Chapter Ten
Burnt Out
Ducky Mallard and Jimmy Palmer have the charred, blackened husk of Commander Robert Ventura laid out on the middle silver autopsy table. It has taken this long to complete a thorough though inconclusive autopsy on Cheryl Keitt. Though they've conducted an exhaustive series of examinations from brain to bowels, they hadn't found any cause for the woman's death. Their only option is to divert attentions to a fresh case while their findings - or lack of such - percolate in their minds while they wait for the result of tests which will take their overtaxed colleague upstairs even more time to complete.
In the meantime, they hope this victim will have a more straightforward reason for his condition.
The carbonized remnants of clothing were very carefully removed, small fragment by smaller fragment. It had been a slow, laborious process because much of the charred material is adhered to flesh, every bit of which must be carefully preserved. No one can know where an essential clue will be found, so everything must be painstakingly examined in its turn.
The garments and such pieces of flesh as could not be kept to the body proper have been preserved in air-tight canisters. Much of the fire's nature can be learned from analyzing such debris.
Now they're left with the corpse itself.
Robert Ventura has lost much of his mass and all of his moisture. One arm, half of the other and both lower legs are gone while blackened skin and flesh have molded themselves to bones and there is too much ash to identify, whether human, clothing or some unknown contributor that may lead the case in a new direction.
Making the 'Y' cut will be a cautious endeavor. While far from a cremation, the fire has radically changed the body. A careless move may well result in the loss of what evidence they'd try to uncover.
xx
Darla Ventura has been moved into Headquarters and Marie Watson joins Louisa Sportelli in a rotating Protective Watch over her in between times when Gibbs will try to 'gently and subtly' pry - or wrench - information from her. He still hopes some reason may be gleaned for setting this complex and tragic plan into motion, a plan in which the intended victim is alive but the murderer, and an apparently innocent woman, are dead.
When Gibbs, Tony and Michelle enter the Autopsy suite, at first neither Examiner glances up from the charred body of Robert Ventura laid out upon the middle table between them. Jimmy is the first to glance up and see the trio.
"Hi," he calls informally. Neither arriving man believes himself particularly included in the greeting.
Ducky turns, mildly surprised to have been so absorbed that he'd failed to notice the electronic door opening and closing. Of course, the air conditioner is on full power to counter the stench of burnt flesh, but still…. "Ah, you're just in time."
"Time for what?" Gibbs asks.
"There seems to have been an impact of considerable force to the center of the Commander's forehead."
They can see where the black, overcooked flesh, desiccated to a tight mask about the skull, indicates a significant horizontal indentation. "Steering wheel?" Gibbs asks.
"Doubtful, as you will soon note, though I suspect the impacts involved in the rolling crash may well have damaged it severely. I don't recall," he admits. "Abby will, of course, be able to confirm or refute this. The good Commander did indeed suffer extensive injuries in the rolling crash down that hill." He recalls that the car, or what was left of the crumpled hulk, had suffered as badly as had its driver.
Both of the corpse's legs are burnt away above the knees, and the right arm is gone while the left is half-consumed, gone almost to the elbow. The hairless head is little more than a hood of tight black flesh and the face a charred mask.
Ventura's breastplate has been removed, and the chest is no different than what Gibbs has seen from hundreds of completed autopsies, except for the seared, blackened, desiccated nature of these organs. "Yes," Ducky says, noting their gaze, "in a death by fire it is not uncommon for the inner organs to be less damaged, sometimes apparently hardly touched, but Commander Ventura was burnt out through and through.
"You'll find this interesting, however." He holds up the excised breastplate. Normally Ducky separates the ribs in a line down the left and right sides, leaving them attached en bloc to the sternum, but the cuts are quite clean and linier. These ribs, however, have been separated in an arc, the uppermost bones short, then lengthening to a maximum of about two feet before beginning to shorten. Further, these are broken away rather than smoothly cut.
"Steering wheel?" Gibbs speculates.
"So it does seem. How fast was the Commander driving before he went off the road?"
"We figure 49, then out nearly 80 feet before hitting the first bit of ground and starting to roll."
"It takes considerably more force to snap ribs so cleanly," Ducky reminds them. "They grew brittle in the fire, but before then?"
"There was damage down the slope, the car got banged up rolling end over end."
"If the car had gone off the mountain for one titanic front-end impact down where it was found some four hundred feet distant, I could account for this. Makes it interesting, doesn't it?"
x
Michelle steps around the body to stand beside Jimmy so she can see past Ducky's hands. As the older man works, cautiously listing each organ in turn and the extent of damage done to it by impacts and fire, Jimmy leans closer to ask his wife quietly. "So, how was your trip?"
Staring straight ahead, she says "Breathless," and glances up at Gibbs, almost daring him to say something.
Gibbs won't get between a married couple. If she wants to keep secrets, especially after the revelations made following the Mary Whitney 'human bomb' case and the aftermath of keeping the secret of what had happened when she and McGee were captured by Dennis Whitney's terrorist cell, that's their business.
If any more pieces of their relationship are to be picked up, that's their issue too.
"What more did you find?" he asks instead of the man beside him.
"Not much more at this point." Ducky looks over the corpse as a whole. "You know, this reminds me of an incident that happened one day in Borneo, when I was attached-"
"That's a bit of a new look I saw for Ziva earlier," Jimmy observes to Tony, mostly to head off one of the man's lengthy digressions while having completely missed his wife's evasion.
"Yeah," Tony's agreement is even more enthusiastic, if only to help his partner out as well as to lead into a more interesting digression. He enjoys Ducky's bemused expression at being cut off, and is well ready to get into the fun. "Black leather cat suit, she has the whole Emma Peel thing going for her."
"Emma Peel?" Jimmy's quite bewildered.
"Avengers? Diana Rigg?" He's not getting anywhere. "BBC? 1960's?"
"Ah." Jimmy considers it. "Aren't you dating yourself?"
"Lately no one else will," Gibbs quips.
"Heh heh."
x
"Did you know, Tony," Ducky asks broadly, always a bad sign; he's been redirected, not derailed, "that the derivation of the character's name 'Emma Peel' comes from the popular British slang for male attraction or 'M-Appeal?"
"No, I didn't," DiNozzo admits.
Jimmy's smile is more a smirk; he hadn't liked being caught out of the loop. "I guess your knowledge doesn't completely cover sexy iconic women."
"I guess not. Still, it's more Ducky's time - and line."
"True," Ducky grants. "Though, if the producers had made Ms. Rigg's character Scottish, she would have had more D-Appeal."
Time to rein this in. "Duck?"
"Hm, yes Jethro?"
"The body?"
"Oh, an excellent body, I'm sure you must recall. I understand the Avengers were quite popular in-"
"OUR bodies!"
He looks to himself and then the other men, pointedly excluding Jimmy. "I very much doubt we three would have much 'F-Appeal' as it were," he says, giving Michelle a wink.
"Keitt and Ventura!"
Ducky shakes his head, giving up the game. "Jethro, speaking as your doctor, after everything that's happened lately you really must cultivate a sense of the ridiculous."
"Cultivate it? I live with it every day."
"I thrive on it," DiNozzo points out.
"I know," Gibbs glares at his risk-taking subordinate and then returns to Ducky. "Get back to it."
"Gladly." Ducky points to the charred and brittle husk of what was once Robert Ventura. "There's not as much as I should like to discover on or in our friend," he says, passing a hand over the blackened corpse. "The fire has done an excellent job. The body is, as you see, half cremated."
The inferno had raged for about three hours, and the charred man's legs are gone below the left knee and the right arm is also missing, the left arm below the elbow and desiccation and smoking have reduced the flesh to a shrunken mass wrapped tightly about the bones.
"There is too little of the body remaining to give an easy Cause of Death. I've requested the Commander's medical records yesterday, but I fear it'll be some time before they arrive."
x
"What can you tell us?" Gibbs presses.
"Definitively, very little." He leads Gibbs and DiNozzo across the room to where a series of panels illuminate rows of X-ray exposures, leaving the Palmers behind. "Commander Ventura suffered fractures of the skull, left upper arm, your guess as to what the right arm had to endure; most of the ribs are broken by what had to have been a titanic impact. It was unnecessary, as you saw, to cut them to reach the thoracic cavity. There's far too little of the legs remaining to determine how much trauma he suffered there."
"He was belted in," Tony recalls. "How'd he get so many breaks?"
"He may well have been belted and strapped in," Ducky admits, "we have only the indication of the latch inserted into the locking mechanism, since the straps themselves were burned away. Yet did you know that in a recent poll of drivers in Wisconsin, almost 1.1 percent admitted to have secured the belt behind them rather than listening to the automatic warning coming from their dashboards? Furthermore, if one percent admitted it, I suspect the number of actual cases to be somewhat higher."
Gibbs doesn't like this. "Navy man is going to be more cautious. It's drummed into you to be careful." He thinks again of the possibility, especially in light of the damage to the ribs against the steering wheel, but his gut kicks it back up again. He turns to the pair behind him. "Palmer."
"Yes?" It's an unconscious male and female duet, much to Ducky's amusement, but Gibbs' glare makes clear which one he'd meant.
"Get back up and run Ventura's computer."
"Yes, sir."
"DiNozzo–" is as far as he gets when his cell phone rings. He pulls it out, not pleased to read 'Shepherd' on the small screen. Her cell phone is 'Jenny'.
xxx
After a detailed report to NCIS' Director on the many convolutions of this case, Gibbs and Tony enter the bullpen and find not only Michelle and Ziva at their desks but Abby pacing the bullpen. She's wearing an orange NCIS jumpsuit considerably smudged with black soot over the too-attention-grabbing tee shirt he'd seen her in earlier. He considers her wise for being so discreet, as he's not in the mood for anything other than strict business and DiNozzo doesn't need any more inspirations.
Michelle, talking on her telephone, glances at them and says rapidly into the handset: "They're back. Oh. Okay. Sorry. Thank you, I really owe you. Bye now." She hangs up.
Abby turns back from a rapid circuit. "Gibbs, I found–" His upraised hand cuts her short as he addresses Palmer.
"Who was that?" Abby's about to speak, but he raises a hand once again. Halting in fractured word, her expression conveys her opinion of the double interruption. Gibbs would normally hear Abby out if not for Palmer's odd behavior. He hopes the Palmer downstairs isn't rubbing off on her.
x
"Sir," Michelle points to her screen, "Commander Ventura has been doing a lot of on-line research his hard drive has already been mirrored last evening by Cyber Crimes to Special Agent McGee's computer and he has a hidden password protected directory where he's been storing details on changing his identity there are websites books referenced checklists of things to do like changing Social Security numbers birth school education and employment records faking tax returns and also things like Mexican plastic surgeons all sorts of things."
Gibbs wonders how many more words she can cram into a single breath, but there's a point more significant than good lungs, though she's tried to use those lungs to blow past now two important things. He's not going to let her get away with either of them. "On a hidden, password protected directory?"
"Yes sir."
"How'd you find it?" The law, not computers, is Palmer's forté - or has she been hiding an aptitude?
"Well, I… sir… I… I didn't."
"Then who did? Who were you on the phone with?" She'd gotten off quickly enough when they walked in.
"Sir, I…."
He raises a finger to halt her and his voice is calm enough to convey deep danger. "Who?"
It takes a moment for her to answer, her wide eyes drowning in apprehension. "Special Agent McGee … sir."
DiNozzo picks up before Gibbs can completely recover from his surprise. "You called Zorba McGeek on his honeymoon?"
"I-"
"The man is on Leave," Gibbs reminds her, surprised he has to.
"Sir, I couldn't find anything on Ventura's computer, nothing at all to account for anything he was doing and I knew something had to be somewhere, but I couldn't find it-"
"So you phoned McTron," Tony relishes this, "in Ireland, on his honeymoon, to do his Harry Potter thingy for you?"
She tries to ignore both him and his mixed metaphor and looks instead up into Gibbs' eyes. "Sir, I-"
Gibbs checks his watch, tacks on five hours to the early evening and doesn't want to imagine what Palmer must have interrupted. "Agent Palmer, just what were you thinking?"
"Errr … getting the case solved?"
"And you couldn't contact Cyber Crime?"
"Sir, I did, sir. They're backed up on a case for Supervisory Special Agent Higgins and his team. They said they can get to it in the morning."
"So you took it upon yourself, by yourself, with no word from me, to call McGee, in Ireland, to solve it?"
She looks down, then back up, determined not to break. "Yes, sir."
"Good girl," he tells her with a grin, continues on to his desk and hears her release tightly held breath. "Don't do it again."
Left behind, she looks for some up side. "He sends his love."
Tony, however, just can't let it go and addresses the bullpen as a whole. "Does anyone find it a little bit scary that McGee can take over an NCIS computer with his laptop in Ireland?"
"No, DiNozzo," Gibbs retorts as he sits down. "What's scary is that he's accomplished more from 5,000 miles away than you have right here."
x
"Gibbs!" Abby sounds like she'll rupture something if she doesn't get to report.
"Sorry, Abby, what've you got?" She's brought the odor of the burnt-out wreck upstairs with her but he won't mention that.
"Major Mass Spec had a field day with the samples you sent me, and I just had to do down to double-check his findings. I mean, I'm not doubting him, he's never wrong, it's just that-"
"Abs, it's late." Dinner is being served in the Café, never a pleasant prospect, and it's too late to consider take-out from the city.
"Oh, yeah, you're gonna love this," Abby steps over to the plasma screen between Tony's desk and McGee's Mardi Gras float, retrieves the remote control and rejoins them. Ziva and Michelle leave their desks for better vantages.
Abby activates the screen and an image of Ventura's burnt-out wreck in the Evidence garage appears. It faces the overhead camera; hood, trunk and all door that can open are so. "I identified the source of the fire. It wasn't the engine, it wasn't the fuel line and it wasn't the gas tank."
"What was it?" Gibbs asks, affection alone allowing him to keep it a calm question.
"The driver's seat," she announces, relishing the revelation as she changes the view to a close image of the spot. "Fire pattern traces the direction of fire back to the source, which was under his seat. He had a really hot butt." She smiles at him and even his best glare fails to wipe it away.
"So he set himself on fire?" Tony doesn't like the scenario.
"Nope. The fire started directly under him." She leaves the rest of the dramatic revelation unsaid as an exercise for the class.
"The fire burnt for three hours," DiNozzo remembers the burnt out bottom of the hill. While the fire had extended slightly beyond the arbitrary 'border', everything within a radius of fifty feet around the car had been obliterated.
"I also found accelerants, and a whopping amount of it."
"What kind of accelerant?"
"Not accelerant, accelerants. Major Mass Spec had a field day pulling up gasoline, kerosene, lighter fluid, charcoal fluid, rubbing alcohol and a gazillion other kinds. The wood in the front and back seats was soaked in it, so were the seats, upholstery, even the roof. He must've wanted the body to be ashes and that car to melt into a puddle of steel goo. Pity it doesn't work that way."
x
"How'd this happen?" Gibbs asks, not liking the developing scenario.
"How does a dead man drive?" she asks instead.
"Better than Palmer looking for a Crime Scene," Tony quips and enjoys Michelle's glare.
"Rhetorical question. He drives with this." From the pocket of the sooty orange coveralls she pulls, between her thumb and forefinger, a blue plastic screw-on cap. "Actually, with one just like it, not with this particular one or type, this is just an illustration.
"Abby." Gibbs has been here long enough today and the prospect of reexamining the case grows more unpleasant as the likelihood increases. The ID change trail in that hidden computer directory is becoming more unpleasantly clear.
"Look." Abby enlarges the picture as the camera zooms in on the exposed engine, enlarges further until it focuses on the carburetor. "See it?"
"No," Tony answers for them. All they see is blackened, half-melted metal.
"It took Major Mass Spec to find it" she admits with a broad smile. "I took scrapings of different parts of the engine, and found melted plastic coating the throttle. I think a plastic bottle cap, sort of like this one but give me time to pin it down as to size, was used to hold it open."
Gibbs thinks back to the death strip on the side of the hill, and what Ziva had relayed about the car's speed. It'd gone off the cliff, with no skid or brake marks on the road, at 49 miles per hour. Abby can calculate - later - how big the cap had been.
"He had the car in neutral," he concludes, "opened the hood, put in a plastic bottle cap to hold the throttle open, put the car in drive and it drove down the road and off the cliff. He rigged something to set fire to the car, starting at the driver seat."
"You got it."
Tony's question is among the most significant. "So whose body is Ducky working on?"