"Every cop has that one case that they know they'll never forget," Tony began. "The one that sticks with them forever. For me, it was a case in Peoria. There was this couple in the foster parent program. They had a big house just outside downtown, and they took in a lot of kids. They were especially good about taking in the tough cases – the kids no one else could handle. DCF was always dropping kids over there. At one point, I think they had ten."

"Then one day, a neighbor or someone noticed that for a house with ten kids, there weren't a lot of toys or bikes or stuff around. And not a lot of noise. Certainly not what you'd expect from a big house with lots of kids. DCF did a cursory investigation and there were a lot of kids they couldn't locate. In fact, kids were disappearing from this house at a pretty good clip. It was like a roach motel – kids went in, but they never came out. There weren't enough DCF investigators to cover it, so the department got the gig. I ended up being the officer in charge."

"Because you get along so well with kids?" Gibbs said, with a chuckle.

"Yeah…" Tony said, with a small grin. "No … they had me head it up because at the initial interview, the wife thought I was cute, and they figured she might open up to me more than to some of the other guys. I am a charmer, you know." Tony smirked and looked at Gibbs, who rolled his eyes.

"So, I'm over at this house doing the fourth interview or something. I'm getting nowhere, and she's getting all flirty and suggestive, and then one of the dogs comes into the living room with a kid's arm in its mouth."

"Oh my God," Gibbs said.

"Yeah," replied Tony. "The woman tried to tell me it was from a doll, but it was pretty obvious. I called for back-up and had a team over there 30 minutes later. We dug up the whole back yard. Found pieces of fourteen kids. The parents would take in a kid, start collecting the support checks, and then kill the kid and bury him outside, while still collecting the checks. They'd been doing it for years. That day – the day I was there – one of the dogs got off its chain and dug one of them up."

"Tony," Gibbs said, with concern, "I didn't mean …"

"Nah, it's okay," Tony said, with a wave of his hand back at his boss.

"Anyway…," Tony continued. "I was a maniac with this case. Remember how you were with Ari? That was me with these guys. I didn't leave the office, didn't sleep, lived on Mountain Dew and donuts. I ran down every single piece of evidence. I wanted them. I wanted it so iron-clad that a bug couldn't sneak out."

Tony closed his eyes and leaned back into the chair, lost in thought.

"What happened?" Gibbs asked, softly.

Tony opened his eyes and cleared his throat. "There was a new assistant DA in town, and he was assigned to the case." Tony stood up and went to the rail, looking out into the darkness. "When we got to court to arraign these guys, we found out that the new DA had neglected to file a piece of paperwork – I never found out what it was, but it was procedural. And we'd pulled a judge who was a stickler for that kind of thing. Without the proper paperwork, he wouldn't hold them, so this woman and her husband walked out of the courthouse and disappeared. We never found them; they never stood trial for the murders."

Tony turned to face Gibbs, leaning back against the rail. "In the courtroom, I went ballistic. I screamed at the DA, pinned him against a wall and took a swing at him. Then I went for the judge. Couldn't get to him, though, so I picked up a chair and threw it through the courtroom window." He smiled a rueful smile. "It was very dramatic."

"I'm sorry I missed it," Gibbs said.

"It took four guys to restrain me," Tony continued. "By this time, my captain and a half-dozen guys from the force had made it into the room. They dragged me out and back to the station. I was suspended, of course, but they kept me out of jail." He shrugged. "I'm not sure why. I'd have tossed me behind bars."

"So," Tony said, sitting back down and looking at Gibbs, "there I was, standing in front of the police station at 3 o'clock in the afternoon with … nothing. They'd taken my car keys, badge, everything. And, predictably … perfectly … it started to pour."

Gibbs hid a yawn. Tony grinned a little. "I told you it was a long story," he said. Gibbs nodded for him to continue.

"Jess and I had this deal," Tony continued. "'Any time, anywhere.' If one of us needed the other one, it didn't matter where we were or what we were doing. No hour was too early or too late. So … I walked home, and I called Jess. She was working in some top-secret location at the time, and all I had was a pager number. I would call and leave a message, they'd relay it to her immediately, and then she'd call me back as soon as she could." He ran his hands through his hair. "I called and left a message: 'Help. Tony'. That was it; just 'help.' It took her 157 seconds to call me back. I sat and counted." He looked at Gibbs. "I didn't know what else to do. I couldn't process anything else. I left the message and then just stared at the second-hand on my watch and counted. When the phone rang, it scared the hell out of me, I was so focused on the watch."

Tony sighed. "By the time Jess reached me, I could barely speak in complete sentences. I was … I was in shock, I guess. She talked to me for I don't know how long – a half-hour maybe – until I was lucid enough to carry on a conversation. She told me later that I kept talking about 'fourteen kids' … kept repeating that, over and over. 'Fourteen kids' and how I couldn't catch them."

Tony rubbed his eyes and flexed his hands a bit, then continued. "Once she'd kind of figured out what was going on, she told me I had to wait for her to get there before I did anything else. She asked me if I had a gun. I told her they took it away when they suspended me. She told me to stay at home, and said that I could drink water, but nothing else. Made me promise. Twice. And she said she'd be there as soon as she could."

Gibbs' curiosity got the best of him. "Where was she?"

"Somewhere in Northern California. I was in Peoria. She made it from California to Peoria in under four hours."

"How?" Gibbs said. He was obviously impressed.

Tony smiled. "She had this friend who flew F-14s – Tomcats. She talked this pilot into filing a flight plan and taking her from Northern Cal to Illinois on a 'humanitarian mission'. They flew into the air base in Peoria, where she'd arranged for a police escort to pick her up and bring her to my place. Most of the guys on the force knew what had just happened, so getting police assistance wasn't a big problem. And she got the full treatment – closed streets and sirens blaring. People thought the president was in town."

"She's very resourceful, your friend Jess," Gibbs said.

Tony chuckled. "You have no idea."

He stretched a little and continued. "She walked into my place and there I was on the couch – tired, surly, filthy – I was covered in dirt from being unceremoniously tossed on my ass outside the courthouse and then slogging home in the rain. I hadn't eaten, hadn't slept, hadn't showered. Didn't care if I lived or died. If she hadn't called me back and given me strict instructions, I'd have emptied every liquor bottle in the house and probably done a swan dive off the roof. But she walked in, sat down on the coffee table in front of me and told me to talk. Which I did."

Tony stood up and walked back to the rail, leaning against it. "More accurately," he continued, "I yelled. I raged, I cried, I threw things, I broke things, I punched a hole in the wall. And she let me. She'd move things out of my way that would hurt me, and she had to duck a few times herself, but she basically just let me get it all out. I don't know what the neighbors thought. After about two hours of this, I fell against a wall and slid down to the floor. She spent the next 40 minutes or so coaxing me up and into the shower."

Gibbs raised his eyebrows.

"We'd been friends since childhood, Boss," Tony said with a small grin. "She'd seen me naked before." He sat back down. "She washed all the crap off me, put me in boxers and a t-shirt, gave me a sleeping pill or something, and put me to bed."

"I woke up ten hours later, in pretty much the same position I'd been in when I laid down, except that my hand – the one I put through the wall – was bandaged. I got up, walked out into the living room, and it was like it never happened. The place was spotless. Everything that I'd thrown or broken was either tossed, replaced, or repaired – including the wall. She'd gotten rid of the clothes I was wearing; I never saw them again. She'd cleaned my apartment, done my laundry, sorted the mail, stocked the fridge … I doubt that she slept. It was like I'd had a nightmare, and now it was over. I walked into the kitchen, and there was Jess, in a t-shirt and jeans, making pancakes."

Gibbs laughed and shook his head.

"We had breakfast and then we spent the rest of the day out."

"Where did you go?" Gibbs asked with a curious smile. He was kind of getting into the story now.

"The park," Tony replied. "And the zoo, and the children's museum. We went to places where Jess thought there would be parents and kids. She wanted me to remember that not all parents hate their children … that not all grown-ups kill kids and bury them in the back yard. She wanted me to see happy families."

He looked at Gibbs. "We grilled hot dogs at the park and made s'mores and then went home and fell asleep in front of the TV. The next morning, she went back to California and I went back to work."

"That's an incredible story, Tony," Gibbs said, sincerely. "I had no idea."

"I don't know what I would have done if she hadn't shown up that day," Tony said, thoughtfully. "And then three years later I found out – totally by accident – that her little jaunt to Peoria to talk me off a ledge had gotten the Tomcat pilot a reprimand and cost Jess her job."

Gibbs and Tony sat in silence for a moment, and then Gibbs stood and stretched.

"Sun'll be coming up soon," he said. "You got an extra razor I can use?"

Tony stood and stretched as well. "In the bathroom. Second drawer." As Gibbs headed up the hallway to the bathroom, Tony turned to go into the kitchen. "I'll make some coffee."