Chapter Six
As soon as it seemed clear that they were out of danger, Brennan insisted on going directly to the site where the shot had been heard and Booth and Tripp had subsequently found the blood, in order to begin gathering evidence. First, Booth went up to retrieve Zack and let Sweets know that everything was all right. Brennan, meanwhile, went to the second floor to give Diggs and Cam the news that it was safe to come out. She found Diggs playing video games, seemingly quite content, with a group of five children. Cam didn't look nearly so at ease.
"Did you figure out what happened?" she asked, as soon as she'd opened the door to Brennan.
"Booth thinks the shooter went out the window in the next room – and took his victim with him."
"So, somebody really got shot?" one of the children asked. He was a blonde boy, undernourished by the look of him, and badly in need of a haircut. Brennan was certain she had seen the child before, but couldn't place him.
"Yes," she agreed. "In the next room."
"But we're gonna catch whoever did it," Cam said quickly. "So, there's no reason for you guys to worry."
Brennan refrained from pointing out that there was, in fact, every reason for all of them to worry, since she assumed such frankness would be frowned upon where children were concerned. Diggs relinquished his video game controller and stood.
"So, that was a nice little reprieve." He lowered his voice. "Is everybody okay?"
"Everyone in our group is, as far as I know," Brennan said. She hesitated.
"What about Sol – uh, Erin?" he asked. "Is she downstairs?"
Again, she hesitated. Diggs took a step closer. He was an attractive man, as Angela had said – as tall as Booth, and nearly as well-built, with curly brown hair that, she suspected, grew significantly lighter in the summer sun. His brown eyes took in her trepidation, darkening with concern.
"You don't know where she is?" he guessed, before she'd said a word.
"She said she had to make some telephone calls. I told her that Booth wanted us to say together, but she was very insistent."
A look of annoyance flashed across his face. "Trust me, I know – short of handcuffing her, you wouldn't have been able to keep her in one place if she didn't want to be there. But you don't know where she went?"
"She said the reception was best outside."
His concern was clearly growing – understandably so, Brennan thought. "How long ago?"
Brennan checked her watch. It was nearly four o'clock. "Thirty minutes or so. We were searching the kitchen."
"Dammit." He frowned, and turned to Cam. "You think the kids will be okay? I should go look for her."
Cam flashed a look at Brennan, who nodded. "We've got them covered," Cam said. "Do you need some help looking for her?"
"Not yet – let me just take a quick look around. She gets cagey sometimes, but I'm sure she's not far."
"Let us know if you need a hand," Cam said, but Diggs was already out the door.
Which left Brennan and Cam, with five expectant young faces looking into theirs.
"So, Booth said it's okay for us to leave them?" Cam asked doubtfully.
"We'll just be down the hall," Brennan reassured her.
The blonde boy in the group was watching Brennan. He sat slightly apart from the others, with an air that seemed much older than his years. When their eyes met, Brennan recalled where she had seen him before. She thought of the look on Booth's face when he had come for them moments before; of his intensity when he had questioned Zoe about the family living on the third floor. The presence of this boy and his brother from the previous summer went a long way in explaining his attitude.
Brennan smiled at the boy." "We've met before, haven't we?" she asked.
He nodded, though he had yet to speak.
"My partner told you to stay here? To wait for him to return?"
Again, a nod.
"Okay. That's what you should do, then. He'll be here in a few minutes, and then we'll all go downstairs and get something to eat." She looked at Cam, hoping to get an indication that this seemed like a reasonable plan. Cam nodded gamely.
"Yes – Absolutely. You guys stay here," Cam said. "Play one more round of your game, and then we're all gonna go downstairs and see what Zoe's cooked up. And we'll just be down the hall, if you need us."
"I want to see my mom," a small brunette girl said. Her voice quavered, precariously close to tears.
"You can – you just have ten minutes, sweetie. Tops," Cam promised her. "I just want to get the final okay, and then the big guy who was here before will come back. You remember him?"
Brennan looked at her curiously. The children nodded.
"Tripp," the little girl said, smiling at the name. "He's coming back?"
"He's coming back," Cam promised. "And he'll take you guys downstairs. And all your moms and dads will be there, and we'll go back to having a normal day. Deal?"
They all nodded. Once it was clear that everyone was all right with the arrangement, Cam and Brennan left the room and started down the hall.
"Thank God for Tripp, is all I can say," Cam said.
"He was helpful?" Brennan asked.
"He's amazing. Kids just love him – he turned the whole thing into a game. If it had been me, I would have freaked them all out and there would have been a mini-revolt."
"He does have a very reassuring way about him," she agreed. "Booth's like that, as well."
"Yeah – Seeley's great with kids. But you're no slouch yourself. You're a lot better with them than I am."
Brennan turned to her in surprise. "You really think so?"
"Oh God, yes," Cam said. "You and Booth will be great at that whole parenting thing. A little neurotic, maybe, but what parent isn't?"
Brennan considered this for a moment with a smile, before she pulled herself back to the issue at hand.
"Booth said the blood was to the left of room 2G," she said. "That should be the next door down."
Cam nodded seriously, with what sounded like a relieved sigh. "Right. Blood. Carnage. Crime scene. The things I do best."
Brennan surveyed the corridor, taking note that the door to room 2G was standing slightly ajar, while all of the other doors in the hallway were tightly closed. She pulled plastic booties and latex gloves from her kit, procuring a pair for herself and handing another set to Cam before they went any further. While she was pulling on her booties, she noted that an oil painting of an ocean scene had been knocked askew, two or three feet to the left of room 2G.
She picked her steps carefully on the wooden floorboards, doing her best not to disturb any trace evidence that might have been left by the perpetrator or the victim. She had just reached the section of wallpaper where the blood spatter had been left when a door opened behind her, on the opposite side of the corridor.
"Psst."
She and Cam turned to find a small, elderly man with glasses peering out, his door cracked just slightly.
"Are you for or against us?" he asked, in a loud whisper.
Cam looked at her. She shrugged. "We're with the police," Brennan said.
"But are you for or against us?" he persisted, his tone more urgent.
Cam hesitated. "If those are our only choice, I'm gonna go with for." She smiled pleasantly. "What's your name, sir?"
He opened the door a bit wider, looking up and down the corridor before he answered. "Jack Tolliver. Esquire. I took a class, got myself a certificate in the mail. Twenty-nine ninety-nine. A friend of mine's still paying for his idiot son – and he went to school thirty years ago. It's started, hasn't it?"
Brennan was baffled, trying to follow the old man's logic. "What's started?"
The insurrection," he said, lowering his voice once more. "The fight between the dead and the living. They're trying to pull us over to their side, you know. I can feel it."
Cam's eyebrows climbed higher up her forehead. "Well, we're definitely not for that. We didn't actually get the memo on an insurrection – we're just here working on a case."
"I saw a dead man attack, not an hour ago," he said seriously. "A skeleton with gleaming body armor beat a man until he fell down dead, right over there. How do you explain that?"
"That is a tough one," Cam said dryly.
"What's he talking about?" Brennan whispered.
Cam ignored her. "Mr. Tolliver, we're just going to be next door here, trying to get some more information on this… Zombie attack – "
"Not a zombie!" he interrupted, incensed. "A skeleton. A reanimated skeleton of pure silver."
Brennan grabbed Cam's arm excitedly. "He means the Gormogon skeleton." She addressed the man directly. "Was this skeleton all silver? Or did you see bone, as well?"
"It happened very quickly – that's the way they move, you know," he said seriously. "Reanimated skeletons with the reflexes, speed, and strength of a supernatural Lance Armstrong."
"Well, that must have been terrifying," Cam said evenly. "Why don't you go inside your room and, if you don't mind, just write up a description of what happened. It could be very helpful to the case."
"Of course. You'll come back for it later?"
"Oh, definitely. You can count on us."
"Amor fagdat superiorum," he said. "That's Latin for, 'The Living Shall Prevail.'"
"No, it isn't," Brennan said. "It isn't Latin for anything. Amor means – "
Cam touched her arm, leveling a gaze at her. "We'll be back later, Mr. Tolliver. Thank you for all your help."
Brennan watched, dismayed, as the odd little man returned to his lair. She listened as locks clicked into place, then turned to Cam.
"He saw the Gormogon skeleton."
"I think you're right."
"Well, then, why aren't we questioning him? He's the only solid lead we've gotten thus far."
"And he's not going anywhere," Cam said. "Let's get the crime scene processed, and then we can let Seeley question the crazy old man while we do what we do best. Fair enough?"
Brennan considered protesting further, but had to admit the plan was sound. She nodded.
"See, this is why I have to keep an eye on you two every second," Booth said, from behind them. Brennan turned to find he, Zack, and Hodgins ascending the staircase. "Leave you alone for a couple minutes, and you end up hanging out in the halls, gossiping like a couple of old women."
"We were just questioning a witness," Brennan said, aware by the tone and the smirk and the fact that this was, after all, Booth, that he was teasing her. It was something he never seemed to tire of.
"Find out anything interesting?" he asked.
"Aside from the fact that there's apparently a war waging between us and the undead…?" Cam asked.
"Please," Hodgins scoffed. "Like that's news."
"Anything else?" Booth pressed.
"Mr. Tolliver said he saw the Gormogon skeleton," Brennan said. "That's what he said – he described a skeleton of silver."
"And Mr. Tolliver also said that that skeleton of silver moved like the ghost of Lance Armstrong," Cam added dryly. "So, we're not stopping the presses on this just yet."
"Still," Booth said, "The silver skeleton thing can't be a coincidence. I'll have a talk with him, see what he has to say." He looked at Cam, more serious now, and nodded his head toward the other end of the hallway. "How're the kids? Everybody okay?"
"They're a little shaken up," Cam said. "And they want to see their parents. I told them you'd come talk to them, and then Tripp would come bring them down for dinner." She lowered her voice. "I'm assuming there's something going on with one of the parents?"
"Those boys," Brennan interjected. "They were from the medical clinic we volunteered at last summer – during the Outward Bound course."
Booth nodded, his gaze focused on her now. "Their mom died – they're staying here with their father."
She was silent for a moment, remembering the defeated woman she had met less than a year before, her body covered in bruises.
"That's why you asked Zoe to get the police?" she asked. "For the boys?"
Booth's jaw tightened. "There's no way in hell I'm letting them go with him. Not again. He's done."
"I don't know if it's that simple," Cam began.
"Well, I'm making it that simple," he said shortly. It was his end-of-discussion voice; Brennan recognized it from a thousand conversations with him in the past. She knew better than to try and reason with him now – though, in her opinion, his decision was the best one for the boys in this case.
Cam nodded. "All righty then. So… You want to take care of them, while we process the scene?"
"Yeah. But first," he nodded toward the wall. "I wanted you to take a look at this. The blood didn't look right to me."
"What do you mean, didn't look right? As in, not really blood?" Brennan asked.
"No – it's definitely blood. But I didn't see a bullet hole – not on this wall, and not on the one across the hall. If somebody was shot, the bullet had to go somewhere, right? If there'd been no exit wound, there wouldn't be all this spatter."
Cam raised an eyebrow at him. "Wow – somebody's been doing his homework. You keep this up, and you're gonna put us out of work."
"Just doin' my job, Camille. You guys forget I'm more than just a pretty face." Brennan raised an eyebrow at him, and he shrugged. "And Bones taught me a bunch of this blood spatter stuff last week."
"I figured," Cam said.
The pathologist pulled on her latex gloves and began examining the area, moving as carefully as possible in order to minimize her impact on the crime scene. Brennan did likewise, moving closer to the wall. The blood spatter was approximately 170 centimeters off the ground, with the largest drops measuring more than two millimeters in diameter. She and Cam looked at one another at the same time, but Hodgins was the one who spoke the words.
"Booth is right – there is something weird. That blood didn't come from a gunshot."
Booth looked at them. "What do you mean, it's not from a gunshot? What the hell else would it be from? Everybody said the gunshot came from right here, right?"
"It did," Cam said quickly. "Trust me – I know a gunshot when I hear one. Especially when it's just down the hall. But see the drops here? They're too big, and there are too few of them."
"Whoever it was, they were hit with something," Hodgins said. "Something big, by the look of it. Maybe a bat, or a club."
"Not somebody's fist?"
Zack shook his head. "There's too much blood for that, and the drops are the wrong size and shape for what you'd typically see in a hand-to-hand assault."
"So, what the hell happened?"
Brennan pushed the door to 2G open wider, conducting a cursory examination of the space before she'd set foot inside the room. It was similar to the others she'd seen in the hotel: private bath, four-poster double bed, fireplace, desk and chair. The chair had been overturned, and was lying a few feet from the bed.
"There's some blood on the windowsill," Booth told her.
Hodgins knelt just inside the doorway, examining what appeared to be imprints of a boot tread on the carpet. Booth picked his way carefully to the fireplace and knelt down, putting his hand in the ashes.
"You'd think Zoe would make sure all the fireplaces were cleaned out between guests, wouldn't you, Bones?"
She barely registered the words, intent on her own objectives. She opened the window and peered outside, blinking against harsh winds and snow that limited her visibility to just a few feet. To the left of the window, a rope ladder hung suspended from a window in the room above.
"Have you checked for a blood trail outside?" she asked Booth.
"Yeah. It's snowing like a son of a bitch out there, though – anything that might've been there is gone now."
He went and carefully picked up the desk chair, examining scuff marks on the floor to determine where it had been before it had fallen. When he set it back upright, he'd arranged it just a foot or so from the side of the bed.
"Does this seem like a weird place for a chair, Bones? You'd think it would just be with the desk – that's the way the set up is in all the other rooms."
"It wouldn't be, if someone was on the bed," she noted. She went to the bed. "There are indentations, and the bedcovers are rumpled – as though someone was sitting here, as well. Zoe was certain no one was staying in this room?"
"As far as she knew, 2G's been empty for the past couple of months," Booth confirmed. He came over and did his own examination, pausing at the foot of the bed. "What's that look like to you?"
She leaned closer. "Dirt."
Booth nodded. She studied the impressions in the bedclothes, her brow furrowed as she processed what she was seeing.
"Someone was sitting on the bed with their shoes, on, their back against the headboard."
Booth began examining the bedposts. She came over and stood beside him, peering over his shoulder. He turned with a little smile, an eyebrow raised.
"Did you want to do this?" he asked.
"No, you're doing fine."
He didn't say anything, but neither did he make any move to continue.
"You want me to move back," she guessed.
"Just an inch or two, Bones. Crime scene investigation isn't a contact sport, you know."
She backed off. "What do you think happened?"
He pointed to a series of scratches on the left bedpost. "I think either this room's been used recently for a little recreational bondage, or somebody was being held here."
"But Cam said she heard someone arguing in the hallway. And they fled through the window. Why would they start here, go into the hall, and then come back and escape through the window? Why leave the room at all?"
Hodgins, Zack, and Cam all gathered in the doorway, listening. Booth licked his lips and scratched his neck – tics she'd observed when he was buying time, before he gave voice to a theory. She waited for him to work out the details, thinking the scenario over herself at the same time.
"Let's say we've got somebody right here – " Booth went to the chair and sat back down. He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back. "He gets a little sleepy, maybe nods off. And then you've got guy number two – our vic – sitting up in bed, hands tied to the bedposts, just waiting for his shot to get away."
"He gets loose," Brennan picked up where he'd left off. "And makes a run for it."
"But he doesn't get far," Booth continued, "before our bad guy wakes up. He pushes the chair back, knocks it over, and gets across the room just as his prisoner gets out the door. There's a struggle. The gun goes off…"
"But no one was shot," Brennan reminded him. "We don't even have a bullet hole."
Booth went to the doorway and stood there for a moment, just inside the room. "Maybe he doesn't want to shoot the guy, though – he just wants to scare him. So, he doesn't fire at our guy. He fires…" He looked up, scanning the ceiling. Brennan followed his gaze.
"Into the ceiling," she said. Sure enough, there was a neat round hole in the ceiling, just inside the door.
"So," Booth said, "he stands here. Fires a warning shot…" He held up his hand and mimed shooting a gun. "But that doesn't stop our vic – so he has to resort to actually attacking the guy."
"Which means he'd have to put the gun away, come up with something bigger to hit him with, come around on the other side of the vic," Cam said, "and hit him with enough force to cause that kind of spatter pattern. All in the time it took for us to hear the shot and for Tripp to go out after the shooter."
"It's highly unlikely," Brennan agreed. "Between the time the shot was fired and the time the physical injury was inflicted on the victim, he would have had to completely alter both his center of gravity and his trajectory."
The group stood there in silence for several seconds, considering this.
"Unless he wasn't alone," Zack said. Brennan looked at him in surprise. Booth looked physically pained at the implication of what Zack had suggested.
"What do you mean?"
"If someone was waiting for him in the corridor, they may have caught him off guard and been able to strike a blow that would account for this type of splatter pattern," Zack explained.
"That would make the most sense," Brennan agreed reluctantly.
"So, what about your witness's story – that the Gormogon skeleton was out here?" Booth asked.
"And that it attacked somebody?" Cam asked, her skepticism plain. "Sorry, Seeley, but that's a little too Night of the Living Dead for me."
"Could being struck with an object made of silver have carried enough force to create that spatter pattern?" Brennan asked. "Something the size and shape of a human bone, for example."
"Just so we're clear, we're still talking about a human skeleton attacking somebody?" Cam said.
"Or someone using a human skeleton to attack someone," Brennan corrected her.
Booth looked at her in surprise, a smile touching his lips. "Is she right?" he asked Zack. "You take a femur made of silver, maybe – that'd be as good as a baseball bat, right?"
Zack and Hodgins looked at one another. "I couldn't say for certain without simulating the attack in a controlled environment," Zack said.
"Yeah, well, this is as controlled as it's gonna get," Booth said. "Guesstimate, remember? What do you think?"
With great reluctance, Zack finally nodded. "Theoretically, yes. I could do some calculations, but… Yes. If someone were standing here with the skeleton, and they used one of the bones of silver as a weapon…"
"So, there you go," Booth said quickly. "One vic, one Gorgonzola skeleton, and two perps clubbing people with silver leg bones. That's what we're lookin' for."
He began walking down the hall toward the children's room, calling back over his shoulder as he went.
"You guys see what you can do here to find out anything else. I'm gonna talk to the kids, and then see if we can round up some suspects and start getting a few questions answered."
Hodgins was already at work photographing boot prints and gathering samples of trace evidence. Zack looked at Brennan questioningly.
"Do you want me to go back to my room?"
"No – of course not, Zack," she said. "You're here to assist. I'd like you to work with Angela to recreate the circumstances of the attack. We should be able to tell a great deal from the evidence we have here; I want to know the size of our victim, the extent of his injuries, and – if it was, in fact, one of the Gormogon bones that was used – which bone would have inflicted the damage."
Zack hesitated for another moment.
"What's on your mind, Zack?" Cam prompted him.
"Gormogon's Apprentice would never have done this," he said. "The Gormogon skeleton is a sacred object – whoever is doing this has been carrying it around as though it was nothing more than…"
"A bag of bones?" Cam suggested.
"Precisely. And then to attack someone with it? This isn't typically my area – these aren't facts, I know that. This is just a feeling."
"But it's a feeling based on something you've spent a whole lot of time thinking about, I'm guessing," Cam said. "We'll keep it in mind, Zack. I think you're probably onto something."
He nodded. A few moments passed before he looked at Brennan, a look very much like pleading in his eyes.
"You still want me to work on the science, right? Gathering the evidence, creating scenarios based on that evidence?"
It was the reason she had been drawn to Zack in the first place, Brennan realized suddenly. That need to make sense of the world using empirical data and incontrovertible facts. He drew as much comfort from these things as she did. She nodded, resting a hand on his arm.
"Yes, Zack. Please. I'll check your work later."
He sighed. Immediately, as though no time had passed between now and those days when he was her prize student at the Jeffersonian, he set to work.
