Thanks for the great reviews..I promised you a long chapter so here you go. I'm sorry if you think I'm dragging this out, but I hate stories that don't give detail, so I tend to go a little overboard. Let me know what you think! P.S. there are some footnotes to explain a few terms incase you are interested.
Booth stood at the bottom of the platform staring in awe as he watched what appeared to be a national squint convention. He was quite certain that he would never get used to the harsh lighting of the Jeffersonian yet here he was in all of its bright white glory. The building had always been somewhat sterile in his eyes, the only accent to the bluntness of lines and electronics was the faint blue undertone lighting that graced the tables on which Bones did her magic.
Bottles and ancient tools lined the tables forming a ring of history that only the person that used them would comprehend, and bones of the museums' most recently discovered Baltic warrior lay strewn upon a light board carefully numbered and ready for their place of rightful residence in their skeleton.
The alarm sound was deafening, a mix of car alarm warning tones and a dog whistle shrill instantly drawing everyone's attention to the person at the bottom of the stairs.
"Hey, why the hell is my card not working?" Booth griped while continually swiping his access card back in forth through the security pole hoping to achieve a different result.
"Maybe someone is trying to tell you something." Hodges yelled from his little corner of the world.
"Sorry sweetie," Angela stated as if the whole incident lay solely on her shoulders.
"Brennan had all the cards reissued after her bones were stolen, guess she must have forgotten you."
Booth had no idea why that little statement wrenched his gut so much. The fact that they had been partners for two years must have meant more to him than it did to her. How could she forget me? "Whatever", he thought to himself, he was just overanalyzing it. She was a busy person, she had things going on, she must have thought she had already given him his new card.
"Hey! Who let him on the platform?" Temperance yelped as she emerged from her office door on the far side of the room.
"I did, why is that a problem?" Angela confounded.
"I don't do things around here for my health Angela, there is usually a reason involved." Temperance stated with a harshness she had not intended.
"Booth, they need to see you in the security office."
"The principal's office… uh oh… I must have done it now." Booth said with an obvious hint of sarcasm in his voice.
"So, quite the mood we are in this afternoon sweetie. What's wrong, Booth wake you up on the wrong side of the bed?" Angela was pleased at the way she could always ruffle Tempe's nerves at the mention of her and Booth in bed.
"Angela, I have work to do."
"I know that, but still… I heard that Booth broke into your apartment this morning… anything you want to tell me?"
"About what?"
"I don't know.. About how the two of you are obviously in love with each other and you couldn't contain your passion anymore."
"Angela!"
"Hey, believe me when I say that I'm sorry it isn't me, but you should have seen the look on his face when I told him that you are the one that didn't give him a new access card. Like a wounded puppy, with those big sexy brown eyes." Bones rolled her eyes.
"That has nothing to do with me. Security needed a new thumb print from him, Where is Zach?" Bones said trying to avert Angela's attention to a different topic; one that Bones felt more comfortable delving herself into.
"I don't know, quit changing the subject."
"Angela, I have work to do, and so do you. See that bag." Temperance pointed to the bright orange bag at the end of the table, "There are bones from 4 different people in there, and I need to figure out who they are, and how they got under the floorboard in a closet."
"Ok, well, my mood has officially been downed. What do you need me to do?"
Angela was better at putting the humanity back into a person than anyone Bones had ever known. While the rest of the staff spent their day picking apart the pieces Angela spent her day putting them all back together, she gave the victims a face, a memory stamp for who they were, and the kind of life they led. Temperance admired her more than Angela could conceive. Angela had a way of bringing the person back to life and making you realize why you were working so hard to solve a case that was considered cold and useless. Angela loved life and lived it to its fullest; something that Tempe never allowed herself the time to do. She could take off the edge of the day with a drink and a dance, remove the images in her head with conversations with a stranger, let her guard down, and be the person that Temperance had grown to call her best friend.
"Dr. Brennan, I took the initiative to start without you, I have already removed any soil deposits that I could see from the body, jarred it and gave it to Hodges to run for foreign debris, also, there was a faint ammonia smell coming from the areas around her wrist so I took three swabbes of the blooded area for testing. I put one in the hemodialysis machine to verify time of death; the other two are in the process of platelet separation so we can identify what product the smell was from."
"Well thanks Zach, but you're wasting your time, we already know where the ammonia came from."
Within a blink of an eye she could be his face turn from contentment to disappointment and she wanted nothing more than to wish she had just kept her mouth shut and simply said thank you.
Zach looked up to her; she knew it and in a way she was flattered. There had been a time in her life when she had looked up to someone in her very same position. She remembered the feeling she would get when working side by side with her mentor. The pleasure that it would bring her when she would discover something that he had missed. Zach wanted that for himself and she recognized it. Maybe next time she could give that to him. Stroke his ego, and let him have his moment of glory, even if it was a detail that she had already caught herself.
"How do you already know?"
"We found a bottle of Lysol in the closet; it had obviously been used and was leaking from the box that it was found in."
"I also found signs of asphyxiation." Zach vocalized in a lower than normal tone.
"Really?"
"Yea, when I was going over the body I noticed a small pink thread near the base of her lips which naturally made me suspicious, so I ventured to her eyes where there was a clear presence of petechial hemorrhaging. Looks like someone stuck a pillow to her face and pushed if you ask me."
This was it, his moment of self defiance, and Bones let him have it.
"So, What we got here?" Booth said finally finding his way back to the platform, new shiny access card in hand.
"Zach found signs of asphyxiation in her eyes." Bones said.
"Ok, so that means what exactly?"
Zach piped up in a flash, "Someone suffocated your girl with a pink pillow."
"I thought she died of blood loss?" Booth looked confused.
"Maybe that is what Hibbert wanted everyone to think? The fact of the matter was, this girl was still alive even after all of her blood loss, maybe his plan fell through and he didn't know any other way of handling it. By the looks of it he had a ritual. He did the same thing each time, no dissimilarity, no variation. He probably assumed after this many girls he had perfected his pattern, Cameron Biggs just threw a big kink into the plan so he started making mistakes, starting making it up as he went along."
Booth was impressed, Bones had never been one for theories of any kind, but this particular time he was thinking the exact same thing.
"So…" Booth thought aloud, "We have a teenage girl that goes to a babysitting job one night, once there the dad freaks out about God knows what, ties her to a bed then eventually suffocates her with a pillow. We have a serious piece of the puzzle missing. Why exactly was she tied to the bed in the first place?"
"That I couldn't tell you," Bones spoke up, "However I did notice as I was looking around the room that there were groove marks on the lower bed post as well as the top, but Cameron's legs weren't bound."
"So you think that the other girls were tied to the bed as well?"
"That is what is says to me, but we can check their bones for abrasions or indentations from the wire."
"What do you want me to do?" asked Angela nosing back in to the mix of the case.
"There are four skulls in this bag as well, I need you to take the box of photos that Booth has and see if you can find a match to each."
"Not a problem sweetie, I'll get right on it." Angela carefully extracted the skulls from the bag setting them on a transfer cart that was conveniently placed to the left of the light board.
"Zach, you finish up what you have already started and let me know if Hodges finds anything in the dirt you extracted."
"How about I tell you myself?" Hodges has stealthily reentered the room while everyone was deep in conversation looking like a giddy school kid with smile from ear to ear.
"What are you grinning at Poncho?" said Booth
"Well… first of all, don't call me Poncho, and second, I found traced of Dermestid Beetles on the bottom of her feet."
"What are Dermestid Beetles?" asked Booth clearly lost in a see of pronouns and squint speak.
"They feed on flesh most commonly used by Taxidermist for skull cleaning." Said Bones.
"You mean to tell me that this guys covers these dead girls in beetles, lets them eat their flesh and then cleans the bones with Lysol to hide the smell."
"Pretty much."
"Needless to say, I'm not hungry anymore."
Asphyxiation: or death due to lack of oxygen, can have many causes, including strangulation or compression of the neck, suffocation, drowning, choking, and hanging.
Petechail hemorrhaging: in eyes, face, lungs, and neck area. Petechiae are tiny purple or red spots on the skin that are caused by small areas of bleeding under the skin.