Chasing
oOo
"FBI." Father Aldo's eyebrows arched at the three letters. "I'm impressed."
Booth slid his ID back into his pocket and produced Angela's sketch. "I was told you might have seen her."
Aldo looked at him. "No, it's good to see you? How long has it been? Or do all you FBI guys walk around looking like someone shot your dog?"
Booth hesitated, shook his head, then held out his hand. "It's good to see you Father."
"Bartender, FBI Agent Booth," Aldo corrected him. "Bartender. A different calling altogether. Moved by a different kind of spirit."
Booth eyed the man. His hair was longer than it had been in the Army, his demeanor just as disarming in its directness. "I need to get to this girl. It could save her life."
Aldo shifted his eyes from Booth to the paper. It didn't take but a minute, but it seemed like an eternity.
"Breezy." He shrugged. "That's what they call her. She comes by now and then looking to make some honest money."
"How?"
Aldo tilted his head back and frowned. "Recycling."
"Recycling?"
"I give her empty bottles to be recycled with an artist a few blocks away. She turns beer bottles into art."
"Have you seen her lately?"
Aldo gave him a long assessing look, the same kind of look Booth had earned his days as a Ranger. Aldo didn't even look again at the photo. "She came in here the other day, said she needed some money." His eyebrows shot up again. "What I gave her wouldn't get her very far. She wasn't using as far as I could tell."
Booth took the photo and pocketed it. "Any idea where she might go?"
"There's a youth center. . . ."
Booth interrupted him. "That's poison right now. One of the directors of the center was killed. She might know something about it."
He got the same measured response Aldo gave him during his time in the Rangers. "My guess is that she'd want to go somewhere no one else knew of. The glass blower was something between us. No one else knew she went there." He shrugged. "But I'm not certain she's there."
Booth said nothing. Years ago he had put his very soul into this man's hands and now the life of a young girl. Aldo pulled out a coaster and produced a pen. "Callie's a retired school teacher. Has a soft spot for the lost ones. She seemed to like Breezy."
"Jennifer," Booth corrected. He slipped his card on the bar.
"Jennifer," Aldo accepted. He handed him the paper coaster. "I hope you find her."
Booth nodded and headed toward the door.
"Hey, Master Sergeant?" Aldo called out. "You know where I am now. Stop by some time when you aren't working."
oOo
He crawled into bed, morning threatening between the curtains in their bedroom. No matter how hard he tried, exhaustion made him clumsy and his movements woke Brennan.
"What time is it?"
"Too early," he said past the arm shielding his eyes. "I need a couple hours sleep."
Whatever Bones said to him was lost as sleep overtook him. When he did awake, Army training and a catnap in the SUV aside, the clock had already crawled past 8. He followed its slow movements from bed to his jogging clothes and then out the door only pausing long enough to read the note Bones had left him.
The day promised to be warm and sunny, and after stretching out the knots from his abbreviated sleep, he took off at a slow pace down the street.
Jennifer Reade was no where to be found. Callie McIntire hadn't been home and the hour had been far too late to go knocking on the doors of the neighbors. He'd left messages for agents to locate her and bring her in.
His work to find Pelant hadn't been nearly as productive.
Running down the street trying to clear his head, he realized in so many ways he was just running in place.
oOo
"You planning on becoming a maitre'd, cher?"
He hung up the black suit he'd wear that night on the coat rack and turned toward Caroline Julian who had already planted herself in his. Several folders were open on her lap and she was fingering the edge of one of them impatiently.
"Bones has a. . . ."
"Then you just give that woman whatever she wants," Caroline ordered. "She's the only reason that serial case Agent Stefani re-opened is going anywhere."
He didn't want to remind Caroline that it had been Stefani who had insisted on the case seeing new light. "Why are you here?"
"You aren't answering your phone," she complained.
"Oh," he muttered as he retrieved the phone from his coat and switched it on.
Her eyebrows shot up as he positioned himself behind his desk. "The Department of Justice likes that you got some bad cops off the streets, cher, but don't you think we could tie one of them to Darius Mull's murder?"
He held back a sigh. "The cops had every reason to want him dead. He had evidence on them, probably used that to blackmail them." Booth pulled a piece of paper from his pile. "Mull's bank records indicate he wasn't getting rich on doing social work. But he did receive a nice bonus the day he died."
Caroline's highbrows hit a new height when she perused the paper he handed her. "Messed with his plans for a trip to Europe," she mused. "Dying like that." She handed the paper back. "Who do we like for this? The runaway?"
"No. One of the cops put the money in his account to make it look like he was dealing with the gangs. Or that he was doing something crooked. But she didn't do it."
"Then why are we looking for this Jennifer Reade?"
"She's probably the one who held onto the cell phone," Booth said as he filed the paper with the other documents. "Maybe even shot the video of his torture. She's running because she's afraid of what the cops will do to her when they find her. She knows something."
Caroline huffed. "You'd think she'd be a better photographer and give us faces in that video." He felt the heat of her look. "You need to find that girl before a friend of those cops finds her."
oOo
Sitting at the computer or making phone calls, it was the job. Phone calls and questions, computer searches and reports. And knocking on doors. And it all took time even though he had a sense that they were running out of time.
Shaw pulled nothing from Callie McIntire's credit card receipts and the other agents he sent out to canvass her neighbors turned up just as much.
"I can't find Callie McIntire," he said as he entered Angela's office. "She hasn't used a credit card for the past week."
"I can't find her, but you can."
"I'll get on that right away," Angela said as she continued to do exactly what she had been doing when he walked in— organizing something on her computer screen.
"Is this a timeline for Stefani's investigation?"
The faces and dates danced across the screen, taking their place in the line with breakneck speed.
"I can check her phone records," Angela said as the screen shifted again.
"We've done that." The image of the dead women remained with him. "She hasn't used her phone for over a week."
Angela paused and turned toward him. "I need something, Booth. Even Stefani doesn't expect me to pull things out of thin air."
"Art shows," he pronounced. "She does art shows. She works with glass."
Angela smiled and within milliseconds, she was bringing up a list. "Juried or open?"
He shrugged and eyed her.
"High end or plastic canvas Kleenex boxes?"
"This is your thing."
She shrugged and her fingers danced along the tablet. The list she had begun grew longer.
"Stefani's pretty attractive."
It was said with that slightly teasing, slightly provocative way that Angela had and he ignored her.
"What kind of glasswork does she do?"
He just looked at her.
"Chihuly, Tiffany?"
He shrugged.
Hodgins joined them and he began to feel time slipping from him.
"It would help to know what kind of art she does with glass. There's neon, lampworking, stained glass, fused glass, glass blowing. . . ."
"She recycles beer bottles."
"Probably eliminates glass blowing, lampworking or fusing since the coefficient of expansion. . . ."
Booth turned toward Hodgins. "I don't need squinty talk. I just need squinty action."
"It would help to narrow down the kind of artwork she does," Angela reminded him. "Beer bottles could mean mosaics. . . ."
"Or she could be cutting them up for glassware," Hodgins added. "Or wind chimes like we saw at that art show in Westmont."
He stared at the computer screen, the words jockeying for position as his patience faded.
"Jennifer Reade may be with her and she might have information about Darius Mull's murder."
He said the words evenly, but they seemed to have an effect.
Angela's list began to thin out.
"That's good, Ange," Hodgins piped in. "Maybe we can narrow it down geographically."
"East of the Mississippi?"
The list divided, then stabilized and a map popped up on the right side of the screen complete with tags to mark each fair's location.
"I can get you a list of contact numbers," Angela offered. "Most of these don't list individual artists."
"Can you email Shaw?"
A slight pause, then, "She's got it."
He thanked her, then headed toward his second destination.
The office still seemed like a house of horrors, crime scene photos littering the panels with glaring honesty. But Brennan, oblivious to their menace, was seated at her desk, laptop open examining a different kind of horror.
"I missed you this morning."
She looked up. "I was just going over Darius Mull's injuries. The person who did this had to have been someone with upper body strength. Yet, they used insulin to subdue him." She smiled slightly, almost as if embarrassed. "You came in so late last night I thought you needed sleep."
He bent down to kiss her. "Thank you."
"Did you remember. . . ?"
He cut her off. "I got your note. Suit's in my office." He smiled, trying to put her at ease. "I've got Shaw looking for Callie McIntyre." At her look of confusion he explained the connection. "The cops aren't talking and I'm running out of possibilities. The cops did this."
He got that look, the one that told him what she thought of hunches, but rather than a scolding, rather than a reminder of how he couldn't take that into court, he got what Temperance Brennan could sometimes do better than anyone—support.
"You'll catch them, Booth. You will."
But he shot that to hell.
oOo
A/N: Consider Thursday in this neck of the frozen Midwest a heat wave—20 degrees rather than the negative temps. I'm ready for spring.