Godfrey took in his surroundings. He'd been expecting many things – but a goth sporting a plaid skirt, chunky jewellery, and a web tattoed on the back of her neck hadn't been among them. He lingered in the doorway, unable to pull his eyes from her.
"Did your mother never teach you that it's not polite to stare?" Abby asked without looking round.
When he didn't answer she turned, walked up to him, and took the package from him.
"I'm Abby" she said. "And I assume you must be Godfrey. Of course I only assume that because you look like a suit and you are carrying a box with red writing on it. And you're here at the designated time. And because Ducky said you were good looking.. Because otherwise I wouldn't assume. It's against the rules."
"Rules?"
"Gibbs' rules" she said, as though that explained everything. "And you should close you mouth. You look like a goldfish. Now .. what have you brought me? Ducky didn't tell me last night."
Godfrey shifted uncomfortably next to her as she cut the box open. Watching her cover her mouth with her hands as she took in the contents. She turned to him with tears in her eyes.
"Who would do such a thing?"
"I don't know" he admitted.
"Did they find the rest of the body?" she asked as she pulled the head out of its confines.
Godfrey shook his head again.
"How's Jenny?"
"Shaken up" he replied.
"I would be too. No wonder Ducky didn't tell me what it was last night" Abby said. "I wouldn't have slept."
"We didn't sleep either" Godfrey said, recalling how upset Jenny had been when she'd realised what was in the box. How she'd locked herself in the bathroom. How he and Gibbs had taken turns sitting outside the door waiting for her to either come out or to let them in. She hadn't, and she'd still been in there when he'd left for NCIS.
He was in the middle of recounting it to her when her phone rang.
"Okay. Give me two minutes. He wants you" she said, passing the phone to godfrey after listening to what Gibbs had to say.
"How'd he know I was here already?"
"Because he's Gibbs" Abby said with a smile as she moved to set up a commlink.
"Parker" Godfrey said into the phone. "Gotcha. I'll bring it back with me. We're ready here" he added when Abby gave him the thumbs up sign.
"Whatcha got Abs?" Gibbs said as he appeared on the screen.
"Okay, so I ran the plates on the motorbike" she began, grateful to be distracted from the contents of the box for a moment. "Guy's name is James Kandon. He works for UPS. No priors. Not even a parking ticket to his name. According to his supervisor everyone likes him, he's never missed a day's work, and he's reliable. "
"So why'd he run?"
"If I saw Ziva coming at me with a gun, I'd probably run too" Abby said. "I checked his schedule. His last pick up yesterday was from a drop off box in Crawford Street. Six-fifteen pm. He then took the truck and the mail to the sorting facility and clocked out of there just after seven o'clock. Ducky said that you guys brought him down a little after that. So he must have come straight from work."
"Yeah" Gibbs said.
"Has he said anything?"
"Tony just called to say he's ready to talk" Gibbs said. "I'm going over there as soon as we're done here. What've you got on the other matter?"
Abby took a deep breath.
"Not much" she said slowly.
"Did she suffer?"
Abby looked up to see Jen push her way to the front, and surmised that Ducky either hadn't told her much or that they hadn't even allowed her to see the head.
"I can't tell" she said.
"Because last time ..." Jen said haltingly, gripping the edge of the desk tightly.
"What happened last time, Jenny?" Godfrey wanted to know.
Jen shook her head and turned away.
"Jenny please. There are way too many blanks in the backstory, and I can't help if you don't tell me everything. "
Whether it was his tone of voice or whether she acknowledged the truth inherent in his words, she wasn't sure – but Jen turned back to the webcam. She exhanged an intense look with Gibbs before taking a deep breath and starting to talk.
"When Mitchell went to trial in ninety-nine there wasn't enough evidence to tie him to the murders. Eight murders and all the evidence was pretty much circumstantial. We had nothing on him. And needless to say, Jethro breaking his hand didn't help either. He sued NCIS, Jethro was put on probation, the OCME was put under investigation. We were accused of fabricating evidence to implicate him. It was a mess. Then about two weeks after the trial the phone calls started. Mostly hang ups. At all hours of the night. From phone boxes. Never the same box twice, never a print found on any one. A short time after that the mail started pouring in. First to the OCME and then to my home. Hate mail, threats, very graphic descriptions of what was coming to me. And then .." She faltered for a moment, her eyes filling with tears. "And then there was a delivery like this one. Same type of box, same red writing."
"What was inside it?" Abby asked, not sure she wanted to know the answer.
"My dog" Jen said. "He'd been tortured. In the same way as the victims, and just as the letters said I would be."
Abby squeezed her eyes shut against the visual.
"And that's when you went into witness protection" Godfrey clarified, his voice low.
"Yes" Jen said, her eyes cutting to Gibbs when she felt his hand on the small of her back, in a gesture she recognised as silent support.
"If there's anything to find here I will find it. I promise" Abby said. She paused for a moment, and then asked her last question.
"What's the cat's name?"
Jenny opened her mouth to speak and faltered.
"Her name's Zully" Godfrey supplied.
"As in Zuleika?" Ducky asked with interest.
Jen smiled sadly.
"I take it you mean Dobson, and not Potiphar's wife .."
"Duck, we don't have time for stories on this one" Gibbs said.
But Ducky ignored him.
"Death cancels all engagements" the medical examiner quoted as he took Jen's hand in his. "I'm sorry my dear."
Jen's eyes brimmed over with tears for a moment, but she held them back and gave him a watery smile.
"What I do not understand" Ziva said suddenly, "is why when it was all over you did not come back to your old life. Did you not have a house there? Did you not have friends?"
Jen looked at her for a moment, almost as though debating whether or not to answer the question. But she spoke again after the silence had stretched for a while.
"There was nothing left of my old life. No place for me." She turned away to the newest occupant on her steel table. "And now if you all wouldn't mind, I have work to do."
"I'll assist" Ducky said.
"I'd appreciate that" she said as she moved to get into her scrubs.
"I'll let you know if I find anything" Abby said to Gibbs, drawing his eyes away from Jen. "In the meantime, McGee and I are going to continue sifting through Mitchell's coreespondence. At last count there were still thirty-seven boxes to go through. The man got a lot of fan mail. Women wanting to marry him, women wanting to have his baby, people starting a sect who wanted his thoughts, people anxious to let him know that they knew he was innocent, people sending in medical records and wanting an opinion ..."
"I can hang around here and help" Godfrey offered.
Gibbs nodded as he headed for the door.
"Ziva ... " he said as he nodded in Jen's direction.
The Israeli aknowledged the order and settled herself at the other end of the room – keeping both medical examiners in her line of sight as they prepped for autopsy.
Jen could feel Ducky's eyes on her as she made the Y incision.
"Spit it out, Ducky. Before it gags you" she said, susprised at the vehemence in her tone.
"You weren't surprised yesterday when I said that Jethro had three divorces under his belt" he said carefully. "When you went away he'd only been married twice."
Jen didn't look up as she answered.
"Was that a test?"
"Why didn't you call?" he asked gently. "Me, if not him."
"I wanted to, Ducky. But it was too hard. I wanted him to be happy. I wanted him to move on. And he did. There's nothing to talk about."
"How did you know he'd moved on" Ducky pushed, wanting an answer to his suspicions.
"I saw him. With her" she qualified, a heartbeat later.
Ducky closed his eyes.
"When?" he asked.
Jen looked across the room to where Ziva was sitting, pretending not to be interested in the hushed tones.
"A month after I left the program" she said quietly.
She thought her heart would beat its way out of her ribcage as the taxi rounded the corner.
"Can you stop?" she asked the driver when they were a few doors from the house. "I'll walk from here."
She wasn't sure he'd be home, but she knew she needed to control her nerves before seeing him - or she'd embarrass herself the moment she saw him. But as she stepped out into the bright sunlight and paid the fare she became aware of the unmistakable sounds of an argument.
"Can you wait for a moment?" she said to the driver.
She walked towards the raised voices slowly, stopping short after a few steps. Jethro had stopped arguing, but the redheaded woman with him hadn't let up. Jen backed away slowly, grateful that he'd been facing the other way.
"I've changed my mind" she said to the driver as slipped back into the cab.
The last thing she saw as they drove away was Jethro enveloping the redhead in an embrace, and his wedding band glinting firecely in the sun.
Ducky did the maths and sighed.
"When you came into Jethro's life you brought .. hope" he began slowly. "You were different to his ex-wives. Different to Shannon. He allowed himself to care for you. He blamed himself for you going into the program. When you left he was deskbound, haunted by the idea of Mitchell still out there. I .. I introduced him to Stephanie. She was a nice girl. I hoped she'd be a positive influence on him. He married her two days before he left for Moscow."
Jen reached out and laid a hand on his.
"You don't need to justify him or yourself, Ducky. I was happy for him. I was only sad for myself."
But Ducky shook his head as he continued.
"When Jethro returned from his assignment the killings started again. And they were both marines. It was almost as though Mitchell was playing with Jethro's head. Daring him to catch him. And Jethro pursued him. To hell and back. But there was something different about the killings. Mitchell was slipshod, not as methodical as he had been. I think Stephanie thought that once Mitchell was behind bars that Jethro would finally settle down and put it behind him."
Jen's eyes cut to his for a moment, and he tried to understand what lay behind them.
"But he didn't" he continued when she didn't speak. "There was always another case. Always someone else that needed to be vindicated. Always someone that needed the kind of justice that only Jethro could get for them. Things came to a head one day, she hit him on the head with baseball bat, and a few days later they went their own separate ways. They were only married fourteen months. The day you speak of may well have been the day Jethro left. His relationship with Stephanie was different than his ones with the others. She was, in many ways, gentler. In fact she was a lot like -"
"It was a long time ago, Ducky" she said as she focused on the body again. "It doesn't matter now."
____________________________________________________________________________
"How many times are we going to through this? I was just doing a guy a favour" James Kandon insisted from his hospital bed. "He stopped me as I was leaving work and offered me money to deliver a package for his kid."
"You make it a habit of making off-work deliveries?" Gibbs asked.
"He told me that it was his kid's birthday the next day and that he'd missed the overnight option. He said his ex-wife would have his balls if the gift didn't get there on time. Said she was a heartless bitch."
"And you didn't think three hundred dollars was a bit – Boss?" Tony asked.
But Gibbs had left the room and was already on his cell phone.
"Abs" he said as soon as she picked up. "I want you to call the UPS sorting facility. See if there's any footage of Kandon and our mystery guy. And then I want you to see what you can find on Mitchell's trials. Both of 'em. Court photos, newpaper cuttings. Anything."
"On it" she said before she hung up.
"What can you tell us about this guy?" he asked, as he stalked back into the room. "He right handed or left?"
"Left, I think" Kandon replied. "Hey ..." he called as Gibbs turned on his heel and walked out again. "Who's going to pay for all this?"
"Your insurance" Tony said with a wink.
"One of your people blew out my tyre" Kandon shouted. "You did this to me."
"Next time don't take jobs from people you don't know" Tony said with a fake smile, before closing the door firmly behind him and hurrying after Gibbs.
________________________________________________
Gibbs felt the charged atmosphere the moment he stepped into the morgue. Ducky and Jen had just finished sewing up the body, and Ziva was standing by looking distinctly uncomfortable.
"Hey .." he said, holding a coffee out to Jen.
"I'm not thirsty" she said quietly as she bypassed him.
"Did you learn anything Jethro?" Ducky asked as Gibbs followed her with his eyes - watching her deposit her scrubs into a basket and leave the room.
"Not sure yet. But Kandon's definitely not our guy" he said as he made eye contact with Ziva that had her leaving the room after Jen.
"It would have been too easy if he was, wouldn't it?" Ducky said as he too made to bypass him.
Gibbs stepped in his path.
"What's going on?" he asked.
Ducky looked at him, lips slightly compressed.
"Why makes you think there's anything going on?"
"Duck ..."
"You're putting me in a very awkward position Jethro" the medical examiner said at length.
"You gonna make me ask again?"
Ducky sighed.
"She came back, Jethro."