Disclaimer: I haven't managed to wrangle the owning rights to this show since the beginning of my last chapter. So it's still not mine.
Tony had a throbbing headache. As if spending the entire morning talking to some woman he'd never met before about how he worked with his partner wasn't bad enough, he now had the pleasure of listening to Abby and McGee talk him through all the evidence they had. He wanted to call Ziva and see how she was doing, but the counsellor's words—specifically those about co-dependency—were weighing on his mind. He had to find five minutes on his own to decide whether he cared that he was dependant on Ziva before he called her. But he didn't have five minutes.
Before following Gibbs into Abby's lab, he took a quick pull on her Caf-Pow and prayed for energy.
"What have you got, Abs?" he called, beating Gibbs to the punch. Gibbs turned to shoot a warning look at him for stealing his material. Tony just smiled.
"We've got plenty," Abby replied, taking the Caf-Pow with a smile. "Let's start with Ziva's cell phone."
McGee hit a few keys and a list of phone numbers came up on Abby's monitor. Tony recognised his own cell number on the list perhaps a dozen times on that page alone. Co-dependant? Maybe.
"This is a list of all the numbers that dialled Ziva in the last two days," Abby said. "The last six numbers came in between the time Ziva was taken from the park, and the time we found her."
McGee highlighted the six numbers, then pulled up another set of records. "This is Abby's cell phone record for last night," he said. "Ziva's call came in at 8:53pm. But check out Ziva's incoming calls. She'd got a missed call at 8:31pm."
"While she was buried," Abby said. "And the same number comes up at 9:04, and 9:37, and 10:16."
"While she was talking to Tony on Abby's cell," McGee added. "Four missed calls from the same number. Hung up before it went to voicemail."
"The next three calls coming in are from me and Tony," Abby said. "Well, they were all from Tony, but he was using my cell, and then his own, and…You know what I mean. And then one more, same number, at a quarter to 12."
"So who was tyring to call her?" Tony asked.
"We don't know," McGee said, then rephrased at the twin glares her got from Gibbs and Tony. "We don't know yet. It came from a pre-paid cell that has only ever made five calls."
"The ones last night to Ziva," Abby said.
Tony glanced at Gibbs, and Gibbs gave him a small nod. Tony took that as permission to theorise.
"So whoever took her wanted to talk to her. Or, they wanted to know if she was dead." He swallowed. "Why keep calling after the first few times, though?"
"To make sure?" McGee offered.
Gibbs shook his head. "No. Tony's right. They wanted to talk to her."
"The first time, she was still knocked out from the drugs," Tony said. "The next three times, she was talking to me. The last time, her cell was dead and she was out of the hole anyway."
Gibbs leaned over McGee and squinted at the monitor. "So when will you know who bought the phone?"
Abby and McGee shared a look, and it was decided Abby would answer. It was unlikely that Tony or Gibbs would hit her. "Well, we won't. Pre-paid cell means no user details. But we're working on finding out where the calls originated from, which will help strengthen our case when we find the bad guys through other means."
Tony and Gibbs stared at her. She cleared her throat. "Um, I checked for prints on the phone as well. They all came back as Ziva's, except one which was an eight point match for Tony."
"I did try to grab her phone yesterday," Tony confirmed.
"Why?" Gibbs wanted to know. Not because it would help the case, but because he'd recognised Tony's number a dozen times on Ziva's records too. All signs were pointing towards the impending annihilation of Rule 12.
Tony shrugged and deflected the question with a laugh. "Who can remember? That was ages ago." He looked at Abby pointedly. "What else, Abs?"
"I ran the plastic cuffs," she said. "The blood was Ziva's. The fibres mostly matched her clothes, but I did find one that you'd expect to find on the floor of a car."
"Carpet?" Gibbs asked.
Abby nodded. "Yep. I'm still running comparisons against makes and models of SUVs, but I'll be able to tell you what kind it came from by the end of the day."
"Why SUVs?" Tony asked.
With a little flourish of her hands, Abby pointed to McGee. McGee pulled up surveillance footage of Washington Park from the night before.
"Because," he said, as he found the right spot in the tape, "we have footage that is most likely Ziva being bundled into a late model SUV at 7:33pm."
"Most likely?" Gibbs and Tony said in unison.
McGee shot Abby a look that the others didn't see, then hit the spacebar to run the footage at normal speed.
"This is Ziva the first time the camera picks her up as she enters the park."
Tony peered at the snowy footage. "Can't you do something about the quality?"
"I did," McGee gritted out. "This is the cleaned copy."
Abby put her finger on the screen. "But look, Tony. That's definitely Ziva."
Tony nodded. He recognised the running style. Next to him, Gibbs was still squinting. "Yeah, that's her," he said for Gibbs' benefit.
McGee forwarded the tape 20 minutes and the vision showed a different area of the park. "The surveillance system is pretty run down. There are a lot of cameras that don't work, so there are plenty of blind spots. But it did catch this."
The four of them watched as Ziva jogged into view, then suddenly grabbed at her neck as if in pain. Tony's hands tightened around the table edge as a big guy, about Tony's height but considerably beefier, came up behind Ziva and made a grab for her. Ziva spun on wobbly legs and tried to push away before spinning again. The guy got a hand on the back of her jacket and Ziva wriggled out of it, then got two more wobbly steps away before the guy picked up a discarded fence pailling and smacked her across the back of the head. After that, Ziva went down like a rag doll. The guy picked up something from the ground and shoved it in his pocket, then drew Ziva into his arms and carried her off down the path.
Tony swallowed a few times, trying to keep the vomit down. "Where does he take her?"
"I haven't been able to track them past the next camera," McGee said quietly. "There are four exists to the park, and only three have working cameras. They didn't show up on any of them, so they must've gone out the fourth."
"The one on the east side," Abby said, much more subdued now than she had been just a minute ago. "I pulled up the closest traffic camera just down the street from the exit." She hit a few keys and another set of video shots came up. She zoomed in on an SUV parked just outside the park. "This is from two minutes after she was taken."
Tony and Gibbs again squinted to see a guy with the same build carrying a person-sized something in his arms to the rear of an SUV where another guy, taller but much thinner, was waiting with the hatch open. The first guy put Ziva in the back and then, after some fiddling around, they both moved back, closed the hatch, and got into the front of the SUV.
"Licence plate?" Gibbs barked, just as Tony opened his mouth to say the same thing.
"Tape's too degraded and it's recording from too far away," Abby said apologetically. "All we can make out is an R, and either an O or zero. I'm running it."
"You track them?" Tony asked.
"All the way through the city, and towards Rock Creek Park," McGee said. "But when they turn into residential areas, we lose them."
"One of those cameras has to have a better shot than this one," Tony said, pointing at the screen.
"No front licence plate," McGee said. "And the rear plate is obscured with a lot of dirt."
Tony worked it all through. "So, basically, we have a cell phone number we can't trace," he ticked off on his fingers, "a single fibre to what could be carpet in an SUV, crappy footage of the attack where we can't see the guy's face, and one digit on a licence plate."
Abby looked at him with sad, guilty eyes. "We're trying, Tony. I promise."
Tony covered his face with his hands before he yelled. He had no doubt that Abby and McGee had busted their asses to get this much together, and it wasn't their fault that they couldn't fid evidence where there wasn't any to find.
"Somebody call Parks and Recreation and make a formal complaint," he ordered through his hands.
"The tracks from the scene," Gibbs said. "Were they from an SUV?"
"Yes," McGee said. "But they're a generic brand. The car didn't come off the production line with them. They would've been fitted later."
With his face still in his hands, Tony said, "But they'd only fit certain makes of SUVs, right?"
"Yes," McGee confirmed. "Currently about 200 makes and models."
Tony's shoulders slumped.
"Bring up the footage of the attack again," Gibbs said.
Tony felt his heart rate speed up and nausea roll through his stomach. Did they really have to watch it again? He took a few quiet, deep breaths and looked up again. McGee cued the footage and let it play. As soon as Ziva grabbed at her neck, Gibbs pointed at the screen.
"Freeze there."
They all stared at the still footage, trying to see what Gibbs could see. Finally, he nodded confidently.
"I'd put money on our shooter having some kind of sniper training."
Three heads whipped around to him.
"Why?" Tony asked.
"That's a hard shot he made. In the dark from probably 50 feet, through trees. And it was windy last night." Gibbs tapped his neck. "But he got her right where he wanted to. "
"A Gunnery Sergeant?" McGee asked. "Could this be about an old case of ours?"
Tony and Gibbs looked at each other as they both weighed it up. Right now, it was as good a place to start as any.
"Probie, stay here and help Abby," Tony said. "We're gonna start looking for disgruntled ex-cons and family members."
A big shout out to Queen Elizabeth II for the long weekend Australia's having right now. If it weren't for Her Maj, I wouldn't have gotten three chapters up today, plus another two almost done that I'll post tomorrow. Cheers!