Larry Jackson would never forget the body he found in front of the Sands that cold day not so long ago. He never again visited the Sands. Indeed, he hadn't taken a single drink since. He had spent more time at home with his family, more time being a father to kids he had neglected, and more time enjoying life sober rather than drunk.
"Wow, the air really is fresher up here isn't it?" Larry asked his wife Rose.
"Yes honey, I've been telling you for months that camping really is relaxing."
"I know."
Rose had been trying to convince him for some time to take a camping trip with her. He kept pushing it off, saying he didn't want to go through a stressful camping trip full of bugs and lack of amenities he had grown accustomed to. But this was far different than he had imagined. The kids were at their grandparents house, and it was just the two of them alone in the woods, with fresh air and no one around for miles.
"I think I'm going to go for a hike."
Rose rolled her eyes at her husband. "Really getting into this aren't you?"
"When in Rome..."
"Yeah yeah, enjoy yourself."
Larry gave her a puzzled look. "You aren't coming?"
"Well if one of us wants to go for a hike, the other one has to actually set up the camp site. Pitching the tent was nice dear, but there's still other things to be done."
He missed the hint. "I'll help when I get back sweetie, I promise."
"Uh huh."
He smiled his most charming smile to her and laced up his hiking boots.
"Don't get lost out there Larry. It's called the wilderness for a reason."
It was his turn to roll his eyes dramatically. "Don't worry! I have the tracking senses of a jungle cat!"
With that he disappeared into the forest. An hour later he was starting to wonder how good the tracking senses of jungle cats were. He knew he wasn't lost, he could hear sounds far off in the distance that had to be man made, but every time he got close to them they seemed to be coming from another direction. Finally he got back on a path that seemed somewhat familiar. He followed it until he came to a small clearing that was not familiar. Here he pulled out his cell phone and waved it into the air trying to get any sort of reception. Nothing.
He grumbled something about hating camping and wandered back out into the woods. Again he found a path and followed it, but this time the results were quite different. He stopped short when he saw the ground in front of him stained with something red. At first he thought it might be paint, perhaps marking off the boundaries of property ownership. These yahoos in the boonies did a lot of crazy things.
"Holy shit!" He exclaimed as he walked further into the scene.
Blood was splattered everywhere. It was splashed against the trees around him and it pooled out into the dirt and mud. In the center of it all was a naked body, seemingly hacked and mutilated most viciously. Larry was too stunned to move at first, and was especially taken aback by what appeared to be totems and religious icons surrounding the body. He did not however notice the small aviator's wings sitting next to the body that designate their wearer as a United States naval pilot.
He fumbled with his cell phone as he got it out and was both relieved and slightly nervous to see that he did in fact have a faint signal on it. Just as last time, his first call was not to his worried wife.
-----
"Hey Ducky! Welcome back from across the pond."
Ducky smiled at Tony's lame attempt at British laden humor.
"Thank you Tony."
"How was Britain?"
"Lovely as usual. I had the opportunity while I was there to inspect the ruins of a 3rd century Roman fortification not too far from my home. The Romans really were fascinating in their time..."
"That's great Ducky! We're all glad to have you back!" Tony dodged.
Ducky shook his head and moved past the still stupidly grinning Tony to make for the elevator that led to his morgue. He used the stairs to get to the desks of his fellow team members, hoping to regale them with the things he had learned while on his vacation trip to his homeland. But if Tony was an indicator of their interest level, there wasn't much point in trying any further. He was just pushing the down button to the morgue when Gibbs charged into the room with his usual strong gait.
"Hold it there Ducky, we're all on our way out."
Ducky sighed. It looked like there would be no break between his vacation and his work.
"Where to Boss?"
"Put your boots on." Gibbs ordered Tony.
"Boots? There hasn't been snow on the ground for weeks."
Kate finally looked up from her desk to glare at him as she casually took boots out of the lower drawer in her desk.
"But I don't have boots here at the office." Tony whined.
Kate smiled at him. "Don't tell me you're worried about ruining your shoes?"
Tony smiled back sarcastically. "No. But then, it never occurred to me to keep a small shoe store in my desk. Must be a girl thing."
Kate flushed slightly red then marched behind Gibbs out of the office. Tony continued his smile, now gleefully at his undeclared victory for this round.
-----
It took awhile for them to get out to the site of the murder.
"My word." Ducky breathed.
He was the first to see the carnage on hand.
Blood was everywhere. It splattered against the trees and still pooled and ran slightly from the corpse in the center of the small grove. The trees were also marked with notches and symbols. Spent candles littered the ground with piles of sand and rocks around them.
The rest of the team slowly filtered onto the scene and Kate immediately began taking dozens of photographs. Tony wandered around peering at the symbols and the body, but this scene was far beyond the depth of his streetwise history. Gibbs too seemed to be at a loss.
"Ducky?" He called out questioningly.
"Well. It is clearly a ritualistic killing. These symbols, sacrificial candles, and the way the body was dismantled and cut apart is far more precise than any random killing, even for a brutal sociopath."
"A sacrificial ritual killing? When was the last time this kind of thing happened in the area?"
Tony rolled his eyes at Kate. "When was the last time something like this happened in the United States period?"
Ducky nodded to Tony. "Yes I think Tony is correct, this sort of killing never really took hold in America, with the exception of your big name psychotic serial killers."
"Always nice to be famous for something." Tony quipped.
Ducky grinned slightly but mostly ignored him and continued.
"No, this wasn't done by someone in it purely for the joy of killing, as so many wayward mentally challenged killers are. This was precise, old, and careful."
"What do you mean old?" Kate asked.
"This kind of pattern, this level of intricacy and the symbols. This isn't something he got out of a movie, and it isn't something he could have made up himself, unless he's a university professor of history. This is an old ritual. It even seems slightly familiar from some of my studies."
Ducky stood up and looked around, finally giving the trees their first real professional appraisal. Tony followed his gaze.
"Any idea what those symbols mean?" Tony asked.
Kate joined them while taking photographs of the trees. "They look like pictographs. Hieroglyphics?" Kate ventured.
Ducky nodded. "Yes I believe they are, excellent observation."
She beamed at the compliment.
"Yes these are definitely Egyptian hieroglyphs. I can't make out precisely what they say, I will need some of my books back at the lab, and perhaps Abby's computer contraptions to help decipher it."
Gibbs, who until now was content to sit back, soak up information and let his people work finally stepped in.
"Ducky, what was the actual cause of death?"
He bent down to examine the body closely, but shook his head.
"Impossible to tell from here. I'll have to get him back to the morgue and do a proper autopsy."
"What exactly are we dealing with? A bunch of crazy witches dressed in robes dancing around a bonfire?" Tony blurted out.
"No Tony, nothing so stereotypical. But this is clearly an occult killing, or to be more specific, a cult killing."
They looked around some more and bagged evidence. Soon the coroner found a way through the woods and reached the site to pick up the body.
"Who discovered the body? Please tell me it wasn't a group of cub scouts on a camping trip." Kate said with real concern.
"Worse maybe." Tony smiled to her.
"What's worse than little cub scouts finding a bloody corpse?"
"Little boys would probably thing it's cool. But our unfortunate camper, Larry Jackson, did not."
"Jackson. You don't mean the same guy who found that marine in front of the bar?"
"The same."
"How's he reacting to it?"
Tony and Kate both looked off to the side to see Larry Jackson talking to another NCIS lower level agent. He had a blank look on his face and appeared to be in a serious state of shock.
"Let's go." Gibbs cut into their useless chatter.
"Back to the office boss?"
"Until we can identify whoever this is, yes. We have to let Ducky and Abby do their thing."
-----
The next day they arrived at the office to find an excited Ducky and even more excited Abby.
"Well, out with it." Gibbs said impatiently.
Ducky moved to speak but Abby cut him off excitedly.
"I scanned the photos you took of the symbols on the trees into a database of ancient texts. There were five all together, and two of them matched hieroglyphics we have on record. The first was the hieroglyph for Osiris, and the second for Abydos. The other three had markings that are synonymous with other writings, but nothing actually used in ancient texts."
"Good job Abs, but what do they mean?"
"I believe I can answer that Jethro." Everyone settled back for a moment, preparing for the lengthy dissertation they expected to follow.
"Abydos was the ancient Egyptian funeral god. His placement at the site of the death means that our killer might actually of intended for that site to be the final burial site of the slain."
"Which means he wasn't expecting to get caught." Tony piped in.
"What criminal ever is?" Kate shot back.
"All of them expect to be pursued. And of course they all think they are smart enough to get away with whatever they did. But this guy expected no one to find the site, and if they found it expected them to leave it as is. He's a few girls short of a swimsuit issue."
"Tony is probably right. The site is of religious importance to him. However, the first hieroglyph Abby mentioned is more important than the second."
"Osiris?" Kate questioned.
"Yes. It signifies our murderer as a follower of the Cult of Osiris, or at least someone who follows their rituals down to the last gruesome detail. The three symbols we cannot identify are most likely indicators of our deceased's akh, ba, and ka."
Practically everyone in the room raced to speak first. Gibbs beat them to it.
"Ducky..."
"I know Jethro. Egyptian mythology is rather confusing at times. Whereas the more well known Greek and Roman mythos, where gods and goddesses are in charge of one or two things and it stays that way, Egyptian gods often warred with one another and stole each other's powers. The akh, ba and ka however refer to the Egyptian afterlife. Each represents a different part of the person, their soul, their unchanging form in the afterlife, their personality, so on and so forth."
"Does that help us at all?" Gibbs asked.
Abby answered that. "I have one of the lab computers running permutations on the symbols. Hieroglyphics are combinations of sets, much in the same way words are combinations of letters. Two different parts of a picture can be combined in different ways to form different words. The problem with these, are that while the base symbols are all real, they were never combined in such a way in known Egyptian texts."
"Meaning?" Gibbs was getting slightly impatient with this history lesson.
"It may help us and it may not. If the computer comes up with a halfway accurate translation of the three symbols, we'll have a lot of insight into how the killer viewed his victim. Other than that, it's back to the usual forensic lab work to gather the rest."
"I think we forgot something."
Everyone looked at Tony with a slightly pained glare. It wasn't often Tony caught something everyone else missed.
"What might that be?" Kate smirked.
"Identity of the victim? It's hard to go question base personnel if we don't know what base to go to."
Gibbs raised his eyebrows at Ducky.
"I can't tell you with any certainty, I need another day for DNA and dental records to be checked. But I can give you some basics. The victim was male, 6'2, maybe two hundred ten pounds or so. And the body was fresh. This murder happened within ten to fourteen hours of when Mr. Jackson found the body."
Gibbs wasted no time in taking command of the situation.
"Alright. Abby, Ducky, I want to know the specific cause of death. Kate, check Naval logs and see what carrier groups are home. Tony check with the local Naval bases and air stations. Both of you check to see if they are missing any male pilots meeting the general description Ducky gave."
"Do I need boots this time?" Tony joked, looking at Kate.
"You will if you don't keep your big mouth shut."
Kate smiled back at him.
"Get moving people."
