Crime Scene Two
Gibbs didn't allow any lagging. He and his team speed walked from their headquarters and followed a map to the Astronomy tower. Along the walls of the spiral staircase was another message, "Unlike last year, no one is safe."
A girl in the Hogwarts black robes lay in a pool of her own blood. A cut so deep one could see the bone stretched from the inside of her elbow to her wrist on both arms. Her skin was marble colored from all the blood loss. Her left leg stuck out at an extremely odd angle, suggesting it had been broken.
"Damn!" Tony said, looking at one of the gashes.
"Ziva, go find the writings on the wall," Gibbs began ordering.
"We already saw it, Gibbs!" Ziva reasoned.
"Why would some kid come up to the highest tower in the school, which is used for Astronomy, when it's sunny out? Something else tipped him off! Go find it!" Gibbs tried not to shout. Ziva hurried away.
"McGee, photos! DiNozzo, sketch!" Gibbs threw the camera at McGee, who barely caught it.
Ducky and Jimmy came close to five minutes later.
"Oh my…" Ducky said sadly. "What is this poor girl's name?"
"I don't know…" Gibbs said with realization. He pulled out his phone and dialed. "Jenny!" he said after a pause, "Did you catch the name of the victim?"
"You didn't?" Jenny's voice said fuzzily on the phone.
"What is it?!"
"Pansy Parkinson. She's from Slytherin. Third year. What do you know so far?"
"Why, you filling in SecNav or Dumbledore?"
"Both!" Jenny said. "Cause and time?"
"Cause, bled to death. Her wrists were slashed wide open. Time? Duck?"
Ducky looked at his watch, then the liver probe in his hand. "Between 2:45 and 3:00 AM. But I can't be too sure. We have to get her back."
"Damn," Jenny said under her breath. "We were still up…"
"Find out where the school's patrol was." Gibbs hung up.
Ziva came back soon after. "There was another message. It said, 'Sleeping Beauty sleeps in the tallest tower…' I got a sample and took photographs." Ziva showed Gibbs and then put the sample in her back pack.
Ducky and Jimmy put the young girl into a body bag after McGee finished getting all the pictures he needed. Blood dripped from her robes onto the tower floor. The bag was lifted onto a stretcher and the ME and his assistant left.
"I don't think there's much staging we can do without Ducky and Abby's findings," Tony began. "There's no way someone would let someone else slash their wrists unless they were drugged or incapacitated in some other way."
"Block off the tower entrance. Let's go," Gibbs said heavily. The team left in very low spirits.
Gibbs stormed into the Room of Requirement. His team came in right after him and went straight to their desks. McGee uploaded photos from the cameras and sent them to Abby's computer.
"What are you doing here?" Gibbs growled at another robed figure in the room. Snape had joined his coworker in observing the agents.
"I, Agent Gibbs," Snape said coldly, "am the Head of Slytherin, the House Miss Parkinson was in. I am the one who will be speaking to her parents, and I, not Professor McGonagall, am the one who needs answers right now."
"Need answers?" Gibbs snapped back. "Join the club! McGee! Put up the message on the plasma!" Gibbs beckoned the two professors into the bull pen. McGee had done as he was told. "Unlike last year, no one is safe." The message written in blood blared on the screen, taunting everyone. "Do you know what this means?"
"Parkinson was a pureblood…" Snape said under his breath.
"Last year there was a series of attacks on students by a creature, a basilisk, left by one of the Hogwarts founders. But it only attacked those of 'impure blood,'" McGonagall explained.
"What is a pureblood?" Gibbs demanded.
"Professors Dumbledore and McGonagall have failed to fill you in on everything that might be relevant, I see," Snape hissed. "A pureblood is someone of complete magical back ground. Their parents were both a witch and wizard, as were their grand parents and great grand parents, so on and so forth. A Muggle-born, often referred to as a Mudblood by idiotic children, is a witch or wizard born to Muggle parents. I believe you've met Miss Granger. A half-blood is one who comes from mixed back ground."
"The alternate term for Muggle-borns is considered highly offensive and is not to be tolerated!" McGonagall reminded Snape forcibly.
"Pardon me for doing what you should have, Minerva, and telling them everything that might help!" Snape snarled.
Gibbs walked over to his desk and wrote something down on a piece of paper. "When are the Parkinsons going to get here?"
"They'll be here far sooner than the McDonalds," McGonagall informed.
"And they will not want to see you," Snape added. "As said, the Parkinsons are pureblood, and very proud of it. They will not like the idea of Muggles handling their daughter."
"They'll have to deal with it. Tony, I want to know when they get here!" Gibbs stalked off towards the stairs and began up them.
Abby popped out of her lab a moment later and looked around. "Where's Gibbs?"
"MTAC, I think…" Tony guessed.
"Um… ok." Abby shook her head slightly and held up a piece of paper. "Do you want to know what this says?"
"What does it say, Abby?" Tony humored her.
"I was running the blood from the message Ziva found. Pull it up, would you, McGee?" The other message popped up on the screen. "Sleeping Beauty sleeps in the tallest tower." Abby continued, "So I started the test, and then I started getting results really quickly, which, of course, confused me. DNA tests are supposed to take hours. The machine recognized the patterns. That message," Abby pointed at the screen, "was written in McDonald's blood, not Parkinson's."
"So… the killer saved some of McDonald's blood?" McGee suggested.
"Yeah, good guess, Probie! That is, unless, the killer is a ninja and snuck in here at night and got some more!" Tony said in tones that suggested his colleague needed to think before speaking.
McGonagall was beginning to think that the churning of her stomach would become permanent.
"What about the other one, the message in the tower?" Tony asked the scientist.
"I haven't gotten anything on it yet, and I can't run Parkinson's blood until Ducky gives me a sample, which he says is a little bit difficult. How much did she lose?"
"Uhh…" McGee glanced over at the professors standing in the middle of the bull pen.
Abby pushed McGee's chair out of the way of his computer. She took the images off the big screen and began flipping through them on the computer's. "Damn!" she whispered, "This is one sick, cruel son of a bitch."
"What if the first message was written to draw someone up to the tower?" Ziva suggested. "Put them both up," she requested. The two images popped up. "Ah, see? The drips on the first message are longer than the second. And the second messages writing is thicker. The killer had more ink for that one."
"Excuse me," McGonagall interrupted, "I think I might throw up!" She left quickly and headed up the stairs, retreating to the Director's office.
"How about you, Professor Snape?" Abby questioned. "Feeling a little green?"
"I have a stronger stomach than most of the staff," Snape said evenly. "Please, continue."
Tony shrugged and picked up where they'd left off, "But the killer wrote 'Sleeping Beauty,' Ziva. How would he know it would be a girl that found it?"
"Perhaps he lured her there, Tony!"
"He didn't really plan ahead with McDonald and Brown, why would he now?"
"Actually," McGee cut in, "he might have planned on McDonald, just maybe not Brown. Think about it, he managed to corner one big kid into a cleaning closet, out of common sight. That requires thinking ahead. All he needed was a way to keep Brown quiet."
"For all we know, McGee, McDonald led the killer to the closet. He tried to hide his girlfriend, yes?" Ziva argued. "Perhaps the killer was closer behind him than he thought."
"But," McGee began, "if he'd planned on rape, why not bring a drug of some sort?"
"How do you know he didn't, Agent McGee?" Snape added his own two cents.
"Well," Tony said to the professor, "the girl was covered head to toe in bruises. That doesn't usually happen if someone is unconscious."
"Perhaps she was beaten?" Snape suggested.
"No," Abby replied. "If she was beaten there'd be a lot more damage. Her bruises were from trying to get away."
Snape nodded and kept his mouth shut for now.
"I want to believe he planned for two," Ziva stated. "If he did not, it means he is even smarter and faster on his feet than we think."
Ducky came out of his morgue. "Before any of you ask, Miss Parkinson was fortunate enough to not suffer a horrible death as well as the fate of Miss Brown. However, she was in very much pain. Her left leg was fractured just below the knee."
"That takes a lot of force!" Abby objected. "Nothing else was found up in the tower, was there?"
"Nope," Tony responded.
"There isn't much of a bruise, she was killed soon after her leg was broken, but if I were you, I would go check that tower for loose rocks. Preferably before Gibbs returns from where ever he may be?"
"McGee, with me!" Tony commanded, throwing on his NCIS cap and grabbing his backpack.
McGee hastened to catch up with his colleague.
"I'm going to get back to work," Abby announced.
"Did you find anything else interesting, Ducky?" Ziva asked as she headed back towards her desk.
"No, I did not," Ducky admitted. "Only the bruise."
"What makes you think it was made by one of the stones?"
"The bruise is very oddly shaped, and deeper in some parts than others, suggesting a rough surface. I don't know what else it could be."
Gibbs came back downstairs and walked through the bull pen, headed for the lab. "When the Parkinsons get here, which should be rather soon according to Dumbledore, Professor Snape, I want to talk to them. I don't care how you get them up here, just get them here."
Snape left the room, presumably to meet the Parkinsons.
Ziva looked at the ME. Ducky only sighed, shook his head, and retreated to his morgue.
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