The Price of Honesty: Chapter 14
A/N: Time for a recap, I guess. Special Agent Stan Burley was murdered in his Bahrain apartment, and Team Gibbs from NCIS Headquarters was sent halfway across the world to investigate. Before they arrived, Special Agent Kim Tomblin reviewed the Bahrain team's open cases; from four cases with possible connections, one remains, a terrorist training camp in Yemen that Special Agent Chad Dunham and a small group of Mossad operatives had been investigating. Ziva is working that angle with the Mossad team while McGee goes through Burley's computer, DiNozzo reviews old cases, and Gibbs does Gibbs-type things. Back in the States, Dr. Sonja Gracy received Burley's autopsy report, having enough time to determine that whoever killed him is very comfortable with a knife, before heading to NCIS to review the report with Ducky.
Despite the fact that the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology and NCIS Headquarters at the Navy Yard were separated by less than nine miles, almost an hour had passed between Dr. Sonja Gracy leaving her office and arriving at NCIS, and she couldn't help but wonder at her career choices—she had left a warm and tropical paradise with horrible traffic, to go back to Washington, DC, which was uncomfortably hot and humid in the summer and bitterly cold in the winter, and still had horrible traffic.
Iraq may have had bullets and bombs, but at least she didn't have to deal with traffic.
She was still smiling thinly at the thought as she signed the visitor's log at the entrance to NCIS Headquarters, the portly guard studying her Army ID with much more scrutiny than the card deserved. "Here you go, Major," he finally said, handing the ID back along with an NCIS visitor badge. "Do you need an escort?"
"No," she said, smiling politely at the question as she clipped the badge to her uniform collar. "I know my way." He nodded in acknowledgement as she hefted her backpack on her shoulder and headed for the elevators. She almost reflexively hit the button for the squadroom, before she remembered that there would be no one there for her to talk to. As the elevator rumbled toward the basement, she found herself smiling at the memory of the slightly exasperated expression on Gibbs' face when he walked into his bullpen to see her sitting at his desk unannounced.
You're pathetic, Gracy, she mocked to herself, allowing a slight smile. It had been so long since she was in the dating game—she was twenty the last time she met a man she referred to as her 'boyfriend', and she ended up marrying him a year and a half later—that she was still trying to get used to all the little 'relationship' things again. Her only consolation was that she was currently 'dating', if that's what they were doing, a man who was even worse at it than she was.
Then again, he got four women to agree to marry him, so he couldn't have been that bad at it.
She was still holding her black beret loosely in her hand when the glass doors to Autopsy slid open, revealing the shiny stainless steel and bright lights she would always associate with morgues everywhere. Over the dull rumbling of the ventilation system, she heard a deep Scottish brogue that she would always associate with NCIS' medical examiner, and couldn't help but smile again.
Not surprisingly, it was Jimmy Palmer who first noticed her entrance. "Dr. Mallard," the pathology assistant said insistently, having to repeat himself twice before Ducky finally stopped talking and turned his head to where Palmer was indicating.
"Ah, hello, Sonja," Ducky said pleasantly, already returning his attention to the corpse in front of him. "I wasn't expecting you for another few hours yet."
"Traffic was bad, Ducky, but it wasn't that bad."
He chuckled at that. "I think we're done here, Mr. Palmer, if you don't mind closing our guest up and preparing him for the funeral home."
"Sure thing, Dr. Mallard," Palmer said pleasantly. "Hello, Dr. Gracy," he finally greeted, almost as an afterthought.
"Jimmy," she replied with a nod. "I didn't mean to interrupt, Ducky."
He waved her apology aside. "We really were finishing up," he said. "Our dear admiral here was the victim of a lifetime of fatty foods and too much stress."
"Cardiac arrest," Gracy guessed, earning a nod in reply. "Not your usual case."
"The stars he wore on his shoulder were enough to land him on my table, natural causes or not. In any society, I believe, a certain amount of diligence will always be given to those of high status, that the commoners do not receive."
"Stars mean a lot in this society," she agreed, adjusting her backpack on her shoulders. "Is there a place you want me to set up?"
"That table over there should be just fine, my dear," he replied, nodding to an empty autopsy table. "And if you will excuse me, I would like to get cleaned up before we begin." She nodded slightly to that as she placed her backpack on the table and began pulling things out.
She began to get the sensation that she was being watched, and turned her head to see Palmer looking at her like he had something he wanted to say, but didn't know how to broach the subject. "Do you need something, Palmer?" she asked with a frown, and the pathology assistant's ears turned pink with embarrassment at the question.
"Well, I was just wondering…" His voice trailed off, and she didn't think it was possible, but he turned even more pink.
"Wondering…" she prompted.
"I, uh, just wanted to know if…"
"Mr. Palmer," Ducky said as he re-entered the room, when Palmer again trailed off. "Dr. Gracy does not read minds. If you have a question, I suggest you ask it."
"Has Naomi said anything about me?" Palmer blurted out, and Gracy remembered the way he spent most of her housewarming party talking to the Israeli au pair. They actually had a lot in common—among other things, Naomi was starting a graduate program in physical anthropology, and it wasn't every day that people who lacked any sort of squeamishness around corpses ran into each other—but they were also both almost painfully shy when it came to the opposite sex.
She had to fight to keep the smirk she was feeling from showing on her face, and keeping her voice as even as possible, replied, "Well, she hasn't said anything bad about you. I can you give you her number, if you want to call her."
"Do you think I should?" Palmer asked, his words coming out quickly in his nervousness. "I mean, if she wanted me to call, don't you think she would have given me her number herself? And I don't know if it's a big deal for her, but I'm definitely not Jewish, and—"
"Jimmy," Gracy interrupted, not able to hold back her smile. "Just call her."
"Uh, okay." He went back to his suturing before looking up again. "Are you sure—"
"Mr. Palmer," Ducky interrupted, "As important as your dating life is, there are more pressing matters at hand."
"Oh, of course. Sorry, Dr. Mallard." Gracy couldn't help the quiet chuckle that crossed her lips as she fully turned to give Ducky and the material in front of them her full attention.
"You'll have to excuse Mr. Palmer," Ducky said, quietly enough that Palmer couldn't hear. "He means well, but relationships have not been easy for him. He got rather badly burnt by one a few years back, a few months before you joined us for the first time, actually."
"We've all been there, Ducky," Gracy replied.
"Ah, but this was not your typical lover's quarrel gone bad," Ducky replied, sounding almost sad. "But enough about that. You came here to discuss Stan's autopsy."
"Right," Gracy replied, forcing Ducky's cryptic statement from her mind as she returned her attention to the case at hand. "Ben Stone did the autopsy in Heidelberg."
"Ah, yes, our dear Dr. Stone," Ducky said, sounding pleased about that fact. "A highly competent pathologist. I remember his residency."
"You're dating yourself, Ducky," Gracy said with a chuckle.
"Nonsense. I remember your residency as well, Dr. Gracy."
"Ben's was a decade before mine."
"Ah, yes, there is that," he said thoughtfully. "How time does fly. Of course, I wasn't with NCIS yet when Dr. Stone was a resident. It was the most unusual case that caused our paths to cross—"
"Ducky," Gracy interrupted, gesturing at the information in front of them. "How about we focus on this case first?"
"Of course," the NCIS medical examiner replied. Gracy grinned as she pulled up her work laptop, a brand-new high-definition LCD touch-screen tablet that displayed slides even better than a microscope.
"Based on the data gathered at the scene, Ben estimated TOD to have been in the afternoon before the body was found. COD was this stab wound."
"A very precise hit directly to the heart," Ducky observed.
"Exactly," Gracy said with a nod. "Left mid-clavicular line in the fifth intercostal space. The point of maximal impulse of the heart."
"Our killer knew anatomy," Ducky mused.
"And knew knives," Gracy added, using her fingers to spread the picture, zooming in on the wound itself. "No hesitation, no slip, just… stab." Palmer, who had finished with the admiral they had been working on when Gracy arrived, pulled up a chair beside them. Gracy angled the screen slightly so the pathology assistant could see as well. "I left the office fairly quickly as soon as I saw this, so I didn't get a chance to go through Ben's measurements on the actual wound." She pulled up that part of the report and frowned slightly at the numbers she saw there. "Well, that's unusual," she murmured, reaching for a pen from her uniform and a piece of scrap paper, jotting down numbers and angles without further explanation.
"What's unusual?" Palmer finally asked. As if forgetting that other people were there, Gracy blinked slightly before turning to him to explain.
"The angle of the wound," she said, gesturing toward her scribbles. She frowned as she tried to figure out how to explain what she was thinking. "There are certain ways to kill that tend to be associated with one gender or another. Women are more likely to use poison than men, men are more likely to be the one behind a gun. Knives can go either way. For one, stabbing is a very personal way to kill someone. Not only do you have to get close enough that they could attack you first, but you also have to be willing to look them in the eye and watch them die. That type of confidence is more typically found in men, especially in a case like this one, where there is no hesitation at all. On the other hand, though, women are more likely to use a knife as a defensive weapon than a gun. More women are comfortable with knives than with guns, so if being attacked in the home, they will go to the kitchen and grab the biggest and sharpest knife they own." She lapsed into silence again. "The fact that Agent Burley was found in the kitchen would raise the index of suspicion for self-defense—"
"But that would imply that Stan would be attacking a woman in his own home," Ducky interrupted.
"Exactly," Gracy replied. "I've never met Agent Burley, but I trust Gibbs' judgment of character. There's no way he would trust a man who would be the sort to attack a woman. Besides," she said, again gesturing toward the wound. "This was most definitely not made by a kitchen knife."
"How can you tell?" Palmer asked with a frown.
"I'll get to that," Gracy promised. "The point to that whole tangent is that this type of wound—the precision, the lack of hesitation—would suggest a man. But based on the trajectory of the wound, if it was a man, it was a very short one."
"How can you tell?" Palmer repeated, studying Gracy's calculations as if they contained the answers to the questions of the universe.
"Contrary to what Hollywood would lead you to believe, most stabbings are underhanded." She pantomimed an underhanded thrusting motion. "They're not the overhand hacking motion that Psycho made popular. Because of that, you would expect a certain upward angle in your typical stabbing, but these angles," she gestured toward the calculations. "If you assume a distance between perpetrator and victim of thirty to forty-five centimeters—twelve to eighteen inches—the perpetrator would be between…" Her voice trailed off as she pulled her BlackBerry from the lower cargo pocket on her right leg and used it as a calculator, "one hundred forty-five and 160 centimeters."
"Oh, my," Ducky murmured.
"Hmm?" Palmer asked.
"About four feet and ten inches to five feet and three inches," Ducky translated.
"Oh," Palmer said with a blink. "That's short."
"Yeah," Gracy agreed. "We're looking for a short, right-handed killer—probably a woman—who knows her way around a knife and isn't afraid to use one."
"And who has knowledge of human anatomy and knew Stan well enough to get that close to him," Ducky added. Gracy nodded.
"But what about the knife?" Palmer asked after a moment of silent contemplation. "You said it wasn't a kitchen knife, but what kind of knife was it?"
"Ah," Gracy said, a slight smile on her lips. "I bet there's someone in this building who can help us with that."