Jungle Fever (3/10)
Title: Jungle Fever
Author: Calliatra
Rating: FR15
Category: Gen
Pairing: None
Characters: Tony, the whole team
Genre: Casefile
Words: 2,423 (26,461 total)
Disclaimer: All recognizable NCIS characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.
Summary: When a Petty Officer’s decapitated body is found it starts an investigation that spirals out of control and places Tony in grave danger.
Written for the Can Anybody Hear Me? Challenge and the Casefile Challenge at NFA and inspired by the Chinese Whisper Challenge.
Chapter Warnings: Autopsy findings, squirrel trivia
Prologue | Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five | Chapter Six | Chapter Seven | Chapter Eight | Chapter Nine
* * *
Chapter Two: A Tropical Lead
“What’ve we got?” Gibbs’ question - brusque, as always - announced his entrance into the squad room.
Tony quickly scrambled out from behind his desk. “Fingerprints confirm our beheaded guy is really Petty Officer Jeffrey Thorne.” With a click of the remote, he made Thorne’s greatly magnified ID picture appear on the monitor. “Twenty-four years old, unmarried, no children. Lives in Norfolk, Virginia. Deployed to the USS Truman, which docked in Norfolk on Sunday afternoon.”
Ziva came up next to him and continued. “He works in the supply corps. He reports to the Supply Officer, Commander Frank Nelson. I have not been able to reach him yet, he is apparently tied in with the restocking process.” Nobody bothered to correct her, this time.
McGee took over. “I checked Thorne’s bank and credit card statements and his phone call history. He doesn’t have much money, but he doesn’t spend much, either. The only regular calls are to his parents. Nothing looks suspicious, so far. I pulled his file, and according to his superiors he was dedicated and good at his job. The only negative incident on file is a fight he got into with a bunkmate after he reported him for drug use.”
“Could that be a motive for murder?” Tony wondered out loud. “You tattled on me, so I’ll kill you?”
“Doesn’t matter, ‘cause it can’t be that guy. I looked into it, Boss,” McGee said, turning to Gibbs, “He was processed for Administrative Separation, but he died of an overdose before anything was decided.”
“So what you’re saying is you have nothing.”
All three squirmed under Gibbs’ glare, but had to admit to the fact.
“I’m going to see what Ducky’s got. You’d better have something for me when I get back.” With that he headed for the elevator.
“How are we supposed to have something?” Ziva complained. “There is nothing to be had. Petty Officer Thorne has never done anything wrong. He does not even have a parking ticket! He does not have money and he was not working on anything important. Why would anybody kill him?”
“Well,” Tony considered, “if there’s no logical reason to kill him, it’s gotta be something personal. This guy was more of a goody two-shoes than McGee, and he’s a tattletale. He probably didn’t exactly make friends that way.”
“You’re thinking someone got angry enough to kill him?” McGee didn’t look convinced.
“I’m thinking he’s the kind of guy everybody hates even more than the Agent Afloat, ‘cause he comes without a badge and the general warning to stay away. I’m thinking we should talk to the people he worked with, see if there’s someone who really had it in for Thorne. You know, someone who thought he was a real thorn in his side.”
McGee rolled his eyes at the forced pun. “We should call his parents, too. If he was having problems with someone, maybe he told them.”
“Are we not forgetting something?” Ziva asked. “The manner of Petty Officer Thorne’s death!” she clarified, exasperated, when her teammates looked at her blankly. “Why cut his head off? There are far more efficient ways to kill a man. And why do the same thing to the squirrel? That does not seem like a man killing his enemy because he hates him.”
“You’re right, it doesn’t,” Tony confirmed. “But until Abby and Ducky get back to us, we have no clues, no suspects and no leads. Do you want to be the one to tell Gibbs that we don’t have any ideas, either?”
Ziva’s silence was answer enough.
*
In Autopsy, Ducky was bent over the body of Petty Officer Thorne, checking for any small marks he might have missed, a job he did not trust his assistant with. Jimmy was, therefore, currently unoccupied.
“Why would anyone do something like this, Doctor? It’s just awful. He must have been so innocent and happy. And then someone cuts his head off, just like that.” Jimmy was utterly oblivious to the odd look the ME gave him upon hearing his description of the victim as “innocent and happy.” “I mean, how could they? He’s just so adorable! If I’d seen him, I’d have wanted to cuddle him, not kill him.”
“I’m not sure Petty Officer Thorne would have been comfortable with that, Mr. Palmer,” Ducky said disapprovingly. Really, his assistant was certainly an odd duck (no pun intended). “Though no doubt he would have preferred unwanted attention of that kind to the murderous kind.”
“What?” Jimmy was flummoxed. “Oh! Oh, no, Doctor, I didn’t mean the Petty Officer! I was talking about the squirrel!” He cast another fond look at the beheaded rodent’s carcass.
“And what, pray tell, made you feel that the squirrel was more worthy of your attention that our Petty Officer?”
“Oh, er, well, nothing. I mean, of course he’s the first priority. It’s just, well, you let me do the autopsy on the last squirrel we had, so I thought I should prepare for this one, you know, get to know our ‘guest’? I was just thinking, he was probably a lot like the squirrels I used to play with when I was a kid. See, I would often spend my summer vacation at my Aunt Agatha’s estate out in the country, and there were squirrels all over the place there. So I’d always leave walnuts on the terrace for them, and after a while they started trusting me.” His face seemed to glow with the recalled youthful joy. “Aunt Agatha was furious, though. She was terrified of squirrels, and when she found out that I’d been feeding them on her terrace she sent me home and told me to never come back.” His eyes assumed a faraway look as he remembered.
“Ah.” The good doctor didn’t really know what to say to that. “Did you know, Mr. Palmer, that some evolutionary biologists believe that humans have an instinctive, primordial fear of mice and rats - and, in your aunt’s case, squirrels - because our ancestors had good reason to be afraid of them? Archeologists have found fossilized evidence of enormous rodents who would certainly have been a danger to early man. Take, for example, the Castoroides ohioensis, the giant beaver of North America. It was up to eight feet long and weighed up to two hundred pounds! A fearsome creature, wouldn’t you say? Yes… by comparison our fellow here,” He walked over to the second autopsy table and took in the small, furry form that appeared quite forlorn on the vast expanse of icy steel, “would seem rather harmless.”
“Aunt Agatha wouldn’t have thought so,” Jimmy laughed. “She always said she’d kill the beasts if she got her hands on one.”
“Then perhaps we ought to be looking at your aunt as a potential suspect in this investigation?” Ducky said, eyebrows raised.
“Oh, no! She could never actually kill a squirrel, she’s much too afraid of them. She would always run away shrieking if she just saw on in the distance.” He chuckled at the memory.
At that moment, the Autopsy doors slid open with their typical, understated whoosh, announcing the arrival of Special Agent Gibbs.
“Got anything for me, Duck?”
“Well, I do believe we have just eliminated Mr. Palmer’s aunt as a suspect in this crime.”
Gibbs’ reaction to this news was to glare at Jimmy, who in turn blushed and started stammering. “It’s just, you see, my Aunt Agatha, she’s scared of squirrels, and so we saying… actually that’s not important, you’re here for the findings on Petty Officer Thorne and, uh, you know what, I’ll just… go now.” He shuffled out, but not without throwing a terrified glance behind him at the steely-eyes Team Leader.
“That boy…” Ducky shook his head; “I don’t know what to do with him at times.”
“The body, Duck?” Gibbs was in no mood to discuss the issues with Palmer.
“Right. You will be interested to know, Jethro, that decapitation was not what killed Petty Officer Thorne. The beheading was, I’m afraid, postmortem. If he had still been alive, there would have been very heavy bleeding, yet most of the blood remains in this body. Clearly the heart was no longer pumping when the neck was severed.”
“Then how’d he die?”
“I found blood in his stool, and some in his urine as well. I also found kidney and liver damage, inflammation of the mouth, throat and stomach and, perhaps most interesting of all, blisters on the lips. All of this together leads me to believe that our Petty Officer was poisoned. I have sent samples up to Abby, hopefully she will be able to identify the toxin.”
“Why would someone poison him and then cut off his head?”
“I believe, Jethro, that part is your job. But I have some addition information that might help you. The lividity marks on the body are inconsistent with the position it was found in in the warehouse, meaning it was dumped after lividity had already set. Typically, lividity is set after approximately ten hours, so-”
“So the body was dumped sometime after 2200.”
“Precisely. And if you’ll take a closer look at our Petty Officer’s hands, you’ll notice that they’re darker than the rest of his skin, indicating that blood flow was restricted.”
“His hands were tied?” Gibbs frowned.
“His feet, as well. It appears he was lying on his back with his arms tied in front of him when he died, which leads me to believe he was held captive.”
“We know where? How long?”
“Impossible to say. We can only hope Abby found trace evidence on his clothes that can tell us something.”
“All right, thanks, Duck.”
Gibbs was almost at the door when Ducky called out. “Oh, Jethro, could you send Mr. Palmer back in? I do believe he is lurking by the elevator.”
*
Abby’s lab was, as always, vibrating with the cacophonous sounds she called music. Abby herself was at her worktable, busily lapping at something set on top of it.
“Hi, Gibbs!” she called out between licks.
“Hey, Abs.” Gibbs’ tone was ever so slightly apprehensive. Getting closer, he managed to make out a row of lollipops, set up in rack ordinarily meant to hold test tubes. As he watched, she bent forward to lick another lolly, marked something on a chart, then moved on to the next one.
“What are you doing?” Having recognized the presence of candy, he was now merely curious. Sweets of any kind had a tendency to make his favorite forensic scientist act a little odd.
“I,” Abby proclaimed seriously, “am solving one of the world’s oldest mysteries. Okay, well, maybe not one of the oldest, but it’s been around since, like, 1970, so it’s definitely pretty old.”
Gibbs winced slightly, then looked questioningly at her.
“‘How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop!’” she exclaimed, as if it were self-evident. “Do you know that there’s no reliable study on that? There’ve only been five so far, and the results range from 3500 licks to 143! Well, I’m going to do it right. I’m starting with these ten to get rough data for a mathematical model, and then I’m going assemble a representative sample and run a full study to test the hypothesis!” She smiled satisfiedly.
“That’s great, Abs,” Gibbs remarked indulgently, “but what about Petty Officer Thorne?”
Abby shot him a reproachful look. “You didn’t exactly give me much to work with, you know. No fingerprints at the scene, no DNA or hair samples, no footprints, no tire tracks, no nothing!”
“You got his clothes. And Ducky said he sent you some samples.”
“Right, he did, which is why I can now tell you exactly what poisoned Petty Officer Thorne. It was…” Abby flourished the computer mouse and the typical diagram of substance analysis appeared, “Croton oil!”
“What’s that?”
“Oh, it’s nasty stuff, Gibbs, I mean really nasty. It’s the oil extracted from the seeds of the Croton tiglium, or Purging Croton, a plant usually found in tropical Southeast Asia and India. If it comes in contact with the skin it causes blisters immediately, and if you swallow even just a few drops it’ll kill you, painfully, within fifteen minutes.”
“Where can you get this stuff?”
“I really don’t know, Gibbs. This kind of oil really isn’t good for anything but poisoning, and there are easier ways to do that. It was used as a purgative in the 16th century, but it’s much to dangerous to be used as medicine these days. I think some labs use it on animals to study pain and pain relief, which is really cruel and inhuman and just horrible, but those things are tightly controlled. It’s not like somebody could just walk out of there with a vial of deadly poison.”
“So…?”
“Well, if I really needed the stuff, the easiest way would probably be to get a plant and extract the oil myself. But why would anyone bother? There are a ton of other poisons you can get much more easily that will kill someone just as effectively. Why go to all the trouble to get croton oil?”
“I don’t know, Abs, but I’m going to find out. Great work.” Gibbs made to head out the door.
“Wait! I’ve got more!”
Gibbs turned on his heel and followed Abby back to the worktable, where, next to the lollipop rack, sat an evidence jar which Abby held up for him to see.
“Look at this!”
Gibbs squinted, trying to make out a shape in the seemingly empty jar. “A hair?” he guessed.
“Yep. The only one on his clothes that didn’t belong to Thorne.”
“What’d you get from it? You got anything about the person it’s from?”
“Nope,” she grinned happily. When Gibbs gave her an irritated glare, she elaborated. “I can’t tell you anything about a person because it’s not from a person. This,” she inserted a dramatic pause and brandished the small jar for effect, “is a hair from a Panthera tigris tigris!”
“A tiger?” Gibbs sounded startled, which was quite a feat to achieve.
“Not just any tiger, Gibbs. A Bengal tiger! They’re on the endangered animals list, there’s only about 2500 left in the wild, so it’s not like Thorne could have come across one just anywhere.”
“Well, where then?”
“Bengal tigers are usually found Indian rainforest. It looks like Petty Officer Thorne,” Abby grinned and inserted a dramatic pause, “has been touring the jungle!”
Previous Chapter Next Chapter
Resources: I like sharing fun resources. So here are some, please enjoy. :)
- This is the place to go if you have any unanswered questions about squirrels. Or if you want to be able to annoy friends and coworkers by spouting endless random squirrel trivia.
- Found a dead body and need to determine time of death? This is the site for you. Just enter parameters like outside temperature, liver temperature and body weight, and this site will tell you when your body died. Mark additional signs like rigor mortis and lividity, and you will be informed if there are any inconsistencies. It’s either fun or slightly creepy, depending on your disposition, but it’s definitely a helpful tool for fanfic writers obsessed with the accuracy of details. ;)
- Deadly Doses: A Writer’s Guide to Poisons is a great way to find the perfect poison for any occasion! It’s a book, but if you google it you can find plenty of places to download it as a pdf.
- Need a movie reference to a certain manner of death? Look no further.
- Yes, people have actually tried to scientifically determine how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop. If you have a scientific mind and a love for silliness, you might enjoy this as much as I did.
Author: Calliatra
Rating: FR15
Category: Gen
Pairing: None
Characters: Tony, the whole team
Genre: Casefile
Words: 2,423 (26,461 total)
Disclaimer: All recognizable NCIS characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.
Summary: When a Petty Officer’s decapitated body is found it starts an investigation that spirals out of control and places Tony in grave danger.
Written for the Can Anybody Hear Me? Challenge and the Casefile Challenge at NFA and inspired by the Chinese Whisper Challenge.
Chapter Warnings: Autopsy findings, squirrel trivia
Prologue | Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five | Chapter Six | Chapter Seven | Chapter Eight | Chapter Nine
* * *
Chapter Two: A Tropical Lead
“What’ve we got?” Gibbs’ question - brusque, as always - announced his entrance into the squad room.
Tony quickly scrambled out from behind his desk. “Fingerprints confirm our beheaded guy is really Petty Officer Jeffrey Thorne.” With a click of the remote, he made Thorne’s greatly magnified ID picture appear on the monitor. “Twenty-four years old, unmarried, no children. Lives in Norfolk, Virginia. Deployed to the USS Truman, which docked in Norfolk on Sunday afternoon.”
Ziva came up next to him and continued. “He works in the supply corps. He reports to the Supply Officer, Commander Frank Nelson. I have not been able to reach him yet, he is apparently tied in with the restocking process.” Nobody bothered to correct her, this time.
McGee took over. “I checked Thorne’s bank and credit card statements and his phone call history. He doesn’t have much money, but he doesn’t spend much, either. The only regular calls are to his parents. Nothing looks suspicious, so far. I pulled his file, and according to his superiors he was dedicated and good at his job. The only negative incident on file is a fight he got into with a bunkmate after he reported him for drug use.”
“Could that be a motive for murder?” Tony wondered out loud. “You tattled on me, so I’ll kill you?”
“Doesn’t matter, ‘cause it can’t be that guy. I looked into it, Boss,” McGee said, turning to Gibbs, “He was processed for Administrative Separation, but he died of an overdose before anything was decided.”
“So what you’re saying is you have nothing.”
All three squirmed under Gibbs’ glare, but had to admit to the fact.
“I’m going to see what Ducky’s got. You’d better have something for me when I get back.” With that he headed for the elevator.
“How are we supposed to have something?” Ziva complained. “There is nothing to be had. Petty Officer Thorne has never done anything wrong. He does not even have a parking ticket! He does not have money and he was not working on anything important. Why would anybody kill him?”
“Well,” Tony considered, “if there’s no logical reason to kill him, it’s gotta be something personal. This guy was more of a goody two-shoes than McGee, and he’s a tattletale. He probably didn’t exactly make friends that way.”
“You’re thinking someone got angry enough to kill him?” McGee didn’t look convinced.
“I’m thinking he’s the kind of guy everybody hates even more than the Agent Afloat, ‘cause he comes without a badge and the general warning to stay away. I’m thinking we should talk to the people he worked with, see if there’s someone who really had it in for Thorne. You know, someone who thought he was a real thorn in his side.”
McGee rolled his eyes at the forced pun. “We should call his parents, too. If he was having problems with someone, maybe he told them.”
“Are we not forgetting something?” Ziva asked. “The manner of Petty Officer Thorne’s death!” she clarified, exasperated, when her teammates looked at her blankly. “Why cut his head off? There are far more efficient ways to kill a man. And why do the same thing to the squirrel? That does not seem like a man killing his enemy because he hates him.”
“You’re right, it doesn’t,” Tony confirmed. “But until Abby and Ducky get back to us, we have no clues, no suspects and no leads. Do you want to be the one to tell Gibbs that we don’t have any ideas, either?”
Ziva’s silence was answer enough.
*
In Autopsy, Ducky was bent over the body of Petty Officer Thorne, checking for any small marks he might have missed, a job he did not trust his assistant with. Jimmy was, therefore, currently unoccupied.
“Why would anyone do something like this, Doctor? It’s just awful. He must have been so innocent and happy. And then someone cuts his head off, just like that.” Jimmy was utterly oblivious to the odd look the ME gave him upon hearing his description of the victim as “innocent and happy.” “I mean, how could they? He’s just so adorable! If I’d seen him, I’d have wanted to cuddle him, not kill him.”
“I’m not sure Petty Officer Thorne would have been comfortable with that, Mr. Palmer,” Ducky said disapprovingly. Really, his assistant was certainly an odd duck (no pun intended). “Though no doubt he would have preferred unwanted attention of that kind to the murderous kind.”
“What?” Jimmy was flummoxed. “Oh! Oh, no, Doctor, I didn’t mean the Petty Officer! I was talking about the squirrel!” He cast another fond look at the beheaded rodent’s carcass.
“And what, pray tell, made you feel that the squirrel was more worthy of your attention that our Petty Officer?”
“Oh, er, well, nothing. I mean, of course he’s the first priority. It’s just, well, you let me do the autopsy on the last squirrel we had, so I thought I should prepare for this one, you know, get to know our ‘guest’? I was just thinking, he was probably a lot like the squirrels I used to play with when I was a kid. See, I would often spend my summer vacation at my Aunt Agatha’s estate out in the country, and there were squirrels all over the place there. So I’d always leave walnuts on the terrace for them, and after a while they started trusting me.” His face seemed to glow with the recalled youthful joy. “Aunt Agatha was furious, though. She was terrified of squirrels, and when she found out that I’d been feeding them on her terrace she sent me home and told me to never come back.” His eyes assumed a faraway look as he remembered.
“Ah.” The good doctor didn’t really know what to say to that. “Did you know, Mr. Palmer, that some evolutionary biologists believe that humans have an instinctive, primordial fear of mice and rats - and, in your aunt’s case, squirrels - because our ancestors had good reason to be afraid of them? Archeologists have found fossilized evidence of enormous rodents who would certainly have been a danger to early man. Take, for example, the Castoroides ohioensis, the giant beaver of North America. It was up to eight feet long and weighed up to two hundred pounds! A fearsome creature, wouldn’t you say? Yes… by comparison our fellow here,” He walked over to the second autopsy table and took in the small, furry form that appeared quite forlorn on the vast expanse of icy steel, “would seem rather harmless.”
“Aunt Agatha wouldn’t have thought so,” Jimmy laughed. “She always said she’d kill the beasts if she got her hands on one.”
“Then perhaps we ought to be looking at your aunt as a potential suspect in this investigation?” Ducky said, eyebrows raised.
“Oh, no! She could never actually kill a squirrel, she’s much too afraid of them. She would always run away shrieking if she just saw on in the distance.” He chuckled at the memory.
At that moment, the Autopsy doors slid open with their typical, understated whoosh, announcing the arrival of Special Agent Gibbs.
“Got anything for me, Duck?”
“Well, I do believe we have just eliminated Mr. Palmer’s aunt as a suspect in this crime.”
Gibbs’ reaction to this news was to glare at Jimmy, who in turn blushed and started stammering. “It’s just, you see, my Aunt Agatha, she’s scared of squirrels, and so we saying… actually that’s not important, you’re here for the findings on Petty Officer Thorne and, uh, you know what, I’ll just… go now.” He shuffled out, but not without throwing a terrified glance behind him at the steely-eyes Team Leader.
“That boy…” Ducky shook his head; “I don’t know what to do with him at times.”
“The body, Duck?” Gibbs was in no mood to discuss the issues with Palmer.
“Right. You will be interested to know, Jethro, that decapitation was not what killed Petty Officer Thorne. The beheading was, I’m afraid, postmortem. If he had still been alive, there would have been very heavy bleeding, yet most of the blood remains in this body. Clearly the heart was no longer pumping when the neck was severed.”
“Then how’d he die?”
“I found blood in his stool, and some in his urine as well. I also found kidney and liver damage, inflammation of the mouth, throat and stomach and, perhaps most interesting of all, blisters on the lips. All of this together leads me to believe that our Petty Officer was poisoned. I have sent samples up to Abby, hopefully she will be able to identify the toxin.”
“Why would someone poison him and then cut off his head?”
“I believe, Jethro, that part is your job. But I have some addition information that might help you. The lividity marks on the body are inconsistent with the position it was found in in the warehouse, meaning it was dumped after lividity had already set. Typically, lividity is set after approximately ten hours, so-”
“So the body was dumped sometime after 2200.”
“Precisely. And if you’ll take a closer look at our Petty Officer’s hands, you’ll notice that they’re darker than the rest of his skin, indicating that blood flow was restricted.”
“His hands were tied?” Gibbs frowned.
“His feet, as well. It appears he was lying on his back with his arms tied in front of him when he died, which leads me to believe he was held captive.”
“We know where? How long?”
“Impossible to say. We can only hope Abby found trace evidence on his clothes that can tell us something.”
“All right, thanks, Duck.”
Gibbs was almost at the door when Ducky called out. “Oh, Jethro, could you send Mr. Palmer back in? I do believe he is lurking by the elevator.”
*
Abby’s lab was, as always, vibrating with the cacophonous sounds she called music. Abby herself was at her worktable, busily lapping at something set on top of it.
“Hi, Gibbs!” she called out between licks.
“Hey, Abs.” Gibbs’ tone was ever so slightly apprehensive. Getting closer, he managed to make out a row of lollipops, set up in rack ordinarily meant to hold test tubes. As he watched, she bent forward to lick another lolly, marked something on a chart, then moved on to the next one.
“What are you doing?” Having recognized the presence of candy, he was now merely curious. Sweets of any kind had a tendency to make his favorite forensic scientist act a little odd.
“I,” Abby proclaimed seriously, “am solving one of the world’s oldest mysteries. Okay, well, maybe not one of the oldest, but it’s been around since, like, 1970, so it’s definitely pretty old.”
Gibbs winced slightly, then looked questioningly at her.
“‘How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop!’” she exclaimed, as if it were self-evident. “Do you know that there’s no reliable study on that? There’ve only been five so far, and the results range from 3500 licks to 143! Well, I’m going to do it right. I’m starting with these ten to get rough data for a mathematical model, and then I’m going assemble a representative sample and run a full study to test the hypothesis!” She smiled satisfiedly.
“That’s great, Abs,” Gibbs remarked indulgently, “but what about Petty Officer Thorne?”
Abby shot him a reproachful look. “You didn’t exactly give me much to work with, you know. No fingerprints at the scene, no DNA or hair samples, no footprints, no tire tracks, no nothing!”
“You got his clothes. And Ducky said he sent you some samples.”
“Right, he did, which is why I can now tell you exactly what poisoned Petty Officer Thorne. It was…” Abby flourished the computer mouse and the typical diagram of substance analysis appeared, “Croton oil!”
“What’s that?”
“Oh, it’s nasty stuff, Gibbs, I mean really nasty. It’s the oil extracted from the seeds of the Croton tiglium, or Purging Croton, a plant usually found in tropical Southeast Asia and India. If it comes in contact with the skin it causes blisters immediately, and if you swallow even just a few drops it’ll kill you, painfully, within fifteen minutes.”
“Where can you get this stuff?”
“I really don’t know, Gibbs. This kind of oil really isn’t good for anything but poisoning, and there are easier ways to do that. It was used as a purgative in the 16th century, but it’s much to dangerous to be used as medicine these days. I think some labs use it on animals to study pain and pain relief, which is really cruel and inhuman and just horrible, but those things are tightly controlled. It’s not like somebody could just walk out of there with a vial of deadly poison.”
“So…?”
“Well, if I really needed the stuff, the easiest way would probably be to get a plant and extract the oil myself. But why would anyone bother? There are a ton of other poisons you can get much more easily that will kill someone just as effectively. Why go to all the trouble to get croton oil?”
“I don’t know, Abs, but I’m going to find out. Great work.” Gibbs made to head out the door.
“Wait! I’ve got more!”
Gibbs turned on his heel and followed Abby back to the worktable, where, next to the lollipop rack, sat an evidence jar which Abby held up for him to see.
“Look at this!”
Gibbs squinted, trying to make out a shape in the seemingly empty jar. “A hair?” he guessed.
“Yep. The only one on his clothes that didn’t belong to Thorne.”
“What’d you get from it? You got anything about the person it’s from?”
“Nope,” she grinned happily. When Gibbs gave her an irritated glare, she elaborated. “I can’t tell you anything about a person because it’s not from a person. This,” she inserted a dramatic pause and brandished the small jar for effect, “is a hair from a Panthera tigris tigris!”
“A tiger?” Gibbs sounded startled, which was quite a feat to achieve.
“Not just any tiger, Gibbs. A Bengal tiger! They’re on the endangered animals list, there’s only about 2500 left in the wild, so it’s not like Thorne could have come across one just anywhere.”
“Well, where then?”
“Bengal tigers are usually found Indian rainforest. It looks like Petty Officer Thorne,” Abby grinned and inserted a dramatic pause, “has been touring the jungle!”
Previous Chapter Next Chapter
Resources: I like sharing fun resources. So here are some, please enjoy. :)
- This is the place to go if you have any unanswered questions about squirrels. Or if you want to be able to annoy friends and coworkers by spouting endless random squirrel trivia.
- Found a dead body and need to determine time of death? This is the site for you. Just enter parameters like outside temperature, liver temperature and body weight, and this site will tell you when your body died. Mark additional signs like rigor mortis and lividity, and you will be informed if there are any inconsistencies. It’s either fun or slightly creepy, depending on your disposition, but it’s definitely a helpful tool for fanfic writers obsessed with the accuracy of details. ;)
- Deadly Doses: A Writer’s Guide to Poisons is a great way to find the perfect poison for any occasion! It’s a book, but if you google it you can find plenty of places to download it as a pdf.
- Need a movie reference to a certain manner of death? Look no further.
- Yes, people have actually tried to scientifically determine how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop. If you have a scientific mind and a love for silliness, you might enjoy this as much as I did.