"Relatively normal."
"Same here."
"An abnormal amount of The Flash comics, but other than that it was spit shine normal."
"What's an abnormal amount for you McGee?" Tony poked.
"I wouldn't go throwing the word abnormal around like that if I were you Dinozzo." Gibbs interjected.
The consensus was pretty much the same on all the rooms.
"I thought Caufield's room would shed at least some light on a motive. Beloved figures aren't murdered for no reason." Gibbs thought aloud.
"Maybe we could set Abby loose in there. She has all those gadgets and everything. Five seconds of waving those little things around and I bet she has an answer." Tony suggested.
"He's right. Caufield is a smart guy, maybe the reason he was murdered is right in front of us but it's hidden so in the event of his death we'd find it." Kate agreed.
"Get her down here," Gibbs ordered.
A half hour later Abby was in Caufield's room at the SEAL base, followed by a large train of cases and trunks full of equipment.
"Find us something Abby. Anything at all. Use McGee, Kate and Tony as you like." Gibbs commanded.
Abby's face blossomed into its famous pretty smile speckled with a dash of feral innocence. She beckoned for her three new worker bees to follow her and then they got to work. She certainly left no stone unturned. She used the tried and true search method first, the infamous black light with the windows blacked out. But that revealed nothing, other than a scrupulously cleaned floor that was entirely clear of dust.
"No one has been in this room to clean it for hours. How could the floor be this clean?" Kate questioned.
"So the guy was a neat freak, is that really a big deal?" McGee returned.
"It might be, but let's overlook it for the moment and keep looking for more." Gibbs ended the discussion on cleanliness.
Next Abby moved into more exotic search tools. She brushed and layered every surface in the room with special chemicals to try and preserve fingerprints, which she later removed and put on plastic films for later checking. Tony meanwhile was using a portable x-ray machine to see through the walls and panels of the furniture to locate any hidden stashes to keep evidence. Kate was going over the room with a cathode ray emitter, and McGee was hacking into the laptop sitting on Caufield's desk.
"Why can't they have these things at my doctor's office?" Tony said pointing to the machine he was holding.
"Probably because you don't want to bombard your body with that much x-ray radiation as often as you'd like. That machine works by pounding a surface with x-ray energy to illuminate shadows beyond the visible light spectrum. They are working on similar systems for airport security, but you don't want that thing casually aimed at you for long periods of time." Abby answered.
An hour after they started, they were about ready to give up when Tony spotted something. Staring straight down at the floor, looking through his x-ray scanner he motioned for everyone to come over.
"I think I have something."
He knelt down and knocked on the floor in three places, all sounded normal. But a fourth and fifth knock produced hollow sounds. Tony smiled and jabbed a penknife into the cracks around the floorboards, prying them up. The space that he opened up was a foot deep, and several feet across.
"Nice extra storage space he's keeping here. What is that?" Kate said, pointing to a blinking machine tucked into the space.
Abby nudged her way into the mix and nodded when she saw it.
"It's an air filter." She said, reaching down to shut it off. A humming sound that they hadn't previously realized hearing suddenly died and the room was even quieter. "He ran it under the floor boards and connected it to heating ducts that he blocked off from the central aeration system. Clever. It kept all the dust from accumulating on the ground."
"Why would he do that?" Kate asked.
"Because he's a smart guy," Gibbs answered before Abby could. "He knew a black light would be easy to wave around here, and that anyone would find the seam in the floor where he has this stuff stashed."
"Okay, so what's he hiding in there?" McGee wondered impatiently.
Tony reached into the space and pulled out a small metal box about the size of a piece of paper. He opened it easily, it had no lock. Inside was a single leaf of paper.
"A blank piece of paper?" Kate said incredulously.
Tony turned it over to find it gray on the opposite side.
"Is this some kind of SEAL code? Gray on one side and white on the other?" McGee asked.
"None that I'm familiar with." Gibbs answered. "Abby?"
She peered at it curiously. But she shook her head just as quickly. "I don't know. I'll take it back to the lab with the other stuff and give it a once over with my toys there. But it just looks like a piece of paper."
"Appearances can be deceiving. Give it everything you have." Gibbs told her.
She smiled. "No problem Gibbs."
With that they packed up the equipment and called it a day.
-----
The next day they entered the office to find Abby asleep at her lab desk. They woke her gently and she snapped awake to find Kate, Tony and McGee in front of her, the latter of the group holding a 7-11 cup out to her. She took it gratefully and sipped away until she had the sleep cleared from her eyes.
"You have anything for us?"
The three of them crowded around her like kids on Christmas morning. It was clear the next step in their investigation might very well hinge on the answers she could provide. With no obvious suspects, no motive, and only a clean murder weapon available, they were fast running out of options.
"Of course I do." She said, beaming.
She pulled out the sheet of paper from what looked to them like a scanner and handed it to Tony with a magnifying glass. He held it to the piece of paper, squinted, then shrugged and handed it to Kate.
"You see anything?" Abby asked.
"No..." Tony and Kate answered.
"Good, no reason why you should."
"Abby..." Kate said with a warning tone.
"I used the most powerful microscope I had to see if maybe there was something written on the paper, but maybe it was just too small to read. But I could still only see gray. When I scanned it onto my computer and tried to magnify it there, the computer wouldn't render the image. That got me curious, so I requisitioned a scanning electron microscope to try and take an even closer look. SEMs are a hundred times more powerful, and could read the declaration of independence written on a grain of sand if you could put it there."
"NCIS bought a scanning electron microscope last night just because you asked?" Kate said with some doubt.
"No they didn't, so I visited a friend of mine in the science department at a local university and borrowed theirs. That's when I found this."
She tapped a few keys on her computer and a hazy gray image appeared on the screen. What looked to Tony and Kate like gibberish flowed across the screen in an unending stream.
"What is it?" Tony asked.
"Documents. There's a hundred pages of twelve point font single spaced documents here. And you'll never believe what it says."
"Wait, how did he fit a hundred pages worth of stuff onto one piece of paper? I don't care who you are, you can't write that small." Tony interjected.
"You're write, the human hand could never do that. But a Focused Ion Beam could."
"A what?!" Kate asked with her eyebrows askew.
"Focused Ion Beam milling lasers can draw hundreds of little smiley faces over a human hair. They are incredibly accurate and the beam is microscopic, it only shaves a few microns of material off of what it hits. The words on the page are jammed together without spaces or punctuation and no spaces between the lines."
"Where does a SEAL get something like that?"
"No idea. But that's what did it, and there's your evidence. The fingerprints I pulled are all his, if anyone else has been in the room recently they were careful about it. I'll try and get the words off here and in some readable form over the next couple hours."
"Give us a quick summary. What is it?" Kate asked somewhat excitedly.
"Basically it's a list of parachuting accidents that have happened all over the armed forces. They are all the same parachute and come form the same company, AerialNation. Ironically the chute that killed Caufield wasn't the same ones he claims caused all these other parachuting accidents. But that's what he claims."
"Well there's your motive." Kate said.
"Yeah, but who would gain from stopping him from going public about a scandal that really only hurts AerialNation?" Tony asked.
"Let's find out."
They turned and saw Gibbs standing at the doorway.
"How long have you been standing there?" Tony asked.
"Long enough to know you've been standing around talking too much Dinozzo. We have work to do, let's go."
Tony, Kate, and the silent bringer of 7-11 beverages McGee exited the room with Gibbs standing just inside the door. Just before he turned to leave he looked at Abby and smiled.
"Good work Abs."
"Thanks Gibbs."
-----
The short drive to the SEAL base was not a quiet one.
"I think we need to act like we know more than we do and go after that new kid that just joined up. The other SEALs won't have been able to get him to clam up as well as the old guys. He'll be easiest to crack." McGee jumped right in.
Gibbs looked back at him from the driver's seat and smiled. "Well done McGee, let's see how you handle it."
McGee got a startled look in his eyes. "Who me? Isn't that the sort of thing you or Kate should do?"
"Hey!" Tony said, in a mock hurt tone.
"It's your ball, run with it." Gibbs ordered. "Just don't drop it."
Ten minutes later McGee again alone in a room with Ensign Bardok, again with Kate, Gibbs and Tony in his ear by way of listening device.
"Ensign Bardok, something you said in our last interview troubled me."
"Sir?"
"What exactly is the top ground speed of the Flash?" McGee asked deadly serious.
In the other room Kate hissed into Gibbs' ear off the microphone. "Gibbs!"
"Just wait a minute Kate, let's see where he goes with it."
She nodded but her eyes and tone of voice clearly showed a measure of distrust for the course of action. All eyes turned back to the television screen showing them what was happening in the room with McGee and Bardok.
"Oh I don't know, if you mean the second Flash, as most everyone is referring to when it comes to the DC comics timeline, probably something like seven hundred miles per hour."
"Certainly fast enough to run across water or create a cyclone to save falling people."
"Exactly." Bardok said, settling into a comfortable groove.
"Remember the one episode of Justice League where Batman's plane got shot down and he and Robin had to bail out, but their parachutes tore and Flash had to spin a cyclone to help them down?"
"Sure." His voice wavered slightly at the thought of a parachute failing. "I wish he'd been there yesterday to save Jimmy, I mean, Lieutenant Caufield."
"And all the others who had the same accident in the last couple months?"
"Yeah them too."
Bardok's eyes snapped up to full alertness as soon as the words were out of his mouth, only realizing what he said after it was too late. Kate stood with her mouth open in the other room, Gibbs wore a proud smirk on his face.
"It's alright Ensign. We know all about the accidents with the parachutes, AerialNation, and Caufield's part in the cover up."
Gibbs shook his head now. "Well now's he's stretching it a bit, but let's see where it takes him."
Bardok was sputtering now, trying to answer without giving anything away, but unable to stop the words from pouring out of his mouth. "Wait there a minute! Jimmy wasn't part of any cover up! He's been saying since I got here that we should go public with what happened, that the families of the men who died deserve to know what really happened."
"Then why didn't he?" McGee pressed.
"Because Commander Innis ordered everyone to silence about the whole thing. He said the brass was taking care of the whole thing, and the best we could do was shut up about it. But Jimmy told me a couple weeks ago that the whole thing had been going on too long now, and they weren't doing anything about it."
"Who else did he tell that to?"
"I don't know." He paused for a moment, gathering his thoughts. "Jimmy was a great guy you gotta understand that. I never saw him do the wrong thing the entire time we jumped together, he was always right, and always did what he thought was the honorable thing. He would have gone public soon if he hadn't of died in the accident."
There was anger in Bardok's voice now, mixed with bitterness.
"I think that's all I need from you for now Ensign. You can go back to your duties."
"Thank you sir."
With that, Bardork left the room and McGee went to meet with Gibbs and the others.
"Great work McGee." Gibbs said then turned to Kate and Tony. "You two could learn a thing or two from him."
McGee was beaming with pride until he turned to see the withering glares on Tony's and Kate's faces.
"Well, now we have a motive, a murder weapon, and what looks like a nice lead to a suspect. I say its time we paid a visit to AerialNation." Gibbs said.