It’s Valentine’s Day on Bones, and while I’m certainly not opposed to holiday episodes in general, a lot of the Valentine’s stuff here felt sloppy and some of it was just annoying, so I wish they’d gone with a normal episode. Especially because this aired a few days after Valentine’s Day, anyway. But more on the holiday stuff later; first, we have a murder to solve.
The Mystery of the Week starts when housekeeper Lucy Rodriguez finds an ickily decomposing body in the home tanning bed of her boss, wedding planner Wendy Bovitz. At the scene, Brennan confirms that the victim is a woman in her thirties. The timer on the tanning bed is broken, so the heat has accelerated the decomp, and they determine the victim has been dead for 32 to 38 hours. Clark finds some fractures that could be a sign of murder, but Brennan says the breaks are a few years old. Tox screen results show alcohol and diazepam in the victim’s system, so Cam theorizes that she might have just fallen asleep in the tanning bed. No such luck, though: further examination of the bones shows that she was stabbed through the heart. (Wedding planner. Valentine’s Day. Stabbed through the heart. Get it?) And Angela’s digital reconstruction of the victim’s face shows that it is in fact Wendy Bovitz.
Booth and Sweets talk to Bovitz’s assistant Darren Hargrove, who says he last saw the victim a few days ago. He left her lots of messages, but she had a tendency to get overwhelmed so he wasn’t surprised that she didn’t respond. The current stressor: the big Erickson wedding tonight; Hargrove doesn’t know how he’ll pull it off without Bovitz. When Booth says that Hargrove’s security code at Bovitz’s office/house was used yesterday, Hargrove says he stopped by to pick up fabric swatches; Bovitz wasn’t there and the fabric was by the door, so he took it and left. He’s distraught over Bovitz’s death and keeps saying that he loved her, but Booth and Sweets both assume he’s gay because of his effeminate mannerisms, so they think he means platonic love.
Angela gets into Bovitz’s laptop and finds an “In Case of Death” file. It has a picture of Bovitz with a black eye and other injuries, with the words “If anything happens to me it was my husband.” Booth finds her husband, Greg Bovitz, who does horse-drawn carriage rides for weddings. He says they were temporarily separated because he was sick of just doing carriage rides – he was a horse trainer by trade. He tells Booth that Wendy’s first husband was the one who beat her, but he was killed in a bar fight last year, so he can’t be the murderer. Greg Bovitz also suggests that Booth talk to Warren Erickson – his wife was planning Erickson’s daughter’s wedding, and she was scared of him. Meanwhile, Cam finds something in Bovitz’s hair for Hodgins to analyze. She thinks it might be a butterfly, but he determines that it was some sort of vegetation. As she continues to examine the bones, Brennan finds a recently-broken finger that could indicate a struggle.
Booth and Brennan go to the wedding venue and find Erickson and his daughter Raina fighting about money. Erickson admits that he went to Bovitz’s house a few days ago and argued over the wedding’s budget, because he thought Bovitz was taking advantage of his wealth by promising extravagant things to Raina. While they’re talking, Clark calls and tells Brennan that there’s skin under the victim’s fingernails, so Brennan tries to get a DNA sample from Erickson, but he refuses. The court won’t compel a sample, but Booth finds out that Erickson’s son is in jail, so his DNA is on file and they can use that to compare. Booth asks for Sweets’s opinion, and Sweets says that Erickson is a self-made millionaire, so he’s insecure and ego-maniacal, and he seems to lack compassion. Sweets thinks he could be a killer.
Hodgins figures out that the thing from Bovitz’s hair is an orchid, so he guesses that Erickson got mad while they were arguing over the flower budget, threw the orchid at Bovitz, and then stabbed her. When they get the DNA results, Clark thinks there’s a match for Erickson, but Cam points out that the DNA they found was female – so it actually belongs to the bride, Raina Erickson. Booth and Brennan confront Raina, who at first denies being at Bovitz’s house. “You mean that DNA stuff is really true?” Hah. She eventually admits that she went there are argued about the orchids, and threatened to call her father to hire a new wedding planner. Bovitz tried to take the phone from her and they fought a little, but Raina swears they made up, and her alibi checks out.
Clark makes a cast of the broken bones to try to identify the murder weapon, and Angela helps with a rendering of the weapon, but they can’t figure out what it is. Hodgins discovers it’s made of cast iron. Angela digs around on the laptop some more and finds articles of incorporation that say that Hargrove gets the whole company upon Bovitz’s death. When Booth and Brennan tell him this, he’s shocked; she’d told him she had a surprise for him, but he didn’t know what. He insists that he didn’t kill her and tells Booth and Brennan that he was in love with Bovitz. But Booth and Brennan recognize the cake topper Hargrove just put in a cake as the murder weapon, and Booth arrests him.
This is a bit premature, though, as Angela discovers that Greg Bovitz checked his email on his wife’s computer right around the time she died – and there’s horse hoof oil on the murder weapon. They bring Bovitz in for questioning, and Booth tells him that his wife was having an affair. Brennan then lies about finding Bovitz’s DNA on the murder weapon, and goes into a whole Wuthering Heights analogy about how hard it must have been on Bovitz to watch his wife with Hargrove. Bovitz is caught up in Brennan’s supposed sympathy and confesses.
Booth and Brennan both say they’re strongly anti-Valentine’s Day, although Booth insists it has nothing to do with his recent breakup. Instead, he objects because it’s a Hallmark holiday, blah blah, and this is one of those times when I really wish the show would remember that Booth’s supposed to be Catholic, because it would make much more sense for him to point out that it’s the feast of a martyred saint. Instead, he says that the only important thing that happened on February 14 was the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Angela suggests that he find someone else who’s doing nothing that night so they can do nothing together, and I kind of assume she means Brennan, but it’s not completely clear. Brennan, meanwhile, keeps getting offers for Valentine’s Day dates and turning them down. She’s insulted that all these men assume she’ll be available at such short notice, while Booth seems a bit jealous and rather interested in who these guys are. After they solve the case, Booth ends up going to the shooting range, and of course Brennan shows up. She brings a “gift” of the actual guns from the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, which she borrowed from the Roaring Twenties exhibit at the Jeffersonian. (Can she just do that? REALLY?) They shoot the guns together, and she ends with a “Happy Valentine’s Day Massacre, Booth.”
Honestly, Cam‘s story line drove me NUTS this week. She keeps trying to rush everyone to solve the murder quickly because it’s Valentine’s Day and she has plans with Paul. She gives them a deadline of 6:45 – but why? Since when are they not allowed to take a few hours off when they’re in the middle of a case? They usually go home to eat and sleep and stuff, right? And since when does Cam herself have to be there if Brennan or one of the squints is working late? All this hurrying made no sense to me and seemed like a dumb way to try to add tension or suspense or something. Anyway, Paul brings her roses at work, and eventually picks her up in a limo with more roses, and I guess it’s sweet and all but I was just so annoyed at the manufactured drama that I didn’t even care.
Angela insists that she doesn’t care about Valentine’s Day now that they’re married, but Hodgins is determined to do something to prove they can still be romantic. His first idea is earrings to match a necklace he gave her, but Cam tells him that Angela doesn’t really like the necklace in the first place. Hodgins then gets an Egyptian tear vase that Angela had admired in the Jeffersonian gift shop, but Clark convinces him that it’s wrong for Valentine’s Day. He points out that Angela doesn’t care about things and advises Hodgins to “give her something that only [he] can give her.” After Cam suggests something from the lab, Hodgins makes a new hybrid slime mold that smells like roses and names it Angelicus montenegris. He tells her “It’s going to be very famous in, you know, certain circles,” and it’s all very cute and very them.
Sweets gets Daisy a bouquet of daisies for Valentine’s Day. Aww.
Our Rotating Intern is Clark, who’s still doing his new soul-baring routine and won’t stop talking about his girlfriend Nora. Nora always tells him what she wants for Valentine’s Day, but this is the first time he’s been hesitant about giving it. He talks to Angela, who tells him that if it’s not illegal or painful, he should do it. Clark won’t tell Angela what it is, but it turns out to be some sort of Cupid roleplaying/stripping routine that I found a little odd, to be honest. But I guess that’s what Nora wanted!
Next time: Angela’s dad is back! And so is the sniper storyline.
Photo Courtesy of FOX