A/N: I'm going to start using abbreviations for the time zones so when you see MST it stands for Mountain Standard Time and EST stands for Eastern Standard Time.

Chapter 2

Idaho Springs, Colorado, Saturday at 8:00 a.m. MST (10:00 a.m. EST)

It was a crisp cold morning in Idaho Springs, Colorado. A small sleepy mountain town, thirty miles west of Denver, was home to just under two thousand people and it reminded Brennan of when they went to Aurora, Washington the year before. She smiled and climbed out of the rented Ford Explorer in front of the coroner's office. Booth was talking to the local police a few doors down and he had promised to catch up to her. Opening the door to the small building, she was greeted by a blast of warm air and a smiling receptionist.

"Hello, my name is Kelly Mitchell. Can I help you?" The friendly woman was about five foot four with dark brown hair tied back into a ponytail. She wore a blue and white striped button down shirt with a pair of navy blue slacks.

"Yes, I'm Dr. Brennan. I'm looking for Dr. Saunders." The forensic anthropologist smiled back.

"Oh Dr. Brennan, we've been expecting you. You'll find Dr. Saunders just through that door." The woman said.

"Thank you Ms. Mitchell." Brennan told her and headed for the door.

"Please call me Kelly. I imagine we'll be seeing a lot of each other." The forensic anthropologist nodded and went through the door. There was a tall muscular man that appeared to be around fifty pulling one of the body storage compartments open.

"Dr. Saunders?" Brennan asked. The man stopped what he was doing and looked over at the body that went with the voice.

"You must be Dr. Brennan. I've heard so much about you." He straightened up, removed his rubber gloves, and wiped the powder from them on his apron. Extending his hand, he shook Brennan's.

"It's nice to meet you. Please call me Leo."

"You can call me Temperance." She smiled. He nodded, moved over to a shelf, and grabbed a box of rubber gloves. Brennan placed her kit down and accepted a pair he handed her.

"I hope those fit, since I'm the only one that wears them in here I tend to by the large ones." Leo told her. Brennan slipped the gloves on and found them to be a little big but she smiled and said,

"No problem. As long as the evidence isn't compromised I don't care. So where is the body?"

"Over here." Leo went over to the drawer he had opened and pulled it out. The two shifted the body off the slab and onto a gurney. Then from the gurney, they carefully moved it to the examining table. Quickly, the forensic anthropologist opened her kit and removed the camera.

"This is amazing." Brennan said as she snapped some photos with her camera.

"I figured you'd like it." Dr. Saunders teased.

"Anyway, the body was found Friday morning by local Sally Glenn and her boyfriend Richard Kidd. They were hiking near Pike's Peak. Now I've seen frozen bodies but this one. I've never seen this." He continued.

"How exactly did they find him?" Brennan asked as she examined the bones that protruded from the frozen torso.

"Well they found him standing straight up. He was buried up to his mid-thigh in the dirt and the rest of him was sticking out of the dirt." He told her. Brennan made a face as she moved up to the torso.

"That explains why from mid-thigh down he's nothing but bones. I'm amazed that the flesh and tissue remain relatively intact above that." She said.

"Well I thawed him out slowly and managed to remove the larger chunks of ice. This is a small town and I don't recognize him. I tried running his fingerprints through our limited database and I got nothing so I sent them to Denver but they got nothing either. That's why I had Denver contact the FBI and then you." Saunders explained.

"How did you remove him from the ground? It's cold enough out here for the ground to be frozen." Brennan wondered.

"That was tricky but the police used wedges and sledgehammers. I had them remove everything around the body within a three-foot radius. I have the dirt stored in large plastic boxes but I haven't had the time to sort through them yet." He explained.

"Can I send them back to the Jeffersonian? I have an entomologist there that would be happy to do the digging for you." She told him.

"By all means. The Post Office is just down the street." Saunders said.

"Now judging from the bones, I'd say that they were in the ground at least three weeks." Brennan carefully examined the piece of broken femur.

"That makes sense. We hadn't had snow for a long time and then about three weeks ago a storm dumped four feet in town and five to six feet in the mountains. A lot of skiers came into town and we were jammed until the recent heat wave." He told her. The forensic anthropologist was about to comment when Booth came in through the door.

"Dr. Leo Saunders, I'd like you to meet my partner, FBI Special Agent Booth." She said.

"Doctor." The FBI Agent nodded and the doctor nodded back.

"Booth, Leo was just explaining to me that there was a recent heat wave." Brennan said. He gave her a look and skeptically asked,

"Forty is a heat wave?"

"Well it's enough to start the snow melting and small avalanches on the mountain that's probably why Sally and Richard found the body." Saunders said.

"I have a trip to the Post Office to make and some pictures to send to Angela. You can help me carry the boxes." Brennan smiled.

"Oh goody." He smirked.

"So are you going out to visit the crime scene?" Saunders asked.

"Yeah, Deputy Brockman is taking us up there in an hour." Booth said.

"Good luck and keep warm." The coroner smiled.

To Be Continued…