Paper Locks
oOo
Even later that night
"We need to call Booth and tell him where Pelant is."
Despite the pain in her side and the nascent headache threatening to go full-blown, Brennan stood and pulled the phone from her pocket and began to dial.
"Wait," Father Jon held up his hands. "We can't do that, yet."
Her finger hovered over the send button. "Booth needs this information."
"I don't have a visual confirmation on your Pelant," the priest argued. He paused, looked skyward, then leveled his eyes with hers. "I have a very good idea where he is, but if it's premature we've got soup sandwich. Besides, killing him was not part of this. I was to track him, that's all, not provide Booth with another kill target."
Even though her thoughts seemed to be running through some kind of fog, she understood the implications of the first half of the statement while the second half only confused her. She skewered him with a look.
"I gave myself over to God to serve man," he explained. "Given everything, I'm not sure if I would be serving man or serving up revenge."
She lowered her finger and pocketed the phone. "Booth is a good man. He wants to bring Pelant in."
The priest shook his head. "I hear the Booth of old in his voice, the one who was a cold killing machine."
"You cannot hear if someone is a killer in his voice," she countered. "It is not rational."
"No," he agreed. "Maybe you are right. But I was one of those men, hunting down men like animals. It made me an animal."
"And, believe me, Dr. Brennan, one animal recognizes another."
"If Booth is going to take down Pelant," the priest's voice rose, countering hers, "he's going to have to do it through legal means." He grew more adamant. "I will not simply turn this man over to Booth or anyone simply to have him executed. I've seen men do that, play God and decide another's fate." He touched his collar. "I understand that this Pelant has targeted his team. . . ."
"He's targeted innocent people." Brennan felt her anger rising. "He's murdered people he felt threatened him."
"And Seeley wants him dead." The priest was unmoved. "Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord. I need assurances from Seeley that this Pelant will find his justice in a courtroom rather than from a bullet."
"Booth would not murder Pelant," Brennan said, trying to navigate this newest twist. "Booth will do what is right."
"Yes, I believe he will." Her head thrummed; she had no idea why this conversation had gone so wrong. "I only agreed to help him find Pelant so that he could be brought to justice here on earth."
Confusion reigned supreme. "What other kind of justice is there?"
"Oh, surely you've seen people justifying their actions in the name of what they think is right," Father Jon countered. "I've known Booth for 20-odd years and I've seen what good men do when they believe they are justified. I've come to believe that this is far more personal for Seeley than he has admitted."
The priest was shaking his head, his hands on his hips, another roadblock to finding Pelant.
"Besides, what proof do you have that this Christopher Pelant is responsible for the deaths of these people? I need tangible proof."
She understood that need, fully supported it. But how do you provide proof when the suspect continually erases himself from the crime?
"When Booth can assure me that Pelant will be brought in alive, I will consider my previous offer. When Booth provides proof," the father was relentless, "I will provide the information."
oOo
The phone call came as he watched Christine curled up in her crib sleeping. She'd fussed and pouted and generally protested the absence of her mother and thankfully she had worn herself out and finally fallen asleep. He'd camped in the chair beside her as she clutched her rabbit and his finger, the connection welcome and one he was loathe to relinquish.
"Agent Booth?" The all-too-familiar voice caused his jaw to clench and he became acutely aware of the weight of the Glock he wore in his shoulder holster. "I wanted to express my heartfelt sympathies on the loss of Dr. Brennan."
Had he been able to reach across the wireless distance and strangle the man, he would have, but all he had were words meant to tie the metaphoric noose tighter around his throat.
"I'm done with you, Pelant," he ground out. "I'm done with this."
He heard the intake of breath, then the mocking tone.
"Is it because you know you cannot stop me without Dr. Brennan?" A slight pause. "You became a much better agent when you started working with her." Another pause. "Has Dr. Saroyan been able to find it yet? I really thought she'd find it by now. That's why I thought it best for her to be out of the picture."
"You caused that car to over the side of the road." He didn't have to fake the emotion in his voice. "You sent the signal that shut down the electrical systems."
"I meant for Dr. Saroyan to be driving, Agent Booth. Not Dr. Brennan." Another breath. "I lost a worthy opponent in Dr. Brennan."
"Damn you." His voice grated as he tried not to disturb his daughter. "I am finished, Pelant. I am done."
"No, Agent Booth," Pelant countered. "You aren't done until I say you are done."
As the line went dead, Booth thought, "Oh, I've just begun, you bastard."
oOo
Dr. Lance Sweets left the Jeffersonian with a promise from Dr. Camille Saroyan to look in on her old friend, but heart sore and feeling the weight of his friend's grief as well as his own, he could only lay in bed that night unable to let go of the feeling that he had to do more.
So at the witching hour, unable to sleep, he found himself pouring himself a cup of coffee and pouring over the Arcadia report on his laptop looking for anything that he might be able to dispute.
And found nothing.
The current pathology was consistent with what Arcadia had projected almost to the letter. Booth's anger was understandable and an integral part of the mourning process. The self-pity and the blame were also understandable, but not the sheer depth of either. And the drinking had been key—it was almost as if he were channeling his own father's descent into alcoholism.
Had Booth begun to gamble, he would not be surprised.
Sipping at his coffee, he considered if he had lost his psychology mojo.
Certainly, the worst aspect of all of this was his own selfish thinking. He hadn't even considered examining how Booth or Brennan would react to the loss of the other and here he was out-profiled by a profiler who had never met either of the partners who had laid out an amazingly accurate blueprint for Booth's current behavior.
He wondered if maybe he shouldn't be drinking something stronger than coffee.
oOo
Three days later
Booth opened his door to an agitated Camille Saroyan who took one look at the shoulder holster he wore to breakfast and quipped, "I seem to be underdressed."
Ushering her into his house, she saw the half empty bottle of Glenlivet on the kitchen table and murmured, "It's a little early for me," she said. "I'd much rather have coffee in the morning."
"Is there a reason for this visit?" he asked a bit louder and gruffer than she might expect.
It took her only a moment to adjust. "Sweets was right. You are falling apart."
He huffed and grabbed at the bottle of Scotch and poured himself a glass. He offered her the bottle, but she shook it off. "No, Camille, I'm just getting started on the Irish wake." He downed the amber liquid then set the glass down on the table with a bang. "I plan on being numb for the next several days."
"Numb and dumb," Cam murmured. "Where's Christine?"
He had his hand around the neck of the bottle and was making to pour himself another glass. "Max took her. Daycare. Keeping the routine." He held up the bottle and his glass. "Are you sure you don't want to drink with me?"
"No," she said loudly. "I want you to get some air with me."
"Cam," he began to protest, but he gave in rather easily as she started to push him away from the table and herded him toward the front door.
Once outside it was a full block before she asked, "He's listening?"
"Probably."
"Camera?"
He nodded.
"Takes voyeurism to a whole new level."
By the third block, Cam had had enough and stopped him on the sidewalk. The house they were in front of had sprays of daisies along the walk; he knew Bones had once remarked on the flowers there and he thought the flowers might be nice in front of their house. "I need to understand what we're doing and why. Why let Brennan look like she's dead? And Sweets? Why isn't he in on this little production number?"
Booth took a deep breath. They hadn't had enough time to brief everyone—it was basically run and gun and hope to hell this worked. "We need Pelant to see he's made a mistake. Puts more pressure on the mad genius. Maybe force his hand."
To her credit, Cam had given him her trust while he put things into motion. Now he willed her to understand. "And Sweets? Did he catch you on the wrong side of the bed?"
He shook his head. "All of his files on Bones and me have been compromised. Pelant knows everything Sweets has on us."
"A profiler's dream," she murmured. "Which explains the Arcadia report that Sweets was talking about."
He studied her reaction. "The Arcadia report suggests that if Bones is killed by Pelant, I'll become so despondent that I'll give up and give in to drink or some other self-destructive behavior." He shook his head. "The Bureau needs to assess their agents, keep tabs on its more successful pairings. The Arcadia was a projection based on past behaviors and Sweets' work."
"You replace one addiction for another," Cam said sotto voce. "It's rather convenient that a FBI psychologist other than Sweets has you pegged like that."
"Isn't it?"
Cam said nothing, just seemed to be considering everything he'd said. He studied the neighborhood, his eyes scanning up and down the residential street. Except for a large woman walking her rather small dog, the area was quiet.
"Are you sure this is going to trigger something in Pelant?" Cam's arms were folded in front of her. "Make him go after you?"
They'd been friends a long time and he knew just what she was suggesting just below the surface of the question.
"He called me, Cam. I told him I wasn't going to play with him anymore. Told him I was finished. Without Bones in the picture, he's going to have to make this more personal, more confrontational to get me to re-engage."
"He didn't mean to get Brennan, but he does and you shut down." She was considering the implications. "How can you be sure he'll come after you?"
So he told her. Told her how Pelant had found out about the engagement and had him break it off. Told her of how the psychopath had wanted to control him. Told her of how he'd been trying to find him these past few months. How he was waiting for something to happen. How he saw the opening and he grabbed it.
Eyes wide, she listened as he poured out weeks of frustration and fear. And when he had purged himself of the pain of the broken engagement she stood quietly for several minutes before saying a word.
"You don't know how much that hurt her," she said finally.
"Cam. . . ," he began, but she raised a hand like a stop sign.
"You're lucky she didn't follow your model of failed engagements." He caught a thread of anger in her voice. "She hasn't trusted herself, Seeley. She hasn't trusted the two of you together."
What he'd been aware of these past few months had been filtered by his own guilt. Even so, when the haze of his own pain had eased, he hadn't really been able to erase the hurt the rejected proposal had visited on his partner.
"When the chemical attraction is gone, what do you have left?" She looked him squarely in the eyes. "Two people who are together only because of a child they created."
"And one who is still in love with the other who apparently didn't love her enough to marry her. It's a hell of a chemistry lesson."
The guilt weighed him down more. "Cam, I had no choice." He felt leaden and weightless at the same time. "He was going to randomly kill five innocent people."
"Yes," Cam nodded curtly, "he blackmailed you into hurting the woman you love to save others. He controlled your lives."
"But he wasn't going to give up killing." She let those words sink in. "If you count your not-quite-dead partner as one of Pelant's five latest victims, Seeley, what have you really gained here?"
He had only one answer.
"Time."
oOo
He was anything but a tall white woman with a lightning fast encyclopedic mind.
"This Pelant character meant the message in this body for Dr. Brennan," Dr. Clark Edison was quite close to a full-blown whine, "and really I'm just not seeing it."
He stood by himself in the bone room—with one anatomically complete skeleton—and tried desperately to think through everything and find the one thing he obviously missed.
And came up empty.
"Now I'm just a brother standing here talking to myself."
"You say something?"
The voice made him jump and he turned to find Dr. Hodgins standing at the doorway, a tray of petri dishes in hand.
Clark groaned and just let loose his frustration.
"I've gone over the bones more times than I can count and I have yet to come up with anything that suggests a message from this Pelant and I'm telling you that I really wish Dr. Brennan were here right now to help on this because I just am not seeing it."
While confession might be good for the soul, it still didn't feel quite right under the circumstances and he immediately wanted to hit the rewind button on his mouth.
But Hodgins was a kind man.
"You're not Brennan."
Yes, Hodgins was kind.
"Thank you for that statement of the obvious."
"No, no, man," Hodgins backtracked. "I meant that you don't have to do things the way that Dr. B did them. You can't. You're not her."
But Clark wasn't reassured. He wore the weight of grief for his mentor and the added burden of working a criminal case that was heavier due to the presence of that one sick bastard, Pelant, and he needed a whole hell of a lot more to feel a whole lot less overwhelmed.
And he said so.
"You just have to do things slowly," Hodgins offered. "In your own way."
"Well, my own way just isn't getting us anywhere."
Hodgins cocked his head. "Have you thought that maybe the message isn't in the bones but in Dr. Saroyan's end of things, in the flesh?"
"Yes," Clark emphasized the lone vowel, "I thought of that, but there wasn't anything particularly special in the flesh." He felt another wave of frustration. "This isn't getting me anywhere closer to the answers."
"Then step back," Hodgins offered. "Even Dr. B on her best days sometimes needed to step back and look at everything from a different perspective."
"You'll get. . . ."
"Why was this body frozen" Clark had the tail end of the idea and he was trying to grab it before it escaped. "Were the other bodies frozen, too? And what's this thing about cutting the tongue with a laser? What's that all about? I know it's crazy psycho serial killer nonsense, but why cut off an ear with some jagged edged cutting implement and gouge out the eyes but cut the tongue out with a laser? What kind of mad man crazed serial killer shit is that?"
And Hodgins was actually smiling. Those were rare things around the lab these days, given the circumstances and all, but it was also a beautiful thing, he thought. That is, if another man's smile could be considered beautiful.
"You're right," Hodgins said, his own excitement building, "it makes no sense. It has to be significant."
"So all I have to do is figure out why this psycho dude did this."
"Easy," Hodgins said grinning as he turned from the room. "If anyone can figure it out, it's you."
"Yeah," said Clark as Hodgins disappeared. "Who else can figure it out, but me?"
He looked around the room, at the skeleton splayed out on the table.
"Don't you think it would be easier to just tell me?" Clark asked the bones. "Bone whisperer kind of thing? Sometimes I think that's how Dr. Brennan used to do it."
But he was only met with silence.
With a huff, he returned to the top of the skull and began his examination yet again.
oOo
The old sanctuary lay in shadows in the early afternoon when she found the priest. The stained glass windows, depicting the mythology of Jesus' last days alive and the events after his death, colored what light entered the area on the west side of the building. Stiff posed statues, iconography of Catholocism, stood as silent witnesses. Despite their frozen features, Brennan thought them well-proportioned and pleasing to the eye.
But Father Jon was not in a pleasing state. In fact, kneeling as he was on little more than a thin mat in front of a large crucifix seemed positively painful and unnecessary. She could tell him about the markers left on his bones by repeated kneeling. Yet Brennan said nothing, only waited as the man seemed to be meditating, eyes closed tightly, his hands woven together in the same way she had often seen Booth do.
As she waited, she thought of home and Christine and how she missed her daughter and wondered how she was faring without her. She felt the same anxiety she'd been feeling about Booth that had accompanied her all these months; only now, the worry had deepened with her now in hiding. And her team? Her friends? The feelings warred with her intention to be patient and somehow her foot began tapping out a rhythm on the stone floor.
"Prayers take as long as prayers take," Father Jon intoned, his eyes still closed. "Answering them might take even longer."
She was about to apologize and tell him she didn't understand his meaning, when he filled in the silence.
"I did tell you I would give you my answer this afternoon, Dr. Brennan," he said gently.
"Temperance," she offered.
Opening his eyes, he looked at her for several seconds. "Temperance. It fits you and yet, it doesn't."
"Yes," she said softly, "I know."
With a grunt and several creaks and groans from his joints, the priest rose to his feet. He studied her. "I promised Seeley I would help. But not to hunt a man to be killed." He gave a slight shake of his head. "I tracked men so that they could be killed and it took me a long, long time to be able to forgive myself."
"You promised to help."
He looked at her, his expression unchanging. Without Booth here, she had to do something.
For a moment longer he looked at her.
And she looked back, unflinching.
Finally, he gave in first. "This is the point at which you extol me to put faith into action and believe in what is just and true rather than in what is tangible and provable."
"I don't believe in faith."
"But you may have the power to help us find him," she said. "And stop him."
She held out the cell phone her father had left her and presented him with the first photo in a gallery of Pelant's handiwork. Angela had sent them to her in no particular order and she simply went with them as they came up. "This is Ethan Sawyer," she began. The photo was a head shot made during his university tenure. "He was in a mental hospital suffering with schizophrenia. Pelant lured him from the hospital and killed him simply because he was afraid of what Ethan might reveal about Pelant's behavior." The second photo was of the crime scene where Ethan's body was little more than torn flesh and exposed bone. "He left him on a trail to be eaten by wolves."
Father Jon's irises opened appreciably and she sensed a tension in his body at the change in photos.
"He was your friend?"
"Yes."
She presented the next victim. "Carole Morrissey." The faculty photo showed a woman with youthful promise. The second photo showed only the architecture of her body with the flesh and all personality stripped away. "He caught her, killed her with a Japanese katana sword and hung her upside down to drain her of blood before burying her."
She went through them all: the exchange student who had simply been house sitting, the reporter who had been covering a story, the financier who had stolen millions, the soldier of fortune, the two FBI agents, the three investigators bent on finding Pelant through cyberspace.
She covered them all, each victim's face followed by their corporeal remains, such as they were, in whatever form they now took.
Father Jon was quiet throughout her presentation, the shadows growing deeper within the church.
"Booth would say that there is evil in the world and that it is our job to try to stop it." She refused to do anything but present the facts to this man. "Pelant kills people. He tried to kill an FBI psychologist, our friend, through manipulating a young woman who had lost her father. Booth wounded her. Pelant tried to kill our pathologist, but failed."
"If you know where he is, you have to help us stop him."
He looked up from the cell phone in his hand and handed it back to her. "I fear that Booth will kill this man and damn his soul for all eternity. He hates this man. For him, this is personal for some reason. Besides, the proof you suggest here is circumstantial at best."
She felt defeated. "Yes, we have circumstantial evidence that he is responsible. The young woman he influenced never saw Pelant." She explained how he had etched a code on bone and how he manipulated a security tape to implicate her in Ethan Sawyer's murder, how he had erased his identity, how he had stolen millions from Hodgins, how he had engineered a computer meltdown.
"The world waited and ignored the stories coming out of Germany that Jews were being shipped off to concentration camps which were essentially death camps," she added. "Good people ignored the cries of Kitty Genovese and allowed a woman to be brutally beaten to death. History is full of good people who do not act and allow evil to continue."
The priest's eyes met hers, but she could not read him. "The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it."
"Albert Einstein," she said. He nodded.
"Booth is a good man," she said. "He hates killing people, it hurts him deeply. I have seen Booth show mercy to people who do not deserve it. He is a good man."
And he waited just a moment longer, a moment in which she could see the light flickering outside as day turned toward night, a moment in which she could long for the comfort of home and Christine, a moment to wonder how much longer she would be with Booth, a moment in which she could contemplate yet another argument she could use to persuade this reluctant man.
"May God have mercy on out souls if what I'm about to do is wrong," he said. "But I will get you your visual proof."
"I will help you find this Pelant."
oOo
Despite the early evening hour, she lay sleeping, curled into herself, her hair haloed around her head. And he couldn't help himself but bend down to kiss her exposed cheek.
"Bones?"
She uncoiled herself from sleep and peered up at him. "Is something wrong with Christine?"
"No," he assured her. "She's fine. Max took her for the night."
Even at something so simple, he could see her mind at work. She knew.
"Where's Jon? Father Jon? I couldn't find him."
She further uncoiled and sat up on the cot. "He said he needed a visual confirmation on Pelant before he could tell us for certain where he is."
And she explained how he had grown reluctant, uncertain about their true intentions.
"I don't understand why he would change his mind, Booth."
He let out his breath in a long sigh and leaned forward. "In the Army, Jon began to question each assignment. He began to want proof that each target was essential." He tried to gather the right words.
"It's ironic," she supplied. "He wanted tangible proof that he was helping his country, but he now works in a profession that has no proof of a supreme being and yet he tries to convince others that such a being exists."
In an instant she'd tripped his religion button. "Don't say that. God exists. He's. . . ."
But his phone chirped, interrupting another losing battle. "Booth."
"Seeley," began the familiar voice, "I promised a visual confirmation on the target and I believe you'll get it. . . now."
The audio ended, but an image of a Georgetown mansion leapt onto the screen and Booth hit his record button while the image morphed into slightly jerky images of a front door then the door steadied and Booth realized he was holding his breath.
Then the impossible happened: Christopher Pelant stood there, one half of his boyish face ruined.
