Disclaimer: Mrs Turner-Padalecki and I don't own NCIS or Supernatural. But I own the freaky poet-murderer.: psychotic giggle:.

A/N: I apologise for how long I took for this chapter to be done… I've got some weird disease that prevents me from putting pen to paper… I have story-commitment issues. So don't hate me too much.

Re DiNozzo's cane: Tony is not completely helpless, he isn't as bad as House, the cane is just support, and Sam is like his own personal Probie. Just to clear that up. I've also done away with the bazillion ellipses.

"This is one twisted son-of-a-bitch." Gibbs said and he eyed Sam's photos of the crime scene. The rips in the lace were even clearer in the shadowed pictures in Gibbs' hand.

"That's what we've been telling you Boss-" DiNozzo began but Sam cut across him, getting up from his char beside Tony and making his way around the desk.

"Aren't we going to follow it up? I mean, look for all the building sites around town?" Sam asked.

Gibbs' eyes lingered for a moment on Sam, then he stared at McGee, who apparently wasn't paying attention.

Tim continued to fiddle with whatever the new gadget of the week was in his hands.

"Uh, Probie?" Tony began, seeing the dangerous look in Gibbs' eyes at being ignored.

"Yea Tony, just a second…" McGee murmured, but he at last noticed the silence in the room, and followed everyone's eyes to Gibbs.

"Uh… Yes Boss?" McGee said in a quavering voice.

"You heard the man, McGee, get on it!" Gibbs said.

"Yes Boss!" McGee answered, sounding more sure than he looked.

Cate almost choked on her salad roll as she watched Tim scrabble around his desk, trying to make it look like he was following orders.

"Whatever they taught you back in Texas, Winchester, Hunting fairies or whatever, they did something right," Gibbs said as he climbed the stairs to the Directors office.

Sam smiled.

"How long, McGee?"

"Uh…" McGee looked rapidly at the faces around him as if searching for an answer there, "About an hour, Boss."

"The Probie means twenty minutes, Gibbs." DiNozzo said, choking back a laugh.

"Good, McGee." Gibbs said as his grey head disappeared over the balcony of the second floor.

They all heard a door close above, and burst out laughing at the visibly relieved look on Tim's face.

Sam ducked as McGee launched his desk top calendar at DiNozzo, turning red down to his shirt collar. "I Hate. All of you. So very. Very. Much right now." He said through gritted teeth.

"We love you too, Probie. Now are you gonna Google those building sites, or do I have to throw that fungi-detecting-apparatus out the window?" Tony said through his snorts of laughter.

McGee sat at his desk again, and logged on to his computer, taking a deep breath.

Cate got up and stretched, smiling as she saw DiNozzo watching her shirt rise above her skirt-line inconspicuously. "I'm going to check out the blood we left with Abby," She said.

"Now what?" Sam asked, unable to wipe the smile from his face that now seemed plastered there permanently.

"We wait." DiNozzo put his feet up on his desk, put his hands behind his head, and closed his eyes.

Ten minutes later, McGee's passive face brightened and he began to read, "Six major building sites around the city in the past few years. Only two on the outskirts have been abandoned in the last year,"

Cate go up and picked up a small remote. "Bring up a map, McGee," She said as she switched on the screen above their filing cabinets.

McGee obliged, and DiNozzo and Sam glided across the room on their office chairs so they could see the screen.

"They're both with a block of the other, so it shouldn't take long to search them," McGee pointed to two seemingly blank spots on the aerial view map. "The first office block was scrapped due to Government budget constraints, and the second was a massive private project that was abandoned when the man who funded the project disappeared."

At that moment, Gibbs materialised behind them, and no one but Sam jumped at he spoke, "Nice job McGee."

Gibbs studied the map for a moment longer, then turned to go, "DiNozzo, Cate, Sam, come. McGee, stay here and help Abby process the evidence, or whatever it is you crazy kids do down there."

"Oooh, Boss, you make it sound so kinky," DiNozzo purred, and Sam laughed as Gibbs did what Sam had affectionately termed the 'Gibbs-Slap'. But through his laughter, he registered a strange emotion at DiNozzo's purr that wasn't amusement.

Cate rolled her eyes at Sam, an 'oh, puh-leez,' kind of look.

The elevator doors slid closed silently, none of the four quite sure what they would find at the construction sites.

Sam stumbled from the car, woozy and nauseous from the car ride to the site. Gibbs' driving definitely left something to be desired.

He bent over with his hands on his thighs, breathing slowly as Gibbs slammed the door and began to wander through the half-built walls and rubble with Cate, apparently oblivious to his former passenger gasping for air.

DiNozzo came up to his and thumped him on the back encouragingly, "Yeah, it's like that the first few times, I actually threw up. But you get use to it. You develop a sixth digit to grip with."

Sam retched at the images, and a few minutes later, managed to straighten up and follow Tony triumphantly, his dinner still sitting not-so-firmly in his stomach.

Sam noted as he looked around the derelict look of the place, it appeared as if no one had worked on the site for centuries. The metal skeleton of the building was exposed and gave the place an eerie feeling.

Sam examined the half-collapsed sign at the front of the site, looking for a coded message in the dusty font of the board. The building had meant to be a single levelled office-block, Sam saw, and turned away from the useless notice.

"Nothing here, Boss!" DiNozzo called from somewhere deep within the partly assembled building.

"I didn't think so." Gibbs said coming towards Sam, kicking an empty beer bottle away with his foot, "This site hasn't been disturbed in a long time, no tracks of traces of human movement."

Sam admired this man; he was to the point, if a little blunt, honest, a fast worker yet exceptionally thorough. All this he could deduce about Gibbs having only known him for little over 48 hours.

Cate and DiNozzo appeared from the within various parts of the building, and the three of them followed Gibbs to the car.

Sam groaned as he got in, but once again, Gibbs had turned a deaf ear.

"The other site seems much more appropriate for a mysterious poetry writer, anyway," Cate said as the engine rumbled into life, "A disappearing owner? Very spooky."

"Cate, you should know by now that just because he disappeared, doesn't make it spooky. He could be running from the cops, he could owe money to shady characters, or he could just be taking a reeeeeally long holiday. Under a different name." DiNozzo said from the front seat.

"Kill the mystery, Romeo," Cate moaned, punching Tony's arm from the back seat.

"DiNozzo's right, Cate." Gibbs said as he swerved between traffic.

"Wow, there's three words I never thought I'd hear twice in a lifetime." Cate murmured to Sam, who was too busy trying to focus on something outside the car to laugh.

If Sam had thought the office block had been creepy half-finished, the abandoned abandoned construction site was just plain scary.

Things scuttled under planks of wood, chains rattled, and things creaked in the hush.

The rooms with roofs were dark, small shafts of light barely penetrated the blackness within.

Sam followed DiNozzo and Cate through the dusty rooms, to freaked out to even crack a smile when Tony leaned into Cate's ear after a particularly loud rattle of chains and whispered "You hear that Todd? That was your great-great-great-grandmother asking you why you haven't already gotten with the amazingly hunky stud next to you."

All of them jumped unanimously though when Gibbs' voice hollered from the darkness. "I've found our next clue from the Puppet-Master."

The three ran towards his voice, brushing away cobwebs and God-knows-what else on their way.

They found him standing in a part of the building strangely devoid of anything. He was in front of a massive wall that rose up easily two storeys high.

Gibbs stood facing them, his arms crossed and his face emotionless. He gave a jerk of his head, motioning them to look up.

The looked, and saw huge letters scrawled there, in a blood-red paint.

"Not exactly subtle, is he?" DiNozzo said with his eyes still on the wall.

Sam read to himself, quietly.

Well done, you've found it!

I knew you'd soon succeed,

Now you know what I am,

At last we can proceed!

"What the hell?" Sam mused, "That's just… What the hell?"

Gibbs hushed him as he spun to look at the wall and studied the closest of the painted letters.

He snapped on a pair of white gloves and touched the huge C reverently, his thoughts shrouded in his inert face. His glove came away smudged red, and he smelled it.

He looked at the three, the corner of his mouth twitching into a smile. "Animal Blood."