Six place. Nearly thirty people. Ninety head shakes.
Understand: it was only an estimate. He hadn't start counting until the third place. But an average of three-shakes-per would account for the two and four timers. Now, at lucky number seven he had started to wonder if the number of repetitions was habitual, or situational, when a woman (brunette, good face, great legs) said: "Sure, that's Eric."
Gibbs' look was suddenly sharper. "He have a last name?"
She put her clipboard aside with a raised eyebrow. "Can I ask what this is about?"
"The man in the picture is suspected of breaking into the Fairfax Red Cross blood bank and stealing four pints of blood. We'd like to find him, ask him a few questions."
The woman's face tightened and she stood up. "I bet. Well, his name is Eric Caswell. He used to volunteer here, pretty regular, but I haven't seen him in a while." She moved towards a battered metal desk. Both men trailed after her, standing by as she located and rifled through a thick manila folder.
"There a reason he stopped coming?" Gibbs asked.
"He got busted down to floor sweeper after he made too many mistakes. He was always filling out the forms wrong, screwing up the inventory." She made a wry face. "Sounds bad, I know. But we spend all out time here keeping an eye on the needles. It never occurred to anyone to watch the blood." She handed a sheet to Gibbs. "Here's his information."
Gibbs glanced over the sheet. "Started about five months ago."
Tony grunted. "There's the missing time, Boss."
Gibbs folded the sheet in half, trading it for a business card. "Agent DiNozzo will take your contact info. If you think of anything more, call me. Phone number's on the card." The woman took the card and Gibbs moved towards the door, the edges of his coat flaring out behind him.
She moved her eyes to Tony, full of faint amusement and obvious interest. "Are all Navy cops so direct?"
Usually playing along was instinctual as breathing, but tonight Tony let it slide away, eying the door. They had a name now, and sex was not what he wanted to be hunting. She gave his obvious distraction a sardonic look, handing over a business card and answering her own question. "I guess that would be a yes."
He gave her a smile, because hey, he was still alive, then strode out after Gibbs. The other man was already on the phone by the time Tony made it to the car, squealing out of the parking lot before he could get his door closed.
)()()()()()()()()()()()(
"No." McGee crooned to his computer. "No, no, no."
"No what?"
It was startling, the voice. His head whipped towards it, pulling at least 2 gees. Standing in front of his desk, no announcement necessary, were Team Leader and Senior Investigator.
Tim's self preservation filter kicked in, and he blinked up at the two men mutely. Gibbs' eyes narrowed to antagonistic slits. His forehead lowered. He leaned in across the desk. "No, what, McGee?"
Over Gibbs' shoulder, Tony's face filled with a frat boy's delight of someone else's imminent doom. McGee's stomach sank under the certainty of his impending entertainment. Gibbs was about to be legendarily pissed. Pissed enough to hang, draw, and quarter the messenger.
Gibb's brow line became a thunderhead and McGee licked his lips."I just finished pulling Caswell's DMV photo." He hit a key and the plasma above his head filled with the license photo of a stiffly smiling blond man. "Same social, same address, different photo." McGee looked up. "It's not him, Boss."
Gibbs stared at the plasma screen. Hunter poised. Sniper still. The fist, when it came, was completely anticipated and completely surprising, crashing onto his desk with a rattle of pencils and keyboard.
Despite himself Tim cringed back. Not too bad, not so much, but Gibbs clearly saw it. The disgust was clear in his eyes. He kicked the front panel of the desk, swore, to McGee or at him, and stormed off.
The word useless fluttered behind him.
"Probie." Tony murmured, earlier delight drained away and sympathy in his eyes. It felt bitter as gall.
Tim looked at his desk. "Don't Tony. Just don't."
To his credit, Tony obeyed. Sitting at his desk, typing and occasionally looking towards McGee, but not saying a word. But McGee was too busy staring at the man who was and was not Eric Caswell to feel any victory.
)()()()()()()()()()()()(
Gibbs went home, feeling the hum of tires on asphalt, sandpaper on wood, bourbon on an empty stomach. Sensation in place of thinking. Because Gibbs did not want to think.
Not about how he had humiliated McGee. Or the hot satisfaction of seeing him crumple. Definitely not the image of Abby's face, swollen and closed off as he pressed her to remember what her spirit wanted to forget.
So he sanded. The block stroking across a rib, down the keel, across a rib. Rasping away the rage, the memory, the image. Over and over, until clattering steps broke the rhythm. Ducky, bearing sandwiches.
They chewed in silence, leaning against the work bench and washing the food down with sips of liquor. When they were done Ducky patted Gibbs on the shoulder a couple times before retreating back up the stairs. Overhead the front door snicked shut. Gibbs picked up the sanding block.
)()()()()()()()()()()()(
Across town, McGee looked up from his dull misery and clicked a few letters on his keyboard. Then he asked: "Busted down from what?"
Tony looked across the dimly lit space. "Huh?"
"The fake Eric Caswell." McGee clarified impatiently. "He got busted down to scut work, but what did he do before?"
Tony skated a business card towards McGee. "Let's find out."
McGee gave Tony a raised eyebrow glance when 'Shane' on the card turned out to be a woman, but by the time he rang off it had been replaced by a look of hard intensity. He stabbed a finger down on the disconnect switch, saying, "He was a phlebotomist. I have to talk to Ducky," and was punching in new numbers before Tony could ask what the hell a phlebotomist was.
The conversation with Ducky was clipped and staccato, ending with a crash of the headset and McGee ripping his jacket from the chair. "You coming?"
Tony decided now was not a good time for questions. He gestured something that could have been courtly, if the court in question was very dimly lit. "Lay on, McDuff."
The came to a stop in a hospital parking lot, where McGee proceeded to sit, watching the sodium vapor lights and making no move to get out. Very curious, after the all fired rush to get here. Inside the car, Tony knew this was the opening of A Talk. The kind he never had to suffer through at Philly or Peoria. Mostly because he had never stuck around long enough to care.
"Probie. You're not useless."
"I know, Tony. But thanks." No moving, more staring.
"Okay." They sat. "Then why are we still sitting in the car?"
McGee's head bent to watch his own hands slip up and down the plastic steering wheel. "Because I can't get over it, you know. How it must have been. Her screaming and him grabbing." McGee flicked his eyes to Tony, asking for a benediction Tony knew none of them could give. "You can't be that drunk. I mean, there's no mistaking that. He had to hit her. Choke her. Hold her down."
Tony looked at McGee's profile and felt the press of the early dark, saying quietly. "Yeah. He knew."
McGee took a sharp breath at the confirmation, letting it out slowly. "I think maybe doing something like that to a woman, to anyone, I think maybe that makes you something less than human."
Tony kept his hands perfectly flat against his knees, spine straight, eyes forward, trying through force of will to keep the world in alignment. Because of all the people he could have predicted ghosting over that thin gray vigilante line, Timothy McGee had never been near the top of the list. "A jury might not see it that way."
McGee burst the little bubble of unreality that skimmed the inside of the car by jerking his door open. "A phlebotomist is someone who specializes in drawing blood. According to Ducky, it's not a skill you can fake your way into. Eric Caswell went though The University of Maryland's training program at this hospital. Maybe our guy met him here, got his social and address. I figured we could flash the picture around."
Tony yanked his own door open, happy to be out. "We've solved cases on less. Not much less, granted. But some. Let's flash away."
Twenty minutes later, after a dark haired and lab-coated woman had pursed her lips at the picture and said, "That's Jack," in a way that implied it might be better for Jack to avoided her, Tony found himself sitting in the hospital cafeteria, drinking bad coffee and wishing he had bought a lotto ticket.
The jackpot was up to 3.8 million, and tonight was clearly the night for impossible things.
When she came, it was at full sea speed, striding down the ramp into the sunken dining area with her lab coat trailing behind her like an avengers cape. She swirled into a chair, lounging back to take in both men with something like relish. A movie goer, anticipating a good show.
"What," she asked, "has Jack Ryker done now?"
"Jack Ryker?" Tony countered.
The nail of her pointer finger made three rapid taps against the table top as she looked him over with unsubtle appraisal. "The man in the picture you showed me. His name is Jack Ryker. He took a couple advanced training classes here, about a year and a half ago."
"Do you know where he is now?" McGee asked with imperfectly concealed eagerness.
"No."
"When was the last time you had any contact with him?"
Her dark red lips curved into a smile of sardonic mirth. "March 21st of last year."
"That's an awfully precise date. What happen on the 21st of March?" Tony picked up the tag teaming.
"If I give you guys the story, are you going to tell me what this is about?"
McGee plowed ahead. "How well did you know Mr. Ryker?"
She cradled her chin, fingers tapping against her cheek, considering. "We dated, if you could call it that. Mostly it was about sex. He was into scenes, roll playing, that kind of stuff. I wanted to see what it was about. Turns out it's pretty boring. So was he."
"So you broke it off?" Tony asked.
"Yes."
"Can we assume that he took the rejection badly, Miss...?" He smiled into the pause, making sure the canines showed.
Her eyes flicked up his body. "Maria Pursima de Jesus. And yes, he reacted badly. Went completely psycho. Pushed me back onto the bed, handcuffed my hands around the post. Pulled out some kind of knife and told me not to move."
She looked at their suddenly pinched faces. "Don't worry. The idiot used a crappy pair of plastic cuffs. I broke them." She smiled and it was full of challenge, "Then I broke him."
"Uh, broke?" McGee asked.
Her hand came out from under her chin and clenched into a squeezing, twisting vise. "Ruptured his left testicle."
Both men cringed back simultaneously. "Ruptured!?" McGee squawked.
"Ruptured," she affirmed with a kind of piratical glee. "Pitched him out the front door; haven't seen him since. But I can give you his enrollment form. Has social security, phone number, and address on it."
Tony cleared his throat, managing to un-curl nearly all the way. "Please," he said. Respectfully.
"Anything to ruin his day. But you never told me what he did."
"He's wanted for questioning in connection to a rape case." McGee said flatly.
It took the wind out of her sails. "Damn," she cursed softly, face falling. "I thought...I guess I thought he was too much of an idiot to actually pull anything off." There was a little silence, and she blew some air out. "Guess I was wrong."
McGee nudged the conversation back on track. "Catching him is a good way to keep it from happing again. Your information could really help us."
She stood. "Right. Okay. Well, come on." They returned to a small reception area that was completely filled by a computer, printer, and three adults. When the forms were printed she handed them over. "The woman he hurt, is she going to be okay?"
Tony remembered the morning at Abby's apartment, shrugging, "It takes time, right?"
Something that looked very much like guilt flashed over her face. "Yeah."
Outside the hospital, Tony snapped his cell phone open, but McGee grabbed it away before he could dial.
"No. We check this out first. I'm not gonna go through a repeat of giving Gibbs bad news."
Tony wrestled the phone back, taking the keys for good measure. "Good point, Probie, but I'm driving."
Back at the Yard, the search took less than five minutes. On the large plasma screen that dominated the darkened bullpen the two men stared at a picture. The license photo of Jacob Paxton Ryker - Height, weight, eye color, hair color, and address. A predator, neatly parsed.
McGee looked at it and felt vaguely disappointed. It should be more clean cut, the difference between the evil and the good. If Tony felt the same way, he hid it perfectly behind a satisfied smile. "You and I should go gambling sometime McLucky. But first we should call Gibbs."
Tim held his phone out to the grinning man, glad to hand the triumph off. "You call him."