Deputy Bobby led the way, single file, Booth behind Brennan to catch her if need be. The path was well worn and mostly flat, leaves falling in heavy clumps in some places, making exposed roots even harder to see despite Bobby trying to point them out with the beam of the flashlight.
Trailing behind, feeling sweat starting to soak the underarms and back of his shirt, Booth was beginning to wonder how Bobby had made it to the parking lot in such a short time after the radio call.
Then the woods parted and Bobby stepped left, and Brennan right, and Booth found himself damn near face-to-face with the eyeless sockets of a skull, the rest of the skeleton hanging down as if the fleshless man stood before him.
The arms of the skeleton had been draped over and secured to the wrought-iron gate of the Guild Cemetery. Like the first skeleton, this one had been wired together in the manner of those seen in medical school classrooms.
Booth stepped to one side and got his bearings.
Small, at least by modern standards, the cemetery was home to one hundred or so souls buried between 1854 and 1899. The wrought-iron fence that surrounded the space seemed in good repair, but the gate was padlocked and Booth knew that this final resting place received few visitors these days.
At least until tonight.
Now, besides Bobby, two more uniformed sheriff’s department officers, as well as Special Agent in Charge Dillon and SA Woolfolk had come to pay their respects, before Booth and Brennan even arrived.
Inside the fence, Booth saw a flashlight beam, moving slowly between the graves.
“Crime scene unit on the way?” Booth asked Bobby.
The deputy turned to the older of the two uniformed officers. “Sheriff, this FBI agent here wants to know if the—”
“My hearing’s fine, Bobby,” the sheriff said, stepping forward and meeting Booth’s eyes. “And yes, crime scene analysts are coming — I requested Chicago PD and got it. I’m Sheriff Greg Trucks, by the way.”
The sheriff — a beefy, craggy, dark-haired guy in his fifties — extended a hand.
Booth shook it, introducing himself and Brennan.
“Glad to have you, Doctor,” Trucks said to Brennan, shaking her hand as well. “We haven’t had a murder in seven or eight months… and we never had anything like this.”
“Where are you,” Brennan asked, “with checking the graves themselves?”
Trucks pointed toward the nearby cemetery. “That’s Mary Newman in there — she’s from the local library association. They’ve taken on the history of the cemetery as a pet project, so I called her in. She’ll know if anything’s been disturbed.”
While they waited for Ms. Newman to finish her survey, Booth watched Brennan studying the skeleton in the moonlight.
After a short time, she turned to the deputy.
“Bobby? May I borrow your flashlight?”
Bobby glanced at his boss; the sheriff nodded.
The young deputy handed over the light and Brennan ran the beam slowly up and down the limbs of the skeleton.
The other onlookers seemed as fascinated as Booth as they watched her work the beam over the skull, the ribs, then the spine, and, finally, the legs clear down to the feet…
… where there appeared to be another note bound to the toes.
Turning to the sheriff, she asked, “Have you photographed this site?”
Trucks nodded. “But I don’t think we should be touching any of it until the crime scene people get here.”
That, Booth knew, was the wrong thing to say to Brennan, drugged or not.
“Thank you for the advice, Sheriff,” she said, artificially polite. “My advice to you, had I had the opportunity to offer it earlier, would’ve been not to have all these people tromping around a crime scene. I didn’t plan on touching anything — I was merely requesting information.”
She’s baaaack, Booth thought, and almost smiled.
The sheriff, who looked like he’d been slapped, struggled for a response.
Before this could escalate into an argument, Booth’s local boss, Dillon, stepped in, but his words were addressed to neither the sheriff nor Brennan.
“Ms. Newman,” he said, “what did you find?”
Booth looked up to see a woman leaning on the fence near the gate. Tall, thin, with a sharp chin and a straight nose that propped up wire-frame glasses, white hair flying out from under a Cubs baseball cap, the chipper Ms. Newman wore a Cubs windbreaker and jeans.
Booth couldn’t see the woman’s eyes in the darkness, but she seemed to be smiling.
“Everything’s all right,” she announced with obvious relief, as if a skeleton wasn’t tethered to the fence barely two feet from her. “Not a single grave has been tampered with.”
“Mary, you’re sure?” Trucks asked.
“Gregory, why would you even ask?” She tried to respond with grace, but the irritation was evident. “You know this place has been my life for the last ten years.”
“Sorry, Mary,” Trucks said, suitably cowed. The beefy guy was not doing well with the “weaker” sex tonight.
Five minutes later the Chicago PD crime scene unit finally showed up and started working the scene. The parking lot had been disturbed by ten or so city, county, state, and federal cars since the perp had made his delivery, but a couple CSUs stayed behind to work the lot anyway.
This assumed, of course, that the perp had arrived by car and hiked in as they had. Airlifting was probably the only other way, and no one in their right mind would skydive with an extra skeleton lashed to his or her back.
Not that leaving reassembled skeletons around Chicago indicated a right mind….
Booth noticed Brennan shining the flashlight on the skeleton again.
“What’s up?” he asked.
Aiming the beam at the midsection of the skeleton, Brennan said, “Look at this. What do you see?”
Booth stepped closer. “Bones, I see bones.”
“Cute,” she said. “But don’t just take in the surface — look closer.”
He tried, but gave up. “I honestly don’t know what I’m supposed to be looking for…”
“Try here,” she said, pointing to where the clavicle met the sternum just above the ribs.
“Yeaaaaah,” he said, still not getting it.
“Do you see the dirt spots on the ribs?”
“That I do see. Why?”
“Where are they on the clavicle?”
She shined the light on the collarbone and he searched for any kind of smudge but saw nothing.
“There isn’t any dirt on the clavicle,” he said. “Okay. What’s that mean?”
“This bone… this particular bone… has never been buried… and judging from the color? It was defleshed artificially.”
He repeated, not quite sure it was English: “Artificially defleshed…?”
“Yes. Sometimes, in the lab, if we have a partial body and we want to study just the bones, we will deflesh the bone by soaking the remains in enzyme-activated detergent and water.”
“And I thought my job had its gross moments,” Booth said.
“It’s just science, Booth. What if defleshing bones meant the difference between finding a murderer and not?”
“As long as the bones getting defleshed isn’t you, Bones? I’d say deflesh away… but it’s still gross.”
Booth turned to find that their exchange had garnered an audience.
Upon being noticed, the others backed off a little. Booth looked past the crowd to see members of the crime scene unit trudging toward them, kits in hand.
He found himself instinctively shielding Brennan, who was in the process of using tweezers to put something in a tiny plastic bag, which she slipped into her pocket.