Disclaimer: I own neither Angel or anything associated with him, and "Bones" is equally out of my reach control-wise
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Angel of the Bones
As he walked through the hospital ward with Bones and Angela, booth wished that they could do this somewhere else; even without the unfair nature of the circumstances that had brought them here- society should be past the point where kids faced death from disease-, he never felt comfortable in these situations...
"Uh... Agent Booth?" Angela asked, even as they continued walking down the corridor.
"Yes, Angela?" Booth replied, already knowing that he wasn't going to like whatever she had to say to him; she never called him 'Agent Booth' when things were doing well.
"This is the paediatric cancer floor of the hospital," the forensic artist said.
"Yeah," Booth confirmed, wishing that she hadn't just said it like that.
After so long dealing with people getting killed by demons, facing death by ritual sacrifice, or variations of the above, the idea of people dying of natural causes was one aspect of humanity that he still had trouble with, probably because he'd had so little contact with it as Angel (Marcus's death by heart attack didn't count- after everything that bastard had done to innocent men to relive his own youth, his heart condition could have been considered just payback rather than simple time catching up with him-, and even when Joyce had died he'd only learned what had killed her second-hand, and there was always the possibility- even if he never liked to consider it- that Dawn's existence had contributed to her condition).
"Right," Angela said, briefly indicating her bag. "Well, uh, what I'm about to show Deputy Director Cullen is kinda gruesome."
"Why are we meeting Cullen here?" Bones asked, glancing up from the papers she'd been studying in a file.
"Because he's the deputy director of the FBI and this is where he wants us to show it to him," Booth said, only to be met with stares from the two women that made it clear they weren't going to accept that as the sole response.
"OK, listen," he said, looking awkwardly at them and hoping that Bones wouldn't over-analyse what he was about to tell her. "About a month ago his daughter Amy was diagnosed with cancer. Meso..."
"Mesothelioma," Bones clarified as they walked around a corner. "Lung cancer."
"Exactly," Booth said grimly. "So she's not doing so well, so it's a lot easier for us to come to him right now."
"Huh," Bones muttered, apparently to herself.
"Huh, what?" Booth asked, looking sharply over at Bones; he recognised that tone of voice, and it was not one he wanted to hear in this kind of situation.
"Nothing," Bones said. "It's just that's an extremely rare form of lung cancer; odd for someone Amy's age to contract-"
"No, no, no," Booth said, turning sharply around to hold up a firm hand to stop the anthropologist going any further. "No probing, OK? Not to Cullen, not to his family. This will take five minutes; we go in, do the show and tell relating to the case and then we're out of there. Is that clear?"
"I just think it's peculiar-" Bones began.
"No," Booth said firmly.
"But I-" Bones protested.
"No," Booth interjected (Why was it she still couldn't take a hint at times like this?).
"You have to admit-" Bones tried to say.
"Booth," Cullen's voice said, his tone clear as Booth turned to face his superior, dressed for once in a more casual woollen top rather than his usual suits. "Doctor Brennan. How appropriate, you two bickering in an adolescent wing."
"Uh, sir, yes," Booth said awkwardly; hopefully Cullen didn't know just what they had been arguing about. "Um, is it OK if we come in, sir?"
"What do you think, sweetheart?" Cullen asked, calling back into the room to the young dark-haired girl sitting up in bed, sketching away.
"Booth's cool," the girl replied with a warm smile despite her condition. "Most of the time."
"You heard the lady," Cullen said, looking at Booth with a slightly resigned expression. "You're cool."
Somehow, even Bones's implied disbelief of that assessment didn't tarnish Booth's good feelings about that description of himself; after Dawn had mainly seemed to be impressed by him because of the 'vampire-fighting-his-instincts' angle of his existence, it was nice to hear that he could still be 'cool' to kids who only knew him as a human rather than anything else...
Then he reminded himself where they were, and chided himself for thinking about something like that in a hospital where children were dying.
God, he just wanted to be out of here and back to dealing with a killer that he could pummel into unconsciousness without being accused of police brutality...
"Your daughter's cancer originated in the bone graft," Bones explained, looking solemnly at Cullen as they stood in his office, Booth for once standing behind his superior's desk while Cullen himself paced around the office, clearly struggling to process the news they'd just revealed to him. "The test confirms it."
"It was the operation?" Cullen asked, looking in slight-but-significant shock at the two of them.
"Not only was the bone contaminated by malignancy, it was significantly older than documented," Bones continued (Booth wondered if her just talking about it like that was her way of coping; he knew that she wasn't insensitive to the whole experience).
"It-it was... expired or something?" Cullen asked, looking between them in confusion.
"No, sir," Booth clarified. "It just came from a much older donor."
"Someone in their sixties," Bones confirmed.
"Hospital error," Cullen said, letting out a brief sarcastic laugh.
"The next step would be to find out where the graft came from and how it slipped through the system," Booth said; he didn't understand most of what he'd learned from the squint squad about bone grafts, but judging by the squints' response to their discovery, he could be fairly sure something like this would have to be the result of far more than a filing mistake.
"This is not FBI jurisdiction," Cullen said, looking between them both as though trying to find something.
"It's a question of justice," Booth said grimly.
"Does this, in any way, change my daughter's prognosis?" Cullen asked, a slight tremor the only indication that what they were discussing was personally affecting him.
"No," Bones said, after a moment's pause.
"So she's still gonna die of this cancer?" Cullen said, the pain in his eyes one that Booth hoped he'd never have to experience himself; even when he had seen Connor die at Gunn's hands in Hell, he'd had hope that he could do something to the cause of Connor's death even before he and Wesley had figured out how they could reverse it...
"Barring spontaneous remission... the likelihood is... significant," Bones replied after an uncertain pause; she might not always get why people felt the way they did, but she clearly wished that she could provide him with a better answer.
"The FBI's not my personal police force," Cullen said, looking down for a moment before he continued talking, his expression tight as though fighting to maintain control of it. "I appreciate what you discovered. Call Charlie Hammond, CDC, tell him what happened...he'll continue the investigation."
"My team can still-" Bones began as Cullen turned to leave.
"We'll notify CDC right away," Booth said, cutting Bones off; Cullen's trembling tone of voice towards the end made it clear that he wouldn't appreciate further discussion on this topic right now.
He might still be convinced that there was something more going on here than a simple mistake with inappropriate bone marrow, but they weren't going to get anywhere arguing with Cullen when he was trying to maintain some professional control.
Right now, he'd just have to take a few vacation days to find out more about this situation and allow the selfish part of himself to hope that he'd get those days back when they found what they were looking for.
As he walked into the coffin display area, Booth tried to restrain the urge to shudder; vampire stereotypes aside, coffins never failed to make him uncomfortable, ever since he'd dug his way out of his own one when he was Angelus.
As he'd told David's client during that whole mess with the memorial stone, he'd spent enough time in that one to know that he didn't want to go back; those things might look comfortable, but there was no way it could ever be comfortable if you had to lie in one while you were still alive.
"What's this place?" he asked, looking around at the various coffins in shades of grey, white, brown or black (What was the point in having a different colour of coffin; other people saw the things once and the 'user' generally never saw it themselves).
"Casket showroom," Bones responded. "They're having a sale."
"Well, it looks like a sick department store," Booth said, looking around the room briefly before turning to lead his partner out. "Alright, nobody would be cutting anybody up in this place; let's go."
"Whoa," Bones said, pointing at the other end of the room. "Wait; over there."
"What?" Booth asked, following the finger to where it pointed at the small grey thing sticking out of the wall at the other end. "It's a water line; what's the big deal?"
"But the floor slopes towards the centre of the room," Bones explained, looking around the room as she continued to speak. "This wasn't always used for a showroom. I wonder what's under the carpet... If body work was done in here," she explained, taking out a pocket knife and crouching down to cut out a piece of the carpet, "they'd need a drain."
"You're kidding me," Booth said, examining the familiar sight underneath the piece of carpet Bones had just cut away. "It's a drain?"
"This is our sales office," Martin the funeral director said, walking into the room behind them with an indignant glare. "There is nothing in here you need to see. The only thing in this room is caskets."
"I'm not so sure about that," Bones said, looking up at him briefly before walking off towards an air vent in an upper part of the room.
"No, what..." Martin asked, still glaring at her with the frustration of a man- in Booth's experience- who was trying too hard to convince people that he'd done nothing. "You are making a mistake."
"Am I?" Bones asked, closing a casket and climbing up on top of it to look at the vent more closely.
"She's ruining my merchandise," Martin protested.
"Come on, how much is that one?" Booth asked, indicating the coffin with a smile; how much could anyone charge for this kind of thing-?
"Seven thousand dollars," Martin replied.
"Bones, watch the scuff marks," Booth said, privately wondering why anyone would pay that much for a coffin; he'd heard of dying in comfort, and could understand people wanting to ensure that their loved ones' last days were relaxing, but where was the point in spending that much money on something that would probably get cremated or just left in the earth to rot?
"Mr. Martin, this room is designed to be washed clean," Bones explained, turning to face them as she indicated the room around them. "You've got drains in the floor. I think this is where you did the bone harvesting. When you thought we were coming back, you moved everything around."
"That's absurd; I did no such thing," Martin said, as Bones grabbed a mask and swab from her bag before resuming her work.
"You're an excellent house cleaner, but in the carpeting and tidying up, you forgot about one thing," she said, opening the air vent and swabbing the inside before she examined the result. "Bone dust. You forgot about airborne particles."
Jackpot, Booth thought to himself, smiling in satisfaction at the awkward look on Martin's face.
They might not have a confession from the guy yet, but they sure as hell had enough to bring him in for questioning (Although why someone who sold merchandise worth that much felt that he needed more money Booth didn't get; what was wrong with just being comfortable rather than opulent?)...
As he sat opposite Martin in the interrogation room, Booth wondered how Cullen was coping with this situation; the fact that he was actually watching the interrogation said a great deal about the kind of personal investment he had in this case, but it couldn't exactly be easy to be so certain that they were facing the person who'd essentially killed his daughter.
Even if Martin hadn't played as direct a role in Amy's potentially imminent death as Holtz had played in Connor's corruption, it still wasn't something that it was really easy to accept...
"How much money have you made over the years doing this, Nick?" he asked, glaring at the man before him; even if he hadn't been performing the operations, the man had still provided the bodies that had caused this problem in the first place, to say nothing of the operating theatre where the samples had been taken. "Tens... oh, hundreds of thousands of dollars."
"I don't know what you're talking about," Martin replied (Why this guy thought that would work after everything they'd discovered so far Booth had no idea; there was no way anyone could perform those kind of operations in his building without him knowing it unless he was so thick he made Cordelia and Xander at their worst look like MENSA candidates).
"William Hastings had an aggressive form of cancer that was very rare," Booth said, taking care to maintain physical control even as he allowed his voice to reveal his anger at the other man's actions. "You made some pocket change off his grafts, you didn't even tell his wife. Now a bunch of people are sick; two died. You're looking at multiple counts of murder."
"I didn't kill anybody," Martin replied.
"No, no, you didn't kill anybody," Booth admitted, even as the contempt in his voice remained; trying to cut corners to make money in such a risky manner might not be illegal in itself, but it wasn't exactly reassuring for the families that had trusted this guy to show some respect to their loved ones. "I mean, they were already dead; you were just recycling."
"I didn't do anything wrong," Martin said, his voice still frustratingly 'in control' for someone in his position even if they were definitely getting him on-edge with their current line of questioning.
"Do you have any doctor training?" Booth asked; maybe the change of topic would put the guy off-balance enough to make a mistake.
"No," Martin replied.
"Spend any time in the service as a medic or a nurse?" Booth continued.
"No," Martin replied again.
"No?" Booth repeated, indicating the file in his hands as he continued to speak. "Then who did the cutting? Who did the cutting of the grafts, huh? Somebody knew what they were doing. Your phone records show that during the months around Hastings' death you received dozens of calls from disposable cells. Four different ones, huh? What do you make of that?" he concluded, slamming the file down onto the table.
"I don't recall this," Martin said, looking at the file with a dismissive angle that only increased Booth's anger towards the man; even with the evidence piling up, he was still desperately lying like a child trying to get himself out of trouble, simply denying everything rather than trying to present any kind of cover story...
"You know what?" Booth said, glaring at the man as he leaned over the table. "The dust that we got off the vent in your showroom matched Hastings and seven other bodies. Who do you work with?"
"I don't know what you're talking about," Martin replied.
"I think you do," Booth said, glaring coldly at the man who continued to deny his role in the deaths of innocent people simply because he'd wanted to make some quick money. "I think you and your partners knew that the bones were cancerous, and you didn't-"
"Who was it, huh?" Cullen said, the door slamming open as he walked into the room, glaring at Martin. "Who the hell did this to my daughter?"
Before Booth or Martin could say anything, Cullen had picked Martin up and slammed him against the wall, control a forgotten thing as he roared his further requests for the identity of the person who'd torn his family apart...
Even as Booth struggled to get Cullen to move away before he did something he'd regret later, he knew all too well what kind of pain was motivating the other man; hadn't he done the same thing to Wesley when he'd abducted Connor?
He might have confidence that they'd find this bastard's partner eventually, but what good would that do Cullen when he and his wife would still lose their daughter at the end of it all?