"This guy should either get an Academy Award or he didn't do it," Booth was angry; he was so sure that Mike Corrigan was the killer that the possibility that he might not be hadn't entered his mind. Until now that is. He sank down carefully into one of those hard plastic hospital waiting room chairs and immediately regretted leaving his inflatable doughnut in his office.
Brennan was flipping through Corrigan's medical records which they'd gotten a warrant for after the man had been admitted to the cardiac intensive care unit at George Washington University Hospital, where apparently he'd been treated for heart issues before. Corrigan's claim that he had a heart condition was clearly true; what Brennan wanted to verify now was what sort of injury his shoulder had been treated for thirty some odd years ago. As she reviewed the file, something became clear to her, "Booth, he couldn't have done it."
Booth looked up at her, "How do you know?" He didn't doubt that she had found some quirky medical mystery that would exonerate him; she'd done it often enough over the course of working together and he always found it incredibly annoying, but he wanted to know what she'd found and get a little explanation in non-squinty terms so that it was perfectly clear.
"He's right handed. The damage to his right shoulder would have diminished his strength and his mobility such that he couldn't have killed the boys in the manner that they died," Brennan could see no way that Mike Corrigan could have committed the murders; despite him being a prime suspect on paper because of his background, it didn't make him a good suspect at all when you factored in everything else.
"You're sure?" Booth let out a frustrated sigh, the man had acted completely innocent, but he wanted him to be guilty. He tried to mentally take a step back as he considered that they were out of options.
"Yes, I'm certain. Mike Corrigan isn't the killer," Not that Brennan knew who the killer was; that was something that apparently they needed to go back to the evidence to find out.
"Shit," Booth raked his fingers through his hair and felt a wave of guilt wash over him that he had caused an innocent man to have a heart attack. That was almost worse than shooting someone. According to Corrigan's cardiologist he was stable and would probably recover; that really did nothing to assail Booth's feelings of guilt.
"Why are you disappointed? I thought the point of this was to catch whoever the killer is," It was perfectly logical and rational and while Brennan could understand that Booth had hoped that Mike Corrigan was guilty, it didn't change the fact that he apparently wasn't.
"He had motive. He had opportunity. He had the means. In a murder investigation that's usually the equivalent of finding the Holy Grail," Booth's mind was spinning. They were missing something somewhere and perhaps the devil was all wrapped up in the details.
"I don't know what that means," Brennan's brow was furrowed; she knew it was a reference to something religious and apparently was important.
"Never mind," Booth just didn't have it in him to explain it to her right this instant. He pulled himself out of the chair and gestured down the hallway in the direction of the elevators, "We need to go back and look at what we don't know…apparently what we do know isn't getting us anywhere."
Brennan reached out and touched Booth's arm, "I'm sorry that you're disappointed," She wasn't sure if it was the right thing to say, but she did feel badly for him that he'd put all of his hope on this one man to be guilty.
"You have nothing to be sorry about, Bones; we're a team and we catch bad guys. Sometimes the bad guy just isn't as easy to find that's all," He slung his arm across her shoulder as they walked towards the elevator. He was glad that she was his partner; he'd been resistant to it at first, but the friendship they'd cultivated while they'd put criminals behind bars had turned into something that he hadn't quite anticipate. He wasn't sure he was ready to articulate how he was really feeling about her; the fact that they had stumbled into this romantic relationship because they'd fallen asleep on her couch reviewing files was something akin to a miracle as far as he was concerned. If it had been up to him, he probably would still be living somewhere in denial. So in some small way, he was thankful for this twisted case because it had brought him and Bones together.
They walked to her car in relative silence, each of them lost in thought about the case and probably at least a little about each other. It wasn't until Brennan was settled behind the wheel fastening her seatbelt that something occurred to her. She glanced over at Booth who almost didn't know what to do with his hands since he wasn't driving, "Did the FBI forensics lab ever analyze the voice distortion from the mystery caller?"
"I don't know, I mean we traced the phone to Colin Fitzpatrick, I got shot, we thought it was Mike Corrigan, did I mention that I was shot in the middle of all of this?" Booth seemed annoyed, not at Bones per se, but at the fact that he still didn't know who had shot him in the butt on what had promised to be one of the best nights of his life in recent memory.
"I know you got shot, Booth; that's one of the reasons that I'm driving. That and the fact that you never let me drive," Brennan was only slightly amused at the hint of a whine in Booth's voice. She was a good driver and he knew that. She placed a quick call to Angela to ask her to try and do something with the voice distortion from the cell phone caller since she was sure it would be faster than waiting on the FBI forensics lab to get back to Booth. Thankfully, Booth had sent the file to the Jeffersonian right after he'd sent it off to Cullen as back up.
"I let you drive," Booth retorted knowing that it was a rare occasion when he actually did let her drive.
"When? And California doesn't count because I had to blackmail you to get to drive that convertible," It wasn't logical to her that if it was ok for her to drive them around in her car right now why it wasn't ok for her to do that other times when they were working a case.
"You're driving right now," Booth had a smug smile on his face; this was a fact that she could not dispute.
"Only because you got shot," Brennan scoffed at him; true she couldn't drive the FBI SUV because she wasn't employed by them, but her car was far more environmentally friendly and got far better gas mileage anyway. They were still bickering when they walked into the Medico Legal Lab at the Jeffersonian heading towards Brennan's office.
Angela followed behind them with a smirk on her face, "If I can interrupt you two lovebirds for a minute, I think you might want to hear what I got off of that recording you asked me to analyze."
"If it's Mike Corrigan, I'm not going to feel guilty about him having a heart attack," Booth blurted out under his breath; he still thought that this would be a hell of a lot easier if they could pin it on one of the suspects they already had in custody; or in the hospital in the case of Corrigan.
"You gave the man a heart attack?" Angela looked horrified, "What did you do to him?" Clearly she was not up on the latest FBI interrogation methods.
"He didn't do anything; he asked him some questions and presented some of the facts. Apparently, Mr. Corrigan has a weak heart because he found the information quite shocking," Brennan immediately defended Booth; she knew it truly wasn't his fault, he was simply interviewing the best suspect they had and Corrigan's physiology had taken over.
"Look, can we just get to the voice on the recording?" Despite the fact that he'd brought it up, Booth wanted to shift the attention off of him and all of the guilt he was feeling as quickly as possible.
"Fine," Angela rolled her eyes slightly as she gestured for them to follow her to her office.
"Are you feeling guilty over that?" Brennan looked genuinely concerned, "It wasn't your fault, Booth. It was a simple reaction of stress on a compromised organ; you couldn't have known that he would be affected that way."
"Bones, can we just drop it?" Both of Booth's eyebrows were raised in irritation. How he could argue with her like this one minute and want to kiss her the next was something akin to the excitement little boys got at setting off fireworks.
"Fine, but you brought it up," Brennan crossed her arms over her chest and tried to turn her attention to Angela.
"And I'm sorry now that I brought it up," Booth glanced over at Angela and gestured with his eyes to get to it already.
"I can tell you for certain that the voice isn't Mike Corrigan," Angela cued up the voice.
"How can you be so sure? You haven't even heard the guy talk." Booth snorted out.
Angela glanced back at Booth and Brennan as she started the recording, "Because the voice on this tape is female."