"Hey, McGee!" Abby welcomed him cheerfully. Tim felt instantly calmer. Things always seemed like they made sense around Abby.

"Gibbs sent me. He wants to know if you've got results back from the clothes."

"I'm still trying, but there's nothing so far – no DNA from anyone but the victim. But some of the other evidence makes it pretty likely that both crimes were committed by the same person."

"All three crimes."

"Three?"

"A worker at the commissary was attacked. Gibbs got the call about five minutes ago. He's pretty fired up."

"And why shouldn't I be, McGee?"

Tim flinched slightly at the sound of Gibbs' voice behind him and he turned around. His supervisor was followed by Tony and Ziva. Before he could respond to Gibbs' comment, he was pre-empted by Ziva.

"I have surveillance tapes from the commissary, Abby. You will need to observe them for anomalies."

"Sure," Abby replied. "Am I looking for anyone or anything in particular?"

"None of the victims saw their attacker's face," Tony supplied unhelpfully. "He was always wearing a mask."

"There is…scuttlebutt." Ziva suggested. "I spoke to many officers around the base, and there are…rumors."

"What kind of rumors?" Their boss prompted.

"A petty officer – Shane Haskell. Many people I spoke with had heard that he raped someone when he was in high school – a girl who worked at a Dairy Queen near his hometown. I could not find the source of this gossip – it had spread too far by the time I arrived. His whereabouts cannot be verified for the times of the attack, but this is not necessarily suspicious. It is not unusual for Haskell to spend time alone in the evenings."

"Can we validate the rumor?" Gibbs asked.

"I have not had time to fully investigate. But the personnel office told me that he enlisted after completing two years of college and that he had received only a GED before that. Petty Officer Haskell is 23, so there is time which is not accounted for in his past."

"You think he was in juvie?" Tony asked.

"It is possible."

"McGee, get into it. Find out who this Haskell is and what he may or may not have done in his past," Gibbs directed. To Tony and Ziva he said, "You two get back to Norfolk and keep probing. I'm not running my entire investigation on the basis of scuttlebutt."

"Yes, Boss." Tony and Ziva headed off purposefully.

"You waiting for something, McGee?" Gibbs asked curtly.

Tim wasn't sure why he hadn't left immediately with the others, but he just felt anxious around Gibbs these days. Part of him wanted to be out of the range of his boss's stern gaze, but the other part of him wanted to stay and wait for some kind of reassurance that he understood his task correctly and was doing the right thing.

"No, Boss. I'll find out everything I can on Haskell. I can look into the three victims too and see if there are any connections to each other, or maybe to Haskell, or both. And if Abby needs help with the surveillance tapes, I can definitely take some of the footage and go over it…"

"McGee! How about you do the one task I asked you to do, instead of standing around talking about the ones I didn't?"

"Right. Sorry. I just thought it might be helpful if –"

"What would be helpful would be you doing your job before another woman is raped!"

Tim scurried off feeling sheepish and embarrassed. He'd just wanted to make sure that Gibbs knew how committed he was to solving the case. Instead Gibbs thought he was trying to evade his responsibilities. He'd have to go beyond the call of duty in his research on Haskell – really dig beneath the surface. And he would get the work done extra quickly, so that he'd be able to help with the other aspects of the investigation. Anything that would make Gibbs know how dedicated he was to the team.


The idea came to him while he was piecing together Haskell's past. It was looking like there was substance to the rumors, but McGee couldn't get any direct confirmation because he wasn't allowed to access the petty officer's juvenile records. According to Legal, if records did exist they could only be unsealed on the order of a judge in a trial, and certainly not on the basis of random scuttlebutt uncovered as part of an investigation. So Tim was trying to verify the story through any roundabout means he could think of. His desk was covered with faxed school records, printouts of old newspaper articles, personnel files. Surrounded by the endless pieces of his suspect's life, Tim had a brainstorm. He could create a database full of all sorts of personal and historical details of the officer's life before he entered the military. And not just about Haskell, either. He started to have a vision of a giant database, with extensive background information on all base personnel, stuff that no one would normally think to assemble in one place. A profiling super-database.

"What have you got for me, McGee?" His boss's voice broke into Tim's racing thoughts.

"Haskell's profile looks like it fits the crime, but I'm still working on confirming the rumor that Ziva heard. I've got a call in to his high school guidance counselor, and I'm trying to track down this childhood friend of his who's mentioned in some of these old records…"

"McGee, we're running a criminal investigation here, not planning an alumni reunion."

"Right, no, I know that. But I've been thinking that all this information could be really useful, I mean, not just for Haskell, but for other people, in other cases."

"What other cases? Was there another attack?"

"No, just the ones we've got. Not that that's not enough, I mean. But all this background information – school records, files from foster care programs, yearbook photos, lists of GED recipients, well, it could really give us a good picture of someone's history, and if we had it all compiled in one place, then we could access profiles really quickly, whenever we needed it."

"McGee, you need to be finding a way to get me the culprit in THIS investigation before a fourth woman is raped. I need to know if it's Haskell, and if it's not then I need you to find me who it is!"

"Right, of course Boss, sure. I'm doing that. This other project, the database, that's not going to interfere at all with my work on the current investigation, I promise."

"It's your job to work on this investigation, McGee, so I don't need you promising me that you'll do it. I assume that you will, if you want it to continue to be your job." Gibbs spoke sharply. "I want this case closed, and I don't want you working on any damn database!"

Tim felt a bit shaken as his boss left the room, but realized that his resolve to impress Gibbs had only been strengthened by the reprimand. He'd redouble his efforts to pin down Haskell's profile, and on the off-hours he'd start working on the database project. Nothing he would do would compromise his work on their open case, and Gibbs would see the value of the database once it was completed and they needed to access it for some future crime. It was a lot to accomplish, but Tim knew that it be worth it in the end, just to know that Gibbs would be able to rely on his work. Once it was up and running, Gibbs wouldn't remember that he'd ever asked McGee to abandon the project. And even if he did remember, Tim was very clear that he hadn't actually been forbidden to do it – Gibbs might not have wanted him doing this, but that was only because he didn't want to lose Haskell. There hadn't been an order, so Tim wouldn't technically be disobeying his superior. Satisfied with his rationalization, Tim set his mind to the immense task ahead of him.