Booth made a point of ignoring Kent's corpse on the exam table, instead standing to the side of the platform. I stepped tentatively over to him and away from Brennan and Zach to make sure that he was alright. He was looking at the military uniform that the corporal had been buried with. There were several medals and awards on top of the folded camouflage shirt.
He picked up a specific one. "You know, this is a Silver Star." He told me quietly, holding tightly onto the red, white, and blue-striped strap on the medal. Ironically, the star itself was more golden than silver except for an embedded, smaller star in the center, which was silver-colored.
He held it so tightly that I thought maybe he was still mourning the man he'd never met, even now. I let my head fall to one side and looked up at him. "I… I know you hate having to be here for this."
Booth swallowed and lowered the medal award back onto Kent's clothes. "Let's just get this over with. Alright?"
I shut my eyes and nodded, turning my back to him and looking to see Zach, Brennan, Angela, Goodman, and Hodgins all around the exam table, prepared to do what they could to get the autopsy done quickly and correctly. Booth remained by the table with Kent's possessions.
"We're going to need a full set of x-rays before we start the autopsy," I said into the quiet, politely sad atmosphere, getting this started so we'd be done sooner.
Brennan took the cue that we were starting and she looked across the body, her eyes seeking out the entomologist. "And a tox screen, and analysis of any particulates in the wounds," she instructed. Hodgins nodded. Even though he was a conspiracy theorist, he knew when to stuff it. This was not an appropriate time to be spouting ideas of that sort, and he got that.
"D.O.D. wants this done fast." Goodman informed Brennan. It was less of him stating a fact, and more his passive and respectful way of telling her to please hurry within reason. "They want this out of the press as soon as possible."
Yeah, I'm not surprised.
Brennan fixed Goodman with a very stern stare. "It will take the time it takes to do properly," she responded firmly. "Can you run scenarios on the angles and the entry order of the shots?" She then added to the artist standing next to Hodgins. Correction: Formerly standing next to Hodgins. The other scientist was moving away from the examination group and walking over to Booth.
Angela looked at one photo in the folder, then the next. She'd gone through then earlier and reorganized them for a more thorough evaluation like Brennan was asking for. She nodded slowly, deciding she could probably get something useful from the limited information that was available. "Yeah. I should be able to give you something."
With his voice down, Hodgins placed himself directly in front of the agent so that Booth had to listen to him. "I know we don't see eye-to-eye on a lot of stuff, because, you know, politically I think we live in an Orwellian nightmare due to-" What had started as the earnest beginning of a sympathetic statement quickly devolved into a stream of nervous ramble that Booth had to cut off.
"What – what are you trying to say?" He interrupted, crossing his arms and looking down at Hodgins, who didn't back down.
"Just…" Hodgins raised a hand up like he was ready to plant a reassuring hand on Booth's shoulder, but he lowered his arm when he rethought it. "I'm sorry, man," he offered empathetically with a sad shrug. "I really am."
Thank you. I thought to the shorter man when he moved past the agent again. Booth had needed to hear that, and coming from Hodgins, who had to put aside his strong opinions on our country's politics and military decisions, it meant enough to mean something.
Booth picked up a small framed photograph of Kent with his mother and father while Brennan gave instructions to her older intern. "I'll need x-rays of lumbar one through four, as well as the left scapula." She was ordering x-rays of the places that had significant bullet damage first.
"Uh." I heard the soft complaint and looked back to Booth in concern. He was putting the photograph back down again, his face pained. "He's just a kid."
"It's always the young." Brennan commented, her tone slipping into that overly rational, detached note that it took sometimes. I looked between the two adults, knowing that this was hurting both of them, and a little bit of me was hating the circumstances for upsetting them. "Anthropologists have theorized that wars break out when there's an increase in the population of unmarried men under the age of twenty-five."
In response, Booth stared at her. It was frightening how blank his expression seemed to have become.
I suppose that it must have bothered Brennan, too, because it made her realize what she'd said that was wrong. "I'm sorry," she apologized uncomfortably, her eyes kind of begging him not to take it the wrong way. "I need to create a distance from the victim. It's how I deal. I – I didn't-" Booth held up a hand to quiet her. "I didn't mean…"
"Just do what you have to do." Booth ordered her tersely, looking anywhere but Kent's body on the examination table. "I'm gonna go do my thing," he told her gruffly, walking away without looking back to her or Kent on the way to the stairs of the platform.
I hooked my fingers underneath the edges of the gloves on my forearms. "I have to go with him," I told Brennan apologetically, pulling on the stretchy latex to pull it off of my hands. This time I hoped that trying to help Booth wouldn't backfire in my face.
Booth had other agents collect the three people from the unit that were both alive and hadn't been interviewed yet about Kent's death, and so the two of us went back to the FBI to conduct the interrogations. He asked me to wait in the observation room, and though he claimed it was so I could watch them both, I suspected it was more so that I couldn't intervene. After the rollercoaster that was the last couple of days, though, I agreed.
Jimmy paced back and forth along the length of the desk. Booth didn't make him sit. "I – I should've been with Kent, man. Maybe… Maybe I could've shielded him, you know?" From bullets? I doubted that they would have both survived. "But, but the captain, he put me and Devon on the front door, and by the time we got to Kent, it – it was too late."
I wanted to tell him not to beat himself up – he'd had to kick through the front door before he could do anything – but he'd probably been over this a thousand times in his head and kept coming back to the same what-if game.
"What did you see from where you were?" Booth started to ask.
Jimmy all but threw himself down into the chair across from the agent, locking his fingers together. He wasn't looking up towards the light, instead keeping his eyes down by his hands and the table, not too unlike Overmeyer had done when Marni Hunter had been murdered.
"Oh, no," he moaned miserably. "Come on, man, I don't need to go through that again, okay? The captain told you." Yes, we had gotten a story from Fuller, but we needed to make sure that it corresponded with everyone else's. "You – You've read the report."
Instead of telling Jimmy exactly how poor the official documentation was, Booth leaned in over the table, hands on his lap. "Come on, Jimmy," he coaxed. "Please. This is for Kent and Devon." Well. That seemed kind of a low blow, but hey, if it worked…
And it did. He looked down, dropping his head almost limply but keeping his shoulders up, and his entire body shuddered before he looked up again.
"It was the first action we saw." He started, sounding surprisingly steady despite his lack of composure. "Man, nobody was ready. We were outside the front door, sweating in the heat, just waitin'."
"What's the first thing you heard?" The agent asked across the table. His voice was so low that it was almost difficult for me to hear, even through my earpiece.
"First?" Jimmy repeated, shaking his head and looking down onto the table. "It was the pop-pop-pop of the enemy AK. And all hell broke loose."
"I heard the pop-pop-pop of the enemy AK-47." Jimmy had described it exactly as Captain Fuller had. Booth tipped his head to the left as he looked at Jimmy carefully, leaning back and keeping his hands in his lap while the vet continued his story.
"We broke down the door and made entry. Those people – the Iraqis – they were already dead when we got to the back room." Jimmy was explaining in less detail than Fuller had, but after seeing how far he'd fallen apart, I wasn't entirely surprised that he either couldn't remember or couldn't say out loud the extent of what had happened. "Kent, too. Lefferts was standing over him, all freaked. We were all freaked, man. These were real people, you know?"
Yeah. It must have been freakish, at the very least. Kent, Fuller, Lefferts, Campbell, Marshall – they were all real, actual, living human beings who Jimmy had talked to and gotten to know at least a little. Seeing any of them dead would be traumatizing. One day they're alive, and the next they're just… not.
Booth carefully asked the next question, not letting it seem too obvious that he was putting the story under intense scrutiny. "Did you see 'em firing on Kent?"
"No." The man admitted. I took a deep breath and leaned forward over the counter beneath the one-way mirror. "But like I said, it took time to kick in the door and push through to the back room." Yeah, true. It had taken me time to sneak past the mercenaries in the front when getting to Donovan Decker, and I hadn't had to kick down any doors. "If I'd gotten there faster, I-" Probably couldn't have done anything? I finished silently for him, and then shook my head. It was easy to know empirically, but when it was you that you're questioning, it seems so much harder to accept. Jimmy inhaled shakily and sighed. "There was nothing I could do, you know? I swear."
The next one that we interviewed was a military private, Jody Campbell, who had earned her medical degree and operated in a local private practice office since returning from Iraq. She was wearing a light green top and jeans, and had no jewelry aside from silver chains around her neck which I suspected were her dog tags. Her hair was dark brown, cut just under her ears. It was thick, but cut in layers so the top looked neat and the bottom slightly ruffled.
I watched, again, from the observation room. She was more put-together than Jimmy. I remembered Fuller saying that Campbell had waited in the vehicle, so she hadn't been there to see Kent suddenly dead right after killing the insurgents. It could also be that she probably wasn't addicted to nicotine, or just had a firmer grip on her mental state.
"I joined the Guard 'cause they helped pay for medical school. All my life, I wanted to be a doctor. It's all I ever wanted." She looked up to the ceiling and shook her head, almost bitter. "I never thought I'd get sent overseas, much less Iraq."
Booth had already read the documents regarding her time in the service, and his volume matched hers when he commented on it. "You service record is… exemplary."
It was totally true, though. Campbell had not only had no problems with behavior or procedure in the military, but she also had commendable grades and records from med school. She had no problems in her practice, either. Aside from the incident with the insurgents and Kent's death, she had an incredibly impressive resume.
"I survived," she responded wryly. "That's my achievement."
"Look, I'm sorry to do this, Miss Campbell." At first, Booth had called Jody 'Private Campbell,' but she had preferred to be called Miss instead of by her rank from the National Guard. "I'm just trying to reconstruct the night of the firefight."
Campbell closed her eyes and inhaled so deeply that her shoulders raised before she breathed out again and started to tell her story.
"I was parked in the alley. The captain told me to stay in the Humvee. … Women aren't supposed to engage in direct combat." Okay… I was not going to look too far into that, otherwise my feminist pride would start to sting. "He took the unit to the house. The street was quiet, I was waiting. Then I heard the pop-pop-pop of the AK-47."
Pop-pop-pop. That same phrase again, three times now, all from very different people. How is it that three people, all of whom had suffered extreme emotional trauma, managed to explain a sound with no strictly correct articulation in the exact same way when most people described a round of gunfire differently? It's not even that they say it sounded like popping. What's weird is that they all say it three times, all in similar tones, even.
Campbell kept talking and I tuned back in again before I could miss anything. "Then Kent and Lefferts firing… the captain and the others, breaking down the door. Then everything… stopped. It went quiet again." She rolled her shoulders and looked down at the table. "Then the captain came back, told me Kent had been hit. He knew I was a med student, so he sent me in while he radioed for a medevac." A term short for 'medical evacuation.' It was supposed to transport a dangerously injured veteran to a nearby facility. "As an intern, I've seen a lot of horrible things. But when it's your friend… someone you serve with…"
Booth nodded, relieving her from trying to continue. We'd gotten the picture. Kent had been hit with at least half a dozen bullets. There wasn't anything that she could have done to save him from that. "Yeah."
The final man we had left to interview was the much-mentioned Peter Lefferts, who had left the military after the tour and become a lawyer with a few reputable cases. Most of them were civil suits, and though he'd lost a couple, he'd also gotten a pretty high rate for winning them, too.
He was still in a suit, having had a business day today, and his hair was still in a military-ish haircut, despite that he no longer necessarily had to keep it short. "Been in the Guard for years. Didn't think I'd ever get called up again. I mean… I'm forty-five. There's just not enough men for this mess." He threw his arms up for emphasis, shaking his head and looking off to the side at the one-way mirror. He wasn't looking directly at me, so I wasn't too put off – he couldn't see me, anyway.
"Look, Mr. Lefferts, if we could just…" Booth crossed his arms on the top of the tabletop.
Lefferts had to know what he was asking. Booth didn't even need to finish his sentence. "We were twenty-two hours into a twelve-hour detail. You try that when it's one hundred ten degrees out." He sighed deeply and shut his eyes, like he was seeing the event replay on the backs of his eyelids. "They called me 'Dad'," he said nostalgically. "Because I was the old guy. Kent was a kid. Captain sent us around back. I was supposed to look out for him.
"It was like I really was the damn kid's father." He squeezed his eyes shut tighter mournfully. "Kent was all gung-ho, you know? Would've fought the whole damn war himself. So he sees something move inside, something shines off the light. "A barrel," he says. And then we hear people moving around. Somebody's coming towards us from inside. And then somebody fires."
"Booth, ask him what the AK-47 sounded like," I said into my earpiece, the microphone picking up on my voice and carrying it through to the matching piece that the agent wore. "Please just trust me."
Booth shifted as he heard. "What did it sound like? The shots?" He clarified, scrutinizing Lefferts intensely and searching for signs of truthfulness and lying.
"It was like a pop-pop-pop." My heart stopped for a moment and I sighed, settling my hands on the edge of the counter. "Then Kent rushes in, sees the first guy, blows him away. He wasn't supposed to go in by himself, so I rush in. I take out the last guy, and then it all stops. And when it does, Kent is lying there!"
He was letting himself get worked up into a fervor, his voice rising and his legs bouncing. He about jumped up from the table, and could not look at Booth. "I – I – I can't believe it!" He gasped out, his voice pitching up higher and tighter in stress. I thought he was going to start to cry. "I'm – I'm – 'm staring down at Kent, and then the others, and they ask "what happened, Dad? Dad, what happened?" And I'm – I'm staring down at Kent, like he really is my kid-!"
No matter how suspicious his recount of the AK-47 rounds were, he was beginning to sound increasingly distressed. It felt and sounded genuine. I blinked and bit lightly on the inside of my cheek, trying not to be affected by the composed adult's devolution into near sobs. Booth was uncomfortable, but he was trying not to show any discomfort out of respect for Lefferts' feelings.
"I'm a lawyer!" He yelled, hitting his fist down on top of the table, throwing his head to the side and looking away. He opened his eyes like he'd forgotten they were closed. "A damn lawyer. I shouldn't have been there. None of us should've been there!"
"Their stories don't line up." Booth sounded like he was making an observation, but I knew he had to be conflicted with admitting that there was something more suspicious at play. He paced back and forth on the platform, up and down the length of the table. Brennan was sitting on a stool next to Kent's body, a table filled with equipment on the other side of her.
She was looking at a bullet she'd pulled out of a gunshot wound. It was both interesting and disturbing to watch her pulling the rounds out. Of course, Kent had died so his body hadn't even begun to heal around the bullets. She didn't have to cut him open, just reach in with a pair of steel tweezers and pull up on the case. I didn't want to watch, I was just compelled to, like in a horror movie when you know the garbage disposal is going to turn on but you can't look away from the character dumb enough to stick their hand in anyway.
I couldn't tell the bullets apart, although she had only taken a couple out so far. The shells had been damaged when they were shot out of the barrel. I could probably tell a difference between them if they were unfired, but after being blasted out of the gun and into the soldier, they all looked like disfigured blobs of metal to me.
"You said the events seemed consistent," Brennan reminded him, sounding only a little confused as she lifted one bullet in a small clear tray over to the table, setting it with the others that she'd just yanked up out of the open injuries.
Again, horror movie garbage disposal scene.
Explaining it quickly would have been easier, but sometimes you don't realize how many ways there are to describe something until you get someone else's opinion, so to prove the point, I asked them both, "What would you say a gunshot sounds like?" While leaning against the rail of the platform. ".45 pistol," I added for clarification.
"Bam." Booth answered, almost bored. I don't think his mind was all there, still in the interrogation room or in the insurgent attack described by the interviewees.
Brennan leaned back over the body, staying out of her own light so she could see what she was doing. "I thought they sound like a bang," she offered in contrast.
I nodded. Thanks. Point proven. "See, you two disagree, yet four mentally-scarred soldiers all described the first rounds in an intense, traumatizing firefight with the exact same word, the exact same number of times. They all said they heard a pop-pop-pop."
"It was rehearsed," the FBI agent concluded. He dropped his voice while looking at the gory scene of Brennan removing another bullet from a gaping hole in Kent's chest. "They're hiding something."
"That makes sense," she agreed quickly, straightening back up and cupping a latex-covered hand underneath the bullet. She pinched it with the tweezers and moved it over to the tray on the table. "There's something Devon knew about."
"And someone else didn't want to get out."
Booth and I both watched in this combination of intrigue and revulsion as Brennan repeated the process another two times, coming up with a total of half a dozen bullets. Now that they were all next to each other in the tray on the table by the microscope, I could sort of see a difference in the size of the metal blobs. Half of them were bigger than the others.
"That's all of them," I sighed in relief. No one needs to see that. And again, I just couldn't force myself to look away. It was like I was compelled to watch. I'll take that therapy now, thanks.
Brennan looked at the stained bullets and separated them with tweezers. Incidentally, one group of all the same type of bullets had more blood on them than the other size. "The way the blood pooled around the bullets, these three were the ones that killed him." She held up the tray with a hand evenly underneath, holding it parallel to the ground so that Booth didn't have to come all the way around the exam table to see.
He frowned while he looked down at them. "Those rounds aren't from an AK-47," he declared about the ones that she was indicating. "The others are."
Actually, in contrast to the ones Brennan was talking about, those others seemed pretty clean. "Well, they didn't kill him," she said certainly. "Circulation had stopped by the time these bullets hit."
Booth looked them both over again and started to shake his head when he really looked at the bloodier rounds. "Wait," he started, his eyebrows furrowing in as he took a much closer look. "The ones that killed him are from an M-14." He paused. "Those are from our weapons."
The killing shots were delivered from one of the American soldiers.
Brennan quickly got to the same conclusion. "Friendly fire," she concluded, face morphing to sympathy for Booth's sake.
"Oh, God." Booth covered his face with his hand and turned away, looking elsewhere.
"But if he was killed with an M-14, why was an AK-47 shot at him, too?" I asked aloud. I thought it was a good point to make. He'd been shot several times in the chest. No way anyone thought he'd survive that. Why go to the trouble of shooting him again with another weapon? And if the rest of his unit had only gone in when they heard gunfire, then did that mean Kent had shot himself? How does that even make sense?
"Booth-" Brennan started to say to the horrified former sniper.
She didn't get to say much before he cut in, not wanting to have to listen to it. "You know what? Let's just find out who did this, alright?" He shifted, looking away from Kent, and waved his hand while he tried to figure out what to do. "Not all personnel in a unit carry the same weapons. We have to find out who was issued the M-14."
As soon as Booth got the call back with the information, he all but ran to his SUV and I followed hurriedly, breaking into a sprint to catch him before he left.
I was still buckling my seatbelt when he was pulling out of the parking spot. "Lefferts was the only one issued an M-14," he addressed me, explaining the results of his phone calls and why we were in such a hurry.
"Kent runs inside and fires at the insurgents." I theorized, painting an image in my head of the soldier running in from the back room. The four insurgents were taken by surprise, but they were armed, so they fired back before he dropped them all. "They start to shoot at him in defense. The others hear the gunfire and follow, but Lefferts gets their first. He accidentally shoots Kent."
I sighed and shook my head, looking out the window. No wonder the lawyer had looked so horrified when he had to relive the experience. He'd killed someone he, at some level, considered a son. Accident or not, I couldn't imagine the guilt that must have put on his conscience.
Still, that doesn't excuse keeping it a secret.
"Devon wanted to tell the truth, but Lefferts, he's got a successful legal practice! Too much to lose, so Lefferts kills Devon." That answered the questions all nicely. Booth turned on the sirens and sped up over the speed limit, peeling down the road while other cars obediently moved to the right side of the road.
We didn't get to Lefferts' law practice in time to arrest him.
When we got there we found a crime scene team and a borderline hysterical business partner who had called nine-one-one. Upon going inside, we found Lefferts hanging limply from a makeshift noose tied to a ceiling fixture over his desk, swinging, totally limp like a rag doll, his throat half-bruised and face sallow.
I looked around the facility for a little bit and talked to the coroner who had recently arrived while Booth kept a distant eye on the proceedings in the office, leaning against the wall opposite Lefferts' dangling body. I couldn't find anything that suggested a struggle or break-in, so I returned to the office and was more than a little bothered to find that Booth was in the same place, except now he was holding a ripped piece of notebook paper.
I stepped up to his side next to the wall, out of the way of the crime scene team.
"M.E. will have to confirm, but it really seems like a suicide." I told him, unsure whether I should sound relieved or apologetic so opting for a more concerned note rather than leaning in either direction. On one hand, someone we talked to killed himself; on the other, it means that he wasn't murdered by the same person we were supposed to have caught.
Booth's brow creased and he kept staring at Lefferts' shoes wordlessly. He was beginning to frighten me a little, so I bit my lower lip and raised a hand up towards his shoulder. I hesitated, started to pull back, but reminded myself that I was safe and he had done so much for me, I could offer him some reassurance and it wouldn't freaking kill me. Stubbornly, I held out my hand and let my palm fall onto his shoulder.
It got easier and I relaxed, leaving my hand up on his shoulder. "I'm sorry," I offered, wishing that I could say something that would have a more powerful effect.
He didn't respond, didn't react in any way, but after a second he sighed and held out the paper he was holding to the side, towards me.
I took the paper with my other hand and rotated my wrist to hold the note the right way to read it off. I said out loud as I looked over the shaking handwriting, done in pen and print. ""I shot Kent that night. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to. But I can't live with it anymore.""
Underneath my hand I felt Booth's shoulder tense up even further, feeling less like human flesh and more like marble. I lowered the note but didn't let go. I'd put it back on the desk for the crime scene team to choose what to do with it. Does – Did – he have any family? I wondered uncomfortably.
I sighed softly. "Asking him to reimagine it again must have pushed him too far," I said softly, curling my fingers in to hold onto his shoulder lightly, just in case he was planning on trying to shake me off. I'm offering physical comfort. This is unusual. Be comforted, damn it. "The coroner puts time of death a few hours ago, after we interviewed him."
The unit brought over a gurney with a thick, large black body bag in preparation to cut down Lefferts' corpse from where it hung on the ceiling, feet still swaying gruesomely.
"This wasn't our fault, Booth," I told him, frowning, my voice down because this was between us. I have nothing against whoever the hell these other people are, but this was really only meant for the agent. "It was a conscious decision to keep it secret and live with the guilt. It was his own choice to kill himself. All we did was our job."
I thought that might at least help, because he'd been agitated that I accused him of not doing his job as thoroughly as he should, and now saying that we'd been doing our job was meant to sort of tell him that I'm still in this with him and he's not alone.
Booth didn't respond, though, so I rubbed his shoulder slowly over his jacket. "Anyway," I started to continue, since I clearly couldn't expect Booth to bounce back too quickly. "His partner has documents confirming airfare. He was out of town when Marshall was murdered. Lefferts shot Kent, but he isn't the murderer we're looking for."