Chapter Three
Somebody Call For Some Feds?
Michelle Palmer wipes the perspiration from her face, stands for several seconds in the cold jet of the air conditioner and gives several fast tugs of her sun dress to circulate the cooling air along her bare body and pull the material from her flesh. It's as though she were thrown into a boiling vat, the dress plastered to her body.
Too soon she has to stop and cross the living room when she hears sounds upon the landing, but by then the too damp dress is chilled. "Should've freakin' changed." She considers calling through the door for the visitors to wait, but all her clothes are in her dressers or closet and she doesn't want to return to that room - at all. If she's showing anything, they can be gentlemen and look away or damn them; she no longer cares which.
Fortunately or un, that chill lasts only seconds before the heat wraps her in its smothering grip.
Again she must yank open, with aggravating difficulty, the front door; the heat expansion has made the wood stick in the frame once again. When it bangs open she's confronted by a wall of Leroy Jethro Gibbs flanked by Ziva David and Tony DiNozzo with Tim McGee partially visible beyond.
It's far too hot for the usual Crime Scene jackets and identification is hardly needed here, and even their white lettered black caps which would have distinguished them in the street on their approach to the four story apartment house have been dispensed with. She's grateful they've done this. She doesn't know who Jimmy has told that they work for NCIS, but after hearing what had happened to Special Agent Janet Levy last week she doesn't ever want anyone to know what she does, and this goes doubly for their new apartment, wherever that might be.
"Welcome back, Probette," DiNozzo is the first to speak and she's more sure than ever that she's sorry to be back. "Somebody call for some Feds?"
"Yeah," she sighs out the heat, "but since you're all I could get, you might as well come in." She shuts the door after them, has to shove it this time to form the unwanted seal and the latch clicks into place. She doesn't bother to lock it. The air conditioner to her right will take hours to make a difference in the wood.
Tim looks at her in open surprise and she knows why. From anyone else that might have been banter, but as nice as she usually tries to present herself, the line was downright nasty.
She can't help it. In less than ten seconds she's already sick of Anthony DiNozzo and isn't interested in who knows it. Keeping her tongue was the way of the old Michelle, the pre- and peri-Virginia Retreat Michelle.
The Michelle she intends to be from now on is a First Class Bitch, and they'd better get used to her.
x
"Where?" Gibbs asks.
She glances to the hallway to her left, their right. "Bedroom." She lets Special Agent Gibbs lead Tim and Ziva across the room, no point in trying to play hostess and lead the tall man, but she does precede DiNozzo. She stops at the bedroom entrance while the trio has gone around the foot of the queen bed with Jimmy, but she has trouble entering the violated room. She feel she's been violated worse, twice now for having her friends see the scene.
Though over a hundred corpses litter bed, floor and all else, where she and DiNozzo stop in the doorway they can see the devastation in the fortunately now flyless room all too well.
The burglar had entered through the window at Jimmy's side of the headboard, the side with the fire escape, and stepped upon the night table, judging by the dirty sneaker print upon its surface and the bronze three small bulb lamp that lies upon the carpet. The window on her side has the laboring air conditioner screwed into the wooden frame. As soon as possible, a.k.a. once photos are taken with the big Crime Scene camera, she'll close that other window and spread tape across the six by four hole. Then whatever flies that want to break in can get stuck and starve to death.
From the other side of the bed brown dried blood had spattered ceiling, bed and light blue wall on her side with high velocity spatter, but the bedspread is covered with the brown blood and gobs of decaying meat half cooked in the sweltering mid-July abuse, as well as the myriad fly corpses which litter the carpet, dressers et al. The bed spread will go to Abby more likely than the trash, she only wants to be rid of it.
"Boy, Probette," DiNozzo says from behind her, "you still go in for spectacular decorating."
x
Gibbs looks up from the corpse upon the once white shag carpet, sees Michelle approach to come around the bed beside Jimmy, but he sees Tony stopped in the doorway, his wide eyes and open mouth a mask of astonished disbelief.
"Hey. You with us?"
It takes the man too many seconds to force that expression from his face. "Right here, boss."
"We have a full set of pictures," Michelle says to Gibbs as she pulls from her sun dress pocket Jimmy's cell phone and hands it over to him.
The blood falls from Jimmy's face. "I - I - I - that - that is - I –."
"Spit it out, Palmer," Gibbs orders, having little sympathy or patience this afternoon.
"Well, that is - those pictures aren't the..."
Gibbs tosses the unit to McGee. "Don't worry, we'll only take the ones from here." Jimmy looks so relieved he can't resist assuring him that "We'll delete the others."
Palmer's panic spikes, but it feels too much like shooting trout in a barrel with a bazooka.
x
The living room door bangs open. "Bing bong," a familiar sing-song voice calls. "Avon calling."
No one is surprised by the outlandish greeting, least of all the Palmers who have hosted Apprentice Medical Examiner Sammy Sky on numerous occasions.
"In the Liberator's Rec Room," Jimmy calls back and a second later the petite blonde leads Dr. Maura Isles of Boston, Ducky's stand-in for the past month, into the room. Despite the large dimensions of the bedroom, with a good quarter of the fifteen square foot room being the focal Crime Scene, eight people plus the corpse by the uncurtained window now taxes the room's limits.
"Hi, everyone!" Sammy exclaims while she gives Jimmy a 'that-joke-was-worse-than-mine' look. She doubts anyone else in the room gets the Blake's Seven reference. Both she and Isles, pulled out of Autopsy, still wear their short sleeved blue scrubs, not fashion statements by any means but more comfortable in the 90 plus degree room than their blue jump suits could be.
Sammy had told them before they'd left that she was designing midriff Field Coveralls for each of them but that Maura had nixed the idea on Ducky's behalf.
"Doc," Gibbs says succinctly to the honey-blonde woman who, though she's spent a month with them, is still too chillingly similar to their late partner Kate Todd for him to feel comfortable around her. He points to the body laid out along the wall.
"Sammy," 'Kate' says to her assistant who she sees is about to gravitate to the returned couple, but since she steps into the space beside the bed there's little Sky can to do to help short of squeezing through or crawling upon the blood spattered mattress.
"I took most of the measurements already, Doctor," Jimmy announces. "Judging by decay, maggot infestation and so forth–"
Michelle whispers something in Chinese that no one asks for a translation of.
Gibbs looks to her but doesn't call her on the interruption. Considering the pooled and spattered blood and assorted detritus, much of this room is a loss. Fine 'welcome home' surprise, though why are they home today?
"I'd say about five to six days," Jimmy finishes.
x
"Well, the wound," Isles says for the record into a mini tape recorder retrieved from her scrubs pocket and set on a clean spot on the carpet and a measuring tape from the other, knowing her main assistant here has already recorded everything, "is a circular one 10 inches in diameter with 8.6 at its least wide by 9.2 inches deep above the pelvic bone which is visible and might be fractured. I'll be able to determine more when I get him on the table. I concur with Dr. Palmer's estimated TOD, Cause... well, the cause is a hole in the right hip, level with the belt-"
"His cell phone blew up?" DiNozzo asks.
Maura looks back over her shoulder. "I'm not ready to determine that. All I will say is the location of the wound. If I find anything in the wound I will be better able to establish additional facts, but I definitely do not attribute a cell phone as the Cause of Death."
"Well, what can you tell me?"
"The Manner of Death is more forthright at this point but before I sign off on it there will be a full post-mortem. That a cell phone was a contributing factor I shall leave to Abby Sciuto to prove or disprove if I find cell phone residue in the wound." She sounds dubious that she will accomplish that.
"You sound like you don't think it's a cell phone," Gibbs presses.
"I don't have any conclusions."
Gibbs, well used to the woman's determination never to commit herself to anything that hasn't been probed, examined, analyzed, x-rayed and so forth, is still willing to trust his own eyes. Whatever excavated that wound also split a leather belt, and if some of that leather is a cell phone holder he won't be very surprised.
He's heard it's possible for a cell phone to explode, though he's never seen the result before. He has a hard time, however, in believing that one can explode with this much force.
He expects that an inspection of the bed and opposite side of the room will reveal more than a meat puzzle.
x
"Boss," McGee ventures, "I don't think his cell phone blew up either."
"What do you think, McGee, that he lit an M-80 in his pocket?" He'd be happier with that explanation.
"No, but-"
"Agent McGee is correct," Maura declares as she looks back over her shoulder up to Gibbs. "In 97% of cases of so-called explosions of cell phones, it's the battery that ignites, accompanied by burning, melting of the casing and so forth."
"That's right, boss. The phones don't explode with the power of a bomb, the batteries ignite and they mostly melt. Burns are the most common injuries, though the explosions do cause wounds like this but not so severe."
"Exploding is a misnomer–"
"DiNozzo." He's heard enough. These two eggheads will scramble his.
x
"Fingerprints from the window. On it, boss." He sees he'll have to climb past Sky and over Isles to reach the open portal. "Will be on it, boss."
Gibbs isn't satisfied with that, though for the moment he grants he must be. "McGee, when you get in there-"
"They can have the space now," Isles says as she rises. "I've seen what I need to." She repockets the recorder and tape measure into her scrubs top.
He steps in the block her exit. "Well?"
"He's dead."
"Thank you." He turns to McGee to complete his thought. "Use your finger thingy. Find out who he is."
Though they usually use the Portable IAFIS Scanner to identify Servicemen, their most frequent subjects, the device accesses the wide range of prospects through wireless links. Still, the thought that this man could be / had been in the Armed Forces leads DiNozzo to ask "You don't think another Serviceman targeting an NCIS Agent, do you? That'd be too much of a coinkydink to happen twice in the same month."
"This point," Michelle says, "I'd believe anything."
x
Gibbs turns to the woman who stands beyond the foot of the bed beside her tall husband, not quite believing she'd said that. "He look like a Marine to you, Palmer?"
The man, such as is left of him, is in his apparent late teens, has not had a haircut in at least 7 months though his hairline has receded a good third of the way up his skull, nor has he shaved in most of the past month. His arms are scrawny and though one arm is under the body and the outer side of the other arm reveals nothing, no one plans to be surprised if they find track marks up and down each set of near surface veins. The clothing looks like something the Salvation Army would throw away rather than try to resell.
x
"From the looks of him," Jimmy says, probably trying to divert the attention of his wife's boss from her, "he's pretty pathetic. I feel sorry for hi–"
No one's prepared when Michelle whirls on Jimmy, shoves him before her in a six foot drive across the room. He crashes into the wall beside the television so hard the painting beside his head is dislodged and she leans her hands into his chest, pins him in place. Though seven inches shorter than he, she makes that up with towering fury.
"Will you STOP being so damned NICE? That bastard broke in, tried to rob us. He destroyed our bedroom! I can never use this room again! Damn it, he's ruined everything! When will you ever get MAD?"
"'Chelle," he's probably stunned in several senses from the assault and impact, but he rallies and gently takes her shoulders in his hands, "be re–"
She breaks from him, whirls away to the crowded room, fists and eyes clenched, body tight, her shrill scream lasts until she expends every atom of air. Even when drained she holds the silent shriek. The only sound is the whirring air conditioner which labors to cool the room against the competition of the open window beside it.
x
It's five more seconds before she gulps in air, opens her eyes and prepares for another scream, but it's cut off by Ziva David standing inches before her.
"Let us go into the living room." The words are phrased as a suggestion but there's nothing of option in her manner.
Michelle looks back at her still shaken husband, then up to Ziva.
"Fine."
