Woolfolk’s tired eyes had woken up. “How in the hell do you know that?”
Booth shrugged. “Kind of an architecture buff. Wanted to be one when I was a kid.”
“Somehow I didn’t see you as an architect.”
“Yeah, and that’s how it worked out; but it’s a great field — all about turning something in your head into something real, something that can shelter people… a building, a home.”
Woolfolk pondered that, then said, “Maybe it’s not that different from what we do.”
Booth had never made a connection and said so.
Woolfolk explained. “We look at evidence and keep arranging the pieces until they suggest a picture; and we work our asses off taking this abstract idea we have, and turning it into something concrete enough to catch a bad guy… and put him away.”
Booth chuckled. “Josh, you have depths I never dreamed of.”
Woolfolk summoned a rumpled grin. “Same back at you. So what picture are you assembling in your mind, Seeley, from this grainy video?”
Booth gestured toward the frozen image on the screen. “Suspect disappears… either inside the Rookery, which should have been locked up at that time of night… or down an alley or manhole or… something.”
“Next step?”
“Find me more videotape from that area, the Rookery’s security video, and interview their night guard.”
Woolfolk was already on his feet. “And what will you be up to?”
“I’ve got to check in with our science squints at the museum, and see if they’ve come up with anything on the skeleton…. When I get back, we’ll start finding anything we can about missing men and serial killers in the area, particularly the variety that challenges the authorities to catch them.”
“Roger that,” Woolfolk said.
“Remember, sooner we catch this guy, sooner we’re back on Musetti.”
With a quick nod, Woolfolk slipped out.
When Booth arrived at the Field Museum, he had to wait for an employee to escort him through all the locked doors until he once more found himself in the basement with Dr. Wu and Brennan.
If the anthropologists hadn’t changed their clothes, Booth might have thought they’d been down here all night.
Brennan looked crisp and fresh in black slacks and a gray blouse. Dr. Wu wore gray slacks and a blue sleeveless turtleneck and appeared equally alert.
Booth gave the doctor a big smile, which she returned.
“Good morning, Dr. Wu — Bones. What do we know?”
Brennan raised both eyebrows and her smile wasn’t exactly a smile. “We know for starters that calling me ‘Bones’ gets the day off to a bad start.”
“Sorry,” Booth said halfheartedly.
Dr. Wu folded her arms. “Sherlock Bones would be more like it — with all the detective work she’s been doing since you saw her last.”
Booth grinned and Brennan’s smile morphed into a real one.
Back to business, Booth asked, “So, what can you tell me about our skeletal door prize?”
Dr. Wu glanced at Brennan, who led them closer to the worktable.
The skeleton had been cut apart, its puppet strings snipped and all the connecting wires in a pile on the next table over; on this surface, the bones were laid out in the form of the body.
“Why cut the wires?” Booth asked, his instinct being that evidence should be preserved.
“All strung up like a Christmas turkey,” Brennan said, “it was hard to examine.”
She gestured to the pile nearby.
“We saved the wires and were careful to wear gloves while we handled them,” she said. “My guess is they’re clean of prints, but you should send them to your lab, of course. Maybe they’ll get lucky.”
“Done,” Booth said.
Brennan’s eyebrows raised again. “As for the remains themselves? You knew already that the femora told us there were at least two different bodies.”
“Yeah. Playing at being one.”
“Right,” Dr. Wu said. “And now we’re pretty sure you can double your total.”
“Four sources?” Booth asked, goggling at the display of bones. “We have potentially four victims here?”
Brennan raised a cautionary palm. “We won’t know for sure until we get the results of more tests….”
Dr. Wu completed the thought: “But the preliminary evidence has us leaning that way.”
The two women exchanged glances and nods.
Surprised, Booth said, “Bones, you don’t ‘lean.’ You’re all about empirical evidence. If you can’t prove it, you don’t believe it.”
Brennan said, “I knew you would want as much as we could give you… so I’m pushing the envelope a little.”
He just stared at her.
She gestured toward the skeletal remains. “Here — look at the vertebrae.”
Booth leaned in. “The spine?”
“Most of it,” Brennan said. “The top seven are the cervical vertebrae, next twelve are the thoracic vertebrae, and then there are five lumbar vertebrae above the sacrum and coccyx.”
“Okay,” Booth said, not knowing where she was going with this anatomy lesson.
“For the time being, ignore the lumbar vertebrae on down.”
No problem, he thought. He had been ignoring most of this stuff since college. Including college….
“The seven cervical vertebrae,” Brennan was saying, “are all from the same body.”
“At least we think they are,” Dr. Wu put in.
“Yes,” Brennan said, and her head tilted to one side and the palm came up again. “Pending further tests.… But they fit together as if they belong together — you understand?”
He shrugged.
“The wear patterns are consistent within those seven bones. They fit together as if they’ve been working together for a long time.”
Booth considered that. “Like a nut and bolt that have been together for years?”
Dr. Wu said, “Exactly. You put on a new nut and it doesn’t tighten down exactly the same… but if you put the old one back on, voilà, fits perfectly.”
He nodded and the Field expert smiled at him again.
They really seemed to be hitting it off. Was she flirting with him? Guys were supposed to know when women were flirting, but Booth could never really sort through the signals.
Tessa, a lawyer he had been seeing, practically threw herself at him before he figured it out. Coming out of his little reverie, he noticed Brennan smirking at him.
“What?” he asked defensively.
“Nothing,” she said, in that tone that always meant “nothing” was something. “Are you listening?”
“Of course I’m listening!”
Brennan returned her attention to the skeleton, pointing as she spoke. “What is true of the cervical vertebrae is true of the twelve thoracic vertebrae as well. They fit together like they belong… and again, the wear patterns seem consistent with them coming from the same body.”
“Hold on,” Booth said. “The cervicals and thoracics came from the same body?”
Brennan said, “Yes and no. The cervical vertebrae are all from one body; and the thoracic vertebrae are from one body — they just happen to be two different bodies.”
“Does your head hurt? My head hurts.”
“I feel fine,” Brennan said.
A concerned Dr. Wu asked Booth, “Would you like some aspirin?”
Booth waved that off, bobbing his head toward the skeletal “corpse” and saying, “Cervical from one, thoracic from the other. And neither of them are from the other two?”
Brennan nodded. “Wear on the thoracic vertebrae shows that the person they belong to had something wrong with one of his legs — causing the vertebrae to wear unevenly and in a way that is not normal.”