A/N: I can finally name my reviewers! Yay! Thank you to reyes27kd, flacks girl, terken, justdreaming-83, TwilightPony21, .B, Rebel Magnus, zzsydneyzz, and LG for reviewing the last two chapters! Normally I unbold the names to make them easier to see, but if it has to be like this for me to thank my reviewers, so be it.

Enjoy Chapter 3!

Chapter Three: Anonymous

Callen sat at his desk, working his way through a humongous stack of paperwork.

"Damn, G, how much paperwork do you have?" Sam asked from his desk.

Callen smiled wryly. "A lot. I thought Hetty was joking when she told me I had to fill these up. She wasn't."

Eric's familiar whistle pierced the air, and Callen, grateful for the interruption, was up the stairs in a trice. Sam wasn't far behind.

"Does he always do that?" Rose Alwyn, the new temp, asked.

"Yep," said Callen. Since Kensi's betrayal seven months ago, Hetty had been trying out a new agent every fortnight, looking for a replacement. So far, she hadn't found one she liked – although Deeks found the string of attractive females (one of whom would be his new partner) fascinating enough.

"And you guys respond?" Blonde-haired and green-eyed, Rose looked nothing like Kensi, though she was a capable agent in her own right.

"Yep," Deeks replied, bounding up the stairs after Callen and Sam.

"Okay…" Rose followed, making a somewhat belated appearance in the ops room. Eric had already started the briefing.

"Corporal James Reynolds, 51," he said, pulling up said corporal's records. "Married, no kids – although he does have a brother, Lance Corporal Kirby Reynolds, who lives in LA. Honorable discharge from the navy two years ago. Killed this morning, just before he was supposed to testify against arms dealer Mitchell Montley."

"Shit," Deeks cursed.

Callen and Sam exchanged looks.

"You wanna share, Deeks?" Sam asked.

"This is gonna go down hard," said Deeks. "LAPD's been on Montley's case for months. Reynolds was their key witness."

"Montley had someone on the outside do him in?" Callen inquired.

"Nope," said Nell. "Corporal Reynolds collapsed in the courtroom. Coroner said it was cyanide poisoning."

"What kind?"

"Liquid," Nell replied. "Someone slipped it in his drink before the trial began."

"Eric, run background checks on the staff of the building, see if anyone could have put in the water cooler."

"Got it."

"Nell, I want the security footage from the trial."

"Yes, sir."

"If someone contaminated the water, there could be other victims," said Rose.

"I'll check patient records of hospitals within a five mile radius of the court building," said Nell, typing quickly on the keyboard.

"Deeks, check with LAPD – get everything you can on the Montley case," Callen instructed. "Rose, talk to Reynolds' wife."

"So what are we doing?" Sam inquired as Deeks and Rose took off.

"We're gonna talk to Mitchell Montley."

NCIS: LA

Deeks reached the court building to find LAPD officers swarming all over the crime scene. Scanning the cops to find one he knew, he called out, "Hey, Chester!"

The officer turned, a grin spreading across his face as he recognized the person calling his name.

"Well, well, if it isn't Marty Deeks," he said, clasping Deeks' offered hand. "What're you doing here?"

"NCIS business, man," replied Deeks. "Dead corporal's within our jurisdiction, even if he's retired."

"'Our'?" Chester questioned. "Thinking like a fed now, huh?"

"Not a chance," Deeks disagreed with a grin. "Listen, I need to know about the Montley case."

"Ah." Chester shook his head. "You know I can't discuss details of an ongoing case."

"C'mon, man, you gonna make me subpoena your case records? Just give me the lowdown – I need to see if someone in Montley's circle could've killed the corporal."

Chester sighed. "All right, but you didn't hear it from me."

"Deal," agreed Deeks. "So what's the story?"

Chester walked him away from the crowd of officers before speaking. "Five months ago LAPD gets an anonymous phone call from some woman. Says she's got information on an arms deal going down in Beverly Hills. So we gear up and head over there, and sure enough we see Montley engineering a sale for over thirty smart missiles."

"You find out to whom?"

"Nah. We were gonna wait till the buyer came – but Montley saw us, got spooked. He ran and took the goods with him. Disappeared off the grid. We caught up to him a month later, but the missiles were gone. Montley said he'd sold them off."

"Same buyer?"

"Guess so. He wouldn't tell us who bought them. He said he didn't know." Chester's disbelieving tone made it clear what he thought of that.

"You didn't offer him a deal?"

Chester gave him a look. "Come on, man, what d'you take me for? 'Course we offered him a deal. He wouldn't take it. Would you believe it?"

"That depends on what you offered him."

"Half his prison time instead of the full term on whatever sentence he got."

Deeks stared. "You're serious?"

Chester nodded. "That was after he didn't talk."

"And he wouldn't take it?"

"Refused to even consider it," Chester affirmed. "Kept insisting he had no idea who bought the missiles."

"What about the woman who called you? You got anything on her?"

Chester exhaled. "Like I said, Deeks, anonymous call. We've got enough on our plate as it is without tracking down a lady who gave us a solid lead. Without that phone call we'd still be running around LA chasing Montley."

NCIS: LA

"I'm serious, G. Something about this case doesn't sit right with me," Sam said solemnly.

"Come on, Sam," Callen said. "Arms deal court trial gone bad – what else is new?"

"I'm just saying – keep your eyes open."

Callen reached the counter and flashed his badge. "Federal agents. We're here for Mitchell Montley."

"A guard will lead him out," the receptionist told him. "Shouldn't be too long."

"Thank you." Callen turned around and leaned against the wall to wait.

"G."

Callen turned to Sam.

"Doesn't it bother you at all?"

Callen groaned. "Do we have to talk about this?"

"Seven months and no trace?" Sam said.

"Kensi knows how we work, Sam. It's gonna take time to bring her in."

"Fine," agreed Sam. "Then let's talk about you. You haven't said anything about it since that day."

"What is there to say? She turned traitor. We lost her trail. We'll pick it up again sometime."

"And what are you gonna do when we finally find her? You got it in you to take her out?"

Callen stared at him for a long moment before replying. "I'll do what I have to do. What about you?"

"Hell, yeah," Sam answered without hesitation. "She was my little sister, G. And she shot you. I don't take that kind of betrayal lightly."

"Haven't you thought that she might be working an op?"

"Is she?" Sam asked immediately, trying to read his partner. Callen dropped his head and looked away, sighing.

"No."

Sam sighed too. "I wanna believe it, G, I really do. But she shot you. Skilled as she is, she can't fake that. Or are you saying your wound wasn't real?" he challenged.

Callen was spared the necessity of answering when a guard came up to them, leading Montley.

"Agents," he said, backing away and leaving them alone with Montley.

"What's this about?" Montley asked. Sam looked at him.

"You're coming with us."

NCIS: LA

"For the last time, I don't know who bought the missiles," Montley said, irritated.

Sam sighed. They'd been at this twenty minutes already.

"Look, Montley, we can do this the easy way or the hard way," he said.

"Been there, done that." Montley sounded bored. "LAPD tried all the tricks on me already. But like I told them, I can't tell you who bought the missiles 'cause I don't know."

"Let's start with what you do know, then," said Callen.

Montley took a breath to calm himself. "Okay, look. 'Bout a week after I escaped the cops, this lady comes up to me and buys 'em off me, cold cash."

"What did she look like?" asked Sam.

"Uhh…" Montley thought. "Medium-toned skin, curly brown hair, dark eyes. Don't know her height exactly."

"She say anything to you?"

"No, nothing – just paid up and said to give her the missiles – look, I told this all to the LAPD already!" Montley said impatiently. "Trust me, if I'd known who she was, I'd've told the cops. You think I wouldn't take that deal?"

Callen stared hard at him. "All right," he said. "I'll accept that for now, but if I find out that you know more than you're telling us, I promise you I will make sure you never get out of jail." He and Sam rose to leave.

Montley sighed. "All right, all right," he relented, causing both Callen and Sam to backtrack. "The missiles came with SIM cards, but I junked them so they couldn't be traced to me. That woman came looking for me a week later, and wanted to know where the cards were. I told her I didn't know, and she demanded half her money back. I told her she'd paid for the missiles, fair and square, without even finding out whether they came with SIM cards or not. Then I assured her that the missiles could still be used even without the cards, just not as effectively, and offered her a quarter of her money. She accepted the deal, but she warned me that if I crossed her again, she'd kill me. That's all I know."

"Those missiles are useless without the SIM cards," Sam said.

Montley threw his hands up. "So I lied to her. What's the big deal? It was business, man. If she'd said she wanted the SIM cards up front, I'd have told her what I did with them, even if it cost me a sale."

"You're lucky she didn't kill you before LAPD caught up to you," said Callen as he exited.

NCIS: LA

"You believe him?" Rose asked, observing Montley on the screen.

"Yeah, I do," said Callen. "You get anything off the wife?"

"Nothing useful," Rose replied. "She doesn't know anything."

"Everything Montley said tallies with what Chester told me," said Deeks just as Callen's cell phone rang.

"Talk to me, Eric," Callen answered.

"You're gonna want to see what Nell got off the security cams from the court."

"Be right there. Eric's got something on the security footage," Callen informed them, and they all hurried to the ops room.

It would have been clear even to the most casual observer that Eric and Nell were excited about something. Callen immediately went on high alert.

"What do you got, Eric?" he asked.

"Okay, so I ran background checks on all the employees at the building – nothing. No reports of cyanide poisoning in nearby hospitals, either," began Eric. "So I checked with LAPD forensics, and they told me that the cyanide was only found in Corporal Reynolds' cup. There was no trace of it anywhere else."

"Whoever poisoned Reynolds had to have slipped the cyanide directly into his cup," Nell added.

"Who could get that close?" Rose asked.

"That's what we thought, so we went over the footage from the security cams at the court." Eric took a breath. "You're not gonna believe what we found."

Nell pulled up a frame from the footage and enlarged it, focusing on a woman who was standing next to Corporal Reynolds. Her face was half-hidden in shadow and the footage was blurry, but she was very familiar nonetheless.

Sam froze. Callen's heart sped up, his long-healed chest wound suddenly aching.

"Kensi," they said together.

A/N: And that's chapter three. I will see you tomorrow!