A/N: Thanks to all those who reviewed the last chapter.
Chapter 10
No sign of Matthew Charlesworth had been found by the team of FBI agents that were already there. This concerned Booth as he was beginning to think that there may be other murders connected with Matthew, and nothing to say that he might not strike again. Also, if his theory was correct, then Dean Lammork was still alive and needed to be reprimanded. He wouldn't have minded betting, if he was a betting man, that Matthew had headed straight to Dean. So find Matthew, find Dean.
He and Brennan headed straight for the greenhouse. No one had been inside it yet, they had been waiting for words of command from Booth and the anthropologist on what to do, so he knew that any evidence they found would not have been tampered with. He watched as Brennan began to poke about, using the dim light from a torch to see. She seemed to know which places to look in, and what fascinated her most was a deep trough full of black soil, crawling with insects that made Booth wince.
"I think we need to get Hodgins here," she looked up and him and said. "This is his area of expertise." She gloved one hand and began to reach down into the soil. The trough was deep and as wide as a single bed, easily big enough to hold a human body.
"They've got some cracking plants growing in here," Booth said, flicking his flashlight around the greenhouse and catching sight of two officers who were stood outside.
"It's the fertiliser they've been using," Brennan said flatly. Booth winced at her meaning. "Booth!" She said urgently. He stepped quickly over to her side and pointed his light at what she was uncovering.
"Another body," he grimaced.
"She's not been here long," Brennan looked at him. "Maybe forty eight hours. Decomposition is accelerated because of the insects and the heat."
"That also accounts for the smell – it's not just manure," he said wryly.
She shook her head. "Get the soco's in here now to set up lighting. And I need Hodgins to come over from the lab," she directed the comment at an agent who had just entered the greenhouse, hand over mouth to attempt to counteract the rancid smell.
The agent looked at Booth, questioning the orders. "Do as the lady says," he confirmed.
"You be okay here while I go and issue instructions?" He asked, placing one hand on her shoulder. He liked this, working with her knowing that when they eventually got to finish she would still be with him.
She turned to him, looking at him with intense eyes. He swiftly gave her a small kiss, and to his surprise she didn't flinch or back away, she just smiled back at him. Clearly she'd made her mind up. The gap that had been between them had been closed with the night. It had taken a lot less heartache than what he would have predicted and it had been much easier. They just seemed to fit.
He left her to her preliminary searchings, having a sneaking suspicion that she was going to find other corpses before she was finished. He watched as three scene of crime officers entered the greenhouse, each carrying a bag of strange looking implements. One of them he recognised from Moreton Street and knew that she had done a good job there from what Tempe had said, so he felt a little happier that Tempe would be getting reasonable assistance.
Once outside he began to organise a search of the property, which included a good deal of land, much of it covered by trees. He was certain that more bodies had been buried here over the past eighty years. After all, there had been at least two murderers, likely three, or even four if Davey had been involved, that had carried out homicides for most of their lifetimes.
There had been no sightings of Matthew or his car. Armed officers had been to his apartment and had checked it thoroughly, he had seemingly not been there since he had left with Angela. Booth began to stride out over the back garden into the woodland. No one had yet done a comprehensive search of the area, so there was a strong possibility that Dean Lammork and Matthew Charleswork were hiding out some where on the estate.
He switched his torch off and switched it to his left hand. In his right he carried his gun, memories of a previous life as a sniper haunting him. He kept to he shadows, walking almost silently. Although it seemed illogical for the two men to be here, where half of the states police seemed to be, he had the strangest inkling of a feeling that they were. After all, who else would imagine that they would try to get into a property that was so well guarded at present? He was almost certain that Matthew would have headed straight here, and that Dean would have been here anyway, even when him and Tempe had come by yesterday.
He continued to trek, the hooting of an owl the only thing that broke the dead silence. His eyes worked well in the dark, even without night vision goggles, and his ears pricked to every slight sound. He heard a crunch of dead leaves and stopped, still. Crouching down, he manoeuvred his body in the direction from it had come and waited. He heard it again and this time saw movement. In the distance, through the trees, he could see what looked like a wooden hut, dilapidated and missing half the roof. Outside the hut stood a man, looking to be in his fifties, stocky with a slightly balding head.
Booth waited, years of training and then practise coming into force. He could not let him know he was there. Then he had to see if he was alone. If he was, then it would be easy enough to accost him and take him in. If Matthew was with him then it would be wiser to take the chance of leaving them and bringing reinforcements back with him. But he couldn't let them know that they were being watched.
It took half an hour of cold patience before Matthew emerged from the hut, still in his date clothes that were now crumpled and tatty from a walk through the country side. Obviously Booth had gotten here before him; Matthew had come the long way to avoid being noticed. Booth stood carefully, keeping in the shadows and began to move silently, not even causing a leaf to crunch under his feet. Once he was well out the range for them to hear or catch sight if him, he began to run rapidly toward the house.
Within thirty seconds of being back he had gathered enough officers to accompany him with causing too much notice. Three he knew were accustomed to this sort of thing, having done the same type of work as him previously. They set of at a brisk, quiet pace, back toward the hut.
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Brennan had begun tapping round the greenhouse and had eventually started lifting area of the floor. Three more skeletons had been buried in shallow graves, and she imagined she would find more. What she really wanted was the 'trophies'; the small bones that had been detached from the bodies and probably kept. She had left the team of soco's to wade through the greenhouse and extended her perusal to outside, beginning to probe through flower beds and other areas where she suspected a bag pf bones would be kept.
Briefly, she wondered what Booth was doing, and smiled inwardly at herself for thinking of him while she was so busy. But hadn't she always thought about him, even when she was up to her eyebrows in bones and decaying matter? At some point during each day, even each hour, she had wondered what he was doing, if he was okay. Angela had been right; she had kept on glancing toward the entrance to see if he was there if he hadn't shown up by midday.
She moved over to another bed of soil, obviously fresh and recently raked. She liked being in his arms and having him touch her, in a different way to David, or even Pete. She knew that it wasn't purely physical; it wasn't just for convenience, which many of her relationships had been about previously. It was because it was him, and it meant something to her to be the one he was holding, the one he kissed, the one he'd phone when, well, a body had been discovered. She sighed, running a rather scary looking piece of apparatus through the soil carefully. She knew she was terrible with dealing with people, and that her people skills were far more suited to her dealing with the dead than the living, and that she found it hard to read others like Booth did, but that didn't mean that she didn't have feelings, that she was a robot. Booth seemed to understand that. Now that something had happened between them, even if it was just a kiss, she felt as if a wall inside of her had been broken down and waves of feelings were washing out. She wasn't quite sure how she should deal with it, but surprisingly it didn't scare her, she just felt a little apprehensive, but excited too.
She resumed concentrating on the task in hand, trailing through the soft soil. She began to prod a little deeper, as she would when she was on a dig, and within minutes she had could across something solid. Patiently, she began to shift the soil, eventually reaching a wooden box wrapped in a plastic bag. Grabbing her camera before she removed it, she took a photo of the box in situ, and then took it out of the soil. Opening it, she found what she had been looking for; small bones, mainly metatarsals, phalanges and the tiny bones from inside the ear. Shining a torch at them she estimated roughly how many different bodies they could have come from, getting the figure to around twenty five. Nineteen skeletons had now been found, so there were at least four more to be discovered and the rest of the house to searched.
She sighed, and stood up; wanting to find Seeley and let him know that she had gotten hold of the trophies. She wandered back to the house, spotting another agent or officer by the back door.
"Do you know where Agent Booth is?" She asked, gripping the hold of the box, now back inside of the bag, with latex gloves.
"He's headed off into the woods. They think they've caught the suspects," he informed her.
Brennan took a step back from him and looked toward where he had pointed. She would never have expected Booth to have taken her with him for this. She was here to do her job, and he his. A small part of her wished he'd come to tell her where he was going, but she also realised that had the roles been reversed and she'd needed to hurry to do something her job would have taken precedence. She knew then that if this between them became a relationship, it would not hamper their work, and that they would both understand how it all fitted together. A smile came to her lips until she heard the gun shot.
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