This is my fourteenth NCIS Mystery, and the third of my second Season. The list of stories was getting so extensive I moved them, with synopses, to my profile.
Jimmy Palmer and Michelle Lee were married in 'Salarium' and are on their Honeymoon. Ducky is being aided by a temporary Assistant, Samantha Sky. Since she's a Medical Examiner-in-Training, I'm able to go into much more detail on autopsies and spend a lot more time with Ducky. So, for all my fans who've been clamoring for more Ducky, I'm pleased to present – more Ducky!
The usual legal disclaimers
Please Review.
Rating: T or NCis-17. Death, Intrigue and Mystery.
Nosferatu
By: JMK758
Chapter One
The Nightmare Before Thanksgiving
Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman party with over two hundred other outrageously attired fantasy figures to deafening music in the two story house which can barely contain half that number. Pilgrims, Indians, Pumpkins, Cornucopia and other emblems appropriate to the late November holiday decorate the blue house and yard; inside the scene is more suited to 'The Nightmare Before Thanksgiving'. Witches, ghosts, spiders, vampires and other horrors fill rooms illuminated with rotating spots and lasers of every hue. Fast food, fast music and the occasional fast relationship are the order of the night.
Billed by the only remaining resident of the house, whose parents don't know the use for which the house is being put, as 'Halloween 2'; it's an opportunity for friends and friends of friends and acquaintances of strangers to once again throw off inhibitions behind masks. The music is loud enough that anyone coming to the door to complain about noise would be unheard. 'Monster Mash', 'the Blob', 'Ghostbusters' and 'I Put A Spell On You' compete with newer favorites to shake the trembling house.
The party has been rocking since early evening, and at nearly dawn shows no sign of ending the assault. There are, however, some unfortunate guests for whom the morning brings the burden of work. Sheena Queen of the Jungle and Tarzan's mate Jane stagger up the stairs, trying to support one another as they make their way in search of a room they remembered when they were sober. After some failures, they find "the Master bedroom where the Vampires feast", as Jane would slur the lyrics, by the enormous pile of coats upon the king size bed. The two women stand, with each other's help, and gape at the mountain of cloth as they recall they had been two of the first to arrive last night.
"Awwww, damn," Sheena slurs, clinging to Jane's bare arm, "whaddawe do now?"
"We …" Jane waves her arm at the mass, "… dig, ya dig?"
Laughing at her own joke, unbalanced by her waving arm, Jane topples to her right. Sheena tries to cling to her and they both topple to the floor with a bang that doesn't challenge the blaring stereo downstairs.
x
Clinging to one another, helpless with mirth, they manage to pull themselves to their feet, depending largely upon the overburdened bed. They reach up and start to tug at the nearest coats and let each fall to the floor to build another hill at their feet. Had they been more sober they would have considered restoring the stack to the bed when they're done, but that thought can't penetrate their booze addled brains. As it is, they consider themselves lucky if they can eventually find their own property.
"What coat'd you wear?" Jane asks, wishing the room would stop gyrating.
"Shi, I donno," a sharp pull on a coat nearly topples Sheena over, "a – a whi one, or wus it black?"
"You are a big – frigging – wha-ever. Help, yeah. Help."
"You help – theese 'r hevy."
"Not 's hev az you…"
"Here it iz!" Sheena exults, pulling her brown leather coat from the foot of the bed.
"Whazat?" Jane uncovers a black shoe and white pant leg, which wouldn't bother her if the foot and leg weren't in them.
"Wha ya got there?" The two women pull off the rest of the coats.
Their shrieks are actually heard over the blaring stereo downstairs.
xxx
"Come on, Ziva," Anthony DiNozzo urges the smaller woman as they get off the elevator and walk to the bullpen, "all I'm saying is 'when in Rome–"
"We are not in Rome, Tony, we are in Washington DC." She tosses her backpack down upon her desk, then looks up at the taller man and wishes she could do the same to him. She certainly can, she knows, but their boss Leroy Jethro Gibbs wouldn't appreciate it. Roughness might be appropriate if he were making a fool of himself, but he hasn't reached that stage – yet. Tony is stowing his own gear behind his desk, but she's sure the nonsensical conversation is not over. With him, it rarely ever seems to be. She actually regrets where she'd spent the night, he was far better company last evening. "And even if I were in Rome, it still would not be significant. In fact, I have been to Rome at this time of year and it is certainly not observed."
"That's not the point, Zee-va."
"What's not observed?" Tim McGee asks from his desk, suspecting he'll regret being drawn into this conversation. Exchanges between these two rarely go well, though for the past several weeks they go better than the ones he's had with the fiery woman. For now, however, he can try to be friendly and to moderate their escalating battle.
"What are you doing, Probie?"
Tim, confused, runs his hand through his brown hair, and wonders if it is time for a trim. He'd go back to a buzz, but Shav likes it longer. "I'm finishing up my last notes on the Dawson case."
"Not 'now' now, I mean Thursday.
"Ah." Now it makes sense – at least a little sense.
"A uniquely American holiday, which is why I cannot understand why Tony cannot understand why I will not be observing it."
"Well, I just figured you and some significant other–."
"I do not have a 'significant other'!" her glare moves from Tony to Tim, "not any longer." She'd heard his message but is too angry to allow the revelation that acknowledging it would cause. She is not going to reveal that significance has shifted from one man to the other, so she locks her aim on the first.
x
'I was right,' McGee concludes, 'I should've stayed out of it.' He doesn't address her point, hoping it'll go away. "Well, Tony, considering the fact that I don't have the day off, I figured I'd just–" he waves his hands over his desk. Actually he does have plans that include a restaurant reservation with an extraordinarily attractive priest, but he's saved from evading this by the entrance of Leroy Jethro Gibbs.
x
"Forget about Thanksgiving, we're going to a Halloween Party."
"Halloween was over three weeks ago, Boss," DiNozzo counters, wondering how long and wild the party had been.
"Tell that to the Trick-or-Treaters." He gathers his gear from his desk drawer. "We've got a dead Seaman in Wythe."
"Where's that?" Tim asks.
"In old Virgin-i-ay, McGooglemap, off 664 just short of Newport News."
"Sailor stationed in Norfolk?"
"Good guess." Gibbs' tone is hardly complimentary.
"Not a guess," he counters, "a foreboding. Parker's going to be thrilled."
The last two times they'd encountered Capt. John Parker, C.O. of Norfolk Station, had been during the incident of the PDC Mark 9, when four Scientists under the Navy's protection had been killed by a fifth, and then again just last week when the head of Disbursement and an uninvolved Petty Officer had been murdered as victims in an embezzlement scheme.
He's sure this is not going to go any better.
xxx
When the Agents arrive at the two story white house seconds before the M.E. truck, they find two MPDC cruisers parked outside and the property cordoned off with yellow 'Crime Scene' tape. Despite the fact that they head for the site of a Halloween party, the festive decorations on lawn and windows relate to a more appropriate holiday. When they enter the house, however, they're bombarded with a cacophony of colors from the horde of costumed revelers.
Fortunately, horde is an overstatement, Gibbs realizes as he surveys the living room. There are only twenty costumed denizens of a warped imagination, though a quick glance tells him these twenty could not have been solely responsible for the volume of food and drink littering the room.
There is a uniformed officer stationed near the door, it is to him that Gibbs turns for answers. "What have you got?" he keeps his voice low enough not to penetrate into the room. In the corner of his eye he sees Ducky and his new female assistant stop in the doorway. He's glad to note that the pale blonde girl finally has a blue coverall jumper that fits her; even one of Ducky's spares was much too large for her five foot two body - and way too tight in the chest for keeping DiNozzo's attention on his work.
"We got the call over three hours ago," the officer tells him, pulling his attention back, "and when we got here there was a dead woman on the bed upstairs. She's wearing Sailor whites, which wouldn't have meant anything here except her ID says she really is Navy. We secured the scene and called your headquarters. Initial reports were that there were upwards of 250 people in this place."
"Three hours, officer?"
"We called it when we made the ID, talk to your Dispatch."
"Oh, I will." He intends to speak to a lot of people about this, particularly since, had it come through on time, this would be a Gamma Shift case.
It's clear, however, that speaking to the twenty who were brave enough to remain to be subsequently held over will achieve little. Anyone they want undoubtedly left ahead of the over two hundred that probably abandoned the building as soon as the body was discovered.
Instead he quickly scans the brave score that'd stayed and his eyes lock on a familiar figure. That is, the face is not familiar but the black and white NCIS cap and the black Federal Agent jacket with silk screened gold shield definitely are. Why the man stands deep in the crowd of cowed revelers is not. "You, he barks, "what are you doing back there?" An agent on the scene should be taking point upstairs.
"Me?" the man points to himself uncertainly. When he steps forward, Gibbs can see he is younger than he'd thought, barely into his twenties.
"Yes, you! Get out here!" When the young man approaches apprehensively, Gibbs' limited patience is at an end. "What are you doing down here? Get to work!"
"I - er - that is –" Identically dressed to the aggravated Agent, he knows why the older man is angry. "You see, this is – well – I mean…"
As the situation becomes clear, Gibbs feels his blood pressure peak. Saying nothing more, he holds out his hand. The younger man reluctantly pulls off his cap and gives it to him. Gibbs tosses the offending headwear to DiNozzo and shakes his empty hand. With greater reluctance and embarrassment, the man unzips his jacket, peals it off and hands it to Gibbs, who turns and stalks to the stairs. His own Agents trail in his wake, not one of them foolish enough to say a word.
x
In the upstairs bedroom several MPDC Officers are already dusting the room for fingerprints and collecting evidence. Their attention, however, locks upon the body which lays supine upon the bed.
"The body was arranged," Gibbs notes immediately. No one, seeing the position, is going to question this conclusion.
Surrounded on bed and floor by such coats as hadn't been removed by fleeing revelers lies the body of a Navy Sailor, pinned insignia gives her rank as 'Seaman Apprentice' and her name 'A. Costa' and she's wearing Jumper Whites rather than the Blues she's expected to wear in November. Her white pants and panties are pushed down to her right ankle, her left leg and foot completely bared. Her legs are together, her hands arranged across her bare stomach, giving a chilling impression of repose. The white top is raised under her arms, her bra pushed up. The black kerchief is still tied, and at the left side of her neck a six inch splotch of maroon blood has soaked into the sheet and likely into the mattress below.
"Now that," DiNozzo says as he leans over her body to see the two small holes in the woman's neck, "is one wild hickey."
"Doesn't look like a hickey to me," Samantha Sky, Ducky's assistant during Jimmy and Michelle Palmer's honeymoon, mutters as she comes around the foot of the bed. Though her voice conveys her horror and disgust, she is unable to take her eyes off the motionless woman.
Costa's white and black cap is beside her head. Her blonde hair, rather than pinned up as per regulations, flows free, and her deep blue eyes stare upward at the ceiling. She's nearly colorless, her pale flesh whiter than can be expected considering the limited splotch of visible blood that has settled about six inches from the wound in her neck.
"Raped by a vampire," Samantha, running her hand through her pale blonde, pixie-cut hair, says uncomfortably, "that really sucks."
x
Ducky, receiving Gibbs' nod when Ziva indicates she's taken a sufficient number of close and medium photographs, steps around the bed beside his assistant to examine the still body. He will touch nothing, not until Ziva has taken all the necessary distant photographs, but even such a visual examination as he may make will provide answers.
He glances to the young woman beside him, handing her a cap and set of gloves, the former of which she pulls over her short, pale blonde hair and pulls her hands into extra small latex gloves much more suited to her petite stature.
"Examining the young lady," he says, "what is the first thing you discern?" Despite his earlier stated intent not to be a teacher, his relationship with his new aide is very much Mentor and Student.
Samantha - 'Sammy' to everyone she knows - restrains her natural first inclination to say 'she's dead', having learned quite early that the tall Senior Agent on the other side of the bed doesn't share in her persistent good humor. She presses at the mattress in several places along the length of the woman's body, not touching her flesh. "She's pale but there's no lividity and nowhere near enough blood."
"And why do you say that?"
Sammy looks to the man at her left. "The policeman said they got the call over three hours ago, add time since death of a conservative half-hour, that's nearly enough time for lividity to be fixed," she points to the flesh just above the mattress, "but there isn't any, or hardly any. It's like she bled out, but that spot," she points to the stain at the side of the woman's neck, "is nowhere near enough."
"Exactly. So, where's the blood?"
Sammy searches the room with her eyes, disturbed to see that no surface in the room is covered in spatter. Looking again at her Mentor, she says the three words she's come to hate above all others during her week in NCIS. "I don't know." She can't believe the look of satisfaction on Mallard's face. "Do you?"
"I do not, Miss Sky. But together we shall find out. Let's let Officer David collect her photographs; then we shall see what we may see."
x
"I hate Halloween," Tony says, "and I'm not at all fond of 'Halloween Two'. I keep expecting Michael Myers to jump out of a closet. But even worse than Halloween, I hate vampires."
"Since when?" Ziva asks, continuing to take pictures, this time starting in the corner of the room.
"Since I used to have nightmares about them a couple of years ago."
"Let me guess; sexy, beautiful Hammer film vampiresses in long, bosom-baring push up nightgowns, long flowing hair and sexy, dainty fangs."
"Well, yeah, but that's not the point!"
"With beautiful, bosom baring women, Tony, there is no other point, except perhaps in your –"
"I went to a party as a blue 'Elf Lord' this year," McGee cuts her off.
"With your Redskin's Snow Queen?" Though knowing better, Tony can't resist, especially when he sees the look in the Probie's eyes and knows he has scored a direct hit. The Snow Queen was last year, and he never had succeeded in melting her.
"No, Tony, I didn't." There is also no chance he'll say anything more, not with Ziva present. The party had actually been at Hamilton Hall adjoining St. Mary the Virgin Church, and his date had been a red devil attired completely against type.
"Sammy," Tony turns to the young woman waiting near the foot of the bed for McGee to finish, "did you go 'Trick or Treating'?"
"Not exactly, I went to a party."
"As what?"
A smile spreads slowly upon her lips. "A bosom-baring vampiress with a push up nightie and dainty fangs."
"I'd love to have seen that."
"I thought you were afraid of vampires."
"Sometimes you just have to face your fears."
"You're going to be facing me when I miss the back of your head," Gibbs warns.
"Sketches! On it, boss!"
x
When Ducky and Sammy can approach the woman's body again, the Examiner shuts the investigators out of his attention. "Let us first examine the body as a whole before delving into specifics. Looking at our unfortunate friend, what do you perceive?
"Well," Sammy begins, having had time to make a lot of observations while carefully drawing no conclusions, "she's very pale, almost as though she'd bled out. Rigor has set into her hands, feet and ankles, as well as her neck but there's not much lividity – far too little in fact. There's some bruising on the backs of her hands, and some of her nails are broken, these two are bent back. There are ligature marks about her neck, looks like she'd been strangled, but they're … they don't look like rope or wire, they're … I'm sorry, I don't recognize the shape. There are also the two wounds on the left side of her neck, and these show capillary damage in a ring about them."
"How large and deep?" he asks, handing her a graduated probe, which she lays beside the two holes and pauses while David photographs it. The investigators will use a ruler to get a clearer judgment of size and width, he wants as much evidence as possible.
"The holes are one and eleven sixteenth inches from the upper part of the top one to the lower point of the other. The outer ring is an irregular circle with a maximum width of two and five sixteenths." She reverses the probe in her hand and inserts the tapered end carefully, stopping at the first resistance and withdraws it. She then takes another probe from the bag at their feet and measures the second wound. "Nine sixteenths deep; that should be enough to puncture right though the Jugular vein," Ducky looks across the bed to say something to Gibbs, "and I think she was unconscious when he bit her."
He turns back. "Why do you say that?"
"The elasticity of the skin and the measurements are too average. If he tried to bite me I'd flinch, try to use my head and shoulder to block him, and when her neck relaxes the marks would be distorted, expanded. Or he'd have to yank my head to the right, maybe pull my hair," she indicates Costa's unmessed tresses, "and stretch the skin so when I relaxed the marks would be smaller. On her, there's also no distortion, and the wounds seem to be made at the same angle. Of course, if he bit her in a less pliant spot I could tell better; that's just my take."
"And an excellent one, I think."
She hands the probes back to Ducky. Since they have blood on them he places them into evidence bags she holds and labels them. They'll be sent to Abby for analysis, to determine if there is anything foreign mingled with the blood.
"Please continue," Ducky directs. He is not done evaluating her work.
"Well, there are no other obvious injuries beyond those to her hands and fingers." She looks up at Gibbs. "Can I move her?"
They already have an extensive series of photos. "Go ahead."
x
Sammy goes to the foot of the bed, takes hold of the woman's left knee and moves it no more than two inches, enough to see what she'd hoped she would not. She closes her eyes, whispering "Oh Jesus!"
"What is it?" Gibbs asks, unable to see anything from his angle. Sammy glances at Ducky, but he makes no sign he's going to answer the question. By the time she answers he's joined her, obliging her to elaborate for everyone else in the room.
"There are two more holes, same size, in her upper left thigh; it looks like they hit the femoral artery. At nine sixteenths it would still be enough, with adequate pressure, to reach the artery. He'd have to bite hard, which he obviously did to leave such deep impressions of the other teeth, but it's possible. Blood would've shot out like a geyser, but there's only a little bit on the mattress. All I can see is what leaked down her leg and covered a few inches of the sheet."
"What are we looking for, Duck?" Gibbs asks, hoping to get a psych profile of the loon.
"A vampire," Sammy says, staring at the wound, therefore unable to see Gibbs' expression.
He doesn't call her on it, however. Considering the eclectic collection of revelers downstairs, a vampire comes as no surprise.
The blonde apprentice moves away to allow Ziva to get these pictures, she'd rather forget having seen any of it.
DiNozzo steps closer so that his voice does not carry further than the slight young woman. "You really think we're looking for vampires?"
"Don't you believe in vampiri, Agent DiNozzo?"
"Vampires," DiNozzo corrects.
"Actually," McGee cuts in, "since the publishing of Brian Lumley's books well over a decade ago, 'vampiri' has become an accepted plural, while 'vampirii', two i's , refers to vampires collectively. Then again, Laurell Hamilton's 'Anita Blake' series coined a collection of vampires as a 'Kiss', a play on the bite being euphemistically referred to in Victorian and later literature as a 'kiss'."
"McGee?"
"Yes, Boss?"
"My hand is going to kiss the back of your head if you don't get back to work. DiNozzo, get downstairs and interview the leftover Hellspawn. Ziva, you're helping."
x
"Miss Sky?" Ducky snatches her attention.
She turns back, not wanting to. "Yes?"
"What more can you tell me? Us?"
"Well …" she gets in close beside him, trying not to crowd the older man, "the ligature marks about her throat are too thin and irregular to be a rope. It's probably not a garrote though; it didn't cut her skin like a wire might." She points to the hands folded upon the woman's stomach. "There's bruising at the backs of each hand, from knuckles to midway along the backs of her hands. Her nails are short," she picks up the woman's right hand, already starting to stiffen with rigor, "but they were bent backward at the ends of the middle and ring fingers of her right hand, and the middle and index fingers of her left."
"Can you give me a time of death?" Gibbs asks.
Ducky hands her a liver probe. She measures the spot in the woman's bare abdomen carefully. "Sorry, this is gonna hurt," she whispers softly, though not softly enough as she pushes the long implement through the pale flesh.
"She's been listening to you too well," Gibbs comments.
"It is never too soon to develop an appropriate empathy with our patients," Ducky chides, his tone carrying the additional remonstration 'I am supervising this examination, thank you very much'.
x
Samantha, uncomfortable at the jibe – she hadn't thought being influenced by the man's predilections to be a bad thing – waits impatiently for the numbers on the rectangular display to cease changing. When they do, she glances at the thermometer attached to the black bag on the floor, using the room temperature in her calculations.
"Well, the body was under a pile of coats – which so many people moved we'll have to search them for blood to see which, if any, were laying right on her even if all of them were here. Her liver temperature is 92.3, which under normal circumstances will decline at an average rate of 1.5 degrees per hour. Taking into account her insulation and the room being 69 degrees, 98.6 minus 92.3 divided by 1.5, I'd say over four hours ago, at least four and fifteen."
"Metro PD got here over three hours ago."
"Leaving a window of over an hour for our perpetrator to make his escape," Ducky concludes, not having missed that Gibbs had looked to him when Sammy had given her estimate on the time. He didn't answer the questioning glance, there was no need.
"Along with over two hundred other people," McGee reminds them. The scene had probably looked like roaches fleeing when a lightswitch is turned on.
"So how did she die?"
Again Ducky doesn't answer the question directly, determined he will only say something if Sammy is grossly wrong. There is no better way to move from classroom training to certainty than through field experience, and he's determined that she shall have all he can give her.
His look to Samantha clearly tells her she won't be out of the hot seat until she's done.
x
"Well, you'll have to examine the mattress to make sure no more blood soaked in than I think did," she tells them, gratified for the chance to turn book learning into the real thing, "but the stains aren't all that big, so I'd be really surprised if they were deep, but it's the cleanliness of the wounds that concern me."
"The perp washed her."
"More than that, Jethro," Ducky counters, "come closer." Gibbs comes around the foot of the bed and Ducky motions him to bend close to her neck. "What do you smell?"
He straightens quickly. "Ammonia, bleach," the scent, together with that of death, is not a pleasant combination.
"Yes, I believe Abby will discover it is indeed a combination of those pungent chemicals that the perpetrator used in an attempt to destroy traces of his DNA over the wound."
"You really think he sucked the blood out?"
Ducky nods to Sammy, Gibbs turns to her but doesn't repeat himself. She raises each of Costa's eyelids to look under them and finds small dots of blood in the soft conjunctivae and sclera of the eyes. "There's Petechial hemorrhaging, which indicate a massive and rapid increase in blood pressure, yet most of her blood is just … gone. There's bruising of the epidermal layer that I think Agent DiNozzo described as 'a really wild hickey', but I'd say you're right. Someone sucked her blood."
"How much did he suck?"
"Well, I'd say her pressure was up from fighting him and everything he was doing to her, note the bruising and bent fingernails, but as he sucked she'd eventually pass out." She continues examining the body closely, quoting as much from the book as from what she sees. "The average body has about 6 liters of blood, but the loss of even 1 liter would put her into shock. I think she'd die by the time she lost about three, four at the most. Her heart would go into averal arrhythmia, meaning the heart begins beating in a fast but irregular pattern, fibrillation."
"Atrial," Ducky corrects.
"Atrial, yes, sorry."
"Go on."
"She wouldn't have lasted long once the femoral artery was punctured - I give her about a minute. If she'd lost a lot through the neck, maybe a half. I can't tell you any better until the Autopsy."
"Can I check her pockets?" This time Gibbs doesn't ask his M.E.
Sammy's surprised at the deferment. "Go ahead."
There isn't much in them, her Navy ID names her as Seaman Apprentice Angelina Costa, assigned to Norfolk Station. A small bill fold contains a civilian ID card and $34 cash. There's a key ring with two keys upon it and she has a cell phone in her pocket. All of these he deposits into clear bags, labels, signs and places them into the Evidence bag.
The cell phone could be the most potentially valuable item in the collection.
xx
DiNozzo and David interview the revelers brave enough to await the police, none of whom are happy about the price of their bravery, It's been a very long three plus hours, several of them are already well into sobriety. DiNozzo's attention is first on the only resident of the house present, a nineteen year old College student.
"You're here alone?" he asks. He doesn't believe the claim.
"Yeah, man, my folks are off visiting my grandma in Utah for the holiday. I told them I had to study for mid-terms."
"Let me guess, you also told them there'd be no parties while they were gone."
"You got it."
"I've got it." He doesn't want it. "So, who was here?"
"I donno. It started out just the House, you know, Alpha Chi Delta, but then it sorta –"
"Wait a minute! You're Alpha Chi Delta?"
"Yeah, man, you know us?"
DiNozzo knows them very well; his own House had been legendary. But those active in his day are now professional men of accomplishment – with only one known exception, Luke Walters, a resident of Danville Correctional. He feels no affinity for this young airhead and so, for the first time in his life, he commits the unpardonable sin. "No, I don't know them."
He'll see Mother O'Mallory about it on Tuesday.
"So tell me about this girl. Who did she come with?"
"Man, I donno; you know how it is, we invited people who invited people who invited people who brought their friends who brought guys and gals they know and it just picked up from there. There hadda be way over two hundred at some points, people coming and going all hours."
"You mean you had no idea who was coming into your home or robbing you blind?" DiNozzo is unable to believe his irresponsible carelessness.
"No way, my parents have everything insured."
DiNozzo doesn't even try. Forget robbery, someone had committed murder. "All right, did anyone see anything?"
"I donno. I had all I could do to keep track of the food and the beer kegs."
"You didn't see anyone take her upstairs?"
"Upstairs, downstairs, in the closets, we had people packing every room. I don't think I even saw that babe alive. There were just too many people. I had enough trouble keeping one Xena straight from another, you know? The only place off limits was my folks' bedroom and we stacked the coats there."
"I know you did."
The sole reason DiNozzo doesn't give up is that Gibbs will not tolerate failure to get answers, unlikely though it may be that any answer will be useful.
x
McGee stays upstairs with Ducky, Sammy and the Police Forensic Unit – who are still there to collect their own data until told otherwise – to gather evidence while Gibbs joins DiNozzo and David in weeding through the score of oblivious revelers. Gibbs feels it could have been worse; they could all have run. DiNozzo is inclined to let the brave ones go, Costa's murderer is certainly long gone.
The trio is halfway through the crowd when a very briefly attired Supergirl gives a piercing shriek and Gibbs and the others whirl to see her standing near the steps leading to the second floor. Her hands are pressed to her mouth in a decidedly un-superheroine-like pose as Ducky and McGee carry the gurney and occupied black body bag down the stairs.
By the time the men have wheeled the gurney out the door, several of the women behind them are weeping. Gibbs, having already determined that none of the overwhelmed mourners knew the deceased Sailor, resigns himself to this being a very long morning.
xxx
When they leave the house, the Agents are besieged by reporters who charge as soon as the doors open and twenty people ask twenty questions in twenty accents and seemingly as many languages. "Agent Gibbs, what happened in there?" "How many are dead?" "Is this an attack on the Navy?" "Is the deceased a Navy Officer?" "Who killed her?" "Was she raped?" "Was it a bloodbath?" "It is true the murderer is a vampire?"
This last brings Gibbs to a stop, he doesn't have to wonder who leaked this detail, only how badly it's going to corrupt his case. "A vampire?"
"Witnesses say the woman was killed by a vampire," the woman tells him.
"Is that so? They haven't said it to me."
"Is NCIS on a vampire hunt?" another reporter asks. Gibbs can just see Director Shepherd's face when she calls him into her office.
"No one is looking for a vampire!"
"Then you're saying he's already been dug up?"
"That's it, show's over."
"What do we tell our readers?"
"Whatever you want, you bloodsuckers do it already."
"Detective Gibbs!" an intense woman pushes to the front, her mistake just enough to snatch his attention, "would you please answer one question?"
"One."
"Would you have lunch with me, Casa Dia, at twelve noon?"
x
Of all possible questions he'd been prepared to rebuff, this one he'd never expected. Looking into her eyes, he finds an intensity of a kind he'd not encountered with any of the bloodhounds that surround them. It doesn't hurt that she's a charming redhead. He pulls his wallet out, opens it and hands her a card. "Call to confirm, I'm going to have a busy morning."
He walks out of the crowd, not certain who is the more surprised.