A/N: A pre-turkey day treat (for those who celebrate). The majority of this chapter is told through Brody's POV but when you get to the end, you'll see why.

Chris strained, against the bowing wood desperately trying to push it back into place. The concrete vault that held Savannah's coffin was threatening to come right through his meager tomb. Though he didn't quite know what it was he knew that it was heavy enough that it would probably crush his skull like a watermelon fight on the Fourth of July.

The wood on the side of the box began to pop and creak against the opposing force of solid rock like mass. The plank furthest to the right on the cap, snapped, winging his right shoulder and the side of his face, dangerously close to his eye. If all that he lost through his harrowing experience was his eyesight he would consider himself lucky. Sliding his hand over, he felt the rough abrasive concrete against the skin on his fingertips and palm.

Oh God! It really was a huge block of concrete that was about to collapse on top of him!

For the most part the shaking had stopped, but Chris hardly noticed, he was too busy praying that wouldn't be suddenly reunited with the former love of his life. Though he was still deeply in love with Savannah (or the memory of her) he wasn't looking to reconcile with her anytime soon.

He was trembling, violently now, every muscle in body literally shaking, pushed beyond its limit. It was stupid to think that he could prevent a huge block of concrete from falling on him but he would be damned if he was just going to give into it. It was better to go out a fighter than to accept an unjust fate.

Somewhere in the mayhem, the phone slipped from his chest and was resting at his side. He could hear Brody calling out in futile effort to find out what was going on. She made some flippant comment about more roaches and how many of them were there this time? To say that she was mocking him was really unfair when she'd only been trying to keep him calm so that he would conserve his oxygen.

Twisting his head his eyes landed on his weapon. Maybe it was time to consider-. Growing up in a strict Southern Baptist home he would surly go to hell for even entertaining the idea, but what difference did it make? He was probably already headed there or at least that's what his father had always told him. Doubtless, it seemed that no matter where he ended up that he was destined to die here.

"What? Earthquake?"

"LaSalle!"

"LaSALLE!"

What the hell was going on? The Earth wasn't shaking here.

Gut wrenching terror filled Brody's soul as she listened to her partner's frantic pleas for help. Mixed in with Chris' shouts she could hear the sound of the splintering, cracking wood, planks collapsing. Fuck whatever air he had left the man was being crushed alive! But by what?

He was almost screaming now, taking in long, panicked, breaths of air, with whimpering mews and grunts of pain mixed in between.

In her mind, she envisioned all sorts of scenarios. LaSalle could be in a scrapyard, where old junk cars went to die, routinely crushed, and squashed like rumpled aluminum cans. He could be trapped in a demolished building with the walls collapsing around him, any number of things, really.

Then there was nothing. Ominous silence filled her as the line went dead. Had his phone died? Crushed in whatever horrifying fate he'd been dealt? Even though the connection had been lost, she continued to shout out his name, in sheer desperation. How could she save him if she could no longer communicate?

"CHRIS!"

Her own pleading eyes looked at Pride. The grey-haired agent was as white as a sheet, his face reflecting the look of a man who had just lost his own child, his only son. No words were needed as she read the obvious pain clouding his usually lively, soulful eyes.

"He's gone, the phone died," Brody said almost mechanically as she inwardly started to curse Patton Plame. The man was a technological whiz and master of the dark web, how hard was it for him to come up with a location for a damn cell phone signal? They had a GPS locator on LaSalle's phone. It should have been instantaneous, right?

"The best Patton can do is the closest cell phone tower." Pride said sickly, "He's thinks there's some sort of interference blocking part of the signal."

"Cell phone tower," Brody repeated, angrily. The average cell phone tower could reach a span of 20 miles. Twenty fucking miles in any direction! Her partner, her friend was dying and the best they had was circle that spanned 20 miles? This was unacceptable, no it was unfathomable, a wild goose chase at best.

Blinking away threatening tears, Brody blew out a tense breath. "The last thing Chris said before we were cut off was that he thought there was an Earthquake, the ground was rumbling, the box was shaking." She wouldn't recap the idea that it sounded like the box was caving in on him, but she gathered by the look on Pride's face that he already knew.

An Earthquake here? Pride couldn't rationalize the idea. If they were within twenty miles of LaSalle they should have felt it, but to be certain, he would check back with Patton.

"We need to keep working the case." He returned as if he were trying to stave off the heartbreaking emotion that threatened to consume and break him into little pieces.

Brody swallowed back the rock in her throat. So that was it? Chris, the man Pride claimed to love like a son was now a case? A case meant that instead of having just precious minutes to find their friend that they now had what? Days? Weeks? Cases weren't solved quickly. A case meant they probably had a dead body on their hands, instead of a vibrant, young man in need of rescuing.

It never occurred to her that the Senior Agent might be in shock as she tried to marshal her frustration. Chris LaSalle was not a case! He was her-. Her- Her family and god willing always would be. They would find him alive, she reasoned, trying to convince herself more than the man standing beside her.

Calmly, she looked to her leader, her boss, "So back to my original question. Where do we start?"

"With Peter Kelly," Pride answered with conviction.

Retreating to the Explorer they rode in silence to the local morgue. A couple of times, Brody tried to reach Chris through the blue tooth in the SUV but it was hopeless, as the call diverted to his voice mail.

"N.C.I.S. I'm Agent Pride, this here's Agent Brody. We called about Peter Kelly."

The elderly looking medical examiner carefully inspected the duo through thick Coke bottle style glasses. He was a short, little man, all of 5'1 and he'd been working at the Mobile coroner's office for more than fifty years. It was a rare occasion when someone like Dwayne "King" Pride showed up in his place of employment, his palace of hidden discoveries.

"I was just about to go to work on Mr. Kelly." he said, meekly.

Pride and Brody watched curiously as he walked them over to the exam table and hopped up onto a stepstool. "I'll do a routine autopsy just to rule out anything suspicious, but the case really seems to be cut and dry. The man appears to have shot himself, death by his own hand, according to the witnesses."

"Witnesses?" Brody and Pride said in unison.

"A Mother and young daughter were just coming up on the gravesite when they heard the gun go off."

"GRAVE SITE?" Pride's eyes went wide. The officer from Mobile PD who had called neglected to supply that crucial tidbit of information.

"Yes, Mr. Kelly was found at his daughter's grave," the kindly old man supplied. "Such a shame."

"The cemetery!" Brody touched Pride's arm before taking off in dead run for the car. How could they have been so stupid and missed that? Of course the cemetery was all the way across town, only five miles from where they had started at the storage facility where they had found Cade. Five miles, so close yet they hadn't had a clue. LaSalle had been right under their noses the entire time.

"Jesus Christ!" Pride swore as he recklessly pulled the SUV from the parking lot. Everything seemed to be working against them. Lights flashing and sirens blaring he exceeded even what was considered to be safe in pursuit speed limits in a desperate race to get to his young friend.

The car rumbled, almost vibrating as Pride drove over the graveled paths through the cemetery.

"Savannah is buried on the northwest side," Brody said, anxiety rising, in her voice. "Lot 57B"

"You don't think, Kelly-" Pride threw the car into park, unable to finish his thought. The idea was just too incomprehensible.

"Buried Chris, alive." That bastard, Brody cursed under her breath as she jumped out of the car and took off in a dead run. Luckily, Pride had been able to park within 50 feet of the gravesite. It was just around the corner in a clearing of large oak trees. Savannah's tombstone was in sight but as they neared they could see that the yellow police tape had been tossed aside with the ground in upheaval, her vault sitting undisturbed on the grass in plain sight.

Just beyond the mass of the perfectly rectangular shaped concrete, sat the pine coffin. The cap had been completely torn off, discarded a few feet away in the grass. Some of the boards on the side were cracked and missing. Breathing hard, both agents fell to their knees, feeling like they had just been punched in the gut. Merri Brody especially felt like she was going to throw up.

Chris' gun and phone were lying in the bottom of what remained of the deadly handmade tomb.

But no Chris.

Pride quickly pulled on a pair of gloves and reached into the box for the gun. "It's still warm," he told Brody. "Two shots missin.'"

"Two?" She knew that Chris had fired one, he'd told them that. But why would he have needed to fire a second?

Pensively, Brody panned the immediate area around them, her eyes landing on the end corner of Savannah's concrete vault, the same vault that had threatened to crush her partner she assumed. Red streaks, familiar splatter dotted the lower side, the grass nearly hiding it from view. "I've got blood."

A/N: And the mystery continues! I blame C.O.L for the cliffhanger ending. So what has happened to our boy? Dead? Did he wander off? Rescued? Shot? Whose blood is that?