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AN: Here's where the story's title begins to make sense; hope you like it
The Sister on the Door
As Booth walked into the Jeffersonian, he tried not to pay too much attention to the crime scene tape cordoning off approximately half of the steps leading into the lab; even after that incident when one of the staff had killed one of the grad students during the Gormogon hunt, the Jeffersonian had always seemed like it was more 'apart' from the death they faced on a regular basis (That mess with Professor Riley didn't count; the guy had only worked at the Jeffersonian, he hadn't died there).
He just wished he could figure out who might have done something like this; he'd tried going over his and Bones's old case files on the way over, but the only killers they'd taken out who might have done this kind of thing were Gormogon and Howard Epps, due to their fondness for 'games', and he knew for a fact that both of those two were dead...
"Hey, Bones," he said as he walked into the lab, swiping his ID over the security scanner as he headed up the steps to study the body lying on the examination table, wincing as he realised how small the body was (He definitely had to re-evaluate his thoughts about who could be responsible for this; it took a seriously sick mind to use a dead child for something like this. "What've we got?"
"Female, early teens at best, precise cause and time of death undetermined at the moment," Bones replied; the anthropologist was already studying the remains as they lay on the table. From what Booth could tell, the victim was still in its clothing of a simple-looking dress of some sort- evidently Hodgins or Cam hadn't gotten around to examining the flesh in detail yet-, but otherwise it was hard to make out any specific details; the victim's flesh was reduced to little more than a few scraps around the limbs and head, although Booth acknowledged that he'd seen the squints cope with less fleshy victims than this.
"Where are the others?" he asked, looking curiously around the seemingly empty lab.
"None of the interns are in yet, Hodgins left a message saying that he'd be late in today- something about a busy night last night; I think he needed to deal with something involving the company-, Cam's talking with the security staff to see if they can tell her anything about when the body might have been left there, and Angela's already working on a facial reconstruction," Bones replied, putting her penlight away as she looked up from her examination.
"Hold on a minute; all the security around this place, and you don't know when a body was dumped on your doorstep?" Booth asked, looking at Bones in surprise.
"The alarms are only intended to go off if anybody tries to actually break into the Jeffersonian," Bones clarified, walking around the table to study the body alongside Booth. "Whoever left this body here, they didn't show any interest in actually penetrating the building; the alarms didn't go off because nobody did anything that might have triggered them in the first place, and it was positioned in such a manner that the security staff didn't notice that it was lying there when they walked past the door on their patrols until they actually opened it."
"Right; that makes sense..." Booth said, nodding slightly before he looked back at Bones. "So, what was the cause of death?"
"I..." Brennan began, before she closed her mouth and shook her head. "I don't know.
Booth blinked.
"Hold on; you 'don't know'?" he repeated incredulously. "Bones, I've seen you work out cause of death with less than this to work with-"
"In all of those cases, the injuries that were responsible for the victim's demise were relatively obvious; I've gone over everything left on this body and there's no sign of any actual injury on the body," Bones replied, only a slight trace of frustration in her voice as she looked at him. "The abdomen shows no sign of stab wounds, what I can see of the throat seems to be intact, the bones aren't significantly damaged in any way..."
She shook her head in exasperation; clearly she wasn't used to the bones failing to provide her with information when she began an examination. "I'd be tempted to rule this death as the result of illness or poison, but from what I can tell all the organs appear to be fairly healthy and undamaged, although I'm obviously waiting for Cam and Hodgins to perform their own examinations to confirm my findings..."
"Can't speak for Hodgins right now, but I'll be ready to get on to that as soon as I've got everything together," Cam's voice said from behind them, the two investigators turning around as the head of the Jeffersonian's Medico-Legal Department walked on to the examination platform, briefly glancing at the body before she turned her attention back to the living. "Well, I've talked with everyone on-duty last night, and from what they can tell, the body was definitely left here at some point after midnight, but apart from that there's no way to determine when someone left the body here; nobody would have been in the park for obvious reasons, and it's not like we have any neighbours who we can ask to give statements..."
"Right..." Booth said, shaking his head slightly as he looked at the body. "Honestly, someone actually gives us a body, and we can't even work out when they dropped it off..."
"Well, I can't help with that bit," Angela said, a solemn expression on her face as she walked up onto the platform with her notebook in her hand, "but I do have a face for our... well, for her."
She was trying to be light-hearted about this to lighten the grim mood, but when she looked at the picture she'd just drawn she felt like crying; the idea that someone had just killed this little girl- she refused to believe that such a sweet girl could have died of some kind of natural causes- was almost too much for her...
Studying the picture, Angela felt her heart break for the little girl she'd sketched; a small round face surrounded by thick brown hair that came down past her shoulders, a couple of long strands around her forehead and a small smile on her face to give her that little extra humanity.
"Oh my God..." Cam said, walking around to study the face that the forensic artist had sketched. "She's so young-"
"WHAT?" Booth suddenly yelled, grabbing the sketchpad from Angela's hands and staring at the picture on it with wide, outraged eyes.
"No..." he said, an edge of apparent horror in his voice as he held the paper up close to his face.
"What?" Brennan asked, turning to look at her partner in confusion, only to trail off as she saw his expression; he was staring at the image on the piece of paper with an expression of cold rage that she'd rarely seen him display even when they'd discovered that military cover-up in their first year.
"No," Booth repeated, almost as though he hadn't heard her, his gaze fixed on the sketched face that he now held in his hands with a strange combination of fear and rage that she'd never seen him display before. "No way... she is not just a 'victim'... there is no fucking way that's her... she's buried... she's safe..."
"Booth, what-?" Angela began, walking uncertainly towards him, only for the man they'd come to consider a part of their strange extended family to spin around and glare intently at her, an urgent, almost desperate expression in his eyes as he stared at her.
"Could you have made a mistake?" he said.
"What?" Angela asked, looking at Booth in shock; in the almost five years they'd been working together, he'd never questioned her abilities before. "No, I did everything that I've always done when making sketches; barring some kind of screwy surgery that threw off the flesh markers, this is definitely our vic-"
"Don't," Booth said, glaring at Angela with a sudden intensity that left the artist with the momentary impression that she was looking at an angry lion or some other kind of predator for some reason...
"Don't what?" Brennan asked, looking at her partner uncertainly. "Booth, it's just-"
"NO!" Booth practically yelled, throwing the sketchpad to the side and grabbing Angela by the shoulders. "You do NOT call her 'the victim'; she DIDN'T DESERVE THAT!"
"Booth, stop that-!" Brennan began, reaching out to grab the agent's arm and haul him off her friend.
"She shouldn't be here!" Booth said; Brennan was shocked to actually see the faint gleam of tears in his eyes as he looked at her, his anger at Angela apparently gone as he indicated the body beside them with a vague wave of his other hand. "She shouldn't be here... she's safe... nobody knows about her..."
"Uh... Booth?" Cam asked, walking over to place a comforting hand on her old friend's shoulder as Brennan's hand moved from his arm to his other shoulder, the anger having faded from Booth's expression to leave only sorrow. "Look, no offence, but... what are you talking about?"
For a moment, Booth simply stood in silence as he looked at the body before them, his partner and his ex on either side, before he finally spoke.
"I... I know her," he said simply, indicating the sketch that Angela had drawn, the paper now in Angela's hands once again.
"You knew her?" Angela repeated, her eyes wide as she looked at Booth in sympathy. "Who... who was she?"
"Her name's Kathy," Booth replied with a brief, grim nod at Angela, before he voiced four words Brennan almost didn't believe.
"She was my sister."
Brennan blinked.
Even after she thought her career with Booth had left her prepared for anything, that had been unexpected.
"Hold on; you have a sister?" Cam said, withdrawing her hand from his shoulder as she looked at him in shock. "You and Jared have never mentioned a sister-"
"It's not something we like to talk about, OK?" Booth responded briskly, shooting a quick glare over at Cam before he shook his head dismissively. "It was all a long time ago, and it was a pointless crime anyway; some bastard just... walked into the house and slit her goddamn throat..."
"Oh my God..." Angela whispered, her gaze rapidly shifting between Booth and the face on display before them. "How... how old were-?"
"It's... not something I'm comfortable talking about, Ange," Booth said, unable to stop a slight flash of pain crossing his face before he shook his head and continued speaking. "Point is, she's been dead for a long time now; this isn't something you need to worry about."
"What?" Brennan said, looking at Booth in surprise. "But-"
"This isn't like your family, OK, Bones?" Booth said, glaring over at his partner before he spun around to face Cam. "And it's not like Michael either, Cam; I know what happened to my sister, I know who killed her, and it's all been dealt with a long time ago."
"Well, clearly it wasn't if somebody went to all the effort of dumping her here-!" Angela began, only to be stopped by an intense glare from Booth that made it clear that further comments from her on that subject wouldn't be welcome.
"Yeah, somebody would have had to know about... certain things... to know who she was and my connection to the Jeffersonian," he admitted, before he turned around to look at Brennan as she was about to speak. "Which is why you are not getting involved in this, Bones."
"What?" Brennan said, refusing to show how hurt she was at that particular announcement when there were more immediate matters for her to be concerned about. "But-"
"Look," Booth said, holding up his hand to stop her saying anything else, "I get that you want to help, but there is nothing you or the squints can do right now; this is just something I have to deal with, OK?"
"Booth-"
"No," Booth repeated, turning the full intensity of his glare back on Brennan. "This is just something I have to deal with, Bones; I'll get her body sent back to her grave myself, and you guys just... put her somewhere safe until I can make the arrangements and... do what you do when I'm not here, all right?"
Brennan could only nod at her partner's request/order, uncertain what else she could do; when Booth looked at her in the manner that he was looking at her right now, it didn't exactly encourage her to even think about doing something else.
"But what about whoever-?" Angela began.
"I'll deal with it," Booth said, looking over at the artist with another intense glare that briefly left Brennan wondering what that meant before she pushed it aside; his Catholic morality probably meant that he just wanted to get his sister's body back in her grave so that she could 'rest in peace'...
"I'm just going to... make the right phone calls, OK?" Booth said, indicating the door with a brief wave of his hand before he turned to face Brennan directly as he pointed at the body- his sister- lying on the table. "One more thing; nobody touches the body, understood?"
"What?" Brennan asked.
"No bugs, no knives, no more X-rays, not even a quick 'poke around' to see what you can find; I know how Kathy died, I don't want her body to have to go through any more than she already did, OK?" Booth said, his tone decisive as he looked back at Brennan. "There's no reason for you to need to look for anything, so just don't; just... put it somewhere safe until I can send her back where she belongs, OK?"
The barely-visible but still-apparent pain in her partner's eyes at his request were enough to convince Brennan to simply nod in acceptance.
Even when dealing with strangers, she'd developed enough personal awareness to know that some people found it uncomfortable to even think about the people they loved being reduced to skeletons on her examination tables; judging by Booth's reaction to just the idea of his sister's remains having been taken out of her grave, he would almost certainly hate the idea of her team examining the body more closely, particularly given his apparent insistence that he knew what had happened to her...
Even as Booth turned around and walked out of the lab, leaving the Jeffersonian staff to exchange uncomfortable glances with each other, Brennan wasn't sure precisely why she felt such a strong urge to leave these new remains in their current condition that she'd never experienced even when dealing with her own mother's remains.
Even the explanation that the Jeffersonian staff had already essentially 'stripped' her mother down to her skeleton long before she'd seen the body for the first time didn't explain her reluctance to do anything more to this body; somehow, the fact that this little girl lying in front of her was her partner's sister...
It put a personal spin on this whole case that she hadn't even fully experienced when she'd discovered her mother's remains in 'Limbo'; she'd always been so sure that her mother was dead that she'd almost been expecting it, but to learn that this little girl before her had shared the same blood as her partner, had lived through some of what he'd experienced growing up... had been left on their own doorstep for the sole purpose of...
Her thought process halted at that moment, her mind flashing back over the conversation.
Booth had said that somebody who knew about his past must have left Kathy's body here, but he hadn't said why someone would have done that; 'why' might be more Booth's thing than hers, but even she knew that nobody would go to all the effort of digging up what Brennan presumed had been a long-buried grave to dump a body in front of a federal building for no reason...
"Uh... not meaning to sound picky, but that didn't really tell us much about what happened, did it?" Angela said at last, looking slightly awkwardly over at the other two women.
"You mean like the fact that he failed to explain why I've never heard him mention a sister before now or the surprising lack of detail about how she ended up dead in the first place despite the fact that I've known him for longer than either of you?" Cam asked, indicating the body with a slightly frustrated wave of her hand. "Trust me, I'm trying to figure that out myself; I've known him and Jared for years, and nobody's ever even hinted that they had a sister at any point."
"And if Booth was old enough when she died to recognise her that quickly..." Brennan mused, picking up the discarded picture to study it herself.
She had to admit, there were elements of the little girl's general facial structure that resembled a feminised version of Booth's own appearance, particularly around the chin and cheekbones; she might not have any way of confirming Booth's story about a previously-unknown sister, but what information she was able to gather at least suggested that he was telling the truth.
What happened to you, Kathy Booth? she asked herself- she didn't believe in actually talking to the dead, but Booth had mentioned the bones 'talking' to her enough that she had picked up the habit of sometimes phrasing her analysis as questions-, her gaze flicking to the girl's throat in memory of Booth's comment about the circumstances of his sister's death; again, the condition of the throat after so long didn't allow her to confirm from a visual assessment whether or not Booth was telling the truth, but there was nothing to contradict his statement that her throat had been slit...
The questions facing her right now were, why would someone do that to a little girl, and what had motivated somebody to leave her body on the Jeffersonian's doorstep (Beyond some apparent desire to send a 'message' to Booth, even if what the message was remained elusive)?