When a teenage runaway is murdered, all suspicion is immediately placed on his girlfriend, another runaway from the foster-care system; which angers Brennan, as she too was a foster child.
Brennan and Hodgins join Booth and Cam at a crime scene beside an overturned garbage truck. Among the trash in the truck is the body of a young man wrapped in a shroud. Brennan finds that his skull is cracked, and his leg is broken. She also finds something organic in his fist, and bags it for further examination. At the lab Angela is able to create a composite from a facial imprint created by the shroud. Angela begins running the composite through the database for missing children. Cam tells her to concentrate on runaways and the foster-care system, as a kid found in a dumpster is most likely in that category. Brennan is put off Cam's assumptions, but tells Angela to follow orders. Angela finds a match, Dylan Krane: a runaway from a wealthy family who went missing with his girlfriend, Kelly Morris, who is from the foster-care system. The parents of Dylan Krane are brought to the Jeffersonian, and immediately point to Kelly Morris as the typical foster child who leads other kids down the wrong path, and ended up getting their son killed. Brennan clearly doesn't appreciate their bias.