He checked his watch — east coast was an hour later, nearly two a.m. out there.
She was going to be pissed, but Booth couldn’t afford to care right now — he needed help. Her kind of help.
He punched in the number and hit the green button.
2
Temperance Brennan was annoyed.
And with Special Agent Seeley Booth at the root of her annoyance, this could hardly be described as a new feeling.
Back on her table at the Jeffersonian Institute, an eight-hundred-year-old Native American, with an arrowhead imbedded in his body, awaited her attention. And that was where she, and her attention, would prefer to be… and where she had been, in fact, burning the midnight oil until Dr. Goodman had called and told her that Booth had requested her services.
She had barely had time to rush home, pack a bag, and get to the airport before the plane took off. She would rather be back in the lab with her new eight-hundred-year-old friend right now, who would be demanding in his way, certainly… but not nearly so much as the FBI’s Seeley Booth.
Instead, here she stood, gripping her forceps, its jaws open, inches above a generic Chicago hotel room bedspread.
When had the call come? Two a.m. or so — then the early morning flight, and now, not even noon local time, and she was checked into a downtown hotel… not having slept in over twenty-four hours.
So not surprisingly, her hand trembled with exhaustion as she closed the jaws of the forceps around the material of the bedspread.
Not even in the room ten minutes, she couldn’t wait to get the spread off. She lifted and pulled, the bedspread coming with her, and without touching it with her free hand, she deposited the loathsome thing onto the floor in a corner of the room.
Her behavior might have seemed eccentric for a scientist like herself; but in reality, she was thinking exactly like a scientist, albeit a slightly paranoid one.
An all-too-credible urban myth among cops and forensic scientists was that the DNA expert who tested the Indianapolis hotel bedspread in the Mike Tyson rape trial had found over one hundred DNA deposits, none of them Tyson’s, on the spread from that seven-hundred-fifty-dollar-a-night hotel room.
Brennan was not the only expert in the forensic field to avoid hotel bedspreads ever since.
Resting the forceps on the nightstand, Brennan flopped, fully clothed, onto the blanket, her head pressing into the kiss of the soft pillow. She tried to relax and shut off her brain — no small feat, especially today.
She heard something in the distance, some sort of tapping, but she could not put her finger on exactly what it was.
After a brief lull, she heard it again.
The third time she heard the sound, she realized someone was knocking at the door. She had fallen asleep after all; but whether for ten seconds or ten hours, she had no clue.
She flicked a glance at the red LED numbers of the clock: 5:17 p.m. Over four hours had disappeared.
Again, someone knocked on the door and she managed to rise, cringe at her hair in the dresser mirror, then wobble to the door and look through the peephole.
As if she needed to have bothered.
Opening the door, she glared at Special Agent Seeley Booth. His face was serious, possibly with worry; then when he focused on her, he gave her a lopsided grin.
“Hey, Bones,” he said. “Thanks for coming.”
“Haven’t I asked you to stop calling me that?”
“Well… that’s the first time today.”
This exchange did not quell her urge to deliver her visitor a full frontal kick.
Booth brushed past her into the room.
“So you’re just barging into my room now?”
“I didn’t barge,” Booth said, turning back to her. “Anyway, you were about to invite me, weren’t you, Bones?”
“I still haven’t decided. And will you please stop calling me that — you know I hate it.”
“Most females would consider that a compliment.”
“Would they?”
He wheeled and patted the air with his palms, put on the lopsided grin again, though his voice was serious.
“Look,” he said, “this is an emergency, Bo… Dr. Brennan. I really need help. I’ve been knocking on your door every hour on the hour — got to where I thought maybe you’d lapsed into a coma.”
She suddenly realized the “short lulls” between knocks had been a lot longer than she had perceived them.
“It’s called sleeping, Booth. You called me in the middle of the night. I needed rest. Don’t you sleep?”
“That’s what the plane ride was supposed to be for…. Listen, I’m sorry I didn’t call you directly about this, but you know all about channels. And I wouldn’t pull you out of bed if it wasn’t for something important…”
They both knew that had sounded a little wrong, and she glanced away while Booth skipped a beat, then went on.
“Look, you haven’t had to put up with me for several months, because…”
“I don’t need a reason for that. I’m perfectly content to go with the flow, on that one.”
“…I’m on an important case, maybe the biggest mob investigation since Gotti. We have a key witness missing, and now somebody dumped a skeleton on our doorstep last night — literally. I need to know all you can tell me about these particular bones.”
“A human skeleton?” she asked.
“No,” he said in sarcastic frustration, “it’s a frog.”
They both knew it was supposed to be a joke and they finally exchanged smiles — granted, small, nervous ones — after which they stood in silence while Booth searched for words.
She knew the feeling — Angela Montenegro, her best friend at the Jeffersonian, would have the perfect comeback here, but Brennan could not think of anything to say.
When in doubt, stick to business.
Brennan asked, “Where is this skeleton?”
“The Everett M. Dirksen Federal Building.”
Brennan arched an eyebrow. “You weren’t kidding about your doorstep. That’s downtown, right?”
“Right. Where the FBI office is.”
“It’s almost as if somebody’s trying to make this a federal matter.”
He grunted something that was almost a laugh. “Isn’t it, though? Somebody’s thumbing their nose at us.”
“Then I better take a look at the… well, it’s kind of a crime scene, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Booth said dryly. “For littering…”
“Then the first thing we’ll do is our bit to keep Chicago’s sidewalks beautiful — and move that skeleton.”
She grabbed her bag.
Booth was giving her that thoughtful wince of his, the one he got when he was a step behind her mentally; he got it a lot, she’d noticed.
“Move it?” he asked.
She led him out of the room and down the hall toward the elevator, saying, “Unless you FBI boys and girls have got a worktable handy in that federal building, with all the right tools, computer enhancements, and—”
“I get it,” Booth interrupted. “You want your lab.”
“Well,” she said, turning to him with her best withering smile, “seems to me it would’ve been cheaper, and more efficient, to fly the skeleton to me, than to fly me to it… which, if you’d bothered to talk to me personally last night, I could have told you.”
Booth punched the DOWN button with a little more force than he probably needed to. “Look, sue me — I wanted you here.”
“And here I am.”
“Bones, the case is here — the answers are here.”
“But the lab is in Washington.”