Bones: Buried Deep

6

Temperance Brennan, arms folded, chin high, the picture of a professional woman, was trembling.

As she stood outside the nondescript house — policemen, crime scene analysts, and EMTs hustling in and out — she had finally succumbed to fear… or at least an unsettled sense that she could not shake.

She hadn’t lied to Booth: she really hadn’t been scared in that kitchen, all her focus had been on Jorgensen and that knife.

But when Booth’s bullet whizzed past her and struck Jorgensen, the knife heading in her direction, her grip on her self-control had vanished.

Flimsy thing, control.

One second you had it, next you didn’t. Oneminute you’re at the Jeffersonian studying an arrowhead in the chest of an eight-hundred-year-old Native American, next you’re in Algonquin, Illinois, stanching the wound of a seventy-year-old probable serial killer.

Nice thing about the lab, she had control — she was in charge.

Things occasionally went differently than expected, but the lab was strictly science, and the unexpected was part of that too.

Not that there wasn’t pressure at the Jeffersonian — a bone broke in the lab, it was generally hundreds if not thousands of years old… in a world where value was determined by whether bones were whole or not. But when things went wrong there, no bullets flew, no knives hurtled in your direction.

More Chicago cops were arriving, and the FBI had a large contingent on hand as well; the neighbors, few that there were, had turned out to watch. SAC Dillon was off to one side, giving Booth the third degree about the shooting, while Lieutenant Greene was being treated by EMTs in the yard.

An ambulance had already carted Jorgensen away to a hospital. The wound was not life-threatening, but the bullet would have to be removed, and the old boy needed to be stitched up.

Jorgensen would remain under police watch, and — at the very least — charged with attempted murder for shooting Lieutenant Greene and attempted assault on Brennan. If the Chicago and FBI CSIs found evidence of more crimes in the house, that list could grow.

Brennan — with no one yet questioning her, treating her, or for that matter bothering to ask if she was okay — stood off to one side, alone.

Which was fine; she figured now would be a good time to keep a low profile, and stay out of the way.

This plan seemed to be working nicely until her cell phone rang.

When she reached for it on her belt, the cell got caught and kept ringing. Heads slowly turned her way. She finally got the thing loose and punched the button.

“Brennan,” she said.

“Hi, sweetie,” came Angela’s cheerful voice.

Turning her back on Dillon, Booth, and the others, Brennan filled Angela in on everything that had happened since they last spoke.

“Oh my God,” Angela said. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” Brennan said.

It was only a small lie.

“I’m not talking just physically, honey, but mentally — emotionally. You must be—”

“I appreciate your concern, Ange, but where are you with the first skeleton?”

“…Trying to identify the different components, but frankly, it’s slow going.”

Not what Brennan wanted to hear.

On the other end, she heard a small commotion, and Angela interrupted their conversation to talk to someone, then was back.

“Jack wants you,” Angela said. “Hang on.”

Dr. Jack Hodgins, the staff entomologist, knew more about spores and minerals than the science department of your average university.

“Temperance,” he said, each syllable a machine-gun bullet. “How’s Chicago? And by that I mean, did you solve the assassination of Anton Cermak yet?”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Nineteen thirty-four, Capone gang CEO Frank Nitti had Mayor Cermak whacked in Miami. Press of the day made out it was a miss on FDR, but it was really a hit on His Honor.”

Shaking her head, Brennan asked, “Interesting to know, but not terribly helpful. Got anything relevant for me, Jack?”

“C’mon, Doctor, you’re in Chicago! It’s like… the Disney World of conspiracies! Vote early, vote often, the Chicago Seven…”

“I meant relevant to the case,” she interrupted.

“Oh,” Jack said. “Well. Sorry. Yeah, I’ve got some preliminary findings about the soil still clinging to the bones.”

She waited.

“The silica and oxygen content of the soil is very high.”

“Sand?”

“Not sand like beachfront… but very sandy soil.”

“In Chicago?”

“Yeah,” Jack said. “That was my first reaction — get past the lakefront, what’s sand got to do with the Second City, right? But then I got to thinking about just how big that lake really is.”

“The bones were from bodies that were buried on the beach?”

“Say that fast, three times…. No, not in sand, sandy soil.”

“Which means?”

“Which means this ground is probably around the lake somewhere, near but not actually at the lake… maybe by a river, or even out in the ’burbs. Plus, it’s nutrient rich, so a marsh maybe. Not acidic enough to be from a bog.”

“That takes in a lot of area,” Brennan sighed. “Do you know where in greater Chicago that might be?”

“We’re working on it. Got some other tests still ongoing — I’ll tell you more when I know more.”

“All right, Jack,” she said.

After quick good-byes, she clicked off.

Brennan went looking for Booth, found him huddled on the driveway with Dillon and the Chicago PD crime scene crew.

They all parted and turned to look at her as she approached.

“What’s the deal?” she asked, stopping in the gap they had made in their little circle.

Booth said, “This is Lieutenant Ron Garland.”

A tall, thin man with a blond butch haircut and sad blue eyes stepped forward. He wore gray slacks, a white shirt open at the throat, and a navy windbreaker with the words CHICAGO POLICE CRIME SCENE UNIT emblazoned over the left breast.

“Ron, this is Dr. Temperance Brennan,” Booth said, and Brennan shook hands with the man. “Tell her what you told me.”

After clearing his throat, Garland said, “Uh, Ms. Brennan, it’s an honor to meet you…. I, uh, just loved your book.”

Brennan smiled and looked away — she always felt awkward meeting the public, though hearing praise from a law enforcement professional pleased her.

Still, she never knew what to say beyond “Thank you,” which she did.

“Not that,” Booth said, frowning at the crime scene lieutenant. “About the house.”

Garland shot a glare at the FBI agent, as if about to tell the fed where to go.

Brennan interceded, saying, “Don’t take offense — tact isn’t Agent Booth’s strong suit.”

Garland responded to Brennan with a small smile, then quickly morphed back to dead serious. “Dr. Brennan, we found a hidey-hole in the bedroom closet… and came up with this.”

Another investigator stepped forward and displayed a huge green album already sealed in a plastic evidence bag.

“What is it?” Brennan asked.

“A sort of keepsake book,” Garland said. “A, uh… what you’d have to call a scrapbook.”

Brennan’s eyebrows climbed. “Really? What sort of scrapbook?”

“When I say scrapbook, I mean that literally,” Garland said. “Sickest shit I’ve ever seen… and I’ve seen some.”

Something slithered in Brennan’s stomach. “How literally?”

Garland heaved a sigh that started in his toes and ended in his scalp. “He apparently peeled a piece of skin from each of his victims… and pressed it into his scrapbook.”

She swallowed, the things slithering in her stomach seeming to multiply and fight for space.

Now Garland’s eyebrows rose. “And I’m afraid that may not be the worst thing.”

Brennan braced herself. “How could it not be?”

“There’s a crawlspace.”

Immediately, Brennan felt better.

“Actually,” she said, “that’s not worse.”

Garland blinked.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I meant that only from a standpoint of investigating a crime scene. This kind of thing… well, it’s my turf.”

Garland relaxed, apparently knowing he didn’t have to say anything more.

And he didn’t: Brennan already knew what the crime scene lieutenant was talking about, and what he wanted. In an instant, all was clear: her squirmy stomach over the scrapbook, her posttraumatic anxiety about the fight in the kitchen, were gone.

For the first time since they had left the Field Museum this afternoon, she really felt like herself.

“Show me,” she said to the lieutenant.

Brennan and Booth followed Garland through the living room, dining room, and into the kitchen.

Around the corner from the refrigerator, out of sight from the other doorway, was a door she had not noticed before. This led to a mudroom with a washer and dryer, beyond which was another door, now open to the two-car garage.

Garland stopped just before he got to the garage door and turned to face Booth and Brennan. He motioned for them to take a step back, which they both did — Brennan caught between Booth and the washer.

Garland pointed to the floor.

Brennan saw a hatch carved into it, a small metal ring set in an indented area on the side nearest her.

“Crawlspace,” Garland said.

She traded a look with Booth, who seemed more unnerved about this than she did.

Which somehow felt reassuring. Big sniper guy, uneasy about a dark place in the floor. A place she would go without hesitation or fear, even already knowing what waited down there.

After snapping on a pair of latex gloves, Brennan crouched, grabbed the ring, and lifted, the door raising easily, a safety hinge latching when the lid was up all the way, holding it in place.

The smell, faint though it was, hit her instantly.

Looking up at Garland, she said, “You’re right — something’s decomposing under this house.”

Neither man said anything as she eased forward, sat on the edge, and let her legs dangle into the dark crawlspace.

Garland handed her down a Mini MagLite and she screwed its head half a turn, providing a fairly wide beam.

She smiled up at the troubled men and said, “Fellas — it’s going to be all right.”

Then she dropped through the door into a crouch.

She found herself in a large area with a dirt floor and less than three feet of clearance to the joists of the house’s main floor.

On her hands and knees, she moved forward, the beam of light sweeping back and forth. She tried to follow the smell of decay, which so permeated the space she did not wonder what awaited her; she knew: death.

The only question that remained at this point was… how many?

Finally making it to what (if she had her bearings right) must be the front wall, she sent the beam into a corner, revealing a stack of bags of agricultural lime.

Some bags were full, most empty.

The house was not huge, but the crawlspace seemed to be open under all of it. Thinking of her two skeletons formed from different remains, she saw plenty of room down here for enough bodies to make several more.

She took a more circuitous route back to the door, skirting the far end of the house, and she was just about to turn back when the light caught something shiny.

Even when she got right above it, she could not see it clearly.

Then, brushing away some dirt, she saw what looked like a diamond ring.

She cleared away more earth, using her fingers, digging tiny bits at a time until she saw that the ring encircled a finger, the finger was attached to a hand, and the hand to an arm.

She went back to the hatch and looked up to see both Garland and Booth peering in.

To Garland she said, “I need work lights — enough to illuminate the whole area down here. And can you rig up some way to blow clean air in?”

The Crime Scene lieutenant nodded and grinned. “Lights and air conditioning, Dr. Brennan — no problem.”

To Booth she said, “Call Dr. Wu…. No, wait, help me up out of here and I’ll do it.”

Garland and Booth both extended a hand. She took them both and let them pull her up out of the hole.

“Thanks, guys,” she said.

The two men exchanged wan glances, apparently spooked a little by how nonchalant Brennan was in the presence of death.

Booth handed her his cell phone. “Jane’s number’s up — just hit the green button.”

She nodded, surprised he didn’t have Dr. Wu on speed dial yet.

The Field Museum anthropologist picked up on the first ring and Brennan explained the situation and what she needed.

“I could bring a couple of interns,” Dr. Wu said.

“No room. They’ll just end up cramped and bored. Better if it’s just the two of us.”

“Might take me a while to get there.”

“No real rush,” Brennan said. “The victims aren’t going anywhere. Just make sure you’ve got everything. My gut tells me, when we do get started? We’re going to be at this for some time.”

Brennan ended the call. “Know where we can get a cadaver dog?” she asked Booth.

“Cadaver dog?”

“An animal that works like a bomb-sniffing dog, only it finds corpses.”

Booth shook his head.

“In Chicago, neither do I,” she said. “Let’s get a tech with ground-penetrating radar instead.”

Booth called in that request; while they waited for the tech and for Dr. Wu, Brennan and Booth tracked down Greene, in the front yard, smoking a cigarette.

“How you feelin’, buddy?” Booth asked.

Greene managed a shrug. “By the time my boss got done reaming me out, my ass hurt more than my chest.”

The FBI agent laughed. “Yeah, I got a rubber-glove exam, myself.”

Brennan spoke up: “We captured a killer — a suspect who responded to our presence by shooting Lieutenant Greene, point blank. Since when does that rate a reprimand?”

Greene smirked but it was not at all nasty, merely weary. “The doc here really isn’t law enforcement, is she?”

Booth didn’t respond to Greene, but did answer Brennan: “Channels, Bones. Neither one of us went through channels.”

“So what?”

“So, technically, the lieutenant and I aren’t even working together. And taking along our resident anthropologist-slash-bone-expert, to confront such a dangerous suspect? Not exactly what either the FBI or the Chicago PD hand out merit citations for.”

Brennan said, “Look, I put up with bureaucracy where I work — who doesn’t? But this is absurd….”

“Plus which,” Greene put in, “I went and got myself shot. Bosses hate that — more paperwork. Shooting board. Union reps to deal with.”

Brennan shook her head. “But the killer was captured!”

Booth said, “And that’s the only reason why Greene and yours truly are not both hanging from a yardarm somewhere.”

Turning to the FBI agent, Greene said, “Yeah, and I hate the yardarm.”

Booth nodded. “So hard to get your shirts to fit right for a month after that.”

“You’re making jokes?” Brennan asked. “You get dressed down for catching a killer, and you make jokes about it?”

Booth shrugged. “I’m open to other options, should you have any.”

She considered that, finally realizing nothing could be done about the vagaries of bureaucrats.

And yet she saw the system’s side of it, too. Law enforcement couldn’t just go around ringing every doorbell in America looking for bad guys.

Truth was they were lucky.

She only hoped their luck would hold out: chances were Jorgensen’s attorney would try to turn this into some sort of harassment case and get all the evidence thrown out.

Brennan hadn’t spent a lot of time in court, but she did understand that if you caught the wrong judge on the wrong day, your whole case could go out the window.

“I almost forgot,” she said to the men. “I got a call from Jack right before I went into the crawlspace.”

“Jack?” Greene asked.

“Dr. Jack Hodgins,” Booth explained. “Member of Dr. Brennan’s team at the Jeffersonian…. A squint.”

Booth’s favorite condescending jargon for scientific consultants like Brennan.

“Ah,” Greene said with a nod, obviously familiar with the term.

Booth had the ability, perhaps unintentional, to bring out the little girl in Brennan, almost never in a good way: right now she wanted to kick him in the shins. Or higher.

Booth caught her glowering at him and said, all innocence, “What?”

Ignoring this typical insensitivity, Brennan said, “According to Jack, our first skeleton was buried in sandy soil.”

Booth’s eyes narrowed. “That’s good to know, but this place surely doesn’t have sandy soil….”

“No it doesn’t,” she said.

Greene asked, “Are you sure about that, Doc?”

“Judging by what I was crawling around on, in that crawlspace? That dirt is clay.”

Booth looked uneasy again. “What are you saying?”

“That our friend Mr. Jorgensen may indeed have constructed the skeletons… but if he did, they were not put together from bodies buried under this house.”

Greene said, “Come on, Doc — I just know we’re gonna find a shitload of skels under this place!”

Even Booth seemed jarred by the inelegance of the lieutenant’s phrasing, but it was Brennan who said, coolly, “Be that as it may — it’s highly doubtful our made-to-order ‘skels,’ as you put it, were composed of bones found under that crawlspace.”

Booth was trying hard to salvage Jorgensen as their man. “But he could have another burial plot, right?”

“Sure,” she agreed. “If he was striking at transients, and gay ones at that… the kind of people who, unfortunately, are able to fall off the planet without anyone much noticing, well… he could have been extremely ambitious, over all these years. And needed, and used, various sites.”

Booth nodded crisply, then turned to Greene, asking, “What about Jorgensen’s former residence?”

“We get the evidence here we’re probably gonna get,” Greene mused, “we could go back there and dig some more — but back in the day?”

By this Greene apparently meant during the first investigation of Jorgensen — the unsuccessful one that had led to a court order against the detective.

“Back then,” Greene was saying, “we didn’t find a goddamn thing.”

Booth said, “Which means he may have had an off-site burial ground, and—”

Brennan interrupted, uncomfortable with how fast the FBI agent was moving. “Booth, he could have buried his victims in sandy soil anywhere within, I don’t know, a hundred miles. It’s useless to speculate. We’ll work what we have here, and go from there.”

Booth seemed about to retort, but thought better of it, putting a lid on; his eyes told her he knew she was right.

A tech arrived and conducted a sweep of the crawlspace with GPR, leaving behind yellow markers to indicate the probable location of bodies.

Dr. Wu and her tools arrived half an hour later.

She and Brennan donned coveralls, white paper masks covering both mouths and noses, and latex gloves; then they carted the tools into the laundry room and prepared to go down into the crawlspace.

The laundry room looked different now — extension cords running everywhere, a motor humming from a fan she could not see but knew must already be down in the crawlspace. Light leached up through the open hatch, a sign that Lieutenant Garland had complied with her requests.

He appeared in the doorway to the garage. “Everything all right?”

Brennan raised a finger in a just-a-moment manner.

Then she lay on the floor so she could drop her head through the hole and look around in the crawlspace.

Halogen work lights were placed at intervals along the perimeter, all pointed in one direction, so they looked like they were chasing each other.

Nice, Brennan thought.

By not having them pointed into the middle of the crawlspace, Garland had illuminated the area without forcing Brennan and Wu to stare directly into a lamp every time they turned toward the wall.

Two fans spun at a low setting, moving the air around, but not enough to create mini-duststorms, when the anthropologists began digging.

Withdrawing her head from the hole, she grinned at Garland and gave him a thumbs-up. “Perfect, Lieutenant.”

He raised a hand to his brow in a small salute. “We aim to please, Doctor. Good hunting. But it may cost you….”

“Oh?”

“I have your novel in the car. I want to talk you out of a signature.”

Before she could respond, he disappeared.

After dropping through the hole, Brennan took the tools from Dr. Wu before the other anthropologist joined her on the dirt floor.

On their hands and knees, Brennan led Dr. Wu to the exposed portion of hand she had found before. The Field Museum rep had brought a digital camera and a camcorder, so that every step of the way, they could document what they found.

“You want me to start here?” Dr. Wu asked, through her mask.

“Yes. I’ll start at one of the other markers.”

But before she did, Brennan paused to watch her colleague.

Dr. Wu snapped a photo, then worked from the small portion of exposed hand, slowly unearthing the rest of the body.

Though they had worked together in the lab, Brennan wanted to see how her counterpart handled herself in the field; and she found Dr. Wu to be as careful and tenacious as herself.

For her part, Brennan started against the opposite wall, slowly working her way down with a small garden trowel.

This was not work for the impatient.

People thought anthropologists and archeologists just stuck a shovel in the dirt, dug around something, popping it out of the earth, dusting it off, then, presto, displaying it in the nearest museum.

That was hardly an accurate portrayal, and when you were digging up a body that had been buried with the idea of keeping it from being discovered by the authorities, the stakes were much higher.

Many of Brennan’s peers listened to classical music, or mastered some breathing method, to keep themselves calm while they plied their trade. Brennan simply concentrated on not missing anything and doing the job with the thoroughness it deserved.

If there were bodies down here, those people might have families who loved and missed them, and had been tortured for months or years or even decades, never knowing what happened to someone precious to them.

Brennan could give those families closure, providing remains for society’s rituals of burial and mourning; but more than that, she could help catch the killer who had taken a loved one away.

All she had to do was concentrate, be thorough, and not miss any clues.

Brennan wasn’t probing long before she felt the edge of the trowel touch something that was definitely not dirt.

Now she slowed even more, her trowel moving inches at a time. She moved the dirt out of the hole and looked down to see a bare patch of white skin…

… the front of a shin, tiny strands of brown hair barely visible in the dirt.

Jorgensen was apparently still in the serial killer business, despite his age, judging from the remains they had found so far.

Neither of these bodies was far along into decomposition. Brennan was amazed and appalled that a man of seventy — granted, one in phenomenal physical condition — had killed and buried at least two more victims.

Of course, this “old man” had not so long ago nearly dispatched a Chicago cop, an FBI agent, and herself as well. Feisty, an adjective she usually associated with active seniors, did not begin to cover William Jorgensen. The only concession he seemed to have made to his declining years was in the mode of his burials: the victims were surprisingly close to the surface.

As she uncovered more of the body, she soon found out why.

The body had been doused with lime.

Brennan knew that many killers who tried to dispose of bodies by burial believed that lime sped up the process of decomposition. She did not know the origin of that particular urban legend, but she knew the exact opposite was true.

Not only did lime not promote decomposition, at shallower depths, like these, lime actually impeded it.

At the end of eight hours, with midnight drawing near, the two anthropologists had exhumed the two bodies they’d been working on, and found signs of three more.

They took a break until daylight, then came back and started again.

And by the end of the day, they had reclaimed the other three bodies, found a sixth, and excavated that as well. Another sweep of ground-penetrating radar confirmed that they had gotten everything.

None of the bodies was reduced to bone, none had been in the ground for more than a couple of years, and although some decomposition was present, these victims all went straight to the coroner for autopsy.

Several things had become clear to Brennan when, for the last time, she left the crawlspace.

William Jorgensen was a serial killer who had been at it for quite some time, six bodies within the last two or three years for sure. Of this there was no doubt.

She and Dr. Wu had excavated all the bodies that were in the crawlspace and yet something did not jibe with this case, in terms of Jorgensen being part of the assembled skeletons that had led them here.

None of the bodies in Jorgensen’s house was as old as the bones that had turned up at the FBI and the Biograph.

Where were the other bodies?

Plus she had a sense that she was missing something, something obvious, and this feeling nagged at her like an aching tooth.

These victims of Jorgensen’s may have wound up in shallow graves, but the answer to the mystery of the two reconstructed skeletons remained buried deep.

In the yard with Booth and Greene, Brennan watched the loading of the last of the bodies into the coroner’s van.

As the vehicle drew away, Dr. Wu approached. She had removed her coveralls and stood before them in faded jeans and a vintage Rolling Stones tee shirt, looking more groupie than scientist.

“I’m outa here, people,” Dr. Wu said. “It’s been… unique.”

Brennan gave the woman a brisk handshake. “Thank you for all your help.”

“Thanks for the opportunity to dig in next to you. An honor and a privilege.”

Brennan grinned. “Back at ya.”

Booth and Greene each shook hands with the doctor, and as she walked away, Greene gave them a wave and followed after her, both casting long shadows in the setting sun.

Soon Brennan and Booth were alone in the yard. The crime scene unit would be going back down into the crawlspace, but Brennan and Booth were done for the day.

She felt both tired and restless. As usual after a hard dig, she craved some alone time. Though she liked Booth, and if pressed would admit to enjoying the man’s company, the last thing she wanted to do now was spend an hour in a car with him commuting back to the hotel.

She looked up at him. “Booth, I need a favor.”

In the gathering darkness, Booth gazed at her. “Anything.”

“Call for a ride, and let me borrow your car.”

“Well… no.”

She glared at him. “Not ten seconds ago, you said, ‘anything.’ ”

“That’s why I didn’t say ‘hell no.’ ”

“Give me one good reason, why ‘hell no.’ ”

“For one thing,” he said casually, “you don’t know your way around this city.”

“How would you know whether I do or not?”

“Oh, well, for starters, in the car? Going from the airport to the Biograph? You didn’t know squat about Old Town.”

“Fine,” she said. “I’ll call a cab.” She turned to stomp off, but he moved and blocked her path.

“Bones! I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.”

“Look, Booth,” she said, her voice icy. “I’m an adult, I have an above-average IQ, and I’m literate enough to read signs and a map. By myself, I found my way to mass graves in Guatemala, Bosnia, and half a dozen other countries around the globe. I don’t need you to take me anywhere.”

Booth backed away. “Whoa… why so testy all of a sudden?”

She flushed. “Sorry. End of a long day.”

“Right. So I’ll drop you at your hotel.”

He started toward the car, and she moved with him.

Trying not to sound whiny, she said, “I don’t want to go anywhere. What I want is some time alone.”

He stopped and she stopped and he studied her for a long time without saying anything.

Finally, he reached into his pocket and got out his cell phone. He dialed a number, his eyes never leaving her face. He wasn’t just looking at her — he was looking… deeper than that.

In fact, his stare was so intense, it made her uncomfortable.

“Woolfolk,” he said, “I’m at the Jorgensen house — I need a ride. Come get me.”

A pause and squawk from the cell.

Booth frowned. “Just come and get me, all right? That’s what partners are for.”

Another pause, then Booth clicked off and dropped the cell phone into his pocket. From the other pocket, he withdrew the car keys and handed them to her. “The map’s in the glove box.”

The keys felt warm in her hand.

“Thank you,” she said. “I guess I owe you one.”

He nodded. “At least one…. Get out of here.”

She turned to leave, feeling a little guilty leaving him standing there alone, but knowing that she needed to be by herself right now.

Booth’s voice came from behind her. “Pick me up in the morning.”

Smiling, she turned and said, “Is that an order?”

He grinned. “Damn straight. I’ll be in the lobby at seven a.m. Don’t be late.”

“Don’t you be.”

The car started easily and she pulled away from the house, watching Booth watching her leave.

Had his words to Woolfolk — That’s what partners are for — really been meant for her?

Whatever the case, it felt good to be driving, to be in control, to be alone and to be free.

She drove aimlessly at first, sticking to the surface streets, avoiding the expressway. She rolled down the window, the cool autumn air blowing her hair as she cruised along the long stretches of road.

Out here in the far suburbs, city and country mixed and mingled. She could travel long stretches seeing nothing but shadowy woods, and an occasional set of oncoming headlights.

Other times, the world was mile after mile of big retail stores, restaurants, gas stations, convenience stores, and strip malls filled with coffee shops and other small businesses.

She turned off her brain, let the cool air rush over her, and just drove, forgetting about the bodies, the defacement of the corpses, all of it. Letting go of the sadness that had crept in when she thought of the families these bony reminders of humanity represented.

Then, slowly, her mind turned to other things.

She thought about her friends back in DC, and then various thoughts about Booth traveled through her mind, in particular the case he had been working on here in Chicago, before she arrived… searching for the missing informant Stewart Musetti….

And then she had an idea.