This is my 34th NCIS Mystery, the Fourth story of my Fourth Season. 'NCIS' is owned by Belisarius Productions while Dr. Maura Isles hails from 'Rizzoli and Isles', which is owned and produced by Hurdler Productions and by Ostar Productions. As a not too great coincidence, she is portrayed by Sasha Alexander, the former Kate Todd.
This story takes place in the second week of July, four days after the conclusion of 'In the Hearts of Men'.
Ducky is still on vacation in Scotland with Dr. Jordan Hampton, and Jimmy and Michelle Palmer are midway through a month long therapeutic vacation in Virginia so Dr. Maura Isles, ME for Boston, together with Apprentice ME Samantha Sky, have been 'womanning' Autopsy.
I own only Samantha Sky, Siobhan O'Mallory McGee, Jeffrey Carpenter and other Original Characters.
You can find all my stories listed in order in my Profile.
This story is rated T or NC-is 17.
Sting
by JMK758
Chapter One
Welcome Home
It's 11:46 on Monday morning when Michelle Palmer, muscles aching from too little sleep and too many hours in Jimmy's car, pushes open the fourth floor apartment door. It gives way with the loud bang of too tightly wedged wood breaking the hot seal and she steps aside, holding the hot door open for Jimmy who lugs in their two suitcases. They'd traveled very light to the Saint Francis Retreat House in West Virginia, so one case each for the month had been adequate for their needs, but in the sauna which passes for their apartment even this task is a wet and breathless burden.
Jimmy puts the cases down on the living room floor and turns as she locks the door. He draws her into a loving hug. "Welcome home," he says and kisses her, but her pleasure remains muted and she pushes out of his embrace. She doesn't want to, but can't bear the furnaces their bodies imitate. They're home, and that's something they can focus upon, even if there's little joy in the reason.
When Michelle backs away - they haven't exchanged a short kiss in over a year but this is one of the shortest - she sighs "So good to be home," looking about the sweltering living room. Too much of the July heat has been trapped in the sealed apartment, as evidenced by the difficulty in breaking the door seal, and she can virtually see the heat striations in the air.
"Yeah," he says. Sixteen days away had been nice, for the most part, but she can see in his eyes, in the way he moves, in a dozen different things a wife notices, that he's gladder to be home than he voices. Sometimes a month at a Retreat House isn't as good as Georgetown, as home on Orchard Lane. He crosses the room to the side windows - sometimes a corner apartment is a distinct advantage - and turns the air conditioner on high.
"I'll unpack," she says, glances at and then ignores the portable phone and the 37 flashing on its base, hefts her case and carries it past the couch to the short hallway. She feels a river of perspiration flow down her front and back, yet one more annoyance. The sun dress is light but naked is too dressed. 'I should've unplugged it' she thinks as she passes bathroom and closets to the bedroom door. She has to push this door too; the heat has expanded the wood even tighter than its usual overly painted seal and when she hits it hard with her hip it bangs open.
'What the hell?' screams in her mind as she's slammed back by a horrific stench almost physical in its force. When she broke that seal she got the full nauseating impact up her nose and painfully into her eyes.
Brown spatter covers the neat Queen bed, evidently driven with such force it'd marked the wall on her side of the room. The entire right wall is splashed with gore. There's a widely spread but quite disgusting collection of small meat detritus decaying on the large bed. A cloud of flies blasts fury through her boiling brain.
To her right at the head of the bed the right window is mostly closed and well secured upon the top of the air conditioner but the one by Jimmy's pillow is wide open. The brown spatter on the bed, ceiling and covering her wall all comes from his side. The still July air, aside from turning the room into an oven, does nothing for the sight of too familiar meaty pieces or the too damned familiar stink.
Her first thought that this is a sick practical joke or even more vindictive assault flashes away instantly as she squeezes the stink from her eyes and takes in the room as a whole. This is no joke, and no one they know is this sick or vindictive.
She pushes the door closed, just the bare tight tip hold it as she tries to keep the cloud of flies from spreading. Stepping around the foot of the bed, to his side, she feels she has a good idea what she'll find - it has the horrible feeling of the inevitable about it - while at the same time she has no idea exactly what to expect other than that it'll be very, very bad.
When she sees it, she feels the suitcase she'd forgotten about slip from her left hand and it clunks to the utterly ruined white carpet. She pulls in a deep breath and is instantly sorry for swallowing the cloying stink, but she only intends to keep the lungbusting air for an instant.
"JIMMYYYYY!"
x
Chelle's startling scream is so intense that Jimmy whirls at the kitchen table and runs through living room and short hall before it ends. He bursts through the doorway into the staggering stench and he slams to a stop on the white shag carpet. The force of the too familiar stink tries to batter him back out the door but he fights it, unwanted experience allows him to win over the invisible barrier.
'Chelle stands on the other side of the bed, her case dropped at her feet and the stench is one he's smelled several thousand times and had never expected nor wanted to smell it in his broiling bedroom.
He wipes the shower of perspiration from his eyes and looks again. He hadn't washed the image away. The bed is a mess for blood and a score of small meaty pieces in advanced stage of noxious decay, and the ceiling and wall to his right are spattered with long dried brown blood.
A hundred flies churn the air, and he reaches back to close the door.
She's staring at something out of his sight but what he can see is the wide open window by his side of the bed's head that he remembers closing and locking. Whatever sparked that screamed summons is on the floor beyond the queen bed by the open, formerly locked window. The headboard, light blue wall, bed, that whole right half of the room is spattered with dark brown dried stains he's - they both have - seen far too many times.
The long ago liquid spatter would be bad enough in itself but it's mingled with too many small bits of solid matter deposited over the wide bed and 'Chelle's side of the floor. This detritus too he has seen in too many varieties over the years and he's sure he could identify a considerable amount of it except that he doesn't want to. The flies that cloud the room only add their own annoying miasma.
When he steps further toward her around the foot of the bed the day that had started miserably goes straight down to hell.
x
The Caucasian man appears to be in his late teens, long and unkempt black hair well receded from his forehead. He's wearing jeans, mostly blue, and most of a once white tee shirt. Beside him and partially under the bed is an empty canvas bag which has soaked up some of his blood. He's bled out from the hole excavated in his right side, the edge of the wound touching the floor.
The pool of blood - he would land so inconveniently after death that as the blood settled it drained from the gaping hole - so completely suffused the white shag carpet that it had even flowed under their bed. The deep wound, charred and blackened, is waist high and looks to Jimmy like a small grenade had detonated above the balding man's right hip.
The wound, on second look, is moving and this stirs aggravation in both of them.
"Chelle?" He can barely move his lips, can't look away from the corpse.
"Yeah?" She sounds breathy, stunned and he can't blame her.
Flashing back to the staggering flamboyance with which she and Abby had done up Agent McGee's desk and Mother McGee's office during their two week honeymoon in Ireland - those combined projects have become legendary - Jimmy can't get that scheme out of his thoughts and hears himself say, though he can't believe the toneless words that slip through his fugue: "We agreed: 'no welcome home surprises'."