SPN/NCIS gen fic: Out for Blood 3/9
Apr. 20th, 2007 06:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
superbadgirlTitle: Out for Blood
Author: SBG
Rating: R, for language
Category: H/C, Angst, A/A, Crossover with NCIS
Season/spoilers: Sometime in S2 for Supernatural (big reference to DMB), S4 for NCIS
Word count: Now a hair over 39,000 ;)
Summary: Someone from Dean and Sam Winchester’s past comes back to haunt them…and they also take a member of the NCIS team.
Disclaimer: All things Supernatural belong to Kripke Enterprises and The CW. All things NCIS belong to Bellisarius Productions and CBS.
Notes: Still thanking![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ldyanne for her support and typo-spotting. :)
Then
Back to part one
Or part two
Sam chewed on his lower lip. It had taken him longer than he thought it would to get into NCIS’ system, and had also taken a reluctant call to Ash for help. What he’d discovered once their joint effort had got him inside was actually worse than his earlier fears: NCIS didn’t have Dean in custody. He scanned through the case file, looking for anything the agents on the case might have figured out that he could use. He hoped they had next to nothing that they’d consider valuable, but that didn’t mean the information wouldn’t be of some use to him. It also wouldn’t hurt to know whom he was dealing with, and how much of what they had he had to make disappear.
He read quickly. The crime scene played out very much like the others. Pictures of the body told the story. It was definitely vampires, not that he’d really needed that confirmation. He stared at the picture of the mutilated body and grimaced, closed the picture and moved deeper into the file. Nothing about this fit what little he knew about a vampire’s MO. Lenore had said they were few in number, and her sect seemed atypical. If there were more of them out there, they were more likely to be evil than not. Either way, bringing attention to themselves was counterintuitive to their survival. He frowned. Hell, the fact that they were in a highly populated area was so off their track that he felt out of his element as well.
He straightened up. Sam couldn’t afford hesitation, hemming or hawing. Dean couldn’t afford his hesitation. Ash had also warned him that he also couldn’t be in the system for long, had to get out before someone figured out he was piggybacked onto it. He had to focus.
But no matter how many other pictures Sam saw in the files, his brain kept flashing back to the picture of Petty Officer Bowman’s dead body, and how right now Dean could be dying just like that. He shook his head as if to loosen the image he’d concocted there. One by one, though, he flicked through the crime scene photos, looking more carefully for anything at all that might help him, looking for signs that Dean was okay. He got nothing. Photos were too flat. He needed to see things for himself. He couldn’t rely on NCIS to do the footwork, and he couldn’t rely on their reports. Everything was too distilled. Neat and clean and grammatically correct, and most of it wasn’t coming from the right perspective. He kept going through the file anyway, because he didn’t really know what else to do at this moment in time. He landed on a picture that was a slight change from the previous killings. Bloody words, a message that he knew was meant for him, filled the screen.
One down. Come get me. K.
One down. Sam stared at the words, heart racing. That did not mean Dean was dead. It couldn’t. He couldn’t let himself think about that. One down, one down. Shit. No, there would be no reason to goad him into hunting if Dean were already dead. He clicked off the picture. He was right. His memory of the night Dad had killed the vampire in Colorado with the Colt was hazy, especially the few minutes after it happened. He’d been too busy trying to get oxygen into his deprived lungs to pay much attention. He remembered snippets. Blood splatter on his face. Dean holding him up. The way the female vampire had lunged for them, her cold rage filling the night. The way she screamed in emotional agony he hadn’t thought possible for an undead creature. The other surviving vampire calling her name and pulling her away. K stood for Kate, and, god, she was pissed at them and she had Dean. Sam closed his eyes for a second.
He wouldn’t do Dean any good wallowing in fear, he reminded himself. Sam refocused quickly, weeding through the rest of the photos, and then the medical examiner’s reports. Kate had clearly issued him a challenge, wanted him to find her, but she hadn’t left anything to work with. And if she had it wasn’t as though he was about to go running into a vampire’s nest recklessly despite his need to get Dean out fast, and Kate had to know that. The playing field here was more even than usual hunts; she’d seen them work before. She couldn’t know much about them, but revenge had obviously been on her mind for a long time. A terrible thought occurred to him. For all he knew, she’d been watching them for a while.
Which meant she might actually have more advantages than he was comfortable with. Plus Sam now had the added bonus of thwarting the feds vying for his attention. He couldn’t conduct himself the same way, knowing he’d be working the same scenes and information as NCIS. Kate hadn’t seemed smart enough to plan that distraction by killing a sailor intentionally, though she did have motivation and a great deal of anger on her side. He really couldn’t discount anything at the moment, and…
Ah, crap.
Sam stopped, leaned close to read the screen more closely. She had someone else, an NCIS agent. No wonder the people on scene had seemed so upset. Poor bastard. Sam read quickly. Blood from agent, DiNozzo, blood from victim. Additional blood from two previous victims, crimes committed in other states. They’d connected those deaths with Petty Officer Bowman’s. Dean’s weapons were logged in; no blood on them and no blood matching Dean anywhere, no mention of his presence there. Good. Maybe it would take the FBI a little while to figure him and Dean for this. Right. They had shitty luck with the law, and there was no way he could count on that changing just because it would be convenient for him. He might have to deal with both NCIS and FBI soon, which was something he really wanted to avoid.
“Focus, Sam, focus,” he said. Dean would make fun of him for talking to himself and, shit, it had been less than a day and he really missed his brother.
Sam had one more thing to do before he disconnected. He searched until he found an NCIS badge in a photo, took what he needed. Their medical examiner would have some blood he could ‘borrow.’ After all, he was just one person against an unknown number of vampires and he needed every edge he could get. There were other less risky options to getting blood from a dead person, but the lure of a firsthand look at the evidence while he carried out his primary task was too strong. It would also give him the opportunity to learn more about the agent in charge, though all he really< needed to know about Leroy Jethro Gibbs was that he was ex-Marine, and that his team was probably as sharp as he was. A former Israeli Moussad agent and an MIT grad. Great.
If Sam chewed his lip any harder, he’d gnaw a hole right through it. He studied the layout of the building quickly, not confident enough that he could download the specs to his laptop. He noted the security system and the locations of the autopsy room and the forensics lab in relation to the bullpen office area Gibbs and his team occupied. The handgun would be in the lab, and it was one of Dean’s favorites. He might take the chance at getting it back, and maybe the hunting knife as well. In for a penny, after all. He just needed a way in. He wasn’t crazy enough to parade around impersonating an agent while they all were hot on a rescue operation of their own. The more invisible he could get, the better. A maintenance guy? File clerk.
He erased all evidence he’d been on NCIS’ network (at least he hoped) and started his real work. Now that he knew for certain vampires had Dean, that this was a personal attack, he could also do what he and Dean should have done before – scope out the potential nesting sites that he had researched while he’d stupidly let Dean fumble around an active crime scene alone. He had too many damned things to do, and Sam’s gut told him he didn’t have a lot of time to do any of it. From this point on, everything had to go his way. Everything.
~~*~~
His level of frustration with this case was immense. Gibbs told himself that he’d feel the same regardless of whom the missing person was. He was a liar. The truth was that every goddamned second that went by meant one less second Tony had to live, and every second Tony lost was one they all lost. They’d wasted too much time crossing leads off their list, and getting no new ones to make up for them. So he found himself once again pacing the elevator. So far, the only thing that had gone right was that Jenn…Director Shepard had managed to put off the FBI for the next 24 hours, and had done it without him having to talk to Fornell at all. He didn’t know how she’d done it, and he didn’t care. He glanced at his watch. Make that 18 FBI-free hours now.
Gibbs knew he couldn’t make things happen through sheer force of will, but he was tired of looking at his team’s faces grow more and more somber. Their chatter, bouncing ideas back and forth, had mostly ceased, and now Ziva and McGee trailed silently after him. Part of it was probably some of the same grim determination he felt. The other part of it, though, was more worrisome – evidence that they were close to being lost, close to believing Tony was gone forever. He slid out of the elevator before the doors had opened all the way.
He knew they couldn’t take all of the remaining 18 hours to find DiNozzo. They were actually racing two clocks at once, counting down Tony’s life and against the FBI. Gibbs was so intent on making it to his desk to keep on racing those clocks that he didn’t see someone almost directly in his path. He collided with an extremely tall, lanky man hard enough that he made the papers the guy had in his hands fly all over the floor.
“Sorry,” he said brusquely, stepping back.
“Don’t worry. It’s okay, I’ve got it,” the guy mumbled, awkwardly turning away from him and ducking down to retrieve the documents. “It happens all the time, really.”
He paused for a minute, watched the guy wave off Ziva and McGee’s offers of help as well. Something pinged inside him, though he couldn’t be sure what or why. Something about the way the guy moved, and Gibbs had never seen the man in the building before. Which meant nothing. There were probably lots of people he’d never seen before. He shook his head. He was getting paranoid. He saw the guy finally collect all his papers and rush around a corner. His head was visible even over the tall wall. Gibbs smirked. It was probably a new agent who’d heard scuttlebutt about him and was as nervous as Palmer. That would certainly explain the furtive, nervous behavior. It was nice to see his reputation was still solid. He continued on his way.
“Jethro, there you are,” Ducky said, standing near his desk with a somewhat befuddled expression. “I expected you’d be here waiting, since you cal…”
“What’ve you got for us, Ducky?” he said, brushing past Ducky to get to his desk. “Tell me good news.”
“Well, I do have news, but I don’t know whether you’ll find it good or not.” Ducky quirked an eyebrow at him, which made him appear even more elvish than usual. Gibbs clenched his jaw. He’d already heard that “news, not good news” thing too often in the past few hours as well. “I have reason to believe Petty Officer Bowman was not killed in his home.”
“But the blood spatter…” McGee started to say, before Ducky cut him off.
“Was staged very adeptly.” Ducky looked toward him. Gibbs hadn’t sat down yet, and now felt disinclined. “Time of death indicates Petty Officer Bowman expired somewhere around two thirty in the AM.”
“But the blood, both his and not his, was still dripping when we got there,” Gibbs said.
“Yes, which means it could not have been there at the time of his death. Some bruising that must have occurred just prior to his death has now also presented on his wrists. It seems very likely that his last few moments were spent trying to break free.”
“And he wasn’t bound on the scene,” McGee said, the one to fill in where Ducky left off this time.
Shit.
“Whoever moved him did an excellent job of making it appear as though his home was the location of the crime.”
“It does not make sense,” Ziva said matter-of-factly. “None of it. Someone left a bloody trail across the United States, seemingly with no real forethought, but now they’re playing games. Leaving open invitations for us to find them.”
“Not us, Ziva,” Gibbs said.
“Then who?”
That was the $64,000 question.
“Does it really matter? They might want someone else to find them, but we’re going to.”
Even if he had no idea how. Gibbs found himself pacing again. It was the only action he seemed able to take lately, useless motion that never led anywhere. Ziva, McGee and Ducky kept talking. He tuned them out. They were missing the huge chunks of information they needed to actually move forward, to break him and the case from the pacing pattern. Things usually came together much more smoothly than this and it was killing him to spin his wheels when so much was personally at stake. He clenched his jaw. He couldn’t let it be personal, he reminded himself.
“I also have tried to understand a bit more about the unusual bite marks, Jethro,” Ducky said. “As far as I can determine, there really were two sets of teeth on each bite.”
“Wait, are you saying both sets were real?”
“It’s difficult to say, of course, Mr. McGee, without the actual teeth.”
“Is it even physically possible to have two sets of natural teeth? They don’t call the first set baby teeth for nothing.”
“At best, supernumerary teeth are highly abnormal. There could be a variety of causes for such a condition – hyperactivity of the dental lamina, heredity. I certainly have never read about a case where one set hasn’t been removed immediately after they’re discovered. I don’t know how one would function with two sets.”
“So it’s a rare condition, and yet we have two occurrences right here.”
“Three,” Ducky said. “I confirmed the third bite on poor Bowman came from yet another person.”
“Three occurrences in the same set of homicides,” Gibbs said. “That doesn’t seem likely.”
“Presumably three cases, and it might not seem likely, but evidence is proving that an incorrect assumption. I believe Abigail is still compiling information from all other cases, as best she can.”
Gibbs’ head started to hurt. This was exactly what kept cropping up – inexplicable, nonsensical evidence. He almost didn’t want to go see Abby, for fear she’d just throw another wrench into the works. The teeth thing had to be explained away as fakes, because the chances of three genetic anomalies ganging up on Bowman and the other victims were astronomical. Impossible.
“We’re going to assume the killers donned sets of fake teeth to prevent ID by dental records.”
“Yes, unfortunately, I was unable to obtain a clear imprint of either set of teeth, on any of the bites.”
“It still doesn’t make sense that they went from careless as they raced across the country to obviously intelligent and methodical now,” Ziva said again, insistently. “Why start trying to hide the trail they’d created intentionally?”
“Name me one thing about this case that has made sense,” Gibbs said. He pointed to the tiny screen linking them to the morgue and to Abby’s lab. “McGee, can you get Abby on that gizmo?”
“You got it, Boss.”
Within seconds, he heard Abby’s voice. Gibbs moved over to McGee’s desk, they all did. At first glance, Abby looked discouraged. At second glance, she looked depressed. Not good. He had to make time to refresh her Caf-Pow again, a gesture he hoped would help cheer her, at least a little.
“I need an update, Abs.”
“Do we have to do it this way, Gibbs? I’d rather talk to you in person,” she said, giving him a pleading look. She probably felt isolated, and knowing her, the solitude was allowing her to dwell on what might be happening to Tony. “It might be easier to show you.”
“Be down in a minute,” he said. He started for the elevator, Ziva, McGee and now Ducky all trailing after him quietly. He saw someone enter the cab, the doors slide shut. “Hold the elevator.”
He jogged to catch it, but the person inside must not have heard his call. Gibbs thought he saw the same man he’d run into before, ducking his head and pushing a button. If he didn’t know any better, he’d say the guy was trying to prevent them from boarding with him. Jackass. Gibbs jabbed at the down button, irritated. He supposed he could chalk it up to Murphy’s Law, but the elevator seemed to take forever. It must have stopped on every floor on the way down, and then again on the way back up. Everyone in the whole damn building had apparently decided to use the stupid thing at the same time. He was about to say screw it and take the stairs when the elevator finally arrived.
He half listened as his three companions continued to talk about the strange teeth phenomena. Teeth weren’t going to help them find DiNozzo; Ducky had made that clear. Gibbs led the way into Abby’s lab.
“It took you guys long enough. Come in,” she said. “I ran a mass spec on the saliva sample Ducky gave me, got no hits right away. I had to do more digging, pulled some strings, worked my magic.”
“And?”
“And got a match to a recently reopened FBI cold case. Quite a coincidence, huh? It turns out that a 35-year-old woman named Katherine Williamson disappeared from her home in Amarillo, Texas back in 1962, was presumed and eventually declared dead. There was blood at the scene, but absolutely no solid leads. Family and friends were all cleared. As luck would have it, DNA from the evidence, both from the woman and whoever took her, was still viable. Someone must have thought they had cause for reopening the file.”
“What does this have to do with Petty Officer Bowman, Abs?”
“I’m almost one hundred percent certain at least one of the people who chewed on Petty Officer Bowman was this Katherine Williamson.”
Abby cued up a picture of a dark haired woman, vivacious and smiling. Gibbs did the math in his head, could practically hear everyone else do the same. No. No way someone from the geriatric set could do this, let alone one missing and presumed dead for the past 45 years. He pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Abby,” McGee said softly, “If she were still alive, she’d be 80 now. That’s not possible. I can’t see Tony being taken out by a…grandma.”
“I know,” Abby said. Gibbs stared at her. She shrugged. “And yet that’s what the evidence says. I can only tell you what I know. You guys have to fill in the very weird blanks.”
Lucky them.
“Although I do have a thought about the motivation behind this style of killing.” She looked at Gibbs. “I dated this guy once who had a biting fetish, which was cool, you know I’m open about stuff, but it got to the point where even I was uncomfortable.”
Speaking of uncomfortable. Gibbs caught both Ziva and McGee squirm from Abby’s unique brand of too much information. He bit back a small smile.
“Anyway, I asked him one day if he thought he was trying to be Dracula. Yeah, I walked right into that one. Turned out his biting fetish was actually a vampire fetish, and I won’t even try to tell you how much weirder it got after that. The things that guy had in his closet would give you nightmares. But you know what they say, where one person has a fixation, there have to be more just like him. I’m all for exploring the dark side of humanity, but letting him actually draw blood was pushing it. I was out the door as soon as I heard that one. I don’t even like it when my doctor has to draw blood for routine tests.”
Abby finished up her longwinded supposition, and left her studio audience uncertain whether to applaud or run away. Gibbs would have been amused at the reactions except, removing Abby’s personal tale from it, it wasn’t particularly funny.
“You’re seriously suggesting we look for an 80-year-old vampire wannabe, Abby?” Gibbs said. “That’s…a stretch.”
“Maybe the 80-year-old doesn’t do any of the heavy lifting,” she said. “She’s the queen vampire. Wannabe. Whatever. Maybe she’s got a crew of hot young crazy people doing her bidding.”
Gibbs thought the idea of an 80-year-old at the head of a vampire cult was ridiculous, though at the core her suggestion wasn’t implausible. Most of the blood drained, human bite marks…they really could be dealing with some strange cult organization.
“But Abby, vampires are supposed to stay young. They’ve got that eternal life thing going on. She couldn’t get followers if she looks like an 80-year-old.”
“Not everyone is closed-minded when it comes to age, McGee.”
“Hey, I’m not…”
Gibbs’ cell rang, sparing him the rest of that awkward conversation. It usually gave him perverse pleasure to watch Abby cut McGee off at the knees, and part of him was glad they could still manage to find that spirit in them when he knew both of them were worried as hell. He noted who the caller was before lifting the phone to his ear.
“Jenny,” he said.
“Gibbs, there’s been another murder,” Director Jenny Shepard said grimly, with no lead-in. “Civilians on scene grabbed the victim’s wallet. Jethro…”
Ah, fuck.
“The police found an NCIS badge. I’m so sorry. I…it’s DiNozzo.”
They were too goddamned late.
~~*~~
Oh, boy.
To part four
Author: SBG
Rating: R, for language
Category: H/C, Angst, A/A, Crossover with NCIS
Season/spoilers: Sometime in S2 for Supernatural (big reference to DMB), S4 for NCIS
Word count: Now a hair over 39,000 ;)
Summary: Someone from Dean and Sam Winchester’s past comes back to haunt them…and they also take a member of the NCIS team.
Disclaimer: All things Supernatural belong to Kripke Enterprises and The CW. All things NCIS belong to Bellisarius Productions and CBS.
Notes: Still thanking
ldyanne for her support and typo-spotting. :)Then
Back to part one
Or part two
Sam chewed on his lower lip. It had taken him longer than he thought it would to get into NCIS’ system, and had also taken a reluctant call to Ash for help. What he’d discovered once their joint effort had got him inside was actually worse than his earlier fears: NCIS didn’t have Dean in custody. He scanned through the case file, looking for anything the agents on the case might have figured out that he could use. He hoped they had next to nothing that they’d consider valuable, but that didn’t mean the information wouldn’t be of some use to him. It also wouldn’t hurt to know whom he was dealing with, and how much of what they had he had to make disappear.
He read quickly. The crime scene played out very much like the others. Pictures of the body told the story. It was definitely vampires, not that he’d really needed that confirmation. He stared at the picture of the mutilated body and grimaced, closed the picture and moved deeper into the file. Nothing about this fit what little he knew about a vampire’s MO. Lenore had said they were few in number, and her sect seemed atypical. If there were more of them out there, they were more likely to be evil than not. Either way, bringing attention to themselves was counterintuitive to their survival. He frowned. Hell, the fact that they were in a highly populated area was so off their track that he felt out of his element as well.
He straightened up. Sam couldn’t afford hesitation, hemming or hawing. Dean couldn’t afford his hesitation. Ash had also warned him that he also couldn’t be in the system for long, had to get out before someone figured out he was piggybacked onto it. He had to focus.
But no matter how many other pictures Sam saw in the files, his brain kept flashing back to the picture of Petty Officer Bowman’s dead body, and how right now Dean could be dying just like that. He shook his head as if to loosen the image he’d concocted there. One by one, though, he flicked through the crime scene photos, looking more carefully for anything at all that might help him, looking for signs that Dean was okay. He got nothing. Photos were too flat. He needed to see things for himself. He couldn’t rely on NCIS to do the footwork, and he couldn’t rely on their reports. Everything was too distilled. Neat and clean and grammatically correct, and most of it wasn’t coming from the right perspective. He kept going through the file anyway, because he didn’t really know what else to do at this moment in time. He landed on a picture that was a slight change from the previous killings. Bloody words, a message that he knew was meant for him, filled the screen.
One down. Come get me. K.
One down. Sam stared at the words, heart racing. That did not mean Dean was dead. It couldn’t. He couldn’t let himself think about that. One down, one down. Shit. No, there would be no reason to goad him into hunting if Dean were already dead. He clicked off the picture. He was right. His memory of the night Dad had killed the vampire in Colorado with the Colt was hazy, especially the few minutes after it happened. He’d been too busy trying to get oxygen into his deprived lungs to pay much attention. He remembered snippets. Blood splatter on his face. Dean holding him up. The way the female vampire had lunged for them, her cold rage filling the night. The way she screamed in emotional agony he hadn’t thought possible for an undead creature. The other surviving vampire calling her name and pulling her away. K stood for Kate, and, god, she was pissed at them and she had Dean. Sam closed his eyes for a second.
He wouldn’t do Dean any good wallowing in fear, he reminded himself. Sam refocused quickly, weeding through the rest of the photos, and then the medical examiner’s reports. Kate had clearly issued him a challenge, wanted him to find her, but she hadn’t left anything to work with. And if she had it wasn’t as though he was about to go running into a vampire’s nest recklessly despite his need to get Dean out fast, and Kate had to know that. The playing field here was more even than usual hunts; she’d seen them work before. She couldn’t know much about them, but revenge had obviously been on her mind for a long time. A terrible thought occurred to him. For all he knew, she’d been watching them for a while.
Which meant she might actually have more advantages than he was comfortable with. Plus Sam now had the added bonus of thwarting the feds vying for his attention. He couldn’t conduct himself the same way, knowing he’d be working the same scenes and information as NCIS. Kate hadn’t seemed smart enough to plan that distraction by killing a sailor intentionally, though she did have motivation and a great deal of anger on her side. He really couldn’t discount anything at the moment, and…
Ah, crap.
Sam stopped, leaned close to read the screen more closely. She had someone else, an NCIS agent. No wonder the people on scene had seemed so upset. Poor bastard. Sam read quickly. Blood from agent, DiNozzo, blood from victim. Additional blood from two previous victims, crimes committed in other states. They’d connected those deaths with Petty Officer Bowman’s. Dean’s weapons were logged in; no blood on them and no blood matching Dean anywhere, no mention of his presence there. Good. Maybe it would take the FBI a little while to figure him and Dean for this. Right. They had shitty luck with the law, and there was no way he could count on that changing just because it would be convenient for him. He might have to deal with both NCIS and FBI soon, which was something he really wanted to avoid.
“Focus, Sam, focus,” he said. Dean would make fun of him for talking to himself and, shit, it had been less than a day and he really missed his brother.
Sam had one more thing to do before he disconnected. He searched until he found an NCIS badge in a photo, took what he needed. Their medical examiner would have some blood he could ‘borrow.’ After all, he was just one person against an unknown number of vampires and he needed every edge he could get. There were other less risky options to getting blood from a dead person, but the lure of a firsthand look at the evidence while he carried out his primary task was too strong. It would also give him the opportunity to learn more about the agent in charge, though all he really< needed to know about Leroy Jethro Gibbs was that he was ex-Marine, and that his team was probably as sharp as he was. A former Israeli Moussad agent and an MIT grad. Great.
If Sam chewed his lip any harder, he’d gnaw a hole right through it. He studied the layout of the building quickly, not confident enough that he could download the specs to his laptop. He noted the security system and the locations of the autopsy room and the forensics lab in relation to the bullpen office area Gibbs and his team occupied. The handgun would be in the lab, and it was one of Dean’s favorites. He might take the chance at getting it back, and maybe the hunting knife as well. In for a penny, after all. He just needed a way in. He wasn’t crazy enough to parade around impersonating an agent while they all were hot on a rescue operation of their own. The more invisible he could get, the better. A maintenance guy? File clerk.
He erased all evidence he’d been on NCIS’ network (at least he hoped) and started his real work. Now that he knew for certain vampires had Dean, that this was a personal attack, he could also do what he and Dean should have done before – scope out the potential nesting sites that he had researched while he’d stupidly let Dean fumble around an active crime scene alone. He had too many damned things to do, and Sam’s gut told him he didn’t have a lot of time to do any of it. From this point on, everything had to go his way. Everything.
~~*~~
His level of frustration with this case was immense. Gibbs told himself that he’d feel the same regardless of whom the missing person was. He was a liar. The truth was that every goddamned second that went by meant one less second Tony had to live, and every second Tony lost was one they all lost. They’d wasted too much time crossing leads off their list, and getting no new ones to make up for them. So he found himself once again pacing the elevator. So far, the only thing that had gone right was that Jenn…Director Shepard had managed to put off the FBI for the next 24 hours, and had done it without him having to talk to Fornell at all. He didn’t know how she’d done it, and he didn’t care. He glanced at his watch. Make that 18 FBI-free hours now.
Gibbs knew he couldn’t make things happen through sheer force of will, but he was tired of looking at his team’s faces grow more and more somber. Their chatter, bouncing ideas back and forth, had mostly ceased, and now Ziva and McGee trailed silently after him. Part of it was probably some of the same grim determination he felt. The other part of it, though, was more worrisome – evidence that they were close to being lost, close to believing Tony was gone forever. He slid out of the elevator before the doors had opened all the way.
He knew they couldn’t take all of the remaining 18 hours to find DiNozzo. They were actually racing two clocks at once, counting down Tony’s life and against the FBI. Gibbs was so intent on making it to his desk to keep on racing those clocks that he didn’t see someone almost directly in his path. He collided with an extremely tall, lanky man hard enough that he made the papers the guy had in his hands fly all over the floor.
“Sorry,” he said brusquely, stepping back.
“Don’t worry. It’s okay, I’ve got it,” the guy mumbled, awkwardly turning away from him and ducking down to retrieve the documents. “It happens all the time, really.”
He paused for a minute, watched the guy wave off Ziva and McGee’s offers of help as well. Something pinged inside him, though he couldn’t be sure what or why. Something about the way the guy moved, and Gibbs had never seen the man in the building before. Which meant nothing. There were probably lots of people he’d never seen before. He shook his head. He was getting paranoid. He saw the guy finally collect all his papers and rush around a corner. His head was visible even over the tall wall. Gibbs smirked. It was probably a new agent who’d heard scuttlebutt about him and was as nervous as Palmer. That would certainly explain the furtive, nervous behavior. It was nice to see his reputation was still solid. He continued on his way.
“Jethro, there you are,” Ducky said, standing near his desk with a somewhat befuddled expression. “I expected you’d be here waiting, since you cal…”
“What’ve you got for us, Ducky?” he said, brushing past Ducky to get to his desk. “Tell me good news.”
“Well, I do have news, but I don’t know whether you’ll find it good or not.” Ducky quirked an eyebrow at him, which made him appear even more elvish than usual. Gibbs clenched his jaw. He’d already heard that “news, not good news” thing too often in the past few hours as well. “I have reason to believe Petty Officer Bowman was not killed in his home.”
“But the blood spatter…” McGee started to say, before Ducky cut him off.
“Was staged very adeptly.” Ducky looked toward him. Gibbs hadn’t sat down yet, and now felt disinclined. “Time of death indicates Petty Officer Bowman expired somewhere around two thirty in the AM.”
“But the blood, both his and not his, was still dripping when we got there,” Gibbs said.
“Yes, which means it could not have been there at the time of his death. Some bruising that must have occurred just prior to his death has now also presented on his wrists. It seems very likely that his last few moments were spent trying to break free.”
“And he wasn’t bound on the scene,” McGee said, the one to fill in where Ducky left off this time.
Shit.
“Whoever moved him did an excellent job of making it appear as though his home was the location of the crime.”
“It does not make sense,” Ziva said matter-of-factly. “None of it. Someone left a bloody trail across the United States, seemingly with no real forethought, but now they’re playing games. Leaving open invitations for us to find them.”
“Not us, Ziva,” Gibbs said.
“Then who?”
That was the $64,000 question.
“Does it really matter? They might want someone else to find them, but we’re going to.”
Even if he had no idea how. Gibbs found himself pacing again. It was the only action he seemed able to take lately, useless motion that never led anywhere. Ziva, McGee and Ducky kept talking. He tuned them out. They were missing the huge chunks of information they needed to actually move forward, to break him and the case from the pacing pattern. Things usually came together much more smoothly than this and it was killing him to spin his wheels when so much was personally at stake. He clenched his jaw. He couldn’t let it be personal, he reminded himself.
“I also have tried to understand a bit more about the unusual bite marks, Jethro,” Ducky said. “As far as I can determine, there really were two sets of teeth on each bite.”
“Wait, are you saying both sets were real?”
“It’s difficult to say, of course, Mr. McGee, without the actual teeth.”
“Is it even physically possible to have two sets of natural teeth? They don’t call the first set baby teeth for nothing.”
“At best, supernumerary teeth are highly abnormal. There could be a variety of causes for such a condition – hyperactivity of the dental lamina, heredity. I certainly have never read about a case where one set hasn’t been removed immediately after they’re discovered. I don’t know how one would function with two sets.”
“So it’s a rare condition, and yet we have two occurrences right here.”
“Three,” Ducky said. “I confirmed the third bite on poor Bowman came from yet another person.”
“Three occurrences in the same set of homicides,” Gibbs said. “That doesn’t seem likely.”
“Presumably three cases, and it might not seem likely, but evidence is proving that an incorrect assumption. I believe Abigail is still compiling information from all other cases, as best she can.”
Gibbs’ head started to hurt. This was exactly what kept cropping up – inexplicable, nonsensical evidence. He almost didn’t want to go see Abby, for fear she’d just throw another wrench into the works. The teeth thing had to be explained away as fakes, because the chances of three genetic anomalies ganging up on Bowman and the other victims were astronomical. Impossible.
“We’re going to assume the killers donned sets of fake teeth to prevent ID by dental records.”
“Yes, unfortunately, I was unable to obtain a clear imprint of either set of teeth, on any of the bites.”
“It still doesn’t make sense that they went from careless as they raced across the country to obviously intelligent and methodical now,” Ziva said again, insistently. “Why start trying to hide the trail they’d created intentionally?”
“Name me one thing about this case that has made sense,” Gibbs said. He pointed to the tiny screen linking them to the morgue and to Abby’s lab. “McGee, can you get Abby on that gizmo?”
“You got it, Boss.”
Within seconds, he heard Abby’s voice. Gibbs moved over to McGee’s desk, they all did. At first glance, Abby looked discouraged. At second glance, she looked depressed. Not good. He had to make time to refresh her Caf-Pow again, a gesture he hoped would help cheer her, at least a little.
“I need an update, Abs.”
“Do we have to do it this way, Gibbs? I’d rather talk to you in person,” she said, giving him a pleading look. She probably felt isolated, and knowing her, the solitude was allowing her to dwell on what might be happening to Tony. “It might be easier to show you.”
“Be down in a minute,” he said. He started for the elevator, Ziva, McGee and now Ducky all trailing after him quietly. He saw someone enter the cab, the doors slide shut. “Hold the elevator.”
He jogged to catch it, but the person inside must not have heard his call. Gibbs thought he saw the same man he’d run into before, ducking his head and pushing a button. If he didn’t know any better, he’d say the guy was trying to prevent them from boarding with him. Jackass. Gibbs jabbed at the down button, irritated. He supposed he could chalk it up to Murphy’s Law, but the elevator seemed to take forever. It must have stopped on every floor on the way down, and then again on the way back up. Everyone in the whole damn building had apparently decided to use the stupid thing at the same time. He was about to say screw it and take the stairs when the elevator finally arrived.
He half listened as his three companions continued to talk about the strange teeth phenomena. Teeth weren’t going to help them find DiNozzo; Ducky had made that clear. Gibbs led the way into Abby’s lab.
“It took you guys long enough. Come in,” she said. “I ran a mass spec on the saliva sample Ducky gave me, got no hits right away. I had to do more digging, pulled some strings, worked my magic.”
“And?”
“And got a match to a recently reopened FBI cold case. Quite a coincidence, huh? It turns out that a 35-year-old woman named Katherine Williamson disappeared from her home in Amarillo, Texas back in 1962, was presumed and eventually declared dead. There was blood at the scene, but absolutely no solid leads. Family and friends were all cleared. As luck would have it, DNA from the evidence, both from the woman and whoever took her, was still viable. Someone must have thought they had cause for reopening the file.”
“What does this have to do with Petty Officer Bowman, Abs?”
“I’m almost one hundred percent certain at least one of the people who chewed on Petty Officer Bowman was this Katherine Williamson.”
Abby cued up a picture of a dark haired woman, vivacious and smiling. Gibbs did the math in his head, could practically hear everyone else do the same. No. No way someone from the geriatric set could do this, let alone one missing and presumed dead for the past 45 years. He pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Abby,” McGee said softly, “If she were still alive, she’d be 80 now. That’s not possible. I can’t see Tony being taken out by a…grandma.”
“I know,” Abby said. Gibbs stared at her. She shrugged. “And yet that’s what the evidence says. I can only tell you what I know. You guys have to fill in the very weird blanks.”
Lucky them.
“Although I do have a thought about the motivation behind this style of killing.” She looked at Gibbs. “I dated this guy once who had a biting fetish, which was cool, you know I’m open about stuff, but it got to the point where even I was uncomfortable.”
Speaking of uncomfortable. Gibbs caught both Ziva and McGee squirm from Abby’s unique brand of too much information. He bit back a small smile.
“Anyway, I asked him one day if he thought he was trying to be Dracula. Yeah, I walked right into that one. Turned out his biting fetish was actually a vampire fetish, and I won’t even try to tell you how much weirder it got after that. The things that guy had in his closet would give you nightmares. But you know what they say, where one person has a fixation, there have to be more just like him. I’m all for exploring the dark side of humanity, but letting him actually draw blood was pushing it. I was out the door as soon as I heard that one. I don’t even like it when my doctor has to draw blood for routine tests.”
Abby finished up her longwinded supposition, and left her studio audience uncertain whether to applaud or run away. Gibbs would have been amused at the reactions except, removing Abby’s personal tale from it, it wasn’t particularly funny.
“You’re seriously suggesting we look for an 80-year-old vampire wannabe, Abby?” Gibbs said. “That’s…a stretch.”
“Maybe the 80-year-old doesn’t do any of the heavy lifting,” she said. “She’s the queen vampire. Wannabe. Whatever. Maybe she’s got a crew of hot young crazy people doing her bidding.”
Gibbs thought the idea of an 80-year-old at the head of a vampire cult was ridiculous, though at the core her suggestion wasn’t implausible. Most of the blood drained, human bite marks…they really could be dealing with some strange cult organization.
“But Abby, vampires are supposed to stay young. They’ve got that eternal life thing going on. She couldn’t get followers if she looks like an 80-year-old.”
“Not everyone is closed-minded when it comes to age, McGee.”
“Hey, I’m not…”
Gibbs’ cell rang, sparing him the rest of that awkward conversation. It usually gave him perverse pleasure to watch Abby cut McGee off at the knees, and part of him was glad they could still manage to find that spirit in them when he knew both of them were worried as hell. He noted who the caller was before lifting the phone to his ear.
“Jenny,” he said.
“Gibbs, there’s been another murder,” Director Jenny Shepard said grimly, with no lead-in. “Civilians on scene grabbed the victim’s wallet. Jethro…”
Ah, fuck.
“The police found an NCIS badge. I’m so sorry. I…it’s DiNozzo.”
They were too goddamned late.
~~*~~
Oh, boy.
To part four
