Chapter 3: Mysterious patterns and a plan

The electric glass doors connecting the older part of the building to the modern laboratory slid open, when their infra-red sensors detected movement.

"No, you'll not get anything more than that, Booth."

"Come on, Bones. Just a little bit more," the agent whined, stepping into the lab behind his partner, and when Angela saw his puppy eyes, she had to laugh.

"Aw, come on, Bren, whatever it is, give the man what he asks you for."

Brennan met her best friend with disbelief. "What? No!" She turned to Booth again. "You'll not get anything else. Don't ask again, it won't help." She started walking again, grinning smugly. "I might tell your son, that you're applying his begging techniques. Let's see what he says about that."

Angela linked her arm with Brennan's. "So, what is he asking for that you are so unwilling to give? Anything that I would do?"

Brennan snorted. "He wants to know what happens in my next book. And apparently he's learned a lot from his son. But that won't work."

"Wait, didn't you say he won't get 'more than that'? So you told him something. He knows more than I do." Angela untangled herself from Brennan's arm, crossed her own two over her chest and tapped her right foot expectantly.

Booth joined them. "Not really," he, too, snorted. "She told me quote 'Kathy Reichs is gonna unearth at least one skeleton' unquote. That's not really information that I didn't know before."

"It's more information," Brennan stated. "Now you know that it will be at least one complete skeleton. She doesn't only find a skull for example. And it's in the earth, so she has to dig for it. And the remains are skeletonized and not just badly decomposed." She shrugged. "But you won't get more. Read the book, when you can buy it."

Booth pouted. "Fine."

"Well, the pleading puppy eyes don't seem to be the only thing he learned from his son." Angela laughed again. "Look at that, Sweetie. He can at least pout as cute."

Brennan looked up and chuckled, too. Angela had a point.

The doors opened again and their new corpse was wheeled in. Brennan sobered and called for Zach and Hodgins.

"Let's first get her x-rayed. Then we'll need to secure any particulates we can find and look over her skin carefully, before we can macerate her, so Angela can do a facial reconstruction."

"She had immaculate teeth and not a single bone has ever been broken," Brennan said, pointing at the x-ray-sheets on the light box of the small lab, they were currently in. "She was in her late twenties, early thirties. About 175 centimeters tall, that's 5 feet nine inches," she explained looking at Booth, "Slender build. Dark blond hair." She pursed her lips. "That's all we have for now. Zach and Cam are going over her skin and Hodgins is analyzing the remnants of her clothing, as well as the insect activity."

"Great." Booth sighed. "That's all very average, don't you think?"

"Yeah. You're right. Even though she is a bit taller than average, it doesn't really help going over missing persons reports." She, too, sighed. "When Cam and Zach are ready, we'll rehydrate a finger and see if her prints are registered somewhere. If that doesn't work, we'll macerate her and Angela will have to do a facial reconstruction."

"Guys?" Cam stood in the door, looking at the two partners, who in turn now looked at her. "I severed a hand and rehydrated it. The prints are running through AFIS now." IAFIS, the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, would compare the prints to any in its database, no matter if they were registered due to a crime or mandatory for a job.

"Are you ready with the examination of the skin?"

"No, Zach's still working on that, but the hand I severed was clean." And anticipating Brennan's need for control, she added, "And, yes, I gave scrapings from under her fingernails to Hodgins."

"Let's hope AFIS has something then," Booth clapped his hands and then flipped one of his poker chips before catching it again. In general it was so much easier to find the murderer, if you knew who the victim was.

"All we could find is a strange more or less regular pattern of diminutive circular wounds in her desiccated epidermis," Brennan told Booth, approaching the table. Her frustration was evident in heavy sigh. "And we don't know what caused them yet."

"Nothing else?" He wasn't 100 percent sure what she'd said, but he assumed it meant that there were round wounds in a pattern on her dried skin.

"Nothing." Brennan let herself fall onto the chair in their favorite booth of The Royal Diner. Booth already sat across from her. "I've never seen such a pattern before." She shook her head. "Anything on your part?" Brennan lifted her gaze hopefully.

Booth smirked. "No, not really. I couldn't ask any specific questions without knowing more of your stuff. The background check on the cemetery employees came back clean, apart from an arrest for DUI ten years ago."

Brennan's eyes returned to the tabletop and her folded hands.

"Describe the pattern," Booth finally said, "maybe I know what caused it."

Brennan looked up at him sceptically, but answered nevertheless. "The wounds are organized in something that looks like..." She searched for the right word, looking at the ceiling. When she had decided on an image, she looked back at Booth. "A bit like a... a heap of tangled rope, though they are not aligned continuously."

"Everywhere?"

She shook her head. "Nuh uh. Mainly her left leg and a few wounds on her right thigh. Any ideas?"

Booth shook his head. "And you won't macerate her, before you know what caused them?"

"No, but we're considering instead to rehydrate her completely, to see how the wounds might have looked before she was desiccated."

"Anything from IAFIS yet?"

"No. And there was only very little insect activity," Brennan said, when the waitress placed the plate with salad, she had ordered while coming in, in front of her. "So we're assuming that she was in a secluded place, not accessible to insects of any kind and later placed in the mausoleum, where the few beetles we did find fed on her."

The young waitress had wrinkled her nose in disgust and hurriedly left the table again. It wasn't the first time, she had overheard them talking about something disgusting and it wouldn't be the last, but she'd never get used to it.

Booth grunted frustrated. "So, there's no telling, when she died."

"No. We don't know how warm it was, where she's been. How dry the air exactly was. She could be dead anywhere from a few months to a decade." Brennan dug listlessly into her salad.

Booth stayed silent, until a suspicion occurred to him. "Wait, if you can't macerate her yet, Angela's not going to be able to do a facial reconstruction, right?"

Brennan shook her head, taking another bite of her salad.

After a while Booth spoke up tentatively, causing Brennan to look up from her salad with raised eyebrows. Booth was never unsure. "Can she use CT or MRI pictures of the skull for a reconstruction? I mean those are 3-dimensional pictures."

"The results are 3-dimensional reconstructions, not exactly 3-dimensional pictures, but it's worth a shot. Good thinking." Her face lit up.

"Don't sound so surprised, Bones," Booth said, putting a hurt look on his face.

Brennan pulled out her phone and continued speaking as if she hadn't heard Booth. "I'll ask Angela, if she can modify her program and then we'll have to find a hospital that is willing to scan a mummy." She waited holding her phone to her ear and chewing on her salad with more appetite now. "Hey Angela. Can you take CT pictures as input for the Angelator?"

"Yeah. As every CT gives you a 3-dimensional version of your inside, it shouldn't be too hard to accomplish." The artist paused. "You're thinking of scanning our Jane Doe."

"That's the plan, as we can't macerate her right now and Booth wants to have an ID, so he can start working."

"Nice idea of yours."

"Actually, it was more like Booth's idea."

"Then tell our favorite G-man 'nice idea'," Angela said and continued, when Brennan had complied, "So, where do you plan on doing that scan?"

"We've not planned that far. Maybe Cam has connections to a hospital with a CT."

"Okay, I'll talk to her. Bye, Sweetie."

Brennan put the phone back into her pocket. "Angela thinks it should be possible."

Booth was grinning smugly about the success of his idea. "I could gather that much. Why didn't you suggest MRI?"

"Do you really want to know?"

"I asked, didn't I?"

Still doubtful, Brennan started to explain, "An MRI works with a powerful magnetic field that is used to stimulate the hydrogen atoms in the body. These produce then a rotating magnetic field of their own which is detected by a scanner. That way an image of the body can be reconstructed. Still with me?"

"Yeah, kind of, but is there a short version?"

"This is already the very, very short version."

Booth rolled his eyes.

"It is!" Brennan said and then continued with her explanation. "As there are more hydrogen atoms in soft tissue than there are in the calcified parts of the body – as the bones – the soft tissue is better accounted for than the bones."

"So, to no use for us," Booth commented.

Brennan nodded. "At least a CT will be better suited for our purposes. It makes x-ray pictures from many different angles around the body and from that calculates an image of it. X-rays show the bones very clearly, while – without modification – they have problems with the soft tissue."

"Which doesn't really interest us anyway."

Brennan smiled. "Exactly. That's why no MRI. Besides: CT is cheaper and less noisy." She winked and finished off another forkful of her salad, her mood now far better than before.

My knowledge on MRIs and CTs is strictly based on Wikipedia.