Disclaimer- I don't own Bones… at all… but I do own Déjà Dead, Death Du Jour, and Deadly Décisions, which are some of the books that Bones is based off of and I'm in the middle of Death Du Jour RIGHT NOW! Woot!
There, on the floor of their hotel room, was a naked shining body of a woman, blood seeping from her forehead disappearing into the cheap red carpet. Booth ran into the room and checked the woman's pulse. He looked up at Temperance sadly.
"The bleeding suggests that she was killed shortly before we entered the hotel. The killer must have left just before we arrived." Tempe walked into the room and sat on one of the unstable, unmade, twin-sized beds. It creaked under her weight.
"I'm going to go downstairs and ask some questions. You call Cullen and tell him we've been delayed." Booth tossed Tempe his cell phone and left the room.
Temperance searched for Cullen's number and called. Three rings later, he picked up.
"Cullen."
"Sir, this is Dr. Brennan. We've arrived safely on the island, but we found a cadaver in our room."
"You're kidding." Tempe heard the obvious doubt in the director's voice.
"We wish we were. I-"
"Where's Agent Booth?" Cullen asked, no doubt unhappy talking to a squint.
"He went downstairs to inquire as to the previous owner of our room, I suspect."
Cullen sighed. "Tell Booth not to worry with this murder. It's not our jurisdiction. Call the coroner for the body and get to the morgue to see your current assignment. Don't fiddle with matters that don't concern us."
"Yes, sir." He hung up before she could say bye. 'Men!' she thought to herself then found the coroner's number in the phonebook and dialed.
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Booth walked right up to the main desk to the fat hooker lady and leaned on the desk waiting for her to get off the phone.
"No! He didn't! Why didn't you tell him to go and f…" It seemed as if she'd be at this for a while. Impatient and agitated, Booth began furiously tapping his fingers on the desk.
"Ugh… I have to go, babe. Yeah… some guy is waiting for me. You just go tell that son of a bitch to suck himself. You can do so much better than that ass! Ok! Aloha!" She finally hung up. "Can I help you?" she asked Booth, not caring if he really needed help or not.
"Actually yeah! Do you know of the person who resided in room 666 before me?"
"We don't keep records of room occupiers."
"Did you see someone get out of here really fast before we came?"
"Uh… I was kind of busy! So stop asking me questions like I'm a security guard or something!"
"Do you even have a security guard here?" Booth didn't wait for her to respond. He stormed back upstairs and into his room.
"Booth, Cullen says not to bother with this one." Booth heard Tempe's voice somewhere out of sight.
"Where are you?" he asked.
"There's a washer and dryer in the bathroom. I'm cleaning the sheets." Booth stepped over the corpse, walked around a corner and almost ran into his germaphobic partner. "Cullen says that this murder isn't the FBI's jurisdiction. I called the coroner. He'll be here in a few minutes. This is for the sheriff to worry about. We're already late."
"You're right. We should get to the local morgue and start working on the real reason we're here. I'm just concerned with the fact that we found a dead body in our room. There's a murderer out there. If we had gotten here ten minutes earlier, we could've caught him. Did you examine her?" Booth asked.
"I didn't touch her at all. I've told you before. I don't work with skin." Tempe shut the washer door and turned around. Her body was inches from his when she first realized how incredible small the bathroom was and that it didn't have a door. She looked at his face. He was focused on the ground evidently upset at the current events. "I'm sorry, Booth. There's nothing we can do."
"She looks young…" he looked back at Tempe.
"I know." She held his gaze.
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The coroner crew came within fifteen minutes and retrieved the body, executing the ritualistic task like clockwork. Booth and Tempe oversaw the procedure willingly and soon joined dead girl at the morgue to perform their actual responsibility.
Temperance pulled on her surgical gloves while walking to a skeleton lain out anatomically on a lab table. Seeley followed closely behind her. Tempe immediately began studying the bones. She looked at the pelvic bone, which showed the characteristics of a female. She added to the evidence by observing the very feminine cheekbones. "The victim was a woman, Caucasian according to the attributes of the jaw and cheekbones."
"That doesn't give us much to go on, Bones," Seeley said as he flipped through the crime scene photos. They showed a mutilated body, it's race and sex unidentifiable. The victim had been tied up, thrown into the ocean, and completely disfigured by sharks.
"Where was the victim restrained?" Tempe asked. "The wrists right?" She walked up to Booth to look at the pictures. "That's unusual…" She looked back at the skeleton.
"What's unusual?" Booth asked.
"There are no markings on the wrists to suggest that she tried to stop from being tied up."
"What are you saying, Bones? Are you implying that this girl let herself get roped up and thrown to the sharks?" he asked incredulously.
"No, Booth. I'm saying that she may have been unconscious when it happened, or already dead."
"But the autopsy report says that there were no other injuries other than the shark bites." Booth flipped through some folders.
"Did the blood samples show any traces of being drugged?" Tempe didn't look up from the bones.
"No…" Booth ran a hand through his hair. "So what we have is a body of a girl, age unknown, who didn't defend herself as she was being tied up. She wasn't drugged or dead. Do you think she could have been sleeping?" he asked doubtfully.
"There's no way to prove that, Booth." She began taking notes. "I believe the victim may have been between the ages of thirteen to seventeen."
"Oh god… the autopsy says that she had been involved in sexual intercourse shortly before her death."
Temperance looked up. "Rape?"
Booth paused. "Deliberate… This girl knew this guy. She voluntarily had sex with him. She wasn't drugged or intoxicated in any way. Do you think maybe he killed her after their little rendezvous?"
"Booth, you know I'm not scenario girl."
"Yeah, but you're brain girl and I really need some different opinions. This guy is obviously sick and twisted."
"Anything that has to do with feeding people to sharks is twisted, Booth."
"Do you really think that?" Booth stopped. "Do you suppose that's what this guy's doing? Feeding girls to sharks?"
Temperance shuddered inwardly. "I don't know, Booth. She was thrown into the ocean, so… Wait! How could I be so unfocused?"
"What? Did you get a thought? Share!"
"Let me see the autopsy reports," Tempe said without heeding to Booth's demand.
"No, Bones. You're going to tell me what's going on in that pretty little noggin of yours."
Temperance didn't react to that remark. "Booth! We don't know if the victim was fed to the sharks or not. We don't know how long she was in the water before they found her body and started lunch. The autopsy will tell us how long the body was in the water before the bite marks were made."
"I already looked, Bones. She was in the water for two days before she washed up on shore," said Booth, not following her.
"No, no, no." Tempe shook her head. "That was the total time she was in the water, from before she was eaten to when she was found onshore. The details show that she was alive when first in the water, conscious or not we don't know. The loss of blood from the shark wounds killed her."
"The sharks killed her," Booth restated. "Not blood loss."
Tempe rolled her eyes. "I guess it's how you view it. We can both agree that it was the sharks that caused the death. What we just need to know is if the cause of death is what her murderer originally wanted."
"Her killer wanted this girl dead. That's all we need to know, Bones!"
She held up her hands. "Booth! You're getting away from the point. The sharks caused her death."
"The murderer caused his death!" Booth covered his face and began to cry.
Temperance walked up to him. "The victim… was a girl, Booth. I have a feeling that this… has nothing to do with this murder. Is there something you want to tell me, Booth? Do you want to take a break and talk about what's really bothering you?"
"Are you a shrink now, Bones?" Booth asked sarcastically.
"No, but I'm your friend and I care about you."
Booth sighed. "I don't really want to talk about it now. It's just… a long story. Go on with what you were saying…"
"Alright… Well, if the autopsy statement says that the victim was in the water a while before the sharks killed her then the murderer just wanted her to drown. On the other hand, if the sharks killed her immediately after being submerged in the water then the shark killing was intentional. As you very well know, I'm not well versed in the human psyche so I'm not the one to ask about murderers and their warped brains. You need an expert for that."
Booth opened the file again. "Guess we have a shark feeder on our hands. Instantly. I quote, 'within minutes'. Remind me never to watch 'Jaws'." Temperance furrowed her brow in unfamiliarity. "'Jaws'? The famous shark movie? Steven Spielberg?"
"Oh I know him. He's that attractive male actor Angela's always talking about." Temperance nodded her head in understanding as Booth shook his head with a grin at another one of Tempe's pop culture screw-ups.
So yeah! Thank you all for the lovely reviews! I'm sorry it keeps taking so long for me to update. I just keep stopping in the middle of a thought to go do something for my mom or something and I lose my train of thought. Shorter than the last chapter. I just had to put this one up. Please review some more! Make my inbox happy! I hope I got all of the anthropologic stuff kind of right... Oh well, you all get the picture. Oh yeah and I'm now kind of done with Death Du Jour... And as an obvious end not, I LOVE KATHY REICHS!
