Welcome back, readers. :) A guest reviewed asking if there were 'more chapters' to this story, referring to the part of the summary that said 3 of 3. If you're just finding this series, please note that it is the third and final installment. Since S3 was shorter, this story will be too, but I'm not covering every episode in detail. Please make sure you read the series in order, or else you'll be a bit confused. :)
A lot of this chapter follows the episode in terms of dialogue. I changed a few things here and there, but it's one of my favorite episodes, and I wanted to write it. As usual, there are inner thoughts and amped up sexual tension (not that it needed to be amped up in this episode, heh). There are added scenes at the end as well.
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Chapter 9
Brennan made another early appearance at the lab the morning of Halloween, hanging her costume as well as Booth's in her office closet. She was the first to arrive, and she spent time analyzing both victims' x-rays and going over the team's findings from the night before. By the time Cam and Zack joined her on the platform, she'd been able to draw some new conclusions regarding the bones of the second victim.
"Judith Evans, sixteen. Our victim from the Dungeon of a Thousand Corpses," she began, gesturing between the body and the set of x-rays that were displayed on the large monitor. "There are stress fractures to both tibias as well as tears to the medial collateral and anterior cruciate ligaments in both knees. It was caused by the knees being drawn close to the chest for a long period of time. The condition is commonly referred to as Catcher's Knee."
"There's nothing in the bio about Judith Evans being a baseball player," Cam replied.
"Compressions to vertebrae C1 through C7 indicate that her neck was bent like this," Zack added, bending his neck until his chin was nearly touching his chest.
"But forced," Brennan clarified. Cam shook her head with a frown.
"I am not liking the picture that's forming inside my head," she said grimly. "Her phalanges cracked, her fingernails shredded, her head forced that way, her knees jammed up against her chest… Do we think Judith Evans was buried alive?" Neither Brennan or Zack seemed to want to confirm her theory, but Hodgins appeared on the platform before either of them could reply.
"I have another bad image of how Stella Higgins died," he said hesitantly. "Spiders."
"Spiders?" Brennan echoed, her forehead creasing between her brows.
"Tarantulas, to be specific."
"Those aren't poisonous," Brennan argued.
"No, but that doesn't make the bite any less painful." He went to another computer monitor and pulled up an odd looking 3D image. "This is an urticating hair from the theraphosinae family."
"It appears to be barbed," Zack observed.
"Yeah. It's very irritating. Tarantula hair was actually used for decades as the main ingredient in itching powder."
"So Stella Higgins was itching so badly that she pulled out her own hair," Cam surmised. "There were hundreds of bites all over her body, so I'd venture to say that there had to be dozens of tarantulas." Everyone but Hodgins shuddered slightly at the mental picture.
"I was operating under the assumption that the mysterious spore was transported by the tarantulas, but I was wrong."
"How do you know," Brennan asked.
"Because there are no tarantula hairs on Judith Evans, but plenty of the spores and particulates. She has carcinogenic dibenzopyrene isomers, asbestos, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, manganese, barium, and steel dust."
"Which adds up to…?" Cam encouraged.
"Internal combustion engines," Zack replied. Hodgins nodded in agreement.
"Traffic. Except for the steel dust. I have no clue about the steel dust," he admitted, shaking his head in consternation. Cam crossed the platform to a different computer terminal and pulled up the results of the toxicology screens she'd done on both victims.
"Stella's tox results show chloroform, ephedrine, theophylline, clonidine, and methamphetamine. Judith's remains show traces of the same compounds, but in different concentrations."
"Most of those are heavy stimulants. Ephedrine is synthesized adrenaline," Brennan frowned. "Their metabolisms would race; their heart rates would accelerate dangerously."
"Spiders, live burial, drug-induced panic… Is our murderer literally scaring girls to death?" Cam suggested. The odds of that being an accurate theory were fairly high, but none of them seemed to want to say it out loud.
"I'll call Booth," Brennan said quietly, leaving the platform for the quiet solitude of her office.
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Booth spent part of the morning questioning Judith Evans' older sister, Sandra. She and her friends had taken Judith with them to the amusement park the night Judith had disappeared. Sandra explained that Judith had been claustrophobic and hadn't wanted to go into the funhouse. She'd promised to wait outside for them, but when Sandra and her friends had emerged, Judith had disappeared. She recalled that the employee working the entrance of the funhouse had told her that Judith had 'taken off with some guy.' When Booth showed her a photograph of Greg Liscomb, she confirmed that he was the employee in question.
Greg Liscomb turned out to be a registered sex offender, but when Booth and Brennan interrogated him, he didn't seem like someone who would have the nerve to kill anyone. He did, however, admit that he'd spoken to each of the victims as well as Megan Shaw. He and Lola, the overly-pierced faux redhead from the amusement park, had been running a sort of role-play scam with a number of teenage girls. Greg would lead them to a secluded area and make out with them, and Lola would interrupt and pretend to be outraged that her boyfriend was cheating on her. She would then 'smack the girls around a little' and send them on their way. It was their idea of foreplay.
Booth walked Brennan to the elevator so that she could return to the lab, promising her that he would handle Lola's interrogation on his own. He had decided to keep both Greg and Lola in custody for the night just to be on the safe side.
"Agent Booth."
"Yeah?" he replied, turning to see Charlie Burns falling into step beside them.
"I spoke with the Shaws and asked them if their daughter had any phobias."
"Yeah?"
"Snakes," Charlie nodded. "One crawled up out of the drain of her bathtub when she was a child."
"Okay, that's good. Thanks. Just call all the pet shops, the reptile specialists or whatever… See who's been buying lots of snakes." Charlie gave him a thumbs-up and headed in the opposite direction, while Booth and Brennan stepped into the elevator.
"Does Lola strike you as a snake person?" Brennan asked.
"I don't know, maybe. I'll bring her in and catch up with you later. I'm gonna have Sweets work up a profile of the killer too."
"You trust him to do that?"
"Well, I think we can solve this case without him, but if Megan Shaw is still alive, then we've gotta use every resource available, right? Besides, we're putting up with him for partners' therapy that you and I both know we don't need. The least he can do is help us out."
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Booth didn't get much information out of Lola, but he kept her in custody anyway. If she and her boyfriend were holding Megan Shaw somewhere, then keeping them locked up might at least buy the team a little time in which to determine her location.
When Brennan returned to the lab, she found Hodgins analyzing the mystery spores with a microscope while Cam leaned over his shoulder. Both were in costume; Hodgins as Captain E.J. Smith, and Cam as Catwoman. Brennan didn't immediately recognize the character, however, so she went with a generalized compliment.
"Is that your costume?"
"Uh, yeah," Cam nodded.
"It's sexually alluring," Brennan stated, mentally comparing her own costume to Cam's feline dominatrix number. Cam was slightly thrown off by the unexpected assessment but voiced her thanks.
"I'm Catwoman. The superhero."
"Oh," Brennan replied vaguely.
"One of the most powerful female superhero figures," Cam added.
"I don't think so," Brennan scoffed.
"Are you kidding?" Cam asked, slightly more incredulous than was really necessary. "Catwoman?"
"Can you fly?"
"I have nine lives."
"Super strength, super speed, force people to tell the truth?"
"I think I'm pretty fast."
"'Pretty fast' is not super speed."
"Hawaii," Hodgins announced, interrupting their argument as he came to stand in front of them. "The spore atronecium from the haleahi nebulae. It's a Hawaiian orchid hybrid."
"The victims were mummified in Hawaii?" Brennan asked in confusion.
"How else would Hawaiian pollen get absorbed into the wet lacquer?" Hodgins replied. Cam nodded, but Brennan was troubled by his findings. She had no idea how someone would've transported a mummy over such a long distance without getting caught, and if Megan Shaw was being held in Hawaii, it didn't bode well for their efforts to save her. Assuming she's even still alive, Brennan thought with a sigh. Booth showed up a short while later, and they exchanged news as they put on their costumes.
"You know, watching you get into that outfit is entertaining, but it's not nearly as fun as getting you out of it," Booth smirked. He very much wished that they had time to lock her office door and fool around a bit, but he knew she was already regretting the time they had to surrender for the Halloween party. She gave him a salacious grin worthy of Angela.
"Did Sweets give you the profile?"
"Yeah…" Booth said, reluctantly pulling his eyes away from his wife and toward the file Sweets had given him. "He says that the killer is male, works alone, and has a respectable blue-collar job. In his public life, he's into saving people. He's unmarried, and he most likely has a police or military background."
"Other than the unmarried part, Sweets could be talking about you," Brennan replied casually, zipping up her boots to complete her Wonder Woman ensemble. Booth surreptitiously checked his chin for drool. As they walked from her office toward Angela's, her breasts bounced with each step, taunting him. Brennan was doing some staring of her own, taking a moment to recall how much they'd enjoyed each other's costumes the year before. So much, in fact, that they hadn't made it out of the house, let alone to the Halloween party.
"Something on your mind, Bones?" Booth teased, easily reading her expression once he'd actually looked at her face.
"Make sure you bring that lab coat back home," she grinned. "Oh, and your fly is unzipped."
"It's supposed to be," he laughed. "Squints never pay attention to stuff like that." Her brows contracted dangerously, and he backpedaled. "I mean, you know… stereotypically." His eyes drifted downward again of their own accord. "Are you sure we have to go to this party? There are gonna be a lot of guys, er...uh, people there, right?"
"Yes, we have to go," Brennan said, looking smug. "Don't get worked up about it. They might look, but you're the only one who gets to touch," she reminded him. Booth smiled happily at that though.
Kind of like bringing an action figure to show and tell but being the only one allowed to take it home and play with it after school, he mused. Booth opted not to voice that particular thought, fully aware that if he did, there would be no action of any kind for him tonight.
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When they entered Angela's office, they found that the rest of the team had changed into their costumes as well. As promised, Zack was wearing large cow-printed pants that draped around his body and were upheld by a pair of suspenders. Angela was dressed as Cher in a black bondage-style top and a rather spectacular feathered headdress. The feathers towered over everyone's heads by at least a foot.
"This star marks the location of Shoreline Amusement Park," Angela explained, showing them a map on her computer screen. The image panned upward to show three blinking triangles. "These are the pet shops that the FBI says sold out of snakes in the last week."
"How many snakes in total?" Brennan asked.
"Over a hundred," she replied. Cam guessed correctly that all purchases had been made with cash. "And the last place sold out about an hour ago," Angela added.
"Whoa. An hour ago?" Booth echoed, pulling his fake eyeglasses off in alarm.
"Booth, Megan Shaw is still alive," Brennan said, nearly shouting.
"Well, Greg and Lola are in custody. Sweets was right; they didn't do it."
Cam shouted out the door for Hodgins and explained to the others that he had been working on isolating locations where the victims would have been exposed to the metal particulates he'd found in the lacquer. Unfortunately, at last count, he'd only managed to narrow it to a hundred and twenty six locations, not including Hawaii.
"No," Booth said sternly. "A hundred and twenty-six, that's not good enough." Hodgins entered the room looking expectant and picking up on the group's nervous energy.
"Megan Shaw is still alive," Brennan told him.
"What do you want me to do?"
"He wants us to guess," Zack replied, gesturing toward Booth with his eyes.
"Well, my guess is Hawaii."
"Not Hawaii," Cam disagreed.
"Guess again," Booth urged. "But better."
"Uh... sorry," he shrugged helplessly, shaking his head.
"Booth, they don't guess," Angela said.
"Who's they?"
"Them!" Cam and Angela replied in unison.
"We do not guess," Zack said blandly.
"You know what? You're a horse's ass."
"Cow. I'm a cow. See my udder?" He indicated the ridiculous rubber udders on the front of his half-cow costume. Brennan was growing progressively more irritated.
"I need Zack and Hodgins. The rest of you can go to the party."
"How can we go to a party when a fourteen-year-old girl is being tortured to death by snakes?" Booth said in frustration.
"People like us can't work at full capacity with people like you constantly interrupting with irrelevancies," she snapped. Hodgins agreed with her, though he threw an apology in Angela's direction for good measure. Brennan tilted her head and looked apologetically at Booth, silently urging him to cooperate. Cam and Angela agreed to leave the room, but Booth refused to go further than a chair parked outside of Angela's open office door.
As Zack sat down at the computer, he made a nervous comment about his costume. It reminded Brennan of her previous argument with Cam.
"Who's stronger, Catwoman or Wonder Woman?" she asked.
"Wonder Woman," they answered loyally.
"I concur, vehemently."
Hodgins turned their attention back to the task at hand, and the three of them took turns coming up with ways to narrow down the list of possible locations. They used Sweets' theory about the killer's job status as well as the type of environment needed to achieve mummification, but it still didn't narrow the results to a practical number.
"The answer is in the anomalies," Brennan insisted. "The Hawaiian spore and steel dust. What makes it?"
"Grinding, drilling, abrading…"
"...Scraping, milling," Zack added absently.
"Train wheels…" Hodgins continued, suddenly looking hopeful. "When a train turns, it grinds the rails and creates steel dust."
"Subways are vented and also provide the warm, dry air needed for mummification," Brennan surmised. "Okay, Zack. What we need now are florists who carry Hodgins' Hawaiian flower and are situated directly over subway tracks."
She turned to leave the room, instructing them to call her when they'd located the florist. Booth had vacated the chair outside of Angela's office at some point, but she could hear his voice emanating from Cam's autopsy room. She decided to make a quick detour to her office so that she could retrieve her gun. When she'd passed the Bureau's marksmanship requirements, she'd moved one of her guns to a locked drawer in her office for the sake of convenience. She had briefly entertained the idea of purchasing one for the glove box of her car, but she'd thought that it might be somewhat superfluous.
"Let's go," Brennan said urgently when she reached Cam's office. Booth followed her through the sliding glass doors and down to the parking garage.
"You're sure about this?" he asked as he pulled the SUV out of the structure.
"Not at all," she admitted.
"Because you guessed."
"We do not guess," she argued, scowling at the smile on his face.
"I think you did. I dare you to put that Lasso of Truth around you."
"Now you're being completely irrational," she bickered back. "This lasso doesn't actually work. These bracelets aren't actually made of Amazonium. They're stainless steel; they can't stop a bullet." Booth muttered a placating 'Okay, Bones,' as her phone rang. She answered it in her usual manner and turned on the speakerphone.
"Aloha Floral Supply between Friendship Heights and Bethesda," Cam told them. "The store sits right over the Red Line." Brennan thanked her and ended the call, while Booth picked up the radio handset to contact the FBI dispatch office. He quickly requested backup and local police units to be dispatched to the location Cam had given them, but Brennan caught his attention by tugging on the sleeve of his lab coat.
"Oh… Please be advised that agents are UC dressed as a squint and Wonder Woman," he added. The dispatcher asked for clarification, and Booth wondered what the local cops would make of their costumes.
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The florist was closed when they arrived, so they went around the back of the building and found a padlocked vent leading underground. Booth shot the lock off of the door and descended the metal ladder first. Once Brennan was safely on the concrete floor as well, he cautiously aimed the beam of his flashlight through the darkness. The sound of the chamber of her gun rotating drew his attention, however.
"Okay, where did you even find a place to carry that?" he asked incredulously. She ignored him and gestured to a chained and gate several yards away.
"Look. Could I please shoot this one?" Booth frowned and tugged on the chain experimentally. It fell open obligingly, and Brennan looked disappointed. They pushed through the gate and further into the cavernous expanse of the underground structure. Brennan's eye was caught by an open doorway off to her right, and she murmured his name so that he could follow her in.
It a relatively small room, empty except for a long table in the center of the space. Several syringes littered its surface, and Brennan leaned down to check for scents of decomposition.
"Cedar oil… lacquer. This is where he mummified the bodies," she concluded. Booth spotted an empty medicine vial on the floor and used his foot to roll it so that he could read the label.
"Ephedrine, other… other drugs," he said speculatively. "I know who the murderer is."
"Who?" Brennan demanded, surprised at the certainty she could hear in his voice. Booth gestured for her to follow him from the room.
"Lola beats up the girls, leaves them bleeding. Who shows up to help? With access to drugs?"
"The EMT! Smart. You should wear a lab coat at all times," she replied, sounding somewhat hopeful.
Amidst the sounds of grinding train wheels and rushing air, they heard a feminine scream coming from another room somewhere in the structure. Booth told Brennan to stay back, and she followed him to yet another padlocked door. The girl screamed once again, sounding like she was just on the other side of the door.
"Can I shoot it?" Brennan asked eagerly. Booth had barely uttered the word 'No' before she lifted her gun and fired at the lock. The bullet ricocheted and somehow grazed Booth's leg. He hopped on one foot, cursing fluently and chastising her. "Sorry! Are you alright? I think the bullet bounced off my bracelet."
He continued to clutch his injured leg, so Brennan stepped forward to remove the padlock and open the door. The floor of the room was littered with clusters of snakes, coiling around one another and filling the chamber with the sounds of their hissing. Brennan shrieked in alarm, and Booth turned to find her standing on a wooden crate.
"What are you doing? They're not poisonous."
"I know, I know," she said anxiously.
"Then why don't you come down?"
"It seems I'm not completely in control of my actions," she replied, managing to sound petulant and irritated at the same time. Booth sighed and came to stand in front of her, facing away.
"Just get on my back," he encouraged her. She obeyed, and he groaned at the intensified pain in his injured leg. They entered the room and spotted Megan Shaw cowering in the opposite corner. The expression on her face was one of complete terror, and she seemed incapable of regulating her breathing. "Megan?"
"It's okay," Brennan soothed, still clinging to Booth's back.
"Can you understand me?" he asked, concerned about the vacancy he saw in Megan's eyes. The girl screamed again, her eyes fixed on the open doorway, and Booth followed her gaze. Pete Geller stood in the doorway with a gun aimed at them, his face masked by the same clown face that had frightened Booth in the haunted house. Booth drew his own gun, but Brennan was faster. She fired a shot in Geller's direction, but the recoil caused Booth to lose his hold on her legs. She fell to the floor, knocking her head hard against the concrete wall.
"Ugh… My head," she winced, gingerly checking the impact point for blood.
"Just stop shooting at things, Bones."
"But he had a gun."
"You stay here. If anyone comes through this door, you shoot their head off. Except me."
"My gun is too big for me," she admitted, holding it out to him.
"Pretty sure I've told you that a hundred times. Here take mine. Guard Megan." They traded weapons, and Booth disappeared through the doorway.
"Come on, Megan. Come here," Brennan said, speaking loudly enough for Megan to hear the words over her own sounds of distress. Megan obeyed, but her panicked cries seemed to be completely involuntary. Brennan put her arms around the girl's shoulders and hugged her tightly, trying to listen to the sounds outside of the room as well. "Megan, listen to me. I want you to close your eyes. The snakes won't hurt you. I won't let them hurt you. We're going to get out of here, and everything's going to be fine. But right now I need you to close your eyes and focus on your breathing, okay?"
Brennan counted slowly, instructing Megan to inhale and exhale on every other count. It seemed to be working, but Brennan knew that they were fighting against chemically-induced panic. It wasn't simply a mind-over-matter situation. She was startled by the sound of gunfire outside of the room, and she adjusted her grip on Booth's gun, urging Megan to quiet down so that she could hear what was happening.
"How can a guy with military training miss with a scattergun? What were you? Navy?" Booth asked. Brennan could hear the sneer in his tone.
"Infantry," Geller shouted back. "Which is how I know that you're carrying a .50 caliber 500. Well, that's five shots...and by my count, you've only got one shot left." Another gunshot rang out through the darkness, and Geller's next words were even louder. "That's one dumbass gun to bring to a shootout! Where's your backup, Booth? Shouldn't they be here by now?"
Brennan shushed Megan and begged her to be quiet. She kept a firm grip on the girl as she inched toward the doorway. Megan's whimpering must've drawn Geller's attention, however, because the next shot hit the heavy metal door to the room they were in. Both women screamed.
"Bones, you alright?"
"We're okay. He's using you to get to us."
"Not for long, Booth," Geller taunted. "I'm just gonna stick my scattergun in there and empty the barrels. Your girl is gonna look like hamburger." One more shot was fired before Brennan heard her husband's voice again.
"One shot," he said clearly, firing the last bullet from Brennan's gun. "One hell of a shot." It passed through the metal door, and Brennan heard a grunt of pain and surprise. Geller collapsed to the floor and lay motionless. Brennan led Megan from the room cautiously, and the girl began to breathe more easily in the absence of the snakes. "Now can you see why I hate clowns?" Booth asked, pointing at the deflated clown mask lying next to Geller's body.
Brennan nodded mutely and eyed him in concern, checking his body for injuries. She spotted the hole in his lab coat and pushed it aside to reveal another hole and a bloodstain on his button-down shirt.
"I'm okay. Just another graze."
"You should go to the hospital."
"We'll see," he hedged. They helped Megan back to the metal ladder and up to the street level. Booth was relieved to see that their backup had indeed arrived. Geller's taunting comment about the fact that backup should've shown up by that point had concerned him. He had suspected that Geller might have injured someone before coming after them.
Brennan guided Megan to an ambulance and gave the EMTs a list of the drugs that were most likely in her system. She stayed with Megan until the ambulance left to take her to the hospital. Booth explained the situation to the SWAT team leader and was cleared to leave the scene a short while later. They decided to return to the lab briefly, but they found it empty. Everyone else had apparently decided to make an appearance at the Halloween party after all.
Brennan urged Booth to take a seat on the couch in her office, and he complied with a wince. She helped him to remove the lab coat and shirt so that she could see the wound on the right side of his abdomen. It was worse than the one on his leg, and she bit her bottom lip anxiously as she cleaned the area.
"You should go to the ER," she insisted.
"Nah, I'm okay. I can tell neither of them need stitches."
"You're not a medical professional."
"Neither are you," he smirked. "But you can clean me up some more when we get home… so long as I get to clean you up too." Booth grunted as he rose from the couch, kissing her softly in an attempt to ease her worries. She smiled reluctantly at his proposition.
"I think I can accommodate that request," she replied slyly. As she drove them home, she noticed how quiet he'd become and realized belatedly that he had been forced to take a life that evening. She'd been so focused on Megan and on his injuries that the full reality hadn't caught up to her. "I'm sorry you had to kill someone, Booth. I know you hate that."
"Yeah… He had it coming."
"You hate it. I'm sorry that happened to you."
"Thanks, Bones." He gave her a sad, exhausted smile. When they got home, they helped one another out of their costumes and into the shower. Once Booth's wounds were properly bandaged, Brennan helped him into bed and gathered their abandoned clothing. "You should wash that costume, baby. So we can make good use of it another time." She raised her brows in surprise at the sexy grin on his face.
"I had every intention of doing so," she assured him with a calculating smile. "I'll wash and patch up that lab coat too. We are definitely holding onto it."
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Booth scowled at his computer screen and jotted down a few notes from the email he was reading. He glanced at the clock on the microwave, wondering when he could expect his wife to return home. She'd been trying to visit Max once a week, though their caseload didn't always allow for it. Thanks to Booth's injuries, they had been given a week's worth of reprieve from new homicide cases after Halloween, and Booth was relieved to see Brennan's self-enforced work schedule return to normal. She was at the prison now, but he knew that she usually couldn't bear to stay longer than a half hour or so.
The electronic file he was reading was a police report from February of 1996. The body of Jack Campbell had been found in his home, the apparent victim of suicide by hanging. The man's obituary had listed funeral arrangements and a date of interment at a cemetery in Chicago. Booth had continued to dig through old records until he'd found the local precinct that had handled the case, and he'd called to make a request for the records. He had used his FBI credentials as a means of explaining his interest but had given his personal email and home address for contact information. The officer he'd spoken with had been predictably unenthusiastic about his request and had made it clear that it could take several weeks to process due to their current workload. Booth had sighed and thanked him; he hadn't been expecting fast service.
Though he had received the email that morning, he'd decided to wait to open it until after Brennan left to visit Max. Booth had gotten into the habit of doing the majority of the legwork on his own, and he tried not to bring it up in conversation unless he had some sort of new information for her. He was pleased and more than a little proud that he had no trouble understanding the medical examiner's report on Jack Campbell. Lisa Campbell had claimed the body and made the funeral and burial arrangements, but she had declined a full autopsy on her husband's body. Since it had appeared to be suicide, the officer in charge had abided by her wishes, and the case had been closed quickly.
The medical examiner's report consisted of what Cam and Brennan would call a 'preliminary analysis.' However, in this case, that was the extent of the ME's investigation. There were citations of bruising around the neck, which had matched the police report's description of a suicide by hanging. The ME did note that Campbell's neck hadn't been broken; he had suffocated to death instead. Were it not for that one detail, Booth might have been content to pass it off as the suicide it had appeared to be, but his gut was telling him not to move on too quickly. That intuition was compounded by a mention of broken fingernails on both of Campbell's hands. The ME had shrugged it off as another self-inflicted wound.
"Booth?" Her voice echoed through the quiet house, and he snapped to attention involuntarily.
"In the office," he called back. Booth waited until she appeared in the doorway before asking about her visit with her father. "How was Max? Everything go alright?"
"It was fine," she shrugged. "Awkward, but that's nothing new." Brennan's eyes flickered to the computer screen, and she didn't need to ask what he was working on. "How about you? Anything new?"
"Maybe," he sighed. "Come look." Brennan crossed the room to stand next to him behind the desk, and he pulled her onto his lap so that she wouldn't have to hunch over as she read.
"Jack Campbell committed suicide?" Her disbelief was evident in her tone.
"Apparently. In 1996. The wife had him buried but skipped out on the full autopsy." He fell silent as she continued to read over the medical examiner's report.
"Self-inflicted defense wounds…" she mused aloud.
"Yeah, I thought that was odd too."
"Not really. Most people who commit suicide by hanging expect it to be quick. They expect their necks to break. Unfortunately for them, that doesn't always happen, and suffocation is much slower than you'd think. The body's natural reaction is to panic and fight for oxygen, which in this case would mean that he was most likely clawing at the ligature in attempt to save himself."
"So even when someone wants to die, their brain tries to talk them out of it."
"Something like that," she nodded.
"You think it was a suicide then?"
Brennan made her squinty face of speculation and began to read the police report. There wasn't much to go on. The officers on the scene had been convinced that it had been a suicide, so the details of the report were perfunctory. She read it through twice before finally meeting his gaze.
"What do you think?"
"I asked you first," he said with a gentle smile. She returned it but rolled her eyes a little.
"He didn't seem like the suicidal type… But then, this happened more than three years after the last time I saw him. He could've changed, I guess. The only thing that makes me a little suspicious is…"
"That he suffocated?" Booth offered when she trailed off. She pursed her lips and nodded.
"I didn't suffocate in that trunk, but it was very hard to breathe. He also… He told the social worker that I'd locked myself in. Like I was trying to set him up or something because I 'didn't like his rules.' He intimidated one of the other kids into backing up his story, and of course his wife did too. They were never charged with anything."
Booth could feel his face flushing with the heat of his anger. He'd known that the Campbells hadn't been charged, but she'd never told him about the lies they'd used to keep themselves out of trouble. He took several deep breaths, tightening his arms around her waist as a means of anchoring himself. He couldn't afford to let his temper get the best of him again.
"So you're thinking it might be possible that it only looked like a suicide? Since he told people that you'd harmed yourself? And the suffocation thing…"
"I don't know, Booth. Those circumstances are oddly similar, but that doesn't mean it couldn't have been a suicide."
"Hmm. Well, this is the first time we've come across a suspicious death that didn't end in cremation… Though I don't know that any judge would approve an exhumation, even if we were willing to share our reasons for suspecting foul play. It would be a hard sell."
"I know. We can't do that." Brennan curled herself against his chest and closed her eyes. "Do you think we're wasting our energy with this?"
"Not if it's what you need. Like I've said, the odds of actually being able to do anything about it are very slim, but maybe… Maybe if you're ever able to confront Max with enough information, he might tell you the truth. Based on what we've found so far, I'd imagine that even if there are others who died under suspicious circumstances, it's very doubtful that there will ever be enough evidence to prosecute. Just like with Delaney."
"He knew what he was doing," she said darkly. Booth didn't reply but turned his head to press his lips to her temple. They sat quietly for a few more minutes before Brennan pushed herself off of his lap and closed the laptop. "No more tonight. Let's go make dinner." Her smile was slightly forced, but he returned it anyway.
"Lead the way."
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So do you think Max killed this one? Or the others?
More on Wednesday!