Watching Bones

Great episode last week – Booth and Bones finally begin their therapy session, and that’s how we open this episode. Everyone welcome Dr. Lance Sweets, Booth and Bones new therapist! Only 22 years old, “Sweets,� as Booth so lovingly dubs him, doesn’t hav nearly the presence or effectiveness as our beloved Dr. Gordon Garrett. What he does have, however, is a keen ability to patronize and irritate Booth. Since Bones doesn’t believe in psychotherapy, she is patiently cooperative if not a little condescending.
After leaving their first therapy session, they received the call t hat a body has been found. Even thought the crime scene is on VA Hospital grounds, the site is oddly populated. Booth explains to Bones that teenagers come there on weekends to “get together,’ to which the light bulb in Bones’ head goes off and she responds “to fornicate!� Just the logical, removed, factual kind of response only Bones could come up with.

The body appears to have been decaying for a few weeks, but it doesn’t make sense that with so many people around it wasn’t found earlier. When Bones mentions that the body seems to be putting off a lot of heat for someone that’s been dead for so long, they take the corpse’s internal temperature and find that with a temp of 127 degrees, this body was cooked. (Looks like another cannibal story, doesn’t it?) Upon checking out the body, Hodgins finds pesticide on the clothing of the victim. Since the victim turned out to be Frank Curtis, the owner of a nationwide organic supermarket chain, it doesn’t make a lot of sense that he would be covered in something he supposedly stands against. Since the family of the victim admitted that Frank tended to pressure other farmers to go organic, and if they didn’t he would push them off their land and buy them out, it stood to reason that he didn’t make a lot of friends that way. Plenty of farmers seemed to have motive.

The most recent farmer Frank was “working� with was Andrew Harding, a tobacco farmer, Harding admits that he isn’t upset to hear about Frank’s death. When Booth mentions the pesticide found on Frank’s clothing and asks about Hardin’s use of the same pesticide on the day of Frank’s death, Harding admits to having sprayed him with it, although he claims he did not kill him. Back at the lab, Cam and Angela identify marks on Frank’s body as button impressions. The big deal about this is that his clothing didn’t have buttons. There was a second body pressed up against his as he decomposed – a second victim. When Bones learns about the second victim, she makes the connection that tobacco needs to be cured, which would account for the temperature needed to cook Frank’s body – and also the “skin slippage� that occurred from the second body to his. Booth and Bones head back to Harding’s farm.

While searching the farm, Hardin’s wife makes everyone lemonade and entertains them all with stories of how Frank used to infuriate Harding by hitting on her. She tells Booth that he was a real ladies man, and that he was known for his flirting. Things don’t look good for Harding until Hodgins identifies a bug found on Frank’s body. The bug is usually found on pineapple plants. It turns out that there is a farmer in VA trying to grow tropical fruits in a hothouse. When they go to interview Lyndon Page, he says that he never had a problem with Frank, and jokingly says that maybe that was because he didn’t have a wife for him to hit on! While checking out his hothouse, Booth picks on Bones about a smell, asking if it was her. At first confused, when Bones finally smells what he’s talking about, she turns around and blames him for it. Page joins them and points out that there’s a compost facility nearby. This makes Bones realize that a compost heap’s temperature gets pretty high. After checking with Hodgins, who verifies that the temperature of compost heaps can get up to 170 degrees (a temperature high enough to cook a body), Booth and Bones go to check out the place. At the discussion of a trip to the compost heap, Hodgins wants in and asks to join them. Booth comments on how he is way too excited about compost.

At the compost facility, Booth talks with some of the men and finds that while some like him pretty well, some disagree. One of the men, Charlie Rogan, dated Frank’s daughter all through high school and really looked up to Frank. Another man, Clay Ansley, disagrees, saying that Frank was only in it for the money. He points to his large house and continual use of air conditioning as proof that he didn’t really care about the environment. Just a little later, Hodgins takes a step in the compost and causes a “crunch� – something compost doesn’t normally do. He and Bones overturn the top layer of compost and find another body - this one a woman. Back at the lab, Zach shows Cam that he has found what appeared at first to be a stab wound on Frank’s body. He has determined that it was actually a congenital abnormality, and had nothing to do with his death. He has also found several puncture wounds that he has yet to determine what weapon created the wounds. With the addition of the second body, Zach and Cam check out the body as Hodgins discovers that the woman was dead a day before Frank. Angela comes back with her sketch of the woman, noting that she doesn’t match any of the missing persons on file. At further examination, they find that various wounds on the body show that someone tried to perform CPR on her, meaning that someone tried to save her. It looks like her murder was not intentional.

When Booth and Bones go back to talk to Frank’s wife, she admits to knowing about Frank’s affairs but says she was trying to protect her daughter. Her daughter, Kat, comes in and admits to her mom that she knew all along but was pretending not to know in order to protect her mom. When they find out that Frank kept an office in town, they check it out and find that it’s really an apartment and that it seems that a woman lives there. When Bones searches the room, she finds dried blood on the edge of the coffee table. They also find a photo of Frank and a young woman on the fridge. The picture of the woman matches Angela’s drawing of the victim. Booth finds a receipt signed with the name Emma Billings. They now have the ID of the second body.

At first glance, it looks like Frank was having an affair with Emma, who was a cashier in one of his stores. Emma apparently moved to get away from a stalker, Noel Liftin. Turns out, Liftin had a motel room right across the street from Emma’s. When the bring Liftin in for questioning, he claims that he loved Emma, but doesn’t seem to know that Frank is also dead. He talks about how possessive Frank was of Emma, and says they should talk to him. Liftin’s alibi is questionable; he claims he was out selling homemade hemp oil body products. When the lab finds some kind of oil product on the furniture and carpet from Emma’s apartment, things don’t look good for Liftin. Things get even a little more complicated when Cam calls Bones back to the lab to show her something they found. They were comparing the bodies and found that both Emma and Frank had a similar congenital defect. Being a little odd, Cam ran the DNA of the two victims. Frank and Emma weren’t lovers; they were father and daughter. Zach continues to work to figure out the murder weapon and with Angela’s help, they call up an image of Frank’s torso. Imagining that Frank may have been a little broader than Zach has recreated the skeleton, they spread the image of the wounds out, creating equidistant stab wounds. Zach realizes that the murder weapon was a pitchfork. As he makes this discovery, Hodgins comes in with test results on the oil found at the apartment. It wasn’t hemp oil, but biodiesel fuel, as used by the trucks at the compost facility. The day Booth and Bones first visited the facility, one of the employees was complaining about the truck acting up ever since they converted it to biodiesel fuel.

Since Liftin had been watching Emma’s apartment, they go back to him to get a composite drawing of who might have been at Emma’s apartment on the day she died. He admitted to seeing a truck from a compost facility, and identifies a man with sandy-blond hair and bamboo sunglasses. Drawing in hand, Booth and Bones return to the facility and search their tool shed. With the help of her trusty spray-on luminal, Bones identifies the murder weapon as a pitchfork in the shed. Booth arrests Charlie Rogan for the murders of Frank and Emma. But, it can’t be that easy – it never is. Bones gets a call from Cam who tells her that she ran a diagnostic on the skin beneath Emma’s fingernails and her attacker was female. Not only that, but there was a 25% match. Emma was attacked, and ultimately murdered by her half-sister Kat.

When brought in for questioning, Kat admits to killing Emma, although it seems to have been an accident. She went to the apartment to tell her to stop seeing her father, and when they fought, Emma fell and hit her head on the coffee table, killing her instantly. Kat didn’t realize it was too late and tried to perform CPR, but called Charlie for help when she realized it was too late. Charlie agreed to help and took care of hiding Emma’s body. Later, when Frank came to Charlie looking for Emma, he charged Charlie who stabbed him with the pitchfork he was using for work. They also buried his body in the compost with Emma’s. Later, they moved Frank’s body so that it would be found so Kat’s mother could collect the insurance money, because with no body there was no money.

Bones tells Kat the truth about Emma, that she wasn’t her father’s mistress, but was really his daughter and her half-sister. Kat had no idea and was even more upset about the accidental murder. Later, back in therapy, Sweets comments that they should be happy that they solved their case. Booth tells him that it doesn’t always work out that way, that sometimes solving a case just brings more unhappiness for the people involved. Sweets starts to get on Booth about this but Bones stands up for him and tells Sweets to back off. Sweets admits to seeing how much Booth and Bones compliment each other in their work, and announces that he plans to keep them together as partners, but that he will also want to continue to see them for the next few months to work on some other “issues.�