Acts of Hubris - Part 2
by: Tamsin Bailey
"Gibbs." The voice was un-slurred, only marginally wary. He was either awake, or used to being woken unexpectedly.
"Hello, this is Nurse Leopold calling from Beth Israel Hospital." In the early days of making these calls she had tried for gentle compassion. A voluntary penance for shattering someone's middle of the night with a waking horror. Nowadays she was efficient, and tried to intuit whether the inevitable pause was shock, or a building heart attack. "Am I speaking with Leroy Jethro Gibbs?"
"Yes."
She filled the quiet that most people made shrill with their fear and demands."I'm calling on behalf of Abigail Sciuto. She is here in our emergency room and would like you to come."
He didn't waste time asking for details she was not allowed to give. Simply said, "Tell her I'll be there in 30 minutes," before clicking off the line. Nurse Lepold looked at the phone in bemusement and wondered exactly who Leroy Jethro Gibbs was.
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It took 27 minutes, door to door, but the triage nurse guarding the admission window was unimpressed by the NCIS shield Gibbs waved under his nose and wasted another three before deciding it was okay to let the man pounding on the counter into the treatment area.
Gibbs found Abby curl on her side, laying on an exam bed. Her hair had been taken out of its pig tails and like Sampson, she seemed to have been robbed of her strength. Her makeup had been scrubbed away and the right side of her face had bloomed into shades of red and purple. A cut across her cheek had been closed with a precise line of butterfly strips.
Abby caught sight of him as he moved into the room, her eyes followed him but her face remained impassive. Her wrists were livid and puffy. The knuckles rawly oozing, the nails broken and split. Seeing them made a barbed tendril of dread curl in Gibbs' stomach.
He drug a chair close to the head of the bed and put his hand down on the mattress, palm up with the fingers curled loosely. "I'm here, Abby." She slid her own hand over until they were palm to palm. He squeezed once, a ghosting of pressure. "I'm here now."
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Early morning Emergency Rooms are secretly efficient places. Not yet swamped by the needy, the staff can run tests and hand out verdicts smoothly. But the inmates, isolated into their rooms and closed behind curtains know only the drag of seconds.
Gibbs was watching people move past Abby's room, trying to interpret the semaphore code of scrub colors when a woman walked in. She wore light blue scrubs and had a stethoscope looped around her neck. Doctor.
"Hello again Abby. I see your friend made it." She smiled, the groves around her mouth settling into familiar lines, offering her hand. "I'm Dr. Elizabeth Snyder."
Gibbs half stood and shook with his free hand. "Jethro Gibbs." She nodded to him, then moved her attention back to Abby, who had rolled onto her back, leaning against the recline of the bed. A ring of darkening bruises showed above the collar of her hospital gown.
Dr Snyder flipped open the chart in her hands. "Okay Abby, I got the results from your CAT scan. You have a concussion, but no bleeding in or around your brain, which is good news. The MRI showed that your kidneys and liver are bruised, but again no active bleeding, which means they will heal on their own." She looked up to make sure Abby was following her. Satisfied, she continued. "We also took some images of your throat, which showed a fair amount of swelling, but nothing cracked or broken. You'll be hoarse though, until the swelling goes down, so try to keep talking to a minimum."
The doctor closed the chart and braced it against the bottom rail of bed, hands folded across the top. Her eyes flicked from Abby to Gibbs, then back. "Now that we've ruled out any surgical injury we can finish up with the rest of the exam." She paused delicately. "Should I have someone show Mr. Gibbs to the waiting room?"
Abby shifted to look at Gibbs, touched two fingers against an unmarked bit of throat. Hurts, she signed with her other hand.
"I know." He spoke and signed back.
Abby watched him without expression. I'm your favorite? She looked up at him through her eyelashes.
"Always. Nothing could change that. Ever." He spoke with conviction, fingers moving emphatically, giving her a truth to hold onto.
Don't go.
Gibbs struggled against the burning knot in his throat that threatened to swamp him. "Okay."
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They arranged his chair so he face the head of the bed. He held her hand while the doctor softly explained each step, enduring the bruising grip. Abby kept her face turned away from him, but that didn't hide the way the hinge of her jaw stood out in relief. Couldn't keep from him the sounds of her tears.
After an eternity everything had been properly collected and sealed and the doctor let Abby scoot back up the bed. She curled on her side, back towards Gibbs, who quietly took the opportunity to flex his fingers. The doctor caught him at it, and grimaced in sympathy. He smiled grimly back and reached to pull the blanket up around Abby's shoulders, letting his hand rest lightly against her upper back. She tensed at the touch.
He rubbed a couple circles over her shoulder blades, then followed Dr. Snyder's beaconing motion out into the hallway. She leaned a shoulder against the wall, hip riding on the grab rail. Gibbs mimicked her pose, arms crossed. "Tell me."
"Miss Sciuto was brought to the ER by ambulance, semi-conscious and suffering from multiple contusions, head trauma, and suspected sexual assault." Gibbs gritted his teeth against hearing it spoken out loud. "By the time we cleared her c-spine she was fully conscious. She confirmed rape, and we started a kit. We also did a peritoneal lavage to rule out internal bleeding, as well as a CAT of her head, and an MRI of her head and throat. You know the results of those."
"And the rest?"
The doctor gave him a long and measured, sucking against her upper teeth before finally saying: "You're a cop." It was not exactly a question, but he showed his badge and she nodded a couple of times.
"The pelvic exam showed routine signs of forced sexual intercourse – bruising and few small tears. Nothing that needed stitching. There was no semen, so he either wore a condom or did not ejaculate. I collected evidence for the kit, and started her on a course of antibiotics as a precaution against any sexually transmitted diseases. Mrs Sciuto agreed to an HIV test, though a more conclusive anti-body test should be done at three and six months.
"Due to the extensive and deep bruising I've prescribed some narcotic pain meds, but even with the drugs she's going to be hurting. Is there someone who can stay with her, help her along, at least for the first few days?"
"There are plenty of people who can watch over Abby." Gibbs confirmed. Dr. Snyder nodded, ready to wrap things up.
"Okay. A nurse will come help Miss Sciuto get cleaned up and give her some forms on aftercare. If you want, you can go fill her prescriptions while we work on getting her discharged." She handed several white slips towards Gibbs. He leaned forward to take them, bringing their heads close together.
"Nothing about what happened tonight is routine, Doctor."
She met his eyes. "I'm so very sorry, Mr. Gibbs." Obviously apologizing for more than just the wording. He nodded, and her own head dipped in acknowledgment before she walked past him down the hall.
Gibbs poked his head back into Abby's room, telling her he was going to fill the prescriptions and then get her some sweats from his car. She didn't respond. He waited for a moment, then left to complete his tasks.
Outside the hospital dawn was starting to turn the scudding clouds pink. There were so many things he needed to do. Call Tony to get the team mobilize. See if he could get any information from Abby so he had a direction in which to loose their inevitable fury. Call Jenny with a SitRep and alert her to order up a temporary lab tech for Monday morning. Instead he leaned his forehead against the open trunk and felt a dull surprise that something mundane as sunrise could be happening.
Eventually the angel and the hard metal made his head ache. He pushed away from the car, pulling out the clothes. He would bring them to Abby, take her home, work from there.
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Tony had set his phone to vibrate last night. So he could feel it against the bass beat of the music rolling through his body. Now it made an angry rattling sound against the wooden bedside table. He watched it blearily: it looked spiteful, moving in aggressive little hops across the table. Then he realized it was a phone, and snatched it up.
He spoke without bothering to look at the caller display "Yeah, Boss!" Trying to sound as alert as possible, which failed at takeoff, crash landing into hungover-as-possible.
He winced into the tiny silence, grateful that Gibbs was not actually there to slap the back of his head. The barked "DiNozzo!" was bad enough.
Tony rubbed tiny circles into his temple, and said, "Yeah. I'm awake."
"I need you to go work a scene."
Tony tried to slide in a question under the flag of information gathering. "But it's Sunday, Gibbs. O'Neal's team is on call. Did something happen?"
No luck. Gibbs sarcasm could etch glass. "They are, DiNozzo. But I thought you might want to give your personal attention to the place where some dirtbag got a hold of Abby last night."
Tony felt himself collapse down into a pin-prick focus. "Is she okay?"
"No major injuries. Concussion. Lots of bruises, some pretty deep. Couple of deep cuts. She'll be okay in time. Call Ziva and McGee, then call Emergency Dispatch and find out where the ambulance picked Abby up."
"She didn't say?"
"Bastard choked her. She can't talk yet."
Choke hold. Tony felt a deep unease. "Boss, did – "
"DiNozzo, just get going." Gibbs interrupted, and as Tony dialed McGee's number he felt a terrible relief that he didn't have to know. At least not yet.
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Thirty-Seven people had called for an ambulance between 2200 Saturday night and 0300 Sunday morning. Seventeen had been dispatched to private residences, 8 to automobile accidents, 3 to a fraternity house that had caught fire, and 2 to nursing homes.
The last four went to random acts of bad luck and street violence. A drive by shooting; a hit and run; someone pulled out of the Anicostia. And one woman found beaten and bleeding in the warehouse district.
Sandwiched between Tony (driving), and Ziva (navigating), McGee watched streets that had been prosperous a century ago slide by outside the window and wondered about those other 36 people. Were they still alive? (Probably not that guy who came out of the river. He was probably dead.) Did they have someone to hold their hand? Were they going to be okay?
Tony parked halfway down a long and deserted block that fronted a massive building of corrugated steel. McGee slid out after Ziva, who looked around and asked "What was Abby doing down here in the middle of the night?"
Tony rounded the hood of the truck, pointing to the posters plastered to the side of the warehouse. A death pale girl in the arms of a equally pale boy, his mouth on her neck, her hand on the back of his head. They both had coal eyes, black lips. They both bled.
"My guess? She and a couple hundred of her closest buddies spent last night worshiping sex death and alcohol." He looked down at the assortment of...stuff scattered across the sidewalk, "And probably a wide variety of illegal substances."
Ziva looked around glumly. "Do we even know where the crime scene is?"
"Ambulance guy said it was outside an ally." Tony squinted up and down the street. "This building covers the whole block, so it must be around the side"
"Very good Tony!" Ziva settled a camera strap around her neck. "Keep it up, and someday you might become a real investigator."
"Huh." Tony smiled sarcastically at her retreating back, "And someday you might come up with a real movie quote." Her hand flicked in a gesture that may or may not have been considered rude in Israel. Tony yelled after her, "Good! That's good. You go right, I'll go left."
As McGee watched Ziva wined Tony up he wondered who had placed the posters so evenly on the warehouse wall. Were they there to advertise, and if so, who would see them in such a deserted place? Maybe they were just to mark the spot?
"McGee!" Tony broke his train of thought. "I'm gonna go look around the other side. You start calling around, see if you can find out who sponsored the party."
Tim gripped the handle of his black backpack and asked the thing that had been behind all the other questions. "Tony, was she raped?"
Tony swallowed hard, and it was suddenly impossible to imagine that there had ever been anything boyish or irreverent inside him. "I don't know, Probie."
McGee nodded, turned away from the other man to dig for his phone. The sooner he made the calls, the sooner they could catch this guy. He was still on the phone when Ziva found the leather collar. Dyed a bright cherry red and crusted with dried blood.
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There was a mirror in the bathroom.
Abby stared, fascinated by the vivid trendils of bruising that writhed against her white skin. Like they were alive, some alien feeding off her flesh. She very carefully did not reach out to touch the reflection. It would be too much. Like some vapid Lifetime character realizing that this had really happened to her.
It was one thing to live your own cliché. Something else entirely to be shoved into one by someone you didn't even know.
She turned her back to the mirror to put on the clothes Gibbs had brought.
When they left the hospital it was with an orderly and a wheelchair. Gibbs held a sheaf of papers in many colors, and a bag filled with pills. Abby had already taken some and it was good how far away they could make the world.
At the car Gibbs reclined the passenger seat back, but it was still hard to bend in the middle. It hurt, and the muscles wouldn't go. Abby let herself fall the last few inches, the headrest groaning a little under the sudden weight.
She remembered, suddenly and completely, the hollow sound her head had made against the pavement. How she had though: There's definitely a reason they call it a melon.
Maybe the drugs weren't so great after all. They made the world go...slidey. Hard to grasp. She could process okay, but the dubbing between sight and sound was just a wee little bit off. Way easier to use one sense at a time.
She let her eyes close and listened to the mutter of Gibbs thanking the orderly, the whap of the guys feet on the pavement. Then it went quite as someone displaced the air over her seat.
Not so good, not being able to see. She snapped her eyes back open. Gibbs, saying, "I'm going to buckle you in." But instead he touched a finger to her forearm, below the stitches, looked at the twin cut on her other arm.
"Abby, did he cut you? Did he have a knife?"
Her eyes slid closed without her actually giving them permission to quit. It could have been troubling, the darkness, but she was concentrating. Two questions at once was unfair. She tried to summarize both up in one nod.
Gibbs drove to her apartment, chivying her into the elevator and down the hall to bed. She watched him put his shield wallet down on the bedside table, flipped open so the metal gleamed softly in the low light. "I'll be here, Abbs."
She slept.
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Inside Abby's apartment, Gibbs listened to DiNozzo's report phoned in report silently: collar, blood, footprints, cigarette butts, beer bottles, hand rolled not-cigarette butts, multitudinous drug paraphernalia. Three boxes of bagged and tagged things that probably totaled almost nothing. The moment when Gibbs should have said, Take it to Abby and could not was a painful stutter.
McGee had a phone number for the warehouse owner, and the name and address of the ambulance caller. Neither were answering their phone at 0730 on a Sunday morning.
Ziva had pictures and sketches of the scene.
Jenny had called earlier to say that The FBI was willing lend their country cousin a forensics technician, but not until Monday. He called Fornelle, who assured him anyone working in the Hoover Building on a Sunday was there from need and not desire.
Fingerprints lifted from Abby's collar were running through AFIS. So far no luck.
Gibbs rubbed his fingers against eyes that felt full of hot sand and thought about last night, the time between laying down under his boat and answering a phone call. Had that time been filled with sleep? He took too long to answer, and DiNozzo prompted, "Boss?"
"Yeah, DiNozzo. Take it all back to the Yard, start processing what you can. The forensics will have to wait until Monday. I'll be here at Abby's. Have someone come spell me around noon."
Tony answered an affirmative. Gibbs snapped his phone shut and wondered about those hours of sleep. Did he twitch? Did he know one of his own was being hurt?
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As ordered, Abby's doorbell rang at 1215. Gibbs opened the door to see Ducky, looking somehow both dapper and rumpled, holding a file and a take-out sandwich. Seeing him, Gibbs felt a kind of relief ripple through his body. Subtle as two atoms releasing their bonds, but if you did it enough you had light and heat and civilization.
"Hello Jethro. Tony said you wanted someone to come relieve you. Since all your worker bees are as of yet still busy, I seemed the logical choice." The older man set the food and file on the table before hanging his hat and coat carefully in the closet.
"Now. Tell me what has happened to our Abigail." He stood behind a kitchen chair, hands gripping the top bar strongly. This man, who refused to see even corpses as just empty flesh. The one out of all of them who would still be able to see the whole of Abby through the haunting that had been laid over her.
"Beaten, raped, left in an ally."
Ducky's knuckles went white and he made an involuntary sound against a jaw set into a ridged line. "Oh, Jethro. This world can certainly be a cruel place."
"Yeah, Ducky, it can." Gibbs rubbed a hand along the back of his head, then reached for the folder. Abby's name has been typed neatly across the tab. "This everything so far?"
"Tony indicated so, yes."
Gibbs grunted and opened it. An index of things collected at the scene, sketches and measurements, and a thick packet of high contrast prints. He skimmed through them quickly, then again more slowly. Again, then again, and again. Until he could see it all with his eyes closed, until that one tiny detail jumped out. The minutia, the careless, the left behind that would catch the bastard.
Until Ducky saw him rub his eyes once too many and said, "Jethro, take a nap." He weathered Gibbs' glare with watertight integrity.
"I'm fine. I've gotten through on less."
"Yes, when you are following a lead. Right now you've no forensics, no witnesses, not even a statement from the victim. All of which means you have no leads."
Ducky ploughed right over the beginning of Gibbs counter. "Yes, you will find them. The pictures will speak to you my dear man, but only if your mind is fresh enough to understand what they are saying."
Gibbs teetered on the edge. Ducky, sensing the wavering played his trump card. "You are going to have to talk to Abby, Jethro. You owe it to her not to undertake that interview while exhausted."
He shoved out of his chair. "Yeah. All right. I'll sleep on the couch."
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He slept, woke, and eventually they all came. McGee bearing pizza, holding it on the flats of his hands so he entered box first. Still believing he needed something more than himself in order to be included. Tony brought movies and the unique gift of his awful willingness to be a wick for their sadness. Ziva came with nothing, not intending to stay. Until Tony reached out to physically hauled her inside and her shoulders hunched against some rejection relaxed back down.
They made their reports: no luck tracking down the warehouse owner; no cameras guarding the entries; no forensics until the temp showed up. No one who would admitted to being at the party.
Each of them looked in on Abby, gathering at her kitchen table to eat pizza and mutually pretend that companionship was the last reason they had all come.
A/N: Greetings from the 36th parallel. I want to reassure anyone who has gotten this far, that this story is complete. I will be posting it in sections as my Internet connection allows. Unfortunately, playtime takes a back seat to serious business on DoD satellites. Too much baud dedicated to fun stuff could slow down important research on how the mating habits of aquatic nematodes effects acoustic equipment. Or something like that.