Armed with cups of coffee, Gibbs happily with one large, black and very strong, Curtis began to tell them about his last conversation with Doug Ritchey.
He called me around ten in the morning and said he needed to talk to me. I was up to my neck in corpses; he insisted it was an emergency. So I agreed to meet him at a coffee shop neither one of us usually goes to in a part of town neither one of us frequents. I thought it was all so very over the top. Until he turned up dead. He paused for a sip from his cup and looked around the room.
John, you remember that conversation we had, about something rotten in the department?Yeah, what about it?Leah found it. Only she's just found the tip of the iceberg and she doesn't even know it.So why tell me? Why not tell her?Because I think someone's on to her. Some really weird shit's been going on, especially since that whole forgery ring went sour.You mean that one that I sent some stuff over to NCIS for?Yeah, there was a lot wrong with that case from the get go. Leah said she had connections over there, so she thought maybe they could untangle it. Guess they did a pretty good job, but the wrong somebody must have overheard the conversation.So what, they figured out her whole set-up just from that?Don't know, but she's had somebody on her ever since. Strange things are going on in the office. Look, I'm trying to protect her. Take these for me will you? They're her files on who and what she suspects is going on. I took them from her desk early this morning.Doug, you're starting to sound just a little paranoid, here. You do realize that don't you?John, listen. I went through those files with her last week. Something started bothering me about them and I've been doing a little digging on my own. She's on the right track, but those can't be kept at the station anymore. I need to talk to her today, let her know what I found out.All right. I'll take these. Are you going to tell me what you found out?No. I think, until all the proof is in and safe and the parties dealt with, maybe it's safer if you don't know.I don't want to hear the word again. If you knew what I knew you'd say the same thing I am. Trust me, John. Take the files. I'm trying to keep Leah safe.I didn't hear from Doug for the rest of the day. I expected him to call me sometime that evening at the latest. He'd made it sound like talking to Leah was a priority and that holding onto the files was only temporary. When I found out the next morning that no one had seen or heard from Doug since he left the station at 9:15 Monday morning, all I could think of was getting Leah safe. That business at Pantheon Street was lucky. And I happened to know that Leah had been assigned the cold cases mainly because cold cases were all she'd been doing since the Perry thing. Curtis sighed and moved to sit down.