Wanting for Independence: Chapter 21
McGee was just finishing a phone call to make an appointment to meet with Kaseem Khalid's supervisor at Booz Allen Hamilton when Kim Tomblin—Cunningham—emerged from the elevator. "You okay?" he asked, concerned. Her hair was in a disheveled ponytail and she looked paler than she had when he picked her up at the airport.
"Fine," she said, her voice short. She crossed in front of his desk to the small area on the other side of the partition from the probie desk and pulled something from her rucksack, which she had unceremoniously dropped on top of the desk when she arrived. She walked back toward him, a drink in hand. "Ducky and Jimmy and a Dr. Gracy are working on the knife wound now," she reported.
"What are you drinking?" he asked.
"Ensure shake. Why?"
"Where'd you get it?"
"My rucksack," she said slowly. "What's with the questions?"
"You carried that on."
"McGee, start making sense or I'm going back to San Diego."
"I was just wondering how you got it through security."
"I'm a fucking federal agent, McGee. I don't go through security, because flashing my SIG at airports tends to scare people. Am I scaring your fucking little probie?"
McGee glanced to his right to see Ruiz looking at Kim with wide eyes. "Looks like it, yeah."
"Good. No reason for me not to have fun on this trip." She took a drink of her shake, the barest hint of a smile on her lips. "They said they'll look for evidence of recent travel to Africa and any evidence of playing with chemical warfare agents. It'll be tomorrow at the earliest before they can get any of that." She took another drink. "They're also looking for evidence for or against Khalid being Carter's killer."
"What?" Ruiz asked in surprise. "Why would they look for that?"
McGee watched as Kim gave him a puzzled look before she turned to Ruiz. "Because we don't have any evidence that he's not," she said slowly. "We have a dead analyst who was looking into Al-Shabaab doing something that they're not supposed to be doing for the Fourth of July, a dead Somali engineer, and SIGINT that says that Al-Shabaab was playing with chemical warfare with the help of an engineer. Why the fuck wouldn't we suspect that engineer of foul play?" Ruiz didn't have a response to that, continuing to stare at Kim with wide eyes, and McGee sighed. He was going to have to have a talk with the probie about how to act around outside experts. Especially outside experts who poked at people for fun.
Must have been a Marine thing.
Kim apparently lost interest with Ruiz, because she turned back to McGee as she took another drink from the shake in her hand. "Do you have a white board?" she asked.
"We have the plasma," he said slowly.
"Well, that's not going to work, unless you want me writing on it." She finished the drink and looked around the office. "What about recycle bins? You have those?"
"Break room."
She walked off, presumably to throw away the bottle, and while she was gone, Ruiz gave him a look that didn't take much to interpret, but before she could say anything, Kim came back into the bullpen. "I just remembered that I have something as good as a white board," she said, leaning over her rucksack. She held up her tablet. "Can you sync it to the plasma?"
"Sure," McGee said, interested to see what she had in mind. It only took a minute for him to connect the tablet to the plasma via the office wifi.
"Thanks," she said as she took the small device back. "So, we have three cases," she said as she brought up a blank page on the tablet and used a stylus to split it into thirds. "Carter's murder, Khalid's murder, and whatever is going to be going on for the Fourth of July." She labeled each of the sections on her tablet, the words showing up on the plasma screen. "Let's go in chronological order. What do we know about Carter's murder?"
"It was between 1900 and 2300 on Saturday night," Ruiz said promptly.
"Suspects? Did you ever find the boyfriend?"
"Still on the list of things to do," McGee explained. "There are twenty-one Jake or Jacob Clarks who work in hospitals in the tristate area."
"Sounds like probie work," Kim observed, nodding toward Ruiz. "Enjoy the cold calls. I know I did when I was a probie. What else do we have on Carter? Any forensics?"
"Abby got DNA, but it doesn't match anyone in the database."
"She'll be able to compare that with Khalid's data. We might know by the end of the day if he's her killer or not."
"By the end of the day?" Ruiz echoed in dismay. Kim frowned before turning to McGee.
"Where'd you find her, anyway?"
"I have a master's degree in accounting," Ruiz said indignantly.
"Great. I'll send you my tax returns. What the fuck does that have to do with solving crime? Do you have any experience with forensics? Or maybe biology lab in college? I'm guessing not much, because if you did, you'd know that extracting DNA from cells and comparing it to DNA you extracted from other cells takes at least eight hours. And no amount of skill or hovering by Gibbs can make that go much faster. Don't you have a junior field agent?" she asked, directing the question at McGee
"He's down in evidence, looking through the case files from Metro PD on Khalid's murder," the senior field agent explained. "Do you want me to get him?"
"Nah, he's fine. Maybe he'll be able to help us fill in the Khalid column when he's done. Let's skip ahead to shenanigans on the Fourth. What do we have? Other than random SIGINT and wild conjecture."
"That's about it," McGee said with a sigh. He knew Kim wasn't thrilled about getting called to DC on so little and wished he had more to offer, but he didn't. "From what we have from our analysts here and from Tony, Al-Shabaab has—or maybe had—an engineer who had a location for them. If Khalid was that engineer, it was probably one of the projects he was working on."
"Since we're already playing the wild conjecture game, we'll continue," Kim said, writing 'Khalid projects?' on her tablet. "Do we know what he was working on?"
"I'm going to meet with his supervisor in three hours," McGee said. "I'll get a list of every project he was involved in since he started working there."
"They were interested in the makings of mustard gas as well, right?" Kim asked. "So we'll want to focus on any projects with a potential distributing method. Impure mustards, which is usually what the bad guys deal in, smells pretty bad, so indoor distribution is less likely—if a building smells like rotten eggs or old mustard, you're going to leave. It also does most of its damage by droplets contacting the skin, so fountains would be a concern. They have the mechanism already to shoot the stuff out and into a crowd, especially if we have windy conditions."
"How do you know this stuff?" Ruiz blurted out, her eyes wide. McGee was really going to have to have a talk with her.
"Figuring out how the bad guys want to kill us has been my job for my entire adult life," Kim replied. "I bet McGee is even better at it. He writes it into fiction that people keep buying."
McGee winced; the Thom E. Gemcity identity wasn't exactly known to his new teammates, and if what had happened when his old teammates found out was any indication, it was best to keep it from them as long as possible. He was getting better at coming up with names for his characters, so with any luck, they wouldn't find out that it was based on them. Not that he had to worry about that with Ruiz; she hadn't been around long enough to make it into a book, and if Kim decided to report back to Gibbs or Vance on the level of intelligence of her questions, she might not make it to the next case. "Is there anything we can put in the Khalid column?" he asked to change the subject.
"Time of death," Kim said. "I got that from Ducky this morning." She recorded the hours on Monday evening to her list. "And cause of death." She put the word 'pithing' immediately below that. "Ducky really loves pithing, in case anyone is wondering. He could probably talk to you about it for a couple of hours."
"There aren't many topics Ducky couldn't talk about for a number of hours," McGee pointed out.
"True," Kim agreed. The chime of the elevator got everyone's attention, and they all turned to see Sonja Gracy step out, still in scrubs but without the other autopsy garb.
"Is he around?" she asked, directing the question at McGee.
"I haven't seen him in a while," he replied apologetically. She sighed and rolled her eyes.
"I'm surprised," she said dryly. "Okay. Abby is working the particulars as far as the blade, but what I can tell you from the autopsy is that you're looking for someone between sixty-six and sixty-nine inches tall, probably right handed, not necessarily with a lot of upper body strength. Doesn't take much to kill somebody by shoving a knife into the base of the skull. I doubt there'll be much in the way of DNA evidence. Jimmy, Ducky, and I are all going to be checking slides for evidence of recent parasitic infections, but we didn't see anything on gross examination. Like Ducky said, the schistomiasis scarring on the bladder is probably from a pretty old infection. Ducky'll be writing the report. Questions?"
"Are you really moving to Germany?" McGee blurted out before he could stop himself.
"Yes, but maybe not until I promote in December," Gracy replied. "We'll see how the cards fall. If you see Gibbs any time soon, tell him he can get the particulars on the autopsy from Ducky." She gave them a tight smile before turning around the way she came, disappearing into the elevator.
"Is she sleeping with Gibbs?" Kim asked once the elevator doors closed.
"Why do you ask?" McGee asked, wondering if she was really able to figure that out just by that one conversation.
"Women's intuition," Kim replied. "And a little bit of pity, to be honest." McGee had to check to make sure Gibbs wasn't standing behind them, because it was for lines like that that he usually appeared out of thin air. Not this time, which was good for Kim, although he doubted she cared much what Gibbs thought of her. "Okay, back to work. We have three cases to solve. And we're down to a week to go for one of them, or we're going to be solving it the hard way. With an attack we didn't manage to anticipate."