Chapter Two
Why Were We Shot?
An hour later Gibbs strides into Autopsy and the glass and metal doors quickly get out of his way. DiNozzo accompanies him but stays a half-step behind as though afraid of being run over.
For the first time in several years, since the cyanide gas attack in Abby's lab, there are two bodies upon the first silver table and neither is dead. Thank God.
Abby is again one of those bodies, she and Samantha Sky sit upon the table bookended by Doctors Mallard and Palmer, who this time use their skills to aid the living. The young women are contrasts, yet their similarities are chilling; black-tressed and pale blonde, tall and petite even when seated, the similarity is in the dark blue NCIS jumpsuits they wear because their clothing is covered in 'blood'.
Sammy's coveralls are rolled high at cuffs and hems and uncharacteristic somberness makes her appear even smaller, particularly when sandwiched between Abby and the lanky Palmer. Being assassinated in a hail of gunfire will dampen anyone's spirits, Gibbs supposes. The pale blonde top of her head is stained by a red blotch that hasn't washed out in the shower.
Abby's forehead is stained, though not as severely on skin as in hair, yet a red line trails from the middle of her forehead toward her left temple. It was in this direction that the 'blood' flowed toward the cement sidewalk of L Street after she'd been murdered.
x
"How are you?" Gibbs asks both women, not choosing favorites.
"This wasn't the way I'd hoped to get back down here, even if I was just here," Sammy admits, her normal buoyancy nowhere to be found even as she glances back to the lighted sign mounted over Ducky's desk, her gift to him in happier hours. 'This is where death rejoices to teach the living', the black on white lighted sign proclaims in ancient Latin. She turns back to him, not feeling very rejoiceful. "I just wanna know why someone fake-shot me to death."
"Like I said, 'beats the alternative'," Gibbs reminds her.
She nods. "I guess if it took this to see Ducky again - you too Jimmy," he nods, having no illusions, "it's not all bad." But her smile is a wan, forced shadow of the usual. "But it freaping hurts."
"It's great to be alive, Gibbs," Abby interjects, cutting off Sammy's buildup, "but those were all kill shots." She puts her hand to her chest, grateful he can't see her stained body. Neither woman mentions, none of the men will venture, that their skin under their blouses is certainly stained where the color bled through. "I've got one heck of a bruise on my breast and an almost perfect triangle between them." She sees DiNozzo's hand approach and slaps it away.
"Just trying to lighten the mood, boss."
Gibbs lightens it, and loosens the more than hour-old knot in his stomach, with a slap to the back of Tony's head.
"Thank you, boss."
x
"How are they, Duck?" At least Mallard will give him an intelligible answer, even if it's a long one.
"Aside from minor bruising-"
"Minor?" Sammy interjects, affronted. She'd been hit dead center in each breast in addition to shots in her sternum and abdomen and doesn't know how she'll clean the huge splotches from her hair short of dying it. The whatever it was stained her breasts et al, not that anyone other than Ducky and Abby, who has already seen her in the shower, will ever know. She'd kept hidden from Jimmy in the coveralls, declaring 'married men don't get to see' but the teasing had been as flat as her mood.
"They're fine," Ducky concludes, sympathizing with the young women but the bruises are reasonably minor despite the fact that a month is a reasonable estimate. "No breakage of the skin, no broken bones, no blood loss; I wish more gunshot victims could be so fortunate."
"What can you tell us?" Gibbs asks Abby, cutting off either woman's objection to Ducky's assessment.
"Laser sight, muffled reports - maybe a silencer - and before you ask no I have no idea what kind of car. I was too busy watching my best friend get shot to death, then dying myself."
Sammy shakes her head but takes Abby's hand. She has nothing to add.
"Big question is," Tony says, "why aren't you dead?"
Sammy glares up at the towering agent. "Agent DiNozzo, you just blew your last chance to ever get lucky."
"They're not dead," Gibbs declares, "because this wasn't an assassination. It was a message."
"If it's that they can get to me anywhere," Abby declares, "already knew it. Mikel Mawher taught me that too well." She'll never miss the late madman; his death in her own office had been so richly deserved.
"From now on, you don't leave the Yard without a bodyguard."
She sighs, shoulders slumping down hard. "Again."
x
"You're being awfully quiet," Tony observes to Ducky. Aside from answering direct questions, the usually loquacious man has been quite reserved. Only the Autopsy Gremlin's said less.
"Usually, Anthony, I endeavor to pass along answers from my patients, but in this case they're doing quite well in expressing themselves. I can repeat that none of the wounds, painful though they undoubtedly were, were actually life threatening. We took x-rays; it was the impacts to their heads and then their heads striking the concrete that rendered them unconscious. The impacts were considerably more powerful than from your standard weekend-enthusiast paintball gun, even though not life threatening, as I'd said. I had Doctor Palmer here draw blood from each of them, in case there were any deleterious and unforeseen effects from what was, essentially, a weekend warrior attack."
"Exsqueeze me," Sammy cuts in, "I just wanna know why we were shot."
"Working on it," Gibbs assures her.
x
"Well, I've sat here long enough," Abby declares, hopping off the table. "I'm going to my lab. I have my own blood to check - and Sammy's - and a crap-load more evidence to process so just stay out of my lab until I send for you."
The command raises eyebrows; normally one must restrain Abby from being with her friends.
"Not me," Sammy counters. "I'm not moving out of this room. If I'm going to die, I'm not having some anonymous ME take the slugs out. My HMO says I can choose my own Coroner." No one chooses to pick up on this hyperbole.
"Wait!" Abby exclaims, whirling on her friend so suddenly Sammy rears back on the table. "What if - this time - I wasn't the target? After all, Mikel's dead," she hops about to Gibbs, "but Sammy was the one the guy shot first; he only hit me after she stopped moving. Maybe this time I was just a loose end to be tied off."
"Yeah, right," Sammy scoffs, but then looks at the five pair of eyes that surround her. None of them look as doubtful as she feels. "What? Who'd assassinate me?" She looks to her roommate. "You're the Super Secret Agent Science Guru, I'm an up-and-coming MD and future ME and I play the violin - Fifth violin - in an Orchestra. Not even the Sixth Violin would gain anything by bumping me off."
Gibbs agrees. Not even John Langley and Colette Zang, who'd murdered Marine Staff Sergeant Wendy Langley and Karen Huston and set Sky up as the 'fall girl' in their failed scheme, could touch her; they're locked away awaiting trial. Nor would their case benefit from killing Sky even by proxy; she's already provided her deposition and she was peripheral to the case. He's more inclined to think that shooting her was 'removing the witness' and Abby was the target. Of a non-killing? Yet Abby's the one whose efforts have led to hundreds of perps being put away. Nevertheless: "You still have a bodyguard."
Sky grins. "Can I pick which body guards me?"
Irrepressible to the end. "No."
She sighs, evidently realizing she's pushed to the end of her very short range. "Fine. Just make him or her a music lover, I'm still practicing Shostakovich's Second Symphony for next week."
x
Gibbs leads DiNozzo and Sciuto from the room, leaving the three MEs to their sterile, white domain. "Do you still have my scrubs?" Sammy asks Ducky, her tone hopeful. "Might as well make myself useful."
"I believe we do," the venerable man says and steps around the table, intending to collect the sets of small garments from the store room, from the rear of a shelf where he'd placed them after the Palmers had returned from their honeymoon. He'd done so in anticipation of the possible return of his apprentice, though he'd never imagined she'd be thrown here in such a circumstance as this.
Nevertheless, he decides that work is perhaps the best way for his patient to ground herself after so outrageous a morning. "And we do have a patient awaiting your services, Miss Sky," he concludes as he approaches the door.
Sammy moves to get down from the table; Jimmy steadies her with a hand on her arm. She thanks him when she gets down and an instant later he grabs her when her knees buckle, catches her before she falls to the floor.
"Are you all right?" Jimmy asks as Ducky hurries back, not having reached the store room. Jimmy holds her by her ribs but that grip isn't enough; she's trembling so violently that he must back her against the table lest she fall.
She looks from one tall man to the other; Ducky's got five inches on her while Jimmy towers over her and neither fact had ever had an effect upon her - until now. She can't stop trembling and her shuddering breath steals her voice.
"Someone tried to kill me."
xx
Gibbs and DiNozzo step off the elevator on three - Abby had very determinedly walked away from them on the first half-lower level when the car had risen only one story and neither man had tried to intrude.
Both know that set of shoulders, that determined gait; if Abby wants either of them - or anyone else - she'll call.
Until then, stay out of her bleeping lab.
x
"What have we got?" Gibbs demands as he strides into the bullpen, knowing none of the three agents will be stupid enough to answer with silence.
DiNozzo takes his place - silently.
"Traffic Cam from the intersection didn't get much," McGee reports immediately. "The car was about midway up the block, a hundred and twelve feet. I can clean it up, but it'll take time."
"Let's see what we've got." Gibbs turns expectantly to the wide plasma screen mounted between McGee's and DiNozzo's desks and a few moments later it comes alight.
But not by much. This is a modern system utilizing a time stamp in the lower right, but the image is too small, recorded from too far away. At nearly oh-four-twenty the sun doesn't lighten the horizon, even if such a thing were visible for the downward angled L Street camera. On the right side of the screen, distinguished more by familiarity than clarity of image, they can make out two figures descending from the top of the screen, a block away from the corner camera, and the women's bodies are barely an inch tall.
In the shadowy street blonde Sammy is visible more for wearing a white blouse and blue shorts in the balmy mid-April night while dark-tressed Abby is in white Victorian blouse over long black skirt. Her blouse forms a band perhaps twenty pixels high. Gibbs knows their soon-to-be-assailant's car license plate, even if visible in the inadequately lit street, will be less than half that height.
Sammy's white image nearly bounces in her joyous gait. The girl has been described once in his hearing as 'Peter Pan on Ecstasy', though she needs no artificial boost to her spirits.
As the women walk, at one point Sammy's arms flung wide in some expressive point, they reach roughly midway up the dim block and Sammy stops suddenly, her hand covering her left eye. A moment later her hand, virtually indistinguishable in this dim and distant image, goes to her chest.
Abby suddenly grabs her arm and yanks but Sammy staggers back out of her grip, a dark stain appears on her chest. She staggers back again - and again - ever receding from the car parked about two and a half lengths from them. Her blouse grows darker and darker, rapidly appearing black stains tell a horrible story.
Abby appears frozen in place, by her posture she's horrified as her friend is 'murdered' before her eyes. The dark spots on Sammy's blouse appear just as horrific in dim and distant black and white. Sky doubles over, evidently the impact to her stomach, her long hair flies forward and then another dark splotch appears at the top of her head and she's knocked backward off her feet, slams to the cement and lays motionless.
Abby turns and a dark stain appears on her antique white blouse, then another and another and another and even for the agents, knowing that their friend is safe in her lab and pursuing evidence with a passion, it's difficult to watch. Gibbs is actually grateful for the lack of clarity.
Abby staggers back under the impacts and then another stain appears on her forehead. Her head jerks back, she falls fast, her head hits the cement and she doesn't move.
The dark car leaves the curb and moves toward the top of the screen. "Freeze that."
x
He steps closer, closer, and is completely unsurprised by what he sees.
The car's rear license plate is black.
"I'd say black masking tape," Tony determines. There's a very dim sheen upon the rectangle.
Gibbs turns to his Computer Wizard. "Can you get an image?"
"It'll take time," McGee says, his gaze locked on his own monitor as he types quickly. "I'll have to go over it frame by frame, manipulate it as best I can and look for the correct angles to pick up the ridges and valleys of the letters using different light wavelengths. I'll have more luck, I think, if I track the car and try for a better image from some other camera."
"DiNozzo, I want you on that. McGee, you work with what you have here. I want no lost time. DiNozzo finds something, you take that."
"Right, boss," is an unintended chorus.
Looking at the image, Gibbs wants to demand answers now. But four in the morning, over half a block away and using city installed and maintained equipment, he won't waste his breath. This time he'll let his people work their miracles while he searches for his own answers.
x
"Whoever it was waited for them," Ziva declares, taking control of the footage displayed on the plasma from McGee's system. Pressing a few keys, she starts the film rolling in reverse, the time stamp in the lower right corner rapidly counting down. The car drops back to its place, Abby and Sammy quickly 'undie' and back out of the top of the screen and then the car sits there - and sits there - and sits there. Cars flash backward down the screen, pedestrians rush in each direction as the timer rushes backward. Finally the car backs away from the curb and out of the scene - at 2:09. "Sat for over two hours," she concludes
Gibbs doesn't bother berating her for stating the obvious. "DiNozzo, track that car, forward, backward, every damn camera in the city. Find it." He has orders for the others, and makes sure his voice carries back as he heads for the stairs.
"Er, boss?" Tim ventures as Gibbs finishes and makes the first turn on the flight up toward the fourth floor and the MTAC balcony. Gibbs halts only long enough to glance back. "How are Abby and Sammy?"
"They're scared as hell," he takes in all four of his field agents, "and depending on us to find this bastard."
xx
Gibbs doesn't pause in the outer fourth floor office, doesn't do more than glance at Cynthia Sumner before reaching for the knob to Director Jennifer Shepherd's door. The woman watches him but has long ago given up trying to slow him.
To Sumner, there's no point in stressing; the man will never change. To Gibbs, the woman has finally learned her job.
"Come in, Jethro," Director Jennifer Shepherd says, not turning from the window behind her desk. She'd come in as soon as she'd heard of the shooting, had been monumentally relieved, followed by volcanically angry, to learn the attack had been faked. She could, of course, express this outrage openly, but she's learned much in the year since the end of the La Grenouille disaster. Now she channels such feelings into determination to get the truth - and the bad guys.
Her new regimen also includes numerous consultations with the Agency's Chaplain. Only Cynthia is privy to the fact that their private conferences involve more than the stated purpose of reviewing Agents' status.
"Perp waited for two hours before attacking Abby and Sky," Gibbs announces.
Shepherd has never known him to ease into any conversation; the word 'preamble' simply isn't in his vocabulary. "Do you know how he knew?"
"Club they went to is on L, walking distance to Abby's apartment. They didn't take her car."
"What kind of club is this?" Knowing Abby, the more eclectic the better.
"It's a Gay club."
x
Even for Abby this is extreme. "What was she doing at a G-?" But then she recalls Samantha Sky's bisexual preferences. It'd slipped her mind over the months since the girl had worked for Ducky last year. "Could this've been a Hate Crime?"
"Hate Crimes usually involve beat-downs and bullets, not ambushes with paint guns." He isn't ready to discount the possibility, but the long ambush makes it unlikely.
"Paint guns?"
"The only casualties were their clothes and a couple of bruises. It was mostly getting hit in the head, falling and whacking their heads on the sidewalk that put them out. People who called Metro, and the first officers on the scene, saw two women covered in red and called in the hit. One of the LEOs recognized Abby, which is why we got, and rolled on, the initial call before Metro even realized they were alive."
"Shoddy procedure."
Gibbs just gives her a 'can't be helped' shrug. Neither of them had liked being awakened to get the initial Emergency Alert through Dispatch that their Forensic Scientist - and an 'unidentified' woman - had been found shot to death on a Washington street.
x
"DiNozzo's searching traffic cam records; he'll find the car. McGee's cleaning up the shooting footage, Palmer's following up the Hate Crime angle, but my gut says no. Ziva's looking into anyone who may have been gunning for Abby, but like with the hunt last year that covers 90 percent of the perps NCIS ever put away."
"What about Sky?"
He shrugs, she knows the answer as well as he does. "The three we had while she was working with Ducky; one's in the stockade, one's in the loony bin-"
"Loony bin?" It's hard to restrain a smile.
"And the third's dead. The two who framed her for double murder are locked up, trial's in two months and unless someone really wants to be Fifth Violin in 'Washington Renaissance', she's a dead end."
Shepherd knows Jethro won't drop the matter completely, however. "You think whoever did this will up the stakes next time." She won't bother to make it a question.
"I'm putting Susan Bourne and Tina Larsen on Protection Detail. When they leave the Navy Yard Abby and Sky don't go to the Head without backup."
But Shepherd shakes her head. She doesn't consider that depth of coverage to be necessary but "I want Janet Levy and Lisa DuBois as well; tell Lamb to see to it."
He'd had the same thought himself.
"Sky was first; two to the heart, one to each lung, one to the gut and one top of the head when she bent over. Abby took four to the chest; one got her in the breast, triple tap to the heart, then one to the forehead. Shooter was twenty feet away and light was crap. Car's plate was covered, McGee's working to bring it out."
x
"Any idea of the message?"
"The obvious is too damned obvious."
"Agreed. Any of us could be hit, and even if I issue a reminder to vary routines - and I will - that's not the message. How are Abby and Sammy taking this?"
"Abby's scared and pissed, Sky's scared silly but tried to pretend. Abby's in her lab and will stay there until she breaks this; Ducky'll keep Sky too busy to think about it. Fred Higgins and his team have that Private from Echo Company, Lim Takabachi, found floating in his pool. Do Ducky good to sit back and direct while the kids get dirty."