Mrs. King clamped off the tubing. The second collection bag was full, gleaming bright red with McGee's blood. "Looking a little pale, there?" she taunted. The words were said to McGee but aimed at Abby.

"Doing just fine, Mrs. King." McGee refused to let himself react. "Abby, you keep doing what you're doing."

He might be okay, but his teammate was not doing well; that, McGee could easily see. Her hands shook every time that she lifted them from her paper and pencil.

This wasn't the usual sort of forensics testing that she was currently engaged in. Abby liked to play with machines, with spectroscopy and chemical analyses. If it was something that went boom, so much the better. DNA was likewise the stuff that her dreams were made of, but that didn't mean that Abigail Sciutto couldn't go back to the basics. Right now she was working at determining the size of the shoe print that they were presuming belonged to Mariah Lovage's murderer using mathematical techniques that had begun as scratching in the dirt by a few ancient Greeks. Certainly she was working the print at the scene of the crime so many years ago; whether it actually belonged to the murderer was something that a jury would decide.

No, the jury had decided it. They had decided it several years past when they convicted Mrs. King's son Jason of the murder of Mariah Lovage. Now Abby was trying to find a way to prove them wrong.

The pencil in her hand was already chewed and bitten. Worn down to a nubbin would be next, the way she was making marks on her paper and then dancing over to the ancient computer to put in the data she was determining. The calculations were fairly straightforward; compare the size of the shoe print in the photo to other things in the photo where the size was a known quantity. That would give them a shoe size to work with. Jason King wore a size nine and a half. If the print belonged to a shoe either larger or smaller, it would exonerate him. The problem lay, McGee knew, in finding something else for a comparison. Everything else in the photo was of equally questionable size. Solve that, and McGee would be a free man.

Maybe. There was still this situation to defuse. There were three people in this room looking at charges of kidnapping two Federal agents, and two Federal agents hoping to be alive at the end of the day.

Abby was up to something. McGee could tell by the furtive glances she kept passing his way. McGee himself couldn't do much, not with his wrists cuffed behind him and his neck in a noose waiting to choke him with one unfortunate move. But Abby kept going back and forth to the computer, ostensibly entering data, flipping back and forth from screen to screen and then back to the table with the photos to take more measurements.

Of course! McGee could have kicked himself, it was so obvious. The computer, ancient though it was, was connected to the Internet. That meant that Abby could communicate with the outside world. She was probably sending email messages to everyone on the NCIS team as fast as she could type without Judy King looking over her shoulder. The first message would go to Gibbs, but Abby wouldn't stop there. Gibbs hated computers, hated anything close to technology, and barely put up with his cell phone. Expecting Gibbs to respond to an email would be a shot in the dark, and Abby was always one to believe in luck but play the odds. She would be sending emails to Tony, to Ziva, to Ducky and quite likely even to Director Vance. He wondered how far she'd gotten down the list; not only Mrs. King, but Will King, one of the rogue cops, was also keeping a close eye on her work.

In the meantime, she needed to keep pumping out the evidence. Abby was using the tools of the trade: a protractor, and a compass. Geometry, definitely. Calculus, perhaps, depending on the items in the photos.

She was testing the blood on the knife handle, as well. She had taken a couple of scrapings from the smears, so as not to interfere with the fingerprints found there, and had dropped the results into a test tube. The liquid solutions that she'd added were now bubbling away, heat applied to the bottom to encourage the reaction. McGee willed himself not to frown; what experiment was she running now? Blood wasn't usually put into a heat-mediated reaction. Heat would cause the blood cells to lyse, to break up into little pieces and prevent any useful data from being extracted. Testing involving blood usually was done with reagents dropped onto a microscope slide or squirted into a machine; that he knew from his undergraduate work so long ago. What was Abby up to?

Whatever it was, McGee wasn't in any position to help. All he could do at the moment was not fall down, a task that had grown more difficult as Mrs. King had siphoned off pint number two. How many pints did the average adult male possess? It wasn't one of the facts that he knew, although he was certain that Abby would be able to spout it off of the top of her head.

Mrs. King handed the second pint of blood to the other cop, Zach King. "Here," she instructed, "give this to Penny. Have her slip it into the blood drive, where it'll be of some use."

Zach flicked a glance toward Will. "You two will be able to handle them?" he asked.

"Not a problem," Will told him.

"Not a problem," Judy King echoed, picking up another empty collection bag. "Our friend here is going to have enough trouble standing up, let alone causing us grief." She slipped behind McGee and began to work on the needle still stuck in the vein in his leg. Zach, with a backwards glance, peered out through the door to the hallway beyond and exited, carrying McGee's blood donation with him hidden under his shirt.

McGee chose not to try to turn to see what she was doing. He knew what she was doing, and knew that if he tried to crane around, he'd likely get dizzy and fall over. That would be bad, he told himself. Very bad. He already was feeling tired and drained—hah. A pun. A pun worthy of DiNozzo, whose place McGee had taken. You going to appreciate what I did for you, Tony, taking your spot escorting Abby? Nah. You'll crack some stupid joke and pretend as though this was all my fault. You'll make smart remarks at my funeral. It was harder than McGee chose to let on to merely stand here, unmoving, perched on top of this stool.

He could feel what Mrs. King was doing: she was setting up Special Agent Timothy McGee to do a third blood donation in as many hours. It was easy to sense her hands tugging on the tape that secured the harpoon in his leg, the tubing wiggling as she hooked up the third empty bag that was waiting to receive some high end red stuff. He even knew when she opened the clamp to allow his blood to flow down the tubing, felt the thrumming of the needle as it pressed along the wall of the vein.

He had options. He could step off of this stool and end this farce right now. They'd have no way to threaten Abby, no way to make her perform like a circus seal. Their quest to free Jason King would be over, along with Special Agent Tim McGee's life.

At which point, they'd probably kill Abby, too.

Couldn't have that. McGee realized dully that the words had been whispered, that he was no longer controlling his every action. He took a deep breath, willing the extra oxygen to compensate for his rapidly dwindling supply of blood.

There had to be a way to narrow down the suspects. They had to assume that it wasn't Jason King who was the murderer despite his conviction, and it had to be a way that he and Abby could implement from inside this dusty and unused forensics lab. They not only had to prove Jason's innocence but come up with a reasonable alternative for the courts to act. What did they have? A partial print that might or might not belong to Jason. A couple of blood smears on a knife handle which also might or might not belong to the man convicted of the crime. A bunch of crime scene photos, and a case file written by cops who saw exactly one murder in twenty years. It was no wonder the locals overlooked the obvious; they were experts at writing traffic tickets and breaking up teen age tussles behind the school, but the murder of Mariah Lovage fell into neither of those categories.

Will King started up in alarm. "What's on the computer—"

Blam!

The test tube—more of a large flash—exploded into shards of glass. Will was thrown back, crashing into the lab table and toppling over three shelves of glassware. He yelled out something incomprehensible, staggering back to his feet.

Abby wasn't done. She seized something long and cylindrical—McGee couldn't identify what it was, not from his perch—and went for him.

Will was ready. He batted aside the lab rat's attack, slamming her back and shoving her against the wall. Abby struggled, jabbing at his face. "Bitch! I should kill you—"

"Hold it!" Mrs. King snarled. "One more move, and I'll yank this stool out from under him!"

Abby froze. The woman meant every word. Even McGee could see that, and he wasn't even able to see Mrs. King from where she stood behind him. He could feel her, though; felt the heat of her body, could sense her bending over to take hold of the leg of the stool. He tensed his neck muscles, wondering if it would do any good.

"Stupid move," Mrs. King said finally, acknowledging that she and her nephew had won. "Get back to work."

"Not yet," Will said, equally as angry and breathing hard. "Look at the computer, Aunt Judy."

Judy King moved from behind McGee to the computer, confident that her nephew had the recalcitrant forensics scientist under control. "Trying to send emails, missy? We'll put an end to that right now." She yanked, and the ancient modem fell to the floor. The computer gave a plaintive beep.

"Hey!" Abby protested. "How can I work—"

The look of fury that Mrs. King turned on her caused Abby to quail. "You are working for the cause of righteousness! You will get my son off, or both you and your friend will die! You hear me? Both of you, dead!"


"What was that?" Gibbs turned his head.

Ethan King, Chief of Police, shrugged. "Car backfired."

"Didn't sound like it."

Ethan shrugged again. "Plenty of old cars around here. They usually sound a bit funny."

Gibbs was not happy. He still had two people missing, and his leads were drying up. DiNozzo from long years of experience could tell just by the way his boss was standing that Gibbs was not only unhappy but downright angry. That was good. Anger was good, because it meant that Gibbs thought that the case was still active, that Abby and McGee were still alive. Dead would have meant a miserable Gibbs, and a miserable Gibbs was an intolerable Gibbs, and DiNozzo still needed to finish this case and travel back to D.C. in the company of Gibbs and Ziva and Abby and McGee. DiNozzo did not want to travel in the company of a miserable Gibbs. Traveling in the company of a satisfied Gibbs was tough enough.

Therefore, Abby and McGee had to be alive.

That was a good thing. DiNozzo couldn't stomach the thought that the little lab rat might be dead. She was the safe one, the one that worked in the lab pulling off forensics miracles. McGee was a field agent, and every agent knew that every time he grabbed the tools of the trade and left Headquarters might be the last time that he sat at his desk. DiNozzo would mourn, but death was a part of every field agent's outlook on life.

Not Abby. Not the little Goth-child, that unique combination of brilliance and quirk. There was no way that DiNozzo wanted her to rest in her coffin for that last time, and he was pretty sure that if it should happen, it would take Gibbs down, too. Gibbs had weathered some bad storms in his time and barely kept his head above the emotion-tossed waters, and there was a good chance that he wouldn't weather this one.

No Abby, no team.

Like hell that was going to happen.

They needed a lead. McGee's laptop case was going nowhere. Mayor Bart Sr. tossing it onto his own lawn? Puh-leeze. That was a really poor attempt at distraction.

Maybe not. It had worked. Gibbs and company had spent over an hour tracking the footprints through the brush, only to be thwarted by a car picking up the footprint maker on the other side of the forest. Total waste of time for Team NCIS. Perps: one. NCIS: zilch.

It was time to get to pull it together. It was time to act, and not react. As DiNozzo watched, Gibbs moved into high gear. "There are exactly two connections that either Abby or McGee have with this town: this trial, and the one that Abby testified on a few years ago. Ziva—"

"Case file on the Bart King, Jr. assault. On it." She nodded her head.

"DiNozzo—"

"Old case, Jason King. I'll head into the Stacks for it." DiNozzo turned to Chief Ethan. "Which floor?"

"Don't need it, son." Now that the NCIS agents had been truly classified as 'missing', the police chief was more cooperative. "We've moved into the New Millenium. We're computerizing everything." He tapped in a few commands into the nearest computer and brought up the file. "There. That has everything, including your friend's testimony. Have at it." He turned to Gibbs. "What're you looking for?"

Gibbs shook his head. "Anything. Everything." He looked around, not really seeing the scene around him.

"Boss?"

Gibbs moved to the window, looking over the parking lot from his second floor advantage. "That didn't sound like a backfire. I don't see any cars moving." He turned away, thinking. "Chief, the man convicted of murder was Jason King. I want to talk to him. Where is he jailed?"

Chief Ethan's face hardened. "Right now, he's at the County Hospital. Got himself stabbed in a prison brawl, not looking too good." He jerked his chin toward another part of the building. "We're holding a blood drive for the kid; Penny Eaton's running it. Some of us thought he got a bad deal, that maybe the case wasn't so cut and dried as Gerald made it seem."

"Gerald?"

"Gerald King. He was the prosecutor at the time. Retired to go into the private sector. Now we got Ms. Connors. She's pretty good, even though she's likely to tread on a few toes every now and again."

"Gerald King? Same lawyer that's defending Bart, Jr.?"

"That's the one. Why?" Ethan asked. "You thinking something?"

"Chief, I'm always thinking something," Gibbs assured him. He came to a decision. "Chief, I want to talk to Gerald King."


McGee looked bad. His face was white, and there were beads of sweat standing out on his face. Abby couldn't stand to look at him, for fear that she'd see him topple over and hang himself.

It was going to happen soon; of that, Abby was certain. The third pint of blood was being walked upstairs to the blood drive by Will King, and McGee was pumping out his fourth. How much more could they take from him before he couldn't stand up any more? It couldn't be much. There was only just so much blood that a human body could lose at one time before shock and collapse set in.

There were only two options left: one, McGee died and then Abby would die because she would have no reason to continue to play their game or two, Abby would come up with the evidence, real or faked, that would get them out of this mess. Of course, that was assuming that Mrs. King would let them go. Abby really shouldn't assume that, because she knew that kidnappers tended to kill their victims once the kidnapees had seen the faces of the kidnappers.

This, however, was different. Mrs. King wasn't just a kidnapper. She was a mother, and she was defending her child the best way she could. It happened to be illegal and it happened to be threatening a couple of Federal agents' lives, but to Mrs. King that was an acceptable trade-off. She intended to free her son no matter what the cost to herself—or a couple of bystanding agents. Even the careers of the two cop nephews were expendable.

Okay, it didn't look like Abby was going to be able to rework the evidence that she'd been presented with. Sure, the guy that had done the work had been sloppy beyond belief, but that didn't mean that Abby could completely rework it all. She didn't have the tools, and some of the evidence had degraded over the years. She was good, but nobody was that good.

That left fakery. Abby had solved plenty of false leads in her time, and she was sure that she could come up with something that would fool Mrs. King and both of the rogue cops. It didn't have to fool a jury, just provide enough doubt to get McGee and herself out of here. She began to catalog all the supplies she had in the lab; whatever she did, it was going to have to look impressive to get Mrs. King to believe.

It also had to be fast. One look at McGee assured her of that.

He was mumbling.

"What?"

"Abby." It was an effort for him to speak above a whisper.

"What?" She moved toward him, stopping only when Zach placed himself in her path, not willing to allow Abby to get too close to McGee. With the other cop upstairs delivering a pint of McGee's finest, it was two to two, never mind that one of the two NCIS people was strung up by his neck making a corpse look lively. Zach King wasn't taking any chances.

McGee licked his lips to moisten them. "The fingerprint."

"Right. It's a partial. I got like a thousand hits off of it before Jumbo here crunched the modem." It had been Will who had yanked out the computer modem, not Zach, but that wasn't important.

"Cross-match them…" McGee swayed. With an effort, he straightened himself. "Zip codes."

"Zip codes…?" Was he crazy? Had the lack of blood addled his wits?

McGee tried again. "Eliminate everyone not in this area…"

"But that's…" Abby trailed off.

McGee was right. It was normally something that she would ask the computer to do, to cross-reference the partial prints against the people likely to be in the area. It was grunt work. It was tedious. It was a task that a human would spend an eight hour day grumbling over and a computer could compress it into three minutes. It was perfect for a computer.

This computer, however, had just had its communication line yanked. It could no longer access the list of partials and the zip codes in the surrounding area of Kings Point. It could cross-reference the two lists but only if someone laboriously entered each data point by hand which made the whole data entry thing sort of useless, Abby realized. It would be just as easy—and just as time consuming—to do by hand.

McGee didn't have that kind of time. There was a good chance that it would take a couple of hours to go through all the data points of information, and by then there was an equally good chance that by the time she was finished her fellow agent would be hanging by the noose around his neck. If Mama Bitch kept forcing him to donate blood to her son, McGee was going to pass out and fall off the stool and hang.

On the other hand, was there a better option? Abby didn't think so.

Gibbs, where are you?