Breaking Away

Author's note: Let me take this opportunity to do a bit of my own breaking away from form.

oOo

The nights here were darker than any he had known in recent memory, the days cast in shadows from the light in the passageway between cells.

This was the oldest part of the jail, the names of prisoners scraped into the walls marking hundreds of occupants over the years. If Bones were here with her magic light she'd probably give him a run-down of the other things covering the walls.

Bones.

She had to be upset to have her phone calls turned away, her visit cancelled. He wasn't sure that he would have changed what happened, could have changed what happened, but he sure as hell would have tried to give her fair warning before he'd elbowed his way into ground zero and took down the goons harassing the accountant.

Hell, he wasn't even sure the man was an accountant. The man just looked scared and he hated that the bullies had been out in full force making a bad situation only worse.

He sighed heavily, the sound of his breath dying in the gloom. The up side to all this? If there was an up side, it was that he got 7 days to heal a bit more before being released back in with the mix. Seven days without a target on his back. Seven days to exercise and get back some more of his strength.

Seven days to miss his wife and kids.

Again he sighed.

Somehow he knew Bones was getting the worst of this. She'd done a miraculous job already of getting information to him, making sure he had photos of Christine and Parker and news of progress on his case. But he couldn't be too sure of how much cooperation she was getting beyond that. The lawyer's messages hadn't been too encouraging.

He swallowed the next sigh. It wouldn't do to get lost in self-pity.

Maybe that super-sized brain of hers was thinking of a way to break him out of jail. Something big with helicopters and a shifty accomplice named Squeaky and enough explosives to blow a hole through the walls and the FBI's story on him.

Sitting up from the unforgiving slab that was his bed, he stood and began to stretch his muscles. Temperance Brennan was probably thinking of a far better escape. His only release was an hour in the yard daily and a phone call to his lawyer every other day.

He just hoped that whatever Bones concocted for breaking away from this place would set the story straight and help clean up his FBI.

oOo

Through the janitor's closet and down the stairs, he paused a moment to listen before finishing the last leg of the trip, veering right toward the small supply closet. Producing a key, he unlocked the door and stepped inside.

Whatever supplies had once been stored there had long since been removed and all that remained were a few empty wooden crates and a pile of thin cardboard trays holding display lettering. He pulled up one of the crates to sit on, checked his watch and waited.

If there hadn't been a small window just above the wooden shelving, he might have been tempted to leave the door open, or wait outside. But he concentrated on the window, concentrated on the square of sunlight, and tried to tamp down the anxiety.

But true to her word, he didn't have long to wait. Three soft knocks announced her arrival and he opened the door for her.

"You didn't have any trouble, Dr. B?" he asked as he shut the door behind her.

"No." She was dressed in the work shirt and pants of one of the maintenance staff, her hair pulled back to accommodate the ball cap and a pair of glasses perched on the bridge of her nose. "You should tell Angela the ID card worked."

He stole a glance at the window before settling back onto his crate. "I was hoping Sweets would meet us, but he must have had a problem breaking away." The psychologist had insisted that they tell Brennan everything, but now that he was facing her alone, he wondered if he could go through with it.

"The next tour group is in ten minutes," she said, checking her watch. "And I need to meet my father and Christine within half an hour." She pulled off the glasses and set them on the table. "He'll worry."

"Yeah, I've got Fisher covering for me in the lab in case Cam or Clark starts looking for me. Ange's dad is in town and she's spending the day with him and Michael Vincent." His best alibi had desperately needed a break from murders and worry. "This is what we've got."

He produced the paper from his shirt pocket and unfolded it on the crate. "Sweets got the names of three people who might have been in McNamara's back pocket. They had access to records and the ability to manipulate evidence or just make it disappear. Ange started looking into. . . ."

But that's as far as he got. Dr. Brennan was pointing to the third name on the list and telling him something he already knew. "He's dead."

"Yeah." Hodgins had witnessed Brennan's mental gymnastics over the years, but she could still surprise him. "Yeah, he is."

"The official cause of death involved injuries consistent with a car accident, but I think that if the case were re-opened, the cause of death would be something different, perhaps injuries from a beating."

Again, she knew far more than he did. "Did Max give you that?"

Now he had her. "My father?"

It wasn't that he didn't think she had a right to know how they came by the information, it was just that he didn't want to add to her burdens. Every day seemed to dawn to some new obstacle, some new problem and she was more than a bit frayed. "Yeah, your dad gave the paper to Sweets." He outlined how Sweets got the paper and the research he'd done, but that crease between her eyebrows seemed a permanent fixture. "The other two names are equally interesting."

He pointed to the top name. "This person's a clerk for the District Court. Worked there for more than 17 years, but disappeared a few weeks ago. She would have had access to all court documents." There was something more he thought she should know. "She accessed the records in the Kessler trial."

"Recently?"

"No. They were paper records that were never converted to digital. Sweets had to dig to get to them."

She had become still as if all her energies were going into understanding how his bits of information fit into the bigger picture.

"This is the most interesting of all." If truth be told, this was the best mystery of the bunch with at least a dozen different scenarios he could sketch out for her. "This person doesn't exist."

That had her attention. "According to the records, this is an FBI tech who works out of the same building as Booth, but he doesn't exist."

"What does that mean?"

"According to Sweets, his name appears on reports and evidence envelopes and, well, everything. But there are no personnel records for him, no Social Security number, no anything." He leaned back on the crate. "He's a ghost."

There was the Brennan look, the slight tilt of her head, the ever-so-minor twitch at the corner of her mouth betraying what he had come to know—and love—about working with her. She instantly saw a connection. Knowing her, she'd seen something more.

"We need to know which files this ghost signed off on."

And there it was another one of those obstacles. "Sweets was supposed to check on that." He checked his watch. "He was supposed to be here."

She stood up quickly. "I have to go."

He handed the list to her and she carefully folded it and pocketed it before retrieving the glasses. "Let me go first and make sure the room's clear."

She nodded and he stepped out of the closed-in space, checked that they were alone before giving her the signal and watching as she made her way through the storage chests and toward the stairs up to the main building.

oOo

It hadn't taken him long to figure out the best way of breaking away was also the simplest.

He wasn't an acrobat and certainly couldn't break through the window of the condo and slide down the drainpipe. There were no ledges and with at least 20 feet to the ground, he'd probably break a leg or split open his head. Tunneling through to the other condo was taking too long and frankly, the tool he was using—a forgotten butter knife—was proving too flimsy for the task.

Then there was that damned ankle monitor. It hadn't taken him long to figure out that if the marshals could keep tabs on him, so could the people who'd let him be imprisoned all those years. He could remove the bracelet, but that was only half the problem; the alarm box was the other half. When the thing went off, the sound could positively wake the dead.

No.

A thirty-mile trek to the Jeffersonian with the hopes of talking to Temperance Brennan was iffy at best. He didn't doubt he could walk the distance; he just wasn't sure how long he'd be able to evade the marshals looking for him.

No. Attacking the problem head on wasn't going to work.

The rational thing to do was to shorten the distance.

He'd gotten the idea watching one of those insipid daytime dramas. Mostly he was reading, but Marshal Hernandez had had the thing on for background noise and he'd paused in reading to see a woman in nurse's white talking to someone in a hospital bed.

It wasn't rocket science.

When he was a boy he'd wrangled a day off of school by pretending to be sick. Fever, coughing. A sore throat made more red than was entirely possible by a bit of the red food dye his mother reserved for her red velvet cake and Easter eggs.

He doubted the marshals would be so obliging to bring him some red food dye and believe the color was a natural symptom of some horrible disease he'd contracted. No.

Simple was best.

He experimented with a number of things: the morning oatmeal had the right consistency, the addition of milk—buttermilk—would give him the acid he needed. Kids were probably still making those volcanos—vinegar and baking soda and—again with that red food coloring—a bit of red to produce a prodigious lava flow.

Simple.

Tell Hernandez that the refrigerator stinks—and how could it not with the kinds of leftovers they were stockpiling in there?—and encourage the purchase of some baking soda. Practice a bit with some oatmeal topped with the buttermilk. His heart might not thank him, but it might work.

No. It had to work.

Make them think he was violently ill, play it up as long as he could and see if it didn't get him a ride straight to the hospital and a little closer to the Jeffersonian and freedom.

He almost had to laugh at the idea. Daytime TV was good for something.