Chapter Six
Leads and Dead Ends
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Brennan breathed a sigh of relief when she realized that she was alone. "My name is supposedly Emily Shelby. I have a daughter named Kyra." She murmured under her breath, her voice barely audible to her own ears.
She relaxed slightly when she confirmed that her memories of the previous day were untouched. She placed two fingers on her neck and felt her pulse, it seemed stable. How she knew that she had no idea. She stretched her limbs feeling herself relax further as the knots in her muscles loosened.
Something struck her thoughts. The dead bodies you work with.
Her eyes narrowed, lost in what those words could mean. Her job, she didn't know she had one. Her job had to do with dead bodies. Forensics? Cop? Gravedigger? Something along those lines. Logic told her that that was where she had to start to find her real identity. Emily Shelby just didn't seem to sit well with her. Despite the daughter that seemed too smart for a child as young as she was, despite the fact that she seemed to hold no job and yet lived in a nicely furnished house. Mainly it was the man she had supposedly married. She could not believe she would pick someone like him and not see through his masks.
She eased herself out of bed, throwing back covers that were too heavy for her liking, and peered at the empty bottle lying on the floor by the bed. She was lucky, there had no lasting harm from the amount of aspirin she had taken in place of whatever drug he had given her.
Now she had something to go on. He got careless when he was sure she would lose her memory by the following day. He had given her a lead.
Her job.
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Booth paced through the darkness of the abandoned warehouse. Even in broad daylight, inside it was as dark as what you expect from an underground cave. The leaky pipes did little to ease the sinister mood. Shadows made by his flashlight danced across the worn walls and the smell of musk and mold wafted around him.
He stepped further and then noticed something caked on his shoe. Mud. He started to shake it off when he froze. Mud? Inside? He shot his flashlight closer to the mess on his leather shoe and pulled out a latex glove from his pocket. He stopped and almost laughed when he realized that he had picked up the habit from his partner.
They had bickered over the fact that she always kept a pair of gloves in her pocket just in case she ran into a body. He had called her overzealous. She had called him under prepared. After her disappearance, he kept a pair on him at all times. It was one time in his life where it was good to be overzealous.
He slipped a sample into the glove, careful not to touch it with his bare hands. He had seen Hodgins collect soil samples before, but he had never expected to it himself. Some kind of instinct just told him it was important. And at the moment, every little bit helped.
He recalled the night of her disappearance. They hadn't noticed anything out of character surrounding the scene. A drop of water hit him on the head. He looked up. There was a leaky pipe directly above his head. That explained why he could've missed the dirt grains the first time around. He had assumed that it had come from his own shoe when he ran in after his partner.
The rain from the past few days may have caused water to drip from the pipe and onto the soil, making it run. It could be nothing. It could be everything.
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Brennan checked in on Kyra who was still fast asleep. Her hands cupped around her cheeks that still retained her baby fat. She shut the door quietly behind her. Mark was nowhere to be found.
There was another unanswered question lingering on her mind. How had he known she had left the house?
She was pretty sure the house had no cameras or else he would have seen her swapping the pills with aspirin. There had to be something else. Could she risk leaving again just to see how he did it?
Not yet. She decided. She couldn't risk letting him make her overdose on her own decoy. He would probably get more drugs to mess with her memory soon and she had to find them as soon as he got them and switch, until then she had to be on her best behavior.
Her fight or flight instinct told her to grab Kyra and run as fast as she could out of there, but she held back. She had no idea who she was, no idea where to go. She didn't know if Mark would follow her or hurt her. The only thing she was sure of was that Mark was deranged. There was something sickening wrong with him and if she tried to run he may kill her to keep that control. No, she had to bide her time, find out who she was before she could bolt.
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Booth thrust the soil sample at Hodgins who looked at him blankly.
"I don't do prints from gloves man." Hodgins stated.
"It's a soil sample. I found mud on the floor of the scene. Must've been made by the rain and the pipes."
"We collected soil from the bottom of John Doe's shoe." Hodgins informed him. "I'll check to see if it's a match."
Booth nodded, his mind far away, in happier times, during which Brennan had been part of the investigation, ranting off vocabulary that he didn't understand. It had irritated him, but now, now it seemed like one of the blessings that had been so plainly thrust in his face, yet he had completely neglected to see and cherish.
"Did you hear me?" Hodgins asked.
"Huh? What?" Booth shook himself out of his trance.
"The sediment on the shoe was of desert origin. High in alkaline and sodium nitrate."
"Wait are you saying she's in the desert?" Booth asked, confusion clearly evident in his expression.
"It's possible, perhaps Nevada or Arizona." Hodgins confirmed, "But it could be nothing."
"Or everything." Angela interjected, coming into the room with a file tucked under her arm.
"Match the two substances." Booth ordered.
Hodgins nodded.
"I got a face off the skull." Angela informed the FBI agent.
He leaned his hand on the back of her chair, looking over her shoulder as she powered up the computer program that would put her sketch in 3D form. A face popped up and a grim expression filled his face.
"That's him. That's the guy we were chasing that night." Booth confirmed.
Angela nodded, wild earrings dangling from her ears. "There goes our number one suspect."
"We're back where we started." Booth groaned.
"Cause of death was an overdose." Zach called coming in.
Booth groaned again. No connections, no leads, except the soil. Except some gradients of dirt that could lead them back to his partner. He crossed his fingers.
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The computer didn't work. Neither did the TV. Brennan sat back on the couch with a look of well contained frustration. Kyra sat on the other side of the room wearing an expression of curiosity.
"You don't watch TV." Kyra informed her.
"What?" She asked, sitting up.
"You don't watch TV. That's what Daddy said. He thought it was funny. He said you were a genius but didn't know who anyone was."
Brennan took this in. "Great." She muttered. "I work with dead bodies. I don't watch TV. That is all I really know about myself."
"What else did Daddy say about me?" Brennan coaxed gently.
Kyra looked thoughtful. "He said you were beautiful. And that you write books and you could tell me stories."
Brennan raised an eyebrow. "Really? Books?"
Kyra nodded eagerly. "You told me a story once and it was wonderful. Better than Bambi."
"I'm sorry I don't know what that is." Brennan said before she could stop herself.
"He's a deer, a baby deer and he's friends with a skunk."
Brennan wrinkled her face in an expression that conveyed that she was still lost. Deer didn't befriend skunks. However it was clear what Kyra's intentions were though she was too shy to ask directly. Brennan could not resist those wide eyes. She racked her nonexistent memory.
"What story do you want me to tell you?" Brennan asked, easing herself back into the chair.
Kyra climbed down from her perch on the armchair across the room and settled beside her, more confident now that Brennan was about to do something she was familiar with, something every child loved.
"The Storyteller's Daughter." She said without a moment's hesitation.
For a minute, Brennan was lost in confusion, blankness, emptiness. Then it hit her. If her memory had gone, there had been no way she could remember a story she knew. She must've made it up. I'm a writer. Another lead. Empty. Useless. A hint but no confirmation, no way to even confirm it.
However when Kyra nestled against her, as if the child had abandoned her walls of distance, she was pulled from the thoughts and tales begin to fill her mouth. It came naturally, almost as if it was something she was born with. The story seemed familiar as if something she could reach out and grab from her childhood.
And for a moment, she escaped. Escaped the confinements of the house, escaped the terror that was her false life. She escaped it and was transported into a world where magic and the unbelievable was possible.
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Cam wasn't working on the Brennan case. She wanted to, but she had struck a deal with her boss. Her team could work on the cold case, but someone always had to be working on the current case. The missing girl and her deceased mother.
The girl had been repeated missing several months earlier but the mother's body was only recently discovered. Cam was analyzing them as she wondered what the rest of the team was doing. Booth was probably beside himself, reworking every theory that stuck him. Angela was probably trying to pull things out of nothing with Hodgins right beside her. Zach would be overanalyzing their limited amount of leads and evidence, trying to explain everything with logic and math.
Here she was cut off from the rest of team. She always had been. They wasted no time reporting things to Brennan when she had been around. And after a while Cam had accepted that even though she was the boss, the team simply felt closer to the anthropologist.
She had already collected samples from the body and was now working on cause of death. The phone startled her from her work, making her jump.
The crime scene unit. Something urgent. Talking fast. Cam's mind raced to comprehend. When she did, she froze. Then ran to the doorway.
"BOOTH!"
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Kyra was now asleep. Brennan was left in the silence, filled only with the child's breathing. The story's magic has woven itself around her, giving her a sense of calm, a sense of purpose. Her mind felt more at ease, more ready to tackle the problem at hand.
She thought about her escape plan. No way she was leaving Kyra in this psycho's home. The more she thought about it, the more she was convinced that her life with Mark was not the life she was supposed to have. He had dropped too many hints and expected that he could wipe them clean, but she had outsmarted him in that department. Simply throwing them away would have tipped him off. She had to fake hiding them but replacing them. He would expect one kind of resistance but not both.
She realized that she hadn't completely explored the house. There could be a clue, left behind by from careless night. In her previous night, she had been in a frenzy to buy herself some time, she hadn't checked every door or the potential hidden cellar door that people heard so much about. Then today, she had been trying to power the electronics for some hint of the outside world. She never had a chance. She had to now.
A car jerked into the driveway, pulling her from her plans. Mark was home.
She pulled Kyra a little closer to her. She had to pretend she still had no idea. Even though he made stomach churn she had to play the 'wife' unknowing and unassuming and not suspicious. She prayed that her acting skills were as good as her storytelling skills.
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Author's Note:
There's the next chapter. That story Brennan was telling wasn't my idea. It was actually one of my favorite child stories, I thought it would interesting to add a story filled with magic and love, since Brennan in her usual state would never believe in it. I thought maybe the story could have come from when she was younger and was more like the rest of us who like fairy tales even though we say we don't. :Guilty look:
