Air Date 9/13/05

When a badly decomposed corpse is found during the routine cleaning of a pond in Arlington National Cemetery, FBI Special Agent Seeley Booth hijacks renowned forensic anthropologist (and best selling novelist), Dr. Temperance Brennan, to help identify the body.

Brennan (or "Bones" as Booth likes to call her) has just arrived home from a two-month stint in Guatemala where she was identifying victims of genocide, and is in no mood to lend Booth a hand (she got burned the last time they worked together). Brennan refuses to help Booth unless he promises her full participation in the case. Reluctantly Booth agrees and their partnership is born.

At the crime scene, Brennan makes a preliminary identification of the victim with the help of her assistant Zack Addy. Brennan determines the body (mostly skeletonized) belongs to a woman between eighteen and twenty-three, race unknown. Pelvic bone shape gives sex. Epiphysis fusion gives age. Brennan can tell from bursitis in the shoulder that the victim was a tennis player.

Back at the Jeffersonian, Brennan argues with her boss, Dr. Daniel Goodman, about his assigning her to work with the FBI without her permission. Goodman reminds her that the Jeffersonian is a federally funded agency and he can loan her out to other federal agencies as he sees fit.

Inside Brennan's Medico-Legal Lab, Brennan examines the victims remains while the Squints (the other scientists from Brennan's lab) chat about Brennan's new book "Bred and the Bone." Dr. Jack Hodgins, an entomologist, tells Brennan that pond microbes accelerated the decomposition of the body. He found three larval stages of Tricoptera and Chironimidae, which tell him the body was in the pond for one winter and two summers. Hodgins has also found small bone fragments in the silt, which he guesses are rana temporaria, otherwise known as frog bones. Brennan finds microscopic grit embedded in the skull fragments. She gives them to Hodgins to analyze.

Brennan debrides the skull fragments and reassembles them, which takes her all night.

Meanwhile, Booth is called out before his boss, FBI Deputy Director Sam Cullen, for guaranteeing a squint a field role in an active murder investigation. Cullen tells Booth that it's on him if anything goes wrong.

At the Jeffersonian, Angela Montenegro, a forensic artist, using a computer program she's developed called the Angelator, does a three dimensional holographic reconstruction of the victim's skull, revealing the victim's identity as missing senate intern, Cleo Eller, the biggest missing person case of the decade. We learn that Cleo Eller was an intern for Senator Bethlehem and that the rumor is they were having an affair.

Brennan wants to confront the Senator. Booth argues that the Senator is not the only suspect. The Senator's aide, Ken Thompson, was Cleo's boyfriend. There's also Cleo's stalker, Oliver Laurier, a speech writer who cracked under pressure and ended up in a loony bin. Booth breaks it to Brennan - the case is big. Cullen's going to want to set up a special unit to investigate which means they're going to have do things by the book, cops on the street, squints in the lab. Brennan blackmails Booth until he agrees to let her come with him into the field.

Back at the lab, Hodgins identifies the particulates embedded in Cleo's skull as fragments of rolled steel (most likely from a sledgehammer), cement particles and diatomaceous earth. Stab marks are found on Cleo's ribs, and distinctive damage has been done to her distal phalanges (the murderer whittled away her finger pads in an attempt to hide her identity). By dissecting pupal casings, Hodgins determines that Cleo was taking lorazepam, chlordiazepoxide and Meclizine hydrochloride for depression. Brennan determines that the small bones found with Cleo's body aren't frog bones. They're fetal bones. Cleo Eller was pregnant!

Hodgins, a paranoid conspiracy theorist, convinces Brennan that because a U.S. Senator who heads a commission on the FBI is involved, the powers that be will try to make this case disappear. Brennan takes matters into her own hands and confronts the Senator without Booth's knowledge. Her plan backfires and Booth is thrown off the case. Brennan refuses to give up and with the help of the squints, uncovers that Cleo Eller's boyfriend, Ken Thompson, fearing the scandal with Cleo and Senator Bethlehem would derail his own career plans, killed the pregnant Cleo using a hammer on a cement floor sprinkled with diatomaceous earth.