The Boneless Bride in the River
Interrupting Brennan's romantic vacation with Sully on his boat in the marina, Booth drags her to a crime scene on the river where the shell of a woman's body is found minus all of her bones. The body poses an intriguing case for the team as they attempt to reconstruct the women's skeletal structure without the help of any bones. Eager to get back to her vacation, Brennan quickly weighs in on the case, but in the absence of any bones, does not feel she has a reason to be involved. Zach, Hodgins and Cam attempt to construct a skeleton for the body, a task that proves to be both difficult and gruesome. During the process Cam finds the sole remaining bone in the deflated body, which is enough of a reason for Booth to barge back into Brennan and Sully's vacation and bring Brennan into the Jeffersonian once again. Booth investigates an international mail-order bride agency as well as the woman's former fiancé, but the man quickly evades the investigation. When further clues in the case point to a rare and ancient Asian custom that involves burying the bones of an unmarried woman with those of an unmarried man as a sort of afterlife wedding ceremony, Brennan and Booth realize they are in fact looking for a murder suspect who may have killed the woman found in the river to use her bones for the ceremony. Meanwhile, Sully propositions Brennan, forcing her to make an important decision about their future together, a proposition that surprises her and for which she's definitely not prepared.