,” Robert Dryden says, when Henson asks. He stands, but leans back against the wall like his legs might not hold him. He considers the blood on his hands and then sighs and crosses his arms.
Henson is flipping through the assigned agent's stenobook, scanning his notes.
“She said she was scared. She said she'd seen Eppy while she was eating lunch on the Mall, that she thought he was following her while she ran errands. The kids... we were only supposed to be at her mother's a couple of days.They needed stuff we didn't pack. But then Eppy... she was too afraid to come back to the house.”
Tempe says, “That's not...”, but Henson touches her lower back, stopping her.
“She said that Agent Booth told her during the interview that Eppy set you guys up. I'd told her, y'know, about Stratton's dumping victims at Douglas Point, that you guys were kidnapped from there. Eppy's cousin TJ is married to Sarah, who works for us. She talked to Sam Lyons more than Kiera did. I borrowed her Mom's car and came. She wanted me to meet her. She was scared, but she didn't want me to call Agent Booth, in case she was just, y'know, being paranoid.”
“Did you meet her?”
“She didn't show. I called my SAC. He said he'd start making calls, that I should get to Hoover and report it, talk to Agent Booth, but...”
“You knew Eppy and TJ were MS-13.”
“No.” He closes his eyes. “God damn me for not knowing that.”
“You're a pretty piss poor excuse of...”
“How did Kiera know?” Tempe interrupts.
Eyes still closed, breathing deep, Robert Dryden shakes his head.
Henson closes the notebook and slaps it back against the chest of the field agent in charge of the crime scene. “How'd you find Sandoval?”
“Kiera.” Dryden pinches the bridge of his nose before he opens his eyes, but then he's steadier, though his voice quivers with the effort to keep himself together. Tempe takes a deep breath of her own and tries to find her patience. “I was at Hoover, but it was taking forever to see someone, and they said Agent Booth couldn't be reached and some intern was reading my inter-agency request for information and manpower and he wanted the case number and then Kiera texted me. This address and room number. So I left. Figured I'd bring him myself and be done with it.”
Henson turns his head toward the agent standing by. “You verify?”
“Yes, sir. He was at Hoover from nine-oh-seven p.m. to ten-thirty-three. Call came in at eleven-twelve. NCSBI verified as well.”
That meant Kiera was in contact after the FBI lost her, after Booth disappeared. “What time was the text sent?”
“Ten-twenty-four p.m..”
Dryden's nodding. “I called back. More than once. Her phone's off or dead.”
Her phone was being used, Tempe corrects herself. Kiera might not have been the one using it.
“We already have an APB out on your wife, Dryden,” Henson says. “Agent Booth is unavailable because he went AWOL from a multiple murder while in pursuit of her after she met with Sarah Martel, who Dr. Brennan ID'ed as one of her kidnappers at Douglas Point.”
Dryden's long legs fold and he sinks back down the wall.
Henson points at the federal agent. “Don't fuck this up, Fortner, or I'll come from Maryland and shoot you myself.”
*** 31 ***
Tempe taps her pen on her desk, waiting for David to answer.
“Hallo,” he says cheerfully.
“David,” she says. Tears clog her throat without warning.
“Temperance?” David says, concerned.
She swallows and fights down the breath clawing in her chest, wanting release. She lets it out slow and blinks hard. She takes another deep breath.
“Tempe?”
“I'm okay. Booth's gone. Again.”
“Gone?”
“Taken. Yesterday. They can't find him.” She wants to give him more than clipped words and terseness, but she can't. Keira Dryden's note led to a weapons cache near Fayetteville. Coordinates spray-painted on the wall there led to bodies, presumably more MS-13 members, in a warehouse in Morehead City. Fresh bodies, trucks, weapons, ammo and standard crossbow bolts, two cardboard boxes of bones, and a codebook, but no Booth. The bones are on their way to her, and Booth's young Agent Samuels called to tell her there was a sticky note with 'Booth' scrawled on it stuck between the pages of the codebook. He was whispering, but she doesn't know why.
“So... you're cancelling for tonight?” He sounds neutral, but cautious.
She's glad he understands. “Yes.”
“You know, there's nothing you can do to help.”
“Yes, there is. There will be something I can do.” She and Zach have already conclusively matched the weapons used against all the MS-13 victims as Ghilley-made crossbow bolts. They are of a revolutionary design. She's asked Samuels to photograph the page of code and send it to Zach. He said he'd try.
“Call me later, Temperance. Let me know...” There's a rustling down the line and then he sighs. “Just let me know.”
“Okay,” she says, her throat tightening again. She doesn't need Angela to tell her David's wary of her relationship with Booth. So is Agent Samuels. How come no one seems to understand that they are only partners? Partners watch out for one another.
She sets the phone down carefully. Her desk is piled with all the various forms for individual bone identification work orders and formal requests for examination related to the many, many sets of bones at the house on South Irwin. She shuffles through them, and then pats them together, resolved to borrow a Jeffersonian intern for a few days to sort them all and place them into individual manila files all marked with location and scanned for digital filing and data accumulation.
The paperless office seems like a goal that the Medico-Legal Lab might never meet.
“Hey,” Hodgins says, skidding in through her doorway. “Look at this.”
***
There's a boy, sitting in the distance, but the sand is cool and the light sweat that's dampened his shirt catches enough of the breeze off the ocean that he's actually kind of chilly under the lowering skies, which are heavy with gathering thunderclouds. The boy gets closer. Booth's feet are heavy as he trudges through the deep sand. He should walk down by the waves, but he can't lose it, and he might fall or open his hands or anything, really, if he walks down there. So he doesn't.
The boy sees him. He jumps up and waves. Wildly. The rifle slung across his back bounces, he waves so hard, with both hands over his head. And now he's calling to him, “Hey! Daddy, hey!!”
Booth stops and looks behind him, but he's the only one here on the beach, besides the boy.
“Parker?” he shouts.
“Daddy!” the boy yells. “Daddy!” He jumps up and down, but doesn't try to come to him.
Booth pushes his legs faster, and then he's jogging, holding it out in front of him. It jumps and jumps, just like Parker. He wants to look at it, but he doesn't want to look away from Parker. What if... what if he looked back up and Parker wasn't there anymore?
His boy. He's almost there. He glances down at it.
“Daddy!” Parker screams from behind him and Booth jerks around, full one-eighty and there, there's Parker behind him... how... he staggers to the side, but doesn't fall. Can't fall... can't lose it, it's Parker's...
“Daddy,” Parker whispers in his ear.
His heart's beating in his outstretched hand. He's on packed dirt, with loose sand and grit prickling the skin of his arms and the left side of his face. Birds. The occasional car somewhere in the far distance. He tries opening his eyes and the brightness in front of him resolves into a broad back in a white shirt. It's day. He feels like he's outside, but not. Booth lifts his head.
A vertigo-inducing roll of nausea makes him roll too fast onto his belly and his broken wrist bounces off the ground. He groans and retches. He crabs sideways, closer to his companion, to get away from his own blood and mess. He eases back down, only then noticing the field splint encasing his hand and wrist.
The man's neck is thick and clean-shaven. Booth knows his name, he just can't put his finger on it. Beech? Oak? There's blood staining his shirt and something on his neck, a stippling of dots, maybe punctures? Is he breathing?
Reaching out to touch him, Booth's hand shakes. His arm is weak. He brushes his fingers over the skin of the man's throat. He's cool to the touch. Staying prone, on his belly, Booth inches closer. He finds the crevice of the juglar and pushes down. Booth's freezing, his fingers are stiff and cold. He slides them around a bit, searching. The man's dead. The stippling is a triangle of black dots. There's a serpentine of darkness behind his ear, much darker than his skin.
Closing his eyes, Booth levers himself up onto his hands and knees. When he's steady, he opens his eyes as wide as he can. The initial blurriness subsides faster than before. He stretches and pushes the man's ear lobe forward. MS-13 is tattooed just behind his ear in fancy script and 'mara salvatrucha' is printed above it in tiny block letters along the rear curve of his lobe.
Ashford. The man's name is Ashford.
And Kiera said he belonged to Sarah Martel.
***
Agent Samuels is waiting on the hood of his car when Hodgins bounces his Mini-Cooper over the two massive speed bumps at the entrance to the Crime Lab's impound lot. Tempe's still surprised that SAC Santana thought to move the tractor from Raleigh Park to circumvent any possible attempts Kiera Dryden or the group she's assumed to be working with might make to move it using the stolen keys.
Agent Campbell, Samuels apprises her as they enter the garage where he's had the tractor moved into a work bay for them, still thinks the taking of the keys was a ruse, and the removal of the tractor a waste of taxpayer's money.
“He said she'd sent us on a snipe hunt,” Tempe says. “But snipe are shorebirds, and we're nowhere near the coast.”
An odd sound escapes Hodgins. He stops, his hands on his knees, choking and coughing.
“Dr. Hodgins?” Tempe asks, reaching out to pat him on the back, but pulling her hand back at the last moment. “Are you laughing?”
Half-standing, Hodgins swipes tears from his eyes and then folds up again. Samuels is grinning. He coughs into his hand when she looks to him for help and then shrugs. Tempe turns on her heel and stalks to the tractor.
“I'm sorry,” Hodgins calls after her. He trots to catch up. “I'm sorry. It's just... I'd love to take you snipe hunting.”
Dwarfed by the lights, engine winch, and tool boards surrounding it, the tractor looks smaller than Tempe remembers from the day before. She circles it, looking again at its angles and attachments, searching out the welded seams, bolts, and pins. “From what I understand, shooting snipe is of near-mythical difficulty.”
“In this case, Dr. Brennan, it's impossible,” Hodgins says, fetching up at the right bucket arm. He peers at the hydraulic wires that run from inside the arm and up under the seat. “'Going on a snipe hunt' is a southern tradition aimed at getting rid of someone for awhile. It's a wild goose chase.”
“Speaking of,” Agent Samuels says, “Why are we here?”
“It's gotta be the bucket.” Hodgins taps along the arm, listening. “There's no where else that's hollow.”
She agrees. “Can you ask them,” she says, gesturing at the group of curious techs who have stopped working and gathered beyond the bay. “To remove this bucket?”
“We can use the engine wench,” one of them volunteers.
Nodding him in, Samuels waves at the tractor. “Please.”
He's much more polite than Booth. Tempe doesn't think he'll last long with the FBI.
***
The tromp of heavy combat boots coming down a wooden staircase wakes him.
“Clear,” someone shouts.
“Clear.”
Something bumps and scrapes nearby. Light flashes over him. He closes his eyes in defense.
“Got him! Got a body, too!”
***
Using the power tools, it takes forty agonizing minutes of anticipation for two FBI techs to loosen the bolts and seperate the bucket built for a Ford 3500 from Sam Lyon's 1948 Ford 8N. Hodgins triumphantly pulls the self-locking hydraulic quick connect apart before the techs wench the bucket up and away.
Almost certainly, the Guard, because Tempe has decided from the evidence she holds in her head that the Guard exists and are taking revenge on MS-13 and Sam Lyons, given enough time, could have utilized the information and keys Kiera Dryden dredged from Sarah Martel to conduct this search themselves.
She's run her hands over every inch of the 8N while the techs sweated and cursed and reconfigured their attack on the after-market bucket. Hodgins closes his eyes and his lips move. Although he doesn't advertise his faith, Tempe's noticed he prays often. She wonders if he is praying that his comparison analysis of the non-standard tractor's photographs against the standard configuration of a collector's edition 8N, on which no one would normally place a F3500 bucket, is correct. Her breath is heavy in her lungs, and her hands ache with the need to touch bone. He opens his eyes, and the confident look he gives her reminds her why she hired Dr. Jack Hodgins.
They move as one to each side of the bucket. The interior of the bucket arms are narrow and dark. She reaches in, sweeping her fingertips over the whole of the surface surrounding the thick hydraulic lines. Past her elbow, there's a blockage. She walks her fingers around the edges of a piece of cloth and then teases it towards her. “Jack.”
“I got it,” he says.
“Really?”
“Yeah,” he replies.
They draw out plastic wrapped bundles of cloth simultaneously.
***
It's nearing eight and the Jeffersonian is quiet, most everyone gone for the night. Hodgins is running trace from the linen in the tractor and Angela's bent over the tiny pin-pricked skull from the set of bones they'd found inside it, working clay around the markers Tempe set. She's refused to draw the child's face until after she feels the contours. Virginia Dare. Not that Tempe can ever prove it. Turner Colvin has already filed the paperwork for her return to Douglas Point. He's also filed for historic designation of a family cemetary on private property. The recovered girl child will be the only official occupant until the FBI 'gets off their asses' and finds the rest of his stolen ancestors. Tempe wonders where the Guard has secreted them, and if they will dare to return them to Virginia Dare's side someday; if the small skeleton will once more lie with her mother's.
With Zach, she is beginning work on the second of the contemporary skeletons found at South Irwin. While Zach measures, Tempe examines each piece for irregularities. She is a female, sixteen to twenty years of age. The story of how Sam Lyons came to have her bones is nowhere to be found in the invoices at South Irwin.
Dr. Wolff's team is probably occupied with packaging the identified Lumbee skeletons from Douglas Point for transport to their families for burial. They'll have marked, graphed, photographed, and radiographed every single bone for posthumous evidence against Jack Stratton for Agent Henson, just as she had done for Samuel Lyons. Her notes, also recovered from their hiding place in Lyon's tractor, have been entered as evidence and will also be used as evidence against Lyons and Sarah Martel.
All his victims will forever be memorialized in books and articles and research papers by their connection to Stratton, instead of who they were in life. Tempe knows one of the girls played tennis, probably competitively. That the tallest boy broke his leg as a young child. All eight had something individually distinctive of the way they lived their lives to distinguish them in death.
Those will be her memory.
Her fingers trail the jut of a sharp ilium on a pelvis that probably never saw motherhood and it reminds her again of the way Ms. Pine stroked the tiny, dry, crumbling pelvis of Virginia Dare. That soft brush of life over death. The true and tempered feel of it is seared into her fingertips and haunts Tempe's dreams. Is that what Booth sees when he watches her?
The atmosphere of the lab shifts, and when Temperance turns, Dr. Goodman is standing at the foot of the steps onto their platform, looking grave, Agent Samuels at his side. Tempe's heart flutter-thumps. Zach straightens, a femur in his hand, Hodgins stands. Angela's hand floats up and rests on her chest.
“They found him. He's fine.”
“Fine?” Angela says doubtfully.
“Broken wrist and nose, dehydrated and hypothermic, but yes, he'll recover just fine.”
Tempe releases the breath she didn't know she was holding. “Where?”
“An abandoned estate on the Outer Banks,” Samuels answers.
“Currituck Sound?” Hodgins interjects.
“As a matter of fact,” Samuels conceeds.
“I knew it! I should have used the methyl red.”
“Jack,” Angela says. “Shut up.”
“It was leased under a false corporate name for a three month period by Tad Daniels, AKA Samuel Lyons. Agent Booth identified it as the place where you'd been held. Agent Booth's most recent captors were Lumbees, and included Kiera Dryden. The man who was posing as Agent Ashford is dead. He was Sarah Martel's husband, TJ Martel, AKA Timothy Jesus Martin, mid-level MS-13 lieutenant. He was responsible for Agent Booth's injuries.”
“It is a war,” Hodgins muses. He sits back down.
“That would appear to be the case,” Dr. Goodman agrees.
“MS-13 found out about the cemetary and decided to try the antiquity market. Easy money, right? Only it turns out the Lumbees are actually paying attention to their seemingly abandoned burial ground. The mystery of Roanoke might be preserved by private sales of the bones, but the actual bodies would be desecrated and scattered. The Lumbee Guard acted to protect them.” Hodgins nods to himself, stars in his eyes.
Tempe doesn't understand the need for visiting graveyards, the bones are just bones, after all, but she respects the sanctity of burial grounds, the need for families to know where it is their loved ones rest.
“So the MS-13... victims... at Douglas Point and scattered all over DC were graverobbers,” Angela says.
“And the Indians shot them with arrows for trespassing and theft,” Zach adds. He looks to Hodgins, and when Jack grins, Zach does, too.
Temperance rolls her eyes. If they were in closer proximity, they'd be doing a high-five. “We have no evidence to support that conjecture in court. Someone used handmade cross-bow bolts to kill three people allegedly associated with Mara Salvatrucha and then buried them within the borders of an abandoned Native American burial ground. Did Deputy Director Cullen mention Kiera Dryden?”
“Whereabouts unknown. Her husband's been extensively interviewed and is not being considered a suspect in Eppy Sandoval's murder or as an accomplice to the murders on Gibson Road and Agent Booth's... whatever.”
Adopting her what-the-hell stance, hand on hip, Angela's eyebrows shoot up. “His whatever?” she says as Tempe says, “What does that mean?”
“He's claims it wasn't kidnapping. Apparently the Lumbees don't think much of the FBI's investigative skills.”
Hodgins laughs. Startled, Tempe looks at him, back at the uncomfortable, tight shouldered Samuels and then laughter bubbles up from her core. Being Temperance Brennan, she tamps it down, but it surges back, riding an image of disgruntled Booth, tromping through the ankle-deep leaf litter along the Savage River and muttering about the incompetence of the modern FBI. She lets it loose.
“I think we all agree, right now,” Angela says, frowning at her.
Still giggling, Tempe nods but suddenly there's a catch in her throat. She looks down and wipes away the tears wetting her cheeks.
*** 32 ***
“Hey, Bones,” Booth says when she clambers out of Booth's repaired Yukon onto the patchy grass parking at Oxenedine Cemetery in Saddletree township, near Lumberton, North Carolina. Samuels has driven it down from Washington on Cullen's approval, to retrieve Booth, assist in the operation, and allow Bones to attend Ghilley's funeral and scan faces and body types while she does so, in hopes of finding another one of Lyons's assistants or Ghilley's accomplices. Booth smiles despite himself, knows it's crooked, and damn it hurts his swollen face, but... Bones.
“Your nose,” she says, her hand rising. He flinches, damn it, even though he knows she wouldn't hurt him. Except, of course, that she might. The doctors proclaimed him lucky. Kiera or someone else in the van had straightened his broken nose. He's glad they didn't leave it to Bones, because she'd totally straighten it herself, without aid of drugs or unconciousness, if she thought he needed it.
“Here,” he says, lifting a thin kevlar vest and holding it up for her to slide her arms through. She does, switching her suit jacket from one hand to the other. Although cast, his wrist protests when he holds on a second too long, the vest sliding from his clumsy fingers.
Samuels walks past them, scanning the area, taking in the small red brick church, the nineteen empty cars in two ragged lines along the dirt drive as he buckles into his own vest, his head turning, eyeing the cotton fields on the opposite side of the two-lane black top. They stretch to a shrubby, undivided tree line that Booth walked earlier. A little run-off creek trickles between the trees. He grumbles a greeting of some sort at Glenn, who grumbles back from his place lounging against the hood of his own Yukon as he waits for them to get their shit together. Glenn's out of Charlotte and he's been in Pembroke running interviews since the Dryden's Caravan was found on I-95. He's ready to go home.
Satisfied that his guys are alert, Booth focuses his attention on the task at hand. “There's agents at all points, about two hundred yards away, and a couple manning cameras and rifles from high points closer.” He tugs her around so he can check the back.
“I'm not worried, Booth.”
Scooping his thumb across her nape, he catches her loose hair up and pulls it out from under the vest. “You should be.”
“You're here.”
Everything in him stops. He's glad she's facing away from him because the straight line of his lips are pressing against his teeth and it takes a second to work his jaw free to speak as his heart lurches back into action. He jerks the wrinkled ID flap up off its velcro strip and then presses it back down flat. “Lumbees: two of their own, plus assorted MS-13 and probably both Lyons and Sandoval; MS-13: unknown, vicious, liable to take revenge on the Guard in a very public manner ; FBI: zero.”
“That's a kill count. The FBI saves people, like protecting innocents from Jack Stratton.” Her tone is positive.
He tightens her shoulder straps, tugging down harder than necessary. “We could have saved a whole lot more people if we'd gotten him sooner.”
Turning, Bones squints up at him and ignores his knee-jerk comment. “So you don't think Eppy Sandoval is responsible for Stratton and Ghilley's deaths?” Her eyes are distant. She's turning and turning the puzzle of the case, seeking every notch and soft spot.
“They rushed ballastics. It's the right gun, but there's a lot of legwork left to put him in the right places at the right time. I know...” He touches his belly. “Right here, that Ghilley's responsible for Stratton. And Ghilley said the Guard was taking him out. I believe him. Eppy Sandoval's a pasty to throw suspicion off the Guard.”
“Do you think Kiera Dryden's Guard?”
“Yeah. And so is her brother. Glenn here,” he cocks a thumb over his shoulder at Glenn, “has searched every public record in Pembroke, half the small towns nearby, Fayetteville, Raleigh and Washington. Marine Corps Captain Tobias Bell, honorably discharged in 2002, has dropped off the face of the earth. Finding Kiera's going to be difficult. Finding any evidence of the Guard...Dryden was right. It's all whispers and shadows. NCSBI's got nothing.”
“Hunting the Guard's like hunting snipe?” she says, slinging her jacket on over the vest.
This. The unpredictibility of what she might say next makes him miss her when she's not standing right beside him. “Have you ever been on a snipe hunt, Bones?”
She tugs her hair out and over the collar and gives it a little shake that settles it miraculously in place. “Sarah Martel said she didn't know about the cemetary. Is it common knowledge among the Lumbee?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. The Lumbees aren't talking. Glenn's guys say they can't even find out if anyone knew Turner Colvin owned the land at Douglas Point, let alone if they knew about a burial ground. But the informant, the one that got Stratton talking was MS-13 - he knew the location for sure, and who Stratton claimed was buried there. We also have photos of Turner Colvin speaking with the MS-13 out of Philidelphia.”
“Our kidnappers' masks were delivered to Turner Colvin's address, on Samuel Lyon's orders to Kiera Dryden.”
“Or Sarah Martel's. Colvin's not straight up honest, but I'm guessing from the transcripts that he's being used in this case.” He reaches out and tucks one of the buckle straps on her vest back out of sight and then pockets his cold hands in his slacks and stares back at her. The vest is obvious, but not unless you know what you're looking at... kind of. Not that he really cares if anyone notices anyway.
Her lower lip pouts out as she thinks. He's sure she doesn't know it.
“We'll sort it,” he finally says. “You and I and a dozen field agents in three states will sort every last scrap of evidence and interrogation. Danny Ghilley was a good man, Bones. I want to know why he's dead.”
“I'll tell you, Agent Booth,” a sharp voice says behind him.
Good hand going to the butt of his Glock, Booth spins, lowering his core mass and weighting his center. Mrs. Bell steps from behind the rear of his Yukon. A breath of breeze ruffles her thin, silvery hair, revealing the pink of her scalp underneath. Her empty hands are raised shoulder high. She's wearing a simple black dress, and black sneakers. “I was visiting next door. I'm not big on funerals, you see, and with Kiera missing... I wanted to be here when they scatter his ashes.”
“Sir,” Samuels calls.
“Your man is four yards behind you, at your five,” Mrs. Bell informs him, amused.“Dr. Brennan has your six. The nice young man back in Kestrel's front yard told me it was fine to walk this way.”
Booth straightens and drops his hand.
Glenn murmurs into his radio. They aren't miked, they're not trying to be discreet here, just prepared for trouble. There are units parked down Oak Grove Chuch Road in both directions, in plain view.
A hawk screes overhead and then drops low, inspecting them before soaring away in a sudden gust.
Bones' shadow envelops him. “Mrs. Bell,” she says, holding out her hand.
Mrs. Bell takes it in both of hers. “I'm glad you're safe, dear. Sarah's family says the FBI is claiming she played a role in your abduction.”
“They are correct,” Bones says, missing Mrs. Bell's cue for more info, using the plural they, and a surge of affection for her catches Booth off guard. He coughs into his fist to clear his throat.
“Why is Daniel Ghilley dead?” Bones asks. To Booth's ear, it sounds like a rhetorical question. Danny deserves more. He clenches his teeth together to keep his mouth shut.
“Because he believed that there is more complexion to human life as a whole than the simple being of the individual.”
He's still processing when Bones nods like she understands. “The greater good.” She glances up at him. “Every soldier's belief.”
And when she puts it like that, yes, he understands; although the denial is already rising in his throat. He swallows it. The good ol' USA and the Lumbee Nation both are better off without Jack Stratton, did it really matter which Danny died for? “But they killed him,” Booth blurts out. “For doing his what? Duty? Killed him for doing what they asked of him?”
“It was his duty, Agent Booth. Tell me the government of the United States of America has never taken the life of a soldier who's been compromised after completing his duty.”
Booth shakes his head in denial, but stays his tongue because... because Jack Hodgins has compromised his reason, and he's tired, and he just wants to fucking shoot someone related to this case. Then he remembers that he already has. He licks his lips.
Mrs. Bell smiles.
“You're admitting to knowledge of both Jack Stratton and Daniel Ghilley's murders,” Bones states.
“Of course not, Dr. Brennan, simply offering my opinion of the rumor, based on American mores and gossip within the community and from your agents when my home was invaded and searched simply because my daughter was the victim of car theft, and then became scared when a man she didn't know well pursued her through the streets of Washington into Reston.”
Booth can't wait to see Caroline Julian and Mrs. Bell come face-to-face.
“The rumor is, of course, ridiculous. Danny Ghilley died because someone,” she says, looking directly at Booth, “... shot him. Eppy Sandoval from what I hear. That boy's been trouble since he hit town.”
Booth turns his face up to the sun and blows out the breath he didn't know he was holding, before he drops his gaze once more to Mrs. Bell's bright, black eyes. “Mrs. Bell, do you have further information regarding the deaths of Jack Stratton, Daniel Ghilley, Samuel Lyons, Eppy Sandoval or the men found in your daughter's vehicle or any information regarding a domestic, para-military unit called The Guard and its connection to Lumbee Nation?”
“If you are questioning me now, perhaps you'd like to Mirandize me?”
Booth shakes his head. “You do have a son, don't you, Mrs. Bell?”
Mrs. Bell clutches her purse a little tighter. “I do. We've been estranged since his father died. He was working as a fire-jumper in Idaho or maybe Oregon the last I heard of him.”
“You can verify that?”
“If it becomes necessary, Agent Booth.”
Right. Papers will be manufactured accordingly if need be in the course of wiggling out of this mess. Booth sighs.
“Kiera doesn't know where he lives, either, Agent Booth,” Mrs. Bell says, her voice rougher than it has been. “As I told your fellow agents this morning, I expect you to find her.”
He doesn't know if she's in denial or just being disingenuous. Voices shatter the cool, still air. The church doors are being blocked open and people are trickling out. Boys in khaki slacks and white shirts trot down the steps.
“Shall we,” she says, sweeping her hand towards the graveyard beyond the church yard and the cars; old, arched grave stones planted in cotton fields bordering North Carolina swamp.
Booth doesn't want to be here. He doesn't want to see the last mortal remains of someone who had his back during some of the hardest years of his life consigned to eternity, forever mute despite the questions he's left behind.
He lifts his head, watching the people who knew Danny before and after the years they spent in each other's back pockets spill out through the tall wooden doors of the only church Danny ever spoke about - dinners and songs carried on the summer breeze and fireflies. Danny told him more than once about the night fireflies invaded a mid-summer church social, about filling a mason jar among the headstones of his people's people. At midnight, the kids opened their jars all at once and set the fireflies free, like souls released from their life's burden.
“Booth,” Temperance whispers, sliding her hand under his elbow. His blood stirs. He knows. It's her. And it never will be. Never can be, not if he wants her next to him day to day, helping him find justice for the dead; helpless and wronged, unlucky or unfound, stolen or bought, or simply used, dead by honor or ideology or because someone was having a great idea or a bad day.
“Booth,” Samuels says.
“Top step,” Glenn calls, already in motion.
Kiera Dryden holds the dark blue box containing Daniel Ghilley in her hands. The Lumbee have spread themselves scattershot across the shallow steps and along the walk into the graveyard.
Booth clears his throat. “Hold,” he says, just loud enough to carry.
Glenn obeys. The Lumbee are as still as a photograph.
Kiera meets Booth's eyes, her face serene. He licks his dry lips and glances sideways to gauge Bones' expression. Her hand is loose and unconcerned on his arm, her expression rapt as she soaks in the scene. The sun is angling through puffy clouds sailing the Carolina blue sky, its beams falling on the ivy holding the brick church together. The dark colors of the women's clothes contrast with the men's white shirts and bright ties. A mockingbird calls from the creek across the road and Booth becomes aware of the trilling of cicadas.
This is their plan, Booth thinks. To carry on. The only dead are confirmed gangbangers, a serial killer, an international fencer of stolen art and antiquities, and one of the FBI's most wanted. Sam Lyon's relatives have nothing to lose by claiming ignorance. Kiera has yet to be definitively placed at Lyon's property on Gibson Road. The FBI's gained new insight into MS-13's operations and shut down two weapons training operations. My word against yours, Mister Concussion.
“They're going to get away with it,” Bones whispers, echoing his thoughts.
Maybe that's okay with me, Booth doesn't say out loud. “Samuels, relay the info. Tell them we'll be transporting Kiera Dryden and Emma Bell. Ask them to find Caroline Julian for consultation regarding the viablity of accessory to kidnapping, assault on a Federal Officer, and murder charges related to the Dryden case... whose case is that?”
“Um, Sir,” Samuels stammers. “I don't know, Sir, yours?”
“Find out whose case it is, Samuels.” Booth turns his focus on Mrs. Bell. To her credit, she doesn't move, though her face tilts upward as he leans toward her, crowding her space. “Emma Boyette Bell, I'm taking you into custody as a person of interest.”
“All right, Agent Booth. Could you wait until after?”
Booth sees Glenn glance back. He raises his brows in question. Glenn shrugs, and lifts the radio, making sure everyone's on the same page. They still need all the photos they can get for their files. The stuff of whispers and shadows is the FBI's bread and butter.
He nods at her and Kiera begins to thread a winding path through the resolute patience of her people to the end of Ghilley's road.
Fin
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