The Price of Honesty: Chapter 10
A/N: Thanks, everyone, for reading and reviewing (and yes, I do know that you're reading... there's a really nice function on FFN that allows me to stalk the collective you). I'm glad that you're enjoying the story, and I hope you continue to do so.
For everyone who has submitted theories as to what's going on... If you want me to tell you if you're right or wrong, let me know. If you want to keep guessing, that's fine, too. My default is to say nothing in response to theories unless you specifically tell me you want to know.
Okay, enough for now. Back to solving crime.
DiNozzo felt like he was dropped in the middle of the ocean and told to swim home, and nobody bothered to tell him which direction 'home' was.
"I hate coming into a case after it started," he grumbled, trying to figure out where to begin. Usually, it was simple; it started with Gibbs getting a phone call, and then there would be some sort of argument in the vehicle which would stop as soon as they arrived at the crime scene. DiNozzo would take pictures and make jokes, McGee would measure things and awkwardly attempt to sketch as he rolled his eyes at Tony, Ziva would gather evidence and attempt to spare McGee from being mocked by Tony by teasingly asking for clarification on pop culture references that he knew that she already understood. Gibbs would take one look at the scene, talk to one person who stumbled across it, and somehow arrive at all the same conclusions as his team one step before they did.
Coming into a case where the scene had already been processed and cleared, the body had been shipped to Germany to be autopsied by someone other than Ducky, and the evidence had already been tested by someone other than Abby left DiNozzo feeling like an outsider on a case that supposedly belonged to the team he was on.
Dunham, Tomblin, and Freiler had done what they could, of course, but it seemed that without Burley there to provide direction, or just be the glue that held things together, everything they had done seemed hopelessly jumbled and disjointed and would have to be repeated anyway. Kim had done little more than flip through case files, not even leaving any notes as to why she excluded some cases and not others; he doubted Freiler had even gotten that far with any of their old cases. And Dunham's 'notes' were nothing more than an encrypted file on the shared drive, containing crime scene pictures and the results of the tests run by the forensics lab.
"That's it," DiNozzo exclaimed abruptly, stopping everyone, even Gibbs, in mid-sentence to turn to stare at him, wondering about his abrupt outburst. Gibbs' expression didn't change, McGee looked slightly resigned, Ziva exasperated, and Chad Dunham, from where he had planted himself at the corner of the conference room table an hour before, just looked confused. "Get Tomblin and Freiler. Campfire."
"It's not your case, Tony," McGee pointed out, his eyes again on the screen of the computer in front of him.
"You got a better idea, McGoo?" DiNozzo snapped. "Because I, for one, didn't get enough sleep last night to reinvent the wheel."
"Not everyone likes sitting around in a circle as much as you do," McGee said mildly. At some point during this exchange, Gibbs had quietly slipped out of the room without anyone noticing—until they heard what was definitely their boss' voice give a 'Hey' in the next room. A few seconds later, he reappeared in the doorway, with Kim Tomblin and Todd Freiler in tow.
"Sit," Gibbs ordered, gesturing vaguely to the empty chairs around the table. "Campfire."
"Sir?" Agent Freiler asked, genuinely confused about what was going on.
"DiNozzo's thing," was all Gibbs gave in reply as he returned to his seat, turning to his senior field agent with an expectant look on his face.
"Right," DiNozzo said after a minute's pause, clearing his throat. "So it's this thing I came up with when I was team leader—"
"We all sit around in a circle and say what we've been working on. It's not that difficult of a concept," McGee said dryly.
"You want to start us off, McGrumble?" Tony snapped, more harshly than he anticipated, but once the words were out of his mouth, he found he didn't care. He had a completely sleepless night after a sixteen-hour flight in the back of a C-130 to investigate the murder of a man he worked with and considered a friend; Bitter-And-Cynical Tony was going to be taking the place of Fun Tony for awhile.
"Tony," Ziva said softly, resting her hand on his thigh, and just like that, he felt his anger and frustration melt away.
He had once made a joke about Jedi mind tricks, and she had just laughed and quirked an eyebrow but didn't deny it. He knew that, for all of her Mossad training, it couldn't have included mind control, but sometimes he had to wonder.
That didn't mean he was going to apologize to the McGoo, though.
"Dunham," he barked, getting back to the campfire and away from any thoughts of putting ink in McGee's coffee or supergluing him to, well, anything. "Walk us through the scene and the evidence."
"Okay, but I'm going to put in the caveat that before Monday, the last scene I worked was when I was a probie," the ruggedly blond special agent warned. "Agent Tomblin was supervising the scene when I arrived—"
"We can cut to anything relevant," Gibbs said dryly. Dunham nodded.
"There was no sign of forced entry," he began. "Nothing on the door or the windows. There wasn't anything missing—at least, nothing obviously missing—from the apartment, and he was still wearing his watch and still had his wallet, so burglary was probably not the objective. The lab's still running some of the fingerprints, but last I heard, the only prints they've ID'd so far have been Burley's and Tomblin's. The MPs collected his knives for comparison, but none of them match his wound. As far as that wound, the medical examiner from Heidelberg confirmed that COD was a single stab to the heart. That's about all the forensic evidence we got."
At the mention of the medical examiner, the three junior members of the MCRT all turned and faced Gibbs, who couldn't help but notice. "Already asked Gracy to look through the report," he said when Dunham finished speaking. The other three around the table frowned.
"Gracy?" Tomblin finally asked.
"Boss is sleeping with the Army's expert in knife wounds," DiNozzo explained before Gibbs got the opportunity to say anything. "Not that that's anyone's business," he added quickly at the look on Gibbs' face. "So we got a guy who can use a knife without leaving fingerprints and Burley invited into his home. Any leads on who? Tomblin?"
"I've been going through our open cases," Tomblin said automatically, tucking imaginary strands of hair behind her ears. "As well as the ones at our subordinate offices that we were peripherally involved in." She smiled thinly in Dunham's direction. "We have the standard smattering of minors—well, standard for us; we don't exactly have the caseload to have separate teams for majors and minors—mostly stolen digital cameras from the NEX and petty officers beating on each other at the bars. Between us and the other offices, we have four open majors. McGee, do you mind?" she asked, gesturing at the laptop. He slid it over without comment, and she logged onto her account. "Okay, first case. For about six months, we've been working on a leak from the Naval Intelligence side of the house. Based on the contents that have been leaked, we had a few suspects, but couldn't get anything to stick on them. One has since been transferred to an aircraft carrier, but the leak has continued, so it probably wasn't him. As far as the others, nothing suspicious in any of their backgrounds, no unexplained deposits in their bank accounts… nothing."
"McGee," Gibbs said simply.
"I'll look into it, Boss," the junior field agent said with a nod.
Tomblin nodded slightly as well. "Number two. Three-year-old boy, father is a PO2 stationed in Cairo, mother is Egyptian. Never married."
"'Nuff said," DiNozzo muttered under his breath. He looked up to see several raised eyebrows around the table. "Arab country, kid born out of wedlock…" His voice trailed off at the blank expressions. "Shutting up. Sorry, Tomblin."
"Actually, DiNozzo's probably right. Parents had an unofficial visitation schedule. Dad went to pick up kid, no one was home, mom and her family refuse to say anything. The kid's registered as a dependent, but since the father doesn't officially have any sort of custody and the mother's not military or a dependent, we can't force her to cooperate."
"How did the petty officer feel about that?" Gibbs asked.
"Not happy," Tomblin replied. "To put it mildly. Special Agent Amin at the Cairo office is on the case; I don't think the father knows anything about how Burley would have been involved."
"DiNozzo'll look into it."
"On it, Boss," the senior field agent said promptly. "And behind door number three?"
"An exercise in frustration," Tomblin said with a sigh, again tucking an imaginary lock of hair behind her ear as she brought up another case file on the computer. "Commander Richard Templeton here at NSA Bahrain. He's rather slimy, and that refers to both his personality and the fact that we can't get anything to stick on him. Enlisted females are coming out of the woodwork with sexual harassment complaints, a few saying that he took it beyond crude jokes and blatant leers. When the complaints started piling up, the chain of command opened an official investigation and involved the MPs; it got bumped to us when one of the female petty officers in question stated that he was exchanging sexual favors for good evaluations." She gave another frustrated sigh and shrugged a shoulder. "Problem is, there's no physical evidence, so it's all he-said, she-said, and he's smart enough about it that there's no pattern as far as good FitReps he's given and the women making the complaints. It's too bad he's not a submariner—we'd recommend that the Navy transfer him underwater somewhere, where there aren't any women around for him to harass, and he's embarrassing enough for his chain of command that they'd probably do it. But he's surface warfare, and moving him from the NSA to an aircraft carrier would actually increase his number of potential targets." She pressed her lips together and shook her head slightly. "But for as much as we came back to trying to get him to confess to anything, he knows we don't have anything to actually charge him with. He was arrogant to us, not homicidal."
"I'll talk with him," Gibbs promised. Tomblin smiled slightly, remembering watching him in interrogation when she was on the team. If anyone could get him to confess to being sleazy, it would be him.
"And I'll let Dunham present the last one, because it's actually the reason why he's here," she said, gesturing over to the field agent.
"Well, Ziva knows this one, too. We've been working on it together for the last few months," he said, causing heads to turn toward the Mossad liaison.
"Really?" DiNozzo asked dryly. Ziva shot him an annoyed look before blatantly turning away from him to face Gibbs.
"About seven months ago, a Marine lieutenant went UA from his post as an MP at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait," Ziva began, "which was what originally got the attention of NCIS. Two months later, Mossad operatives came across a training facility in Yemen, where they believe one of the instructors is American, which was why the Mossad operatives involved read me into the case. It is believed that the UA Marine and the instructor are the same person, Second Lieutenant Jeremiah Hoskins."
"They're stepping up activity," Chad Dunham said, taking over, "which was why I came to brief Burley. I think they have something planned, but I have no idea what. We need authorization to move on this before we have another Christmas Bomber or something worse on our hands."
"But why would someone come after Burley for that?" McGee asked with a frown. "I mean, there are a lot more people more directly involved. Unless..." His voice trailed off, wondering if what he was thinking made any sense at all.
"Lieutenant Hoskins was an MP officer," Ziva answered before Dunham had the opportunity. "He had worked with NCIS in the past in that capacity and understands the organization."
"And he also knows that, with the United States occupied with Iraq and Afghanistan, that there isn't as much attention given to the Horn of Africa as there should be," Dunham jumped in.
"And distracting NCIS by investigating the death of a senior special agent would take away the little bit of attention we're giving it," DiNozzo theorized. McGee's eyes widened slightly; that was actually exactly what he was thinking, and to prove that he and DiNozzo weren't out there being completely wrong together, both Ziva and Dunham nodded. "But why would Burley open his door to a known mercenary or traitor or whatever Hoskins is?"
"If a Marine lieutenant in uniform knocked on your door, would you question it?" Ziva asked, knowing the answer. "Burley was only peripherally involved. He may not have seen many pictures of Lt. Hoskins and would not have recognized him out of context. But in his position, his death could be distracting enough to have dire consequences."
"Ziva, work with your Mossad colleagues on the Yemen angle," Gibbs ordered. "Figure out everywhere Hoskins has been since he went UA, and then get him. Or kill him. I don't care which."