Silence reigned in the car as it sped down the streets of Washington, DC. The two teenagers sitting in the backseat were quiet, both lost in their thoughts, anxiously waiting for the ride to the FBI Bureau to be over. It felt weird, for both of them, to be sitting there. The two girls exchanged shy glances every once in a while and a weak smile would form on their lips. Booth, from the rear-view mirror, witnessed that exchange.
"We're almost there." He said, stopping at a red light. "Only a few more minutes."
"Why are we going to the Bureau?" Raquel asked, unsure of why Booth had gotten her out of gym class in the middle of the day.
"You will be meeting with Veronica from the Jeffersonian and you will describe to her, as best as you can, the man you saw in your bedroom when you were younger."
Raquel swallowed and nodded.
"Why am I here?"
Booth's gaze shifted to Quinn.
"You will need to give a bit more information to Clara."
The light turned green.
"I'm not sure exactly what she plans on doing with you. She hasn't told me."
"Who's Clara?" Raquel asked, confused.
Quinn turned to the teenager beside her.
"A psychic." She replied, tapping her temple with her index.
Both girls giggled. A smile tugged at Booth's lips.
The grey brick wall reminded Raquel of the cold storage room at 53 Maple Street. How she hated going down there when her mother would ask her to fetch some object or other. She hated the entire basement. There was just something creepy about the dark corner where no light shone no matter what time of the day it was or how she always hurt funny noises coming from the depth of the immense underground area. The tick-tocks of the plumbing, the footsteps above her head; everything scared her. Every tiny noise the house made made the blood in her veins freeze.
Booth pushed the door to the interrogation room closed and Raquel was forced to take a deep breath. At a table, a young woman with long brown hair and green eyes stared at her. Freckles coloured her cheekbones and Raquel almost found her adorable.
"Hi. You must be Raquel. I'm Veronica."
"Hi." Raquel replied, shyly.
"Please sit down." Veronica said, pointing to a chair across from her.
Raquel looked up at Booth who nodded. Slowly making her way to the table, she sat down at the chair appointed by the artist. Linking her fingers together, Raquel settled them on her thighs. She watched as Veronica grabbed a pencil and a sketchbook.
"People these days do all of this on computer but I still prefer the old-fashioned way." Veronica explained.
Raquel nodded.
"Whenever you're ready, Sweetie."
"What am I supposed to say?"
"Booth told me your story. Don't worry, I'm not here to judge you. All I need is for you to describe to me the man you saw in your room at night as best as you can."
"Okay."
"He had a round face and his cheeks were kind of chunky."
Booth kept his eyes on Veronica's wrist as she began sketching the man Raquel was describing. Listening intently, he tried to picture the man clearly in his mind. The round face, the chunky cheeks, the almond eyes and the long hair. He tried to imagine who this man was. Could he have been a former occupant of that house? Was he even real? Was he dead? Were the Lawson children stalked at night, watched intently as they got ready for bed? Was this guy a pervert? Had he been arrested? There hadn't been any sighting of the man since the Lawsons. Was he still in the area? Had he left Winchester?
Raquel now seemed almost calm. Her previous tense body had loosened and her voice had steadied. Veronica sketched away the minutes, asking specific questions when Raquel's description got vague.
He wondered briefly what Clara was doing in his office with poor little Quinn. He had immediately sensed the discomfort on Quinn's part the second the psychic had walked in the room. The teenage girl had shot him a desperate look when he had told Clara Raquel and him had to go. He had taken Quinn apart and had reassured her about Clara.
"You won't be forced to do or say anything, Quinn, okay? Just be honest with her."
He had left all alone with the old woman, guilt gnawing at the back of his conscience.
Seconds turned into minutes. What Booth had expected to take a while was quickly coming to an end.
"Is that all you remember?"
Raquel nodded.
"Okay. Is this him?"
Slowly, Veronica turned the sketchbook. Booth stepped closer to the table.
Raquel gasped loudly, her eyes turning round in surprise. In a flash, she was transported back to eight years earlier, in her old bedroom. She saw it slowly push the door to her bedroom open. Everything was dark. She could barely make out the contour of his body as he stepped inside the room. He came to a stop in front of her bed. That's when she saw his face, the same one that was now staring back at her, eight years later. It had been the only time she hadn't ducked under her blankets. She had peeked and the memory of his face was now engraved in her mind for ever.
"Yes. It's him."
"Okay."
Then, turning to Booth, she added:
"I'll scan it in my computer and run it through a database. Maybe we'll find a match."
"Monique can help you with that on the third floor." Booth said, never taking his eyes off the picture.
Where had he seen this man before?
"We'll just wait for Quinn to be done with Clara and then I'll drive you back to school."
Raquel nodded.
"I just thought it would be a good idea to meet and talk about your Ouija board experience."
Quinn shook her head.
"I don't want to talk about it." The teenage girl said, crossing her arms.
Clara nodded.
"It's okay to feel scared, you know."
"I'm not scared."
Clara got up and sat back down on the edge of Booth's desk.
"I know how you must feel. I was about your age when I had my first Ouija board experience. It was thirty-five years ago. I was fifteen and I was convinced the house I was living in back in Idaho was haunted. It was a real old house and there was a rumor at school that my house was haunted. So I gathered up my girlfriends and with her parents' board, we sat down in my basement on Halloween and we played."
Clara paused briefly and examined Quinn's expression. Her face showed no emotion. Clara went on.
"At first I thought it was all crap, forgive my language. But when the plate started moving beneath my fingers, I knew that it was true. We were hiding under a huge blanket to prevent us from seeing what was going on around us. When we asked our first question and that the plate started moving, everything suddenly got really warm under that blanket. I felt a strange feeling running through me, like a powerful anxiety and it took my breath away. I remember looking up at my best friend and I could see through her eyes that she was feeling the same way. Suddenly, the girl on my left gasped, quickly followed by my best friend. The two of them shrieked and pulled the blanket off of them. The two of them swore they felt their arm hit something hard when they were trying to get out. I remained skeptic at first."
"What made you change your mind?"
"We decided to go up to my room where there would be more light... and people. My parents' room was right beside mine. At least, there would be someone close by. We walked up the stairs. I was the last one in the group as we marched up the stairs and I kept turning around. I really felt like someone else was walking up behind me but every time I turned around I'd be greeted by darkness.
In my room, the four of us sat down on my bed and placed the Ouija board in front of us. We picked up where we left off. I remember closing my eyes and seeing this little girl every time my fingers touched the wooden plate. She was beautiful. She had long, wavy dark brown hair and really nice blue eyes. She was wearing a white, lacy dress. I could only see her. I couldn't see her surroundings. After a period of questioning, we learned that her name was Elizabeth and that she had died in a fire in a house that had once stood across from my own."
Quinn now looked interested.
"The next day, I went down to the library and checked out newspapers from the beginning of the century to that day. I found the article, which dated from 1942. The fire had taken the lives of not only Elizabeth but her entire family which contained, including her parents and herself, seven people. The fire even burned part of their neighbor's house. It was really interesting."
"Is that why you decided to become a psychic?"
"You don't become a psychic, Quinn. You are born one. But yes, that's how I discovered my powers. I met up with this woman named Janet. She was a medium herself and she told me to play the Ouija board once again but on my own this time. She taught me how to come in contact with the dead, to gather information about what have happened to them. I solved my first unsolved mystery at the age of 17."
Clara paused briefly.
"I think you may have that gift, Quinn. Tell me, have you had any bizarre experiences since last week?"
Quinn hesitated between lying and telling the truth. Was she ready to tell Clara what had happened over the last few nights? Would the woman laugh in her face or would she believe her?
The teenage girl looked up at the older woman sitting on the desk.
"I've had these dreams."
"Oh?"
"About Emily Brown."
The phone call had came in at about nine o'clock that same morning. Melanie Pharratt's body had been excavated from the cemetery in Winchester and the remains were now being sent to the Jeffersonian.
A feeling of excitement that Temperance hadn't felt in years had immediately rushed through her. The autopsy results on Mickey's body had been the first step to proving wrong to the woman who claimed to be a psychic that everything in this case could scientifically and logically be explained. Maybe she would be able to prove Clara's theory on Melanie Pharatt's death wrong as well. The thought that she was supposed to be doing this to prove Pharatt's innocence suddenly came rushing back to her. Clara was siding with them on his innocence. Temperance felt torn.
I need to be professional. Temperance had told herself while unzipping the blue plastic bag containing Melanie Pharatt's remains.
She glanced at her watch. 1:05. Maybe if she was lucky, she would get to leave the lab at a reasonable hour again tonight. Taking out a femur, she put it aside and began assembling the skeleton.
She circled the table at she examined the remains and spoke in her recording machine, listing everything she was seeing. It was obvious by the looks of it that trauma to the head had been the cause of death. Her wrists were broken in three places and her left ankle had suffered a similar fate. Every injury supported the theory that David Pharatt had pushed his daughter.
Temperance sighed. Booth would be disappointed by the findings. But there was nothing else she could. She couldn't falsify her results to make her husband happy. Clara would probably also say that she is wrong, that she has overlooked some minor detail, that David Pharatt was innocent. But without hard evidence, an appeal wouldn't be granted.
Grabbing the file, Temperance went over the first autopsy results. All of them seemed congruent with what she had gathered herself.
On the second page, photographs had been attached to the paper. Taking it out of the folder, Temperance lined them side-by-side on the examination table. For the first time in her line of work, Temperance was able to see the victim with flesh. The sight of Melanie's rigid body, white, with slightly blue lips, made her toes curl and the blood in her veins freeze. Her heart began pounding loudly.
She stared at the pictures, unable to tear her gaze away. The doors behind her slid open but she ignored them. Their sound was drowned by the beating of her heart.
That's when she saw it, the minor detail that would certainly change a person's life for ever. The way Melanie laid on the ground was not consistent of someone who was pushed down the stairs. Temperance frowned and looked up from the pictures to the remains.
Grabbing her cellphone, she dialed her husband's number only to fall on his voice mail. She decided to leave a message.
"Hey Booth, it's me. I've got some news on the Pharatt case. If we can figure out from which step in the stairs Melanie was supposedly tripped and recreate what happened, we may have a case. Call me back when you get that message. I'll probably stay at the lab for a little while."
Shutting her phone, Temperance went back to the remains. Leaning over the body, Temperance examined each inch of the little girl's body once again in search of another detail she could have missed.
Search for something inconsistent with a fall. Temperance told herself.
Something, at the back of her mind, was telling her suddenly that a fall wasn't the cause of death. After all, if she had been tripped, she would have been tripped in the middle of the stairs, not the top, and so not high enough for the fall to kill her. There was something else, something that made more sense than trauma to the head.
She found it on the neck. The same injury she had found on Hope Lawson as well. Her heart began to race once more and the more she examined the neck and throat, the more she believed to have found it.
Cause of death: strangulation.
Looking up, she tucked a strand of hair behind her ears. Taking at a picture in her head, she examined Melanie's neck area a bit more closely. Squinting, she tried to make out something- any sign that would prove her right- but found nothing. What or whoever had strangled Melanie hadn't left any trace.
A light flickered above her head and Temperance looked up. A movement caught her attention in the corner of her eye. There, on the platform, sat a little girl, legs dangling off in the air, staring directly at her.
Temperance felt the air being knocked out of her. She closed her eyes and shook her head before reopening them. The little girl had disappeared. The sliding doors opened and closed behind her.
With her heart racing like mad inside her chest, Temperance gathered Melanie Pharatt's remains, bagged them and brought them down to the morgue.