Chapter 3

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Tim's head turns and sees someone in a motorboat watching him.

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"Where did you want to stop along here, Agent McGee?" asked Charlie Stoppard. He was, in appearance, the opposite of what one would expect of an outfitters' proprietor. No checkered flannel shirt and long beard, but rather a neat button-down shirt, clean-shaven face, short hair and wire-rimmed glasses. His one measure of individuality was his ball cap, which bore the legend, My other vehicle is a canoe. He was bright, likely well-educated, and Tim warmed to him.

Tim looked out the window of the truck as they rolled along. "There was a buoy placed in the river yesterday. I want to be near it. A little upstream, but not too far." No, not far at all. He didn't want the rafting company to know he'd been here, in case Gibbs had them questioned for the case.

"Saw it this morning. The Hamsel Rafting Company put it there? Looked like one of theirs."

"You saw it? You were there?"

Stoppard chuckled. "People always get the notion that a company owns a section of the river. That's not so."

"It's on their land, isn't it?...Uh, I guess that sounds stupid…"

"The fight went to the Supreme Court. Navigable waterways, such as rivers, were determined to be held in trust for the public. They're owned only by the states in which they flow."

"So everyone has access to the river."

"Yep. My main territory is downstream of here, since canoeists aren't as fond of whitewater. But I've brought people to this point."

"I, uh, guessed that Hamsel didn't have any underwater gear, so I called you."

"You were right on both counts. They don't, and I do. Jock Hamsel doesn't care for the underwater stuff. He doesn't know what he misses. Sure, I outfit customers with canoes and tents, but I always put in a pitch for scuba diving. It's a beautiful world down there."

Reaching the spot, Stoppard parked his truck. Together with Tim, he hauled out the scuba gear, and helped Tim get it attached after Tim had put on a wet suit. "You have done this before, you said?" Stoppard asked.

"A time or two. I know how it works."

"Well, then, I'll trust your judgment. You did sign the waiver. You want to phone me when you're ready to leave, or should I just swing back by here for you?"

Tim thought. "Come by in two hours. That should be plenty of time."

"Fine. That way you'll miss the start of Hamsel's rafting day. It might be awkward, having them come across a surfacing diver."

I couldn't agree more. "Okay. See you in two, then."

Stoppard eyed him. "You didn't say how you knew about the buoy."

"It's part of an ongoing investigation," Tim said with a small smile. No point in covering up; Hamsel employees would probably have already started to talk about the finding of the body. By the time that word got back to NCIS about Tim's little excursion (if it did), the case would be wrapped up…he hoped.

He'd enjoyed the few times he had been scuba diving. The underwater world was quiet and beautiful, and as long as the water wasn't too deep (Tim had an itching fear of deep water), it was a pleasure. This time, pleasure was put aside for business…and an answer to the riddle of the lights he'd seen.

With Stoppard gone, Tim looked both ways, upstream and downstream, but saw no one. No humans, anyway. On the opposite bank, two deer appeared out of the trees, and seemed to watch him. Tim smiled. Then he frog-stepped into the river, and let the water close over his head.

Swimming just under the surface, keeping an eye out for the buoy, he found the spot pretty quickly, and dove the estimated nine feet to the river bottom. The view was a little different today, as he was looking through a diving mask. Objects—stones, seaweed, shells—looked bigger and closer. He remembered this would be the case, and compensated for it.

The river bed had largely corrected itself from the removal of the body yesterday, and Tim was at a loss to know exactly where it had been. The buoy, floating above, was a clue, but who knew how accurate the Hamsel Company had been at placing it? Tim grimaced in frustration. Had it been over there, by that reddish rock? Or maybe…The point was, the body was just a reference point. It was the colored things he was looking for, and he wasn't seeing them.

He dug into the mud and sand at the river bottom, only coming up with mud and sand, and a few pebbles and shells. Nothing out of the ordinary, in appearance. But I saw it! He knew he hadn't imagined the colors; they were so vivid in his memory.

Had they been jewels? But why would Kinsky have been weighted down with jewels around him? If they were part of a theft, why put the jewels there, unless the murderer intended to come back for them later (and did, in fact)? And if they weren't jewels, then what were they? Pieces of colored glass, or shells? And what would they be doing there?

Even supposing someone had come along and removed the evidence, as he was beginning to believe, if the lights were made of many little parts, most likely one or two would have been overlooked, and left behind. I should be able to find it…but nothing glowed, nothing shimmered or glimmered, nothing appeared even as remotely colorful as he had remembered.

Tim checked his watch and saw that he had only 12 minutes before Stoppard returned for him. He might as well stop now. Placing a few shells and pebbles in his waist pouch as souvenirs, he surfaced.

"Hey, pal! Find anything of interest?"

Surprised, Tim turned to the sound, while treading water. It was one of the Hamsel brothers (Tim wasn't sure which one), in a motorboat.

Tim suddenly didn't want to be identified, so he lowered his voice. He knew that in the full wet suit, his own mother might not recognize him. "Nope. Little disappointed. You hear these talks about gold in the rivers," he said as inspiration hit.

"That's true. Someone may find some, sometime, washed down from the mountains. But I've never seen any in the Potomac. Or any other river, for that matter. Guess I'm not a lucky guy," he laughed. "I wish you better luck."

"Thanks," Tim replied, and waved as the boat moved on.

This was a waste of a day, Tim thought, not looking forward to the long drive home.

On Monday morning Tim arrived at work early. Ziva was already there. "Hi," he said, pulling his chair over to her desk. "How did Norfolk go?"

"I took many notes," she said, pulling out her Blackberry. "I was about to start editing them. Can you wait until Gibbs and Tony get here, so I do not have to go through my speech twice?"

"Oh, sure. That's all right."

"And how was your Sunday?"

"I, uh…" Go on! It's Ziva! You can trust her. Maybe. Or maybe she'd just laugh. "I didn't do much. Went swimming." Dang; I hate lying. Well, it's not exactly a lie… He fingered the pebbles and shells, which he kept in his pocket.

"I was not aware that the municipal swimming pools were open yet. I thought that would be next weekend?"

"I didn't go to a municipal pool." Well, that much was truthful. "Anyway, it was a quiet day, pretty much."

"Good," Ziva said with a friendly smile. "I am glad that your day off was good."

"Yeah." She rose to get something from the break room, and Tim went back to his desk. He'd been on the verge of asking her if she knew anything about gemstones and colored glass, but realized what he wanted to know—how they would appear underwater—was something she probably had no experience with. He could research that himself.

But I want to find out something before the trail goes cold…

The MCRT stood before the plasma screen while Ziva spoke. "As Tony said on Saturday, Kinsky led almost a dull life. His mates on the base said he was quiet, kept mostly to himself, and read a lot of e-books. He had no vices that they knew of, did not drink nor smoke, did not like to party, and had no family that he was supporting. His needs were simple."

"And no one would miss him if he disappeared," Tony observed.

"That is what I thought, yes. But then his CO said something interesting…Kinsky, as I said, liked to read. Not just fiction. He read scientific publications…not necessarily highly technical ones, but one that a well-read layman can follow."

"I thought he dropped out of college," said Tim.

"He did, but not because he could not do the work. He ran out of money. So he enlisted in the Navy. He had hoped to return to school once his enlistment was over."

"What specifically was he reading?" asked Gibbs.

"I have turned his e-book reader over to Abby in hopes that she can find that out."

"So we have a good kid, all for the fact that he was getting money from somewhere, and no one at Norfolk seems to know anything about that," Tony summarized.

"Yes. I specifically asked his CO if he could think of anything illegal that Kinsky might have been involved in, or any way in which he could have picked up extra money, and he said no."

"Who did he report to?" asked Gibbs, his arms crossed. "And did you talk to Moe McGuthrie?"

"Yes, Base Commander Captain McGuthrie said he did not know Kinsky. Did not recall having ever met him. He had reviewed Kinsky's service record by the time I came, and could only say that he seemed to have been a fine sailor. Kinsky's Petty Officer is…was… a Petty Officer First Class Jason Abernathy. He could not provide any other news. He said he liked him, was a good man, the whole thing. He appeared to be very saddened by Kinsky's death."

"Sounds like Kinsky did a good job of not letting anyone know him too well," Tim remarked. He couldn't really fault to young man for that; Tim recognized his own introvert tendencies.

"This one's really a stumper, isn't it, Doctor Mallard?" Jimmy said with some cheer. With a gloved hand he scratched the back of his neck, which had gotten sunburned on Saturday. Then after a brief glare from Ducky, he shed that glove and got a fresh one.

"It is a puzzle, Mister Palmer," Ducky acknowledged as he made another incision on the corpse. Silently he wondered if he was making incisions now just for the sake of making incisions.

"Have you ever not reached a conclusion in an autopsy? I mean, er…you do make the job seem easier than it is…"

"No need to try to spare my feelings, Mister Palmer. I am only human, and therefore, fallible. There have been two cases in my career when I was not successful in determining a cause of death. And yes, I do regret those."

Jimmy looked uncharacteristically sober. "You must have felt like you weren't giving the dead an easy rest."

Ducky pursed his lips. "That ventures into the spiritual."

"Sorry…"

"No, it's all right. You are right in that I regret it, and regret feeling that I could not do more for the dead. I do not like not finding the answers. We are the last stop in these people's lives, and it behooves us to make their fates known, to provide closure for their families, and justice where warranted."

"We don't seem to be getting anywhere with Seaman Kinsky."

Ducky sighed. "No. But I am not ready to write it off as 'natural causes' yet. He was a young man in the full bloom of life. He was very healthy. He should not just have died."

"Unless he was talented enough to weigh himself down with stones in a river before he died," Gibbs said, coming in.

Jimmy grinned, which should have been a warning sign. "Maybe he was practicing to be an escape artist, like Houdini and his trick went wrong."

"Mister Palmer," Ducky said with a greater sigh.

But Gibbs only stared at Jimmy for a long minute before looking like he understood. "Maybe, Palmer. Just maybe. I'll keep that in mind." He went back out, leaving Ducky looking surprised, and Jimmy grinning all the more.

Gibbs' next stop was Abby's lab, where she spun on a heel as she sensed him come in. "Gibbs-san! You have to get Ducky and Jimmy to give me something more to work with from the body. Seaman's Kinsky's core material is so unremarkable that he might as well still be alive!"

"Can't help that. What else you got?"

"Well, with nothing new organically, I've turned my attention to his phone and his e-book reader. First, the phone." She displayed the records on a screen. "It's a pretty fancy phone for someone in his pay rate, particularly one without many friends and no family to call. I guess he liked it for the bells and whistles. It was purchased only three months ago, and mostly used for going on the internet."

"Where'd he go?"

"Lots of places. But these stand out: half a dozen sites about pseudo-science wacko stuff. Parapsychology and that kind of junk."

Gibbs smiled and put his hands on her shoulders. "Abbs, you're the most superstitious person I know, and you believe Ouija boards work."

"The first one isn't to be sneered at, and as for the second, I'm keeping a scientifically open mind," she said firmly. "But anyway, either Kinsky believed in this, or—"

"—or else he found it fun to read about. The e-book reader?"

"Okay. I was able to pull off his download history. By the way, the reader was purchased right about the same time as the phone. Did he come into money then?"

"Looks like it."

"So he starts downloading stuff. Some of it is novels; mostly thrillers, military fiction. He appears to have been a big fan of Horatio Hornblower. But the rest…Gibbs, they're articles on more of this parapsychology stuff, from a youdo-voodoo standpoint. Like he was immersing himself in it. Trying to learn how to do it. Now why would someone kill him over that?"

It was a good question. Gibbs only shrugged, and left.

Later at home Tim scoured the web for clues as to what he'd seen. He looked at hundreds of images of gem stones, but none of them seemed right. For one thing, the stones tended to be too dark. Even the paler ones, like rhodochrosite and topaz, seemed to be dark. He remembered pastel-like colors; almost like something created in a cartoon. The optical density of the gemstone determined the refraction, or the rate at which light entering the stone was slowed down, which in turn determined how the eye perceives it.

That was all very well and good, but all it did in Tim's mind was to rule out gemstones. Too bad; connecting a criminal to wealth was a time-honored motive, no matter how bizarre the circumstances might be. Follow the money.

If not gemstones, then what? Colored glass? But even very pale colored glass was unlikely. What would be the reason for it? It didn't have the value of gemstones.

Tim tried to think of other things. Naturally-occurring things in the river? He remembered that his mother had a couple pieces of jewelry, Mother of pearl, or nacre, as it was properly named, according to the web. It was the inner lining of mollusk shells and some other sea shells. Yes, that might fit what he saw. But why hadn't Tony seen it? And why had Tim found no trace of it? And why was it around the body to begin with?

He picked up his phone. "Tony, I need to know. When we dived down for the body Saturday, did you…see anything unusual around it?"

Tony hooted. "Are you back to seeing things, McScrewy? Maybe you need a vacation."

"Forget it, then," Tim snapped, ending the call. I've gotta stop asking questions on impulse.

Unknown to Tim, outside his apartment building, two men waited in a dark car with the lights and the motor off. They would wait until Tim's lights went off.

They were patient. They could wait all night if they needed to.