Disclaimer:Bones, the concept, the characters and the indicia thereof belong to their creators and copyright holders. No infringement is intended, no money is being made.
I do not own The Prisoner.
I also intend no disrespect to the memory of Dr. William Maples, whose book Dead Men Do Tell Tales was the inspiration for my personal research into forensic anthropology, and upon one of whose cases I have very loosely based the events described in this story. Dr. Maples solved that case through determination, hard work, and not a little genius, and I'm glad that there are shows out there now which tell people just how intricate and difficult the forensic anthropologist's job really is.
What do you want?
Information.
You won't get it.
By hook or by crook, we will.
There's dull discomfort on several levels, but all of that goes away with the introduction of a new, astonishing, tearing agony that turns his chest into a furnace. Seeley Booth reflects that if this is hook he'd rather not wait around to experience crook.
"Can't they…..can't they make it less awful?" Angela stares through the glass. "He looks like he's dying."
"He's not dying. They're reinflating his lung." And it hurts like a bitch, she doesn't add. Booth looks so small under all the paraphernalia of modern medicine. Not at all like the Booth she knows.
Temperance Brennan watches, her lips drawn into a familiar thin line. She's used to waiting for things—test results, fingerprint matches, the foul-smelling maceration cookers in the exhaust hood in the lab, but this is different. It happens to have been thirty-eight hours since she'd had any sleep other than a doze caught in the waiting room of one hospital or another. When Booth had brought her the case she'd been interested, yes, excited even: burned bones were challenging to deal with, and Bones liked a challenge. Had she known that it would end up bringing her here, to this antiseptic-smelling room, watching Booth be dragged by hook or by crook back into the breathing world, she thinks she might have had some fairly piquant remarks on the subject.
It had started with the discovery of a burned shack on the edge of a field not far from the Pine Barrens. The shack had burned hot, hot enough to have scorched the treetops a hundred yards downwind. Unfortunately the deputy who responded to the initial call from a concerned hiker had not read her Patricia Cornwell, and so the remains that were delivered to Brennan at the Jeffersonian were handed over in a garbage bag, as twisted and broken and pulverized as if they'd gone through an industrial crematory crusher. All the deputy's cops could tell her was that there had been two sets of remains, one larger than the other, and that they had been laid out on a grid that was subsequently recognized as the remains of a queen-sized coil-spring mattress.
Brennan didn't often give in to hopelessness, but looking at that crazily mixed bagful of bone and ash brought her close to it. "Okay," she'd said, after just a little too long. "We'll separate this out into sections and X-ray it one by one. And after the X-rays we sift."
The one thing that had kept her going was the fact that the sheriff's deputy, while her ignorance had made Brennan's job exponentially more difficult, had also taken several high-definition, 12-megapixel digital photos of the scene before she'd destroyed it. Those photos were now blown up as huge as they could go, and set up in Brennan's lab for reference, even as she and her team picked through the ash for tiny fragments of calcined bone.
Bone burns differently inside flesh than outside it. For a body that has been set on fire whole, the effects the flames produce on the skeleton have a certain set of characteristics: a skeleton that has gone naked into the fire is going to behave differently. Crazing patterns on the surface of the long bones, for example: whether the cranial vault has burst from the boiling of the material inside it. From the bodies Brennan was slowly piecing together, crumb by crumb, it appeared that they had been whole when they were set on fire.
There were two of them. With the shrinking of the bones through the intense heat, it was difficult to determine age very clearly; but sex differences were easier to see. One male, one female. Brennan thought both of them were under thirty, based on the sutures she'd found in the fragments of skull, and past puberty. Early teens to late twenties seemed most likely.
With calcined bone like this DNA was almost impossible to recover: but the investigation came across an unexpected windfall. Two sets of clothes, a man's and a woman's, folded neatly, found just inside the woods upwind of the burnt shack. There was no ID with the man's clothing, but the driver's license in the wallet found with the woman's clothes was made out to one Carrie Winters, twenty-five, currently employed at a local diner as a waitress. And there was a note: we have agreed that purification by flame is the only way Jeff and I can be together in Gods hand, we have sinned, theres no other way.
Brennan and her team weren't involved in that end of the case. It was taking them all their time to piece together the poor dead pair from the fragments in the bag; and over half of the bones would turn out to be missing. There was enough in the bag to make up at least one long bone for each skeleton, plus the female's sacrum, most of her right fibula, much of her skull, and some of her ribs. The man was in better shape, but barely. His palate was missing, as were all the bones of his feet. But they had dental work to match, and it was only a matter of time once she relayed that information to Booth for the systems to bring up the identity of the pair. Carrie Winters had died in that fire, said her skull. The man beside her appeared to be her brother Jeffrey.
It wasn't until afterwards that Brennan understood the danger: this fire, this cremation, had been staged by the man who had actually murdered Carrie and her brother, to look like a double suicide potentially precipitated by feelings of guilt and horror over an incestuous relationship. None of them had bought the note: its wording didn't fit with either of the Winters' educational level or vocabulary choices. There was something else to be found.
It was Booth who had found it. He'd tracked down Carrie Winters' on-again, off-again boyfriend, John Harper, and found out that Carrie had thrown John out of their apartment a month ago at Jeffrey's urging, and that John had proceeded to develop an intensely complicated plan for getting rid of both of them. John Harper was, of course, not born with that name. It was a man called Caleb Unwin who had been lying in wait for Booth up in Newark that night, and who had put a bullet through his chest.
Brennan wraps her arms around herself, watching the white-coated nameless people work over Booth. He'd managed to knock Unwin out, even hurt as he was, and his backup arrived a scant few minutes later and took Unwin into custody and Booth to the nearest hospital. Where he has been ever since, and where she and Angela have been for the past nine hours.
Beyond the glass there's apparently some conversation going on. Brennan looks away, is caught by Angela's eyes. "There's nothing we can do," she says. "You should go home. Get some rest."
"So should you." Angela looks back at the room beyond the glass. They've cleared away now, and Booth is lying pale and still under the weight of modern medicine: but she thinks perhaps there's a little more colour in his face, and his lips are less blue.
"Dr. Brennan?" someone says. Bones turns. "—Dr. Brennan, you asked to be informed when he was awake. He can't have visitors for more than a few minutes, of course."
"Of course," she says, and her eyes are unreadable as she looks at Angela, at the doctor, and back at Angela again, before slipping through into the white room, and looking down at him.
The eyes are too bright, glittering slits of deep rich brown: but they see her, and they know her, and that is all that matters.
"….what're you…….doing here…?" he whispers. "You're…..bad…..with people."
Bones smiles down at him. It's a smile very few people ever get to see. "So I'm told," she says, quietly, "but any decent scientist is always striving to improve."
Beyond the glass Angela can see the change in him, but would not necessarily recognize the words that drift disjointedly through his head:
I am a free man.