"All I ask," Goodman sighed, following Brennan across her office while she shoved her left arm through the other sleeve of her dark blue jacket. "Is that you stop by the archaeology section and identify the skull as a Syrian, Hittite, or Egyptian."
I pulled at the sleeves of my blazer. For the first time in a long time, I was able to dress somewhat normally again. For today's court date, Brennan and I were going to be trying to ensure a life sentence for a man who had murdered the woman he was cheating with his wife on. Brennan was wearing nylons, a dark pink skirt, and a blouse underneath her jacket, while I was wearing black slacks, a short-sleeved light blue blouse, and a long-sleeved white blazer.
"No, we need to be going to court," I corrected Goodman, looking at the lock screen on my Smartphone and seeing the time. We'd be late signing in as expert witnesses if we took a detour to Goodman's favored department.
"I need my notes," Brennan mumbled, bending over and looking through the drawer of her desk for the forensic notes she'd taken when we'd gotten the case from Booth.
"Well, there's a photocopy in the file," Goodman suggested, because we always kept photocopies on hand just in case.
"No." Brennan refused flatly, straightening up when she couldn't find the notes. She moved further behind the desk to find a different drawer to rifle through. "The last time I read from photocopies, the defense lawyer told the jury I was 'winging it.'" The distaste she repeated the phrase with conveyed her irritation.
"It was a ploy," I reminded her, hovering by the doorway. "The psycho was still convicted." I looked over my shoulder as Booth hurried into the room.
My father clapped his hands together quickly. "Ready? Chop, chop!" Brennan didn't stand up yet, and Booth huffed, crossing the room.
"I can't find my original notes…"
"Photocopy in the file," Booth offered, putting his hands on her shoulders and lightly pulling her back upright.
"No," the anthropologist objected, but let Booth lead her around the desk and steer her in the direction of the door. "The last time, the defense lawyer told the jury that I-"
"It was a ploy," Booth interrupted, giving one of her shoulders a pat and ushering her out of the doors. I turned on my heel and started to follow after the two of them while Booth drove her by the shoulders through the lab, towards the exit of the Medico-Legal lab. "It failed. Let's go."
"That's what I said," I told Booth and reminded Brennan, while Goodman hurried to pull the door shut behind him and fall into a hurried pace a couple of feet to my side.
Hodgins caught up on Brennan's other side. Booth let one arm drop and slid his other across Brennan's back, moving around to the opposite side. The entomologist was holding a clipboard with a pen caught in the clip.
"I found glass. I found pollen." He announced to the anthropologist as we walked down the hall, dismissing both Booth, who was trying to hustle his boss, and Goodman, who was also vying for anthropological services. "Which do you want first?"
Brennan didn't dismiss Hodgins, although Booth seemed like it would be cool to ignore him. "Pollen," she decided. On her other side, Booth shot Hodgins a glare that promised upcoming doom and shooed him away like he was a fly. Hodgins shrank back and commenced retreating.
Goodman saw an opportunity and, despite how slim the odds were, he admirably took a shot at it. He piped up. "Perhaps you could swing by archaeology on your way to your-"
Booth interrupted, groaning loudly. "No!" He stressed, emphasizing very, very carefully. "No swinging! Bones is going straight to court, Holly is going straight to court." I'd known he wanted us both to get to court and slam dunk the case while on the stand, but I was beginning to feel less like an expert witness and more like a prisoner who had to be in one place at a specific time.
I expressed as much calmly. "I'm starting to feel like you're my warden," I said to Booth.
Angela also joined what I was starting to suspect qualified as a bombardment. "Alright, so her height makes no sense, and her spine length is wacky." She was looking down at her tablet, stylus in one hand, bangs curled to the side softly. She pursed her lips and looked at her screen analytically, clearly expecting for Brennan to say something helpful.
Zach leaned over the silver railing on the side of the exam platform while we were going past the stairs towards the hallway on the other side of the Medico-Legal lab. "Dr. Brennan?"
Like he'd rung a bell for her, Brennan started changing direction to her left. As he was on her right, Booth couldn't just block the way. "Okay," she started to slowly say to Angela while bounding up the stairs. I shrugged and followed after her. Brennan was still buttoning up her dark blue jacket while she stepped swiftly to the exam table, where Zach had returned to and was looking over a bare skull. "Calculate the height off the femur and assume that the fire shrunk her spine."
Booth jumped up the stairs right after us so that the security system wouldn't rearm before he was on. "I don't think you should talk about other cases so much on court day," he decided, sounding frustrated and just a bit exasperated. "You might get confused."
"We won't get confused," I vowed, rolling my eyes. Booth should really know by now that Brennan and I can go between topics quickly enough to make his head spin. We can easily separate facts from one case to miscellaneous details from others.
Goodman was the only one who remained on the ground level, staying a few feet away from the stairs. "One simple question," he called up. I was beginning to wonder just how desperate he was for this identification. "A Syrian, Hittite, or Egyptian?"
Brennan started to twist over her shoulder to Goodman, but Zach impatiently called her name again at the same time as Goodman added, "Five minutes."
"Bones!" Booth rolled his eyes and threw his arms up. If this were his first time working with either of us, I had no doubt that he'd be done with us by now. "Kid, come on!" He tried to appeal to me this time, but I wasn't in as much of a hurry as he was. Besides, if we left the Jeffersonian in this mess, who knew if it would even be standing by the time we'd gotten back?
"Alright, what's up?" I asked Zach, bending down next to him over the skull. There were thin tissue markers placed over the bone with careful precision. I kept my hands to myself since I wasn't wearing any gloves.
"Buttercup," Zach quipped, tacking on to the end of my sentence. I blinked and turned my head to stare at him instead of the eerily smiling skull. Zach pressed on like he hadn't just called me a cutesy name. "If you sign off on these tissue markers, then Angela can finish the facial reconstruction."
Brennan leaned down on the opposite side of the table with a single glove on one hand, turning the skull enough for her to see it at another angle. I fixed Zach with a stare, unsure if I should be irritated or just stunned into shocked silence for a while longer.
"… What did you just call me?"
"What's up, buttercup' is an amusing, rhyming, linguistic meme." Zach explained to me, talking so quickly that I had to puzzle it out in my head before I realized the point to it. I'd said 'what's up' and he'd apparently been watching TV recently. I nodded slightly towards him like I was permitting him a free pass for calling me something like 'buttercup.' At least the nickname Xena was badass, but if someone started calling me Buttercup on a regular basis, I might just have to knock their head into a wall. "This is the latest Jane Doe from limbo." He added to Brennan.
On the ground level, Booth couldn't see the skull that the three of us were all looking at. Brennan's lips were parted slightly, eyes narrowed in focus. "How about this for an amusing, rhyming linguini?" He called sarcastically up. I didn't even bother looking through the rails at him. "See you later, alligator."
"Linguistic meme," I corrected Booth, only minimally irked by his continued attempts to get us from point A to point B. "It means it's a meme of English language and culture. Linguini, on the other hand, isn't actually a word in English." I rolled my eyes though he couldn't see. "It's a misspelled version of a type of pasta called linguine."
Of course I knew that – I love pasta.
Goodman, standing beside Booth and mirroring each other with their hands in their pockets, reacted to something that we'd moved over whole seconds ago. "Please don't refer to bone storage as 'limbo,'" he complained to Zach.
Zach looked over his shoulder at the administrator. "There are thousands of human remains down there waiting to be identified." The sad thing was that that was no exaggeration. There literally were thousands of bodies stored in the basement. "Limbo seems an appropriate name," he defended.
Brennan hummed while she looked past the tissue markers to the skull itself. "No sign of foul play," she noted.
Goodman gave up on the fight with Zach. "If you have time for this, you have time for my Hittite." He declared flatly. Aggravated, Booth turned on Goodman, held his hands up, pinched his fingers together, and pulled his hands apart like he was sealing a bag. In this case, he was sealing the topic.
I turned my back to the table to look at the boss over the rail. I held my arms out and demanded, "If you already know that it's Hittite, then why are you following us?!" Seriously! What could we tell him if he already had the answer?
Brennan remained utterly unbothered by the bickering. "Tissue depth of the cheekbones and along the jawline looks a little deep to me," she told Zach helpfully. "But otherwise-"
Since it seemed like she was about to approve of it, Booth intervened again, waving his arm widely to get us to start running. "And out of limbo, back on Earth, and on our way to court!" Brennan was still focused on the skull, so Booth added, "Kid!"
I sighed, but obeyed the command. "Dr. Brennan," I said, getting her attention and nodding towards the stairs at the front of the platform. "We're going to be late if we stay much longer." Her eyes lingered on the skull, but she nodded in agreement and straightened up, forcibly ripping her mind away from Zach's identification case.
Booth almost managed to shepherd us entirely out of the building, but we ran into one more dreaded obstacle while we were in the hall out of the Medico-Legal lab. This one was not one that I particularly liked; I just tolerated him for Brennan's sake, because she happened to be dating him.
David Simmons had met Brennan online and they'd arranged for a first date on the night when Brennan and I were both shot at by Jamie Kenton. We'd suspected David might be the one trying to snipe Brennan, so we'd brought him in for interrogation. It turned out that he was totally innocent, so he and Brennan kept going out. They aren't a sappy, clingy couple, but Brennan usually sees him at least once a week. Even though I accused him of trying to kill her, David was polite and respectful, even to me, and because I honestly didn't think Brennan was in danger of him, I treated him decently in turn.
"Temperance!" David waved and Brennan picked up her pace to reach him. We'd been heading in opposite directions in the hall, the man probably intending to find Brennan. "Hi!" Booth and I both stopped and we exchanged an irritated glance before plastering on small, fake smiles. We both knew we couldn't be mean to David, but we didn't want to be late to court. It was almost eerie how similar our behavior was in that moment. "Good morning, Holly," he added courteously to me.
My smile became a bit more genuine at his friendliness. "You too, David. Haven't seen you in a while."
"David!" Brennan laughed and kissed him quickly on the cheek. He smiled pleasantly at the action. He was holding a three-prong binder filled with papers. "What are you doing here?"
Booth laughed awkwardly and tried to excuse us. "These two have to get to court, so-"
"Agent Booth," David interrupted with a nod, smile faltering. Unlike with me, David hasn't had to talk to Booth since we interrogated him. He and I only talked sometimes because I lived with his girlfriend. "Nice to see you again. Especially when I'm not in custody." Well, that felt pointed. It served the purpose and silenced Booth for a few seconds, who scowled. "Listen, I read your manuscript," he continued to Brennan, his tone lightening kindly and he handed her the binder in his hands. "I couldn't wait to tell you how great it is."
All three of us perked up – Brennan in delight, Booth in curiosity, and myself in excitement. Brennan was my favorite authoress even before I'd met her, and that hadn't changed.
"Thank you!" She smiled and took the binder, keeping it shut, and held it under her arm. "Really?"
"You read her manuscript?" Booth asked David, puzzled like he didn't understand why Brennan would ask him to.
On the other hand, I bounced on the balls of my feet, eyes lighting up happily. "You have a new book?!" I asked the anthropologist with a big smile that almost made my cheeks ache. Booth swept in near Brennan and made a swipe for the manuscript, trying to pull it out from under her arm.
"Uh-uh!" Brennan turned to the side so that Booth ended up grabbing at the air. He pouted while she gave him a half-glare for trying.
"You have a new book!" I reiterated, clapping happily, still just as excited as I'd been the first time I'd said it. I made myself stop bouncing and made my hands into fists to control myself. "I want an autograph," I declared. Since we lived together, I didn't think it was too outrageous.
"Right, I forgot. You're a fan." Booth sighed at me. I didn't usually act like a fan, but I was one. He and Brennan had learned it when we'd met. I'd had one of her books in my messenger bag when I'd been first arrested, so the two of them had known ever since we met that I liked reading Brennan's books. "Am I in it?" He asked both David and Brennan eagerly.
"No!" Brennan responded quickly.
"Definitely," David confirmed at the same time, nodding seriously.
"Ah!" While Brennan seemed a little embarrassed, looking to David as if she'd been betrayed, Booth clapped his hands together gleefully.
"You are, too, Holly," David added to me, even though I hadn't asked.
"I am?! Awesome!" I had already known that the characters in her books tended to be modeled at least loosely off of real people. There were recurring characters that her character, Kathy Reichs, worked with routinely that I could easily compare to Hodgins, Angela, and Booth especially. There were even parallels to Goodman and Zach. The common denominator between them all was that they were fixtures in Brennan's life that all seemed at least semi-permanent, and having a new character based off of myself was both surprising and flattering.
"Absolutely," David confirmed again.
"Uh…" Brennan shuffled her feet anxiously and finally, finally, jumped into the wagon with Booth on the get to court ASAP opinion. "We have to get to court," she excused, trying to end the conversation where it was.
I deflated and sighed. Yeah… Brennan started walking, still holding on to the manuscript. David turned around to look after her. "I hope you remembered your original notes, because, last time…" he trailed off meaningfully, recalling the attempts to discredit her from the last time.
He only reminded Brennan of the incident and she groaned. "Told you, Booth!" She turned around on her heel, starting off in the other direction back to where we'd come.
"No – Bones, we don't have time!" Brennan zipped past him without pause and he threw his head back. I shrugged and waved goodbye to David, turning around to follow my mentor back towards the lab. "Our – kid!" Booth protested. He gave up. "Alright, fine, listen, three minutes! I'll wait for you in the car!"
I smirked. It was probably a good thing he couldn't see. I held up four fingers on my right hand and raised my arm over my head. "Four minutes!" I countered playfully, hurrying after Brennan and smiling to myself.
We were on our way back to Brennan's office. Angela and Goodman had both moved to occupy one of the offices and had a hologram face being constructed and elaborated on by Angela's computer program. When we passed this office, Brennan stopped in her tracks and stepped back. I almost ran right into her because I'd had absolutely no warning.
Brennan gave up on walking and outright ran into the office, stopping and staring at the hologram in horror. I followed after her in concern, because I hadn't seen that expression on her face very often and it couldn't be good.
Goodman and Angela both noticed the hurried and unannounced entry, and the administrator was the first to look away from the hologram and frown. "Is something wrong?" He asked Brennan, sounding curious and worried.
Brennan started to shake her head as if denying it, although something was very obviously an issue. "What's this?" She asked Angela, pointing at the hologram. It was of a woman, maybe in her forties or late thirties, with long black hair, brown eyes, and pale skin. I looked between her and Brennan and noted a couple of similarities, but that – nope, not going there.
"Dr. Brennan?" I asked, persisting with Goodman's inquiry.
Angela was holding her tablet, which she'd been using to control the hologram's projection. She lowered it as she answered Brennan. "Zach's Jane Doe," she answered. "He said that you okayed the tissue markers."
Brennan started to shake her head violently. "N-No, that can't be right. That can't possibly be right." She tore her eyes away from the hologram, glowering at Angela and backing up. I recognized that behavior as a sign that she was preparing to flee. "You did it wrong!" She accused. "It's a mistake, Angela!"
I moved to the side, allowing for clear passage out of the office for the anthropologist. She never freaked out like this, and I didn't want to exacerbate it by accidentally making her feel trapped.
Instead of being affronted, Angela only seemed bewildered. "Alright, fine," she said, placating, going along with it before things got worse. Brennan turned around and started powering away like there were wheels attached to her shoes. "Sweetie, I'll turn it off," Angela called, raising her tablet and powering down the hologram. It disappeared from the air and the lights from the device turned off. Angela looked at Brennan's retreat through the window of the office and then looked back to me. "What just happened?"
I opened my mouth and started to reply, but realized I had no idea what I was supposed to say. I shrugged my shoulders instead and turned around to follow Brennan, intent on finding out just exactly what was wrong.
Brennan raced up the exam platform to Zach, who was working on filling out some information on the Jane Doe that Brennan had to recognize – why else would she react so weirdly? She didn't bother to scan her card, so the security alarms started to blare. A security guard jogged forward from the doors to turn it off while she ran up the stairs.
"Zach!" I stopped by the stairs but didn't try to go up. The security guard scanned his own card, swiping it through the system, and the alarms turned off. "The artifact bag from your Jane Doe. Do you have it?"
Zach turned around, blinking in surprise that we were back. We were supposed to have already left. "Yes," he said, answering and backing up. There was a plastic evidence bag on the backlit exam table. Brennan swiped it up without listening to the rest of her intern's answer. "I also have three…"
The security guard spoke into the radio by his shoulder while going back to his station by the front doors. "It was Dr. Brennan," he told the other guards who had started to respond to the alarm systems.
Brennan jumped down the stairs again, setting off the alarms for a second time. This time I had almost predicted it. I usually kept my Jeffersonian I.D. on a lanyard clip around my neck when I was in the lab, so I picked it up and slid it through to authorize Brennan's movement. She didn't care, as she was already running off towards her office.
Zach stopped to lean over the rail and called after his boss, seeming lost where her urgency was concerned. "… Three bags of soil samples from where the remains were buried…" He trailed off and turned his eyes to me.
I shrugged, feeling just as lost as he was looking, and I reached up to wave to him while I took off after the anthropologist. "Later, Zach!" I yelled, feet thundering while I raced after her.
The next place I found her was inside her office, already throwing herself down into her chair and holding up the sealed plastic bag with trembling, shaking hands. I almost ran right past, but stopped, slipped slightly, and bolted inwards, but slowed down. Barging in like that seemed insensitive, like I was bursting in on a private moment which I didn't like to do, even though she was clearly upset.
She didn't even acknowledge that I was there, reaching into the bag and pulling out a much smaller, sealed one with a single green glass marble. She held it up like she was looking to the design inside before putting it down onto her desk and going back into the evidentiary bag. There wasn't much inside, but Brennan knew what she was after and picked out what looked like a metal silver belt buckle with a dolphin engraved on one side.
I set my hand on the door frame and hovered at the entryway while the anthropologist dumped out the bag with the buckle. It fell into her waiting palm and she held it back up to see the smaller, more elaborate details. Her other hand dropped the bag and covered her mouth while her shoulders fell, making a choked noise behind her hand that sounded suspiciously like she was struggling not to begin crying.
"Dr. Brennan?" I interrupted her quietly, but loud enough to be heard, and I ventured into her office. There aren't mines on the ground, I told myself firmly, walking towards her desk and pulling down on the hem of my blazer. I liked the blazer. It's nice to be able to afford new and cool clothes.
Her eyes snapped up but she wasn't outwardly startled, so I think she'd known I was there the whole time, even if she hadn't acted as if she was aware of my presence. She swallowed, her eyes red, and turned over the belt buckle in her hands. "This-" She sniffed and coughed to clear her throat. No way are we going to court today, I thought mildly and then scolded myself for being flippant. "This belonged to my mother."
The marble she recognized, the buckle from her mother, the face she remembered and flipped out because of. The Jane Doe that Zach had pulled from the Jeffersonian's limbo was Christine Brennan, one of the parents that had vanished when Brennan was fifteen.
I sat down hard in the chair across from her. I'd never known her mother but I empathized with Brennan, and the similar situation I'd been in with my foster parents' disappearance made it even easier to relate. The compassion hit me like a brick and if there hadn't been the chair I think I'd have either gone off into a different headspace or gotten dizzy.
"Oh my God…"
Booth found us when we didn't turn up at the car. I was, for once, speechless. I didn't know what I should say, what I could do to try to make it better. I didn't know what Brennan needed to hear, or even if she wanted to be alone, but it didn't seem like she should be left lonely in case she did need company. What do you do when someone you care for finds their mother's remains?
Booth paused by the doorway when he saw the two of us sitting on either sides of the desk, Brennan still holding onto the buckle like she was afraid to put it down in case it would prove to be an illusion.
Brennan turned it over slowly, staring at it. "I have to miss court," she told Booth, surprisingly evenly.
Booth was equally quiet. I hadn't heard him sounding so sensitive since he'd told me about the incident in Kosovo, which we hadn't talked about since. We didn't need to. "I know," he told her calmly, stepping further in and slowly moving to stand beside me. He made no move to get a seat, instead tucking his hands in his pockets and watching the two of us carefully.
"I remember this belt buckle." Brennan held it up so that Booth could see the dolphin engraved on the front and laughed dryly at the memories that came with it. "I… borrowed it without asking the first day of high school. My father had it… specially made for my mother because she loved dolphins."
"Bones…" Booth started, but stopped. Like me, he didn't know what he was supposed to say to make this any better. "I'm sorry."
She looked back down and turned the buckle around so that she could see the special design again. "I always knew that for my parents to disappear like that, they… they had to be dead." It was what I assumed of my recent foster family, too. It was easier than thinking that they had just uprooted their lives and abandoned me. "I thought that when it was confirmed, I'd feel relief, but…"
Zach was visible through the glass side wall. The blinds were down but I could make him out through them. I fisted my hands in my lap and tried to conclude for Brennan so that she didn't have to try to speak it out loud for herself. When you say something yourself, it seems more concrete. If someone else says it then you don't have to accept it quite so quickly.
"But it still means that your mom can't come back." I guessed that that was what she was thinking, speaking slowly and choosing my words with caution. I didn't want to make it any worse than it already had to be. I couldn't even begin to imagine what she must be feeling. "When there was room for doubt, there was also enough room for a little bit of hope, too."
When Zach appeared in the doorway and paused, unsure whether or not he was welcome inside, Brennan beckoned him in with one hand. "You have the file, Zach?" She asked, sniffing and brushing hair out of her eyes, regaining more of her composure.
Zach was holding a small folder. For something that was so important to Brennan, it seemed insane how thin the file was, how little information we really had at this point. He held it out to Brennan, stepping inside with relief. "Jane Doe, number one two nine oh nine nine eight."
"Where was she found?" Brennan asked, trusting that Zach would have already read the information before he started placing the tissue markers for the skull remodeling.
I understood the need to know where her mother had been all of this time – at least, I thought I did – but apparently I wasn't the only one who thought maybe she should give it some time. "Bones," Booth started to gently dissuade. "I-"
"What does it say?" She interrupted Booth to prompt Zach pointedly.
The grad student opened the folder up to the first page and cast his eyes down. "In September of nineteen ninety-eight, a grave-digging crew at the Sunset Memory Cemetery in Salisbury, Pennsylvania, uncovered human remains in a completely advanced stage of decomposition." I suspected he was reading it from the report rather than paraphrasing.
"Is it from a grave?" Booth added, probably wanting to know if it was worth looking to the cemetery's records.
Zach shook his head, supporting the file and papers with both hands. "No," he responded. "It appears that somebody just dug a hole at the edge of the cemetery and… plopped the body in there."
"Zach!" I exclaimed, shocked, shooting him a glare for his insensitivity. Normally I can just let it pass – I've known since I met him that he's not as… in touch with his emotions, or adept at reacting to others', but this case was more than just an awkward response or ill-timed quip.
He looked sufficiently cowed for it and realized that it was a bad thing to have said. "Sorry…" he apologized, looking back down to the small file on the woman from limbo. "Um, the local coroner found no obvious evidence of foul play and sent the remains, a few artifacts, and soil samples to the Jeffersonian, hoping we could identify her." He shut the file, closing it but keeping it in hand. He watched his boss sympathetically. "Technically, your mother's been at the Jeffersonian as long as you have."
Although I think it might have been meant as a comfort (I've stopped questioning how his head works), Brennan shut her eyes tightly and turned her head to look away from the older intern, clasping her hand over her mom's belt buckle.
I turned to Zach again, shaking my head and appearing as irritated as possible without seeming angry, because I don't think he meant his words to come across as badly as they were. "Again!" I hissed. "Zach!"
He winced again apologetically. "Sorry…" he offered to me, and his eyes darted back to Brennan, who was starting to unwind from the unwittingly painful remark. "But they both got here in nineteen ninety-eight."
If Brennan hadn't had a bunch of papers on her desk, I'd have leaned forwards solely for the purpose of banging my head on it.
"Zach…" I groaned quietly before looking back up to the anthropologist, filling my eyes with empathy and compassion and concern. It used to be hard to show all of those emotions – or any of them, really – but I was getting better about it. I leaned forward and put a hand on her desk. "You should take the day off," I suggested to her. It was less like a suggestion, really, and more like a very gentle instruction. "Let Zach take care of tagging, and I've got my license, so I can drive home."
Home. Home was an actual place now.
"Temperance. Go home." Booth murmured, using the soft, pleading eyes and the understanding expressions on her to get her to agree.
Brennan relinquished the keys to her car and let me drive. I think even she accepted that she was too distracted to safely operate heavy machinery today. I got us back to the apartment in one piece.
We still had no TV, so no mindless television programs. Brennan disappeared into her room for a couple of hours. I made myself busy by picking up where I left off in one of the many books she owned. When she came out again, we didn't talk too much. I noticed she kept her mom's dolphin buckle in hand, holding it like a cherished heirloom – which it might actually be for her – and she settled in with a book, too, and that's how we spent the rest of the day.
Come nighttime, I was almost ready to 'suggest' that she try to go to bed when someone else knocked on the door to the apartment complex. I twisted around to look over the back of the couch. Brennan lowered her book when they knocked again. I glanced at my page number and closed my book before getting off.
"Let me get it," I said, being rather graceful in my opinion.
I undid the chain lock and the deadbolt on the door. What can I say? I'm paranoid. I lock both before even taking two steps from the door most of the time without even realizing I'm doing it. Grasping the door knob, I pulled it open and was met with an FBI agent in casual wear – jeans and a button-down – carrying take-out from our favorite local restaurant, a Chinese place called Wong Foo's. Booth was friends with the manager.
I blinked at him once. One in the morning seems like an odd time to come around. "You realize dinner was six hours ago, right?" I asked, just to make sure he hadn't gotten the time horribly, horribly wrong. People ate dinner at different times, but around seven, when Brennan still hadn't said anything about food, I'd taken it upon myself to break into the cupboards and fix ramen. It was fast and easy, if not healthy, and besides, a balanced meal wasn't as large of a concern as keeping an eye on her, just to make sure she'd be alright.
"Great!" Booth beamed like I'd actually started singing praise for his timing. "It's been long enough for you to be hungry!"
I rolled my eyes at his logic and resisted the urge to reply with something along the lines of how teenagers are always hungry, or something stereotypical like that. Truth was, I wouldn't say no to comfort food, even though I wasn't the one really in need of it.
"What are you doing? It's past midnight," I pointed out, standing in the doorway with a hand still around the door knob.
He shrugged, trying to pass it off as a casual occurrence. "Well, I was driving by and I saw the lights." He held up one of the two take-out bags. They smelled tempting. "I thought you might like some Wong Foo's."
The story would have been plausible, if we weren't in an apartment complex. On the fifth floor. With the windows facing an alleyway. Where cars didn't drive. So either he's lying, or he's freaking Batman and didn't tell us. I think I'm going to have to go with the former.
I narrowed my eyes. "You saw our lights for sure from the road on the other side of the building and some fifty feet below?" I said slowly, skepticism plain. No way was I going to let him think that I was just buying it. Sure, I'd let him in, but might as well see if he'd give a more realistic answer first.
His smile remained constant. "That is correct," he reaffirmed. I sighed dramatically but stepped to the side, swinging the door open wider. Booth cheered for being allowed entry. "Alright!"
He brought our favorites, but didn't even know what he'd been carrying until he opened it. Sid – Wong Foo's owner – tended to decide what to order people instead of letting them order for themselves, and he had a serious talent for it. I picked up some chopsticks, sat back on the couch with Brennan, and Booth dragged the armchair closer to the coffee table so we were all closer together.
Brennan and I were better at using chopsticks, and within minutes, Booth had given up on trying and had gotten a fork from the kitchen. He twisted it in the take-out box to collect noodles. "After you gave me your parents' missing persons file, I did some poking around." After meeting Jesse Kane, Brennan had asked Booth to see if he could look into it. Jesse had inspired her to do something about it, but had also served as a warning not to let it become an obsession.
Brennan looked up, shocked like she'd forgotten he'd said he would. "You worked on it?"
"I said I would," he responded, frowning, sounding almost hurt that she'd thought he wouldn't after he promised to. "Well… there wasn't much I could do," he admitted. "There was no evidence, no clear jurisdiction." He sighed and shifted so he was at an angle facing her. "Listen, Bones, finding your mother's remains means I can open an official FBI case. I mean, for the first time, a real investigation can occur!"
Brennan started to nod and she closed her eyes, thinking back to when they'd disappeared, fourteen years ago this coming Christmas. "Three days after my parents disappeared, they found our car at a rest stop a thousand miles from where we lived in Chicago." She looked to Booth, about to ask something about getting the car, but Booth beat her to the punch.
"Yeah, I found it in a federal impound lot in Jersey. I'm having it trucked to the Jeffersonian."
She blinked. "They kept it all those years?"
"If nobody claims it and they're not too overcrowded, then they don't really have a reason to get rid of it." I answered with a shrug in between bites of my food, a lo mien recipe with mild spices and beef.
Booth took a deep breath. "Your father was a high school science teacher. He had no trouble with anyone at work. And then, your mother… that's a different matter."
Brennan frowned, disgruntled. "She was a bookkeeper," she protested, objecting to the idea that someone with a peaceful job could get on the wrong side with other people.
Booth grimaced. "She was a witness for the prosecution… twice. On evasion charges." Brennan's face fell and she looked down to her chop sticks. "That gives motive." Booth changed the topic from Christine to the final member of Brennan's immediate family. "Then there's, uh, your brother."
"Russ." She looked like she was saying the name of a traitor, not of her older brother. She looked at the take-out on the table and glared at it. "The brother who deserted me."
Well, there was a lot that was said there, but I wasn't going to risk saying it and getting shot down in flames.
"He's on parole," Booth said quietly, wincing back in anticipation of Brennan's reaction. She didn't seem shocked in the least. "He ran a chop shop, processing stolen cars for parts."
"Figures," she snorted callously.
"He says that… you blame him for your parents' disappearance?" He asked it with his tone going up at the end like a question, clarifying with Brennan if Russ had been correct in that or not.
She looked up to him suddenly and sharply. "You talked to Russ?" She demanded, like he'd somehow betrayed her by contacting her brother.
"I called him," Booth nodded slowly, knowing he was in the firing range. "Just asked him a few routine questions. He didn't give me much." After eying him carefully, Brennan decided that what he'd done didn't constitute as backstabbing. Still disapproving, she looked back down at the food in her lap.
"Russ didn't have many answers on hand, but he might still know something and just not realize its significance." I theorized because it seemed reasonable and we had to start somewhere. I pulled both of my legs up to cross my legs on the couch cushion. "We'll find what happened to your mom, Dr. Brennan, I promise."
Hodgins and Zach found both Brennan and I the next morning when we came into work late. "Adipocere and decomp residues in the bagged soil indicate the body was buried for at least five years." He told us, looking down at his clipboard to double-check what he was saying. Evidently his memory was correct, and he looked to see Brennan for her reaction. We all had to be careful with what we uncovered and how we revealed it to her, as she was so closely involved with the victim.
Zach nodded at his friend's side and looked straight to Brennan. "That's congruent with P.H. in the soil, the climate and degree of decompo-"
Brennan cut him off with a bite in her tone and a fierce rebuke. "No, seven years. It should be seven years." Right – they'd disappeared in ninety-one, but if Hodgins and Zach were right, then she'd have died in ninety-three, which left two years in between and unaccounted for.
Hodgins and Zach both exchanged a look with each other. Zach opened his mouth to reply but Hodgins talked over him before he could start. "I'm still going through the soil samples," he told Brennan carefully, "But something in there might allow me to be more specific."
"She was buried near Christmas, nineteen ninety-one." She told them both, like she was ordering them to find evidence that supported that statement instead of just to do their jobs and find the truth.
Booth entered the scene, scanning his card and jumping up the platform stairs. I hadn't even seen him coming because I'd been paying attention to Brennan, Hodgins, and Zach and what they'd found. He leapt up and continued to move across the platform speedily, going in a beeline for Brennan and I.
"I need the room, guys," Booth called around, making a motion around the room and then jerking his thumb towards the front doors. I think that was optional – as long as they left earshot of the platform, he'd be happy.
"The whole lab?" Zach echoed in confusion, frowning at Booth. "For what?"
I waved my fingers at Zach and teased, "Super secret special agent things," I whispered, before grinning.
"It's a cop way of saying 'get lost,'" Hodgins explained to Zach with a groan, grabbing onto Zach by one of his upper arms and dragging him towards the stairs. Zach looked down but let Hodgins lead him off the platform, scanning his card when the entomologist didn't.
Once they were out of earshot, Brennan raised her eyes up to Booth skeptically, wondering exactly what was so important that he had to kick her coworkers out. "What?"
He reached back and then swung his arms forward again, clasping his hands and rubbing his thumb over the back of one hand uneasily. It was enough to put me on edge and prepared for really bad news. Booth cleared his throat.
"When you first gave me the file on your parents, I… I looked back into their lives, three to four years before they disappeared. Jobs, friends…"
Brennan nodded slowly to show that she was being attentive. "Okay…" she prompted for him to continue and to get to the point.
He shifted and watched her carefully, his eyes brimming with compassion and sympathy. "I looked back a little further and I found that… Christine Brennan didn't exist before nineteen seventy-eight."
She half-smiled uncomfortably like she might if she thought someone was trying to tell a joke. "What are you telling me?" She asked, shifting her weight unhappily. "That – that this woman isn't my mother? I was born in nineteen seventy-six. Obviously my mother existed."
"Existed, yes." No getting around that. Witness for the prosecution? Evasion charges? It wasn't too much of a leap to assume that Christine had maybe been involved in something else. "Under the same name…" I hesitated before slowly finishing, "Not necessarily…"
He looked down at her solemnly. "Do you know the most common way of creating an identity?"
She moved slightly, fidgeting, and didn't look up to meet his eyes. "Getting the birth certificate of someone deceased who was born the same year you were, and… taking over that identity." Almost everyone who worked in investigative jobs knew that. It wasn't exactly secretive knowledge, or as rare a practice as I'd like to think.
"I found one Matthew Brennan, born and died in nineteen forty-eight." Brennan was the surname Christine had taken when the two were married, and it was the name passed on to both of their children. Max could be a nickname for Matthew, which meant that the two of them… they had stolen someone else's names and abandoned their own. Brennan started to shake her head while refusing to let it sink in. "Do you understand?" He asked in concern when she didn't respond.
Brennan shook her head steadfastly, adamantly refusing to believe that her parents could have been anyone other than the parents she had known. "I don't know what it means," she denied. The fervency of her denial meant that she clearly understood exactly what the implications were. "I don't know what any of it means."
But if she needed someone else to explain it for her… even if she didn't, it had to be said, and she had to accept it before we could move onwards with the investigation. "It means your parents… as you knew them, anyway," I amended. I crossed my arms uncomfortably over my chest, feeling like the bad guy for just summarizing. "They changed who they were, and took on assumed identities for themselves… You were both alive then, even if you can't remember it. Maybe they did the same for you and Russ, too."
She looked so shaken that I regretted even making the last point.
Booth and I split up to look for Russ around the local carnival in North Carolina's Morehead City. We'd had to drive a while to reach it, but when we'd called for Russ's parole board, they told us that was where he was living. A little GPS tracking on his phone and we had his location. I was glad that we had the objective of finding the man, otherwise we'd probably have ended up in an uncomfortable situation where he thought we should enjoy the rides or cotton candy or something all family-ish.
I found the guy that matched his photograph by the Ferris wheel. There were four feet tall grey metal rails up around all of the rides, open only for the entrances and exits. I leaned against the side of one and listened in, eavesdropping on Russ Brennan and the man that he was talking to. Russ looked a little different from the photograph I'd seen, but it was definitely him.
He had short brown hair, almost the same color as Brennan's, but ruffled. His eyes were brown like hers, too. He was tall, almost six feet in height, and he was wearing old blue jeans, work boots, and a tan-brownish colored jacket, loose on him and zipped up high. The long sleeves were pulled down to his wrists. He wasn't exactly pale, but he wasn't tanned, either.
The other man appeared to be the carnival's owner, his impatient face illuminated by the lights from the Ferris wheel, the games and other rides, and the lights set up for safety around the machinery. "Every minute this is down, I'm losing money," he complained to Russ.
Russ was working on the side of the equipment. The Ferris wheel was paused and a couple of kids were getting on with an adult who looked too young to be their mother, so was probably a sibling or an aunt. "You want faster work? Grab yourself a cup of coffee and leave me alone, man."
Nice, I thought to myself, kind of surprised how he was reacting similarly to how I thought I might. Subconsciously I'd painted him as a villain because my allegiances lied with Brennan, but Russ seemed not only ordinary, but surprisingly normal.
The manager threw Russ an irritated face for his troubles, but left. Russ shook his head and I heard him sigh in relief, even over the carnival music.
Unfortunately for him, he wasn't done being spoken to. "Hey," I called, standing up with the toes of my shoes through the gaps in the rails. I leaned over the top with a smirk. Russ looked over his shoulder and didn't seem too surprised to find someone he didn't recognize. "I haven't been on one of these in… God, years."
"Hm." He hummed and then nodded. "This one goes up about six stories." That seemed like a pretty typical height for carnival Ferris wheels. He went back to work with a wrench.
I nodded slowly. "So where'd you get your license?" To work on heavy machinery like carnival rides and, say, Ferris wheels, a person has to be licensed for it. Just like you'd need a license for operating automobiles.
He looked over at me again and this time he put down the wrench and left the side of the ride, wandering over to my spot by the fence. "You're a cop," he accused, crossing his arms over the front of his light brown jacket. There were stains on his jeans, so they were probably meant for outdoor work.
It was surreal to be so close to him – the missing brother who'd run out on Brennan.
I canted my head to the side. "Associated with cops," I corrected, and then stopped leaning so much. I straightened up so that I wasn't looking up at him. Standing at my full height, plus the extra couple of inches from standing on top of the lowest horizontal rail, I was still a little bit shorter. "It does surprise me that you figured it out so quickly, though. Who do you think has the easiest time picking out cops in public?"
"Other cops," he replied guardedly, unsure what I was aiming for.
"And the people who should avoid them." I knew from experience that when you had things to hide, you paid more attention to the people who might uncover them. It made it easier to identify anyone of authority because they stood out when you knew what to look for. I wasn't exactly a parolee, but I had spent a while covering up the fact that I had been illegally living on my own. Russ tensed like he thought I was going to expose that he actually wasn't licensed for the repairs. "Relax," I waved one hand. "I'm here with my colleague, Special Agent Seeley Booth. He talked to you a couple months ago about your parents' disappearance."
He relaxed slightly, recognizing the name and realizing when I was referring to. "And now he's brought a pipsqueak kid to talk to me more about my family?" He snorted derisively, shaking his head and then looking back down on me. "Are you going to ask me more questions about my childhood?"
I was mostly just offended by being called a pipsqueak. I felt like remedying that was the priority. "I'm almost as tall as you. You have no room to be calling me a pipsqueak," I retorted, while I let go of the rail with one hand to get the small, wallet-sized picture of Christine that Angela had printed off. It was an image produced by her computers based on the hologram. I held it up for Russ to take.
He didn't recognize her immediately. It sounded bad, but really, he hadn't seen her since he was… what, eighteen? Nineteen? He was in his early thirties now. It only took a couple of seconds though, and then he looked up, less confrontational and more surprised. "You found my mother?"
I nodded to confirm it but let myself ease up on the sass. There was no reason to be a bitch when he was having it confirmed that his mother was dead. "Yeah. Dr. Brennan – er, your sister – confirmed the identification."
"What about Dad?" He inquired.
"Not yet." I shrugged. "We're looking into it."
He kept the photograph. I let him and didn't call him out on it, because hey, I could get another and was it really fair to show him a picture and then not let him keep it when it was of the parent he hadn't seen in almost fifteen years?
"What do you want from me?" He asked uneasily, not wanting to be drawn back into it.
"Right now?" I raised my eyebrows. "Mostly to ask if you remember your parents having any other names besides Max and Christine. Or if you were ever someone else before your name was Russ."
I could tell when I hit a cord. He seemed more surprised than just someone who had been asked if he or his parents had a separate identity, and he rocked backwards as if he was prepared to back up from me.
He lied anyway. "No. Of course not."
I smirked, letting him know I wasn't buying it. "Why do I feel like you're lying to me?"
He smiled charismatically. "Cops always think I'm lying!"
"Except I'm not a cop," I reminded him, ceasing with the smiling so he would know that I was totally serious. "I'm just someone who trusts your sister, and when she doesn't think she can trust someone, I'll take my cue from her." Russ stopped smiling too, fading into an uneasy and slightly upset frown. "We want you to come into D.C.. We're leading an investigation into your parents' disappearance, and you were older than Temperance was when they left. You probably remember more."
He shook his head and looked over his shoulder to the people on the Ferris wheel, then returned to looking at me in order to refuse. "I can't just get up and leave whenever the FBI wants me." He pointed behind him. "I've got a job."
"Yeah!" I agreed, doing that insincere, smug, see-through smiling thing. "You've also got a parole board that probably doesn't realize your job involves maintenance on equipment you're not licensed to handle. Especially considering that if it breaks down, other people are going to get hurt."
I could tell the second that Russ realized he wasn't going to be able to weasel his way out of seeing his sister again, because his face fell at the thinly veiled threat.
I nodded when he realized it. "Yeah. I probably should've introduced myself first. My name's Holly Kirkland, I'm your sister's roommate, and I will shamelessly blackmail you if I think that the result could help her." He surveyed me carefully, his eyes seeming dull in comparison to a couple of minutes ago. I passed over one of Booth's cards with his credentials and phone number. "This is Agent Booth's phone number. Call him up when you get into the city."