Chapter Six
Formulas
"What've you got, Abs?" Gibbs asks the woman when his tardy team members finally deign to show up over two minutes late. They could've brought a 'Caf-Pow!' for the time of their detour. Mind on the case, he'd forgotten and Abby had been put out until Michelle had volunteered to get a cup - and she'd beaten the men back to the lab.
Abby's a skeleton. Her too tight, long-sleeve black pullover and tighter black pants have anatomically correct bones in front and back. The only things missing are skull, hand bones and foot bones, and this makes the image even more unsettling, so much so that the agents do their best to ignore her attire.
'If DiNozzo says one word about her going on a diet,' Gibbs thinks, ready to give the latecomer a reason to be on time in the future.
The six surround the large white table, upon which are two Evidence bags, one contains what's left of a broken pink bra, nipple-less with heart-shaped holes and seemingly barely enough material for the 36D's it's labeled for. Gibbs admits the garment probably isn't much tested, as it needn't perform its function for very long. Now its burst in two places from the force of Eastergaard's body-rupturing impact.
The color and style-matched panties contain even less material because they're designed with no material at the crotch. Both garments had torn asunder upon impact and, with little exception to show their natural color, they're caked in dried blood.
"How hard did she hit?" DiNozzo muses, looking at the burst clothes and recalling the body's devastation. The woman had hit full frontal to the cement, her every bone had shattered, every organ ruptured, her sides literally blown out.
"That's easy," Abby the skeleton declares, mind not quite on the question, leaving her brain to calculate freely. "Jubilee Eastergaard was 5 foot 10, 153 pounds and fell 558 feet for 5.889 seconds with an acceleration of 32.174 feet per second squared. The formula's simple, S equals 1/2 a t^2. She fell 558 feet, we'll ignore air resistance because I didn't see her fall, if she turned or went the whole way front first - I hope not because that's a horrible sight, the cement jumping up at you like that. 1/2 (32.174) 5.889^2, her speed at impact was 189.472686 feet per second. She's 153 pounds, so she hit the cement face down full body - splat - with a force of 85,374 foot-pounds - roughly."
"Sorry I asked." She had that precision for a 'rough' estimate?
She turns to him. "Sorry, Tony, but I'm in full forensics mode, so don't ask a question that requires an automatic answer."
"That was automatic?" His vision jerks in time to a sharp pain in the back of his head. "Thank you, boss."
Gibbs had given him his own splat, this one to the back of the head. He'd been saving it for a smart-ass comment, knowing DiNozzo wouldn't keep him waiting long.
x
"Get on with it, Abs."
"Getting on with it, oh mount of merriment. As I'm sure you couldn't help noticing, these are the last clothes Jubilee Eastergaard wore this morning."
"I noticed," Gibbs assures her in characteristically bland tones. "Why was she wearing them? Is this what women wear for killing themselves these days?"
Abby almost falls for it until she sees the glint in Gibbs' eyes, that and the fact that, despite cryptic notes written on computer screens, NCIS never considers suicides as such, but investigates them as murders until proven otherwise.
"Believe me, Gibbs, a woman doesn't wear this to commit suicide. She may feel she's died and gone to heaven in them - no offense to the missus, McGee,"
"None taken."
"but she doesn't kill herself in them. And I also did a blood test; her blood alcohol level was nada point zilch."
"What scale was that on?"
"Don't worry, Tony, they'll never use it on you."
"Ouch, full body blow."
"You deserve it." McGee's wife may forgive DiNozzo some day, but it'll take a lot longer before she will. Tony had laid the rumor of the priest's pregnancy upon her shoulders, and because of it she'd slapped one of her best friends.
x
Gibbs is rapidly running short of patience. "Can you get back on track?"
"Getting back on track, oh silver Zorro. Like I said, her body was a drug and alcohol free zone, though I did swabs on her panties and the samples Jimmy brought me and conclude that A: she wasn't alone before she died and B: she wasn't bored."
"What, Palmer's delivering sperm to you?"
She'd answer Tony's sally but Michelle's reply, delivered in Chinese, is one she suspects would be more devastating if not hidden from Gibbs and from virgin ears. She can see that only Ziva interpreted the words and had schooled her face to immobility.
"Any hits on DNA or anything else?" Gibbs presses.
She gives the chief investigator a look as though to say 'we've had this conversation before' because they have. "Come back tomorrow afternoon. I can tell you that over 70 percent are still motile, meaning they were knocking on her door within an hour or two before she died."
"But can you tell if she was alone when she died?"
"Nope, not with what you brought me. Even the Duckman wasn't sure - her body was so shattered it virtually exploded. The only things of her that weren't ruptured, shattered or otherwise destroyed were what she left in the apartment."
DiNozzo had seen the body often enough to marvel that the MEs could get as much from it as they did. "So who has sex and then jumps off a balcony in her bra and panties?"
"I usually wear a red negligee," Michelle quips, confident the man won't pick up on this one, but she shrinks away from Gibbs glare.
"I thought you'd wear that Vampirella outfit and turn into a bat," DiNozzo prods, but his answer is again Gibbs' hand hard to the back of his head.
x
Particularly gory deaths seem to need the crutch of bad humor and this one is in a rare class. They've only had three other long fall deaths from buildings, but 43 floors is definitely the longest and there's not much intact for Ducky and Palmer to sort through.
But for Gibbs this is too much. Their victim is MAGTF-CE's XO and if her death is related to her job, the consequences for the Marine Corps, and possibly America's entire defense strategy, can be catastrophic. "Focus, people. Ziva."
David knows he still holds the question open and she doesn't want it. "Well, choice of clothing to a suicide is sometimes significant... but I suspect Ducky would be the best selection for a psychological autopsy."
"Busy with the physical one."
"All right. If I were in only a pink nippleless sex bra and crotchless panties–"
"Special Agent DiNozzo would be picking the lock of your door," Michelle quips.
"HEY." When DiNozzo feels he has their chastised attention, he finishes with "I'd already be inside."
"Then you would be the one going out the window," Ziva assures him.
"In pink bra and panties?" McGee immediately regrets the shudderable image.
"You're all going out in a line if I don't hear some good theories soon." No one dares mention that the lab windows, aside from being overhead, are a tight squeeze to climb up to the back grounds or that the windows in Operations don't open. He hadn't implied he'd open them. "McGee."
"I'm, er, still going over the lobby security footage."
"What did you find?"
"Isolating those who went into the lobby and were stopped by the Concierge to be announced, five men arrived between midnight and prior to Major Eastergaard's fall and left the building after but before MPDC arrived."
"You eliminating the women, McGee?"
"There weren't any; not that were visitors from midnight on."
"Why only since midnight?" If the killer spent the evening, they won't know it.
"That's what we got." Gibbs doesn't hide how dissatisfied he is. "I have a call in to the Security company but I will call back."
"Yes you will."
"Either way, I can't run facial recognition on them, the film's grainy and the faces are too small. Camera's too far away for that class of equipment, it should have been installed right on the desk but someone probably thought he was getting his money's worth with a close up camera set to view the entire lobby." They probably only use it to track familiar people, not strangers.
"Then we'll go it the old-fashioned way. You and Palmer go back there and interview the staff."