Hidden Enemy

Disclaimer: I don´t own any characters or anything

Summary: Someone attacks Kate, almost killing her. Why is her blood found on Gibbs´ shirt and just why is his DNA under her nails?

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4- By the book

They had worked with this whiteboard a lot when a case seemed complex or they wanted to rule out anything. "So, let´s say he left at 1 am. That would give him an hour before she was approximately attacked. So he would have had time to get there before her, right?" McGee said and checked the protocol from the interview with the first witness again. "That girl said her car was up the driveway and the sedan was behind it..."

Tony frowned slightly and snatched the paper from him. "Means that she was there first, right?" He said and scratched his head. "That´s just too odd for Gibbs -he´s about the most rational person on this planet. At least as long as he has coffee. I´m either getting old or this is too much for me." He muttered as he felt a slight headache.

"You sound like Gibbs sometimes, you know that?" Abby said silently and smiled a bit. The fax machine started to beep and something a page was printed out. She walked over and looked at it, frowning. "That´s the blood work from the hospital -same result I got. They can´t identify it either, saying it´s either a common cold medication or something that´s volatile and therefore leaving a wrong signal in the analysis." She said. "Gibbs never takes cold meds -he never has a cold..."

Tony put his head onto the desk and tried to sort his thoughts. It was no use if they tried to rule out anything that would count against him in the first place before checking it. "This is not working... let´s just try to be professional about this. If this was just two people who are not our friends, we would be doing this differently. Don´t look at me like that, Abbs. I know it´s not easy to turn off our emotions, but we have to try." He said and took a bite from the chocolate. Normally, he loved chocolate, but today it tasted like sand. Tony kept wondering what made him talk like that.

Abby smiled a bit. "I´m trying, okay? It´s just not really easy to work a case where your best friend was almost killed and the only suspect is your boss." She replied and tossed an empty caf-pow cup into the trash can. Gibbs was more than just her boss, but she wasn´t going to tell them about the past they shared. Both of them had made a vow never to talk about it again and especially Abby didn´t like those memories. On one hand, he had saved her life, but on the other hand, she had lost her whole family at once. She put those thoughts off and tried to concentrate on the task ahead.

"We should do this by the book. Probie, that´s your department, I´d say. Let´s hear something." Tony said after looking around for a moment. He hadn´t done anything by the book ever, in fact, he had hardly touched the textbook at all after graduating. It had worked out just fine until now, but this case was so different he wished he had not burned his old textbook along with other things after getting the job at the Baltimore PD.

"We should go check both cars for traces, then trace back suspect and victim to their last known location, which would be the office and the parking lot. We need to check those places for evidence, get all witnesses in for another interrogation and try to find out what happened when before going back to the whereabouts of suspect and witness." McGee said, still remembering the chapter on scene management from the textbook. He had only been out in the field for a few months now and still did a lot by the book. The rest of the team had developed their own method to solve cases, but he hadn´t gotten there yet.

Dinozzo just nodded and walked out of the lab, back up into the bullpen. He picked up his backpack and pulled out gloves. "I´ll take the office and the trash from last night. You got the parking lot and the surroundings." He told McGee, who was surprised by the fact that he didn´t get to search the trash can. Normally, Tony would have done anything to humiliate him by assigning him to the trash.

After searching the parking lot for almost an hour, McGee returned to the side entrance which they usually used. Main entrance was too far from the parking area and they didn´t bother to make that extra way. He was about to walk back into the building when he noticed something on the ground. It was a piece of cloth, looked like silk and he was about to dismiss it as just that, but then he remembered that they were looking for anything unusual. It could be nothing or it could be the one piece of evidence proving a frame-up. He picked it up and put it into an evidence bag, then returned to the office. Dinozzo was talking on the phone, so he just waited. "What you got there, probie?" He heard his colleagues voice after a moment.

"Some cloth, looks like silk or something similar. It was out near the side entrance. Nothing else except for that though. I´ll have Abby run a check on it." He explained and got a nod. "Who was on the phone?"

"Just Ducky. Kate´s condition is still critical. She lost a lot of blood and remains unconscious. Gibbs is awake again, but still not fit for another interrogation. Keeps saying that he doesn´t remember anything. I´m bound to believe him -not only because he´s our boss. Nothing in the trash, nothing around here either. I have both cars brought in later on for a check -police is done with them, but except for the blood in Kate´s car they found nothing unusual. Abby will check everything again, you know how they work at the PD." Tony said and sighed. They were picking up pieces right now and from the experience he had in this field, this investigation could take days if not weeks. It was time they didn´t have. If Kate died, Gibbs would be charged with murder instead of attempted murder, which was a huge difference.

He started to hate this case -not only because of who was involved. There were so many pieces of evidence pointing straight at Gibbs. In his whole career, Tony had never seen a crime that had been so straight forward and that was odd to his mind. Of course, there was a possibility that Gibbs was guilty, but somehow he wasn´t ready to give in to that yet. There had to be more than they saw at the moment. It was just a gut feeling though.

Both men went out for some coffee and then returned to the office, taking the elevator to the lab. "Anything new, Abbs?" Tony asked, handing her a large cup of caf-pow he had picked up before coming to the lab. She took the cup and shook her head, making her pigtails dance a bit. He had sent the cloth down to her before, but it still sat on the desk, unopened.

Abby looked at the bag and finally opened it. She pulled a face and held the bag away from her face. "Wow... that´s disgusting..." She said and felt a bit lightheaded for a moment. "That´s really odd..." Abby shook the strange feeling off and started to cut the cloth up for further analysis. "Oh, I got the blood results from two months ago -just about what you would expect from Gibbs. Too much coffee, too much stress, but this one peak wasn´t there." She pointed at the third peak in the analysis diagram that was still displayed on the screen.