Chapter Three

New York 4:00 p.m.

in Dallas 2:00 p.m.

Saturday April 26th, 2007

Back in New York Danny and Martin were sitting at there desks on the phone, talking and taking notes when Jack and Carlos walked into the office. They hung up a minute after wards.

"What do you have, guy's?" asked Jack as they picked up their notebooks and walked over to the table in the middle of the room.

"Ok, here is what I have on Agent DiNozzo. DiNozzo was just coming back off of a weeks vacation, he was suppose to have called his boss that night to talk about some case that they were going to be picking up. When DiNozzo didn't call or come by the next morning to have breakfast with a lab tech that works there, they got worried and went over to his place. That's when they find out that he had taken off the night before. They attempted to call him but there was no answer, and this is out of character for DiNozzo. So they went into his apartment and found that a couple of things were gone of his. His gun, a lock box that he had never allowed anyone to open and some of his cloths were missing. Now DiNozzo has moved around a little bit in his career, but he has always given notice before and he has stayed there the longest. Now, they ran a list of all the phone numbers that he called last night from his cell and home number. It looks like he took off as soon as he got off of the phone with Mason, but he did get one call after Mason. It was from an ATF agent, JD Dunne. Now, NCIS has got his phone records for the last year, DiNozzo and the other five have talked with each other once a week every month for the last year. Their going to try and pull his records for the past three years that he has lived in D.C and see if the pattern holds." said Danny as he flipped through his notebook.

"Ok, what do we know about the ATF agent?" asked Jack.

"ATF Agent JD Dunne, is twenty-four and is part of Team Seven out in Denver, they are also called the Magnificent Seven. He is the youngest member of his team; he is a computer genius and master hacker. He was born in Boston and his mother died when he was eighteen years old. The team leader of Team Seven is Chris Larabee; he's an ex-Navy SEAL and former Denver police officer." said Danny.

"Alright. Have you talked to Agent Dunne?" asked Jack as he looked through his notes, then back up at Danny.

"Not yet, I'm waiting for a call back from Dunne. His team was out of the office earlier when I called." said Danny.

"Ok, that's good work Danny. Martin what do you have for me?" asked Jack as he looked to Martin.

"Well, James was on call last night, so when they needed him to come in and he didn't show up they got worried. So they go out there last night and he's not there, they call his cell phone, but they don't get an answer. I talked to a Captain Jim Brass; he said that the CSI's that were working on the case had tried to get a lock on the cell phone but that they couldn't find it. But they pulled his cell and home phone records and they found the same thing that Danny said the NCIS found, minus the phone call to Dunne last night. But, they did find the calls to Dunne in the past six months, and they had never even heard of JD Dunne. An the way that Captain Brass talked I took it that the CSI's and a couple of the cop's on graveyard shift were very close with James." said Martin as he flipped through his notebook.

"Ok, is that all that you have for us?" asked Jack.

"Yeah that's about…" started Martin but then his phone rang, he got up and answered it, turning and quickly writing in his notebook, before thanking the person on the other line and then hanging up.

"Ok, that was Captain Brass. Will James was dating one of the lab tech's at the lab out there, well the tech just told them that he over heard an argument a couple of weeks ago with a man named Jason Scott. He said that James's was very upset about the call but that he didn't want anyone to know about the call. The tech said that James told the man that… 'enough was enough, and that he wasn't going to pay anymore,' now that sounds like blackmail to me. We don't have the name of who owned the phone but the tech did give us the number. It's… uh… 940-779-3942…" said Martin.

"Wait; did you say 940-779-3942? That's the number to Jay's cabin down at Possum." said Carlos as he grabbed his cell phone and started dialing it.

"Gage! Do you know if Jay has been up to his cabin in the past month?" asked Carlos as he stood up and started pacing around the room.

"He has, when… two weeks ago, thanks. Yeah, seems some one called Vegas from the cabin. Hey word of advice, look for anything with the name Jason Scott on it. Talk to ya later." said Carlos as he hung up, and turned back around.

"Ok, it looks to me like the call came from Jay's place out in Young County, now he might have had some one out there." said Carlos as he sat back down.

"Alright, just were in Texas is Young County, or is it in Texas?" asked Jack, as he wrote what was said in his notebook.

"Jay's place in Young County is about three an a half hours from Dallas, Jay has a cabin out there on Possum… Kingdom Lake. He told us that his grandfather left it to him, when he died." said Carlos.

"Ok. Now Ranger Sandoval, what do you have for us." said Jack as they turned towards Carlos.

"Ok here is everything that I know about Jay. Jay was born and raised in L.A, came to Texas for college and stayed. He flew through college, started out with the DPT when he was twenty-one, got in his time then when he was twenty-five he was offered one of the spots in the rangers. He's done pretty well for himself, he's really out going. He loves the outdoors, that's why every chance that he has he goes out to his cabin. I know that he enjoys sports, he plays football and baseball, and he loves to watch karate. I know that he has taken a few classes, but I just don't think that he… he has never seemed to be able to pick it up like he should have. Uhm, he is a crack shoot, oh, he told me once that his father was the one to teach him how to shoot. He loves going to the lake, I think that he misses the ocean myself. He loves to read mystery novels and watch them on T.V all the time. He drinks smoothies like crazy, once Sydney joked with him that he was an addict, and that we should put him in rehab. Of course this was at the same time that he was holding her smoothie hostage, so. He likes to joke a lot, he knows quiet a few cures in Spanish, before we were partnered together. At first I thought that he must have learned them from a partner or something, but that wasn't the case. He said that he had a friend that was Hispanic while he was in college. But…" said Carlos as he trailed off.

"But, what Ranger Sandoval?" asked Jack as he got up and grabbed some bottles of water and handed them out.

"They are more what you would yell in the middle of a gun fight then what a college student would say. He also speaks Chinese, and he sometimes will let slip the weirdest things. I noticed that Jay, while he did things and said things that were very Southern California, he also did things that weren't. Now some of them could be explained away by the fact that Jay's mother was Chinese and taught him Mandarin, but other things weren't. Like when he gets drunk, he will start cursing up a storm, more then once he has started using Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, some kind of African dialect, and he's also used a couple of Navajo words. An let me tell you, you have never heard cursing till you have heard Jay when he is drunk, that boy has a dirty mouth on him." said Carlos as he opened his bottle of water, he brought it up to his lips then back down.

"Uh, there is one thing. The others won't know about it. And I want it kept quiet, no one must know about it, especially the Captain and the Brass back home." said Carlos as he looked around the room and at Jack and the boys. Jack nods his head then Carlos takes a drink of water.

"Uhm, Jay… Jay is gay, and he's dates quiet a few guy's. He never sleeps with any of them. I think that he has an out of town boyfriend. But I'm not sure." Carlos said as he took a drink of water from his water bottle.

"Ok, so Jay is gay. Could he have been going out of town to meet up with some one, say a boyfriend that lives close by or that was staying close by? Or some one that he met?" asked Danny as he looked at Martin who was shifting in his seat, ever so slightly.

"No. This was work; Jay never let anything get in the way of work and we were scheduled to leave the next morning. And… about a year after we were partnered together Jay called me up one night, he had been out drinking and he had no ideal were he was. He needed me to come pick him up, I come get him and he was in a daze. He had passed out after the guy that he had picked up the night before had dropped him off in the middle of no where after he had told him that he wouldn't have sex with him. I guess Jay put up to big of a fight, and the man dropped him, cause I know that Jay had been drugged. Cause the next morning he had no ideal about what happened the night before, I had to tell him. That's when I found out that he was gay, Jay was freaking out, he had heard and seen what had happened to guy's that other cop's have found out were gay. A couple of them had been left with out backup or were just beaten. So on the way to his house he's thinking that I'm either going to beat the shit out of him or tell some of the other guy's on the force. When we get to his place I helped him up to his room and tell him that his liking guy's is alright, that I have a cousin that is bi. And that he can call anytime that he needs, and I'll come get him or whatever. Then about six months after I found out about Jay, we caught a case, this young man was found beaten and raped. He was bi, and he had picked up this guy at this bar, but no one in his family or any of his friends knew that he was bi. So he had told no one were he was going, no one was there to see the man that picked him up. It took us three months to catch this guy, after he killed seven other men in Dallas. So after that I told both my cousin and Jay that they were to have some one meet with any guy that they were going to go off with, and that if they ever felt threaten that they were to call someone." said Carlos, Danny and Jack nodded and Martin just looked down at the table, nodding his head.

"Ok so we have ruled out…" said Jack as his cell phone rang; he got up and answered it. He turned around and looked at the table his eyes wide. Then he turned back around and talked for a few more seconds then hung up and turned back around.

"Well that was the NYPD, Amber Wilton was just reported missing by her boyfriend Dr. Sheldon Hawkes, who's an M.E for the city. She was supposed to meet him for breakfast, but she never showed. But she told him that she was meeting with a Jay Mason, the owner of a radio station out of town, on Friday night at eight o'clock. Now, Mason went missing at seven forty-eight, do you know what he had planned for dinner that night?" asked Jack as he looked at Carlos.

"Yeah. He told me that he was going to go to bed early, cause I had asked him earlier if he wanted to grab a bite from the restaurant at the hotel. Wait, if he was going to go out and see this woman, why wouldn't he have told me. I mean, why the lies? He told me that he didn't know anyone here in New York, and yet we found out that he dose and that he lied to me about going to bed early?" said Carlos as he shook his head.

"Don't know. Dr. Hawkes and a friend of his from the crime lab are coming over later, so we need to think people, everything that we know about Ranger Mason. We need everything, Ranger Sandoval. You might not know anyone here, but you know your partner, you know his habits. I want you working with Martin and Danny and I want you boy's to look for places that you might think that he would go if he escaped from a kidnapper or if he has taken off. So get to work boy's." said Jack as he stood up, the guy's following behind him.