Bones: The Perfect Pieces in the Purple Pond
September 26th 2008 05:04
Here it is Zack fans! The episode you’ve been waiting for!
Booth and Bones are called in to investigate exactly what the name of the episode implies, “perfect pieces in the purple pond”. Translation: a bunch of body parts floating in strangely purple water. No one knows how the water got purple.
Meanwhile, at the McKinley Psychiatric Hospital, Sweets is talking to Zack.
Zack: As I’ve told you many times Dr. Sweets, I do feel remorse.
Sweets: But not for stabbing a man in the heart.
Zack: No, for succumbing to the faulty logic that his death was desirable.
Sweets: You know a sane person would regret murdering someone more than being taken in by a line of crap.
Zack: Define “crap”.
Sweets: Drivel, blarney, nonsense, uh, balderdash, twaddle, bull, bunkum, hooey. Like that.
Zack: Now I see it as drivel blarney nonsense balderdash twaddle bull bunkum hooey, but then I perceived it as logic.
Sweets gets up, swipes his security card, and asks Zack how his hands are. He’s got almost %60 function ability back. That’s great, but he’s not getting out until they’ve cured him of his delusion.
Sweets is still swiping the card, but the door is not opening. Finally, he calls out, “My card isn’t working, hello?”
Zack tells him, “I’ was wrong, not delusional.” The guard opens the door and tells Sweets that his card must have expired (yeah, thanks for that), and he tells Zack, “Perhaps you should consider that your delusion is that you’re not delusional.”
~*~*~
Booth and Bones arrive at the warehouse where the body parts were found. 12 in all, no head.
FBI Guy: Interesting anomaly, no head.
Bones: No head? That’s odd.
FBI Guy: Which is why I said “anomaly”.
Booth: Hey, you don’t need to be snippy with my partner, pal.
Bones: Booth, it’s alright—what’s wrong with your back?
That’s right, Booth is walking like he pulled something. When Bones offers to help, he quickly tells her it’s nothing, he just hurt himself playing with Parker. Alright then, but she could probably help. He waves it off, and they make their way to the “purple pond”.
Booth: Kid said it turned purple when he peed in it.
Bones: For future reference, this is more of an anomaly than a missing head.
FBI Guy: Sad comment on your life, Doc.
Booth: Again, snippy. You know, if my back wasn’t bad I would hit you.
Bones: Booth! I can take care of myself.
Bones decides that the body is that of a male, she doesn’t know why the water is purple, she’ll leave that detail up to Hodgins. Booth is expecting she’ll need them to drain the whole thing, but she thinks a small sample would suffice. Wow, really? Booth’s happiness is cut short when Bones thinks about it a second and realizes that he’s right, the head might have sank to the body so, yeah drain it.
Booth: We’re draining it! Draining it…
~*~*~
In the lab, Angela comments that it looks like the ends of the victim’s fingertips were burned, and the newest grad student, Wendell Bray, points out that sometimes guys try to conceal their identity by losing their fingerprints. Angela gives him a ‘not bad’ look, and Bones informs them that Wendell is her brightest scholarship student. Nice.
Angela points to the shoes bagged in an evidence bag. “Okay, these are children’s shoes, but they’re size 11.”
Cam: So you think our victim was a giant toddler?
Bones: But that would show up on the Bones.
Cam: Sarcasm does not play well on the forensic platform.
Angela tracked down the manufacturer, they were special order. Bones notices that "all the cuts to the skeleton are clean except for several incomplete slices to the C-2 vertebra." Meaning the killer hesitated as they cut off the head. Makes since. What did they get from the X-rays? Wendell thinks the victim might have had Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. They should look at local orthopedic physicians.
Hodgins enters, explaining that the purple water was caused by "a bottom growing algae called Lemanea." He does the calculations and decides that it might have been agitated when Todd peed in the pool.
Now that that’s over, Cam turns to him. “So, Dr. Hodgins, have you moved yet?”
Hodgins blows a quick breath into his gloves. “Nope. Will you hand me those shoes? I can check for particulates.” They hand over the shoes and Hodgins leaves.
Bones is confused. Hodgins is moving? Angela explains that Cam thinks Hodgins should move into Zack’s old room. “Oh,” Bones replies. “Cam is right.” She goes back to the body, and tells Wendell, “I tell all of my new grad students not to be distracted by the standards set by Zack.”
Wendell: I don’t know who that is.
Angela: You and me, Wendell? We need to talk.
~*~*~
Booth and Bones are in the car, but what’s this? Bones is driving his car? Yep.
Bones: If your back doesn’t hurt, then why are you letting me drive?
Booth: Well, you know what? Don’t get used to it because I heal really really fast.
He tells her that his guys didn’t find the head, but he put out a search 200 miles of where the body dropped.
“Body parts dropped,” Bones corrects. “The victim was killed, chopped up, and then dropped.”
Booth grins at her. “Breaking in a new intern aren’t you?”
How did he know? Because she always gets all precise when she’s breaking in a new intern, that’s how.
Booth: So you want me to talk to him? Break him in a little bit—
Bones: No—
Booth: Ahhh—
Bones: Booth, you don’t always have to fix everything for everyone. I can handle myself.
“Partners watch out for each other,” he argues. To which she argues, “Well f that were true you’d let me fix your back.”
He insists that his back is find, all he needs is an aspirin and a bath, maybe a nice single malt scotch…He brings up the computer, showing her a picture of Jared Addison. He was the one identified after the FBI cross-referenced the Ehlers-Danlos syndrome with the special sneakers.
Bones looks over at the screen. “Jared Addison, 25 years old…”
“Watch the road!”
“What? I am watching the road—”
“25 years old—while you’re looking at the screen?”
“I am an excellent diver—”
“Oh well, I’m guessing that’s our victim.”
They both stop shouting over each other and Bones lets out a long breath. It’s going to be a long day.
~*~*~
Booth and Bones talk to Jared’s mother Tilda. She stands up from working in her garden and tells them that her son had the shoes specially made. Booth shows her a picture of Jared and the truth starts to sink in.
Booth: I’m very sorry for your loss. If you need a moment—
Bones: It would be helpful if we could see your son’s room.
Booth gives her a ‘we’re trying to be compassionate here’ look, which Bones, of course, just looks back a ‘What?’
Tilda takes them inside to her son’s room and opens up a closet full of the same size 11 children’s shoes. “You can see why I recognized the shoes.”
As Booth asks her why she didn’t report her son missing since he disappeared days ago, Bones looks around the room. Action figures line the bookshelf.
Tilda had no idea her won was missing. He was a novelist, finishing a book. She pulls out his most recent one, Robot Eyes. Booth flips the book over and looks at the picture on the back. That’s definitely not Jared. Plus, it says that he lived in the Caribbean on a boat.
Bones: That’s not your son.
Tilda hesitates.
Bones: Obviously the publisher hired an impersonator and came up with some romantic cover story.
Booth: How’d you know that?
Bones: …my publisher wanted to do the same thing with me….
Jared’s mother tells him that his publisher dropped him after his second book. He needed to make his next book great to get another one to hire him. Booth asks Tilda if they could bring in an “expert” to take a look at her son’s room.
Bones frowns. “What kind of expert.”
“Bones,” Booth says carefully, giving her a look. “Expert.”
Yeah, she still doesn’t get it.
~*~*~
Hodgins finds coffee grounds and sea kelp in the victim’s shoes as well as a very small fly egg. In order to find out where it’s from, he’s going to have to hatch it. Cam almost laughs. “Seriously?” Hodgins is not amused. He’s an entomologist, that’s what he does, why does she find that so funny?
Okay, Cam knows he’s upset about Angela and Zack, but “despite your personal problems, this is a work place and your attitude leaves a lot to be desired.”
Fine, if she wants to make a change, make it. Otherwise, Hodgins suggests she lets him do his job and hatch the fly egg. Cam gives up, leaving.
~*~*~
Back in Jared’s room with the “Expert” (a.k.a. Sweets), Booth and Bones watch as Sweets looks over the action figures.
Sweets: These action figures? Their awesome.
Bones: Hmm, still livin’ at home there, huh Sweets?
Sweets: No, I have my own place. And before that I lived with a woman, alright.
Bones: Was that woman your mother?
Booth: Yeah, your mommy?
Sweets: No she most definitely was not my mother.
He turns back to the action figures. “If our victim was 25 years old, I assume he was mentally slow?”
Bones tells him that judging from his novels, “I’d estimate his IQ to be higher than yours.”
Sweets: Then Booth is right, something else is wrong.
Booth: Ha! Full speed ahead Sweets!
Alright…Sweets looks around a second, then suddenly, “Ah! It goes without saying. Everything is perfectly aligned. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.” And why does it help? Because people with OCD repeat patterns in everything in their lives according to a psychologically set pattern.
Sweets: If we ask, ‘which of Jared’s set patterns have been recently disrupted’? We may very well discover what got him killed.
Bones: But we can’t ask Jared Addison, he’s dead.
Sweets: Whoa, she is wicked literal!
Booth: Hey, it’s her process, don’t be mean to her.
Bones: Booth!
Booth: I’m not defending, I just explaining.
Bones: I can defend—you were defending.
Booth: I was explaining.
Sweets: Whoa, this is an interesting development in your interpersonal behavior.
Bones: No, what’s more interesting is that Booth’s back is hurt and he won’t let me fix it.
Booth: No, none of this is interesting okay? Look, I just want to know what kind of mojo disrupted crazy-boy’s pattern.
The case. Right.
Sweets decides that his first guess, at the victim’s age, would be sex. Bones says that Jared never mentioned a girlfriend and suddenly Sweet’s gets a deer-in-the-headlights, crazy look on his face. He just stands there for a while and finally Bones asks Booth, “What’s wrong with him?”
Sweets continues to stare at nothing.
Booth: Sweets, what are you doing?
Sweets: *coming back to the present* I’m putting myself in the mind of an obsessive-compulsive in order to figure out where I might conceal a memory enhancer, of psycho-sexual proxy…
Booth: Right, right…*to Bones* What’s that mean?
Bones: A masturbatory aid.
Booth: Oh. Check the shoes.
Sweets: Good.
Bones: What? He’s not gonna find it in the shoes.
Sweets pulls out a picture. Found it. Bones is shocked. Do all boys put them in their shoes, or is that just Booth? Booth just gives her a smug look. “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”
Sweets reads the picture. “Miss Kelly Sutton. There’s an e-mail and uh…list of sexual suggestions.” He hands the picture over to Booth.
Booth: Whoa.
Bones: What? You’re surprised he has a girlfriend?
Booth: No I wouldn’t actually call her a girl.
The photo shows Kelly as a woman in her fifties relaxing in a bubble bath.
~*~*~
Booth brings in Kelly Sutton for questioning. She tells him that she loved Jared. The age difference didn’t matter, Jared wanted to marry her. Booth tells her Jared’s mother wasn’t so sure about that.
As Kelly continues to talk, in the room behind giant mirror, Sweets leans toward Bones, explaining that one study showed that in 45% of successful marriages, the woman was at least five years older than the man. That makes sense to Bones. Older women are more experience, and younger men can keep up better.
Sweets: I know quite a bit about older women. The woman I lived with was 26.
Bones tries not to laugh, and suddenly Booth starts coughing in the interrogation room. He glances at the mirror and taps his ear piece.
Oops! “Sorry.” Sweets turns off their microphone.
Booth asks Kelly how she and Jared met, and she tell shim it was at her son’s nursery. He came in and she helped him pick out an orchid for his mother. He was full of anxiety. “Probably about microbes, Booth,” Sweets cuts in.
“Germs?” Booth asks Kelly, and she tells him that she cut the orchid for him and took it out to his car. She thought he was adorable, so she asked him out to dinner, “And the rest is history. He fell in love with me, and I responded.”
Booth tells her that Jared’s mother thought he was at the hotel writing his next book, but there’s record of him checking it. Kelly says that Jared was there for a conference. For the science fiction writers? No, for behavior modification. This catches Sweet’s attention. “If he was trying to overcome—” He realizes he should be talking into the mic and starts over. “If he was trying to overcome his psychological issues, that might have threatened her.”
“With your support?” Booth asks Kelly. Of course. She was fully supportive, she’s not crazy.
~*~*~
Back at the lab, Wendell still can’t find cause of death. Bones admits they might never figure it out without the head. He notices a fracture on one of the fingers, calling it a “boxer’s fracture.” He swings his gloved hand towards her to illustrate: "It happens if you slug someone without keeping your wrist dead straight." Bones is impressed. She doesn’t expect anyone to live up to Zack’s standards, but “that is extremely good work.”
Leaning towards him, she asks "Mr. Bray, have you ever conducted a sexual relationship with a woman over 20 years older than yourself?" Wendell just looks at her, taken a back. She asks because “anthropologically speaking there’s a correlation between physically aggressive young males.”
Wendell nervously answers, “I’m pretty sure you aren’t any 20 years older than me Dr. Brennan…”
Bones frowns. “Why would my age be relevant?”
Okay then…She leaves and Wendell stares after her in total confusion.
~*~*~
Hodgins visits Zack at the Psychiatric Facility, bringing a tough math equation as a gift.
Hodgins: Try and figure this one out!
Zack looks it over, explaining how hard it is, and Hodgins just answers, “So…I’ve got you beat right?” He leans back in his chair with a grin. “Yeah, that makes me King of the—” Zack looks up and Hodgins quickly corrects, “That, that makes me King.”
He tells Zack that they’re going to get him out of there so that “someday you can be King again.”
“I know you’re lying to make me feel better and not to be malicious,” Zack answers in his scientific way.
So, does he want to hear the case? Hodgins tells him about the body found chopped up in 12 pieces, without a head. “So 13 pieces,” Zack answers, then, in the same sentence, explains the solution to the math equation.
Hodgins is disappointed. “You solved it?”
“Yes.”
“I’m King of the Looney Bin.” Zack smiles and Hodgins gives in.
“Yeah you are.”
He gets the case file out to leave with Zack so he can look over it. Maybe he’ll find something they’ve missed. Zack tells him that Angela says that they aren’t together anymore. Hodgins tries to shake it off, but Zack just says, “I’m sorry things are going badly for you.”
Hodgins lets out a sad laugh. Zack doesn’t get it.
Hodgins: My best friend is locked up in a looney bin, wearing gloves because he blew up his own hands, and he feels sorry for me.
~*~*~
Booth and Bones arrive at the hotel conference room to find Jim Amerian telling a group of swim-suit clad people, “Mud’s not toxic, mud’s not poisonous. Mud will not hurt you.” He tells them to stir the mud with their hands. They hesitate. “Do it!”
Bones leans over to Booth. “Look at the hematoma on his left eye. That’s what you would call a “shiner”.
“I know Bones.”
Jim tells the group to rub the mud all over their bodies. “It’s not gonna hurt ya!” Although clearly terrified, most of them start in, pulling mud out of the buckets and grimacing as they wipe it on their arms. One man, Ralph, starts to panic. He can’t do this! He makes a run for it.
Jim turns back to the group. “You think you want to pull a Ralph?” He assures them that they don’t and that he knows what they’re going through because he used to be right where they are now. Booth steps up and taps the man with his badge. He might want to follow him, he has a few questions to ask.
Outside the conference room, Jim tells them that he’s a professor of psychology. Jared was one of his students. Was he the one who gave Jim the black eye? No, that was another student who couldn’t handle his floor licking exercise. Jared on the other hand, was successful.
Booth asks him when he last saw Jared, and Jim says it was right after the “toilet exercise”. Booth asks, “You mean he went to the bathroom?” No, each of Jim’s students must pick a mint out of toilet water and hold it on their tongue for 10 seconds.
As Booth and Bones argue that maybe some people might view what Jim does as torture, Jim insists that Jared was his star patient. Suddenly Ralph appears. No, he’s not there to apologize, he’s there to turn himself in.
Ralph turns to Booth. “I killed Jared. Can you please sterilize your handcuffs before taking me in?"
~*~*~
Sweets is conducting the interrogation, and Bones wants to know why. Booth just looks at her like it’s obvious. "Crazy guy? Shrink? It's a no brainer."
Bones: Are we going to let Sweets interrogate all of our insane suspects?
Sweets puts a hand to his ear, glancing at the mirror. Booth leans towards the mic. “Annoying, isn’t it Sweets?”
Sweets turns back to Ralph. “Why did you kill him?”
“I didn’t kill him,” Ralph insists, seriously explaining, “The fact is if I don’t eat at exactly 8:14 AM according to this watch, the person nearest to me dies.” The professor told him not to eat until nine. They’re either going to have to take his watch or only put him next to horrible people who should die.
Sweets asks Ralph if, by any chance, he dismembered Jared after killing him. “No, I just killed him.”
“Uh, no,” Booth’s voice comes in over the mic. “We gotta keep looking.”
Bones asks why, if Jared was having breakfast with Ralph, didn’t Jared turn up for the session? Sweets asks where Jared went after breakfast. At the coffee place in the lobby. “Why?” “To get coffee.”
Ah, the coffee grounds Hodgins found are starting to make sense.
~*~*~
Back at the hotel, Booth and Bones approach the coffee cart. The barista asks what they want, and Bones asks for a sample of his grounds.
Booth: Just take ‘em Bones, it’s garbage. You don’t need a warrant for garbage.
What’s going on? Booth shows his badge and asks the man if he recognizes Jared’s picture. The guy asks if Jared filed a complaint, because he barely pushed him. He pushed him? Why. Because Jared made him wash his hands with antibacterial soap before starting in on his cappuccino. “And then he had me redo it, three times! Because the cup was dirty, on the outside. Which is was not!” He points to the mugs. “Look at my cups. Pristine.”
Booth: So, you pushed the dude for insulting your cups?
No, “all of these OCDC people are the same”, he argues. He’s going out of business trying to cater to them. “Call it a crime of passion” if you must. He tells them that the last time he saw Jared, last Thursday, the guy came in, apologized, even shook his hand without worrying about germs. It was like he was a totally different person.
Booth and Bones look at each other. Looks like the professor’s methods are actually working.
“Please keep that under your hat,” the guy begs. “The last thing I need is for this to become the coffee Mecca for the phobics.”
Booth and Bones can’t help but smile.
~*~*~
Back at the lab, Wendell awkwardly hovers in Angela’s door. She said he could come to her with any questions, right? Of course!
“I owe people money,” he begins.
“That’s not technically a question, so there’s not much for me to go on.”
He tells her that he he’s got to keep his nose clean, keep his grades up, and graduate top of his class so he can pay those debts back. Angela nods in understanding. "You're worried about getting fired because you can't satisfy Dr. Brennan, right?"
Flustered, Wendell says a curt, “no” and rushes out.
“Wendell? Wendell hold on.” Angela rushes after him. “You never actually asked me a question.”
“That guy, the psycho who helped the serial killer?” Wendell asks with a worried look.
“Okay, could you please not call Zack a psycho?” Angela interrupts. “Crazy as it sounds, we all still love him.”
Wendell leans in. “He was Dr. Brennan’s boy toy right?”
“What?” Angela is confused. “Boy toy as in sexual?” He laughs. “No, no—where did you get—No, absolutely not.”
“Plus the FBI guy,” Wendell says seriously.
“Again, no. Wrong.”
“Then she hit on me!”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“She looked me right in the eyes,” Wendell argues. “And asked if I had any experience with older women, like as in, ‘if you want to work around her, you gotta—”
“Wendell, stop!” Angela interrupts. She tells him he needs to look for another explanation for their conversation, and if he can’t find one, “you’re hallucinating. Or insane, because she absolutely didn’t hit on you.” She gives him a strange look. “I’m glad we talked.”
~*~*~
Angela’s back at her computer when Cam asks if she found out anything new. She found out that for once a day for 30 days, at exactly the same time, Jared called only one number. Who is it? Forward-Retro Publishing Company. The company that dropped Jared after his second book.
~*~*~
Booth and Bones interrogate Jared’s former publisher, Gary Tushman. He says the publishing company’s changed, adding, “You know what I mean Dr. Brennan.”
“No I do not.”
“Try me, Mr. Tushman,” Booth says.
Tushman tells them that it’s no longer about good writing, it’s about marketability. He turns to Bones, that’s the whole reason your photo takes up the whole back cover.
Bones: Because I’m a very good writer.
Tushman: You’re serviceable. But your success is dependent upon your image as a hot scientist chick.
Bones looks to Booth for help, “That’s not true, is it?”
“Of course not,” Booth assures, glaring at Tushman. “Don’t call my partner a “chick”, what’s the matter with you?”
Hey, Tushman argues, he’s just telling it like it is. He hired a guy to be Jared, go to the Geek conventions and all that. So he had no contact with Jared at all, then? No. Booth calls him on the lie, “He called you every day for 30 days”, and suddenly Bones shoots across the table and grabs Tushman by the cheeks.
Booth: Whoa, Bones! Agh.
Bones: *still holding the guy’s mouth open* Ask him what happened to his tooth.
Tushman: Ah, that’s assault, are your hands clean?
Booth: My partner wants to know what happened to your tooth.
Bones: Jared Addison punched him.
Okay he admits to “the cause and effect situation”, but Jared didn’t hit him because he said he was a bad writer. Jared was trying to explain that he’d gotten over his OCD, that he’d do whatever Gary wanted to sell his books, but Gary still refused. He thought Jared was just making it all up. Then Jared punched him, and Gary told him he’d sell his book.
Bones: Why did you change your mind after he hit you?
Booth: Wait, so if I punched you, you’d read my manuscript?
Gary says that Jared hit him with his bare hands. The old Jared wouldn’t have done that. Gary wouldn’t have killed him, because, "Can you imagine the sales I'd've gotten off of revealing the real Jared Addison? I'd've made a fortune."
~*~*~
Back in the lab, Hodgins’s fly egg is finally hatching. Cam approaches and Hodgins shushes her.
“You need quiet for that?”
“No, I just thought it might stop you from talking.”
“Pushing it Dr. Hodgins, how’s about we say you’ve found the line?”
Hodgins turns back to the microscope as the fly hatches. “Hey there little buddy!” It’s a white fly, which only lives in humid climates. Cam points out that Jared’s girlfriend, Kelly, worked in a nursery.
Cam tells her, quite respectfully, that “I’m not moving into Zack’s ld space. I’m not being difficult, I just…I can’t do it. I hope you understand.”
She does.
~*~*~
Angela joins Sweets at a table at the Diner.
“Okay, here’s the thing, this new guy? Wendell, he might be nuts.”
“Hi Angela, pickle?” He offers it to her, and she ignores him.
“He thinks Brennan hit on him.”
Why? She tells him and Sweets answers, “I’m certain she did exactly that.”
“No, no, I’ve known Brennan for years, and there is no way believe me that she—”
“Our murder victim was 28 years younger than his girlfriend,” Sweets explains. “Dr. Brennan was probably looking for insights in her, you know, clumsy yet enduring way.” She might want to let Wendell know she misjudged him.
Angela tells him about the fact that Wendell really needs this job to pay off money, “Like, The Mob, or something”, and Sweets quickly interrupts her. “No, no rampant paranoia, not my jurisdiction. But on the other thing I’m solid.”
She argues that the last time she listened to him “You broke up me and Hodgins.” No, that wasn’t he fault, and Sweets thinks she knows that.
Unable to argue, Angela grabs her purse and gets up. “Yeah.”
~*~*~
Booth, Bones, and Hodgins enter the nursery to serve the warrant to Kelly’s son, David. Hodgins thinks the fly could definitely have come from here, and he goes off to search, Booth and Bones talk to David. Bones reaches her hand into the fertilizer, and Booth is quick to stop her. She doesn’t know what’s in that!
No, David argues, all their fertilizer is 100% organic. Bones puts some of it in her mouth, much to Booth’s disgust. “Ahh, there you go, now you’re gonna get sick, your stomach’s gonna go upside down. It’s gonna be a mess.”
“It’s coffee.”
Booth’s expression changes. “Coffee?” He reaches down to try some himself, spitting it out as Bones and David discuss Jared.
He was there shortly before he died, he was “my mom’s boyfriend. Heavy emphasis on the BOY.”
Still trying to get all the coffee grounds and sea kelp out of his mouth, Booth says, “Yeah we heard this place kind of freaked him out.”
David didn’t know whether it was the dirt or the question freaked him out. What was the question? He wanted permission to marry his mother. David’s answer, “I told him it’d be creepy to have a stepfather who’s ten years younger than me, and that he should forget about it and try to be normal.”
Bones: So you said no.
Yeah, he said no.
Hodgins found the flies and Bones finds them also on the shovel. She tests it for blood and…sure enough there it is.
~*~*~
Back at the lab, Angela confronts Wendell, telling him that he wasn’t totally wrong about Dr. Brennan. She explains that Bones’s interest was completely anthropological.
“But she was looking me right in the eyes.”
“She’s direct,” Angela explains. “And awkward.” So he has two choices. “You either answer her questions like me or Zack, or tell her she’s being inappropriate like Booth or Cam. Either way she’s not going to hold it against you.”
Is she sure? Yeah. But quite frankly, she’s more worried about the money owing thing. Wendell assures her he can pay his debts. That may be, but he can’t work on legal cases if “the wrong kind of people have leverage on you”.
Suddenly Wendell gets angry. “If they’re the wrong kind of people then so am I!” Angela asks him to please calm down, and Wendell yells that his entire neighborhood chipped in to send him to school. Definitely not the mob. Angela explains that she thought he owed the mob and Wendell just laughs.
He doesn’t owe the mob and he doesn’t smoke. Holding the cigarette helps him get into his father’s head.
Wendell: I don’t get you people. I’d like to work here, but it’s like a minefield.
She admits it takes some getting used to.
~*~*~
Cam tells everyone that it was not blood on the shovel. Bones’s “magic juice” (as Booth calls it) reacted with potato proteins on the shovel giving them a false positive.
Booth: I locked the guy up because of potatoes.
Now they’re right back to square one. And without the head, they might never figure it out. When Hodgins suggests that maybe Wendell missed something in the Bones, Angela defends him. He’s doing his job very well. Hodgins admits he just misses Zack. Booth tells him he’s got to get over it, Zack’s not coming back.
“I know where to find the victim’s head.”
Everyone swings around to find Zack standing there in his scrubs and gloves. Everybody just stares in shock.
Cam: This is not good.
Bones: How did you get out?
Zack: You don’t appear happy to see me.
Booth: Oh we’re not.
Bones: Wha—I am. I really am.
Over her shock, she runs over to give Zack a hug. Angela and Hodgins follow as Cam mumbles to Booth, “I doubt he got a weekend pass.” Booth asks Zack how he got out, and Zack answers, “Dr. Sweets helped me.” Angela decides she’s completely changed her mind about Sweets then. “I now love him.”
Cam: Does Dr. Sweets know that he helped you?
Zack: No. *looks at Bones’s arm still clinging to him* You’re hurting my arm.
"All right, Zack, you're with me and Bones. The rest of you, go play with your microscopes or whatever it is you do."
With that, Booth steers Bones and Zack towards the bone room.
Zack looks over the pictures of Jared’s room, explaining that "Everything in the room is organized in sets of twelve. A dozen shoes in the closet. A dozen action figures on the shelf."
Booth and Bones: Should have noticed that.
But Zack did an analysis of Jared’s novels and there’s no recurring anomalies with numbers, just germs and fear of microbes. Then what’s with the number 12? They live at 12 Kindergarten Street. Kindergarten has 12 letters. Alphanumeric is also a twelve-letter number by the way,” Zack adds. “But I suspect that’s just ironic.”
Booth leans over to Bones to whisper, “Okay this side of him? I don’t miss at all.”
Zack continues to explain that books, CDs, gnomes, decorative rocks is always twelve. Booth points out that Jared wouldn’t be gardening, he hates germs. Zack adds that even his name Jared Addison has 12 letters, and suddenly Bones realizes something. “He didn’t name himself, his mother did.” She had OCD too? Most likely.
“But the body was found in 12 pieces, not counting the head, why?” Booth asks.
“The incomplete saw marks on the C2 vertebrae were hesitation marks,” Sweets says, suddenly appearing. “She couldn’t deal with the part of her body that was her child’s face.” He turns to Zack. “You. You used me to escape?” Zack shakes his head. How?
One crime at a time Sweets. Booth asks why Jared’s mother would kill him and he answers, “He was overcoming his disorder.” He was ready to take over his own life, leave her house. It wasn’t just his patterns he was destroying, it was hers. As a result, she suffered a psychotic break and murdered her own child.
Sweets holds up his ID. He still has it.
Yeah, Zack swapped out the magnetic strip “with my looney bin library card.” So that’s why it didn’t work.
Booth asks where Jared’s head is then, and Zack points to the photo. There’s only one thing that’s not in a group of twelve, the birdbath in the center of the yard.
~*~*~
Booth and Bones go with the FBI to remove the birdbath. As the rest of the squints, Zack included, go to the Royal Diner for one last “this is how it used to be” meal.
Sweets waits outside the psychiatric hospital by himself. He sighs and checks his watch.
It’s great to see everyone laughing again at the Diner.
Wendell takes one last look at the forensic platform and heads out, bag in hand.
Booth and Bones dig up a box labeled “Jared Addison”. Tilda stands by as they open it to reveal her son’s head.
Cam hangs up her phone. “Well, Zack was right.”
Angela: Of course he was.
Cam: As always.
Zack: Time to go.
Suddenly the smiles are gone. Everyone is reminded that this is not just like old times after all.
~*~*~
Booth gets out of his car and opens the backseat to let Zack out.
Sweets: What took so long?
Booth: Relax Sweets, okay? He’s all yours.
Sweets: Wait, uh, I thought we’d do this together.
Booth: Look, just take him back through the front door, don’t look guilty, and if anyone asks, you just say you took him for electric shock. Alright?
Booth looks at Zack. “Don’t. Escape. Again.” If he needs to contact them again, just “Call me or Dr. Brennan.” Zack understands.
Alright then, Booth’s got to go.
“Wait—” Sweets stops him. “What if, I mean what if he overpowers me?”
Booth just stares at him. “Zack?”
Zack: I’m much stronger than I look.
Sweets: He’s done it before. He killed a man.
Booth: Okay Zack, promise you’re not gonna kill Sweets.
Zack: I promise.
Booth: There you go!
He’s gotta go, he’s got great seats at the game.
Sweets starts to lead Zack inside. “If we bump into anyone, let me do the talking.”
“I haven’t actually literally done it before you know,” Zack says.
“Had sex?”
“Ended someone’s life,” Zack clarifies, wondering, “Why doesn’t anyone ever believe I’ve had sex?”
Whoa, hold on back up a second. Sweets reminds him that confessed to plunging a knife into someone’s chest.
“I said I killed him, which I did. I told The Master where to find him.”
“But you didn’t plunge a knife?”
“It wasn’t me.”
Sweets can’t believe what he’s hearing. “Zack, why did you confess?!”
“I would have done it,” Zack says quickly. “If The Master would have asked, I would have done it.”
“No, no you don’t know that,” Sweets argues. “People have no idea if they’re capable of ending a life until they’re put in that situation.”
Now everything finally makes sense to Sweets. In all their sessions he’s had question marks because “you at heart, are NOT a killer”. He has to tell Booth and Bones. He gets his phone out, but Zack automatically stops him. He can’t. He’s Sweets’s patient and that would violate patient-doctor confidentiality and Zack is not giving him permission to tell them. But doesn’t he want his friends to know that he’s not a killer?
Zack points out that it still makes him an accessory to murder, if he tells them they’ll take him out of the psych facility and put him in prison. And "Hodgins assures me I would not do well in prison."
“Okay, what about the person who actually did commit the murder? He’s still out there.”
No, The Master killed him so he could recruit Zack.
“We should go in. I don’t want to get you into trouble.” Zack heads towards the hospital and poor Sweets has no choice but to follow.
~*~*~
In her office, Bones is throwing away her last manuscript. Booth enters.
Booth: What are you doing?
Bones: Throwing out my book.
Booth: It’s still on your harddrive.
Bones: Nope, not anymore it’s not.
Booth is shocked. “You erased it? WHOA!” He lunges forward and grabs the manuscript before she can throw it into the trash. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, stop!”
“But I don’t want to be a writer anymore.”
“Why because of what that publisher said?” Booth asks, still pulling papers out of the trash. “He was an idiot, did you see his glasses?”
Bones: I don’t want to be a sexy scientist.
Booth: That's like me saying I don't want to be a sexy FBI agent. We can't change who we are.
Sulking, Bones sits down at her desk as Booth continues to pull out her manuscript despite his bad back. She lets out a long breath and he says, “Suspenseful and chilling. Temperance Brennan leads the pack. Anthropology has never been more exciting.”
Bones is more than a little surprise. “You memorized my reviews?”
Booth holds up her book. “Angela can scan these and get them back on your computer.”
“You’ve known my reviews, Booth, but do you ever read my books?”
He grins at her. “Every single word.”
(Awwwww!)
“You never said anything.”
“Well I figured I’m all over your real word, why would want me in your fantasy world too?” He hands her her manuscripts. She doesn’t want to take it. He won’t give up. Come on, you know you want to.
Finally she takes it back. “I can appreciate that.”
“See how this works?” Booth gets all enthusiastic. “Give and take? We’re PARTNERS, huh?”
“Except you won’t let me fix our back.”
“Oh come on, my back is fine,” says Booth with a limp.
“Or really?” Bones gets up and starts to put her manuscript back in the trash.
“Ohhh, okay, how do I know you’re not gonna, like, paralyze me or make it worse?"
She sets down her book and goes to stand behind him. “I also help you by explaining a lot of things to you.”
“Well, yeah, you know I explain…” Booth stops in mid-sentence as Bones wraps her arms around his waist. “Things to you just as much as…” Bones puts her hands up behind his ears.
“Well my things are more important.”
“That’s debata—OW!” With a loud crunch, Bones cracks his back.
“Necessary pain.”
“Yeah—” he groans as she starts maneuvering him around. Even in pain, Booth manages to croak out, “The way you really help me is to be a guy.”
Bones finally lets him go. “I help you be a guy?”
“Yeah it’s a guy’s thing to fix things, to make ‘em right,” he says, Bones still at his back. “When I fix things, I feel like I am one with the universe."
*CRACK* Bones shoves her fist into his back.
“Ah! Whoa.” Suddenly Booth isn’t in pain anymore. Surprised he turns to face her. “That’s amazing! How’d you do that?”
“We help each other, quid pro quo.”
“I know what that means Bones.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“I know a lot of things.”
Well he didn’t know what fear of germs was called. Yeah, but she didn’t know that she could just take coffee grounds, that she didn’t need a warrant for that.
“I sort of knew that I just…”
Fade to black.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
I knew it! I KNEW Zack wasn't the actual killer! So glad to have him back (along with the original "Zack hair" LoL) Sweets of course was hilarious and I love how protective in a funny way Booth was in this episde. He read all her books? Awwww The back fixing was classic!
Booth and Bones are called in to investigate exactly what the name of the episode implies, “perfect pieces in the purple pond”. Translation: a bunch of body parts floating in strangely purple water. No one knows how the water got purple.
Meanwhile, at the McKinley Psychiatric Hospital, Sweets is talking to Zack.
Zack: As I’ve told you many times Dr. Sweets, I do feel remorse.
Sweets: But not for stabbing a man in the heart.
Zack: No, for succumbing to the faulty logic that his death was desirable.
Sweets: You know a sane person would regret murdering someone more than being taken in by a line of crap.
Zack: Define “crap”.
Sweets: Drivel, blarney, nonsense, uh, balderdash, twaddle, bull, bunkum, hooey. Like that.
Zack: Now I see it as drivel blarney nonsense balderdash twaddle bull bunkum hooey, but then I perceived it as logic.
Sweets is still swiping the card, but the door is not opening. Finally, he calls out, “My card isn’t working, hello?”
Zack tells him, “I’ was wrong, not delusional.” The guard opens the door and tells Sweets that his card must have expired (yeah, thanks for that), and he tells Zack, “Perhaps you should consider that your delusion is that you’re not delusional.”
~*~*~
Booth and Bones arrive at the warehouse where the body parts were found. 12 in all, no head.
FBI Guy: Interesting anomaly, no head.
Bones: No head? That’s odd.
FBI Guy: Which is why I said “anomaly”.
Booth: Hey, you don’t need to be snippy with my partner, pal.
Bones: Booth, it’s alright—what’s wrong with your back?
That’s right, Booth is walking like he pulled something. When Bones offers to help, he quickly tells her it’s nothing, he just hurt himself playing with Parker. Alright then, but she could probably help. He waves it off, and they make their way to the “purple pond”.
Booth: Kid said it turned purple when he peed in it.
Bones: For future reference, this is more of an anomaly than a missing head.
FBI Guy: Sad comment on your life, Doc.
Booth: Again, snippy. You know, if my back wasn’t bad I would hit you.
Bones: Booth! I can take care of myself.
Bones decides that the body is that of a male, she doesn’t know why the water is purple, she’ll leave that detail up to Hodgins. Booth is expecting she’ll need them to drain the whole thing, but she thinks a small sample would suffice. Wow, really? Booth’s happiness is cut short when Bones thinks about it a second and realizes that he’s right, the head might have sank to the body so, yeah drain it.
Booth: We’re draining it! Draining it…
~*~*~
In the lab, Angela comments that it looks like the ends of the victim’s fingertips were burned, and the newest grad student, Wendell Bray, points out that sometimes guys try to conceal their identity by losing their fingerprints. Angela gives him a ‘not bad’ look, and Bones informs them that Wendell is her brightest scholarship student. Nice.
Angela points to the shoes bagged in an evidence bag. “Okay, these are children’s shoes, but they’re size 11.”
Cam: So you think our victim was a giant toddler?
Bones: But that would show up on the Bones.
Cam: Sarcasm does not play well on the forensic platform.
Angela tracked down the manufacturer, they were special order. Bones notices that "all the cuts to the skeleton are clean except for several incomplete slices to the C-2 vertebra." Meaning the killer hesitated as they cut off the head. Makes since. What did they get from the X-rays? Wendell thinks the victim might have had Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. They should look at local orthopedic physicians.
Hodgins enters, explaining that the purple water was caused by "a bottom growing algae called Lemanea." He does the calculations and decides that it might have been agitated when Todd peed in the pool.
Now that that’s over, Cam turns to him. “So, Dr. Hodgins, have you moved yet?”
Hodgins blows a quick breath into his gloves. “Nope. Will you hand me those shoes? I can check for particulates.” They hand over the shoes and Hodgins leaves.
Bones is confused. Hodgins is moving? Angela explains that Cam thinks Hodgins should move into Zack’s old room. “Oh,” Bones replies. “Cam is right.” She goes back to the body, and tells Wendell, “I tell all of my new grad students not to be distracted by the standards set by Zack.”
Wendell: I don’t know who that is.
Angela: You and me, Wendell? We need to talk.
~*~*~
Booth and Bones are in the car, but what’s this? Bones is driving his car? Yep.
Bones: If your back doesn’t hurt, then why are you letting me drive?
Booth: Well, you know what? Don’t get used to it because I heal really really fast.
He tells her that his guys didn’t find the head, but he put out a search 200 miles of where the body dropped.
“Body parts dropped,” Bones corrects. “The victim was killed, chopped up, and then dropped.”
Booth grins at her. “Breaking in a new intern aren’t you?”
How did he know? Because she always gets all precise when she’s breaking in a new intern, that’s how.
Booth: So you want me to talk to him? Break him in a little bit—
Bones: No—
Booth: Ahhh—
Bones: Booth, you don’t always have to fix everything for everyone. I can handle myself.
“Partners watch out for each other,” he argues. To which she argues, “Well f that were true you’d let me fix your back.”
He insists that his back is find, all he needs is an aspirin and a bath, maybe a nice single malt scotch…He brings up the computer, showing her a picture of Jared Addison. He was the one identified after the FBI cross-referenced the Ehlers-Danlos syndrome with the special sneakers.
Bones looks over at the screen. “Jared Addison, 25 years old…”
“Watch the road!”
“What? I am watching the road—”
“25 years old—while you’re looking at the screen?”
“I am an excellent diver—”
“Oh well, I’m guessing that’s our victim.”
They both stop shouting over each other and Bones lets out a long breath. It’s going to be a long day.
~*~*~
Booth and Bones talk to Jared’s mother Tilda. She stands up from working in her garden and tells them that her son had the shoes specially made. Booth shows her a picture of Jared and the truth starts to sink in.
Booth: I’m very sorry for your loss. If you need a moment—
Bones: It would be helpful if we could see your son’s room.
Booth gives her a ‘we’re trying to be compassionate here’ look, which Bones, of course, just looks back a ‘What?’
Tilda takes them inside to her son’s room and opens up a closet full of the same size 11 children’s shoes. “You can see why I recognized the shoes.”
As Booth asks her why she didn’t report her son missing since he disappeared days ago, Bones looks around the room. Action figures line the bookshelf.
Tilda had no idea her won was missing. He was a novelist, finishing a book. She pulls out his most recent one, Robot Eyes. Booth flips the book over and looks at the picture on the back. That’s definitely not Jared. Plus, it says that he lived in the Caribbean on a boat.
Bones: That’s not your son.
Tilda hesitates.
Bones: Obviously the publisher hired an impersonator and came up with some romantic cover story.
Booth: How’d you know that?
Bones: …my publisher wanted to do the same thing with me….
Jared’s mother tells him that his publisher dropped him after his second book. He needed to make his next book great to get another one to hire him. Booth asks Tilda if they could bring in an “expert” to take a look at her son’s room.
Bones frowns. “What kind of expert.”
“Bones,” Booth says carefully, giving her a look. “Expert.”
Yeah, she still doesn’t get it.
~*~*~
Hodgins finds coffee grounds and sea kelp in the victim’s shoes as well as a very small fly egg. In order to find out where it’s from, he’s going to have to hatch it. Cam almost laughs. “Seriously?” Hodgins is not amused. He’s an entomologist, that’s what he does, why does she find that so funny?
Okay, Cam knows he’s upset about Angela and Zack, but “despite your personal problems, this is a work place and your attitude leaves a lot to be desired.”
Fine, if she wants to make a change, make it. Otherwise, Hodgins suggests she lets him do his job and hatch the fly egg. Cam gives up, leaving.
~*~*~
Back in Jared’s room with the “Expert” (a.k.a. Sweets), Booth and Bones watch as Sweets looks over the action figures.
Sweets: These action figures? Their awesome.
Bones: Hmm, still livin’ at home there, huh Sweets?
Sweets: No, I have my own place. And before that I lived with a woman, alright.
Bones: Was that woman your mother?
Booth: Yeah, your mommy?
Sweets: No she most definitely was not my mother.
He turns back to the action figures. “If our victim was 25 years old, I assume he was mentally slow?”
Bones tells him that judging from his novels, “I’d estimate his IQ to be higher than yours.”
Sweets: Then Booth is right, something else is wrong.
Booth: Ha! Full speed ahead Sweets!
Alright…Sweets looks around a second, then suddenly, “Ah! It goes without saying. Everything is perfectly aligned. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.” And why does it help? Because people with OCD repeat patterns in everything in their lives according to a psychologically set pattern.
Sweets: If we ask, ‘which of Jared’s set patterns have been recently disrupted’? We may very well discover what got him killed.
Bones: But we can’t ask Jared Addison, he’s dead.
Sweets: Whoa, she is wicked literal!
Booth: Hey, it’s her process, don’t be mean to her.
Bones: Booth!
Booth: I’m not defending, I just explaining.
Bones: I can defend—you were defending.
Booth: I was explaining.
Sweets: Whoa, this is an interesting development in your interpersonal behavior.
Bones: No, what’s more interesting is that Booth’s back is hurt and he won’t let me fix it.
Booth: No, none of this is interesting okay? Look, I just want to know what kind of mojo disrupted crazy-boy’s pattern.
The case. Right.
Sweets decides that his first guess, at the victim’s age, would be sex. Bones says that Jared never mentioned a girlfriend and suddenly Sweet’s gets a deer-in-the-headlights, crazy look on his face. He just stands there for a while and finally Bones asks Booth, “What’s wrong with him?”
Sweets continues to stare at nothing.
Booth: Sweets, what are you doing?
Sweets: *coming back to the present* I’m putting myself in the mind of an obsessive-compulsive in order to figure out where I might conceal a memory enhancer, of psycho-sexual proxy…
Booth: Right, right…*to Bones* What’s that mean?
Bones: A masturbatory aid.
Booth: Oh. Check the shoes.
Sweets: Good.
Bones: What? He’s not gonna find it in the shoes.
Sweets pulls out a picture. Found it. Bones is shocked. Do all boys put them in their shoes, or is that just Booth? Booth just gives her a smug look. “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”
Sweets reads the picture. “Miss Kelly Sutton. There’s an e-mail and uh…list of sexual suggestions.” He hands the picture over to Booth.
Booth: Whoa.
Bones: What? You’re surprised he has a girlfriend?
Booth: No I wouldn’t actually call her a girl.
The photo shows Kelly as a woman in her fifties relaxing in a bubble bath.
~*~*~
Booth brings in Kelly Sutton for questioning. She tells him that she loved Jared. The age difference didn’t matter, Jared wanted to marry her. Booth tells her Jared’s mother wasn’t so sure about that.
As Kelly continues to talk, in the room behind giant mirror, Sweets leans toward Bones, explaining that one study showed that in 45% of successful marriages, the woman was at least five years older than the man. That makes sense to Bones. Older women are more experience, and younger men can keep up better.
Sweets: I know quite a bit about older women. The woman I lived with was 26.
Bones tries not to laugh, and suddenly Booth starts coughing in the interrogation room. He glances at the mirror and taps his ear piece.
Oops! “Sorry.” Sweets turns off their microphone.
Booth asks Kelly how she and Jared met, and she tell shim it was at her son’s nursery. He came in and she helped him pick out an orchid for his mother. He was full of anxiety. “Probably about microbes, Booth,” Sweets cuts in.
“Germs?” Booth asks Kelly, and she tells him that she cut the orchid for him and took it out to his car. She thought he was adorable, so she asked him out to dinner, “And the rest is history. He fell in love with me, and I responded.”
Booth tells her that Jared’s mother thought he was at the hotel writing his next book, but there’s record of him checking it. Kelly says that Jared was there for a conference. For the science fiction writers? No, for behavior modification. This catches Sweet’s attention. “If he was trying to overcome—” He realizes he should be talking into the mic and starts over. “If he was trying to overcome his psychological issues, that might have threatened her.”
“With your support?” Booth asks Kelly. Of course. She was fully supportive, she’s not crazy.
~*~*~
Back at the lab, Wendell still can’t find cause of death. Bones admits they might never figure it out without the head. He notices a fracture on one of the fingers, calling it a “boxer’s fracture.” He swings his gloved hand towards her to illustrate: "It happens if you slug someone without keeping your wrist dead straight." Bones is impressed. She doesn’t expect anyone to live up to Zack’s standards, but “that is extremely good work.”
Leaning towards him, she asks "Mr. Bray, have you ever conducted a sexual relationship with a woman over 20 years older than yourself?" Wendell just looks at her, taken a back. She asks because “anthropologically speaking there’s a correlation between physically aggressive young males.”
Wendell nervously answers, “I’m pretty sure you aren’t any 20 years older than me Dr. Brennan…”
Bones frowns. “Why would my age be relevant?”
Okay then…She leaves and Wendell stares after her in total confusion.
~*~*~
Hodgins visits Zack at the Psychiatric Facility, bringing a tough math equation as a gift.
Hodgins: Try and figure this one out!
Zack looks it over, explaining how hard it is, and Hodgins just answers, “So…I’ve got you beat right?” He leans back in his chair with a grin. “Yeah, that makes me King of the—” Zack looks up and Hodgins quickly corrects, “That, that makes me King.”
He tells Zack that they’re going to get him out of there so that “someday you can be King again.”
“I know you’re lying to make me feel better and not to be malicious,” Zack answers in his scientific way.
So, does he want to hear the case? Hodgins tells him about the body found chopped up in 12 pieces, without a head. “So 13 pieces,” Zack answers, then, in the same sentence, explains the solution to the math equation.
Hodgins is disappointed. “You solved it?”
“Yes.”
“I’m King of the Looney Bin.” Zack smiles and Hodgins gives in.
“Yeah you are.”
He gets the case file out to leave with Zack so he can look over it. Maybe he’ll find something they’ve missed. Zack tells him that Angela says that they aren’t together anymore. Hodgins tries to shake it off, but Zack just says, “I’m sorry things are going badly for you.”
Hodgins lets out a sad laugh. Zack doesn’t get it.
Hodgins: My best friend is locked up in a looney bin, wearing gloves because he blew up his own hands, and he feels sorry for me.
~*~*~
Booth and Bones arrive at the hotel conference room to find Jim Amerian telling a group of swim-suit clad people, “Mud’s not toxic, mud’s not poisonous. Mud will not hurt you.” He tells them to stir the mud with their hands. They hesitate. “Do it!”
Bones leans over to Booth. “Look at the hematoma on his left eye. That’s what you would call a “shiner”.
“I know Bones.”
Jim tells the group to rub the mud all over their bodies. “It’s not gonna hurt ya!” Although clearly terrified, most of them start in, pulling mud out of the buckets and grimacing as they wipe it on their arms. One man, Ralph, starts to panic. He can’t do this! He makes a run for it.
Jim turns back to the group. “You think you want to pull a Ralph?” He assures them that they don’t and that he knows what they’re going through because he used to be right where they are now. Booth steps up and taps the man with his badge. He might want to follow him, he has a few questions to ask.
Outside the conference room, Jim tells them that he’s a professor of psychology. Jared was one of his students. Was he the one who gave Jim the black eye? No, that was another student who couldn’t handle his floor licking exercise. Jared on the other hand, was successful.
Booth asks him when he last saw Jared, and Jim says it was right after the “toilet exercise”. Booth asks, “You mean he went to the bathroom?” No, each of Jim’s students must pick a mint out of toilet water and hold it on their tongue for 10 seconds.
As Booth and Bones argue that maybe some people might view what Jim does as torture, Jim insists that Jared was his star patient. Suddenly Ralph appears. No, he’s not there to apologize, he’s there to turn himself in.
Ralph turns to Booth. “I killed Jared. Can you please sterilize your handcuffs before taking me in?"
~*~*~
Sweets is conducting the interrogation, and Bones wants to know why. Booth just looks at her like it’s obvious. "Crazy guy? Shrink? It's a no brainer."
Bones: Are we going to let Sweets interrogate all of our insane suspects?
Sweets puts a hand to his ear, glancing at the mirror. Booth leans towards the mic. “Annoying, isn’t it Sweets?”
Sweets turns back to Ralph. “Why did you kill him?”
“I didn’t kill him,” Ralph insists, seriously explaining, “The fact is if I don’t eat at exactly 8:14 AM according to this watch, the person nearest to me dies.” The professor told him not to eat until nine. They’re either going to have to take his watch or only put him next to horrible people who should die.
Sweets asks Ralph if, by any chance, he dismembered Jared after killing him. “No, I just killed him.”
“Uh, no,” Booth’s voice comes in over the mic. “We gotta keep looking.”
Bones asks why, if Jared was having breakfast with Ralph, didn’t Jared turn up for the session? Sweets asks where Jared went after breakfast. At the coffee place in the lobby. “Why?” “To get coffee.”
Ah, the coffee grounds Hodgins found are starting to make sense.
~*~*~
Back at the hotel, Booth and Bones approach the coffee cart. The barista asks what they want, and Bones asks for a sample of his grounds.
Booth: Just take ‘em Bones, it’s garbage. You don’t need a warrant for garbage.
What’s going on? Booth shows his badge and asks the man if he recognizes Jared’s picture. The guy asks if Jared filed a complaint, because he barely pushed him. He pushed him? Why. Because Jared made him wash his hands with antibacterial soap before starting in on his cappuccino. “And then he had me redo it, three times! Because the cup was dirty, on the outside. Which is was not!” He points to the mugs. “Look at my cups. Pristine.”
Booth: So, you pushed the dude for insulting your cups?
No, “all of these OCDC people are the same”, he argues. He’s going out of business trying to cater to them. “Call it a crime of passion” if you must. He tells them that the last time he saw Jared, last Thursday, the guy came in, apologized, even shook his hand without worrying about germs. It was like he was a totally different person.
Booth and Bones look at each other. Looks like the professor’s methods are actually working.
“Please keep that under your hat,” the guy begs. “The last thing I need is for this to become the coffee Mecca for the phobics.”
Booth and Bones can’t help but smile.
~*~*~
Back at the lab, Wendell awkwardly hovers in Angela’s door. She said he could come to her with any questions, right? Of course!
“I owe people money,” he begins.
“That’s not technically a question, so there’s not much for me to go on.”
He tells her that he he’s got to keep his nose clean, keep his grades up, and graduate top of his class so he can pay those debts back. Angela nods in understanding. "You're worried about getting fired because you can't satisfy Dr. Brennan, right?"
Flustered, Wendell says a curt, “no” and rushes out.
“Wendell? Wendell hold on.” Angela rushes after him. “You never actually asked me a question.”
“That guy, the psycho who helped the serial killer?” Wendell asks with a worried look.
“Okay, could you please not call Zack a psycho?” Angela interrupts. “Crazy as it sounds, we all still love him.”
Wendell leans in. “He was Dr. Brennan’s boy toy right?”
“What?” Angela is confused. “Boy toy as in sexual?” He laughs. “No, no—where did you get—No, absolutely not.”
“Plus the FBI guy,” Wendell says seriously.
“Again, no. Wrong.”
“Then she hit on me!”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“She looked me right in the eyes,” Wendell argues. “And asked if I had any experience with older women, like as in, ‘if you want to work around her, you gotta—”
“Wendell, stop!” Angela interrupts. She tells him he needs to look for another explanation for their conversation, and if he can’t find one, “you’re hallucinating. Or insane, because she absolutely didn’t hit on you.” She gives him a strange look. “I’m glad we talked.”
~*~*~
Angela’s back at her computer when Cam asks if she found out anything new. She found out that for once a day for 30 days, at exactly the same time, Jared called only one number. Who is it? Forward-Retro Publishing Company. The company that dropped Jared after his second book.
~*~*~
Booth and Bones interrogate Jared’s former publisher, Gary Tushman. He says the publishing company’s changed, adding, “You know what I mean Dr. Brennan.”
“No I do not.”
“Try me, Mr. Tushman,” Booth says.
Tushman tells them that it’s no longer about good writing, it’s about marketability. He turns to Bones, that’s the whole reason your photo takes up the whole back cover.
Bones: Because I’m a very good writer.
Tushman: You’re serviceable. But your success is dependent upon your image as a hot scientist chick.
Bones looks to Booth for help, “That’s not true, is it?”
“Of course not,” Booth assures, glaring at Tushman. “Don’t call my partner a “chick”, what’s the matter with you?”
Hey, Tushman argues, he’s just telling it like it is. He hired a guy to be Jared, go to the Geek conventions and all that. So he had no contact with Jared at all, then? No. Booth calls him on the lie, “He called you every day for 30 days”, and suddenly Bones shoots across the table and grabs Tushman by the cheeks.
Booth: Whoa, Bones! Agh.
Bones: *still holding the guy’s mouth open* Ask him what happened to his tooth.
Tushman: Ah, that’s assault, are your hands clean?
Booth: My partner wants to know what happened to your tooth.
Bones: Jared Addison punched him.
Okay he admits to “the cause and effect situation”, but Jared didn’t hit him because he said he was a bad writer. Jared was trying to explain that he’d gotten over his OCD, that he’d do whatever Gary wanted to sell his books, but Gary still refused. He thought Jared was just making it all up. Then Jared punched him, and Gary told him he’d sell his book.
Bones: Why did you change your mind after he hit you?
Booth: Wait, so if I punched you, you’d read my manuscript?
Gary says that Jared hit him with his bare hands. The old Jared wouldn’t have done that. Gary wouldn’t have killed him, because, "Can you imagine the sales I'd've gotten off of revealing the real Jared Addison? I'd've made a fortune."
~*~*~
Back in the lab, Hodgins’s fly egg is finally hatching. Cam approaches and Hodgins shushes her.
“You need quiet for that?”
“No, I just thought it might stop you from talking.”
“Pushing it Dr. Hodgins, how’s about we say you’ve found the line?”
Hodgins turns back to the microscope as the fly hatches. “Hey there little buddy!” It’s a white fly, which only lives in humid climates. Cam points out that Jared’s girlfriend, Kelly, worked in a nursery.
Cam tells her, quite respectfully, that “I’m not moving into Zack’s ld space. I’m not being difficult, I just…I can’t do it. I hope you understand.”
She does.
~*~*~
Angela joins Sweets at a table at the Diner.
“Okay, here’s the thing, this new guy? Wendell, he might be nuts.”
“Hi Angela, pickle?” He offers it to her, and she ignores him.
“He thinks Brennan hit on him.”
Why? She tells him and Sweets answers, “I’m certain she did exactly that.”
“No, no, I’ve known Brennan for years, and there is no way believe me that she—”
“Our murder victim was 28 years younger than his girlfriend,” Sweets explains. “Dr. Brennan was probably looking for insights in her, you know, clumsy yet enduring way.” She might want to let Wendell know she misjudged him.
Angela tells him about the fact that Wendell really needs this job to pay off money, “Like, The Mob, or something”, and Sweets quickly interrupts her. “No, no rampant paranoia, not my jurisdiction. But on the other thing I’m solid.”
She argues that the last time she listened to him “You broke up me and Hodgins.” No, that wasn’t he fault, and Sweets thinks she knows that.
Unable to argue, Angela grabs her purse and gets up. “Yeah.”
~*~*~
Booth, Bones, and Hodgins enter the nursery to serve the warrant to Kelly’s son, David. Hodgins thinks the fly could definitely have come from here, and he goes off to search, Booth and Bones talk to David. Bones reaches her hand into the fertilizer, and Booth is quick to stop her. She doesn’t know what’s in that!
No, David argues, all their fertilizer is 100% organic. Bones puts some of it in her mouth, much to Booth’s disgust. “Ahh, there you go, now you’re gonna get sick, your stomach’s gonna go upside down. It’s gonna be a mess.”
“It’s coffee.”
Booth’s expression changes. “Coffee?” He reaches down to try some himself, spitting it out as Bones and David discuss Jared.
He was there shortly before he died, he was “my mom’s boyfriend. Heavy emphasis on the BOY.”
Still trying to get all the coffee grounds and sea kelp out of his mouth, Booth says, “Yeah we heard this place kind of freaked him out.”
David didn’t know whether it was the dirt or the question freaked him out. What was the question? He wanted permission to marry his mother. David’s answer, “I told him it’d be creepy to have a stepfather who’s ten years younger than me, and that he should forget about it and try to be normal.”
Bones: So you said no.
Yeah, he said no.
Hodgins found the flies and Bones finds them also on the shovel. She tests it for blood and…sure enough there it is.
~*~*~
Back at the lab, Angela confronts Wendell, telling him that he wasn’t totally wrong about Dr. Brennan. She explains that Bones’s interest was completely anthropological.
“But she was looking me right in the eyes.”
“She’s direct,” Angela explains. “And awkward.” So he has two choices. “You either answer her questions like me or Zack, or tell her she’s being inappropriate like Booth or Cam. Either way she’s not going to hold it against you.”
Is she sure? Yeah. But quite frankly, she’s more worried about the money owing thing. Wendell assures her he can pay his debts. That may be, but he can’t work on legal cases if “the wrong kind of people have leverage on you”.
Suddenly Wendell gets angry. “If they’re the wrong kind of people then so am I!” Angela asks him to please calm down, and Wendell yells that his entire neighborhood chipped in to send him to school. Definitely not the mob. Angela explains that she thought he owed the mob and Wendell just laughs.
He doesn’t owe the mob and he doesn’t smoke. Holding the cigarette helps him get into his father’s head.
Wendell: I don’t get you people. I’d like to work here, but it’s like a minefield.
She admits it takes some getting used to.
~*~*~
Cam tells everyone that it was not blood on the shovel. Bones’s “magic juice” (as Booth calls it) reacted with potato proteins on the shovel giving them a false positive.
Booth: I locked the guy up because of potatoes.
Now they’re right back to square one. And without the head, they might never figure it out. When Hodgins suggests that maybe Wendell missed something in the Bones, Angela defends him. He’s doing his job very well. Hodgins admits he just misses Zack. Booth tells him he’s got to get over it, Zack’s not coming back.
“I know where to find the victim’s head.”
Everyone swings around to find Zack standing there in his scrubs and gloves. Everybody just stares in shock.
Cam: This is not good.
Bones: How did you get out?
Zack: You don’t appear happy to see me.
Booth: Oh we’re not.
Bones: Wha—I am. I really am.
Over her shock, she runs over to give Zack a hug. Angela and Hodgins follow as Cam mumbles to Booth, “I doubt he got a weekend pass.” Booth asks Zack how he got out, and Zack answers, “Dr. Sweets helped me.” Angela decides she’s completely changed her mind about Sweets then. “I now love him.”
Cam: Does Dr. Sweets know that he helped you?
Zack: No. *looks at Bones’s arm still clinging to him* You’re hurting my arm.
"All right, Zack, you're with me and Bones. The rest of you, go play with your microscopes or whatever it is you do."
With that, Booth steers Bones and Zack towards the bone room.
Zack looks over the pictures of Jared’s room, explaining that "Everything in the room is organized in sets of twelve. A dozen shoes in the closet. A dozen action figures on the shelf."
Booth and Bones: Should have noticed that.
But Zack did an analysis of Jared’s novels and there’s no recurring anomalies with numbers, just germs and fear of microbes. Then what’s with the number 12? They live at 12 Kindergarten Street. Kindergarten has 12 letters. Alphanumeric is also a twelve-letter number by the way,” Zack adds. “But I suspect that’s just ironic.”
Booth leans over to Bones to whisper, “Okay this side of him? I don’t miss at all.”
Zack continues to explain that books, CDs, gnomes, decorative rocks is always twelve. Booth points out that Jared wouldn’t be gardening, he hates germs. Zack adds that even his name Jared Addison has 12 letters, and suddenly Bones realizes something. “He didn’t name himself, his mother did.” She had OCD too? Most likely.
“But the body was found in 12 pieces, not counting the head, why?” Booth asks.
“The incomplete saw marks on the C2 vertebrae were hesitation marks,” Sweets says, suddenly appearing. “She couldn’t deal with the part of her body that was her child’s face.” He turns to Zack. “You. You used me to escape?” Zack shakes his head. How?
One crime at a time Sweets. Booth asks why Jared’s mother would kill him and he answers, “He was overcoming his disorder.” He was ready to take over his own life, leave her house. It wasn’t just his patterns he was destroying, it was hers. As a result, she suffered a psychotic break and murdered her own child.
Sweets holds up his ID. He still has it.
Yeah, Zack swapped out the magnetic strip “with my looney bin library card.” So that’s why it didn’t work.
Booth asks where Jared’s head is then, and Zack points to the photo. There’s only one thing that’s not in a group of twelve, the birdbath in the center of the yard.
~*~*~
Booth and Bones go with the FBI to remove the birdbath. As the rest of the squints, Zack included, go to the Royal Diner for one last “this is how it used to be” meal.
Sweets waits outside the psychiatric hospital by himself. He sighs and checks his watch.
It’s great to see everyone laughing again at the Diner.
Wendell takes one last look at the forensic platform and heads out, bag in hand.
Booth and Bones dig up a box labeled “Jared Addison”. Tilda stands by as they open it to reveal her son’s head.
Cam hangs up her phone. “Well, Zack was right.”
Angela: Of course he was.
Cam: As always.
Zack: Time to go.
Suddenly the smiles are gone. Everyone is reminded that this is not just like old times after all.
~*~*~
Booth gets out of his car and opens the backseat to let Zack out.
Sweets: What took so long?
Booth: Relax Sweets, okay? He’s all yours.
Sweets: Wait, uh, I thought we’d do this together.
Booth: Look, just take him back through the front door, don’t look guilty, and if anyone asks, you just say you took him for electric shock. Alright?
Booth looks at Zack. “Don’t. Escape. Again.” If he needs to contact them again, just “Call me or Dr. Brennan.” Zack understands.
Alright then, Booth’s got to go.
“Wait—” Sweets stops him. “What if, I mean what if he overpowers me?”
Booth just stares at him. “Zack?”
Zack: I’m much stronger than I look.
Sweets: He’s done it before. He killed a man.
Booth: Okay Zack, promise you’re not gonna kill Sweets.
Zack: I promise.
Booth: There you go!
He’s gotta go, he’s got great seats at the game.
Sweets starts to lead Zack inside. “If we bump into anyone, let me do the talking.”
“I haven’t actually literally done it before you know,” Zack says.
“Had sex?”
“Ended someone’s life,” Zack clarifies, wondering, “Why doesn’t anyone ever believe I’ve had sex?”
Whoa, hold on back up a second. Sweets reminds him that confessed to plunging a knife into someone’s chest.
“I said I killed him, which I did. I told The Master where to find him.”
“But you didn’t plunge a knife?”
“It wasn’t me.”
Sweets can’t believe what he’s hearing. “Zack, why did you confess?!”
“I would have done it,” Zack says quickly. “If The Master would have asked, I would have done it.”
“No, no you don’t know that,” Sweets argues. “People have no idea if they’re capable of ending a life until they’re put in that situation.”
Now everything finally makes sense to Sweets. In all their sessions he’s had question marks because “you at heart, are NOT a killer”. He has to tell Booth and Bones. He gets his phone out, but Zack automatically stops him. He can’t. He’s Sweets’s patient and that would violate patient-doctor confidentiality and Zack is not giving him permission to tell them. But doesn’t he want his friends to know that he’s not a killer?
Zack points out that it still makes him an accessory to murder, if he tells them they’ll take him out of the psych facility and put him in prison. And "Hodgins assures me I would not do well in prison."
“Okay, what about the person who actually did commit the murder? He’s still out there.”
No, The Master killed him so he could recruit Zack.
“We should go in. I don’t want to get you into trouble.” Zack heads towards the hospital and poor Sweets has no choice but to follow.
~*~*~
In her office, Bones is throwing away her last manuscript. Booth enters.
Booth: What are you doing?
Bones: Throwing out my book.
Booth: It’s still on your harddrive.
Bones: Nope, not anymore it’s not.
Booth is shocked. “You erased it? WHOA!” He lunges forward and grabs the manuscript before she can throw it into the trash. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, stop!”
“But I don’t want to be a writer anymore.”
“Why because of what that publisher said?” Booth asks, still pulling papers out of the trash. “He was an idiot, did you see his glasses?”
Bones: I don’t want to be a sexy scientist.
Booth: That's like me saying I don't want to be a sexy FBI agent. We can't change who we are.
Sulking, Bones sits down at her desk as Booth continues to pull out her manuscript despite his bad back. She lets out a long breath and he says, “Suspenseful and chilling. Temperance Brennan leads the pack. Anthropology has never been more exciting.”
Bones is more than a little surprise. “You memorized my reviews?”
Booth holds up her book. “Angela can scan these and get them back on your computer.”
“You’ve known my reviews, Booth, but do you ever read my books?”
He grins at her. “Every single word.”
(Awwwww!)
“You never said anything.”
“Well I figured I’m all over your real word, why would want me in your fantasy world too?” He hands her her manuscripts. She doesn’t want to take it. He won’t give up. Come on, you know you want to.
Finally she takes it back. “I can appreciate that.”
“See how this works?” Booth gets all enthusiastic. “Give and take? We’re PARTNERS, huh?”
“Except you won’t let me fix our back.”
“Oh come on, my back is fine,” says Booth with a limp.
“Or really?” Bones gets up and starts to put her manuscript back in the trash.
“Ohhh, okay, how do I know you’re not gonna, like, paralyze me or make it worse?"
She sets down her book and goes to stand behind him. “I also help you by explaining a lot of things to you.”
“Well, yeah, you know I explain…” Booth stops in mid-sentence as Bones wraps her arms around his waist. “Things to you just as much as…” Bones puts her hands up behind his ears.
“Well my things are more important.”
“That’s debata—OW!” With a loud crunch, Bones cracks his back.
“Necessary pain.”
“Yeah—” he groans as she starts maneuvering him around. Even in pain, Booth manages to croak out, “The way you really help me is to be a guy.”
Bones finally lets him go. “I help you be a guy?”
“Yeah it’s a guy’s thing to fix things, to make ‘em right,” he says, Bones still at his back. “When I fix things, I feel like I am one with the universe."
*CRACK* Bones shoves her fist into his back.
“Ah! Whoa.” Suddenly Booth isn’t in pain anymore. Surprised he turns to face her. “That’s amazing! How’d you do that?”
“We help each other, quid pro quo.”
“I know what that means Bones.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“I know a lot of things.”
Well he didn’t know what fear of germs was called. Yeah, but she didn’t know that she could just take coffee grounds, that she didn’t need a warrant for that.
“I sort of knew that I just…”
Fade to black.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
I knew it! I KNEW Zack wasn't the actual killer!
So glad to have him back (along with the original "Zack hair" LoL) Sweets of course was hilarious and I love how protective in a funny way Booth was in this episde. He read all her books? Awwww The back fixing was classic! | 34 |
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