Acts of Hubris - Part 7
by: Tamsin Bailey
Eventually everyone left the Navy Yard. Even Gibbs, back to Abby's to relieve Ziva. Around him McGee felt the building calm and fill with a hushed sense that the outside world had ceased to exist. An oasis of desk and chair and lamp. Like some kind of Stephen King novel. Except not creepy. Peaceful.
Across his computer screen windows flicked, creatures of the night just beginning to stir and he the spider at the center.
Fingers pausing on the keys, his eyes reflexively darted to the next desk over, making double sure that Tony and his nerd sniffing abilities had not somehow reappeared. Still gone, and if there was any luck still not psychic. Tim grimaced at the paranoid reaction, arching into a stretch. Muscles popped and groaned at the movement. Too long sitting in one position. Probably time for a coffee run.
He had finished reading through the chat archives of , making sketch dossiers of all prominent users. Now he was trying to find out who they were in the real world. Capturing IP address and tracing them back to a physical location. From there he could use public records to get names.
He even found some pictures from networking sites. A-ma-zing what some people would post on the Internet.
Didn't work for everyone, of course, but it was safer. This way he only had to hack into one site, instead of tracing all the users back to individual ISP accounts. The spider analogy really wasn't that far off. He waited for each user to sign on, then pounced, wrapping them in the sticky thread of his tracer.
A script could do the same thing independently, but he didn't really have any other leads to follow and he wanted to make sure that it was done right. He couldn't risk some automated worm missing something crucial. Gibbs would kill him. Worse, the guy could get away. That was not going to happen.
On the screen a new window popped up; he forgot about the coffee.
Later, well after he had decided to sleep at his desk instead of making the trip home, the computer beeped. He looked at it with bleary non-comprehension. It beeped again, sounding reproachful. Reflexively he hit a key.
Rubbing his face he scanned over the case report that had popped up on his screen, sleepiness draining away fully and abruptly as he grabbed for the phone.
)()()()()()()()()()()()(
Gibbs stared into the now familiar dark of Abby's living room and wish desperately to be at home. In his basement. Working on his boat. His hands itched to be holding sandpaper. A drill. Anything that would kill the thoughts in his head.
The bastard had taken her blood. Her blood. And that was...well, for one it was creepy. Two was harder to pin down, but had something to do with belief. If Tony was right, this guy believed blood had power, and he had taken it from Abby against her will. He had harmed her twice, and now Gibbs twitched with a doubled desire to break this guy's spine across his knee.
He huffed impatiently and sat up. There was no sleep here, and no boat to numb the thoughts away. Coffee was the only thing left.
He gasped when the phone rang, hand jerking to fan coffee grounds in a broad arc across the kitchen counter as hot adrenaline made a trip hammer out of his heart.
"McGee, this better be important," he snapped into the phone. Angry at the spilled coffee, and the ache in his chest, and letting himself get so worked up over a ringing phone.
"Boss, I think I found something." McGee's voice was taunt with excitement and he didn't even try to apologize.
"Found what?" Better modulated, but still not civil. McGee continued not to notice.
"Remember that program I wrote to search through the sex offenders database? Well, after Tony's vampire theory I made a second one to search through the tri-state crime database looking for any cases with blood as a descriptor. I just got a hit. An open case from about six months ago, in Fairfax, Virgina."
Gibbs' stomach tightened. "Another rape case?"
"No, a smash and grab at the local blood bank. The guy tossed a rock through a window and walked away with 4 pints of human blood.
That was a relief. No rape meant chances were even he could argue Jen out of running to Metro. "You think it's the same guy?"
"In the 15 years since the database came online there has been exactly one incidence involving the theft of human blood. Now six months later, in the same geographic area, someone commits a similar crime. We all know how you feel about coincidences, Boss."
Gibbs allowed a half smile. "Good catch, McGee."
"But, Boss, that's not all," McGee's voice swooped into seriously excited. "The case file included a photo, pulled off the building's security camera. We have a picture of this guy."
"Are you going to tell me the file has a name next?"
"No. But I do have the photo running through facial recognition right now. Fairfax PD didn't have much luck, but we have more resources." And certainly more motivation.
"Tell DiNozzo he has some catching up to do when he gets in." Gibbs snapped the phone shut on whatever McGee's reply would have been. Hopefully he would get some sleep.
"Is something wrong?" Abby stood silhouetted in the bedroom door, her voice uneasy.
"Hey, it's late. You should be sleeping." He knew it wasn't going to be that easy, but hope always springs eternal.
"I'm all slept out. Was that McGee? Is Tony okay?"
Gibbs thought, very briefly, about asking why McGee's call and Tony's health should be linked. It might distract her. But she was already looking stubborn, and really, he didn't want to know.
"It's nothing Abbs."
She watched him, rolling her bottom lip between her teeth. He kept his face open and relaxed and her eyes narrowed. "Nothing at two in the morning?"
"Yep."
She bit her lip again and he saw how she still stood hunched over to keep from pulling on the bruises. He went back to the couch, taking one side. "Come sit down if you aren't going to go back to bed."
He tossed a blanket over her, reaching across to run a hand over the counterclockwise swirl of her cropped hair. "Not quite regs."
She smiled, small and quiet, letting his hand pull her against his shoulder, head bobbing with the rise and fall of his chest.
After a while: "Gibbs, is anything ever going to be okay again?"
He didn't try to play dumb. "Yup. Always be different, though."
Her breath warmed the fabric over his chest. "I can feel him at night. Touching me. Don't know how long I can stand that." She touched a finger to one of the cuts on her arm. "He's always there."
He folded his hand around hers, pulling it away. "Not always. One day he'll be the last thing you think about."
"When?"
He couldn't answer, and didn't try. She sighed and he knew this was how his friends had felt watching him mourn his wife and daughter. Bystanders to a pain they would give almost anything to ease.
"We're all here, Abby. McGee, Ziva, Ducky. Even Tony." He said it because it was right, and it wasn't a lie. It just wasn't the whole truth. They would all stand beside her, but she was the only one who could put herself back together. Much as he might wish otherwise, all the hard work was up to Abby.
The best he could do to make it easier was catch the bastard.
She was still after that, and he let his thoughts drift into 2 am meanders. When he looked down again he was surprised to see her eyes open, frowning down at the stitches along one arm.
"You said he had a knife, at the hospital," he prompted cautiously.
"Knife," she repeated softly, concentrating hard. He let her work at it until her eyes started glazing over, sliding into the past. He wanted her remembering, not reliving.
"You remembering something?" he asked.
"No," her voice was faint, a deep frown line between her brows. "Maybe."
Something inside him twitched, straining towards the new information. He stifled it, forcing caution. "Try Abby. Anything."
She squeezed her eyes shut, hand curling into a fist. "No, I don't...."
"Yes, you do," Gibbs told her evenly, trying to bring courage and calm into her. Fighting the tension in his own muscles. He wanted this.
Her nostrils flared as she sucked in a breath, then another that oscillated on the edge of control. The third, he knew, would be a spiral into panic.
"Just the memory," he warned her,"don't go all the way back."
She looked down at her hands, spreading each finger wide, but her voice was remote and her eyes stayed dry. This was what he wanted: to keep her balanced between memory and emotion.
"I remember he had big hands. I remember he...I...he held onto my collar. He pulled it through the buckle and I couldn't breath. He told me not to move but I kicked him and I couldn't breath and when I was on the ground he hit my head against the pavement."
She jerked under the thrall of a new realization, back curving into a bow strung with an agony past tears. "He, he kept touching my neck. At the party. When we were dancing. He wanted...h...h...he chose me because of the collar."
There was an inward twisting despair in her voice. A clear indication of blame. For being carelessness, or wearing a collar, or being the type of person who went to a Goth party in the first place. Parring that away would be the work of months, if not years. His work, and his teams', and that of the hospital recommended crisis councilors he would make sure she had an appointment with soon.
"Even if that's true Abby, even if, that doesn't make it your fault." He tried, but it was less than a whisper in the maelstrom.
Her head twisted away to watch but not see the window. "Well, I didn't exactly make it hard for him, did I Gibbs?"
"Abby," he said again, his voice deep with resonance. "It. Was. Nothing. You. Did. You couldn't have known."
"How do you know that, Gibbs! You can't possibly know that. He chose me for some reason." Her voice cracked with pleading and disbelief, and Gibbs wavered between decisions. Tell her, or not?
Beside him she breathed raggedly, fighting tears, and he sighed. There was only so long he could keep if from her, anyway. Hopefully the weirdness would help. Convince her that he had had a clear agenda she could not possibly have predicted or guarded against. That even if he had decided she was his perfect victim, it didn't make her guilty of aiding and abetting.
"Because I know what he really wanted."
It derailed her completely, brought her face back towards him, made her eyes blink and her throat heave in a swallow. "What?" she asked in a small voice, confusion and dread making a heavy weight of the single word.
"Blood," Gibbs said.
"Blood?" she asked doubtfully. And then inevitably she demanded: "What?"
So Gibbs swallowed the feeling of being trapped in a really bad B movie and explained about the missing blood in the alley, and the day Tony met Ryan Banks, and McGee's hot-off-the-presses discovery of the surveillance photo.
Into the pause his story created Abby blinked a few times. Then she said, "No coincidences." with a funny twist to her voice. And then, impossibly, she smiled. "Do you know how fantastically far fetched that is, Gibbs?" Her hands went up, arcing her emphasis into the air. "I mean, you're rules have a way of turning Occam's Razor into, like, a sledgehammer."
Gibbs shrugged. "If you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." Her eyebrows went up, and he added, "But I did tell DiNozzo that I'd kill him if he was wrong."
Even better than the smile was hearing her laugh out loud. "Sir Arthur Conan Gibbs. Poor Tony." But it couldn't last; the smile slid away, tension flowing back in. "But why...why the rest?"
"That I don't know. But whatever the reason, it came from him and not you," he told her.
She went back to the window after that the silence felt like quiet and not recrimination.
"Do you remember anything else? Anything that might help?" Gibbs finally asked.
She wrapped her arms around herself, palms pressed flat against her rib cage, and lied. "No, nothing else."
Her eyes slid away to look somewhere over his shoulder and Gibbs knew that he had not convinced her. Not all the way. That she believed if they kept going, if she told him whatever she was hold in so tightly, she might reach something he could not absolve her of.
"Okay," he said, because pushing her right now would bring nothing but tears and shaking. It would ruin that singular laugh, and he couldn't do it. "Okay."
A/N: Hi everybody. As promised, another little bit. Thanks again to everyone who has subscribed or reviewed.