Bones: Buried Deep

by Max Allan Collins

  Now, as Woolfolk eased the Crown Victoria up to the guard shack, the pretense was gone.

  Two men approached the stopped car, each wearing the typical gray suit and dark glasses of special agents.

  The one from the shack on the passenger side came up to Booth’s window, pistol drawn, his arm hanging down so the pistol was almost hidden behind his leg.

  The agent on the driver’s side approached holding an MP5 at port arms and leaned down to address Woolfolk, who already had his ID out.

  To Booth, all this was the Bureau equivalent of closing the barn door long after the horse was gone. Hell, the horse, four riders, the saddle, their case, his career….

  Booth powered down his window to show his ID to the tall blond agent who took off his dark glasses to reveal light blue eyes as he studied the ID nearly identical to his own. Booth had seen the man in the Chicago office but had no idea what his name was.

  The agent gave Booth a polite nod and put his glasses back on.

  “What the hell happened?” Booth asked him.

  The agent looked at him, said nothing, then offered up an almost imperceptible shrug.

  On the other side of the car, the other guard waved Woolfolk through.

  Woolfolk followed the blacktop another quarter mile, turned right onto a side street, and parked in front of the third house on the right.

  Two police cars were parked on the street along with two more Crown Vics and a Chicago PD evidence tech van angled into the driveway of a sprawling white two-story clapboard house with black shutters on half a dozen windows.

  Getting out, Booth noticed that other than the police cars, which had brought out a few gawkers, the neighborhood looked much as it had the day he had scouted the house — just like every other block in this tiny town hunkered next to the lake… quiet, unassuming, anonymous.

  The Gianellis had a long reach, but the only way they could have found this place was from someone inside the Bureau — a prospect that added nausea to the rage boiling in Booth’s belly.

  Seeley Booth had two priorities now — find Stewart Musetti; and find the sellout in the Bureau who had leaked the location of the safe house.

  “Who’s in charge?” Booth asked as Woolfolk caught up with him on the sidewalk.

  Both men were sticking their IDs in their breast pockets to identify themselves.

  “Dillon,” Woolfolk said. “He’s probably inside.”

  Robert Dillon — always Robert, never Bob, which led to bad jokes about the singer — was Special Agent in Charge of the Chicago office; a hard-ass, but always fair. Booth respected him.

  Booth and Woolfolk walked up to the front door. As they approached, two Chicago evidence techs exited carrying their cases.

  One was a tall African-American guy — BELL, according to his name tag. The other was a red-haired woman nearly as tall and thin as her partner; her name tag read: SMITH.

  “Anything?” Booth asked.

  The woman gave them a glum smile. “Not much.”

  Bell shook his head. “Place is cleaner than my apartment.”

  The evidence techs continued on to their van while Booth and Dillon opened the front door.

  The living room was empty but for the rent-to-own-style furnishings. A couch sat against one wall, two chairs at angles next to it, a television perched on a stand underneath a huge window.

  Booth put his hand against the TV screen — cool.

  The two agents passed through into a dining room. Four chairs surrounded a rectangular oak table, place mats on the table, sun streaming through thin curtains from three windows. The room seemed as if it was just waiting for someone to set out lunch.

  In the kitchen, they found an agent Booth knew from the academy, a wide-shouldered, ruddy-faced guy named Mike Stanton.

  Counters running down the two sides, refrigerator on the right, stove and microwave on the left, the spacious kitchen had an island in the middle and a breakfast nook in the back right corner.

  The breakfast dishes were still on the table, the attack probably coming mid-meal. Nothing seemed amiss, meaning the agents hadn’t even had the chance to draw their weapons.

  “Booth,” Stanton said by way of greeting.

  “Hey. Where’s Dillon?”

  “Out back with the locals. Trying to figure out if they could have gone out that way.”

  Through the back door, Booth went down the few stairs into the yard, Woolfolk on his heels.

  Dillon was out there, all right — a square-shouldered, square-jawed man of fifty, his dark hair swept straight back, his dark eyes cold as they scanned the area. His sharp nose gave him the appearance of an eagle.

  Two uniformed officers and two local detectives fanned out around Dillon, wearing that horrible frustrating expression that meant they not only were unable to find what they were searching for, they didn’t know what they were searching for.

  Booth approached the group and Dillon raised his chin in greeting.

  “What went down here?” Booth asked.

  Dillon shrugged. “They came in through the main gate, grabbed the guard, then your guess is as good as mine…. The bad guys probably used the agent playing guard as a hostage, to bargain for Musetti. But we don’t even know that for sure.”

  “Jesus,” Booth muttered.

  “All we know for sure is Musetti and our boys are simply not here… and no sign of a struggle. No neighbors saw or heard anything. Even the car is gone. The detectives are going to canvass the neighbors down toward the lake, to see if they could have gotten out that way. May be our intruders had a boat waiting.”

  “In broad daylight, on a hot summer day with people on the beach?” Booth asked. “Doubtful.”

  “Agreed,” Dillon said. “But no stone gets left unturned on this one. I want you in charge, Seeley.”

  “We’re in agreement already. But what about the Gianelli case?”

  Dillon’s features hardened. “Without Musetti, there is no Gianelli case.”

  “No argument there, either.”

  “Good. Make it happen, Booth — find Musetti. Find our four agents.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Dillon gestured. “Woolfolk will work with you. Find Musetti and save our collective ass.”

  Booth knew a dismissal when he heard it. He turned, but before he could take a step, Dillon’s voice halted him.

  “We’ll get what little we have on your desk by the end of the day. In the meantime, start beating the bushes…. See if anybody on the street knows anything.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  At midnight, Booth was still at his desk, everyone else having cleared out, when a call from the night guard brought him to the lobby, where he found four FBI agents waiting…

  …the four FBI agents who had been babysitting Musetti.

  One still wore the security uniform from the guard shack.

  He said when he went up to a car, men with automatic weapons came out of the woods and took him prisoner. Then, as Dillon had suspected, the attackers had gone to the house and used him to get inside and snatch Musetti.

  “They had us blindfolded,” the agent told Booth. “Wrists and ankles duct-taped — took us in a truck of some kind, and drove us around in circles till we were so goddamn disoriented, I don’t think any of us has any idea where we were….”

  Booth took them upstairs and questioned them at length, but little else was learned.

  None of the agents could tell Booth where they had been, and Musetti had been transported in a separate vehicle… and they all assumed their witness was already dead.

  No argument there, either.

  * * *

  However hopeless it might look, for the next forty-two days, Seeley Booth sought Stewart Musetti like the hitman was the holy grail.

  The FBI agent worked sixty- to eighty-hour weeks, stopping only to eat and sleep.

  He interviewed Musetti’s girlfriend, his ex-wife, the Gianellis, every man, woman, or child with even the most tenuous connection t
o the Gianelli family… and learned nothing.

  What meager evidence had been collected from the safe house was tested and chased down, and each piece led to its own dead end.

  Six weeks and all he had to show for his search was a pile of files leading nowhere, bags under his eyes, and the feeling that Stewart Musetti was gone for good… and he strongly suspected the same was true of the government’s case against Raymond and Vincent Gianelli.

  Hot summer gave way to a warm autumn.

  The garbage strike finally got settled. The drought continued, but the humidity was down, which at least gave Chicago a more tolerable climate.

  One thing had not changed since that first awful day: Booth working until midnight.

  On night forty-three, he was about to pack it in when the phone rang and he picked it up. “Booth.”

  “Special Agent Booth, this is Barney.”

  “…Barney?”

  “You know — guard in the lobby?”

  “Oh yeah. Sorry, Barney, didn’t recognize your voice.”

  “You’re about the only one left in the building, sir. So I thought I better start with you. I’ve got something down here somebody needs to see. Probably you.”

  Booth was in no mood for practical jokes, whether Barney’s or some vandal’s. “What is it?”

  The guard took a long moment before answering. “It’s… well, it’s bones, sir. I guess you’d say — it’s a, you know… skeleton?”

  Hanging up the phone, Booth threw on his jacket and hustled to the elevator.

  Two minutes later he was in the lobby, where he found gray-haired, pot-bellied Barney staring out through the glass panes that made up the lobby.

  Just outside, on the sidewalk of Plymouth Square, Booth saw something too. He exited the building, Barney on his tail, and looked down at a fully articulated human skeleton.

  He scanned the area, thinking this might indeed be some elaborate pre-Halloween practical joke… but he saw no one.

  Booth had a sinking feeling that this was all that was left of his star witness.

  Under the mercury vapor lights illuminating Plymouth Square, the bones appeared very white, almost bleached. Squatting next to the skeleton, Booth saw something that struck him as odd, even in this already strange situation.

  Tiny wires holding the bones together.

  Someone had taken time to assemble the skeleton like one of those seen hanging in the science room back in Booth’s junior high days.

  Between the bones of the foot, not quite a toe tag, Booth saw a folded piece of paper.

  A note?

  His curiosity told him to pick it up; his training told him not to.

  He glanced one more time toward the toe-held note, then pulled his cell phone from his jacket.

  “What do you want me to do?” Barney asked from behind him.

  “Call 911 and tell ’em what we’ve got. I’ll watch the body until you get back.”

  “Yeah, I, uh… guess he ain’t goin’ anywhere.”

  “I guess not, Barney. But you are.”

  The guard nodded and hustled off.

  Booth punched in Woolfolk’s number, and when the sleepy agent picked up the phone, Booth outlined the situation.

  “Is it Musetti?” Woolfolk asked.

  “It’s just a frickin’ skeleton,” Booth growled. “How the hell would I know?”

  “Okay, okay…. What do you want me to do?”

  “Get your ass down here. I want to see the security video from this building, the surrounding buildings, and any traffic light cameras in a six-block radius. Somebody left us a hell of a present, and I want to know where to send the thank-you card.”

  They clicked off and Booth went back to staring at the pile of bones in front of him.

  Musetti?

  Maybe. But like he had told Woolfolk, how the hell would he know?

  The good news was, he knew someone who would know, someone who could tell him exactly whose skeleton had been dumped in Plymouth Square tonight.

  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.”