This is my twenty-eighth NCIS Mystery and the eighth of my Third Season. The list of stories got so extensive I moved it, with summaries, to my profile.
There are numerous stand-alone and spin-off stories also listed in my profile.
Belisarius Productions owns NCIS and the usual legal disclaimers apply. I own characters such as Samantha Sky, Rev. Siobhan (Sha-vonn) McGee and original agents.
This mystery unfolds in early May, two weeks after 'On the Wings of Demons'
Rated T or NCis-17
Please Review.

Let Down
by JMK758
Chapter One
Shattered

Doctor Donald Mallard holds the night club door open before his companion as they step into the pre-dawn light. It's 0530 on Monday and after a most pleasant if lengthy Sunday evening - and night - the club is closed. Neither he nor Jordan Hampton had kept track of time, so the morning, evidenced only by the fading of stars and slight fade of darkness in the east, came as a surprise to them.

He subtly repositions the white scarf draped over his tuxedoed shoulders and she catches him at it. "You're elegant as ever."

"In your presence, my dear lady, I dare not be otherwise, else I shall simply fade into the background."

"Impossible, trust me."

He offers his arm and they slowly walk toward the lightening horizon. "While I would never presume to contradict a lady, you have already brightened this street with dazzling daylight. I am merely fortunate to bask in your glow."

Even in the dim light of too distant street lamps, Ducky sees the blush fill her face and decides it's time to desist as they continue in the direction of his two block distant Morgan.

They'd entered the Club for dinner, and yesterday's balmy temperature dropped with the descending sun and then moon, while the sun is still several minutes due in its return. Ducky doesn't particularly wish to report for work, though he does entertain the thought of spending a few more hours with the lovely woman.

Jordan's royal blue dress is elegant but hardly warm, and she runs her hands briskly over her bare arms.

"I am sorry, my dear," he says contritely and opens the outer and inner buttons that secure his tuxedo jacket.

She recognizes he's missed the hint. "I'm not cold for a jacket."

He's not slow to make up for it, puts his arm decorously about her waist and she snuggles closer as they continue their short walk. "Better?"

"Almost," she grants and eases an inch closer.

"Almost?"

"My lips are cold."

He stops and she comes around before him so both his arms embrace her. "We cannot have that at all."

x

He proceeds to warm her lips, and though public displays of affection aren't in his nature, seconds tick on without an indication from her that her lips are warm enough yet and he can hardly bring himself to quit.

The pitch of the screech from above rises; breaks them apart as other screams split the air. Ducky turns back the way they'd come an instant before the shriek ends in an abrupt, loud, sickening thrump and scores of wet impacts pepper their faces and clothes.

The woman's ruptured body, clad only in burst pink bra and panties, lies face down in a wide splash of blood on the cement ten feet from them, her head toward the tower. Her body hit the cement full on and it's not only ruptured but visibly flattened. Blood and worse extend from the building well out into the street and for several yards to either side.

Screams continue, too strident and long for the Medical Examiners' tastes. Jordan looks down at her dress; the royal blue is dotted with red splotches and less pleasant colors. Ducky's been spared the obvious spatter, though the marks on his white scarf and the V of his crisp shirt testify to the tuxedo's black-obscured damage. A look at Ducky's face and she doesn't want to see her own.

x

They look upward and attempt to trace the path of the body as chaos reigns around them. Many people run in for a better view of the gory spectacle while others flee the prospect of more descending bodies. The Examiners don't consider them, they want to determine as quickly as possible from whence the woman had come.

Unfortunately the sheer angle upward along the tower, together with each apartment having a short and narrow individual balcony, prevents them from determining from which apartment the woman fell. However, as they look about, they find themselves in the center of a growing mass of chaotic humanity.

"You want this one?" Jordan offers, her voice haunted. It's been years since she'd witnessed a violent death and never one this extreme.

"We shall do the Gibbs / Carpenter jurisdiction waltz later, my dear. For now, I shall leave the poor woman to your care while I secure this Scene. I am a considerably more intimidating presence."

She waits until he turns to that task rather than let him see her grin.

x

Hampton steps closer to the ruptured body and hikes her dress clear of her blue high heeled slippers. To avoid stepping in blood and other bodily fluids is impossible; it covers an almost fifteen foot radius and the densest concentration immediately surrounds the visibly flattened corpse.

Hearing Ducky's authoritative voice behind her - the man can command a scene when he wills it - Jordan examines the body, shuts away emotion as she would at her dissection table and focuses upon analysis. This also helps protect her from nightmares – most of the time.

The woman's - too early to attempt to estimate age - body hit the cement full on, she saw that herself, and burst apart, which means she probably fell a minimum of three hundred feet, almost 30 stories, from the tower beside them. She's blonde, her hair perhaps less than shoulder length, and she's slim. To guess weight at this point - well, she's about average build and looks to have been between 5 9 and 5 11, the uncertainty caused by the distorting effect of going from over a hundred feet per second to full stop in zero time.

Jordan is aware, with the clinical portion of her mind whose input is all she allows to reach her at this time, that the sun slowly brightens the scene and the conversations from the growing but Ducky-controlled crowd are overrun by MPDC and ambulance sirens. She presumes the latter are for the spectators, the woman before her is in need of nothing save her ME truck.

xxx

Tony DiNozzo gets off the elevator in a jovial mood he's too willing to share with all his fellow agents, and though his voice is reasonably mellow it would vastly help his colleagues' appreciation of his good spirits if he had more than a passing knowledge of the lyrics of the song he's warbling.

Undeterred by this deficit, Tony tosses his backpack in a long arc behind his desk and turns his entry into the work space into a soft shoe dance step.

"You are in too good a mood for our good," Ziva declares, including McGee and Palmer in her assessment as the man plops into his seat. So far as she's concerned, the man still has good reason to be somber, but his two-week gray mood has vanished a month too soon.

"'s the matter, Zee-vá? Not riding on the top of the world this Monday morning?" he quips, and punctuates the jibe with a drummer's rill of pencils upon his phone, monitor, keyboard and Mighty Mouse stapler, ending with a cymbal strike on his water glass.

"I am not riding on top of anything," she declares, oblivious to the mental image she grants him. "What have you to be so chipping over?"

"Chipper. And I've decided this weekend that life is too short to spend any more time wearing sackcloth and ashes."

"No, it isn't," McGee counters, not looking at his partner. He doesn't care what kind of weekend the man had, quite probably with Jeanne Benoit. He doesn't care.

"You may not have noticed," Ziva says, "but Gibbs is not here."

"Yeah," Tony finally notes the vacant desk and his high spirits lower, "that's not good."

"Indeed."

"Whenever we beat him in, he usually pops out of some extra-dimensional vortex and tells us to"

"Grab your gear." Tony jumps as the command comes over his partition. "Dead Marine Major in Near Northeast, Ducky's already on the scene."

"How did Ducky beat us to a Crime Scene?" Tony asks as he retrieves his unopened pack.

Gibbs has already rounded the corner and strides to his desk. "He spent the morning with the corpse."

His words conjure for his team four varied and equally gruesome mental images, all very quickly dispelled.

xxx

When Gibbs' blue Charger, with Ziva riding 'shotgun' and Michelle in the rear seat, pulls up to the curb seconds before the white and black MCRT truck bearing a still-too-happy DiNozzo and a by now quite thoroughly aggravated McGee, the street is a crowded, securely cordoned Crime Scene filled to bursting with MPDC units and too many news trucks even for Washington. When Gibbs displays his shield a uniformed officer waves the agents into the zone and it seems as though half the district has come to work the spectacular scene.

Reporters, kept beyond the perimeter, are thick as sharks and twice as voracious. They'd tried to crowd the NCIS vehicles, only to be frustrated by the vehicles' admission into the 'No Reporters' land.

Gibbs has already told his team that US Marine Major Jubilee Eastergaard had quite literally fallen into their jurisdiction an hour and a half ago, but that Ducky had elected to notify him rather than a Gamma Shift team.

"By the time the police had determined that the poor woman had fallen from a patio on the 43rd floor, some five hundred fifty, five hundred sixty feet," the ME had said when he'd made the initial call, "and then ascertained that she was in NCIS' jurisdiction rather than their own, it was nearly seven o'clock and I formally relieved Doctor Hampton."

Gibbs wished he could have seen that changing of the guard.

x

Now the agents gather beside the rear on their blue and white truck, quite surrounded by Metro units. Ducky, a few yards forward, stands with two uniformed officers within the yellow cordoned zone, several feet from a large, once white sheet.

"Something's cosmically wrong with the universe," Tony declares as Jimmy removes a gurney from the blue, white and red ME truck several car lengths ahead of them, "when even Palmer beats us to a Crime Scene."

"Well technically," Michelle points out with a honeyed smile, "since I rode with Agent Gibbs while you drove the truck, both Palmers beat you."

He's about to return a particularly devastating riposte when he catches Gibbs 'get-to-work' look and reaches for his Crime Scene duffle that contains, among other things, his sketch pad and pencils. Looking at the white sheet covered lump on the sidewalk within the wide, blood spattered cordon, he recalls 'forty-three floors' and doesn't want to sketch this body. For that matter, he'd as soon not take or look at the pictures.

x

Gibbs leads the way under the yellow tape that isolates much of the sidewalk on the left side of the street and approaches Ducky. The tuxedoed man stands before the reddened sheet, outside the wide spatter zone.

"About time you got here," Ducky says, his attempt at gallows humor, but his eyes say he doesn't find his own dig at his friend's characteristic impatience humorous.

"Caught in traffic," Gibbs excuses himself as only the boss may.

"Nice penguin outfit," DiNozzo can't help but interject, "though the blood does detract from the image."

"Yes, well, after it's cleaned I shall lend it to you for your next date."

DiNozzo mentally cringes, recalls the day he'd been obliged to borrow Ducky's coveralls and the adage about plowboys not drawing on gunslingers.

x

"What've you got, Duck?" Gibbs is in no mood for banter and wishes DiNozzo hadn't abandoned his two-week-old somber persona.

"When Metro determined that the poor woman came from the 43rd floor, Jord– Doctor Hampton remained with the body while I went up to obtain her identity and further information. We quickly ascertained that she was Marine Major Jubilee Eastergaard. It was then that I telephoned you."

"That was nearly seven, what time did she fall?"

"Doctor Hampton and I left Alberto's, 1 block west, at five-thirty. I should say the lady fell between five thirty-five and forty."

"Where's Jordan?" he asks, intentionally using the woman's name to point up Ducky's unnecessary formality. He gets a chagrined smile; it's been over a year that the MEs have been 'keeping company'.

"She is upstairs, where she has secured the scene."

"From Metro?" Tony asks.

"She knows how seriously I take my Crime Scene examinations."

Gibbs gives a silent signal to DiNozzo and McGee, who get a confirming nod from Michelle with the large Crime Scene camera. They step gingerly between the still tacky spatters as they move in on the body. Considering it in quite capable hands, Gibbs is not anxious to view the body this shortly after breakfast and he returns his attention to Ducky. "What about the medical one?" Gibbs knows Ducky's even more particular about these; he and the woman had met over a follow-up to an autopsy.

"Well, she was alive before she hit the street; she screamed all the way down, that is what alerted us and everyone else on the block." With just a shift of his eyes he indicates the throng of people kept at bay by Metro Officers and the wide ranging yellow tape. Gibbs suspects that many onlookers haven't moved since the doctor had herded them back from the body two hours ago.

"I sympathize, Anthony," Ducky says, drawing his attention to the men behind him. DiNozzo has his sketchbook out and is probably wondering where to begin. "If this were a television program the actress in question would be made up with bruises and lacerations yet with still well coiffed hair. Reality, however, is an unforgiving medium."

x

He turns to the two women photographing and logging the site. "David, Palmer, work the crowd. Palmer, give the camera to McGee." Gibbs is glad the onlookers haven't been dispersed; it doesn't pay to send their eyewitness away yet. He gives by far the most credence to Ducky's account but it doesn't hurt to have more viewpoints, provided those viewpoints make sense, not always a foregone conclusion when dealing with witnesses. He knows that with the body uncovered for McGee to photograph, no one will leave. The woman wears fragments of a once pink set of underwear, but even a glance is enough to show that she's not as high as her body ought to be. 'Rib cage was probably crushed when she hit,' he decides.

"I shall have to see, when I get her back to Autopsy," Ducky finishes his earlier interrupted answer, "if any other factor contributed to her demise."

Gibbs wishes him - and Abby - luck with that. The Major's 'bodily fluids', to put it gently, aren't all dried yet and cover more than fifteen feet about her, from the side of the building well out into the street, and droplets not visible to the eye have certainly traveled further.

The last time they'd dealt with a long fall, Ducky had classed it as particularly sad, such a long moment to contemplate one's fate and no chance to change the outcome.

At 43 floors, this one's far worse.

xx

Access to the tower, which goes by the pretentious name of 'Valhalla', isn't challenged by the gray suited Security Officers at the front desk. Neither man attempts to get their names; the younger man hasn't gotten all the color back into his face, and on occasions like this Law Enforcement holds unrestricted right-of-way. Metro uniforms account for only a portion of the men and women controlling the perimeter and limiting access to and from the building.

Gibbs glances back at the wall filled with windows. The body landed a few feet to the right of the door, blood and worse spatter the closest windows. It will have to remain there for quite some time to come.

"Which of you was on duty when she fell?" he asks the two guards.

"I was," the younger man says.

"John Korven," the older one introduces himself. "I'm the Field Supervisor, I was called in after this started."

The younger finally realizes Gibbs is staring at him. "Oh, er, Bob Hillman."

"We'll need your statement. I'll have an agent here shortly to take it."

Hillman, apparently about to say something about his shift ending soon, sees in Gibbs' eyes the wisdom of keeping that observation to himself.

"How many guards are on duty?"

"Five days, two overnight; one at the desk, the other on roving patrol, hourly rotations," Korven tells them.

"And when the woman fell?" Gibbs asks Hillman.

"Er, Noble was on 14."

xx

Gibbs and Mallard, each sign the Crime Scene Access Log held by the guarding Police Officer in front of 4306 with their names and ID numbers, the Doctor just pointing out on the paper his previous signature for the revised time to be added, and they step past. The apartment is immediately to the left of the elevator. There are five widely spaced doors on each side of the long corridor, sequential numbers paired opposite one another, 1 through 6 to their left, the remaining four to their right, ten apartments on the floor. Gibbs judges them to be fairly large considering the distances from one door to the next. The front or southerly facing apartments, evenly numbered, are all equipped with balconies that line the entire front of the building, offering a spectacular view of the city. They suppose the rear set offers as good a northerly view.

The first room they enter, past a kitchen to their left, is a living room that their bullpen would fit into. There's a hallway to their right that leads past a bathroom into the bedroom, and another closed door to their left. Beyond couch to the left flanked by two easy chairs, coffee table before the couch and plasma television entertainment system at the right, a wide, glass-doored patio overlooks miles of DC.

Across the wide street and to the right, an equally tall building partially cuts off the spectacular view, but with what's left of center they can see the Navy Yard on the horizon beyond the Capital Mall.

On the coffee table before the long white couch are a bowl of cashew nuts, another of small candies and, most prominently, an open laptop computer facing the couch.

x

A uniformed Sergeant crosses the room to them and brief introductions are made with Sergeant Dave Lewiston. "You'll want to see this," he says, indicating the computer. Rather than touch it, the three men line into the space between couch and table.

The computer and keyboard have evidently been dusted for fingerprints; powder grains and void spaces where tape has done its job abound, but what's interesting shines black upon the top of the white page.

'I can't endure this anymore. I'll be so humiliated when people discover what I've done. This is the only way.'