*Phoof
Gibbs looking perplexed at an obviously distraught Meredith Leigh.
The gray haired leader of the Washington, DC Major Case Response Team [MCRT] made his way into Forensic Specialist Abby Sciuto's lab. He immediately noticed the music she had on was less frenetic than her other choices, but that was not his concern. He had a killer to catch.
"What have you got, Abbs?" Gibbs said while looking at her multicolored computer screen display.
Abby looked more like death warmed over than usual. "A major headache from my New Year's Eve bowling party with the Sisters, but you don't want to hear about that…" She quickly tapped a few keys on her keyboard and brought up a graph chart for Gibbs to see. "Major Mass Spec found hydrogen peroxide, benzalkonium chloride, benzyl alcohol, disodium edetate, tetrasodium edetate and sorbic acid. Your basic contact lens cleaning solution, Gibbs. No other foreign substances, unless you want to count all the icky foreign matter in the Maryland County water supply. They say its parts per billion,
but-"
"Abby…" Gibbs said warningly.
She looked momentarily contrite. "Right - getting back to the case. The concentration of lens solution was high Gibbs-"
"Could it have killed him?" the silver haired Head of the DC MCRT wondered aloud.
Abby gave him a wicked grin in spite of her current condition. "Only if he mainlined the stuff …" Then she saw that she had said the wrong thing. "Sorry," she said meekly. Then she returned to her analysis. "There was enough there to make him sick, but not super sick."
"So why did you call me down here?" Gibbs asked. They were wasting time just looking at useless charts as far as he was concerned.
"Patience, oh Great One. I found a partial on the snap lid of the water bottle." She hit another set of keys and produced a computer graphic image of the print found with flashing markers indicating the ridges and loops.
Gibbs leaned in close to look at the print. "That's it?"
Abby rolled her eyes. "No, that's not all. Geez, you never let me have my moment-"
"Abby!" Gibbs barked trying to get her focus back to the case.
"Okay, okay! I found a set of prints on the underside of the cap that was screwed onto the bottle. Whoever was trying to make the Staff Sergeant sick had trouble getting the plastic straw seated just right, so they man-handled it and left prints all over the underside of the cap."
He looked back at her. "Did you get a match?"
"Nothing from the FBI, but I did get a match on set of prints for a local stalking case. Involving one Lance Corporal Meredith Leigh…she was suspected of doing the stalking…."
"And she also happens to play for the Bethesda Bombshells." Gibbs said thinking aloud again. He gave the Forensic Specialist a kiss on the cheek. "Good job, Abbs." He said softly. "Sorry about the bark, but I had to get you to focus."
"It's okay, Gibbs. I needed that bark. I'm feeling pretty scattered today," the Goth specialist admitted.
As he left the room, Abby with a self-satisfied smile on her face, gently rubbed her cheek.
Lance Corporal Meredith Leigh was now in her dress winter uniform, her brunette hair done in a single tight bun. She looked nervously around the darkened charcoal room. A single set of lights shone on the table illuminating her and the chair across from her.
She started when Leroy Jethro Gibbs entered the room without preamble and dropped a folder on the table as he sat down opposite her.
"Tell me about your relationship with Staff Sergeant Colton," he began blandly.
Her eyes darted uneasily around the room. "He's my coach-" she began.
Gibbs chuckled and shook his head.
"What?" Meredith asked, her voice filled with obvious dread. She didn't like this place and she especially didn't like this NCIS Agent.
Gibbs continued chuckling. "He's just your coach? You don't really expect me to believe that, Corporal, do you?"
"It's the truth," she said defensively but her weak voiced rebuttal told him that she was hiding something.
Gibbs chuckled again, this time letting a wry smile show through. "The truth? Ah, well, now that's a good one…"
Ziva, Tim, and Tony were watching the interrogation through the one way mirror.
"Ah, Meredith Leigh," Tony turned to his audience, "She's new to the game, you know." Seeing that neither agent really cared what Tony thought about the suspect, he turned and focused on viewing the pretty girl. "Young, petite, slight, brown hair – not really what you would think of as an LFL player – but she's surprisingly strong…"
Tony let that idea drift in the air as he turned and caught Ziva shaking her head.
"What's the matter Agent David, is your Mossad ninja sense tingling?" Tony quipped.
Ziva shot him a momentarily irritated look. "I do not believe she did it," she said firmly.
Tony gave her a look of disbelief. "By 'it' do you mean the stalking or the killing?" He probed.
Ziva turned to face him. "The killing, Tony," she said simply.
"So, do *you* think she did it?" she asked him.
"She could have," Tony said, giving the suspect an apprising look. He turned to Tim. "What do you think, ailing Elf lord?"
"I think I want to hear what Gibbs has to say to her." Tim said tersely motioning to the technician to turn up the volume.
"Looking for more material for your next bestseller, McNovelist?" Tony said snidely, trying to get in the last word.
Tim was about to fire back when Gibbs' harsh voice reverberated through the room as he slammed the bagged water bottle on the table in front of her.
"You spiked his water bottle, Corporal! It would have been just as easy for you to put a bullet in him!"
Meredith looked like she was on the verge of bursting into tears. "I swear to you, Special Agent Gibbs, I didn't kill him…I couldn't…I…I loved him….I only wanted to make him sick so he would want me to take care of him."
Gibbs watched Leigh closely. The tale-tell signs he always saw in a killer weren't there. His gut told him she was telling the truth. Though she had tried to make her true love sick, she hadn't wanted him dead.
-TBC…
