Prodigal, part seven
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On LJ: One | Two| Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven | Eight | Nine | Ten
"You're kidding me, right?"
Hollis looked up from the medical report she was reading to see what DiNozzo was complaining about.
"McGee, there's, like, fifty here," DiNozzo went on, eyes still on his computer screen. "I thought you were going to filter them first."
"I did," McGee replied sourly and Hollis realized what this was. "Ziva's got the ones with military connections."
After Staff Sergeant Baxter's murder, she and Gibbs had tasked McGee with pulling up a list of every knife-related homicide in the country, going back to a month before Li Feng's death. It wouldn't get them all possibilities -- Feng's death wasn't even classified as a suspicious death -- but it might get them some other possibilities that they'd not have found otherwise because they hadn't happened on military bases or to active duty personnel. Obviously Lorne hadn't been implicated in any other crime, but if they could establish any kind of connection, then it would get them further than they were now. Which was really nowhere.
DiNozzo groused some more, but went about further narrowing down the list. It was busy-work in a way, but it was also the sort of boring gruntwork that came with the job and DiNozzo, for all of his tendencies to bitch about work when Gibbs wasn't around, understood that.
Gibbs wasn't around because he was off meeting with his contacts about O'Neill's program and other points of interest that Mitchell hadn't been willing to share. Hollis had wanted to go with him -- this was still a joint operation no matter how much it had been taken over by NCIS and she was still co-lead investigator -- but he'd first told her not to and then, when that had failed miserably, he asked her not to.
"You have your sources, I have mine," he'd said after she'd come very close to tearing him a new one for flat-out refusing to let her accompany him. "Mine tend to be ornery and pissed off and won't like the impression that I'm pimping them out to CID. It's not like I'm not going to tell you what they say, Hol. Just... trust me that I'll get more out of them if you're not there. There's no reason for both of us to go into debt for this."
She'd let him go alone because he'd asked, not because she'd been swayed by his arguments.
"How are you coming along on verifying Baxter's old postings?" she asked McGee. That had been the justification for him foisting off the trawling of victims on DiNozzo and David.
"He's on the up-and-up through July 2004," McGee answered, looking up but still typing away. "I'm having trouble tracking down anyone from after his second tour in Iraq -- his CO left the service. I'm trying to find him now, but there's no address on file and the guy's last name is Kim."
Hollis tipped her head in acknowledgment of that difficulty. "Keep trying."
David returned before Gibbs; she'd been meeting with someone from Mossad, but Hollis didn't think it was necessarily related to either the case or Safir; Hollis thought she was the only one who'd blinked at the idea of a colleague casually going off during work hours to meet with a member of a foreign intelligence service; Gibbs had merely told David not to be all afternoon. Now that she was back, however, David, was as unimpressed as DiNozzo to see the amount of phone calls and crime-scene photos in her immediate future, but she started her work with only a deep sigh.
"I do not like making phone calls," she said to no one in particular after an hour's frustration on the phone that floated in and out of Hollis's awareness. "Nobody believes I am who I say I am. Is there some rule that you must be native-born to be law-enforcement in this country?"
"At least you just have trouble because of your accent," McGee told her. "Tony's first language is English. He's got no excuse."
Hollis didn't look up to see what kind of gesture DiNozzo, who was on the phone, made in response, but she heard the movement. She was on the second-to-last page of Ducky's wound pattern analysis, which was a lot of eloquent prose all saying that the knife that had killed Baxter was certainly the same make and model as the one that had killed Pal, Kennedy, and Litorsky but that there was no way to guarantee that it was actually the same one. Which put it in the same category as every other bit of evidence they'd collected - circumstantial. They still had nothing to tie Lorne to anything but the death of Jamail Baxter and even that was suspicious.
Gibbs returned around 1630, damp from the heavy rain and cranky for other reasons.
"Well?" Hollis prompted after he'd gotten settled at his desk. The others did their best to pretend they weren't eager for the answer.
"O'Neill is running the first SAP staffed by people who can keep a secret," Gibbs answered with a frown. "A lot of people want to know what the hell he's doing."
Gibbs's contacts hadn't been able to get much. O'Neill's program had existed for a decade at least but was definitely post-Cold War, was extremely well-funded, and there was no consensus about what it actually did and who was involved. "'Technology intelligence acquisition,'" Gibbs said sourly. "They're a little well-armed for a bunch of nerds."
McGee, on to his second page of James Kims, did not react.
It was two days later and Hollis was in her service uniform outside of a courtroom turning her phone back on to check the voicemails that had accrued.
"Road trip to Madison," Gibbs said in the fourth one. "Be ready at six."
Hollis looked at her watch. This was a ponderous panel and she wasn't sure they'd be done by six, let alone that she'd be in any position to be packed and ready. Forget actually knowing why she was headed to Wisconsin and whether she really needed to be or if this was just another case of Gibbs's inability to delegate. She suspected the latter -- he would've sounded a little more excited if they had a bead on Lorne -- in which case she could blow him off and remind him that she had other obligations. Instead, she went and found the JAG lawyer and asked what the odds were that she'd actually get called as a witness today, the last day before a three-day recess. Twenty minutes later, she was headed back to the office.
"Why are we going to Wisconsin?" she asked when Gibbs picked up his phone.
"We got the right James Kim," Gibbs answered. "And he's not an artillery officer."
The flight left from Reagan National after eight and got in to Madison after ten, after which they went straight to the hotel with instructions to meet in the lobby at 0700 the following morning. NCIS had sprung for two rooms only, so Hollis forestalled a lot of hemming and hawing among the junior members of the team by announcing that they'd split up along gender lines.
"One of those had better be for me," Hollis told Gibbs when she saw him in the lobby at 0650 holding two coffee cups. He cocked an eyebrow, but handed one over without a word. It had cream (not milk) in it, which was how she took it.
McGee had his phone out and was programming a route to Lt.Col. (ret) James Kim's home by the time David and DiNozzo arrived, each with their own coffee. "It should take about twenty minutes with no traffic," he said.
A half-hour later, they were stuck firmly in traffic and they all had to hope that Kim hadn't already left for work.
"Did you speak to him?" Hollis asked McGee as Gibbs stressed and flexed his fingers on the steering wheel. Jethro in traffic was exactly as she'd have imagined if she'd bothered to imagine him stuck in traffic. Everyone in the car was on their best behavior.
"I left a message," McGee answered with a frown. "Boss, if you want to get off at the next exit, we can take local roads from here."
Gibbs's skepticism of either GPS or McGee's navigating (or both) showed on his face, but he said nothing. He did start working his way into the right lane, though.
Ten minutes later, they were turning on to the right street when they saw something that made them worry a lot more than the fact that Kim might've already left for work.
"I hope those police cars are not here for the same reason we are," David said, leaning forward to look past Gibbs's right shoulder.
"Crap," Gibbs sighed, since their luck hadn't been that good.
MPD seemed surprised to see NCIS (Hollis hadn't bothered to throw in the 'and CID,' choosing to let her uniform speak for itself) pulling up to their murder scene.
"He was a marine," Gibbs told Detective Feasby.
Feasby didn't even blink. "So was I. That doesn't answer my question."
"A marine was killed a few weeks ago," Hollis said. "We believe he was killed because of something he saw or did while under Kim's command."
It wasn't precisely true, of course, but it was their working theory, the reason they'd gotten permission to chase him down, and Feasby didn't need to know differently. At least not yet.
"We came out here hoping Colonel Kim could shed a little light on the situation," she went on, pretending she didn't see Gibbs's smug look. Like he thought that he was really actually responsible for her fast talking. She'd been a professional-grade bullshitter for a lot longer than she'd known him. "This wasn't what we had in mind."
"You think this is all connected?" Feasby asked with a frown. He was looking at her chest, but with the sort of distraction that meant he was looking at the junk on the front and not what was underneath. "Colonel Mann... The Army's in on this, too?"
"It's a big case," she answered. "Do you think it's possible for us to take a look around?"
Feasby didn't seem overjoyed, but he also had the resigned look of someone who understood just how much this was out of his hands. He gestured for them to pass.
The house was small and neat, orderly in a way that Hollis expected every retired career marine's home was. She wasn't the only one to make that assumption.
"It's like Gibbs's house," DiNozzo whispered to McGee as they moved through the front of the house; Kim had been killed in the kitchen. "Except there are more ducks."
Kim had apparently been a duck hunter and the living room was tastefully and sparely decorated with duck-themed items.
One look at the body and any doubts that might have lingered that this was just an unfortunate coincidence vanished. Single slash across the throat.
"Whoever it was grabbed him from behind," Feasby told them as they squeezed carefully into the already-crowded kitchen. "Signs of struggle -- the chairs and table are askew and we got fibers underneath his fingernails -- but no defensive wounds. We've processed the place for prints, but..."
"What kind of fibers?" Gibbs asked.
"Some synthetic," Feasby replied. "Blue. My guess, it'll turn out to be from the sleeve of whatever coat his assailant was wearing."
He turned, saw an oblivious McGee standing right next to him taking pictures with his phone, and grabbed him in a quick restraining hold. McGee scratched at Feasby's arm before Feasby pretended to slice his throat.
"It's a pretty basic move," Feasby went on, releasing McGee, who stepped back with a disgruntled expression and ignored DiNozzo's laughter at his expense. "They teach it to marines in Boot."
"I know," Gibbs said wryly. Feasby's expression changed and Hollis kept back the sigh as the two former leathernecks had a moment of recognition and silent bonding. Normally the whole cultish thing was annoying -- it happened with the Army, no doubt, but not to the extent that every marine assumed that there was at most one degree of separation between him and every other marine -- but here it might work to their favor.
"Basic move or not, they did not teach Colonel Kim how to defend against it," David said from where she was standing, which was on top of a newspaper on top of a chair so that she could take photos of the entire kitchen.
"They did," Gibbs told her. "Wouldn't have made a difference. Get to the right part fast enough and it's all over."
David gave a tiny shrug of agreement, then went back to her picture-taking.
"One of Lorne's marines?" DiNozzo wondered aloud. "I don't think Lorne's big enough to do this himself."
Kim looked to have been a little taller than average height and of regular build. Lorne might've been able to do it, but it probably would have been far messier than this.
"Who called it in?" Hollis asked.
"MGE service guy," Feasby answered, gesturing to the closed kitchen door, which had a window in it. "The automated reader was blinkered and Kim had called in for a repair for this morning. Guy showed up at 6:30 and rang the doorbell, got no anwer so he came around the back and peeked through the window."
The time of death was estimated to be 9:30 last night; Kim had already been dead before they'd landed.
"Anyone else live here?" DiNozzo asked. "From the ducks, I'm guessing 'no.'"
"Divorced, ex-wife and kids over in Sun Prairie," Feasby replied with a frown. "We sent a car over to do notification."
The body was removed as soon as everyone had taken their pictures; there was a little bit of pressure to get the worst of the gore cleaned up before Kim's family arrived.
Feasby was accommodating as far as letting them participate in all facets of the investigation, including letting them ask questions of Lorraine Kim, the ex-wife.
"Five bucks says that you end up taking this case from me," he'd said when Hollis had thanked him for his cooperation. "Might as well make sure you have everything you need to get the guy."
Mrs. Kim, distraught in a way that ex-wives usually were not, told them that she and her late husband had been divorced for ten years, that the strain of a military marriage had gotten to be too much, and she'd returned to her hometown to raise their three children. It had been a relatively amicable divorce and they'd managed to stay friendly for the sake of their children. Colonel Kim had filed his retirement papers on his twentieth anniversary in the Corps and taken a job at the university to be closer to the kids.
"Where was your ex-husband stationed in 2004?" Hollis asked her after they got the basic questions out of the way.
"In 2004?" Mrs. Kim repeated, closing her eyes as she tried to remember. "Jimmy was in Colorado Springs already, I think. Yes. He moved back from Honduras in 2002 and the kids spent the summer with him in San Diego in 2003 and then it was three years in Colorado Springs before he moved back here."
At the mention of Colorado Springs, Hollis exchanged a look with Gibbs.
"Colorado's a little inland for a marine," Gibbs prompted. "Do you know what he was doing there?"
Wiping away fresh tears, Mrs. Kim shook her head. "He was an intelligence officer," she said ruefully. "I got plenty of iterations of 'I can't tell you' even before we got divorced. It was probably one of the reasons we did get divorced. It's hard to share your life with someone who can't reciprocate."
After the interview, Hollis asked David and DiNozzo to look through the place to find any photos or souvenirs of Kim's time in the service. There was no I Love Me wall per se, just a couple of framed photographs and his officer's sword on a plaque on a wall in his office, and she knew there had to be a cache somewhere. Gibbs had one, too, although she'd never seen it.
By late afternoon, Gibbs was on the phone back to Shepard explaining what had gone on and wrangling out how much longer they could stay. By the evening, Feasby was already hearing murmurs from his boss that the case was going to be plucked out of their hands. Unlike the police in Jackson, he was not relieved. Resigned, maybe, but not happy about it at all.
Hollis wondered if Feasby realized what kind of respect Gibbs was paying him by not actually taking over the investigation and bringing in his own lab people. A couple of things were FedExed back to Abby, but the rest was left in the hands of Madison's finest, entirely because Feasby obviously trusted them.
David found a small box in a locked file cabinet in Kim's office. In it were unmarked photographs of unnamed people. But that didn't mean that they didn't know who any of them were.
"I believe we have found our connection," David announced, holding up a photo. In it was Kim, Jamail Baxter, and two other marines sitting around eating MREs in a forest clearing that looked like it could have been anywhere.
"We already knew that Kim and Baxter knew each other," Gibbs pointed out sourly.
"Yes, but we did not know that they knew Samantha Carter," David agreed, holding up the next photo. In it, Carter, dressed in utes and holding a canteen, was sitting on a log between Kim and a bespectacled man.
Hollis chuckled mirthlessly. "This world keeps getting smaller and smaller."
The photos, about a dozen in all, were completely devoid of any context. There was no way to figure out when or where they had been taken; Carter had shorter hair, but past that, nothing. The trees behind them were garden variety oaks and nobody was wearing their blouses so there were no patches or even nametapes visible. Baxter was in most of them and the ones that Kim wasn't in Hollis assumed he was the one taking; the other two marines were in most of them as well, with the odd extra character. All of the photos were scanned to send back to Abby to get names to put on the faces.
"What are these?" DiNozzo asked as he finished scanning. "R&R for O'Neill's group of tech spies?"
It was as good a guess as any. Probably a better one than most.
It was already after nine when they quit the house. Hollis asked Feasby for a recommendation for a place to eat and he gave them directions to an Indian place nearby from which it would be easy to find the highway that would take them back to their hotel.
Dinner was definitely of working-meal variety; the restaurant was mostly empty, but they still kept their voices down as they discussed what the implications were of Baxter and Kim both being part of O'Neill's unit.
"Baxter and Kim were both in Colorado at the same time as Feng, Kennedy, Litorsky, and Pal," McGee said. "It's fair to assume that Kim led a team the way Lorne does--"
"--and Colonel Mitchell most likely does," David added, tearing off a piece from the giant nan.
McGee tilted his head in acknowledgment. "Is it also fair to assume that Kim's team saw or participated in something the scientists were doing and that's why they're getting bumped off?"
"We don't have a strong connection between the scientists," Hollis pointed out, entirely to play devil's advocate since she was willing to bet that this was exactly what was happening. "Proximity, that's it. And for civilians working for the military in Colorado Springs, that's not going to count."
"We have a link between Lorne and Litorsky," DiNozzo offered. "Even if it's not exactly the one Lorne told us it was."
"It was," Gibbs said, sipping at his tea. "He might've been lying about how well he knew him, but not about why."
"We can't prove either of them knew the others," McGee said. "We can say that it was likely, that the similarities in how they were killed makes it probable that it was the same killer and therefore the same reason, but..."
"I thought you were supposed to be advocating the conspiracy," David said. "And letting Colonel Mann tell you why you were wrong."
"I don't think he's wrong," Hollis said before McGee could defend himself. "But I don't think we can prove he's right yet, either."
"Maybe I'm just not as into the whole black ops thing as everyone else," DiNozzo sighed, leaning back as the waiter arrived with their entrees. "But I don't like the idea that we're just slaughtering our own because we don't like what they saw. The Pentagon paraded around with a 'Kick Me' sign for Abu Ghraib and is content to let the rest of the world assume they're restaging the Spanish Inquisition in various Third World countries. What's the point of taking some pretty extreme measures against a black op becoming public, even if it's really nasty?"
"Especially if it is a program as well-hidden as General O'Neill's," David added, pointing so that the waiter knew the paneer makhani was hers.
"Six murders so far's pretty extreme," DiNozzo went on. "Even most conspiracy movies stop after two or three. Except The Parallax View -- that had a pretty impressive body count. I hope this ends better than that does, though."
They focused on eating then, Hollis enjoying a very nice fish bhuna, but then Gibbs's cell phone rang.
"What is it, Abbs?" Gibbs answered, then listened to her answer before holding the phone away from his mouth. "McGee, where's your phone?"
"In my pocket?" McGee answered, confused. He reached down, but then his eyebrows shot up. "Or not. Crap. I must've left it at the house."
Abby had sent McGee some photos but hadn't heard back from him, nor had he answered when she called. She knew better than to send the pictures to Gibbs's phone, Jethro having a very fragile detente with modern technology. As it was Gibbs handed off his phone to McGee to complete the conversation with Abby.
"Abby's got IDs on some of the people in Colonel Kim's photos," McGee explained as he handed the phone back to Gibbs. "All of the other marines and two of the civilians. Can we go back to the house to get the phone? It can wait for the morning, I suppose, but..."
Gibbs made an annoyed face that everyone took as acquiescence. They finished up, paid, and piled back into the SUV to return to the crime scene.
The house was cordoned off with police tape, but there was nobody posted.
"How are we--" McGee cut himself off as David brandished a lockpick. "Nevermind. Someone want to call my phone once we're inside?"
DiNozzo sighed and pulled out his own phone, waggling it in front of him.
McGee and David exited the car, parked across the street, and headed for the house. A sharp, low whistle from Gibbs stopped them in their tracks, though.
Leaning forward, Hollis saw Gibbs indicate through hand gestures that he'd seen something in one of the second-story windows. Everyone else picked out their flashlights and quietly got out of the car, unholstered their weapons, and joined McGee and David.
"Covered flashlight," Gibbs explained. "Window on the right."
"The office," David whispered back. "Someone is here to finish looking for what they did not find."
"DiNozzo, Ziva, you two get the exits," Gibbs ordered. "Watch out in case they're not using a door.'"
When they approached the front door, they could see that the tape had not been tampered with. David made quick work of doing so, peeling back the strip over the door edge with practiced ease as DiNozzo disappeared around the side of the house. David had them inside in seconds, where they paused to listen for movement. They heard nothing, so Hollis followed Gibbs up the stairs and McGee followed her.
The upstairs was three rooms and a bathroom with the office being the second door on the right. They moved slowly, not wanting to give away their position, and Hollis hoped for no creaky stairs. As they got close to the landing, they could hear the shuffling of papers and the quiet movements of someone who knew what they were doing by searching a dark room with only a red-lensed flashlight. There seemed to be only one person, which was a relief in that Hollis really didn't like the odds of the three of them against Lorne's full team.
Gibbs gestured for her and McGee to bracket the door and they did, guns drawn. Gibbs came up and past them, reaching in to the room to where he knew the light switch to be.
"Freeze," he ordered, flicking on the overhead light.
"Fuck," Lorne cursed quietly, pushing his NVGs up and blinking quickly. "Hello, Special Agent Gibbs."
On LJ: One | Two| Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven | Eight | Nine | Ten
"You're kidding me, right?"
Hollis looked up from the medical report she was reading to see what DiNozzo was complaining about.
"McGee, there's, like, fifty here," DiNozzo went on, eyes still on his computer screen. "I thought you were going to filter them first."
"I did," McGee replied sourly and Hollis realized what this was. "Ziva's got the ones with military connections."
After Staff Sergeant Baxter's murder, she and Gibbs had tasked McGee with pulling up a list of every knife-related homicide in the country, going back to a month before Li Feng's death. It wouldn't get them all possibilities -- Feng's death wasn't even classified as a suspicious death -- but it might get them some other possibilities that they'd not have found otherwise because they hadn't happened on military bases or to active duty personnel. Obviously Lorne hadn't been implicated in any other crime, but if they could establish any kind of connection, then it would get them further than they were now. Which was really nowhere.
DiNozzo groused some more, but went about further narrowing down the list. It was busy-work in a way, but it was also the sort of boring gruntwork that came with the job and DiNozzo, for all of his tendencies to bitch about work when Gibbs wasn't around, understood that.
Gibbs wasn't around because he was off meeting with his contacts about O'Neill's program and other points of interest that Mitchell hadn't been willing to share. Hollis had wanted to go with him -- this was still a joint operation no matter how much it had been taken over by NCIS and she was still co-lead investigator -- but he'd first told her not to and then, when that had failed miserably, he asked her not to.
"You have your sources, I have mine," he'd said after she'd come very close to tearing him a new one for flat-out refusing to let her accompany him. "Mine tend to be ornery and pissed off and won't like the impression that I'm pimping them out to CID. It's not like I'm not going to tell you what they say, Hol. Just... trust me that I'll get more out of them if you're not there. There's no reason for both of us to go into debt for this."
She'd let him go alone because he'd asked, not because she'd been swayed by his arguments.
"How are you coming along on verifying Baxter's old postings?" she asked McGee. That had been the justification for him foisting off the trawling of victims on DiNozzo and David.
"He's on the up-and-up through July 2004," McGee answered, looking up but still typing away. "I'm having trouble tracking down anyone from after his second tour in Iraq -- his CO left the service. I'm trying to find him now, but there's no address on file and the guy's last name is Kim."
Hollis tipped her head in acknowledgment of that difficulty. "Keep trying."
David returned before Gibbs; she'd been meeting with someone from Mossad, but Hollis didn't think it was necessarily related to either the case or Safir; Hollis thought she was the only one who'd blinked at the idea of a colleague casually going off during work hours to meet with a member of a foreign intelligence service; Gibbs had merely told David not to be all afternoon. Now that she was back, however, David, was as unimpressed as DiNozzo to see the amount of phone calls and crime-scene photos in her immediate future, but she started her work with only a deep sigh.
"I do not like making phone calls," she said to no one in particular after an hour's frustration on the phone that floated in and out of Hollis's awareness. "Nobody believes I am who I say I am. Is there some rule that you must be native-born to be law-enforcement in this country?"
"At least you just have trouble because of your accent," McGee told her. "Tony's first language is English. He's got no excuse."
Hollis didn't look up to see what kind of gesture DiNozzo, who was on the phone, made in response, but she heard the movement. She was on the second-to-last page of Ducky's wound pattern analysis, which was a lot of eloquent prose all saying that the knife that had killed Baxter was certainly the same make and model as the one that had killed Pal, Kennedy, and Litorsky but that there was no way to guarantee that it was actually the same one. Which put it in the same category as every other bit of evidence they'd collected - circumstantial. They still had nothing to tie Lorne to anything but the death of Jamail Baxter and even that was suspicious.
Gibbs returned around 1630, damp from the heavy rain and cranky for other reasons.
"Well?" Hollis prompted after he'd gotten settled at his desk. The others did their best to pretend they weren't eager for the answer.
"O'Neill is running the first SAP staffed by people who can keep a secret," Gibbs answered with a frown. "A lot of people want to know what the hell he's doing."
Gibbs's contacts hadn't been able to get much. O'Neill's program had existed for a decade at least but was definitely post-Cold War, was extremely well-funded, and there was no consensus about what it actually did and who was involved. "'Technology intelligence acquisition,'" Gibbs said sourly. "They're a little well-armed for a bunch of nerds."
McGee, on to his second page of James Kims, did not react.
It was two days later and Hollis was in her service uniform outside of a courtroom turning her phone back on to check the voicemails that had accrued.
"Road trip to Madison," Gibbs said in the fourth one. "Be ready at six."
Hollis looked at her watch. This was a ponderous panel and she wasn't sure they'd be done by six, let alone that she'd be in any position to be packed and ready. Forget actually knowing why she was headed to Wisconsin and whether she really needed to be or if this was just another case of Gibbs's inability to delegate. She suspected the latter -- he would've sounded a little more excited if they had a bead on Lorne -- in which case she could blow him off and remind him that she had other obligations. Instead, she went and found the JAG lawyer and asked what the odds were that she'd actually get called as a witness today, the last day before a three-day recess. Twenty minutes later, she was headed back to the office.
"Why are we going to Wisconsin?" she asked when Gibbs picked up his phone.
"We got the right James Kim," Gibbs answered. "And he's not an artillery officer."
The flight left from Reagan National after eight and got in to Madison after ten, after which they went straight to the hotel with instructions to meet in the lobby at 0700 the following morning. NCIS had sprung for two rooms only, so Hollis forestalled a lot of hemming and hawing among the junior members of the team by announcing that they'd split up along gender lines.
"One of those had better be for me," Hollis told Gibbs when she saw him in the lobby at 0650 holding two coffee cups. He cocked an eyebrow, but handed one over without a word. It had cream (not milk) in it, which was how she took it.
McGee had his phone out and was programming a route to Lt.Col. (ret) James Kim's home by the time David and DiNozzo arrived, each with their own coffee. "It should take about twenty minutes with no traffic," he said.
A half-hour later, they were stuck firmly in traffic and they all had to hope that Kim hadn't already left for work.
"Did you speak to him?" Hollis asked McGee as Gibbs stressed and flexed his fingers on the steering wheel. Jethro in traffic was exactly as she'd have imagined if she'd bothered to imagine him stuck in traffic. Everyone in the car was on their best behavior.
"I left a message," McGee answered with a frown. "Boss, if you want to get off at the next exit, we can take local roads from here."
Gibbs's skepticism of either GPS or McGee's navigating (or both) showed on his face, but he said nothing. He did start working his way into the right lane, though.
Ten minutes later, they were turning on to the right street when they saw something that made them worry a lot more than the fact that Kim might've already left for work.
"I hope those police cars are not here for the same reason we are," David said, leaning forward to look past Gibbs's right shoulder.
"Crap," Gibbs sighed, since their luck hadn't been that good.
MPD seemed surprised to see NCIS (Hollis hadn't bothered to throw in the 'and CID,' choosing to let her uniform speak for itself) pulling up to their murder scene.
"He was a marine," Gibbs told Detective Feasby.
Feasby didn't even blink. "So was I. That doesn't answer my question."
"A marine was killed a few weeks ago," Hollis said. "We believe he was killed because of something he saw or did while under Kim's command."
It wasn't precisely true, of course, but it was their working theory, the reason they'd gotten permission to chase him down, and Feasby didn't need to know differently. At least not yet.
"We came out here hoping Colonel Kim could shed a little light on the situation," she went on, pretending she didn't see Gibbs's smug look. Like he thought that he was really actually responsible for her fast talking. She'd been a professional-grade bullshitter for a lot longer than she'd known him. "This wasn't what we had in mind."
"You think this is all connected?" Feasby asked with a frown. He was looking at her chest, but with the sort of distraction that meant he was looking at the junk on the front and not what was underneath. "Colonel Mann... The Army's in on this, too?"
"It's a big case," she answered. "Do you think it's possible for us to take a look around?"
Feasby didn't seem overjoyed, but he also had the resigned look of someone who understood just how much this was out of his hands. He gestured for them to pass.
The house was small and neat, orderly in a way that Hollis expected every retired career marine's home was. She wasn't the only one to make that assumption.
"It's like Gibbs's house," DiNozzo whispered to McGee as they moved through the front of the house; Kim had been killed in the kitchen. "Except there are more ducks."
Kim had apparently been a duck hunter and the living room was tastefully and sparely decorated with duck-themed items.
One look at the body and any doubts that might have lingered that this was just an unfortunate coincidence vanished. Single slash across the throat.
"Whoever it was grabbed him from behind," Feasby told them as they squeezed carefully into the already-crowded kitchen. "Signs of struggle -- the chairs and table are askew and we got fibers underneath his fingernails -- but no defensive wounds. We've processed the place for prints, but..."
"What kind of fibers?" Gibbs asked.
"Some synthetic," Feasby replied. "Blue. My guess, it'll turn out to be from the sleeve of whatever coat his assailant was wearing."
He turned, saw an oblivious McGee standing right next to him taking pictures with his phone, and grabbed him in a quick restraining hold. McGee scratched at Feasby's arm before Feasby pretended to slice his throat.
"It's a pretty basic move," Feasby went on, releasing McGee, who stepped back with a disgruntled expression and ignored DiNozzo's laughter at his expense. "They teach it to marines in Boot."
"I know," Gibbs said wryly. Feasby's expression changed and Hollis kept back the sigh as the two former leathernecks had a moment of recognition and silent bonding. Normally the whole cultish thing was annoying -- it happened with the Army, no doubt, but not to the extent that every marine assumed that there was at most one degree of separation between him and every other marine -- but here it might work to their favor.
"Basic move or not, they did not teach Colonel Kim how to defend against it," David said from where she was standing, which was on top of a newspaper on top of a chair so that she could take photos of the entire kitchen.
"They did," Gibbs told her. "Wouldn't have made a difference. Get to the right part fast enough and it's all over."
David gave a tiny shrug of agreement, then went back to her picture-taking.
"One of Lorne's marines?" DiNozzo wondered aloud. "I don't think Lorne's big enough to do this himself."
Kim looked to have been a little taller than average height and of regular build. Lorne might've been able to do it, but it probably would have been far messier than this.
"Who called it in?" Hollis asked.
"MGE service guy," Feasby answered, gesturing to the closed kitchen door, which had a window in it. "The automated reader was blinkered and Kim had called in for a repair for this morning. Guy showed up at 6:30 and rang the doorbell, got no anwer so he came around the back and peeked through the window."
The time of death was estimated to be 9:30 last night; Kim had already been dead before they'd landed.
"Anyone else live here?" DiNozzo asked. "From the ducks, I'm guessing 'no.'"
"Divorced, ex-wife and kids over in Sun Prairie," Feasby replied with a frown. "We sent a car over to do notification."
The body was removed as soon as everyone had taken their pictures; there was a little bit of pressure to get the worst of the gore cleaned up before Kim's family arrived.
Feasby was accommodating as far as letting them participate in all facets of the investigation, including letting them ask questions of Lorraine Kim, the ex-wife.
"Five bucks says that you end up taking this case from me," he'd said when Hollis had thanked him for his cooperation. "Might as well make sure you have everything you need to get the guy."
Mrs. Kim, distraught in a way that ex-wives usually were not, told them that she and her late husband had been divorced for ten years, that the strain of a military marriage had gotten to be too much, and she'd returned to her hometown to raise their three children. It had been a relatively amicable divorce and they'd managed to stay friendly for the sake of their children. Colonel Kim had filed his retirement papers on his twentieth anniversary in the Corps and taken a job at the university to be closer to the kids.
"Where was your ex-husband stationed in 2004?" Hollis asked her after they got the basic questions out of the way.
"In 2004?" Mrs. Kim repeated, closing her eyes as she tried to remember. "Jimmy was in Colorado Springs already, I think. Yes. He moved back from Honduras in 2002 and the kids spent the summer with him in San Diego in 2003 and then it was three years in Colorado Springs before he moved back here."
At the mention of Colorado Springs, Hollis exchanged a look with Gibbs.
"Colorado's a little inland for a marine," Gibbs prompted. "Do you know what he was doing there?"
Wiping away fresh tears, Mrs. Kim shook her head. "He was an intelligence officer," she said ruefully. "I got plenty of iterations of 'I can't tell you' even before we got divorced. It was probably one of the reasons we did get divorced. It's hard to share your life with someone who can't reciprocate."
After the interview, Hollis asked David and DiNozzo to look through the place to find any photos or souvenirs of Kim's time in the service. There was no I Love Me wall per se, just a couple of framed photographs and his officer's sword on a plaque on a wall in his office, and she knew there had to be a cache somewhere. Gibbs had one, too, although she'd never seen it.
By late afternoon, Gibbs was on the phone back to Shepard explaining what had gone on and wrangling out how much longer they could stay. By the evening, Feasby was already hearing murmurs from his boss that the case was going to be plucked out of their hands. Unlike the police in Jackson, he was not relieved. Resigned, maybe, but not happy about it at all.
Hollis wondered if Feasby realized what kind of respect Gibbs was paying him by not actually taking over the investigation and bringing in his own lab people. A couple of things were FedExed back to Abby, but the rest was left in the hands of Madison's finest, entirely because Feasby obviously trusted them.
David found a small box in a locked file cabinet in Kim's office. In it were unmarked photographs of unnamed people. But that didn't mean that they didn't know who any of them were.
"I believe we have found our connection," David announced, holding up a photo. In it was Kim, Jamail Baxter, and two other marines sitting around eating MREs in a forest clearing that looked like it could have been anywhere.
"We already knew that Kim and Baxter knew each other," Gibbs pointed out sourly.
"Yes, but we did not know that they knew Samantha Carter," David agreed, holding up the next photo. In it, Carter, dressed in utes and holding a canteen, was sitting on a log between Kim and a bespectacled man.
Hollis chuckled mirthlessly. "This world keeps getting smaller and smaller."
The photos, about a dozen in all, were completely devoid of any context. There was no way to figure out when or where they had been taken; Carter had shorter hair, but past that, nothing. The trees behind them were garden variety oaks and nobody was wearing their blouses so there were no patches or even nametapes visible. Baxter was in most of them and the ones that Kim wasn't in Hollis assumed he was the one taking; the other two marines were in most of them as well, with the odd extra character. All of the photos were scanned to send back to Abby to get names to put on the faces.
"What are these?" DiNozzo asked as he finished scanning. "R&R for O'Neill's group of tech spies?"
It was as good a guess as any. Probably a better one than most.
It was already after nine when they quit the house. Hollis asked Feasby for a recommendation for a place to eat and he gave them directions to an Indian place nearby from which it would be easy to find the highway that would take them back to their hotel.
Dinner was definitely of working-meal variety; the restaurant was mostly empty, but they still kept their voices down as they discussed what the implications were of Baxter and Kim both being part of O'Neill's unit.
"Baxter and Kim were both in Colorado at the same time as Feng, Kennedy, Litorsky, and Pal," McGee said. "It's fair to assume that Kim led a team the way Lorne does--"
"--and Colonel Mitchell most likely does," David added, tearing off a piece from the giant nan.
McGee tilted his head in acknowledgment. "Is it also fair to assume that Kim's team saw or participated in something the scientists were doing and that's why they're getting bumped off?"
"We don't have a strong connection between the scientists," Hollis pointed out, entirely to play devil's advocate since she was willing to bet that this was exactly what was happening. "Proximity, that's it. And for civilians working for the military in Colorado Springs, that's not going to count."
"We have a link between Lorne and Litorsky," DiNozzo offered. "Even if it's not exactly the one Lorne told us it was."
"It was," Gibbs said, sipping at his tea. "He might've been lying about how well he knew him, but not about why."
"We can't prove either of them knew the others," McGee said. "We can say that it was likely, that the similarities in how they were killed makes it probable that it was the same killer and therefore the same reason, but..."
"I thought you were supposed to be advocating the conspiracy," David said. "And letting Colonel Mann tell you why you were wrong."
"I don't think he's wrong," Hollis said before McGee could defend himself. "But I don't think we can prove he's right yet, either."
"Maybe I'm just not as into the whole black ops thing as everyone else," DiNozzo sighed, leaning back as the waiter arrived with their entrees. "But I don't like the idea that we're just slaughtering our own because we don't like what they saw. The Pentagon paraded around with a 'Kick Me' sign for Abu Ghraib and is content to let the rest of the world assume they're restaging the Spanish Inquisition in various Third World countries. What's the point of taking some pretty extreme measures against a black op becoming public, even if it's really nasty?"
"Especially if it is a program as well-hidden as General O'Neill's," David added, pointing so that the waiter knew the paneer makhani was hers.
"Six murders so far's pretty extreme," DiNozzo went on. "Even most conspiracy movies stop after two or three. Except The Parallax View -- that had a pretty impressive body count. I hope this ends better than that does, though."
They focused on eating then, Hollis enjoying a very nice fish bhuna, but then Gibbs's cell phone rang.
"What is it, Abbs?" Gibbs answered, then listened to her answer before holding the phone away from his mouth. "McGee, where's your phone?"
"In my pocket?" McGee answered, confused. He reached down, but then his eyebrows shot up. "Or not. Crap. I must've left it at the house."
Abby had sent McGee some photos but hadn't heard back from him, nor had he answered when she called. She knew better than to send the pictures to Gibbs's phone, Jethro having a very fragile detente with modern technology. As it was Gibbs handed off his phone to McGee to complete the conversation with Abby.
"Abby's got IDs on some of the people in Colonel Kim's photos," McGee explained as he handed the phone back to Gibbs. "All of the other marines and two of the civilians. Can we go back to the house to get the phone? It can wait for the morning, I suppose, but..."
Gibbs made an annoyed face that everyone took as acquiescence. They finished up, paid, and piled back into the SUV to return to the crime scene.
The house was cordoned off with police tape, but there was nobody posted.
"How are we--" McGee cut himself off as David brandished a lockpick. "Nevermind. Someone want to call my phone once we're inside?"
DiNozzo sighed and pulled out his own phone, waggling it in front of him.
McGee and David exited the car, parked across the street, and headed for the house. A sharp, low whistle from Gibbs stopped them in their tracks, though.
Leaning forward, Hollis saw Gibbs indicate through hand gestures that he'd seen something in one of the second-story windows. Everyone else picked out their flashlights and quietly got out of the car, unholstered their weapons, and joined McGee and David.
"Covered flashlight," Gibbs explained. "Window on the right."
"The office," David whispered back. "Someone is here to finish looking for what they did not find."
"DiNozzo, Ziva, you two get the exits," Gibbs ordered. "Watch out in case they're not using a door.'"
When they approached the front door, they could see that the tape had not been tampered with. David made quick work of doing so, peeling back the strip over the door edge with practiced ease as DiNozzo disappeared around the side of the house. David had them inside in seconds, where they paused to listen for movement. They heard nothing, so Hollis followed Gibbs up the stairs and McGee followed her.
The upstairs was three rooms and a bathroom with the office being the second door on the right. They moved slowly, not wanting to give away their position, and Hollis hoped for no creaky stairs. As they got close to the landing, they could hear the shuffling of papers and the quiet movements of someone who knew what they were doing by searching a dark room with only a red-lensed flashlight. There seemed to be only one person, which was a relief in that Hollis really didn't like the odds of the three of them against Lorne's full team.
Gibbs gestured for her and McGee to bracket the door and they did, guns drawn. Gibbs came up and past them, reaching in to the room to where he knew the light switch to be.
"Freeze," he ordered, flicking on the overhead light.
"Fuck," Lorne cursed quietly, pushing his NVGs up and blinking quickly. "Hello, Special Agent Gibbs."