Hi there, this is my very first FanFic ever. I have a complete story planned, so maybe it will take a few chapters to catch on to it. Hoping for reviews! Thanks! DeereGirl
Characters not mine except Kathy Westmann!
01 - Diversion
Gibbs was furious. Not enough that the strength of his team was diminished by Kate's death and they still had no trace of her killer, now the director had ordered them to follow up on another case and leave the hunt of Ari to a fellow NCIS team, claiming Gibbs and the rest of his crew were not impartial about the case and too much personally involved. Heck, that was true, and even though revenge should never play a part in an investigation, in this case it would have surely felt right. But he had no choice, the order was given to the director from the White House and there was no way to act around it. He had to leave the case to Special Agent Rabb and his team. Rabb was a former JAG member and Gibbs had no doubt he would hunt down Ari and put him to jail for the rest of his live. He trusted Rabb but was still outraged not to be able to get Ari himself. He felt he owed it to Kate and it felt like someone was ripping out his heart whenever he thought about her.
The new case the director had assigned them to seemed to be a fake, Tony and McGee were still trying to find any helpful information or a suspect with a motive. All they knew was what the director had told them: A security officer in Norfolk had been found dead in his apartment after he hadn't shown for his shift. He was a computer specialist but was not currently assigned to any top secret activities and was also not on any lists for important or crucial missions in the future. He had no special access to the Navy's computer systems and Ducky had found no signs of external forces that could have lead to his death. The official cause of death Ducky put on the papers was a heart-failure. According to the files his father, uncle and cousin had died in young age for the same reason. The case seemed solved but the director insisted that there had to be something else to it and so Gibbs and the rest of the team tried to dig deeper. With no real leads whatsoever. In order for Gibbs to have some distraction McGee had brought in the officers' girlfriend for interrogation. Although they did not really know what to ask her, Gibbs was almost relieved to have something to do.
"Please state your full name and address for the record" he asked the young woman sitting opposite of him in the interrogation room.
"Kathrin Stephanie Westmann", she answered, "Kathrin with no e at the end and Westmann with two n's. My friends here call me Kathy."
"Well that's an unusual way of spelling" Gibbs said, "you from Germany?"
Turned out she was. Born in Mannheim, where her mother was stationed with the American Army. She had gotten pregnant in the States and then been relocated to Germany where she found out that she was pregnant. She had died shortly after the birth of her baby and Kathrin had been given to a German couple. After school and university she had now decided to travel to America and try to find relatives of her mother. That was how she'd met the deceased security officer from Norfolk – he had good expertise in writing programs to search internet databases. Over the very private search for her relatives they got closer and fell in love but Petty Officer Mark Williams was quite reserved and so she had not known that both his father and his cousin had died of a fatal heart-failure before they were thirty five.
"Didn't it bother you that the man you were in a relationship with didn't talk to you about his family – while he was helping you trying to find yours?" Gibbs asked the girl.
"I am not used to men talking about their feelings. If half your male relatives die young you live in the constant fear to be next – if I were in a situation like that I wouldn't tell anyone either. I would try not to think about it myself. Live life as long as you still have it… Besides, I am not much of a talker either. So we got along very well."
Well, that was unusual. Tony and McGee looked at each other with raised eyebrows and then looked back at the girl.
Gibbs had squeezed answers out of her for almost an hour now. She seemed to have a vest as white as a chlorine-bleached tablecloth. And he could not intimidate her with his questions or his looks. She had a history too good to be true. And that made her suspicious.
"Dig deeper on her", Gibbs told Tony and McGee after he had finished the interrogation. "Her history and her reasons are too clean, there must be something wrong with it. I want you to find it, and find it fast. I want to close this case and see that we get to support Rabb on the Ari-hunt. Understood? Good!" Gibbs said, the doors of the elevator closing behind him, leaving McGee and Tony standing in the hallway.
"You take the internet search, I'll call around in Germany to get files faxed over. I hope they speak English over there" Tony said to McGee. "Well, before you start calling, maybe you go get something to eat. It's six a.m. in Germany at the moment, I doubt that people there work that early" McGee answered. "Always want the last word, right, Newbie?"
But in fact, Tony was quite happy to get a little break. He was still shaken over Kate's death. She had been like a sister to him and he missed her terribly. Plus, this Kathy girl had really gotten to him. She was attractive, but not like the type of woman he usually enjoyed looking at. She was athletic and very tall, around 5'11'' and she had no German accent at all. Her English was very good, almost better than Ducky's, she spoke British English but knew the American idioms and expressions. She seemed to be overly intelligent and he was drawn to her like a moth to a flame. Even though he knew she was a suspect. Given the fact that she had volunteered as a paramedic for almost two years it seemed possible that she knew which drugs to give the poor guy to make his death look like a heart-failure. But what motive could she have had to kill the guy? After all he was helping her to find her relatives and had not been successful yet. So killing him would have decreased her chance of finding her next of kin drastically. It made no sense… Plus, Ducky had not found any drugs in the Petty Officers' blood. That was one of the problems – had he used the medicine prescribed to him by his doctor he most probably would still be alive. Did she murder him by taking away his medicine? By replacing it with placebos? He had to check that out…
He hurried to Abby's lab and told her about his suspicion. She went down to Ducky to figure out a way how to prove Tony's theory. Meanwhile, Tony got back to his desk and on the phone. He had never made overseas calls from his desk and was annoyed by all the administrative work that had to be done before he could make direct calls to Germany, without having to get a permit for the operator for every single call. Finally he called Gibbs on his cell and asked him to get cranky with the director. This worked just fine and after ten minutes Tony had all authorizations he needed to make direct overseas calls from his phone.
Several hours later his ears were ringing and his head was pounding. He had made over a hundred calls to different authorities in Germany, not one of those calls indicating any inconsistency with Kathy's story. Gibbs had made another short appearance, telling them to have all reports finished by 7:30 the next morning – to close the case for good.
"Found anything?" McGee asked Tony.
"No, not a single damn thing. She really is a Goddess, I think. I called everyone who ever exchanged a word with that woman and everything she told Gibbs was confirmed. Plus, everyone seems to be just crazy about her."
"Same here" McGee said, "all files I could access matched her statements. And I even hacked into some secured state databases."
"We're ruined. If we have nothing to tell Gibbs tomorrow morning he's gonna go ballistic" Tony mumbled. "Let's hope Abby and Ducky got something out of my idea with the placebos".
"They already left about an hour ago" said McGee, "and I think we should do the same. It'll just leave us enough time to get two hours of sleep, take a shower and get back here." So they left NCIS Headquarters at dawn.
Gibbs indeed went ballistic the next morning. Kathy's vest was even whiter than the day before. Abby and Ducky had not found any trace of drugs in Williams' blood, all the pills left in the bottle retrieved from his nightstand were the actual stuff, no traces of placebos found either. Ducky had carefully examined his heart and had nothing further to say. As Tony's calls and McGees' internet-research further confirmed all of Kathy's history and testimony, Gibbs had no choice than to inform the director that Petty Officer Mark Williams had died from a heart-failure. He was outraged after meeting with his team and everybody was nervous when he stormed out of Abby's lab to talk to the director. They all followed him in a safe distance and only Tony was brave enough to get close to the door of the director's office to try and listen what was being said. Ducky went downstairs to get some coffee and Abby and McGee were curiously staring at Tony's face to interpret what he was hearing. All of a sudden the door was opened and Gibbs was storming out.
"What did you think you were doing with this charade, director?" he yelled.
The director was running after him, leaving Tony, Abby and McGee standing in the hallway
"Is that your way of testing your staff if they are still able to do their jobs after one of their colleagues got killed? Don't ever try to test me like that again, is that understood?" He barked at the shocked director, then turned on his heel and walked up to the rest of the team.
"Back to the lab" he hissed "I'll introduce you to your new team member."
Abby looked at McGee and Tony with huge eyes, surprise written all over her face. "Well, that was quick. Normally it takes weeks to approve new NCIS members" she said.
