No Woman, No Cry, Bob Marley and the Wailers
She was tired of living a lie.
They were speeding off to no where in particular—as far as she could tell—Bowman making directional shifts as if he wanted to turn their escape route into some kind of Gordian knot to confuse anyone following.
It annoyed her.
As did the wig that still whipped about against the strong air currents within the car. With the car hitting 65 mph and the windows rolled down to dissipate the smell of decomposition that Bowman was adamant still clung to the car, not only was she wary of the wig shifting, but her eyes had begun to burn under the contacts as well. Trying to have a conversation had become impossible with the rumble of the car's tires against the road and the roar of the wind in the car. Her few suggestions—to stop for food or for a restroom—had had to be shouted.
Glancing at the side mirror, she looked for a familiar black Sequoia or Russ' Trans Am or Hodgins' Mini Cooper or any of the cars her friends drove.
Nothing.
A look toward Bowman was like the other dozen or so glances cast his way; he gripped the steering wheel with a fierce intensity. His posture had not shifted much in the last half hour and she imagined which muscle groups would be stiff and ungainly when they did finally stop and Bowman alit from the car.
If this was being on the run. . . .
Images of her parents speeding off from their home in Chicago in a vain attempt to escape McVicker, the pig farmer hit man, came unbidden. She knew their feelings and motivations were much different than her own.
They hadn't carried a homing beacon, a cell phone transmitting its GPS coordinates to another cell phone. No. They'd sped off into the unknown leaving only questions and pain and doubt. They had been playing their own kind of game.
She was perfectly fine if the FBI or even local police stopped their flight; she had no desire to repeat a scene from her parents' lives.
She stole another glance toward Bowman. While she understood the emotional turmoil one might feel from seeing the body of a dead person—she had seen hundreds of reactions to the dead over the years—she thought it a waste of time and resources to drive aimlessly through Virginia rather than to stop and to create a plan. Bowman's "escape" seemed pointless meandering wasteful of resources and time.
She wondered, not for the first time, if it might not be better to simply admit to who she was, tell him that she had an excellent grasp on how he had conducted the fraud and that he would be well-advised to divulge everything given that a federal agent had been shot in the line of duty probably because of this case and a woman had definitely been murdered as a direct result of something involving the theft.
But a greater mystery remained and despite a strong sense that the truth would be far better than the lies he had been living, Temperance Brennan knew that all the puzzle pieces had yet to be turned over.
Someone knowing of her penchant for puzzles had suggested that she turn over the pieces and use only the shape of the pieces to guide her in putting it together. She'd ignored the suggestion knowing the challenge in reconstructing a human skull shattered into bits or reconnecting a skeleton crushed into hundreds of pieces far outweighed any temporary pleasure she might derive from such a challenge.
This was still a puzzle of a different sort and somehow, even with some of the pieces turned upside down, she wanted to reconstruct the whole image.
So she bided her time, endured the wig whipping about in the windy car, and calculated the distance and best time to the next rest stop where she could relieve some of the dryness in her eyes.
oOo
Okay, as irrational as it seemed, she was relying on guesswork. Not Sweets' guesswork, no. Sweets had predicted that Bowman would, in Sweets' words, "fold like a house of cards" the moment he was in police custody.
"He feels entitled to the money, as if he's earned the right to take it," Sweets had suggested at the last meeting she had had with their team on this case—Silverman and Street and Sweets. Her father had attended as well, claiming he was amused by the fact that it was one of the few times he'd ever been in the Hoover building as a guest of the bureau rather than as a suspect in handcuffs.
"But Bowman has a fear of authority figures," Sweets said as he detailed his reasoning, "brought on by his abusive father, and while he is using the gift card scheme as a was of defying that authority, he's also someone who is ultimately controlled by that authority."
But Bowman wasn't folding. He'd even greeted a police officer at the last rest stop.
No. She would not rely on Sweets's guesses. Inconsistencies like Bowman's chat with the police officer about traveling the byways of American roads had only verified the fact that psychology produced possibilities, not probabilities.
Despite her rejection of Sweets' guesses, she was still relying on guesswork. Not Sweets', no. Not Silverman's or Street's or even her father's.
Hers.
Salted—was that the right term?—with some advice that Booth and Angela had given her years ago.
"I was in foster care," she started, eyeing Bowman's reaction over her salad.
They'd managed to hit a rest stop in West Virginia—one where she could get a salad that managed to look far less wilted than she felt.
Bowman paused, clearly surprised by her admission.
"Why?"
She wove the lie with bits of the truth, certain that Street's suggestion about how to create a story had merit. "My mother died, my father disappeared," she said. "I had no other family to take care of me, so I went into the system."
Part of her wanted to believe that a black SUV with Booth at the helm would appear at any moment and relieve her of playing out more of the lie, but that small part was overwhelmed by her rational self which only wanted to create a lie which would strengthen her connection with Bowman. They'd already dumped the body they'd discovered in that tunnel leading from the bank, and while that certainly should qualify as a major crisis to bond over, she wanted to cement the relationship. She was unwilling to allow anything more than a few hugs or chaste kisses to pass between them.
Words would rescue her even if Booth and the others could not.
"Layla," Bowman said, his hand reaching over the table toward hers, "why are you telling me this?"
Subtlety was not her strong suit and deception was something she had to work at. So she wove the tapestry of her alter ego's life with threads of truth.
"What we did back there was illegal," she said in a whisper. "I don't have anyone. Not really. Artie, well, Artie. . . ." She drew in a deep breath and tried to plunge ahead. "I don't always have the best taste in men."
"I'm not Artie," he said, squeezing her hand slightly. "I'm not going to hurt you."
"I don't know that."
"You've got to. . . ," he paused and tried to grin. "You've got to believe me, believe that I'm not like Artie. I would never hurt you."
"Artie says the same thing. He's not going to hit me again," she toyed with her water glass, "until he does it again."
She waited.
Bowman sketched a slow nod and set his face in a way that she knew he did whenever he wanted to reassure one of the bank customers that the downward turn in interests rates for their CDs or the low rate of return on their Christmas club accounts was simply a reflection of the times and was only temporary.
"There's an old Columbian saying, 'a woman should never be hit, even with a rose petal.'"
She'd heard the expression in Columbia from an old man who had guided her to a mass grave in which men, women and children had been unceremoniously dumped.
The people from the village had watered the path to that gravesite with their tears and grief, not rose petals.
She waited again.
"I won't hurt you, Layla."
She accepted his answer with a single nod and a slight squeeze of her hand. But she knew that had she really been Layla Knowles, Willy Bowman had already hurt her.
oOo
Where they were headed remained a mystery. As was what or who they seemed to be running from.
Certainly she could put the pieces together—the woman they'd found in the tunnel bore striking similarities to Tracy Lord, Booth's contact for the gift cards. Her death and the placement of the body suggested that the killer knew about Bowman's tunnel and might have left it as a message for Bowman.
They had only failed to report the body and had dumped it near that drainage tunnel on government land. That had been her suggestion. She knew that when the body was discovered, it would be sent to the Jeffersonian for analysis.
She'd left her own kind of evidence on the body—ring, hair, USB drive. She'd barely had time to leave Booth a voicemail and call in the discovery of the body to the local police before Bowman had returned with rubber gloves, plastic sheeting and duct tape.
The perfect disposal of a body it was not.
"Where are we going?" she asked again.
"I've got to think," Bowman said. "I've just got to think about this."
That had been his answer each time she had asked and she retreated to her side of the car and tried to think through all that she knew about the case.
But her mind kept drawing her backwards in time.
She remembered waving to her parents as they went off to do some Christmas shopping. She remembered the hours stretching past dinner and into their bedtime and finally breaking into doubt and fear. Now she understood that her parents' concern and Russ constantly keeping tabs on her, each of them knowing where she was at all times, had been part of their life underground. Three years in foster care, three years in the system, had erased that connection, made her want to flee any connection to people who seemed more concerned about their monthly checks than that shy, rather awkward teen, who never seemed to fit into whatever new family, whatever new situation, she was placed in.
She had been the puzzle piece that did not fit; the one that could never be turned over or twisted or turned to complete the picture.
Nothing then had worked. Only later, much later, had she been able to create her own picture puzzle, her own world. One in which she fit in and crafted pieces that fit right around her:
Angela. Hodgins. Zack. Cam.
Her brother. Amy and the girls. Her father.
Booth.
Even with the GPS coordinates, they would be worried about her.
She knew how that worry felt, what that worry did to a person. She knew the ache, the uncertainty.
And she knew they needed a few more of the puzzle pieces.
oOo
He'd turned the car north, then west and raced away from where they had dumped the body—a location she was sure wouldn't be frequented by foot traffic, but was on government land. Bowman had driven for almost an hour before he had stopped the car at a rest stop, exited and bent over a 50-gallon drum for several minutes. Despite her suggestion to keep the windows down as they sped away from the body, the smell of decomposed flesh still hung about the car.
Leaving the door open, she exited the car and sat at the weathered picnic table at the rest stop. Below her, cars whizzed past on the highway. Watching Bowman clutch the garbage can, she wondered now if he was going to be sick again.
"How can you be so calm?" he asked turning toward her, his skin pale and clammy.
Did she take this moment to tell him who she really was and encourage him to drive to the nearest police station and confess all? Did she let him know that she'd already seen hundreds of victims in her life and she knew how to divorce herself from the horror?
"I used to work in a hospital," she said simply. "I've seen dead people before."
She had tried to make sure that they hadn't compromised the original site and she'd marked the position of the discharged bullet to aid the creation of scenario on Angela's computer.
While she knew she still could not read Bowman as well as she could read Booth or other people in her inner circle, she knew he was at the end of his metaphorical rope. But for some reason, he seemed to change with the words. He took a deep breath and exhaled, nodded slightly, then closed the distance between them. Sliding into the seat beside her, he tentatively took her hand in his.
"Who would put a body under the bank like that?" she asked. "What does it mean?"
Layla had had narrowly defined behaviors in the bank and the few nights she had "snuck out" to have dinner with Bowman. Now, the scripts had to be tossed aside and anything she could do to get Bowman to open up or to stop running seemed acceptable.
"Do you know who that could be?" She was trying to fend off a strong urge to throw off the trappings of Layla Knowles and become Temperance Brennan. But she feared neither woman was safe with Bowman right now. "They sent you a message of some sort, didn't they?"
"What are you saying?" He turned toward her, his eyes wide and beads of sweat glistening along his cheeks.
"Are you involved in something? Did you do something?"
She knew the questions were blunter than Layla would ask, but she was fighting her own sense of panic. She'd activated the app on her phone to broadcast her GPS coordinates to Angela's phone, but she had no idea if it was working or if Booth would make sense of the numbers she had left on his voicemail. So much of it hinged on whether they had found the USB drive she'd hidden on the body and if they had gotten through the low-level protection she'd placed on the files.
"God, Layla," Bowman said, holding her hand tightly and patting it with his other hand, "I didn't think anyone could get hurt in this."
"In what?" Eric Street had rehearsed her in different ways to approach Bowman, different ways to get him to open up to her. Slow and easy, make him want to help you. But although she dealt with slow and easy well, sometimes, making Bowman want to help her, anyone want to help her, always rankled. "I'm just as guilty of what, disposing of that body as you. I'm what the police would call an accessory."
"I didn't kill her."
"I know." She pulled her hand free from his and pulled him into a hug. "You are too gentle, too kind to ever kill anyone."
The hug felt uncomfortable and the words a bit sugary, but she had tried to do both with some conviction.
Her eyes wandered over his back and the way the blue shirt had grown darker where it was stained with his sweat and how it disappeared beneath his belt and past the bulge made by the gun he had placed there. Part of her had wanted to scream at him to not touch the gun at the crime scene, and part of her now wanted to snatch it from him.
Releasing him, he still clung to her and she tried to calculate her chances of overpowering him, racing to the car and driving off to find help. She pushed down the flight and fight response and tried a new tack.
Get him to trust you, Street's voice echoed in her mind. Tell him you trust him; for someone in your position, an abused woman, he might eat it up.
"Willy, I trust you." She tried to catch his eyes with hers. "What are you involved in?"
He paled and sat back, his back thudding against the table. He closed his eyes and when he opened them, tears welled there. "There's only one person they would hurt," he said softly as if trying out the words. "She always wanted more."
"There's another woman?" She tried to mix in enough hurt in her voice for Layla's question, but she'd already figured out who they'd moved from the tunnel. It was a leap, but one that made sense given everyone involved and the details she had gleaned from Booth's reports.
"I don't know if I should tell you," he said. He swiped at his eyes. "I just wanted to help her, help you." He blew out a breath and the smell of decomp seemed to swirl around her. "I tried to protect her."
"I know."
"And now. . . ?"
"And now we're in this together."
She tried to sound more confident than she felt. They'd been there for 10, no, closer to 15 minutes and each minute meant that Street or her father was narrowing the distance between them. They had to be.
"I can't stay here," he said finally.
"Of course not."
"And you trust me?"
"Yes," she lied.
He tried to smile, but it resembled one of those expressions on a Japanese Noh mask she'd once seen, Mikatsuki, pained and artificial.oOo
It had been the opening they had been waiting for: Bowman offering to help, her acceptance. It was the break they had wanted and he'd gone one better.
"One night, after work," he said as he led her toward the safety deposit box vault, his voice low and conspiratorial, "we're going to disappear, you and me."
"That's impossible," she replied, but Bowman had smiled, taken her hand, and opened the door with his other. "Artie will find me."
The smell of decomposing flesh hit her the moment the door to the tunnel was opened.
He had tried to pinch his nose against the smell, tried to cover the odor with an explanation, but she recognized it from years of working with the dead. "Sometimes a rat or small critter finds its way down here and dies," he'd said as he led her into the tunnel. "It actually is a good thing. It'll keep people away."
When his flashlight played against the body, his surprise and shock seemed almost palpable. And it had absolutely shattered his boyish confidence.
He'd been reduced to almost incoherent sputterings; she had tried to calm him, tried to take control of the crime scene.
But not as Dr. Temperance Brennan.
When he insisted they had to move the body, she'd sent him off to find duct tape and plastic sheeting, both items in abundance in the bank's workroom since painters were scheduled to come in next week to spruce up the lobby.
It had given her enough time to pull on the latex gloves that she had slipped into her bag by habit and do a cursory examination of the body. Several rats had already gnawed at the body and in the poor light she worried she had missed something vital. She even phoned 911 hoping a police presence and the dead body would be enough leverage to get Bowman to open up about the plan.
Yet, she was not a woman given to false hope.
Police would be dispatched to the bank, but barring an enterprising officer, she doubted they would push the investigation beyond checking around the bank for a body before attributing her call to someone's morbid fascination with crime novels, a prank call or the like.
Fools, yes. But years of working with Booth and the police had given her a more realistic perspective on their response.
This was all new territory. She knew the body would best be left beneath the bank where it could molder for years without discovery. But the files on the USB drive were key to their case and she found the body a useable means of getting the information to her people at the Jeffersonian. She'd stay with Bowman and work on him, try to extract some useful information before finding a way to separate herself from him.
Perhaps he had returned more quickly than she expected, perhaps she had spent too much time securing the USB drive on the body, but she had only a few seconds to leave Booth a voicemail with the code Bowman used to access the door to the tunnel.
oOo
He still gripped the steering wheel with a fierce determination, but she noticed his respiration had returned to an almost imperceptible rhythm. He'd followed a northerly route, driving the car at or slightly below the speed limit in the right hand lane on the highway.
She could practically hear Booth, "You're in the grandma lane."
Booth. He was not far from her thoughts. He would probably be worried about her—certainly Street or her father would have notified him that she was missing.
And he would worry. And blame himself for what she had chosen to do.
The GPS coordinates and the items she'd left behind should tell them in some way that she had chosen this route toward unlocking the case. She hated the thought of putting Booth through this again, Booth and Angela and Max and Hodgins and Cam, but she couldn't quite abandon the case.
Yet, she almost wanted a respite from the constant fear that her wig would blow off or the contacts would become so unbearable in the mini windstorm in the car, that Bowman would realize something was wrong.
She constantly checked her side mirror in the vain hope for a black SUV or Russ' Trans Am, but they seemed to be tailed only by semis and RVs.
But hope she knew all too well simply clouded reality.
She was essentially on her own.
"We're going to need money to live, Willy." She tried his first name, one of those rare times she Bowman looked a little too long in her direction and the car seemed to slow down.
"I don't need much. I've been working most of my life."
"I'm sorry, Layla," Bowman's voice took on that low, soothing tone that reminded her of Booth. "That had to be rough living in foster homes."
"It was." She took a deep breath, not sure if this was the right approach. "Every time I was in between families, I was homeless. That's legally what I was. Homeless. And I hated it. I hated it almost as much as I hated being with a family that didn't even bother to learn my name or treated me like I was in the way."
Bitterness colored her words.
Bowman said nothing, only glancing in her direction.
"I don't have any kind of money, Willy. I can work and I can be a good partner," she said pushing past a wave of emotion that seemed to come out of nowhere and threaten to overwhelm her, "I just don't want to be homeless."
She drew in a deep breath, centering herself, finding a place to stow the emotion while rational thought took over.
She counted the seconds as Bowman said nothing, as the distance between her real self and her pretend self seemed to grow.
"We'll need to stop, Layla," he said finally. "I need to tell you some things."
oOo
Sinking into the chair at the Waffle House, she was grateful that they were no longer moving. And Bowman had slipped toward the bathroom leaving her to herself finally.
There seemed no rhyme nor reason in their "getaway"; Bowman had double backed more than once, talking to himself—arguing with himself, perhaps—before swinging the car around in a wide arc from one exit to the entrance ramp. He'd exited the highway at mile marker 447 some time back and cut across the countryside along two-lane roads before finding his way back onto a highway.
Studying the menu, she wondered if people were tracking the GPS at all—certainly they could call the local police to put a tail on them. Couldn't they?
While the restaurant was crowded enough and Bowman had promised to return, she wondered if this would be a good time to simply slip away.
But she wanted to see this to the end. She'd figured out how Bowman had seeded his gift card fraud; she even had a reasonable hypothesis as to whose body they'd found in the tunnel beneath the bank. Given the people who had to protect his operation from too much scrutiny, she'd already formulated another hypothesis as to who in law enforcement might be providing a smoke screen.
All she needed, really, was for Bowman to take them to his accomplices, for Street or Booth to show up, for this case to wrap.
She really wanted to shed the wig and the constant worry that seemed to weigh on her.
"Hey." She looked up as Bowman slid into the seat opposite her. "Did you order the breakfast special?"
She'd ordered a while ago, but the waitress, somewhat harried and inefficient, had practically slammed down her tea pot and cup, splashed Bowman's coffee onto the table, before mumbling something about their order and taking off toward another table.
He slid a plastic card toward her.
"Keep this with you."
"Why?"
She couldn't keep Temperance Brennan and Layla Knowles completely separate. They'd been on the road for almost 10 hours and she had learned very little as they seemed to weave back and forth, seemingly circling something but never quite finding enough purchase to land.
"It's a card worth several thousand." He smiled a crooked smile and reached out a hand to wrap around hers. "It's a year's salary on one card. More, really. A chance for a new start."
"Willy," she started, the uncertainty weighing heavily upon her, "what is this all about? What the hell is going on?"
So he told her. Or, he really just confirmed what she already knew and filled in a few gaps.
"Why carry cash when all you need is to carry one of these?"
Her father would appreciate the ease with which one could move throughout the world and never quite leave enough behind for someone to know that you had been there. Gift cards pre-loaded with tens, hundreds, thousands of dollars—money stolen from the dead or the dying.
"And that woman?"
His face clouded over.
"She was involved in this, Willy. Wasn't she?
The long, slow nod should have been enough confirmation for Layla, but Temperance needed to know, needed to put together the whole puzzle.
"Her real name isn't important," he said. "Just know that I knew her growing up. We both lived in hellholes. My father and her father. . . ."
She snaked out a hand and put it on his arm.
"Let's just say that I wanted to take her out of that."
"You wanted to rescue her."
Again, he gave her the long, slow nod. "You know that song, 'No Woman, No Cry' by Bob Marley?"
This time she gave him the long, slow nod.
"That was me. Rescuing her from the ghetto. Rescuing her from the pain and the despair."
She couldn't remember anything like that in Tracy Lord's background—in the background of the woman who went by the name of Tracy Lord—but she did not dispute Bowman's story.
"I've got it all figured out," he said, grasping her hands in his. "How to live, how to take what we want and never look back." He grinned. "You'll never have to go back to Artie. I'll take care of you."
She offered him a smile and a nod toward the waitress who picked up their bill and payment.
"Layla," he said as they made their way from the restaurant, "we can really live now."
She listened as he prattled on and waited until they were at the car before she sprang her last question on him.
"If I'm going with you, Willy," she said, "I have to know if there was anyone else involved. Obviously, someone killed that woman in the tunnel and if you say she was helping you, it stands to reason that there's someone out there who is looking for you. Was someone else involved in this scheme of yours?"
That slightly wild look he'd worn when they first saw the corpse returned and she wondered if he was going to be sick again.
"Yeah, but Layla, he's pretty powerful. He's well-connected, if you know what I mean."
She didn't know, but she held back her question and waited.
And was rewarded with a name and her part of the puzzle was complete.
"We should get a motel room for the night," Bowman suggested.
She gave a slight shrug and stole a glance at her purse which had migrated to the back seat during their ride. She retrieved it and shuffled past the other contents looking for her phone.
"If you're looking for your cell phone, Layla," Bowman was saying, "I got rid of it."
"Why?" A wave of panic came unbidden.
"People can locate you with your cell phone, Layla. Artie can locate you." He tsked and gave her the tone of voice he used with all the women in his employ. "You're not going back to Artie."
The panic had subsided. A bit. "What did you do with it?"
He reached out for her and held her arms. "I tossed it out on that one highway. You know, the one with the rest area over the highway?" He gave her that condescending look again. "What wasn't busted when it hit the pavement was obliterated by those big semis. . . ."
She never gave him a chance; she had had enough.
With one full swing of her fist, Temperance Brennan, formerly Layla Knowles, decked Willy Bowman and laid the banker out flat on his ass.