Title: Undercover, Ch. 12
Rating: K+
A/N: Well, three weeks and one failed hard drive later, here we are again. Fortunately the time spent waiting for my computer to be fixed produced two more chapters and the beginnings of a third. It's been quite a ride--but at least I finally got this chapter more or less the way I want it. So, without further ado, please allow me to present for your reading and reviewing pleasure the next chapter of this not-so-little fanfic. Hope you enjoy it--and please do let me know what you think. :)
Thanks!!
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The sun shone in brightly through the third-story window of NCIS Headquarters, lying in warm golden squares on the carpeted floor. It caught the silky strands of Kate's hair and highlighted the dark bruises around her throat, bounced off the tip of Tony's pen as he lounged in the chair behind his desk, and crept toward McGee's feet as he stood between his desk and Tony's, looking over the other agent's shoulder at the report he was reading to the rest of the team. Their area of the bullpen was quiet, unusually so, and the only movement was Kate's incessant pacing, back and forth, back and forth in front of her desk, like a caged tiger marking off the paces of his enclosure again and again…as if knowing the extent of his captivity would somehow take him one step closer to freedom.
The warm fingers of sunlight didn't reach far enough to touch the silver-haired agent in the desk farthest from the window. He sat silent and stone-faced, eyes hard as flint as he listened intently to Tony's report. There were still remnants of bruising on his face, faintly blue from where angry fists had pummeled him over and over again. At the moment, one hand clutched a little rubber ball, his fingers squeezing and releasing slowly, deliberately. Every once in a while his gaze flickered from the top of his desk to the two male agents across from him, the harsh lines on his face unchanging even as his eyes took in everything before him. But he never once looked over in the direction of the dark-haired woman who moved restlessly in front of her desk, a string of mottled finger marks around her neck and an edgy impatience evident in the taut lines of her body.
It had been a tense two weeks for the team, ever since the night that they had gotten a call from the FBI and rushed to a crowded hotel room expecting the worst. After the EMTs had finally released him, Gibbs had obstinately refused any further medical treatment, opting instead for his usual panacea of a slug of bourbon and his boat. Kate, however, had had to stay in the hospital for two days, with the team visiting her almost around the clock. When she was finally released, she'd been forced to take a week's leave of absence, per the Director's orders. (Actually, she'd stayed home because he threatened to fire her if she so much as poked her nose into Headquarters before the week was up.)
This was her first day back at the office since the attack. She was full of manic energy, almost as though she was possessed by the same demon that had driven Gibbs for nearly a week and a half now. She never slowed down, never stopped moving, and she was apparently so sick of people asking how she felt that she'd finally snapped that she'd gone nearly out of her mind with boredom, and the next person who bothered her was going to take a bullet between the eyes. Kate was left strictly alone after that.
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During her absence, Gibbs had been far worse than usual. In the normal scheme of things he was quite often silent and gruff and unapproachable, but during the past two weeks things had come to such a head that even his normally unflappable team was shocked. He worked like a dervish on the current case, staying at the office well into the early morning hours, demanding impossible results from Tony and McGee, pushing everyone on the team to their limits and beyond. Finally Abby told him, with some indignation, that she'd never seen him behave like this before. "You're so grumpy, Gibbs," she exclaimed in frustration, a comment that would have provoked a slap to the back of the head coming from anyone else. Since it was Abby, Gibbs merely gave her a long, hard stare and told her to get back to work on the case. Exasperated, she huffed softly and swung around to face her computer again, black pigtails framing her worried face.
Even Ducky had a word with him about his unusually foul temper. Gibbs was down in autopsy, examining the bruising on one of the female victims, when Ducky launched off into one of his long-winded, tangential stories—this one about a baby marmoset, a Hawaiian dancer, and a toothpick. After only a few moments, Gibbs snapped "Ducky!" with more than his usual force, effectively silencing the older man for a good minute or two. When he finally looked up, he noticed that Gibbs looked faintly guilty but refused to say anything.
Shaking his head gently, Ducky simply returned to his work.
"It won't work, you know, Jethro," he said sadly, almost to himself. "You can fight it as much as you want to, but I'm afraid you aren't going to win this one."
Gibbs stared at him blankly as the medical examiner laid down one dissecting tool and picked up another. Then he turned on his heel and headed out the door. Pushing his visor up, Ducky turned to Gerald and shrugged slightly.
"Sometimes I think he deliberately makes things difficult for himself," he remarked dryly. "Ah, well. Now, Gerald, what do you make of this mark here?"
Upstairs, Tony and McGee were comparing notes on exactly the same subject—their boss's unwonted ill-humor. McGee, who was still trembling from one of Gibbs' famous tirades, stopped typing for a moment and glanced over at the other agent.
"I've never seen him like this before," he whispered timorously. "What's the matter with him?"
Tony shot him an impatient look.
"Well, McGee, he had to watch some jerk nearly strangle Kate right after he nearly got beat to a pulp by the guy—besides the fact that the same guy murdered three other Marines and their wives and managed to pull it all off right under Gibbs' nose. What do you think's the matter with him?"
McGee nodded gravely and looked back at his computer screen. After a moment, he braved another glance in Tony's direction.
"He was kind of like this when the terrorist—you know, Ari—when he kidnapped Kate last year. I mean, he went kind of crazy then, too. Doesn't that…uh… mean something?"
Releasing a long sigh of frustration, Tony leaned back in his chair and began twirling his pen around his fingers until it was a silver blur.
"Think about it, Probie. The two cases have a lot of…similarities, if you know what I mean."
McGee's face crinkled up in confusion, his brows pulling together over puzzled eyes.
"I don't get it," he said after a long minute. "What similarities?"
Tony directed a longsuffering glance toward the ceiling and stopped twirling his pen abruptly.
"Never mind, McGee," he said tersely. "Get back to work."
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And now all of them except Kate were trying their very best to avoid Gibbs' hard stare as Tony read on. McGee shuffled nervously, and even Tony seemed slightly subdued, a little less than his usual infuriating self. Only Kate didn't seem fazed by the tension hanging thick in the air as she slowly wore out the carpet in front of her desk.
"Well, it seems that your profile was pretty much dead-on, Kate," Tony said cheerfully. "Sommers was born Mark Caswell in 1970, the only child of James 'Hoss' Caswell and wife Caroline, both of whom hailed from Pleasant Grove, Alabama."
" Just a minute." Kate interjected witheringly. "'Hoss'?"
Tony gave her a wide grin. "It's the South, Kate."
She merely rolled her eyes at him, and he continued.
"Anyway, Sommers was born in Jacksonville, Florida, where they lived for three years before moving again, this time to Macon, Georgia. His father was an alcoholic and had a gambling problem, which didn't work out too well with his pay as an itinerant construction worker. Apparently he took out his frustrations on his wife and kid, because during the nine months they lived in Macon, Caroline and Mark Caswell showed up at the ER three times, each time pretty badly beaten. After the third incident, Child Protective Services stepped in to investigate. They decided that the situation was bad enough that they should remove the child, considered relocating him and his mother to a shelter, and then decided that the mother was not capable of protecting the child from his father, so they yanked him into the foster home system."
"Wait." Kate stopped pacing for a moment and held up a hand in protest. "They blamed the mother for not protecting her son? Did they somehow fail to notice that she was getting beaten up too?"
Tony shrugged. "It was a different time, Kate. And since Caroline kept going back to her abusive husband, CPS had some grounds for taking the kid. Add to that the fact that the social worker assigned to the case suspected sexual abuse, and proceeded to call in a child psychiatrist--who confirmed that the child showed all the classic signs of sexual abuse by a parent, most likely his father. They couldn't find any physical evidence, but his psych exam was conclusive enough to get the case worker to file a court order to have him immediately removed from the home and a restraining order put on both parents."
With a disgusted look, Kate resumed her pacing again. Tony gave McGee an innocent shrug, and kept reading.
"At any rate, Mark Caswell entered the foster home system at the age of eight, where he bounced around from place to place until he was eighteen, never staying anywhere longer than about two years. Surprisingly enough, he was apparently a pretty good kid—made decent grades, didn't get in a lot of trouble, stayed on the right side of the law. At fifteen, he legally changed his last name to Sommers, which was his grandmother's maiden name on his mother's side. At eighteen, he graduated high school and almost immediately enlisted in the Corps, went through basic training at Parris Island, and then went to Camp Geiger for his infantry training. In August of 1990, the Gulf War broke out, and Sommers's unit was deployed to Iraq in early September. His unit was part of Operation Desert Storm, and Sommers was awarded the Silver Star for bravery under fire for his actions during the Battle of Khafiji on January 29. His unit remained in Iraq for the rest of the year, returning to the U.S. in late September of '91."
"Pretty impressive," Kate said begrudgingly. "What then?"
"Well, turns out that Sommers, who at this point was a lowly staff sergeant, wanted to rise in the ranks. He applied for the Marine Enlisted Commissioning Education Program in October of '91, was accepted in December, and started classes at NCU in January of '92. Four years later, he returned to active duty as a second lieutenant, stationed at Camp Lejeune. Over the next five years, he rose to the rank of captain and had a pretty much exemplary record—except for one incident in the fall of 2001."
"What kind of incident?" Kate asked, eyes narrowed intently.
Tony planted a foot on his desk and pushed his chair back, twirling it a little for effect before stopping its motion abruptly.
"Well!! This was a big hairy incident—like, Incident with a capital 'I.' Apparently when Captain Sommers was stationed at Camp Lejeune, he had a run-in with a Major Robert Harwell."
"Okay…" Kate said slowly, clearly waiting for the big news. "And?"
"Well, when I say run-in, I mean that in the most literal, physical, absolute sense of the word. Apparently Harwell was pretty hard-nosed, even for a Marine officer—tough, old-fashioned, absolutely intolerant of any kind of failure in his men." Cautiously Tony slid his eyes over to Gibbs, who stared back stonily from under bushy brows. Wincing, the younger agent glued his eyes back on his report.
"Anyway, one day he saw Sommers outside the officers' mess and started chewing him out about something—no one really knew what. He was yelling, gesturing, started accusing Sommers of shirking his duties as an officer, being lazy, being a discredit to the uniform—the whole nine yards. Witnesses said that Sommers took the chewing-out pretty calmly until Harwell got in his face and grabbed his arm to make some point. That was when Sommers came unglued."
Kate raised an eyebrow. "What do you mean, 'unglued'?"
Tony shot her a speaking glance. "Like, flew-into-a-psychotic-rage unglued. Sommers got violent, started pushing Harwell back and yelling something unintelligible, which was right before he knocked him to the ground and started beating the hell out of him. It took three men to pull him off and hold him back, and Harwell spent three days in sickbay as a result."
McGee whistled. "Golly. What'd they do to Sommers?"
"Well, naturally they stuck him in the brig to await his impending court-martial, but then somebody decided that he ought to have a psychiatric exam, since exemplary Marines are not usually in the habit of beating hell out of their superior officers for no apparent reason. The exam revealed effects of PTSD, which the base hospital's psychiatrist attributed to his experiences in combat during Desert Storm. They let him out of the brig, put him in the base hospital, and kept him under observation there for another three weeks. The psychiatrist kept tabs on him for another three months and then pronounced him fit to return to his usual duties again."
Kate looked incredulous. "That was it?"
Tony flipped through a couple of pages. "They did put an official letter of reprimand in his file, along with a mandatory transfer to Quantico. Seems they didn't want a repeat incident with Major Harwell. But because of the PTSD—and Sommers's spotless record—they didn't do much else to him. Guess they figured he really wasn't responsible or something."
Kate chewed on her bottom lip, thinking. McGee glanced over at her with a speculative look. "So you think that the incident with Harwell triggered the memories of his father's abuse?"
She stopped pacing for a moment and leaned back against her desk.
"It's possible. I doubt the PTSD was entirely attributable to Desert Storm, especially that long after he'd seen active duty. I would imagine that Harwell's verbal abuse and the threat of physical abuse revived Sommers's childhood fear of his father and triggered his violent reaction to the major. After that…Tony, are there any incidents on his record after he transferred to Quantico?"
Tony glanced down at the paper he held. "Nope. Not a thing. And no one at Quantico except his direct superiors knew about the incident at Camp Lejeune, either. For the three years he's been at Quantico, his record is perfect—not a single thing on it."
"Personal life?" Kate queried.
"Mmm…met a girl named Beth Jameson six months after his transfer, got married to her a year later, and they've been living happily-ever-after ever since. No kids yet, but they still seem pretty happy together."
Kate nodded. "Looked like it from what I saw. What about the other officers on base?"
"Or his men?" McGee added, almost as an afterthought.
Tony shook his head. "Nothing there. The other officers on base liked him, his men didn't have any gripes beyond the usual complaints about getting their butts chewed out—going by our interviews, he didn't seem to have a major beef with anybody."
McGee squinted a little in confusion. "So why would he snap all of a sudden and start killing random officers? I mean, it wasn't personal, was it?"
Kate shook her head decisively. "No, he didn't have anything against the officers themselves. They simply represented his abusive father."
Tony shot her a suspicious look. "How can you be so sure?"
"Well, for one thing, he targeted Gibbs, whom he'd never met before in his life. And then when we were in that hotel room and he was talking to Gibbs, he never said his name, never referred to him as a fellow officer or a Marine, and the whole time he seemed to think that Gibbs actually was his father. I would guess that at that point his perception of reality was so distorted as to be almost non-existent. Sommers was projecting his fantasies into real life. The actual people he targeted had nothing to do with it--which is why Sommers waited so long after the incident with Major Harwell to start murdering his fellow officers. Or in this case, two NCIS agents."
In the short silence that followed, all three agents surreptitiously turned their heads to sneak a glance at Gibbs. He was staring down at the top of his desk, his fingers still manipulating the little rubber ball, flexing and relaxing in a hypnotically repetitive motion. Sensing that Gibbs was about to notice their covert scrutiny, Tony jumped in to break the ominous hush.
"You gotta hand it to him, though. For a demented psycho-killer, Sommers was actually pretty smart. He managed to fool his superior officers, his men, even his wife. Nobody had any idea that he was the one committing the murders, not even the people who knew him best."
McGee seized this conversation lifeline with alacrity. "Tell Kate how he managed that."
Tony risked a sideways glance at Gibbs' motionless figure before replying. "Apparently he was pretty good at covering his tracks. Take the weekend of the first murder, for example. He's got the weekend off-duty, tells his wife he's going into D.C. to find her a birthday present, is gone the whole day. Good story, right?"
McGee nodded expectantly.
"But it gets better. While he's in D.C., before he goes to commit the murder, he actually goes to a jeweler's, picks out a diamond pendant, has it gift-wrapped and brings it home for her birthday the next week. She still has the pendant, by the way. And it was definitely him—McGeek here and I pulled his credit card receipts, and it's his signature on the handwriting. Pretty romantic, huh?"
"Charming," Kate said witheringly. "What about the second murder?"
"Not so hot there," Tony admitted sadly. "About a month later he's off-duty over the weekend again, tells his wife he wants to go sailing on the bay for the afternoon, knowing that she gets seasick easily and probably won't want to come along."
"Which she didn't," McGee interjected, earning himself a glare from his teammate.
"I'm telling this story, Probie. Anyway, he says he's going out sailing for the afternoon, but when I take McGullible here to pull the security tapes from the dock, Sommers's boat doesn't move the entire afternoon and no one down at the dock can remember seeing anyone matching his description that day. Strange, huh?"
"I'm surprised and astonished," Kate remarked dryly. "What about the third murder? Wasn't his wife starting to get suspicious by then?"
"Apparently not, even though they were staying at the same hotel as the two murder victims." Kate rolled her eyes to the ceiling, and Tony continued with a smug smile. "At about 9:00 PM he told her he was going downstairs to work out and would be back in about an hour. She went down the hotel bar for a nightcap and came back to find him reading the paper in bed."
Kate chuckled. "Not bad. I can just hear it—'Great story in the paper, hon. You wouldn't believe what the government's up to these days.'"
Tony grinned. "Yep, not a bad cover. But then she seemed to swallow all of them hook, line, and sinker. Not exactly the suspicious type."
Kate shook her head, a line digging itself between his brows. "But even if his wife never got suspicious, wouldn't someone at the hotel notice that something was up?"
Tony shook his head. "Nope. He was too good for that. McGee and I went to all three hotels where the murders took place and pulled the security tapes from each of them. Turns out that Sommers used the same M.O. with all three murders. He'd gain access to the hotel, either by checking in under his own name with his wife or by checking in under an assumed name alone—which is what happened the first two times. At some point, usually in the evening, he'd slip down to the staff quarters, steal a waiter's uniform and a cart, and hide them somewhere close by. The first two times he posed as a waiter, waiting tables and working behind the bar. The third time he actually had drinks with his victims, pretending that he'd just into them by accident."
"Getting a little bolder, riding on his previous successes," Kate said, lips pursed in thought. Tony looked up at her, eyes scanning her face as her brow furrowed. "So he was working among the staff and they still didn't notice anything…well, hinky?"
The two male agents smiled briefly at the reference to the team's resident Goth. Brushing a speck of lint off his jacket sleeve, McGee answered Kate's question.
"Apparently he was a pretty good actor," he said. "The staff members never really suspected. If anyone asked who he was, he'd say that he was from another hotel and was subbing in for a friend who was sick."
Tony smiled knowingly. "When we talked to the staff and flashed Sommers's picture a few times, they started remembering a lot more than they initially told the local LEOs. He was good at fading into the woodwork, but ultimately somebody always remembered seeing him in the hotel on the night of the murder."
"So either way, he'd slip the drug into the woman's drink during dinner or while she was at the bar?" Kate asked.
"Yeah," Tony replied. "He'd give her a few minutes, then excuse himself and go slip into the waiter's uniform that he'd hidden close by—unless he was already in it, that is. He'd watch his intended target from a discreet distance, and when she started to feel sick, she'd generally head for the ladies' room. He'd follow her there, wait until she started to collapse, and then bundle her up into the cart and take her up to her hotel room."
"Just like he did with me," Kate murmured, lost in thought.
"Right," Tony said slowly, his eyes flickering to the dark bruises that still disfigured her throat. "Anyway, he'd lay her down so that she was in a direct line of sight from the door, wait until the husband came in, and clock him over the head with a blunt object of some kind while he was leaning down to check on his wife. The rest…well, I guess we know how he did the rest."
Tony trailed off uncomfortably, unsure how much Kate could handle only a short time after her own encounter with the killer. He needn't have worried, however. Apparently she was more than happy to discuss the case.
"So Sommers put the drug in my drink when Gibbs and I were sitting with he and his wife at that table in the bar?" she wanted to know.
"Uh-huh," McGee said warily. "After you and Gibbs disappeared, the FBI took over and cleared the room. Somebody had the good sense to figure out where you'd been sitting and bagged and tagged all the glasses at the table. Abby tested your drink and found that it contained high levels of seconal sodium—enough to knock you out for a good half-hour or so."
"And enough to slow my reflexes when I woke up," Kate said ruminatively. "I remember when I started to come out of it. It was like my whole body was weighted down. I couldn't move, couldn't fight back, couldn't even talk. He might as well have tied me up and gagged me."
Everyone in the bullpen heard the distinctive pop of Gibbs' jaw snapping shut as he bit down hard on his back teeth, but no one dared glance in his direction. Kate, though she wouldn't look over to the desk across from hers, got an almost mischievous gleam in her eyes and kept right on talking.
"How did he manage to sneak away from our table?" she asked, almost too innocently. Tony gave her a nervous smile and nudged McGee.
"Ah…well, he…umm…" McGee stammered, clearly unnerved by the rising tension. Kate arched a questioning brow at him.
"Spit it out, McGee," she ordered, sounding uncannily like their boss. McGee gulped and continued.
"He told Gibbs that he and his wife were going to take the next dance. When we interrogated her, we learned that he told her he was feeling ill and was going to the restroom."
Tony grinned cheekily, seeming to forget Gibbs' silent but menacing presence nearby.
"Well, he wasn't actually lying to her. He did go the restroom…he just got a little confused about the signs on the doors. Must have been such a horrible shock," he said mockingly, voice laced with fake sympathy. McGee and Kate chuckled at their irrepressible colleague, until the loud screech of the springs in Gibbs' chair signaled some abrupt movement on the older agent's part. All three of them jumped, and Tony cringed and slunk down low in his seat.
"Sorry, boss," he whispered contritely, shooting Kate a pleading glance that silently begged her to continue this conversation somewhere else before someone got shot…or worse. But she seemed possessed by some inner devil, and merely smiled sweetly with a brief flash of dimples before continuing her former train of thought.
"You know, it's funny," she mused as she paced over to the window and turned, the sun creating a little nimbus of light around the top of her head. "I remember when I was in the lounge of the restroom, feeling all dizzy and sick, and I saw that waiter. Something was off about him from the very start."
McGee looked surprised. "Why didn't you call out for help or something?"
"I was trying not to throw up my toenails, McGee," she snapped, sounding a little more like her old self. "It tends to take up a lot of your concentration."
"Did you ever realize who he really was before you blacked out?" Tony asked interestedly. Kate paused for a moment, an odd look passing over her face.
"You know, I think I did. No…no, I know I did. It was when I started going down and he came over to help me. I saw it in his eyes."
"You mean like a crazed-demented-psychopathic-killer kind of look?" Tony wanted to know. Kate shook her head, her brow furrowing as she tried to remember.
"No, nothing like that. He was really normal, actually. Just like any of the other waiters at the gala that night. What was different about him was that he didn't look surprised."
"What do you mean?" McGee asked.
"Well, here's a woman who's clearly not feeling well…dizzy, nauseous, off-balance. She stumbles into the room, starts to fall to the ground, nearly passes out. Wouldn't you be a little surprised, a little taken aback?"
McGee nodded. "I guess so. But he wasn't?"
"No. He looked like…like he'd been expecting it. That's what told me that something was wrong…really wrong."
"Why didn't you call for backup?" Tony said, sounding faintly outraged. Kate gave him a very patient look.
"If he really was the killer, I didn't want to let him know I was on to him. I knew the only way we were going to catch him was if I pretended I didn't know what was going on, just like all the other victims."
Gibbs' chair creaked again, but the younger agents were so engrossed in the current conversation that they barely noticed.
"So you deliberately went with Sommers hoping that he'd get caught red-handed, so to speak?" McGee asked incredulously. Kate shrugged a little.
"I was so dizzy by that time that I could barely think at all, but I remember telling myself that just had to stay calm, not do anything suspicious. I knew Gibbs would come looking for me, and that the FBI was monitoring all the entrances and exits. That's why I dropped my purse behind that potted plant…to let them know what had happened and where he was taking me."
Tony and McGee stared at her for a couple of beats, mouths wide open, eyes stunned and aghast. Finally McGee closed his sagging jaw long enough to ask, "Wasn't that a huge gamble? I mean, what if they didn't find you in time? What if something went wrong?"
Kate raised her eyebrows coolly, but there was a flash of something deep in her eyes. "It was a risk I had to take. A judgment call, I guess. Fortunately it happened to work out."
Tony gave her a speculative look, then shrugged philosophically. "It happens. I remember this one time when I was with the Baltimore PD—"
But his reminiscence was cut short by a sharp thud as the little rubber ball that Gibbs had been clutching fell suddenly to the floor and began to roll slowly in the direction of McGee's feet. Startled, all three agents looked over to their boss's desk just in time to see him lunge to his feet and slam both hands on his desktop, blue eyes ablaze and mouth set in a straight, grim line. Tony and McGee's eyes bugged out of their sockets as they edged nervously in the opposite direction. Kate merely planted both feet and raised her chin, wordlessly daring Gibbs to take this one step further.
At that silent lift of her chin, he suddenly snapped. His brows slammed together over the bridge of his nose, his eyes narrowed into ominous slits, and he sucked in a single deep breath before glaring directly into her eyes and growling deep in his throat.
"Kate. Conference room. Now."
And before she could say or do a single thing in reply, he charged around his desk, grabbed her by one arm, and began hauling her off to the elevator with long, ground-eating strides. As the doors opened with a loud "ding," Tony turned to McGee and grinned manically.
"Ten bucks says he socks her first," he said cheerfully, pulling his wallet out of his back pocket with a flourish. McGee gave him an indignant look and shook his head.
"Uh-uh," he said positively, deep suspicion written all over his face. "The last time I bet on something with you, you cheated and I lost twenty bucks. Besides, Gibbs wouldn't hit a woman. Especially Kate."
Tony raised a suggestive eyebrow. "Oh, yeah? I haven't seen him this mad since some little rookie spilled his coffee all over his desk three years ago. He nearly took that guy's head off."
McGee narrowed his eyes in thought for a moment before pulling out his wallet from his back pocket and thumbing through the bills inside. "Fine, I'll bet you twenty bucks that she socks him before he does something to her. But no bets on him hitting her. I'm not that much of a sucker."
"He'll do something," Tony warned dramatically. "Just wait and see."
McGee smirked happily as he closed his wallet. "My money's on Kate," he said smugly. "That Irish temper of hers is just about to explode. And when it does—he better watch out."
Tony grinned again and waggled his eyebrows. "All right, you're on, McGee. Personally, I'd bet on Gibbs every time. But…it's your funeral."
They shook hands, McGee eyeing Tony warily the entire time. Neither of them happened to notice that the elevator display currently showed the car stopped between the second and third floors, the little light blinking almost mournfully, caught between the two numbers. Tony, engrossed in his own twisted schemes, picked up the office phone and hit the button for Abby's lab.
"Abby," he muttered into the receiver, ignoring the perky chatter on the other end. "Game's on."