 Book Description
Tempe's work at the Jeffersonian Institute is put on hold when Special Agent Seeley Booth, stalled on a case deposing a Chicago mob family, calls her in to assist with a bizarre discovery: a plastic bag of skeletal remains -- and a chilling note -- left on the steps of a federal building. Tempe determines the bones are from different corpses, suggesting a serial killer's handiwork. A suspect is quickly taken into custody, but Tempe senses the case is far from closed. And as Booth's Mafia case heats up with violent twists and bloody discoveries, including ties to one of Chicago's most gruesome and notorious killers, Tempe must unravel the story of the bones, where the truth lies buried -- in order to stay alive.
Exclusive Excerpt:
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.
o 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 . . .”
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