01E14 - The Man on the Fairway

Zack Addy expresses regret that it's the third case in a row he and Bones must handle without Special Agent Seeley Booth when they are called to the site of a crashed private jet which carried State Department staff and two Chinese cultural attachés (often a spy cover.) The FAA and NTSB classify the crash on a golf-course as an accident, but there is one charcoaled body more than on the passenger list, plus bone fragments of yet another person at the crash site, with cut marks consistent with amputation. Jeffersonian director Dr. Daniel Goodman accepts orders to concentrate only on identifying the sixth passenger; Bones insists to Booth the seventh man is the only possible murder victim. To the amazement of both, Jesse Kane, a reputed expert on missing persons and aspects of police work, approaches them, claiming the bone fragments are probably from his father, rich stockbroker Max Kane, whose disappearance five years earlier on the way to his cottage started Jesse's quest for such cases. He hands Bones his research notes, which suggest Max's much-younger girlfriend, Karen Anderson, as a suspect. The sixth passenger is identified as a white girl in her twenties, on drugs and with foot fetishist marks, while the Chinese were drunk and on Viagra. Karen still lives in Max's house, with a new partner but with access to his fortune for another two years or until he's legally declared dead, but reports Jesse hadn't spoken to Max for two years prior to his disappearance, having been cut off financially as a lazy NYU party animal. Continuing their investigation behind Goodman's back, much to good boy Zack's horror, the team finds the bone fragments fit Max. The body had been frozen, dismembered mechanically using a wood-chipper and spread out over the golf course. Jesse suggests Bones should open her own investigation into her missing parents. Booth finds the wood-chipper in the city's greens department and only one of its two operators, Ray Sparks, is an ex-con...