Jungle Fever (6/10)
Title: Jungle Fever
Author: Calliatra
Rating: FR15
Category: Gen
Pairing: None
Characters: Tony, the whole team
Genre: Casefile
Words: 2,986 (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: Some snarking and somewhat less-than-moral bad guy.
Prologue | Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five | Chapter Six | Chapter Seven | Chapter Eight | Chapter Nine
* * *
Chapter Five: A New Direction
When Gibbs returned to Interrogation his expression spelled bad things for Commander Nelson.
“We found the crates. Including the three extra ones.”
“What extra ones?” The question was calm, but there was a sudden strain underlying the voice.
“The crates of illegal animal parts.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“We found your fingerprints on the inside.” There was an intake of breath from the Commander.
“Thorne found out you were smuggling, so you killed him.” Gibbs’ words, steely and accusing finally shattered Commander Nelson’s calm demeanor.
“I didn’t!” he exclaimed, but in anxiety rather than anger.
“We found croton oil in the crates, the same poison that killed Thorne. You had motive, you had the means and if we look hard enough I’m sure we’ll find opportunity, too. No jury will have to think twice. Thorne was one of your men, he trusted you, and you murdered him!”
The Commander had gone pale as Gibbs raised his voice, and was now visibly shaking. “I didn’t! I would never harm one of my men!” His voice was rising in desperation. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this, no one was supposed to get hurt!”
Gibbs was unmoved by the pleading note. “Talk,” he instructed coldly.
Nelson had slumped, and placing his head dejectedly in his hands he spoke in the general direction of the table. “I was approached by a man, he said his name was Smith. He said he needed something transported into the country safely and without being noticed. He offered me a lot of money. I thought he had to be smuggling weapons or drugs, I refused. He explained that it wasn’t anything like that, it was just furs and things, nothing dangerous. Nothing that could hurt anyone. I thought, well, what’s the harm? And he was offering so much money, enough to pay off all my debts.” He paused to take a deep breath.
Nelson still hadn’t lifted his gaze from the table, which was probably for the best, as the look on Gibbs’ face was one to send men running. What’s the harm? What was the harm in helping criminals as long as they promised no one would get hurt? What was the harm in dishonoring the Navy as long as the money was good? Gibbs longed to yank the Commander up by the shoulders and shake some sense into him, make him actually listen to his own reasoning, but he stayed still and let Nelson continue.
“It was so easy. All I had to do was arrange for those three crates to be loaded onto the ship when we docked in Mumbai, and then to be logged as malfunctioning plane parts we’d replaced. Those are never checked. All anyone does is log it when another broken part is added, but no one counts the parts that are already there.”
“Thorne did,” Gibbs interjected.
“Yes, he did. He was just supposed to take inventory of the replacement parts, but he decided to make sure every replacement part checked out of storage corresponded to a broken part in the other storage area. Well, of course it didn’t, there were three crates too many. That’s when he came to talk to me. I told him I’d look into it, that there was probably just a logging error somewhere, that he shouldn’t worry about it. I thought I could keep it all quiet. When my assistant asked what he should note down for my meeting with Thorne, I told him I’d wanted to talk to him about a mistake he made. We were only three weeks from homeport, I thought I’d just get the crates off the ship and be done with everything. But Thorne…”
“Wouldn’t give up.” Gibbs growled. Thorne had been a good sailor, would probably even have made a good agent. He had tenacity and a sense of duty, and he had been killed for it by someone who had neither.
Nelson sighed. “Thorne wanted all the records to be perfect before unloading began. On Friday he opened one of the crates, and when he saw what was in there of course he came to find me right away. It was obvious that this was smuggling, not something I could just tell him to forget about, so I said I needed his help to catch whoever it was. I told him I suspected the Agent Afloat, so he had to be kept out of the picture. I told him that it was probably a gang of smugglers, and that if we wanted to catch all of them, we couldn’t do anything until they tried to get to the crates in port. So we closed the crate back up and tried to make it look like it had never been opened. I had a cell phone number I was supposed to call if there were major problems with the shipment, and that’s what I did. I told Smith I’d looked into Thorne’s file, that his father was sick, that he could probably be bribed with money to pay for the medical expenses-”
“You called Smith?” Gibbs interrupted. “You told a crime ring that one of your men was a danger to their operation?”
“I had no idea they were going to…” Nelson broke off.
“Kill him?”
“No! All he knew was that there was smuggling going on on the ship. He had no idea I was responsible, or that anyone outside the ship was behind it, he wasn’t a real threat. I could have arranged for those crates to be ‘lost’, made it look like the real smugglers got to them somehow. If Thorne talked, there would have been an investigation, but it wouldn’t have gotten very far. It was just easier to bribe him to keep quiet, I figured. I made sure the crates were unloaded and taken to the warehouse Smith named as quickly as possible, I just wanted to get it over with.
“When he didn’t show up on Monday, I thought he’d probably taken the money, maybe didn’t want to face me because he was feeling guilty. I didn’t want to draw any attention to that, so I didn’t report him AWOL. Then, when I heard he’d been killed, I just worried that there might be an investigation, that you might find something on the crates, so I deleted that inventory from Thorne’s computer. I never thought there would be a murder investigation, because there was no reason to murder Thorne.”
Gibbs almost shook his head in disbelief. The degree of self-deception the Commander had gone to to absolve himself of all responsibility was staggering. Had he really managed to convince himself that Thorne, the most conscientious of sailors, could be bribed to ignore crime corruption the Navy he loved so much? Most likely, Gibbs thought, the guilt had simply been pushed aside only to come out full force when he had to face the fact that Thorne really had been murdered.
“I was sure it had to be an accident. And then, when you showed up and said it was murder, I panicked. I knew the broken parts’ storage was empty, but nowadays you can find trace evidence everywhere. I remembered that Thorne got some strange powder on him from inside the crate and brushed it off roughly, and I was afraid he’d lost skin cells or tiny hairs or something else you could trace back to him. I wasn’t thinking straight, I was so shocked. You have to believe me, I had no idea they were going to kill him! I would never have gone along with that!”
“Who are ‘they’?” Gibbs’s voice held no sympathy. No matter how much he denied it to himself, Nelson wasn’t naïve enough to really have believed that. He had purposefully put one of his men in harm’s way purely for the sake of money.
“I don’t know!” Nelson was almost pleading. “The only one I met was Smith.”
“Describe him.”
“He was tall, and kind of thin. It was dark, that’s all I could see.”
“Not good enough,” Gibbs growled.
“That’s all I saw! All I know about him is the name he gave me and his cell phone number.”
Gibbs shook his head in disgust. Nelson had struck up with crime syndicate without so much as a second though or any moral consideration. He was a disgrace to everything the Navy stood for, and he deserved much worse than the court martial he would be facing.
*
“Boss, we have a problem.”
Those were not words Gibbs liked to hear immediately on entering the squad room. He turned to McGee, who had spoken. “What kind?”
“Well, when I ran the cell phone number the Commander gave you, the system blocked me and sent out an alert.”
“To who?”
McGee opened his mouth to answer, but never got a chance.
“Me.” A dry voice said right behind Gibbs. He turned, and found himself face to face with Tobias Fornell. “Well, FBI headquarters, and when they saw where the alert came from they decided to send me. It’s been a while, Gibbs. McGee.” Fornell directed a nod towards the younger agent.
“Conference Room,” was all his friend replied.
Fornell turned to face Gibbs as soon as the elevator doors had slid shut. “Why are you looking into Todd Lombard?”
“Who?”
“The phone number you ran.”
“Ah. Murder of a sailor. You?”
“Illegal wildlife trade.”
“Looks like we’ve been doing your job again, then, Tobias.” Gibbs allowed himself a smirk.
“What do you mean?”
“Got three crates in the lab full of illegal wildlife.”
“You’re kidding.” Fornell couldn’t have looked more stunned if Gibbs had just informed him he was moving in with Diane.
“Nope.” Still smirking, Gibbs leaned casually back against the steel wall of the elevator.
“How…?”
“Ah, c’mon, Tobias, you know how these things work”
“‘Show me yours I’ll show you mine’? Really, Jethro? Whatever happened to simple inter-agency cooperation?” Both men chuckled at that.
“Okay,” Fornell conceded, “Here’s what I know. We’re staking out a wildlife smuggling ring right here in DC. We know who’s behind it, but we’ve got no proof. It’s three guys, high society, organizing everything, but they never get their hands dirty. We’ve caught couriers on occasion, but most of the time they have no idea who they’re working for. Even when they do, it’s not concrete enough to get us a warrant, let alone a conviction. And when I said high society, I meant high society. The case against them has to be completely airtight just to get a prosecutor on board, that’s why we can’t risk anyone messing with it. Now what’ve you got?”
“Dead sailor. He found the smuggled crates, informed his Commander. Turns out the Commander was the one doing the smuggling.”
“He killed him?”
“He called your guy, Lombard. He killed him.”
“That’s not possible.” Fornell shook his head emphatically. “He’s been under twenty-four-hour surveillance.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time someone got away under your guys’ noses.”
“Thanks for that reminder,” came the caustic reply. “But I still can’t let you go poking around. These guys are cautious, if they notice feds sniffing around they’ll pack everything up and we’ll never get them.”
“You try going in under the radar?”
“Undercover? Yeah, we tried that, they didn’t go for it. They’re too smart, too careful.”
“Or you just didn’t do it right.”
“Don’t go getting ideas, Jethro. If the FBI can’t do it, it can’t be done.” Fornell did not like the look of that sparkle in his old friend’s eye.
The corners of Gibbs’ mouth almost twitched into a smile. “Maybe you just didn’t have the right… assets.”
*
“Tony!” Abby squealed when she saw the senior field agent walk through the door to her lab. Or, actually, it was what she meant to squeal. What came out of her mouth sounded significantly more like “Oh-ee!”, most likely due to the fact that she had a large white cloth stuffed in her mouth.
“Abs? What’s with the… mouth thing?” Tony asked carefully.
Abby quickly spit it into the garbage can. “I cut my tongue. You know how sometimes there are these sneaky bubbles in lollipops that you can’t even see but when you get far enough through the candy you kind of open them and they have these really sharp edges? There was one in my lolly and now my tongue is bleeding. Well, actually…” she moved her tongue around her mouth experimentally, “Yeah, it’s not that bad anymore. Anyway, that’s not important, this is what’s important!”
She pulled up a photo of the road in front of Warehouse C, where Thorne’s body had been found. “I went through all the pictures you emailed me where you said to look for some kind of tracks, and this is where I found something. Look here,” she zoomed in on a piece of the road, “See that clump of mud right there? It’s been mostly flattened by a small tire. It didn’t notice it the first time because your car and Metro’s car flattened most of the mud clumps on that road, but this one was too far outside of either track for those cars to have done it. I can’t get very good resolution, but I did manage to measure the width and get an estimate of the profile depth. From that I’d say the track was made by a wheelbarrow.”
“The killer brought the body to the warehouse in a wheelbarrow?” Tony asked, dumbfounded.
“I know, right? Even if he did it to avoid leaving tire tracks or something it’s crazy risky. Anyone could have seen him with the body!”
“Well,” Tony mused, trying to make sense of this discovery, “He probably covered up the body with something so it couldn’t be seen. And the warehouse complex isn’t used much, apart from the guard there’s only a couple of homeless guys who stay out of sight most of the time. If the killer dumped the body at night he could be pretty sure he wouldn’t be seen, I guess. But he couldn’t have come far, nobody would go for a long walk out in the open pushing a wheelbarrow with a dead body in it. So either he lives nearby or he came in a car. And since the whole area is pretty much only warehouses… Abs, can you check the tapes from nearby traffic cams for the night Thorne was dumped?”
Abby grinned at him. “I already did. I marked a couple of routes to the warehouse complex and then looked for cars that passed by there late Monday night. There aren’t that many people driving out into the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night, so once I controlled for the type of car that could fit a full-sized wheelbarrow, I got this.” She hit a few keys on her keyboard and four dark, very grainy images showed up on the large screen. They all showed dark streets, with a large, dark vehicle visible from different angles.
Tony stepped closer to the screen, squinting. “That’s a van, right? It looks too light to be black, so dark grey? That’s good work, Abby.”
“No, it’s not.” Abby shook her head. “Do you have any idea how many dark vans there are in the DC area? When I manage to enhance the pictures enough to tell you the make and model and the license plate so you can put out a BOLO, then it’ll be good work,” she said forcefully.
Tony held up his hands in defense. “Whatever you say. I’m still going to go check if there’s been any suspicious activity in the last couple of days involving dark vans.” He headed out of the door and for the stairs, as the elevator lights indicated it was once again being misused as a conference room.
He stopped in the stairwell just outside the squad room, stepped into an unobserved corner and quickly pulled out his cell phone. “You have no new messages,” the tinny female voice declared.
“Gibbs is looking for you,” a very different female voice announced behind him.
Tony snapped around at Ziva. “You really shouldn’t sneak up on people like that,” he informed her. “It’s not polite.”
Ziva glanced at the cell phone in his hand. “Camille has left you no message?”
Tony looked for a second like he wanted to deny that that was what he had been checking for, then simply shook his head and sighed. “No.”
“I am sorry,” Ziva said, almost gently. “I know she is important to you, even if I do not understand why.”
“She isn’t, though,” Tony tried to explain, “Not really. I mean, not her personally. It’s just, well, she bailed before our first date. I’m used to not getting second dates, ‘cause that’s the kind of guy I am, but I’ve never been stood up for a first date.”
Ziva looked contemplatively at Tony for a moment. “And now you are wondering if you are perhaps losing your good looks or your charm, the things that never used to fail to get you a date.”
Tony said nothing, which was as good as an outright admission.
“You are getting older, Tony. What you have always done will not work forever. But,” Ziva raked her eyes up and down his form appreciatively, “you are definitely not losing your looks yet.” She gave him a suggestive smile.
“Elevator eyes, Ziva,” Tony remarked with mock-seriousness. “That’s yellow light behavior.”
“Then I guess you are lucky today,” Ziva smirked. “But if I were you I would not try my luck with Gibbs. He does not like to be kept waiting.”
“Did he say what he wants?”
“Not me,” Gibbs voice came from right behind them, causing both of them to jump. “Fornell.” He turned to Tony. “You’ve got dinner plans.”
Previous Chapter Next Chapter
Author: Calliatra
Rating: FR15
Category: Gen
Pairing: None
Characters: Tony, the whole team
Genre: Casefile
Words: 2,986 (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: Some snarking and somewhat less-than-moral bad guy.
Prologue | Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five | Chapter Six | Chapter Seven | Chapter Eight | Chapter Nine
* * *
Chapter Five: A New Direction
When Gibbs returned to Interrogation his expression spelled bad things for Commander Nelson.
“We found the crates. Including the three extra ones.”
“What extra ones?” The question was calm, but there was a sudden strain underlying the voice.
“The crates of illegal animal parts.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“We found your fingerprints on the inside.” There was an intake of breath from the Commander.
“Thorne found out you were smuggling, so you killed him.” Gibbs’ words, steely and accusing finally shattered Commander Nelson’s calm demeanor.
“I didn’t!” he exclaimed, but in anxiety rather than anger.
“We found croton oil in the crates, the same poison that killed Thorne. You had motive, you had the means and if we look hard enough I’m sure we’ll find opportunity, too. No jury will have to think twice. Thorne was one of your men, he trusted you, and you murdered him!”
The Commander had gone pale as Gibbs raised his voice, and was now visibly shaking. “I didn’t! I would never harm one of my men!” His voice was rising in desperation. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this, no one was supposed to get hurt!”
Gibbs was unmoved by the pleading note. “Talk,” he instructed coldly.
Nelson had slumped, and placing his head dejectedly in his hands he spoke in the general direction of the table. “I was approached by a man, he said his name was Smith. He said he needed something transported into the country safely and without being noticed. He offered me a lot of money. I thought he had to be smuggling weapons or drugs, I refused. He explained that it wasn’t anything like that, it was just furs and things, nothing dangerous. Nothing that could hurt anyone. I thought, well, what’s the harm? And he was offering so much money, enough to pay off all my debts.” He paused to take a deep breath.
Nelson still hadn’t lifted his gaze from the table, which was probably for the best, as the look on Gibbs’ face was one to send men running. What’s the harm? What was the harm in helping criminals as long as they promised no one would get hurt? What was the harm in dishonoring the Navy as long as the money was good? Gibbs longed to yank the Commander up by the shoulders and shake some sense into him, make him actually listen to his own reasoning, but he stayed still and let Nelson continue.
“It was so easy. All I had to do was arrange for those three crates to be loaded onto the ship when we docked in Mumbai, and then to be logged as malfunctioning plane parts we’d replaced. Those are never checked. All anyone does is log it when another broken part is added, but no one counts the parts that are already there.”
“Thorne did,” Gibbs interjected.
“Yes, he did. He was just supposed to take inventory of the replacement parts, but he decided to make sure every replacement part checked out of storage corresponded to a broken part in the other storage area. Well, of course it didn’t, there were three crates too many. That’s when he came to talk to me. I told him I’d look into it, that there was probably just a logging error somewhere, that he shouldn’t worry about it. I thought I could keep it all quiet. When my assistant asked what he should note down for my meeting with Thorne, I told him I’d wanted to talk to him about a mistake he made. We were only three weeks from homeport, I thought I’d just get the crates off the ship and be done with everything. But Thorne…”
“Wouldn’t give up.” Gibbs growled. Thorne had been a good sailor, would probably even have made a good agent. He had tenacity and a sense of duty, and he had been killed for it by someone who had neither.
Nelson sighed. “Thorne wanted all the records to be perfect before unloading began. On Friday he opened one of the crates, and when he saw what was in there of course he came to find me right away. It was obvious that this was smuggling, not something I could just tell him to forget about, so I said I needed his help to catch whoever it was. I told him I suspected the Agent Afloat, so he had to be kept out of the picture. I told him that it was probably a gang of smugglers, and that if we wanted to catch all of them, we couldn’t do anything until they tried to get to the crates in port. So we closed the crate back up and tried to make it look like it had never been opened. I had a cell phone number I was supposed to call if there were major problems with the shipment, and that’s what I did. I told Smith I’d looked into Thorne’s file, that his father was sick, that he could probably be bribed with money to pay for the medical expenses-”
“You called Smith?” Gibbs interrupted. “You told a crime ring that one of your men was a danger to their operation?”
“I had no idea they were going to…” Nelson broke off.
“Kill him?”
“No! All he knew was that there was smuggling going on on the ship. He had no idea I was responsible, or that anyone outside the ship was behind it, he wasn’t a real threat. I could have arranged for those crates to be ‘lost’, made it look like the real smugglers got to them somehow. If Thorne talked, there would have been an investigation, but it wouldn’t have gotten very far. It was just easier to bribe him to keep quiet, I figured. I made sure the crates were unloaded and taken to the warehouse Smith named as quickly as possible, I just wanted to get it over with.
“When he didn’t show up on Monday, I thought he’d probably taken the money, maybe didn’t want to face me because he was feeling guilty. I didn’t want to draw any attention to that, so I didn’t report him AWOL. Then, when I heard he’d been killed, I just worried that there might be an investigation, that you might find something on the crates, so I deleted that inventory from Thorne’s computer. I never thought there would be a murder investigation, because there was no reason to murder Thorne.”
Gibbs almost shook his head in disbelief. The degree of self-deception the Commander had gone to to absolve himself of all responsibility was staggering. Had he really managed to convince himself that Thorne, the most conscientious of sailors, could be bribed to ignore crime corruption the Navy he loved so much? Most likely, Gibbs thought, the guilt had simply been pushed aside only to come out full force when he had to face the fact that Thorne really had been murdered.
“I was sure it had to be an accident. And then, when you showed up and said it was murder, I panicked. I knew the broken parts’ storage was empty, but nowadays you can find trace evidence everywhere. I remembered that Thorne got some strange powder on him from inside the crate and brushed it off roughly, and I was afraid he’d lost skin cells or tiny hairs or something else you could trace back to him. I wasn’t thinking straight, I was so shocked. You have to believe me, I had no idea they were going to kill him! I would never have gone along with that!”
“Who are ‘they’?” Gibbs’s voice held no sympathy. No matter how much he denied it to himself, Nelson wasn’t naïve enough to really have believed that. He had purposefully put one of his men in harm’s way purely for the sake of money.
“I don’t know!” Nelson was almost pleading. “The only one I met was Smith.”
“Describe him.”
“He was tall, and kind of thin. It was dark, that’s all I could see.”
“Not good enough,” Gibbs growled.
“That’s all I saw! All I know about him is the name he gave me and his cell phone number.”
Gibbs shook his head in disgust. Nelson had struck up with crime syndicate without so much as a second though or any moral consideration. He was a disgrace to everything the Navy stood for, and he deserved much worse than the court martial he would be facing.
*
“Boss, we have a problem.”
Those were not words Gibbs liked to hear immediately on entering the squad room. He turned to McGee, who had spoken. “What kind?”
“Well, when I ran the cell phone number the Commander gave you, the system blocked me and sent out an alert.”
“To who?”
McGee opened his mouth to answer, but never got a chance.
“Me.” A dry voice said right behind Gibbs. He turned, and found himself face to face with Tobias Fornell. “Well, FBI headquarters, and when they saw where the alert came from they decided to send me. It’s been a while, Gibbs. McGee.” Fornell directed a nod towards the younger agent.
“Conference Room,” was all his friend replied.
Fornell turned to face Gibbs as soon as the elevator doors had slid shut. “Why are you looking into Todd Lombard?”
“Who?”
“The phone number you ran.”
“Ah. Murder of a sailor. You?”
“Illegal wildlife trade.”
“Looks like we’ve been doing your job again, then, Tobias.” Gibbs allowed himself a smirk.
“What do you mean?”
“Got three crates in the lab full of illegal wildlife.”
“You’re kidding.” Fornell couldn’t have looked more stunned if Gibbs had just informed him he was moving in with Diane.
“Nope.” Still smirking, Gibbs leaned casually back against the steel wall of the elevator.
“How…?”
“Ah, c’mon, Tobias, you know how these things work”
“‘Show me yours I’ll show you mine’? Really, Jethro? Whatever happened to simple inter-agency cooperation?” Both men chuckled at that.
“Okay,” Fornell conceded, “Here’s what I know. We’re staking out a wildlife smuggling ring right here in DC. We know who’s behind it, but we’ve got no proof. It’s three guys, high society, organizing everything, but they never get their hands dirty. We’ve caught couriers on occasion, but most of the time they have no idea who they’re working for. Even when they do, it’s not concrete enough to get us a warrant, let alone a conviction. And when I said high society, I meant high society. The case against them has to be completely airtight just to get a prosecutor on board, that’s why we can’t risk anyone messing with it. Now what’ve you got?”
“Dead sailor. He found the smuggled crates, informed his Commander. Turns out the Commander was the one doing the smuggling.”
“He killed him?”
“He called your guy, Lombard. He killed him.”
“That’s not possible.” Fornell shook his head emphatically. “He’s been under twenty-four-hour surveillance.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time someone got away under your guys’ noses.”
“Thanks for that reminder,” came the caustic reply. “But I still can’t let you go poking around. These guys are cautious, if they notice feds sniffing around they’ll pack everything up and we’ll never get them.”
“You try going in under the radar?”
“Undercover? Yeah, we tried that, they didn’t go for it. They’re too smart, too careful.”
“Or you just didn’t do it right.”
“Don’t go getting ideas, Jethro. If the FBI can’t do it, it can’t be done.” Fornell did not like the look of that sparkle in his old friend’s eye.
The corners of Gibbs’ mouth almost twitched into a smile. “Maybe you just didn’t have the right… assets.”
*
“Tony!” Abby squealed when she saw the senior field agent walk through the door to her lab. Or, actually, it was what she meant to squeal. What came out of her mouth sounded significantly more like “Oh-ee!”, most likely due to the fact that she had a large white cloth stuffed in her mouth.
“Abs? What’s with the… mouth thing?” Tony asked carefully.
Abby quickly spit it into the garbage can. “I cut my tongue. You know how sometimes there are these sneaky bubbles in lollipops that you can’t even see but when you get far enough through the candy you kind of open them and they have these really sharp edges? There was one in my lolly and now my tongue is bleeding. Well, actually…” she moved her tongue around her mouth experimentally, “Yeah, it’s not that bad anymore. Anyway, that’s not important, this is what’s important!”
She pulled up a photo of the road in front of Warehouse C, where Thorne’s body had been found. “I went through all the pictures you emailed me where you said to look for some kind of tracks, and this is where I found something. Look here,” she zoomed in on a piece of the road, “See that clump of mud right there? It’s been mostly flattened by a small tire. It didn’t notice it the first time because your car and Metro’s car flattened most of the mud clumps on that road, but this one was too far outside of either track for those cars to have done it. I can’t get very good resolution, but I did manage to measure the width and get an estimate of the profile depth. From that I’d say the track was made by a wheelbarrow.”
“The killer brought the body to the warehouse in a wheelbarrow?” Tony asked, dumbfounded.
“I know, right? Even if he did it to avoid leaving tire tracks or something it’s crazy risky. Anyone could have seen him with the body!”
“Well,” Tony mused, trying to make sense of this discovery, “He probably covered up the body with something so it couldn’t be seen. And the warehouse complex isn’t used much, apart from the guard there’s only a couple of homeless guys who stay out of sight most of the time. If the killer dumped the body at night he could be pretty sure he wouldn’t be seen, I guess. But he couldn’t have come far, nobody would go for a long walk out in the open pushing a wheelbarrow with a dead body in it. So either he lives nearby or he came in a car. And since the whole area is pretty much only warehouses… Abs, can you check the tapes from nearby traffic cams for the night Thorne was dumped?”
Abby grinned at him. “I already did. I marked a couple of routes to the warehouse complex and then looked for cars that passed by there late Monday night. There aren’t that many people driving out into the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night, so once I controlled for the type of car that could fit a full-sized wheelbarrow, I got this.” She hit a few keys on her keyboard and four dark, very grainy images showed up on the large screen. They all showed dark streets, with a large, dark vehicle visible from different angles.
Tony stepped closer to the screen, squinting. “That’s a van, right? It looks too light to be black, so dark grey? That’s good work, Abby.”
“No, it’s not.” Abby shook her head. “Do you have any idea how many dark vans there are in the DC area? When I manage to enhance the pictures enough to tell you the make and model and the license plate so you can put out a BOLO, then it’ll be good work,” she said forcefully.
Tony held up his hands in defense. “Whatever you say. I’m still going to go check if there’s been any suspicious activity in the last couple of days involving dark vans.” He headed out of the door and for the stairs, as the elevator lights indicated it was once again being misused as a conference room.
He stopped in the stairwell just outside the squad room, stepped into an unobserved corner and quickly pulled out his cell phone. “You have no new messages,” the tinny female voice declared.
“Gibbs is looking for you,” a very different female voice announced behind him.
Tony snapped around at Ziva. “You really shouldn’t sneak up on people like that,” he informed her. “It’s not polite.”
Ziva glanced at the cell phone in his hand. “Camille has left you no message?”
Tony looked for a second like he wanted to deny that that was what he had been checking for, then simply shook his head and sighed. “No.”
“I am sorry,” Ziva said, almost gently. “I know she is important to you, even if I do not understand why.”
“She isn’t, though,” Tony tried to explain, “Not really. I mean, not her personally. It’s just, well, she bailed before our first date. I’m used to not getting second dates, ‘cause that’s the kind of guy I am, but I’ve never been stood up for a first date.”
Ziva looked contemplatively at Tony for a moment. “And now you are wondering if you are perhaps losing your good looks or your charm, the things that never used to fail to get you a date.”
Tony said nothing, which was as good as an outright admission.
“You are getting older, Tony. What you have always done will not work forever. But,” Ziva raked her eyes up and down his form appreciatively, “you are definitely not losing your looks yet.” She gave him a suggestive smile.
“Elevator eyes, Ziva,” Tony remarked with mock-seriousness. “That’s yellow light behavior.”
“Then I guess you are lucky today,” Ziva smirked. “But if I were you I would not try my luck with Gibbs. He does not like to be kept waiting.”
“Did he say what he wants?”
“Not me,” Gibbs voice came from right behind them, causing both of them to jump. “Fornell.” He turned to Tony. “You’ve got dinner plans.”
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