Chapter 2: Baby Steps

"It is the first step that is troublesome."

It was only two days later when Zack got an email. It wasn't signed, and for the first time he realized that he did not know the man's name. He had forgotten to ask. He must have given his own name when he wrote down his official e-mail address for the Jeffersonian. But the anonymous gmail account didn't help him with a name. It would be a week before he would translate the Greek word for bastard, and nearly a month before he would try to trace the IP address and discover the man was using a computer at a public library. For now, he simply answered it: "I don't drink coffee."

That Saturday, Zack found himself eating lunch at a sandwich shop. Two more e-mails had clarified that meeting, not coffee, was the purpose of the original inquiry. He had never been here before, but the bus had gotten him there easily enough. He preferred the Metro to the bus, if he had to use public transportation, but he supposed he couldn't be too choosy. It was getting chilly outside, but if he walked briskly, the cold didn't bother him. People in DC complained about the weather getting cold at much higher temperatures than the people in Michigan did, he'd found. 'Cold' was an imprecise and relative term, but despite that, commonly used.

The sandwich shop was warm, though, so he'd taken off his jacket and looked out at the sunny fall day. He ordered the same meal he always requested at the diner, for comparison purposes.

"Which bones are the most useful?"

"That depends on the skeleton, how the person died. All bones are useful, but they each tell you different things." Zack was good at doing two things at once, but talking and eating was not a good combination. He hesitated for a moment, then plunged ahead. "A missing skull or pelvic bone will make identification more difficult, but if the person were stabbed or shot in the torso, we would need the ribs or sternum to determine the blade or caliber of bullet used." He gestured towards those bones on his own body to demonstrate; it was inconvenient not having a skeleton to refer to. "Without femurs, it can be problematic to estimate height, which can lead to delays in identifying the decedent, especially if the teeth are compromised. The vertebrae and hyoid are always worth checking if suspicious circumstances surrounded the death. But every bone can tell you something; I've worked with as little as a single phalanx, carpal or patella." He was dumbing it down as much as he could; he just pretended he was talking to Angela.

"Fascinating. What could you tell from that?"

"In one case, age of bone, age and diseases of victim, source of mark on the bone."

"That's not enough to go off of, is it?"

"In the case of the finger bone it was, but not usually enough to make a positive ID, no." It was an effort not to say proximal phalanx. For some reason, his nieces always found the word phalanges amusing, so he assumed normal people didn't use it.

Zack stopped talking abruptly and focused on his lunch, which he'd been neglecting. The man from the conference was a very attentive listener. He did best in conversations with only one other person, because then he did not get confused about who was addressing whom. The food was passable; not as good as the diner, though. It was better than what he would have made for himself, he reflected, so not a total disappointment.

"What drew you to this line of work? Surely with your other interests you could have done something else. Something more…profitable."

"The Jeffersonian is a prestigious institution. I am well compensated for my work."

"Oh. So you just do it for the money?" The man sounded disappointed. Zack wasn't sure why that would matter to him.

"No. I do it because I want to do it. I…enjoy it. We solve puzzles. We catch bad guys."

"So, your work prevents bad things from happening?"

Zack shook his head. "We apprehend the criminal after the fact. If a crime has not been committed, we have no evidence to gather. In theory, we prevent another similar crime from occurring."

"Why do you say, 'in theory?'"

"It is possible that person had no intention or inclination to kill anyone else. We can punish them for the crime they did commit, but we can't be sure we have prevented another crime from occurring. And even in the case of serial murderers…"

"You work on serial killer cases?"

"I have, yes. One, we never caught, but there is a good chance he will kill again. Technically, he has only killed three people, but he has other counts of attempted murder and kidnapping. Another…is dead now, but our involvement in the case did not prevent any deaths. In fact…we allowed him to live longer, and caused even more deaths. Indirectly."

"Who was that?"

"Howard Epps. I can speak of him because the case is closed. He was clever, but he's dead now. In other cases, the jury makes the wrong decision at the trial."

Zack was clearly agitated, because he was speaking rapidly. He took a sip (or rather, a gulp) of his drink.

"So by trying to catch Howard Epps, you helped him to kill innocent people?"

Zack nodded, miserable. "I even got blown up, which wasn't as bad as I would have thought. But we catch bad guys. It's what we do. I cannot know what they will do in the future; I only can find out what they have done in the past. Epps shouldn't have been able to kill from death row." He was repeating himself; his listener knew he was not convinced of what he was saying so insistently.

"And yet he did. If there were a way of stopping them before the damage was done, would that be worth pursuing?"

Zack nodded eagerly, but just looked at the man expectantly. When he said nothing, Zack looked away. "But there is no way of knowing who will become a killer and who will not. Certainty only applies to the past, not the future. Even a sociopath like Epps had a last victim; they all do."

"Perhaps." The man did not say anything further, and Zack just looked at him, puzzled. He was not comfortable with conjecture. The only way to apply certainty to the future would be...the laws of physics. Something incontrovertible. A specific event had too many variables. Maybe, if you accounted for them all...but that was particularly tricky. That was why weather reports were so often wrong.

Author's Note: Still with me? Zack references several cases from seasons 1 and 2; too many to list. This is the fall of episode three, so just before "Mummy in the Maze" most likely. Coming up next is a flashback.