Dawes held Kirk's broken camera in a small green suitcase, held shut with buckles snapped tightly on one side to keep it in the dark. Whatever was left of the film should be preserved as well as possible.
"This camera is going straight to the state police crime lab," he declared when Angela asked for it back, standing behind his desk and plopping it down on top of his table, keeping both hands on top of it possessively.
Brennan looked between Angela and Booth for someone to protest, and after a couple of seconds passed and no one had formulated a good argument, she leaned forward to pick up the slack. "Angela is better at developing film than anyone in Santa Fe," she argued confidently.
Angela nodded, slowly at first. "Plus, I can use Kirk's equipment," she reasoned hopefully, watching the sheriff for him to give his assent. "It's top of the line," she added.
"We won't have to wait hours for results," I tried, nodding along with Angela in agreement. Objectively I understood why Dawes wanted the state to do it, but we all know Angela isn't guilty. Why shouldn't we trust her with evidence, especially since she'll do the best job at it? "And your sister's been in the desert for a week. We need to use the extra time to find her."
Sheriff Dawes bit his lip, debating it with himself. He looked between the three of us and our expressions, but then his eyes fell back down to the case with Kirk's camera. It must have helped him to decide. "Can't do it," he answered apologetically.
I sighed deeply, hands curling into fists at my sides, an automatic, somewhat telling reaction to being told 'no.' What could we do to convince him he was making the wrong decision? I highly doubted there was anything we could say about ourselves, but Angela and he had known each other for years, so maybe she could say something that had a bigger impression.
Angela turned to look at Booth, who was waiting on the far left of the desk for the rest of us to come to a consensus on what to do with the camera. "Booth," Angela hinted simply.
Booth nodded to her in acknowledgment and he raised his arm to Brennan, his hand falling on her back and gently giving her a push to start making her move away. "You know, according to Homeland Security, Kellogg sold exactly a hundred twenty thousand dollars' worth of art overseas," he said casually, steering the anthropologist around and to face the doors.
Brennan let him lead her, but she looked up the few inches to him and frowned. "What's that got to do anything?" She questioned in confusion.
"Well, it sure as hell doesn't buy him a beach house in Los Angeles, now does it?" Booth responded rhetorically, giving her another little nudge for slowing down. "He lied. Let's go check him out."
My lips parted in a silent 'oh' as I realized what he was doing. "Right, and if he's lying, then there's almost certainly something we need to know behind the lies." I stepped back away from the desk, raising the hand without the cast up to wave at Angela. "So. We'll be going." I glanced meaningfully at the sheriff and discreetly gave her a thumbs-up down in front of my stomach before turning around and following after Brennan and Booth.
Kellogg stayed behind his desk like it was a safety blanket. Hell, maybe to him it was. "I haven't attained anything like the success Kirk has, but I do alright," he answered the question posed cautiously, one of his legs bouncing repeatedly, thumping on the floor, out of sight and hidden by the desk. "Why?"
"You have a beach house," Brennan answered honestly. Without the data behind it, or the conclusion we'd drawn from the fact, it seemed like she was just spouting a random fact, which made me smile slightly. Clearly, Kellogg was out of the loop, as he just sort of stared at her in a you've got to be kidding me way.
"I applied for a warrant," Booth said, taking the focus away from Brennan's response. "Checked for your assets, your tax returns-"
"I told you," Kellogg interrupted in irritation, narrowing his eyes at Booth and visibly trying to curb a temper. "I do well in Europe. Germany especially appreciates Native-themed work."
"Kirk Persinger's remains were found way out in the desert," Brennan told him, both with a bit of accusation and a bit of a warning – if you've got something to hide, we'll find it and don't push us, because it won't end well. Of course, she probably wasn't thinking those exact words, but it was probably a close enough guess.
Kellogg blinked once, and I thought maybe he was processing it. He blinked twice, and I could have sworn that now he was fishing; for such a mouthy little guy, he didn't have a very fast response. "What's that got to do with me?"
"You're one of very few people in the community who has a vehicle that can actually go out far enough into the American Sahara," I said with a very pointed jerk of my thumb over my shoulder and to the back side of the trailer, blocking the artist's dirty Humvee from view.
Kellogg held himself firmly, beginning to look aggressive as a temperamental vein stood out along the side of his tensed jaw. "A vehicle I often loan out," he emphasized, predictably not taking well to the insinuation.
"What are these?" Brennan asked, breaking through the conversation for just a moment. She leaned over a plastic table covered in a maroon tablecloth, steely gray engraving slabs drying on trays with the tools used next to them. They were elaborate, intricate, and beautiful. If I hadn't known better, I'd say that it had to have been manufactured. They were floral in the center, but the right and left remained blank.
"Engraving plates," Kellogg answered swiftly before talking really quickly to add, "Please don't touch them, the oils on your skin will compromise the integrity!" I looked up to Booth, who had looked to me at the same time. I felt a little bit like asking if Brennan had just thrown her voice into Kellogg's mouth. Booth sort of shrugged. "Why would I kill Kirk?"
Brennan held out her phone low to the plates and looked to be taking a photograph, hiding it from Kellogg by turning her back more to him.
Booth glanced at Brennan before he realized what she was doing, and then looked away quickly so Kellogg wouldn't notice the pictures she didn't have permission to take. "Maybe because, you know, you had a little thing for Dhani. Or, maybe because you were jealous of Kirk's artistic success."
Brennan pressed another button on her phone to send them before she hid it in her back pocket inconspicuously. "These aren't Native designs," she stated to Kellogg decisively, pointing with one hand back to the plates.
Booth rolled his eyes and sent Brennan one of those exasperated looks he usually reserves for just Brennan and I. "Bones, I'm working a line of inquiry here," he complained, gesturing back to Kellogg pointedly.
I went on as if Booth hadn't voiced the complaint at all, sauntering closer to the table to look at them. I could have sworn I'd recognized the floral pattern from somewhere, but I couldn't recall from where. I turned back to stare down at Kellogg inquisitively. "All of your work is stolen from-" He opened his mouth and I held up my hand. "If you interrupt me to say "inspired by, not stolen from" then I will deck you right here," I threatened seriously. Kellogg shut his mouth. "-Native designs," I continued, picking up where I left off. "But the patterns on these plates are floral."
"They're influenced," Kellogg argued defensively, twisting it so he wasn't technically doing what I'd told him not to. "Not taken-"
I held up my fist again dangerously and took an intimidating step closer. "Hey, buddy, I'm not kidding. If you irritate me, I will Hulk punch you in the face. Why are you using that type of design now?"
"It's commissioned," Kellogg answered grudgingly. I don't doubt that he would have left me hanging if it weren't for Booth's FBI presence. He may have been about to part with more information, except Brennan's phone rang in her pocket and he cut himself off.
For a moment I hoped it would be someone getting back to her already on the pattern of the engraving plates, but Brennan took one look at the caller identification and raised it to her ear. "Hi, Angela. Well, that's great!"
At the promise of good news, I tilted my head and watched Brennan closely for any hint, but as the anthropologist's face fell, she frowned, concerned and suspicious. She looked to Booth. "Sheriff Dawes took off with the negatives," she explained.
"Was there anything recognizable in the pictures?" I asked Brennan for her to relay the question to Angela. I was torn between cheering for the artist's success in winning the police versus local Polaroid development battle and feeling oddly betrayed by the sheriff's sudden and unexplained departure – with evidence, no less.
After asking Angela if she had recognized anything, Brennan listened and then shook her head. "Nothing that meant anything to Angela," she repeated for Booth's and my benefit.
Booth took a deep breath and nodded to himself. "Alright," he murmured so that Brennan could hear. "We'll go take a look for ourselves." He pointed at Kellogg sternly. "We'll talk to you again."
Sheriff Dawes had returned to the police station shortly after we got back to it from Wayne Kellogg's, and he still had all of the Polaroid negatives. None of them seemed tampered with. I was inclined to believe Angela when she said so, especially since the extent of my knowledge with photographic negatives is that they have to be developed with special equipment or dyes in a dark environment, and… well, and they look like photographs when they're done.
"I wanted to show these to Alex Joseph," Dawes explained curtly when he realized that we were accusing him of guilt. He set the handful of the pictures down onto the desk, facing up for us to see his proof. There weren't too many, but Angela didn't comment on it, so it was probably less of Dawes hiding them and more to do with a lot being too damaged by the light getting in. "I don't need your permission."
"Why Joseph?" I asked, raising my eyebrows. Somehow I don't think that Alex is going to be up for a desert hike anytime soon – seeing as he's hospitalized and all.
"Angela says there are only a few partial photos of your sister in the desert." Brennan was highly inclined to believe Angela over the sheriff, just like I was. Even though the artist herself wasn't at the station, I think she'd appreciate the votes of confidence.
"That's right," Ben nodded calmly, agreeing with Brennan. "And," he added, his gaze changing as he looked back to me. "The only person who knows the desert as good as Dhani is Joseph." He pointed down at the top photograph on the pile. "This formation here?" It was an odd rock cliff – not as cool as Devil's Tower, but it was still easily twenty feet tall at the highest point and was identifiable by cliffs and crags. It wasn't just smack in the middle of the desert – the land around it was sloped and formed to match the inclines. A photographic Dhani Webber stood in front of it, looking just past the person taking the picture. "I'm not familiar with it."
Brennan bent forward slightly to look down at the picture with interest, focusing on the landmark the sheriff had pointed out. "There's nothing like this anywhere near where we found Kirk's remains, or the camera," she pointed out while frowning. If there had been anything like that, then we definitely would have seen it.
I groaned, my shoulders slumping. "Oh, come on… great, it means the kill site is somewhere else in this God-forsaken sand-land." I sighed. We had learned a lot about what was going on so far, but now it felt like we were running in place, so to speak. Ben had been a false alarm and there was no use following that lead; Alex Joseph was beat up for the drugs, which, as far as we can tell, is irrelevant to Kirk's murder; and Kellogg just had to be nice and loan out his Humvee. I glanced back up to Dawes and muttered, "No offense."
Ben shrugged his shoulders, a bit disgruntled, but not bothered enough for it to take precedence. "We find that outcropping, maybe we find the place where Kirk was killed, and maybe we find my sister," he said. The reasoning was sound – no wonder he wanted to know if Alex could identify the landmark. Dhani had been out in the desert for a week now; if she was still alive (and at this point, it is a pretty big 'if') then time is of the utmost importance.
"Did Joseph recognize the rock?" Brennan asked hopefully. Although she didn't know Kirk or Dhani personally, the three of us were just as motivated to find the missing people as Angela and Ben were – for Angela's sake, if nothing else.
The sheriff nodded. "Yeah." Apparently, he's too high and mighty to freely give out details.
I rolled my eyes when it became evident that he was going to need prompting. Booth crossed his arms, irked by having to ask. "Where?" He asked shortly, audibly restraining his annoyance.
Ben hooked his thumbs through belt loops on his pants, looking over Booth for a second. "It's easier I take you than explain," he said with a sigh. If we were anywhere else, I'd have thought it was an excuse, or a means of dodging the question – as it was, though, when we're the middle of freaking-no-where with few landmarks, let alone ones that foreigners would recognize, it actually passed as a pretty legit statement. The sheriff assumed we were down with it and he bent down, picking up his backpack from his chair.
"Whoa, whoa!" Booth protested, holding his arms out and gesturing for Ben to slow down. Ben fixed him with a questioning look somewhere between what is it now and you're getting under my skin but I'm trying not to show it. "If Joseph is the murderer, he's just sending you on a wild goose chase."
Ben raised an eyebrow at Booth and he lifted his chin, showing he wasn't going to back down. Stubbornly, he shrugged one of the straps up over his shoulders. "Well, then we know he's our murderer, and all we've wasted is a tank of gas and a goose chase," he rationalized bluntly.
I looked between the two adults on either side of me and then back to the sheriff. Irritating as he is at times, he does actually have a good point. If Alex is telling the truth, then we have a lead; if he's lying, then we know he's the bad guy. "How far out did he say it was?" I asked, already wondering if I should get more coffee when we inevitably picked up Angela.
The sheriff nodded towards the door, a silent beckoning to get a move on. "A ways."
It turns out that Sheriff Dawes and I don't agree on the loose translation of "a ways." For the last five hours, I'd been crammed in between Booth and the window seat on the left side of the sheriff's own Jeep, the big tires good for the terrain but no so much for the bouncing whenever the road wasn't smooth – which was almost always.
Ben drove in the seat directly in front of me and Angela had managed to claim shotgun somehow without anyone noticing until the car was already moving. Brennan was on the other side of Booth, putting the FBI agent in between two equally unamused women who just wanted to get out of the car.
"My lungs are gonna come out through my throat," Brennan groused after huffing when the car bounced higher than normal because the sheriff apparently can't tell the difference going over and around rocks and dips. Really, it shouldn't be a problem – it wouldn't have been if it weren't so crowded.
Brennan's complaining reminded me that I haven't been doing any whining yet. Well, better fix that or they'll start thinking I'm having fun. I kept my eyes closed with my head down. I'd tried to lean against the window. I'd quickly learned that wasn't a good idea. I had dozed off for a couple of hours, which honestly surprised me, but the majority of the time I was staring out the window sullenly.
"I'm not even too sure that my stomach's still where it's supposed to be," I whined childishly, the advantage of actually being seventeen being that no one can fault me for acting like a kid when the rest of the time I act as much like an adult as the others.
"You know, where I come from, when you say you're driving 'a ways,'" Booth mocked from my right, holding up his hands to make air quotations visible through the rearview mirror. "It means forty-five minutes."
"Out here it means four hours," Angela answered dully. Just because she'd expected for it to be a long drive doesn't mean that she's enjoying it.
"We have been in this poor excuse for a safe vehicle for over five," I hissed, glaring at the back of the seat in front of me. I really hope Ben got the impression that I was laser-burning him with my eyes.
I looked up at the rearview mirror and saw Ben's reflection. He sort of shrugged, almost apologetic for forgetting the differences in what we considered "a ways." "I maybe should've said "quite a ways,"" he offered.
Booth sighed loudly and leaned back against the back of the seat, staring up through the windshield with narrowed eyes. I almost laughed. The three of us were acting like kids. How had Angela and Ben stayed patient?
"Wanna play a game?" Booth asked me without warning, twisting as much as he could with the seat belt restricting his movement. "Or sing, or something to pass the time?"
A frown pulled at my lips and I shook my head quickly. "I don't really do the whole… singing thing," I answered slowly, looking down to my hands in my lap and picking halfheartedly at the edge of the cast on my wrist.
"That's not true," Brennan contradicted, frowning herself for a different reason as she leaned forward so her head was almost touching the back of Angela's seat. It was a small car and there wasn't much space, but she had to have some way to see me around Booth, I guess. "You hum fairly often. And you sang with the radio when we went to Hanover Preparatory." Hanover Prep was the exclusive, rich school that the victim of the third case I'd been on went to.
"Yes, well, a lot can change in a few months, as I believe I have definitely proven," I muttered. I don't sing aloud very often. I do sometimes, and I know I'm good at it, but I've kind of been discouraged growing up from making a lot of noise. I got myself out of the habit and it's hard to convince myself it's okay to do. Back when we took the long drive to Hanover Prep, I'd been putting a lot more effort into seeming like a normal, non-abused teenager. "I hum when I'm agitated. Again, I don't really do the whole singing thing anymore."
"Ha!" Booth crowed triumphantly like he'd just discovered the truth about some big mystery. I realized too late what I'd let slip and, moodily, thought to myself that it wasn't important enough for him to seem that happy about it. "Anymore? So you do sing!"
I glared at him – which, to be honest, I do a lot. I glare at people. It's up on the Top Five list in how I communicate nonverbally with people; glaring is right up there with physical assault. The difference between this time and others, though, is that I actually meant it to be mean this time, because I couldn't think of another way to get him to leave me alone. Can't he tell when to drop the subject?
"Do I have to reiterate for a third time that I don't sing?" I asked hotly before checking the leash on my temper, abruptly snapping my head back to face out the window.
I had fortune with my timing, which is not something that I get to say all that often. I'm not a very lucky person. "There it is," Angela breathed in relief, seeing the ground change to an incline as worn rocks and boulders created a landmark. If I really felt like it, I probably could have climbed up, but with one hand already lame it was probably better to stick to the faint paths weaving lowly through or to go around.
Ben pulled the Jeep up closer to the outcropping but he couldn't get too close as there were more rocks in the way, and he didn't want to risk the tires getting slashed. Brennan and I both got out of our respective doors as fast as humanly possible to escape from the cramped and now boring space, but Angela and Booth acted like their seats actually weren't on fire and took more time.
"This is the right one, right?" I asked, looking up skeptically at the overhang to my right. "I don't know how many of these things there are likely to be, but I would like to be sure."
"I think so." Angela nodded slowly, hesitant to commit to it, but she started stepping sideways. The short sleeves of her white shirt blew in a breeze that picked up her hair as she held up a couple of pictures of Dhani side-by-side, comparing the background of the Polaroids to the setting in front of her. "A different time of day, though." Booth stepped away from the group, wandering around to go in a full circle around the abnormal rock formation, while Angela stepped a few feet back to get a better perspective. Brennan and I stayed put.
"You people look for the exact spot the pictures were taken." Dawes followed Angela's lead and faced forward while walking back, but unlike Angela, he took more than a few paces, backing up until he was only about a yard from the front of his Jeep. "I'm gonna take a circle around in the truck."
"Looking for Dhani?" I inquired, watching the sheriff closely. Dashing off with the negatives may have been for a decent reason, but that didn't stop me from being the slightest bit suspicious of him going off on his own in the middle of nowhere. He should have at least told Angela where he was going, rather than making off like a bandit.
Ben nodded, yanking open on the driver's side door of his car. "Yeah," he called. Reasonably satisfied, I turned back to the rocks. It seemed like we were on the same side as Dhani had been on, but it was hard to tell between the time differences and the exact shadows and angles. The Jeep revved up as the keys were twisted in the ignition again.
Angela pursed her lips, concentrating on the seemingly minute differences between the small images and the real one ahead. "You know," she said carefully, considering. "I think we wanna go south slightly." She twisted her neck to see what the ground was like to the left and reconsidered. "Maybe southwest."
I looked over Angela's shoulder at the Polaroids. Other than some shadows and angles, there was nothing I could have used to make that distinction. "You can tell that by just the photos?" I asked, getting a bit more respect for art in general as well as Angela's artistic ability.
"Yeah." Angela shuffled the pictures so that she held them all in one hand so that she could point to the top edge of the one on top with the other. "And the angle, there, on the outcropping."
"Right," I said softly, lifting my eyes to look at the landmark. I raised my right hand to filter the light. "And in the picture, the sun was lower, too, and the shadows were longer, so the picture would have been taken from further away." Shadows are very educational.
Booth came jogging back around the other side. It is a big abstract landmark, but its size is more in height than it is in width, and Booth had been trained as a ranger and sniper. He was used to the hotter climate and harsher ground.
"Where's he going?" Booth called, scowling and pointing back in the direction that the Jeep had moved in, going back in the direction opposite Booth as the rumbling engine grew fainter with distance. The FBI agent slowed his feet, coming to a measured stop in front of Angela and I with a little cloud of dust at his feet.
"He's looking for his sister," Brennan answered quickly with a little shrug.
Booth waited intently for a moment; it took me a second to realize that he wasn't waiting for someone to talk, but that he was listening to the Jeep, and then it took me another couple of seconds to realize that at this point, there wasn't any noise from the Jeep to listen for.
"Any of you bring any water?" Booth asked, his hands dropping to his sides.
In answer, I looked to Brennan, who was shouldering a bright orange backpack – one that's kind of hard to miss in the dull colors of the landscape. We had packed a few bottles in there to be safe, and I reached up to pull at the black string around my neck holding up a plastic canteen, made heavy by the water inside.
"A couple bottles each," I answered slowly, straining my ears to listen for noise underneath my voice, for the sound of the car, but was met with just that irritating sort of silence where you feel like your ears are ringing because there's nothing else to hear. "And more in the car."
"Why?" Brennan wondered, absently reaching over her shoulder and patting the top of the bag, making sure that it was there as she was reminded of it. "You worried?"
"Yeah," Booth answered honestly, shaking his head and staring down to the ground, resigned.
Angela frowned, concerned, and she didn't quite seem to have realized what the lack of noise meant. "About what?"
I scoffed, running a hand through the top of my hair in stress. "Well, for one, Jesus lost his sandals about two hundred miles ago." I pointed sharply in the direction that I think we'd driven here from as I revisited the phrase Angela had introduced Brennan to upon our arrival two days ago. "Secondly…"
"I don't hear the truck anymore." Booth finished for me and rubbed the back of his neck, sighing in frustration, while Brennan looked after the dirt treads of the Jeep and Angela bit her lip. "Great."
Brennan tipped her head back to squint up at her cell phone, held high in the air with her left hand. "No cell phone service…" she finally had to grudgingly concede defeat. "No water." She let her arm fall to her side but held tightly to her phone. "How long do you think we'll survive out here if the sheriff doesn't come back?"
The four of us chose a direction – we are southwest-bound, in the slim chance that this was the direction Kirk and Dhani had come from or gone in, hence the photo angles – and started hiking. It wasn't as much of a hike as it was a trek, but between the temperature and the general atmosphere, no one was feeling very happy about it. No one likes being ditched in the desert, and if anyone says otherwise, then they're freaking insane.
I looked at first Angela and then Brennan, both walking on my right whereas Booth was to the left. Walking in a line made it less likely for us to unknowingly change direction, and to be safe I could see Booth turning to see the sun every so often.
"We're physically fit and we've been keeping hydrated. I'd say three days at most," I approximated, trying not to let my voice betray the anxiety I was really feeling.
The number one rule of being alone or lost is to stay put. In this case, it doesn't seem like a good idea – either Ben is a good guy or a bad guy, and if he's a bad guy, he'll stay gone. For our sakes, I really hope that he's not the killer himself, but he'd said he'd just drive around, but went far enough to get out of earshot. Why would he do that if he hadn't been lying?
To make things worse, I was uncomfortable, sweating, dark hair sticking to the back of my neck, and trying to ignore the dust that was dirtying my skin, occasionally rubbing my arms for want of shelter and sleeves and a shower.
"How far are we from the highway?" Angela asked, not able to keep herself from sharing her trepidation. Her sunglasses were pushed up into her hair, both for ease of storage and to keep her hair from blowing in her face whenever a breeze picked up. There wasn't much of one now that we were further from the rock formation.
Booth had already talked with the sheriff on the way here, so, honorable or nefarious, Dawes had already told him where we were relative to places we'd already be aware of. "Five days minimum."
Brennan looked down to her feet and watched her shoes, frowning at the ground. "I don't like that math," she decided grimly.
"Join the club," I mumbled under my breath.
Angela stopped completely still with no warning. "Wait a second…" she lifted an arm to point out an odd color in a mix of high-standing, brown-green desert weeds, growing in the little shade offered by a naturally high rock. It was the front of an older SUV, tires slashed and backed against the boulder in front of it like it was battered and hidden away.
"Kirk's?" Booth asked when he realized what Angela was pointing to.
Angela let her arm drop and she nodded sadly, sighing deeply. "It looks like it, yeah," she responded, staring at the green truck in hurt. I honestly want to find whoever did this to Dhani and Kirk just so that I could give them a good punch in the face for putting Angela in this situation.
What can I say? Once you've got my trust, you've got my loyalty and protection. Nothing makes me angrier than someone hurting my people.
I followed Booth to the wrecked vehicle. As much as I want to help Angela, I just can't be as good a comfort as Brennan, between wanting physical space and not knowing Angela as well. I'm of more use checking out the car for clues, or to see if it's still in working condition.
That was confirmed when I glanced back and saw Brennan setting her hand wordlessly on Angela's shoulder. She didn't see, but Angela looked to Brennan gratefully.
I tried to pop open the hood of the car, but the edge dug into my fingers almost painfully with how hard I was trying to pull. Just when I was about to call it quits and let Booth try (he knows more about cars), it came unstuck and the hood swung upwards. I yelped with little dignity and lost my balance, stumbling before falling backwards onto the ground.
"Whoa. You okay?" Booth asked, battling between concerned and amused and opting to be a good Samaritan over laughing at me.
"I'm fine," I answered petulantly, glaring at the car. I was more worried that I'd lost my balance at all than anything – I was hot, but I didn't really feel dizzy. It hadn't taken much for the car to get the better of me. "It's a good thing I wasn't fast enough to try to catch myself. If I had, I would've hurt my wrist." I held up my left arm for show before twisting to the side and planting my hand on the ground to get up.
Booth took my answer at face value and he looked into the hood of Kirk's abandoned car. "Yep, the distributor's smashed," he reported as a little cloud of smoke, formerly stuck under the hood, floated up into the air. "All the wires are pulled out."
"Someone didn't want it going anywhere," I noted. I was sure there had to be a reason; concealing evidence, maybe? Or maybe to deliberately strand Dhani.
Brennan knelt down by one of the tires and ran her fingers along the inelegant slash in the thick rubber. "It doesn't make sense that the sheriff brings us to the scene of the crime and then leaves us to die, does it?" She asked, looking up to Booth.
The agent pushed the car hood back down. There was no use in trying to fix the car if wires were missing – or if the distributor was ruined. His white button-up, which he had left unbuttoned over the same-colored tank top, had the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. "One God-forsaken part of the desert's just as good as another God-forsaken part of the desert," he reasoned, rolling his shoulders and then looking over the roof of the car. "We don't even know if Sheriff Dawes actually saw Alex Joseph," he reminded us unhelpfully. "I mean, for all we know, he could have done all this himself!"
Brennan rocked back on the heels of her feet. "Could Dawes do that, Ange?" She asked with a secondary pause at the sheriff's name. No matter how objective we tried to be, there was no way we could forget that right now, we were pondering whether or not one of Angela's old friends had murdered her boyfriend and possibly another of her old friends.
It was just disheartening to hear how well Angela was taking it – her answer wasn't exactly immediate, but it was resigned, leaving judgment to us, while honest at the same time. "Well, I always thought Ben Dawes was a good man. It would take a lot to change my mind."
"Like, being left to die in the desert?" Brennan questioned. I think it was rhetorical, but even as Brennan rose from the tires, Angela remained quiet.
"Don't take it the wrong way, Angela," I told her softly, taking a step closer to the artist and trying to catch her eye, plastering on what I thought was a convincing smile. "I've been there, except I was there with a psychotic who wanted to gauge out my eyes and feed me to dogs."
I meant for it to be lighthearted, but only when I felt my chest tighten in response – the beginning of a nervous wave, the warning sign before I started thinking back to the abduction – did I realize that it was in no way amusing.
"No, sweetie. Don't even joke about that," Angela shook her head at me in firm reprimand, and given how if affected even myself, I just nodded, looking down. I'd had good intentions, but now that I knew it wasn't okay, I wouldn't say something like that to her again.
Booth had had his back to us. I'd thought he was letting us have our moment, but then I realized that he was actually looking at something on the ground. He slipped his tinted sunglasses off of his face and folded the legs up before pointing with them to tire treads on the ground. "These tracks here, they don't match the sheriff's vehicle. Too wide."
I turned my back to Angela and stepped closer to look. They were maybe ten feet away from the wrecked SUV.
"Kellogg's Humvee." I stated it simply. It wasn't as much of a question anymore as it was an assumption; the tires of the Humvee were wider than those of Kirk's SUV, and that was the only car in the community we'd seen that could come this far away from life and water sources.
"This is blood, I think!" Brennan called, raising her voice over the normal volume. I twisted. She was standing over a slanted boulder, half embedded in the dirt, with a somewhat flat side slanted and facing the sky. A metallic red stain splattered on it and there was a trail leading from the rock on the ground in spontaneous pools, no clear pattern between the distances. She pointed to the bloodstains on the ground and then back to the boulder. "The victim was kneeling here-"
Brennan never means to hurt people, but she compartmentalizes a bit too well sometimes. She didn't seem to realize at first that she wasn't just talking about a stranger to her, but that she was also talking about Angela's lover. I looked to Angela in alarm. The other woman was looking away back to the SUV mournfully, her face a few tones paler than it had been. If it weren't for Brennan's words, I'd have thought maybe the heat was getting too her.
"Bones," Booth stressed emphatically, getting the anthropologist to stop. She turned to Booth and in the process saw Angela over his shoulder.
Brennan dropped her head, her face flushing in shame. "Sorry," she said to Angela, who just shrugged like she couldn't care. No one bought it, but no one called it. Brennan whispered this time, careful to keep so Angela couldn't hear, but Booth and I were closer to her so that we could. "He was dragged this way." She walked a path to the left side of the blood on the ground. "Then the blood trail ends." She pointed to the last discernible blood mark, by the side of the tire tracks.
"He was thrown into the Humvee," Booth realized and said aloud.
Brennan looked over to Angela, her face pulled down into sincere concern. "We've got to be two hundred miles from where we found Kirk's bones," she said softly to Booth, looking up at him with confusion. "You think the murderer drove that far to drop the body?"
Something clicked then in my head. One God-forsaken part of the desert's just as good as another God-forsaken part of the desert, right? So why go take hours to go that far away? The distance and time, plus the presence of the Humvee and the peyote Alex had been collecting – it all fit together and it all came back to drugs.
Two hundred miles was a lot of distance to cover for a Humvee, but it wasn't nearly as time-consuming if done aerially.
"I don't think they drove," I corrected Brennan, looking in the direction of the Humvee tire trails and taking off in a run – just because I needed to work out some stress, and mostly because I was healed enough that I could run. I couldn't do marathons, but I could get away with a sprint.
"Where are you going?!" Brennan yelled at my sudden departure. "Holly! Booth-? Hey!"
I ran alongside the tracks for over a minute. I wasn't counting, but I had the general idea of the time that passed, and it helped that I knew I hadn't been going so long that I'd lose the others – I could hear them running behind me. The air whipped at my hair when I ran. It was freeing. Compared to how I'd been forced to be more stationary as of late, just sprinting felt like I was flying.
Stopping, however, I realized that something was wrong.
The trail I'd been following ended abruptly and I halted as quickly as I could without skidding and tripping, but even after my body had stopped moving, my eyes took a couple of seconds to realize that they were supposed to focus now on something that wasn't the ground, and I swayed almost dangerously on my feet – off-balanced, but I didn't feel out of whack. I just felt kind of tired, like I always do after a good run, except I was too hot. Way too hot.
Booth stopped much slower than I had but he was next to me, and that was a good thing, because something definitely wasn't right with me. Prideful or not, there's no damn reason to put my health at risk. "The tracks stop right here."
I reached up and rubbed my forehead, trying to ease what was beginning to become an ache, but I realized rather acutely that there was a problem; I wasn't sweating anymore. And yeah, that sounds like a good thing, but I just ran for a while at a pretty rigorous pace, and I'm in the desert, for God's sake.
"What 'here'?" Brennan asked, huffing slightly as she held out her arms in question and made a point to look in both directions, right and left. "There's no 'here' here!"
Which could have been true, if it weren't for how all the little desert plants were completely absent in a wide, several-yard path, where there was just loose dust covering the ground like it was blown there by wind.
"Booth," I said, swallowing dryly, staring at my hand warily, stumbling.
"Landing strip, huh?" Booth sounded torn between sighing and smug for having been on the right track with the first few leads. "I knew this was about drugs." He pointed down one direction of the airplane strip and I went backwards, losing the feeling in my limbs and starting to see black. "Mexico's about eighty miles that way…"
I shut my eyes and welcomed the darkness so that I wouldn't feel the pain from the inevitable fall to the ground.