In a change of pace, the team tries to solve a murder while the victim is still among the living. FBI Director Cullen's daughter Amy had previously received a bone graft for her broken leg that has now given her terminal bone cancer, and that the tissue bank that supplied the sample only exists on paper.
Tropes
- Bittersweet Ending: The team has busted an illegal tissue harvesting ring that's selling cancerous tissue samples, but Deputy Director Cullen's daughter Amy is still going to die of terminal bone cancer.
- Downer Ending: Sure, they caught the murderer, but Amy's still terminal.
- Laser-Guided Karma: A woman who dropped out of medical school is stealing corpses from a funeral home and selling them through a fake medical supply house for bone grafts. One of these corpses, who died of mesothelioma, infected at least five people with a deadly disease. The suspect isn't going to trial, though. She didn't last long enough in med school to know that bone dust is toxic, so she gave herself a fatal disease.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: Cullen, Booth's boss, has always been a somewhat antagonistic figure to Bones, but here he's just a grieving father who insists that "The FBI is not my own personal police force, give it to the CDC".
- Whodunnit to Me?: The team tries to solve a murder where the victim is still alive.
