Tonight's episode was un-flipping-believably fantastic. But that's beside the point. Once again I must send humble thanks to all of my awesome reviewers. You guys always make my day and all of those virtual treats are very tasty. Not to mention it gives me that extra push to write more. Hope you enjoy the results. Oh, I suppose I should mention that timeline wise this falls between The Soldier on The Grave and The Woman In Limbo.

Disclaimer: They aren't my toys. I borrowed them. I don't really want to give them back.


Ch. 9 – Sunday Morning

Booth shuffled his feet and took a deep breath before he knocked. He was nervous and that was utterly ridiculous. He'd spent more time with Bones in the past year than with anyone else. He'd even been here with her alone before… although that evening hadn't really ended that well. But now, standing outside of Brennan's apartment at nine o'clock on a Sunday morning he was suddenly nervous, like he was on a first date. And that definitely wasn't why he was here.

Realizing that one of Brennan's neighbors may have spotted him by this time, just standing outside of her apartment like some stalker, he knocked. Obsessing about Bones may have been one of his more frequent activities lately, but now was not the time for it. Hearing movement just beyond the solid, wooden portal labeled 2B, he straightened up and pasted his aptly named "charm smile" on his face.

Brennan opened her door and started in surprise when Booth and his charm smile greeted her. He was dressed in jeans and a white t-shirt that clung to his well-defined chest muscles. Blinking to prove that he was not a figment of her imagination she managed to sputter, "Booth."

While Brennan was taking in the sight of Booth on her doorstep early Sunday morning, Booth was taking in the sight of Bones. She was clad in a white cotton tank top and striped, pale green, satin pajama bottoms. He also noted with a smile that she was wearing large, fluffy, white bunny slippers. He had a feeling they had been a gift from Angela.

"Morning, Bones."

Brennan blinked quickly, several times in succession but said nothing.

"Are you going to ask me in or are you just going to leave me standing out here in the hall all day? Because I'm pretty sure your neighbors might notice if you left me out here."

"Oh, sorry, come in. You'll have to forgive me, I haven't finished my first cup of coffee yet so I'm not quite awake."

Booth smiled and stepped over the threshold, following behind Brennan as she led the way into her kitchen, throwing an inquisitive glance at him over her shoulder. He seated himself on a stool at the breakfast bar, noting the steaming cup of coffee on the counter and the closed laptop on her kitchen table.

"Did you just get up?"

"Nah, I was up at eight. Couldn't sleep anymore with everything that's supposed to happen today running through my head. So, I took a shower and I was about to have breakfast and work on my book when you showed up."

Booth nodded and quickly swallowed the flash of anxiousness that cut through him when Brennan mentioned the plans for that night. No matter how many details he knew about the mission there was still an awful feeling in his gut and a tiny voice telling him that it wouldn't take much to lock Bones up in her lab and never let her out again. Skirting away from his trepidation he turned his full attention to the still slightly drowsy forensic anthropologist wandering around her kitchen.

"Have you had breakfast?" she asked.

"Yeah, thanks," Booth said, "but don't let me stop you from having yours."

Brennan nodded and began to pull out the ingredients she would need for French toast, oblivious to Booth studying her kitchen. He noted that all of the scorch marks had been painted over and her cupboards were a different type of wood than before. He unwillingly flinched when Brennan pulled open the door of her stainless steel fridge to pull out eggs and a carton of orange juice.

"Want some juice?" she offered, holding the container in his direction.

"Sure," Booth said, enjoying the sight of yet another different side of Bones. As she mixed the eggs and other ingredients, dipped the bread in the yellow liquid and then dropped the bread in a heated pan he noticed that the expression of concentration on her face was similar to the one she wore when she was studying her bones and it amused him.

Pulling out a plate, she stacked her toast on it, drizzled it in syrup and sat across from him, taking a long sip of coffee and biting into a mouthful of syrup-soaked French toast. Swallowing the first bit of her breakfast, she turned to Booth with an inquisitive expression.

"So what brings you here so early?"

"A couple things. First, all the details for tonight have been cemented."

"Great. Can you go over them with me again?"

"Sure. Clark checked with Mark Dalton, the Delta Phi Epsilon house manager, last night and confirmed that he'd called Peek-A-Boo to request a stripper for tonight at 9:00 p.m. Your false profile was put into their system on Friday afternoon, complete with photograph. Madeleine Brightman called me at ten last night to tell me that their network was hacked again, so we know this guy has checked you out. Clark, Angela, and I will meet with you here at 6:00 p.m. to do a last minute review of everything. Plus, we'll get all of our gadgetry, coordinate our watches so to speak. I'll leave at 7:00 p.m. Mark has announced that his older brother, me, is coming to visit him for a couple days before I get married two weeks from now. The frat is throwing me a bachelor party: the whole reason for your appearance. You leave the surveillance van where Angela and Clark will be hanging out, fifteen blocks away and take a taxi. You show up at the house at around nine and do your thing. After that, you call a cab and leave again. I will be two minutes behind you. Our guy might attack you before I can catch up so you might have to fend him off until then. We arrest him, interrogate him, and then lock him up and throw away the key. Then you and I have a drink with Angela and go home. Sound good?"

Brennan swallowed a sip of coffee and nodded, "Sounds fine. What else did you come over here to talk about?"

"It can wait until you're done eating," Booth said and flipped open the Sunday paper to the comic's section as Brennan finished her meal.

Brennan slid off her stool and landed with a solid thud on the floor. She picked up her dishes and Booth's glass, placed them in the sink, and refilled her coffee mug.

"You want some coffee?"

"I'm pretty wired already, thanks," Booth said with a smile. Brennan grinned in return and led the way to the couch in her living room. Settling herself in one corner while Booth reclined in the other. Curling her feet up under her, Brennan turned to Booth curiously.

"Ok, I'm done eating now, what else did you want to talk about?"

Booth gazed straight into Brennan's face and assured himself that he had her full attention.

"Don't do this, Bones."

"Do what?" Brennan asked confusedly.

"I am asking you, Temperance, to not go undercover," Booth pleaded, his desperation evident in every line of his face.

Brennan carefully thought out her response before she spoke, an unusual move for the usually forthright forensic anthropologist.

"Isn't it a little late now, Booth? I mean, you just told me the whole plan for tonight. It's practically set in stone. Besides, I promised you…"

"I know what you promised. But it's not enough, Bones. It's just not enough."

Brennan gave Booth a hard gaze.

"Booth, what's wrong? This is more than just your usual zeal to be an overprotective ass."

Booth snorted but quickly resumed his serious expression.

"It might be more than that," he sighed. "It is more than that. But the best thing to fix it is for you to not do this thing tonight and spend the evening in your lab instead. I'll even promise not to heckle you for it."

"No, Booth. I can't do that. This is so much more than just stopping a killer. It's about saving women who don't deserve this, who don't deserve the immeasurable pain this man will put them through. And right now, I'm the best person to do that. With your help," she added with a small smile.

Booth briefly found himself at a loss for words because her smile had reached her eyes and the green depths that occasionally appeared blue reminded him of the great importance of his argument.

"I know what this means to you, Bones. I really do. But you don't know why this whole situation petrifies me," he said softly.

"Then tell me," Brennan said, shooting Booth a long gaze that he broke away from. Reaching out she placed a light hand on his forearm, a gesture that caused him to look up into her face again in mild surprise at the gesture that she had only used once before. She spoke in a softer voice, "Tell me, Seeley."

Booth took a deep, shaky breath and released it slowly and then began to speak.

"It was the seventh case I worked on for the Bureau after I left Quantico. The first few I'd worked on had been fairly easy for me to solve and I'd already been given two cases to work as lead agent. And then Clark came to me one day and demanded my help on this profiling case he'd been working on for a couple months, while I'd been working on those six other cases.

"He and I had shared a room at Quantico and we'd gotten along pretty well. Hell, I considered him my first friend in the Bureau although we'd ended up in different departments. So I jumped at the chance to work with him.

"He had a serial murder case. Five people had been killed. There were no immediately obvious similarities between the victims. Two women and three men. They were aged anywhere between twenty-three and sixty-two. Two victims were married, one was engaged, the other two were single. All of the deaths had occurred in different states. Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Minnesota, Colorado, New Mexico. It wasn't until Clark studied where the bodies had been found and the occupations of the victims that he found the common tie: they had all been found in libraries and they had all specialized in rare books.

"We revisited all the crime scenes and interviewed the librarians. We discovered that at each scene a rare book had been stolen. Only one book per murder. The killer had taken the first editions of A Tale of Two Cities, The Count of Monte Cristo, Anna Karenina, Canterbury Tales, and Beowulf. After that, we combed through the personal effects of all the victims and found that in all of their day planners, on the day of their murders, they had all had an appointment with Harold Philips an hour before their estimated time of death.

"Clark was certain that our guy planned his kills long in advance so he sent out feelers to many of the country's largest rare books collections to find out if any of their employees had set up an appointment with Harold Philips. We got lucky. A young librarian in Connecticut had an appointment with our suspect, set for the next week. Her name was Kate Mahoney."

Brennan's eyes widened at the now familiar name. Booth swallowed hard, as he tried to find detachment like Bones, but his emotions crept into his voice anyway. It became unsteady as the rest of the story spilled out.

"Kate was only twenty-five. She'd gotten married the year before to a nice guy who was an English professor at the community college in the next town. She was pretty. Brown hair, blue eyes, about as tall as you. And she loved books. Loved them with the same passion that her husband loved her. They had just decided that they wanted to try and have a baby.

"Anyway, she loved books. We went to visit her in the rare books section of the local library and she stood there talking to us half the time and murmuring to her books the other half. Treated them like her children. But that section of the library… it had a smell. Not a bad smell, just a scent that I've never experienced anywhere else. It had weird lighting that wouldn't damage the books and it was sealed off from the rest of the library with a heavy, wooden door because it had special air ducts and a different heating system. It was in the basement of the building and Kate said the only thing she regretted was that her books could never see daylight because it would utterly ruin them.

"So we talked to Kate and we told her what had happened to the other five people who had had meetings with Harold. She was rightly alarmed and asked if there was anything she could do. I think she was really more concerned about any harm that might come to her books than to people. Clark and I said we needed to discuss our options and we left her.

"I wanted to catch the guy by letting him go in to meet Kate while we were waiting in the next room and just come in and apprehend him. Clark didn't like that. He wanted to know what motivated the killer, why he was killing and stealing these books. This had been his puzzle for the past few months and he wanted all the answers. So, he convinced Kate and I to set up a sting of sorts. Kate would wear a wire and proceed with the meeting as planned. Clark and I were to come in thirty minutes after the meeting was supposed to start and catch our guy. Then we'd have our suspect plus Kate's recorded conversation with him so that Clark could have all his answers."

Booth's voice cracked and he briefly closed his eyes, only to have Kate Mahoney's smiling face greet him. It had been several years ago and he'd made his peace with what had happened, but now, reliving it and with the added knowledge of what Bones was about to do that night, the memories hit him with double force. He cleared his throat and continued on while Brennan watched him with a sympathetic face.

"Everything started out according to plan. Kate went into the library's rare book section five minutes before her appointment and Clark and I waited upstairs, two aisles over from one of the stairwell entrances. We'd been waiting twenty minutes when the fire alarm suddenly went off. I immediately suspected the worst. We went down the stairs and caught a man in his mid-forties trying to sneak up. Clark cuffed him and when he patted him down he found a hand bound copy of some of Virginia Woolf's early poems and a .45 that was still warm."

Brennan's eyes widened, knowing how the story would end. She felt like the eyewitness at a car crash aware of how things would end and unable to stop it. She timidly rested a hand on Booth's back and he lifted one corner of his mouth in an attempt at a smile that came off as a grimace.

"I ran down the rest of the stairs. I can still see how everything looked when I pulled open that heavy wooden door. Nothing was disturbed; everything was in order. The air ducts were blowing out cool air but the smell… the smell that had mystified me, intrigued me, it was different. Because along with that scent of ancient paper and old leather was a tang I knew. A tang I dreaded. I knew what I'd find before I saw her but I kept running anyway, with some crazy hope that maybe I was wrong. But I wasn't. I found Kate Mahoney in her office. She'd been shot twice in the chest and once in the head. The crazy bastard shot her after she'd told him where the book was within the first five minutes of their meeting.

"I felt awful. I'd gotten to know this woman and her husband. And now I had to tell him that his wife was dead. But Clark? The only thing that bugged him was that there was nothing on the tape and that he'd have to spend weeks questioning Harold to find all the answers he wanted. And that was the point where I realized what Clark really was and what he wanted from the FBI. He just wanted something to play with; he didn't care about the repercussions. But I did and I still do."

Brennan squeezed Booth's shoulder as he finished his tale. He reached behind him and squeezed her hand once in silent thanks and then released it. Pulling her hand back, she set the cold remains of her coffee on the nearby table and turned to face Booth square on. He mirrored her actions and stared at her expectantly.

"Booth, I understand where you're coming from. I understand why you'd rather have me locked away in the Jeffersonian tonight than be in that frat house. But I am not Kate Mahoney and no one's going to shoot me. First of all, I'd kick his legs out from under him before he could pull the trigger. Second of all, this guy, he doesn't use guns. He likes to beat these women; he likes to make them scream, so even if things go wrong and something happens to me tonight, he's not going to kill me right away. Besides, I know you and I trust you. You've got my back."

Booth smiled but the expression didn't entirely wipe the fear from his eyes.

"So I guess that means that I haven't managed to convince you to stay in with your bones?"

"Sorry," Brennan replied with a wry grin. "I have to go remove my clothes in a room full of men tonight for pay. A lot more entertaining than watching Zach and Hodgins attempt to shoot spitballs at each other."

"Spitballs? Really?"

"Jack taught Zach how to make them last week. There have been several wars during the past week while waiting for lab results. Although, there may not be too many wars in the near future. Zach hit Dr. Goodman on Thursday."

Booth laughed at the image and watched Bones stand up and take her coffee cup into the kitchen. He stretched and marveled at how easily he could become accustomed to this.

"Oh Bones?" he called out.

"Yes?" she replied, popping her head around the corner of the wall bordering the kitchen.

"I think I've figured out a way to keep you from having to take off all your clothes tonight."

"Please expand," she said, unmoving from her position.

"Remember that rule Madeleine told us about?"

Brennan gave Booth a wide grin, "You, Agent Booth, are a genius."

Booth grinned in return, pleased with the compliment. Brennan's head disappeared and he heard the rattle of dishes being loaded into the dishwasher. Booth was contemplating the stack of magazines on Brennan's coffee table and wondering where she hid her Cosmo when there was a loud, insistent rapping on the door. Standing up, he strode over to it and pulled it open to reveal an astounded Angela Montenegro.

"Booth!"

Booth stepped back and felt his eyes unwillingly widen in surprise.

"Angela!"

Stepping inside quickly and shutting the door behind her, Angela sidled up to the agent and began speaking in a conspiratorial tone.

"So you spent the night? Where's Bren? Is she in the shower? If she's in the shower why aren't you in there with her? Do I smell French toast? Did you cook?"

Booth was saved from the barrage of questions when Brennan appeared in the entranceway of her question.

"Angela!"

"Hey, Bren. Sorry, I didn't know you had company," she said with a poorly disguised eyebrow twitch.

"Angela, Booth just came over to tell me some of the details about tonight. Why are you here?"

"I can't believe you forgot, Bren. We're supposed to go…"

"…shopping," Brennan finished, placing a hand on her forehead. "I completely forgot. I'm sorry. Give me five minutes and then we can go."

Angela began to protest, thinking that somehow she could prolong the private moment occurring between the FBI agent and the forensic anthropologist but was instead left with her mouth hanging open as Brennan rushed into her bedroom and closed the door. With nothing to do, the artist turned back to Booth but before she could shoot more questions at him, he interceded with a question of his own.

"You're going shopping? You and Bones are going shopping?"

"Yes, Booth, people do go shopping from time to time."

"I know. It just doesn't seem like her favorite past time."

"It isn't but she asked for my help to come up with an appropriate outfit for this evening's… adventure. So we're going shopping."

Booth nodded and turned at the sound of Brennan's bedroom door opening again. She stepped out wearing blue jeans and a white tank top with black sandals on her feet. Booth couldn't help but notice that the outfit faintly mirrored his and he noted out of the corner of his eye that Angela had noticed as well.

Before he could be pulled into another of Angela's interrogation sessions that made him sweat more than is background check for the FBI, he made a quick exit, briefly telling Bones that he'd meet her back at her apartment that evening. She nodded and smiled and Angela gave him a wide grin. As he closed the door behind him, he heard the artist demand, "So what really happened?"


So, what do you think? Too long? Too much talk, not enough action? Think I should work for the Bones wardrobe department? Want to send my muse and I some tasty goodies and other promises of things I will never ever get except in virtual reality? To comment or for anything else just press that little button. It makes my fictional world go 'round.