Cars pulled over to the side as Booth sped down the boulevard, lights flashing and siren blaring. He couldn't afford to waste any more time. Dr. Symmes, whatever his condition was, was a threat to society and needed to be captured as quickly as possible. It annoyed him deeply that there were no hard evidence linking him to the crime scenes which was why a confession was desperately needed and something told him that the doctor would provide just that if Booth played his cards well. Fortunately for him, he had always been lucky at card games.

He pulled up in the doctor's driveway for the second time in two days to find Miranda working in the front-yard garden. She looked up at the sound of the SUV and got to her feet. Bringing her hand above her eyes, she squinted at him as he slammed the door to the SUV and crossed over to the other side of the vehicle.

"Agent Booth?" She said, confused.

"Hi. Is Dr. Symmes here by any chance?"

"Yes. He's in the back garden. Would you like me to fetch him for you?"

"No, that's okay." Booth replied as he stepped over a small patch of flowers. "I'll show myself to the backyard."

Miranda nodded, puzzled.

Carefully, Booth made his way to the garden. He had caused enough noise by slamming his SUV door and he didn't want to risk a flight on the doctor's part. He wasn't up to running after a man in the quiet streets of Winchester. His knee, which had been bothering on and off in the last two years, would cry mercy after only a couple of feet.

He spotted the doctor laying on a lawn chair by the edge of his pool, in the middle of his backyard. Sunglasses laid on his nose, making it impossible for Booth to know if the man had seen him or not. Slowly, he made his way up to the doctor and cleared his throat.

Slowly, the doctor reached for his sunglasses and lowered them. As he peered over them, Booth couldn't tell if he was happy or scared to see him. His eyes showed no emotions whatsoever, making Booth wonder if the doctor was currently taking his medication. The lack of emotion seemed to suggest that the bottle of pills had probably been untouched for quite some time. Subconsciously, he snaked his hand down to his gun. The cool contact reassured him.

"I had a little chat with your brother." Booth started. "He admitted to everything."

He wasn't quite sure what had made him say this but it seemed like the right way to go.

"Really?" Dr. Symmes asked, sitting up on the chair.

"Yeah."

"And you stopped by to tell me this?"

"Yes, of course. I dropped by to tell you that I have arrested him for complicity in first-degree murder."

Symmes' eyes grew round for a second or two. Booth forced himself not to smile.

"What do you mean complicity?"

"Well you know, there's no way you could have brought Mackenzie to the roof by yourself, especially not at your age. Mackenzie weighed what? Fifty? Sixty pounds? It's a little heavy for a 52-year-old man to carry, even when the child is drugged."

"I really don't know what you're talking about, Agent Booth." Symmes said as he pushed his sunglasses over his eyes and laid back down on the chair.

"As a pediatrician working in a hospital, you would have access to any type of drugs you wanted. It would be easy to slip some into one of your pockets and leave the hospital undetected. And with the only witness in the case gone, you thought you could get away with a fifth murder. Unfortunately, you didn't plan that your brother would confess to taking part of your murderous rampage."

"My brother had nothing to do with it."

Booth raised his eyebrows.

"Is this a confession, Dr. Symmes?"

Realizing his mistake, Symmes stood up, fists clenched and arms rigid on both side of his body.

"I'm not confessing anything."

He was breathing loudly and Booth could see in his eyes the million thoughts racing through his mind. He had been cornered but he was refusing to see it. He was stalling, trying to buy more time. Booth couldn't see why he was bothering but he couldn't complain either. The more he made him talk, the more chance the doctor had of screwing up in his story. This was all Booth wanted.

"So what now? You're going to punch me like you punched your brother the day you had your attack?"

For a second, the doctor looked defeated. But a wave of confidence suddenly washed over him and the look in his eyes became demonic. Booth subconsciously took a step back, hand lowering towards his gun.

"Do you know what it's like, Agent Booth?"

"What's like what?"

"I don't do as I please, I follow orders."

"You follow orders?"

"Yes, orders."

"From whom."

"Cameron Brown."

"Camer-?"

Booth chuckled, astonished.

"You expect me to believe that you follow orders from a deceased man?"

By now, the doctor seemed to have lost all contact with everything around him. He began pacing back and forth in front of his pool, arms flying as he began confessing to everything.

"He came to me thirty-two years ago, telling me he had a mission for me. He said that he had been falsely accused of the murder of his daughter Emily and that I needed to avenge him. He told me I'd find a little girl living there who also happened to be nine years old. I was to find her and kill her. Only then would he have his revenge."

"But you didn't expect an earthquake that night?"

Symmes chuckled.

"Actually, the earthquake made it easier for me. While everyone was petrified in their houses, I was free to roam around the yard undetected. I know the police think the earthquake broke the window but it didn't. I did. One hard punch and the whole thing shattered into a thousand pieces. It cut my hand, but a few stitches took care of the business. When the doctor asked me what had happened to my hand, I simply told him I had to break a window to get into my house after locking myself out. He fell for it, the idiot."

Symmes stopped pacing and turned to Booth.

"Do you know what she was doing when I took her? She was just sitting up in her bed, her eyes opened wide in fear. She seemed frozen in place. She screamed out when I grabbed her. I tried to put my hand on her mouth but the little rat bit me. I slapped her once across the face, just once, and it shut her up. I was able to get her to cooperate. Despite all the movement, I got her out of her bedroom window and then I myself jumped out. I made her climb onto the roof and told her to lay still. While the police was busy checking out her bedroom, we climbed down a water spout and I brought her down to the secret room."

"And that's when you killed her?" Booth asked, his throat dry from the emotion.

A wicked smile spread across the doctor's face.

"I strangled her. She suffered, Agent Booth. She suffered. I made sure she did. Just like Cameron Brown suffered in his cell all these years."

Anger flooded through Booth's veins and it took every inch of his will power not to jump on the man standing in front of him.

"You're sick, Dr. Symmes. I hope you know that."

But Symmes only continued to smile.

"I saved your daughter's life, Agent Booth. Don't forget that. I could have given up on her but I didn't. You owe me for her life."

"I don't owe you anything." Booth said through clenched teeth.

Symmes chuckled.

"You wish you didn't."

The doctor paused, looked over at his neighbor's house before turning his gaze back to the agent.

"It's funny how fate works, isn't it? All nine years old, all eight years apart, exactly the number of years Cameron Brown spent in his prison cell before he died."

"Fate has nothing to do with this."

"You think so? Huh. And I can't still believe how everyone believed I was insane. I even got my brother to think I was really schizophrenic."

Booth couldn't believe what he was hearing. The doctor wasn't really schizophrenic?

"Someone who kills five children just for the fun of it is not a sane person, Doctor."

Stepping closer to the agent, Symmes looked at Booth straight in the eye.

"Unfortunately, I don't care whether it is considered sane or not. I was just following orders. I didn't do anything wrong."

"Didn't do anything wrong?" Booth asked, in disbelief.

"If you think what I did is wrong, why don't you just arrest me?"

Booth didn't answer.

"I know why. It's because you want to hear the rest of the story. Well I'll tell you the rest of the story. Melanie Pharatt was the easiest one. When Cameron Brown came to see me a second time to tell me that, two years from then, the little girl who lived there would turn nine, I wasn't sure what to do. For two years, I wondered how I would do it when one day, David Pharatt stopped by my clinic with his daughter. She was my first patient, did you know that? Her father was scared she had caught a bad cold but it only turned out to be allergies. Tripping her was a brilliant idea since I knew her mother had died a similar way and that Pharatt had been accused of murder. The police would immediately turn their attention to him and I could walk away, once again, undetected."

"You're sick."

"I know. You told me that already."

The doctor's smile turned evil.

"And Raine Bennett? She didn't see it coming either. I guess her parents should have taught her better than to accept an invitation from a stranger."

Booth's heart was racing madly in his chest. Somehow, the doctor must have found out Raine Bennett had been his investigation and that he hadn't been able to solve it until today.

"But you weren't a stranger. She knew you. She trusted you."

"That, she did. She trusted me enough to come back to my place for some cake. She never saw that frying pan coming. You remember those black and heavy frying pans? It made such a weird noise when it collided with her skull."

There. Right there, something had disconnected. Anger had clouded his mind, disconnecting him completely from reality, sort of like when he had shot at that clown head so many years ago. In an instant, his clenched fist collided with the doctor's jaw. Symmes fell to the ground, in pain.

"You sick bastard!" He cried out, rubbing his jaw.

"Oh so now I'm the sick bastard?"

Symmes stood up, unsteadily. He glared at Booth, his face red and contorted in anger, his eyes shooting daggers at the man in front of him.

"You'll never prove that I killed those girls, Agent Booth. Your word won't be enough and the only other witness lives miles away, too scared to even come back to his hometown to testify against the man who supposedly killed five little girls. There is no DNA, no actual evidence that link me to the girls. And by the time you'll find that evidence, I'll be long gone. I'll be somewhere nobody can find me."

"I hardly doubt that because you see, when you went over to the Robertson's home, you brought along company."

The doctor eyed him, suspiciously.

"You brought along some hair. Some belonged to your cat and some probably belonged to you. Your cat's hair has already been matched from my last visit here and all I need now is a hair of yours to make the comparison. But it's not all, there's something else."

The doctor watched wide-eyed as Booth's hand disappeared in his pocket, only to come out seconds later with a tiny recording device.

"It'll be pretty hard to argue against an actual confession."

Synmes' face contorted in anger.

"You sick..."

"Bastard? Yeah, you called me that already. The problem is that the insult doesn't really apply to me because I have a father and know who he is."

Lowering his hand to his belt, Booth grabbed his handcuffs.

"Richard Symmes, I'm placing you under arrest for the murders of Laura Joyce, Melanie Pharatt, Raine Bennett, Hope Lawson and Mackenzie Robertson."

Grabbing the doctor by the arm, Booth cuffed his left one. He heard movement behind him but decided to ignore it. As he grabbed the doctor's right arm, he felt a sharp pain at the back of his head.

Spots appeared in front of his eyes while things slowly began to darken around him. Booth was barely aware of letting of the doctor's arm and falling to his knees.