Envying someone for having the self-assurance to strive for what she wanted, well, that irked Brennan — about herself. Envy seemed petty. Was petty, she knew.
That didn’t make the feeling go away.
She neither liked nor trusted such feelings. As a scientist, she preferred an intellectual path. “Feelings” were nothing more than emotion, a desire for something that the brain told you was probably counterproductive.
Just minutes ago, this frustration had seemed about to reach a blessed conclusion. She’d be on a flight back to DC with the remains, and Agent Seeley Booth would be half a continent away.
She’d sat in Booth’s Crown Vic, looking out the window, ignoring the man behind the wheel, relieved to see the WELCOME TO O’HARE AIRPORT sign as they started up the serpentine road that led to the terminal.
But then Booth’s cell phone chirped, and everything changed.
“What do you mean,” she said, trying not to sound as irritated (and frustrated) as she felt, “I’m not going on that flight?”
These were the first words she had spoken to him in quite a while.
Sitting behind the wheel at the curb, with the motor running, he appeared lost in thought, and his response had an absent quality: “Guess we’ll have to FedEx the skeleton.”
“What kind of silly red tape have you got us caught up in? Booth, I take stuff like that on planes with me all the time!”
As he turned to her now, she could see Booth’s troubled expression, the angles of his face highlighted by the setting sun.
“You won’t be able to convey that evidence,” he explained, “because you won’t be getting on that plane.”
“Why the hell not?”
He tasted his tongue; didn’t seem to care for the flavor. “Because we need you… I need you.”
“Be still, my beating heart,” she said. “Why do you need me?”
“Seems we just got ourselves another skeleton.”
“…Another…” She gaped at him. “You have to be—” But she didn’t complete that: he clearly wasn’t “kidding.”
He flipped the switch for the flashing lights and got the car in gear and the siren going.
Gunning the car and dodging around a taxi, he said, “Call just came in — skel number two, outside a theater in Old Town.”
“Old Town?”
They were speeding now, headed back toward the expressway. “On the North Side, border of Old Town and Wrigleyville, two sections of the city.”
“You seem to know your way around Chicago pretty well….”
He zoomed past a truck, jumped two lanes left. “Feels like I’ve been here forever, on this mob case. But I spent some time in the Windy City when I was a kid, yeah.”
Oddly, a part of her didn’t mind staying, while a more sensible portion of her mind was frustrated that her evidence would head home without her.
Finally she asked, “This… new skeleton?”
“Yeah?”
“Wired together, like the last one?”
“Don’t know — my guy Woolfolk didn’t say — you know as much as I do.”
They rode in silence for a time, cars barely getting out of their way or forcing Booth to swerve around them.
Brennan worked at remaining calm, and on the outside it took; but inside, despite having dug up mass graves during wars in Bosnia, Guatemala, and half a dozen other hellholes, she felt something approaching apprehension.
They were hurtling through traffic to get to a skeleton, a dead person, someone who could not get up and walk away… and yet Booth was racing there like they could arrive and perform CPR on the patient.
“Why?” he asked, with a sideways glance.
The word, after all that silence, seemed a non sequitur.
She squinted at him. “Why what?”
“Why do you want to know if our new skeleton is wired?”
Glad to have something to think about besides imminent death in a car crash, Brennan pondered the question.
“Just — the timing,” she said at last.
“How’s the timing relate?”
“Well, it’s just now getting dark. What’s the neighborhood like around that theater?”
Booth considered. “Lots of shops, restaurants, bars, apartments above businesses.”
Brennan nodded. “No shortage of traffic — foot and car both.”
“Plenty.”
“Daylight, or near to it, lots of traffic… and your suspect managed to drop a skeleton right in front of a theater?”
“Not in front of the theater,” Booth clarified. “Actually in an alley next to the building… but I get your point. Reasonable to assume some passerby would notice a guy lugging around a skeleton, or even a big unwieldly package.”
Her eyes narrowed. “The remains are in an alley?”
“Yeah. A famous alley, at that.”
“How does an alley get ‘famous’?”
“John Dillinger gets shot in it.”
“The bank robber from the thirties,” she said, eyes narrowing further.
“July 22, 1934, to be exact — Melvin Purvis and a squad of FBI agents shot Dillinger dead in an alley outside the Biograph Theater.”
“The FBI — it doesn’t go back much further than that, does it?”
“No. It was just this fledgling agency called the Division of Investigation. Purvis taking Dillinger down was a big deal — a public relations coup for the bureau.”
“…Don’t you see, Booth?”
“See what?”
“You’re being taunted. This killer is thumbing his nose at the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
Booth frowned. “You could be right.”
“You mean, I am right.”
His eyes were on the traffic, and his response came so late, Brennan almost didn’t know what he meant.
“You are right,” he said.
Almost didn’t know what he meant….
The neighborhood turned out to be as Booth had indicated — considerable foot traffic going by the shops, bars, and of course the famous theater (sadly closed but with its marquee promising to “reopen soon” with performances by the Victory Gardens theater company).
At the moment, pedestrians were forced to cross to the other side of the street, police having put up crime scene tape to cordon off the area of the alley and around the theater.
As Booth double-parked, Brennan could see the passersby gawking at the scene — police and federal agents milling around the mouth of the alley, haphazardly parked cars both marked and unmarked, the coroner’s van closest to the alley.
Booth displayed his ID, sticking it into his breast pocket. The cops cleared a path and Brennan followed, ducking under the crime scene tape as they entered the dark alley.
Night had settled over the city and their path was illuminated by halogen work lights, two to a yellow tripod, the tripods set every ten feet or so along the alley, with a triangle of them pointed at something on the ground at the far end.
Three men in suits waited there as well, talking to each other, watching as she and Booth approached.
As they neared these men, Brennan could see that the closest one stood up straight, his square shoulders back, chest out, his expensive suit barely able to contain his alpha male attitude.
He was definitely the boss.
Booth said, “Special Agent in Charge Robert Dillon, this is the anthropologist I told you about — Dr. Temperance Brennan.”
Dillon extended his hand. “Glad to have you aboard, Dr. Brennan.”
As she shook his hand, she struggled to keep her face impassive. Welcome aboard? As if they were fellow passengers on a cruise ship? He had a firm grip, and dark eyes that struck her as avian and predatory.