The Male in the Mail

Episode Summary

At the post office, Saroyan, Brennan, and Booth find a series of boxed packed with human remains. From the wear on the lower incisors and the, Brennan notes the victim was a male in his early 20s. His head was dismembered at an unspecified cervical vertebra, and there are other marks of dismemberment on theof both scapulae.At the Jeffersonian, Hodgins uses a fancy-pants eye surgery laser to cut open the cardboard box. Once they get out all the bones, Edison notes that the victim had aat the second metacarpal of his left hand. The weapon that was used to dismember him was a blade that was uniform with vertical striations. Angela traces the label on the boxes to a Ship-n-Print in Hyattsville, MD. As Booth and Brennan head over there to check it out, Edison finds a hit in dental records for an Oliver Lawrence, who worked at the store.B&B interview the front desk guy, Tony Dunson, but quickly ask to speak to the manager, Connor Trammel. Trammel notes that Oliver was a good employee and went missing a while back. There was also a bunch of staff turnover around the same time, as he and a group of employees - Sheila Burnside, her husband (Hugh?), and Ralph Berti - won the lottery. He no longer speaks to them, though, since he's still working at the copy shop and they've squandered their riches. Hodgins and Edison finally work out the weapon that dismembered Oliver - a guillotine best fits the profile of the weapon, and Brennan realizes that the industrial paper cutter in the shop matches pretty well.Back at the Jeffersonian, Edison notes that there were microfractures to the victim's third and fourth left ribs, as well as his left radius, leading Brennan to conclude that there was a fistfight. There are also different weapon marks - this time, there are, on the right scapula (acromion), humerus (), and ulna (). The victim was hit on the shoulder and elbow with a tiny saw. Meanwhile, Hodgins is still boiling the boxed body and comes up with afor Saroyan, who sees a piece of tape embedded in the muscle. This suggests that the victim was killed when his rightwas severed. Edison thinks the weapon may have been a tape gun and has Angela compare the blades of the guns used at the Ship-n-Print to the marks on the bone, and one matches.One of the last jobs that was run on the company's printer was of a woman sitting on the copier, with a man's hands cradling her butt. Based on the distance between her, Brennan thinks the woman was Sheila. Based on the slight deformity of the left second finger, Brennan thinks the man was Oliver. Because of this evidence and because of the location of the injuries on the victim's right side, Brennan thinks the killer may have been Hugh, Sheila's husband. But the Jeffersonian team finally finds the smoking gun: a fragment of bone embedded in the victim's muscle. This bone, however, came from the Buddhist necklace that Tony Dunson always wears. He was shippingto clients, and Oliver found out. Tony didn't mean to kill Oliver, but it just happened.Oh, and Booth's father died. I actually missed the first few minutes of the show (stupid DVR), so I didn't get the explanation. But lots of the show was about encouraging Booth to mourn for the father who beat him and whom he had cut out of his life 20 years ago. His grandfather rightly chastizes Booth for being so callous that he (the grandfather) lost a son, and gives him a box full of his father's mementos. Booth squints through fake tears at thein last season's power-outage episode, and he has a bunch of misty watercolor memories.