Warning: Contains Physical Assault and mentions of painful murders. Please do not read if you do not have the stomach for such.

Disclaimer: The show is not mine, nor do I lay claim to it in any way. Only this writing and the new characters are mine. For entertainment purposes only.

Bone Deep

Chapter One

^Brennan's Point of View- Wednesday AM

It was 4:30 in the morning and Forensic Anthropologist Doctor Temperance Brennan couldn't sleep. The sheets felt dry and seemed to crackle as she shifted. Grumpily, she turned over again. No matter the position, sleep evaded her thoroughly. She tried breathing techniques she'd learned in Africa and relaxation mantra's she'd learned in Nepal, but nothing helped. She sighed gustily.

Well, if she wasn't going to be able to sleep, she might as well go to work. That was all she seemed to be doing lately, working and sleeping. However, over the past month or so, even sleep was slipping away from her in small, uncontrollable bits. Resigning herself to the inevitable, she pushed back the covers and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. Another night of approximately three hours sleep. Idly, she wondered what this insomnia was doing to her limbic system.

By the time she arrived at the Jeffersonian Institute's Medico Legal Lab, it was 5:13. To be honest, she hadn't expected anyone else to be present at such an early hour, so it was with some shock that she spotted a light on in one of the labs. She stuck her head in.

Dr. Camille Saroyan, Pathologist, stood off to one side of an autopsy table littered with case files in the pale blue folders emblazoned with the Jeffersonian's logo.

"Cam?" Brennan hadn't realized that her voice was in such disuse until she spoke and it came out a croak. Hastily she cleared her throat. "Dr. Saroyan?"

Cam raised her head. Her beautiful mahogany skin was drawn tight around her eyes. She looked almost as tired as Brennan really felt. "Dr. Brennan. Is it morning already?" She peered sleepily at the clock sitting on the counter by the stainless steel sink.

"In a manner of speaking." Brennan shrugged gently as she slowly approached the table. "It's almost 5:30, won't Michelle be worried?" She referred to Cam's adopted teenage daughter.

"School trip." Cam answered, stretching and popping her neck. "She won't be back for several days."

Nodding her understanding, Brennan turned to leave.

"What about you? It's a bit early to be back at work, even for you, especially after the late night you had."

"I often come to work this early." Brennan said, avoiding the question entirely. Before Cam could ask anything else, Brennan had turned on her heel and started for her own office. She was comforted by the familiar sight of the mummy that looked on from the glass wall and by the skulls arrayed on her desk that grinned their histories her way. More boxes of human remains sat neatly stacked next to her desk, waiting to tell their own stories to the well trained eye. She set her bag down, took off her jacket and sat. Her computer hummed softly as she started it up and typed in her password. Fumbling a little, she silently cursed her predictability that had caused her partner to be able to guess her past three passwords and forced her to come up with one even she had difficulty with.

The work of examining the bones might have seemed tedious to anyone else, but as she took the plastic storage boxes over to her couch and began her work, her tensed shoulders relaxed. This was what she was made to do. Self-made in most senses of the word. She fell to a rhythm that had become almost easier than breathing.

She closed the last file, the paperwork of her efforts tucked carefully inside, ready for submission. Slipping the information card into the front slot of the final box, an old man who had died of natural causes, she stretched and looked at the clock once again. It was only 7:47. Maybe she could kill time by going to get some breakfast. Grabbing her jacket and bag, she swung by autopsy where she had seen Cam earlier.

The woman was dozing on top of the files she had been looking over. Unable to help a small smile, Brennan gently touched the Pathologist's shoulder. When her boss barely roused enough to mumble, Brennan gently guided her to the couch back in her office. The small throw she kept there for when she herself spent the night didn't disturb the woman at all when she pulled it over her shoulder. Cam safely ensconced on her couch, Brennan continued to the diner.

Her fruit bowl and toast was half gone when another person sat beside her. She knew who it was without having to look.

"Mornin' Bones." Booth said jovially. Her partner, FBI Special Agent Seeley Booth, almost always called her by the moniker he had given her. She had minded at one point, she mused, but now she knew something was wrong when he didn't use it.

"Good morning." She replied, finally looking over. He looked tired too. "Sleep well?"

He grunted noncommittally and ordered eggs and a meat she didn't pay attention to the name of. "I might've slept better if I didn't get this-" He held up an FBI case file, "- this morning."

"Another one?" She groaned, taking it from him and flipping it open. She didn't need his nod. Instead, she stared down at the reason for her and her colleagues' recent bouts of sleeplessness. The FBI had indeed found another victim.

More than a month previous, two sets of remains had been unearthed by a team repairing a dilapidated section of railroad track. Each was defleshed and in a nondescript white box like some sort of mockery of a coffin. Then a week later, a child had come across another while digging in the sandy soil of the train tracks next to his home. After a while, the cases were finally bumped to the FBI where they were assigned to Booth. Another box, another set of remains a week after they had gotten the cases with only one difference. It was fresh, only in the ground a few days. So it had begun.

The total had just grown to five. Five women with bone deep cuts all over their bodies, begun while the victims were still alive based on the staining on the bones near the wounds. Then the flesh had been removed with great finesse by a tool they had yet to identify and their graves created. So far, very little further evidence had been forthcoming. They had identified the kind if knife that had been used on the victims prior to their deaths, but it was a common hunting knife. They knew the culprit was right handed. The victims had been identified, but any possible connections linking them all hadn't been uncovered. They seemed to have nothing in common. The first and third victims were both blonde, but one was short, the other tall. The second victim was a redhead, the fourth a brunette. Their eyes, backgrounds, ages, religions, acquaintances, friends, family; all different. Even when two victims shared a commonality, the other two didn't. It seemed the only thing all four women shared was the torment of their final hours. The remains pictured in the file were the same as the others.

"Maybe this one will bring the bastard down." Booth growled.

"You had them sent to the Jeffersonian?"

"They should be arriving in about ten minutes." He nodded.

"Then I should go." She made as if to stand up but a hand on her shoulder forestalled the action. She looked back to meet her partners intense gaze.

"You should finish your breakfast." He said, dropping his brown eyes to the counter. "You look like hell."

Snorting, she took up her spoon again. "Thanks."

Booth just gave a weak, cheeky grin in the face of her sarcasm. She thought he secretly enjoyed it when she tried her hand at socially accepted forms of communication such as jokes or sarcasm. Granted, she didn't make the attempt very often, but when she did his face lit up much the same way his son, Parker's, had when she'd given them a key to her apartment building's pool.

They ate breakfast together and then returned to the Jeffersonian. Dr. Jack Hodgins, Mineralogist, Entomologist and Botanist, met them at the door. "I found something." He said breathlessly, holding up a small vial with a swab in it.

"What?" Booth asked immediately, peeking into the vial.

"I don't know yet." Hodgins grinned. "I found it in the groove of one of the perimortem injuries on the victims bones though. Well, Wendell found it, but still-"

"How does this help us?" Booth cut in.

"New evidence adds up." Brennan answered before Hodgins could even reopen his mouth to speak. "Good work Hodgins. It could be the thing that leads to our killer. Once you identify what it is." She gave him a meaningful look and he pursed his lips and went off to his lab.

Swiping her card, Brennan climbed the few steps to the forensics platform. Her intern on rotation, Mr. Wendell Bray, had already removed most of the bones and set them up in an anatomically correct order. "Dr. Brennan. Female, between 25 and 30."

She nodded in confirmation as he took out the last bone, a tibia, and put it in place. "Take the box to Hodgins." She told him without looking away from the new remains before her. Her eyes were only for the stained and marked bones on the table. Nicks covered a good portion just as with the other victims, several with the familiar staining that fairly screamed of perimortem torture. Wear on the bones of the female's shoulders and hips bespoke an active swimmer while the vertebrae of her spine said she spent a great deal of time sitting hunched slightly. Over a desk perhaps. Small fractures on her tarsals and carpals suggested she'd been bound and had struggled. In a matter-of-fact voice, Brennan relayed all of this to Booth.

"Cause of death?" He spoke quietly.

"She has the same nick on the cervical vertebrae, suggesting the carotid was severed. The staining is significant enough to conclude the victim died of blood loss."

"Just like the others."

"She appears to have a broken arm." Brennan commented, peering closely at the woman's elbow.

"That's new." Booth answered as cheerfully as he seemed able to muster.

She made an assenting grunt. "Mr. Bray." She spoke to the returning Wendell. "Once you and Hodgins have finished the in-depth exam for particulates take the bones to x-ray. I want a closer view of this break."

The intern nodded.

"Inform me the second you've finished, then get the skull to Angela for the reconstruction."

"What about you?" Angela asked, coming up on the platform, her pregnant belly protruding slightly.

"We've got to go over to Alexandria," Booth answered quickly for her. "to interview the last victims sister."

She crinkled her brow his way. He had a habit of speaking for her. She was perfectly capable of doing so for herself. She might have argued the fact, but since she was tired and couldn't refute the statement as false, she let him off with a simple glare.

"Come on Bones, let's go." He said, placing his arm at her back to guide her.

"Angela, let us know when you're done with the reconstruction." She said over her shoulder. It really did sometimes feel like Booth was abducting her from her own workplace.

The car ride with Booth was unnaturally silent. After a while she attempted to strike up a repartee. "You look tired." It was the truth. He had dark half circles under his eyes, his posture was rigid and he was blinking an incredible amount.

He glanced at her angrily. "You don't look like a real spring chicken yourself."

"I don't know what that means, but if you're implying that I'm tired as well, you would be correct." She looked out the window at the passing scenery so she didn't have to meet his eyes when he glanced at her again.

"Yeah, I guess everybody's feeling the strain. I hate serial killers." He sighed.

She allowed a small smile to curve her mouth. "Yes, I agree. They do tend to ruin one's day." She was rewarded by his echoing grin.

"You know, the Andersons are pretty sure this sister that's been out of town doesn't know anything informative."

"The Andersons, you mean the adoptive parents of the last victim?"

"Yeah, I mean, they say that Nicole's sister didn't have a lot of contact with her. Mostly just spoke to her on the phone at Christmas and sent a card on her birthday."

"I don't understand why the Anderson's feel they would know how much contact their daughter had with her sister. She was twenty-two, an age when most children rarely tell their parents the truth about their lives."

"Well, Mrs. Anderson said she spoke to Nicole every day, confirmed by the girl's phone records before she went missing."

"Perhaps Nicole wouldn't tell her mother if she was in regular contact with her birth sister." Brennan posited.

"What, you mean like the mother and sister didn't get along?"

Brennan shrugged. Booth was working into the murky, relationship side of things, something she really didn't want to get into. "I simply meant that we can't know the voracity of Mrs. Anderson's statement."

"Yeah, right. Look, when we're talking to the sister, don't go mentioning the cause of death or serial killers like you did with the parents. She doesn't need to hear all that right now."

"You don't think she might have already heard? Or get upset with us for not telling her the full truth?"

"The girl lost her sister. Just let me do the talking."

She rolled her eyes but still conceded. He was better with people than she was after all.

It was an hour drive through sparse traffic to the small, box-like house the sister had inherited from her now deceased parents. She met them at the door and then showed them inside. The woman looked about thirty years old, her frame smaller than her sister's but otherwise the same. She looked even more tired than they.

Beside an end table with a blue glass figurine on it, Brennan perched on the edge of the overly stuffed couch while the woman took a seat wearily on the chair.

"Ms. Cappen-" Booth started.

"Please, call me Valerie." She said with a sad smile. "Can I get either of you anything?"

"No, thank you, we're fine. I take it you've heard the news about you sister."

She nodded. "When Nicole stopped answering my calls, I knew something was wrong. When I found out her mother hadn't heard from her either and had filed a missing person's report. I-" Her eyes filled with tears. "I tried to come home, but- I don't have a lot of money. I couldn't change my ticket. Then... I heard her- her body was found." She bit down hard on her lip like she was trying not to sob and quickly covered it with a hand.

Brennan felt uncomfortable, but she didn't speak.

"Wait. So you did have regular contact with your sister?" Booth asked.

Trying to hide a smug smile, Brennan cleared her throat and sat back.

"In a manner of speaking. We talked on the phone once a week just to touch base. Went to lunch almost as often. Nicole mostly complained about her mother or gushed about her new boyfriend."

"New boyfriend? You wouldn't happen to know who that was, do you?"

Ms. Cappen shrugged. "Gregory something. I didn't pay close attention. I'd been frantic about getting ready for my trip. Our last conversation was... too short." She bit her lip again.

"Is there anything else you can tell us? Anything Nicole might have mentioned?"

The woman shook her head sadly. "Not that I can think of."

"Alright then." Booth held out a card. "We'll look into that new boyfriend. Give us a call if you remember anything, anything at all. We'll be sure to keep you posted."

Standing, Brennan glanced at the time, then thanked Valerie Cappen after Booth and exited the house.

"Alright." Booth sighed after they set off in the SUV. "You were right. I guess Nicole didn't tell her mother everything."

"Thank you for saying so. Did the FBI find any 'Gregory's' when they investigated Nicole Anderson?"

Booth grunted. "There was a... Gregory Castilnetta I think, that she had a few classes with." He answered thoughtfully. "We'll check it out on our way back."

"Well, that was a bust." Booth griped, sliding into the SUV's driver's seat.

"Wha- How? We proved he is the boyfriend Nicole Anderson was talking about." Brennan pointed out, climbing in the other side.

"Well, yeah, but he's got an airtight alibi. His whole basketball team just confirmed it." Booth pulled seamlessly into traffic. "It just means we're at yet another dead end."

"Then we should go back to the lab. Wendell might have the results soon. We can't do much more till we get another lead."

"Yeah, alright."

^Later that night.

Staring at the bones of the latest victim was starting to make her eyes ache. Brennan knew it was late, but this case was making her frustrated. It wasn't like she would be able to sleep for very long anyway, even if she did go home.

Thanks to Angela's sketch and corresponding dental profiles, the young woman had been identified as Emily Marcus, twenty-six. She had been an avid swimmer but worked full time at a small accounting office downtown. She was the mother of a small two year old boy.

Brennan leaned back up to a standing position. She hated when the victim's had small children almost as much as when the victim's were small children. The third victim, Elizabeth Mayhew, had had two children as well, including a boy around Parker's age. Seeing that boy sobbing and Booth looking so sad made her feel physically ill. So this time she had opted not to go for the notification. Luckily, Booth seemed to understand her desire to continue working and took Sweets with him instead.

Switching off the lighted exam table, she decided to retreat to her office to finish an E-mail correspondence and give herself a break from examining the victim.

"Hey, Dr. B, look." Hodgins intercepted her, handing over a printout.

After a glance, she looked back up at him. "Silica and concrete? That's what you found in the victim's wound tract?"

"Yeah, weird huh? The concentration of silica is very unusual as well. I was gonna do a few more tests before heading home, but I thought maybe you'd want to know."

She nodded. "Thank you."

It was almost an hour later that Cam said goodnight and Hodgins stuck his head in to say the same a half-hour after that. The machines didn't need him around to do their thing, so he was going home to take his pregnant wife a large bag of baked chips.

The lab was dark and quiet. She was the only one in the building besides the security guards by this point.

An unfamiliar sound made her look away from her computer screen. Curious, she stood. A few steps beyond her doorway, she stopped.

It was black with shadows except where dim night-lighting shone out. There wasn't a sound. Supposing maybe she should go home and at least try to sleep, she turned back to her office. A sharp blow to the back of her head felled her unconscious to the floor.