Chapter Thirteen

"I see nothing that isn't good."

Dr. Marquardt delivered the news with the brightest smile Gibbs had seen on her face since he'd met her. "Your chest x-rays look great, Tony. Your lungs are clear, all of the fluid has moved away from your heart, and your blood pressure is holding steady at 103/62. I wouldn't mind that being a bit higher, but I'm not going to complain. Your blood volume is just over 90%, so we're going to discontinue all of the fluids and allow your body to finish replenishing that on its own. Now, before that shot I just gave you kicks in, how's your pain?"

Tony opened his mouth to answer her, but Gibbs caught his eye and shook his head.

"Tell her the truth, DiNozzo."

Tony sighed. "My shoulder hurts a little bit."

"Dislocated shoulders will do that." She palpitated the injury carefully. "How badly does it hurt? On a scale of one to ten?"

"Um … like a two." Tony grimaced as Dr. Marquardt pressed on a particularly sensitive spot. "Maybe a four, or …" She pushed again, right above the joint, and Tony went white. "Nine!"

Dr. Marquardt pulled her hands away, and Tony sank back into his pillow.

"Ow." He lifted his right hand and gently rubbed his shoulder. "What'd ya do that for?"

Gibbs smirked. "Got the truth out of you, didn't she?"

"Rude," Tony muttered.

Dr. Marquardt smiled again. "I'm going to order an MRI, just to be safe. I don't think there's any serious ligament or bone damage, but now that the swelling's gone down some, I want to get a clearer look at it. Either way, you're keeping that brace on for at least a week, and you'll be in a sling for a few weeks after that. If you try to use that arm for anything other than physical therapy before I release you, you're going to aggravate it, and you'll run the risk of messing it up permanently. Understood?"

"Got it. Don't use the shoulder."

Dr. Marquardt tilted her head and looked slightly confused. "Believe me, you're not going to want to. If you think it hurts now … anyway, it shouldn't be that hard to remember."

Tony's attention was wandering rapidly. He was moving the fingers on his right hand up and down and staring at them in near-fascination. Dr. Marquardt looked even more confused than before, and Gibbs swallowed the urge to smile.

Dr. Marquardt cleared her throat. "So, for now, if no one's pushing on it, the morphine keeps the pain under control?"

"Morphine's great!" The grin on Tony's face was almost more than Gibbs could handle. He didn't laugh, but he did allow himself a small smile. "Don't know why I say I don't want it. Because I do. Because it's awesome."

Gibbs coughed.

The confusion in Dr. Marquardt's eyes had turned to alarm, and she glanced across the bed. "Agent Gibbs?"

"Painkillers." He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead before he looked back at her. "This is why he doesn't like painkillers. They make him … loopy."

"He's been on a morphine drip all day. He hasn't been like this, has he?"

Gibbs shook his head.

"Needles are worse." Tony's voice was still dreamy-sounding, but it was obvious that he was trying to follow their conversation. "Don't like needles." Gibbs and Dr. Marquardt turned to face him. He lifted his hand and shook his finger at them. "Needles are worse."

Dr. Marquardt nodded in understanding. "Injections hit you harder than a drip does. That makes sense."

"Yeah. I do that sometimes."

Gibbs cleared his throat to pull Dr. Marquardt's attention back to him. "So, what are we looking at, Doc?"

She nodded quickly and got back on topic. "I'll make the final decision after I see his MRI, but unless something really unexpected comes up between now and morning, I'm going to be releasing him after breakfast."

Gibbs closed his eyes and shook his head. Dr. Marquardt picked up on his thoughts immediately.

"Agent Gibbs, I know that you don't …"

"Release me where?"

"Home." She looked down at Tony and smiled.

The goofy grin vanished. "No," he whispered. "I can't. Can't go home." He grabbed Gibbs' arm and pulled himself up from the bed. "Boss, I can't …"

"Calm down before you hurt yourself, DiNozzo."

"Why can't he go home?"

Gibbs looked across the bed at Dr. Marquardt. "The guy who did this … he took off with DiNozzo's ID and keys."

"Oh. I didn't realize …"

"Took my gun, too," Tony put in. "I can't even shoot him."

Gibbs opened his mouth to tell Tony that he wasn't going to be shooting anyone, but Tony kept talking.

"I can go to your place, Boss. That's always … oh. Wait. I can't go there, either, can I?"

Gibbs shook his head again. "Fornell hasn't released the crime scene yet, so no. We can't go there."

"So where am I gonna …?"

"We're both staying at Ducky's."

Tony's eyes lit up again. "Oh, Ducky's. That'll be awesome." The crooked, dopey grin was back. "I love being an Italian gigolo furniture mover."

Dr. Marquardt looked to Gibbs for an explanation, but he only shrugged. "Long story."

She turned back to Tony. "Okay. Now that it's all settled where you're going to be staying after you're released, I'm going to go order that MRI. I'll check on you a few more times overnight, but you should try to get some sleep. You're going to need it."

"Sure," Tony murmured as he settled back into his pillow. "Go to sleep. So a nurse can wake me up. To tell me to go to sleep. So another nurse can wake me up."

Dr. Marquardt grinned as she walked around the bed and toward the door.

"I'll be right back," Gibbs said. "You good?"

"Yep." Tony yawned and closed his eyes. "I'm sleeping."

Gibbs turned and followed Dr. Marquardt across the room. He caught up to her just as she opened the door, and he reached out to hold it open for her. They stepped into the hallway, and she turned to face him as the door closed behind them.

"I know what you're going to say, Agent Gibbs. And the answer is no."

Rivers was standing off to the side, doing his best to pretend that he wasn't eavesdropping on the conversation. Gibbs pointed at him and then at the hallway around the corner. Rivers dropped his head and shoulders and walked away.

"I don't think you understand, Doc."

"No, I do understand. I do. Dr. Simms told me about the excitement this afternoon. I know what happened, and I know how concerned you are about Tony's safety. I also know you're about to ask me to keep him here until you catch the man who tried to kill him."

"It's the safest place," Gibbs said. "We can keep it locked down, and we can …"

"That's part of the problem, Agent Gibbs," Dr. Marquardt interrupted. "You can't keep it locked down. This is a hospital, not a prison or a safe house. Do you know how long it took me to get upstairs tonight? How many times I got stopped? How many people refused to let me go where I needed to be until they saw my identification?"

Gibbs nodded, both in answer and in satisfaction that the agents he'd assigned to the security detail were doing their jobs right.

"What if I'd been responding to an emergency?"

He hadn't thought of it quite like that.

"What if someone was having a heart attack? What if one of my patients coded? What if it was Tony, and I was downstairs, and I couldn't get to him because one of your guards, following your orders, refused to let me come up?"

Gibbs sighed, closed his eyes, and rubbed his temple.

"I wish I could help you. I really do. There's nothing I care about more than the health and safety of my patients, and believe me, the last thing I want is Tony ending up in my OR again because this guy comes back. But there are 400 patients in this hospital, and I have to think about their health and safety, too. Even ignoring the fact that there was a murderer walking my halls this afternoon, Tony's presence here is a risk."

Gibbs' eyes shot open, and Dr. Marquardt raised her hand.

"If he was still in real medical danger, I'd keep him. But he's not. And I'm sorry, Agent Gibbs, but I can't justify it. Those guards might be protecting him, but they're not doing much for the other patients and their loved ones. And if, God forbid, something were to happen here, what should I say to the families of the innocent people who got caught in the crossfire?"

"His health might not be in danger out there," Gibbs forced out through clenched teeth. "But his life sure as hell is. Does that not matter?"

"I have 400 other people to worry about, so I'm going to trust you to take care of him." Dr. Marquardt was keeping her voice low and steady, but it was clear from the look in her eyes that the conversation was upsetting her. "If something goes wrong and he gets hurt again, or if he starts having trouble breathing or having chest pains, you bring him back to me. But unless and until that happens, he's out of here in the morning."

"Doc, listen to me …"

"No." She shook her head and stepped away. "Because this decision is hard enough, and I'm not going to let you make it any harder. I can't help you. I'm sorry."

"Doc, please."

She changed direction quickly and walked back toward him. "You keep saying that it's your job to protect him, right? So do it." She leaned forward and lowered her voice. "Do your job, Agent Gibbs, and I won't have to do mine."

"So what are you telling me here, Charlie?" Leon Vance pulled his car into the parking lot at George Washington University hospital. "Can you help me out or not?"

"I can't give you DelMar, Leon."

Vance turned the car off and leaned back in his seat. "You're the director of the FBI," he said into the phone. "I doubt there's anyone you can't give me."

"Look, I get what you're saying. And if this had happened to one of my people, I'd be just as pissed as you are. But I can't give you an innocent man, and Stefano DelMar is innocent."

"How can you be so sure of that?"

"Because he's been in a safe house since Saturday morning. That's how."

"A safe house? Like the one Jack Kale was supposed to be in the day my people found him in Michael Strauss' apartment?"

A long-suffering sigh sounded in Leon's ear. "Okay, yes. That's a fair point. But he's in Virginia, Leon. And he hasn't been alone for more than fifteen minutes in the past four days. There's no way he could have even gotten out of the house without it being noticed, let alone get all the way back to D.C., spend a couple of hours kidnapping and torturing your man, kill Marco Santori, and hang around the hospital today."

Leon pinched the bridge of his nose. Ducky had, for all intents and purposes, eliminated DelMar as a suspect in the attack on NCIS Special Agent Anthony DiNozzo, but there was still the matter of the ten-year-old, unprosecuted attempted murder of Baltimore detective Tony DiNozzo. Nothing could change the fact that he had to face Gibbs, and nothing could change the fact that he had to tell him that someone in his agency – under his command, under his roof – wanted DiNozzo dead. But he'd have much preferred to preface that conversation with, 'We have Stefano DelMar.'

"So why is the newly-crowned king of D.C. organized crime in your safe house?"

"Because someone's started offing Azari's higher-ups, and he got scared. He came to us Friday afternoon, right after the second body was found. He knows that the media are attributing the murders to him, and he's fine with that. He just doesn't want to be the next dead mafia guy on the news."

Leon took a deep breath and closed his eyes. "You know he's tried to kill DiNozzo before, right?"

"No." He opened his eyes and prepared to launch into the story McGee had told him, but he never got the chance. "I know that we fed DiNozzo and the Baltimore PD a story about Stefano trying to kill him, and I know that they bought it. But he didn't do it."

"What?"

"The guy who tried to bash DiNozzo's brains in in Baltimore was a kid named Benjamin Rossi. Stefano thought DiNozzo was a half-starved nineteen-year-old homeless kid named Tony Pagano. He found him in an alley, took him to Macaluso, and always felt responsible for him. Hell, even after finding out he was a cop, Stefano still looked out for him. It was Stefano who stopped Rossi and who called the cops and the ambulance. Stefano didn't try to kill DiNozzo that night; he saved his life."

Leon shook his head. "Then why does DiNozzo think …?"

"Because he doesn't remember what happened, and that's what we told him. Rossi's fingerprints and DiNozzo's blood were all over that pipe. Stefano never touched it."

"So where is this Benjamin Rossi?"

"He went down with Macaluso. He's in prison, and he's never getting out. You can take my word for that. As far as Stefano goes, Leon … the night Rossi tried to kill DiNozzo, after the raid was over and everyone had been arrested, Stefano asked for me. I was working organized crime back then, and he knew me. He was seventeen years old, he'd just witnessed an attempted murder, and he was scared. He was the one who brought DiNozzo to Macaluso in the first place, so he was in a really dangerous position. He needed a cover story that would sound good to Macaluso, and we needed information that he had, so we worked a deal. He's been a CI for ten years."

Vance was dumbfounded. Everything they thought they knew about DelMar was a lie cooked up by the FBI to protect one of their assets?

"Why hasn't Fornell seen fit to tell us any of this?"

"Because he doesn't know."

Vance narrowed his eyes in anger, though he knew the man he was talking to couldn't see it. "You had an informant inside an organization that one of your men has been investigating for twenty-five years, and you didn't think you should share that fact with him?"

"Stefano's role was never to feed us information on Azari. It was to feed us information on the other organizations that Azari had relationships with. Fornell wasn't part of the larger investigation. There was no reason for him to be told."

Vance shook his head in disbelief, but he didn't say a word.

"I want to help you find this guy, Leon. I do. If there's any way that I can help, I will, and you should know that. You've already got Fornell and his team, and I've got my best artist working with your witness. DiNozzo may be a cocky, annoying son of a bitch, but he's a damn good agent, and he didn't deserve this. We take care of our own, and this is no different. If you think of anything else I can do, just ask, and you've got it. Okay?"

"What do I tell Gibbs about DelMar? Because he's liked him for this from the very beginning."

"Yeah, I understand why. To tell you the truth, Leon, based on what you and Fornell have both told me, it sounds like someone knew that torturing DiNozzo that way would put Stefano in the frame. The whole damn thing smells like a set up, but I don't blame Gibbs for a second for falling for it. If I didn't know where Stefano has been for the past four days, I'd probably have believed it, too."

"So what do I tell him?"

"Tell him the truth," Charlie answered simply. "Read him in. Read them all in, even Fornell. I know how Gibbs gets when he's protecting his people, and I don't want them hunting Stefano down for something someone else did ten years ago. That wouldn't end well for anyone."

"Understood, Director Vance. Thank you. And good luck with Gibbs."

Fornell pressed ended the call a bit more forcefully than needed to, but nowhere near as forcefully as he wanted to. He looked up at Ziva, Tim, Abby and Ducky and shrugged.

"If it's any consolation, the FBI's intra-agency cooperation is no better than it's interagency cooperation is."

Tim turned away from Gibbs' desk, breaking the tight circle they'd formed around it when Director Vance's call came in, and walked over to his own. He tapped a few keys on his keyboard, and all of the pictures and information they'd gathered on Stefano DelMar disappeared from the plasma, leaving only a blank screen. The silence in the empty and mostly-darkened squad room was deafening.

"And back to nothing we go." Tim flopped in his chair tiredly and ran his hands through his hair.

"Not nothing, Timmy," Abby said. "It can't be nothing. You have to have something."

He rubbed his eyes quickly and leaned forward on his elbows. "Why? Have you got anything? Other than Tony's blood all over Gibbs' basement? Or the most common mold in existence on a piece of rope that could have been bought at any hardware store on the Eastern Seaboard? Or a picture of the back of some tall guy's head?"

"That's not fair."

"What about you, Ziva?" Tim stood up and stalked back toward the group. "Those fantastic, mysterious 'contacts' of yours hear anything? Find anything? Know anything?"

Ziva shook her head slowly. "No."

"Ducky? Can you tell us anything else about this guy? Other than the fact that he's not Stefano DelMar and he really hates Gibbs and Tony? Anything?"

Ducky pressed his lips together and straightened his back. "As I told you, he is a member of law enforcement, and he has direct knowledge of the Brewer investigation."

"Oh, that's right. So he might be an NCIS agent, or another employee, or he might be a D.C. Metro cop, or an FBI agent, or a reporter, or a friend of Brewer's or Kale's or ... in other words, we have a suspect pool of roughly 15,000 people. That's a big help."

"It might be a large sampling," Ducky said calmly. "But 15,000 people is better than a hundred and fifty million, don't you think?"

Tim drew a deep breath and pulled his shoulders back, and Fornell decided to step in before the obviously frazzled man went any further.

"McGee!" He pushed himself to his feet and walked around the corner of the desk. "Gibbs' office." Tim gave no indication that he'd be moving any time soon, so Fornell put a hand on his shoulder and shoved him toward the elevator. "Now!"

Tim pulled his arm away angrily and stormed out of the squad room with Fornell following a short distance behind him. When he reached the elevator, Tim turned back around and glared at the FBI agent, who smiled patiently in response and pushed the call button. When the doors opened, Fornell held his hand out as if to say, 'After you,' and Tim stepped inside.

They rode the elevator down two floors in absolute silence before Fornell hit the stop switch. Then he turned, leaned his back and shoulders against the wall, and crossed his arms.

"So," he said. "What's up?"

Tim huffed in irritation. "Nothing. Why do you ask?"

"Oh, I don't know." Fornell kept his voice light and non-accusatory. "Maybe because you're tearing around like Gibbs after someone spilled his coffee?"

"I'm fine."

Fornell shook his head. "You've been the one telling us all – from the very beginning – not to get too invested in DelMar. You've been the one saying it might not be him and we should be looking for other suspects, too. To be completely honest, McGee, I don't think I've ever seen anyone get so pissed off about being proven right before."

Tim ran his hands through his hair again. "But eliminating him leaves us with nothing. We can't question him about any of this, and even if we did, he wouldn't be able to help us. And Tony deserves to … he just … he deserves more than nothing."

Fornell studied the younger man's face as he talked. "When's the last time you slept, Tim?" He got a shrug for an answer. "Have you slept at all in the past twenty-four hours?"

"No."

"And how long had you been up before Gibbs called you last night? Sixteen, seventeen hours? So you're coming up on forty-eight hours with no sleep, running the way you have been? You've been making everyone else take naps, but you haven't bothered to take one yourself?"

"I'm the senior agent right now, and it's my …"

Fornell cleared his throat. "Not for nothing, kid, but I'm pretty sure that I'm the senior agent."

Tim bristled, and Fornell raised his hand in surrender. "I get it. You're the ranking member of Gibbs' team, and that makes you responsible for taking care of everyone else, right? Even DiNozzo?"

"Especially Tony," Tim muttered.

"Okay. Well, I'm responsible for you right now, Tim. And if there's one thing I know about Gibbs, it's that he gets really pissed when you borrow his people and don't give them back in the same condition you got them in. Which means if you work yourself into the ground, it's my ass he's going to take a chunk out of, not yours. Understand?"

Tim nodded reluctantly.

"What's going to happen now is we're going to go back upstairs, and you're going to calm down. You're going to take a breath, take a nap, and look at this whole thing with a fresh eye and a new perspective, okay?" Fornell searched Tim's face for some sign of agreement, and it didn't take him long to find it. "And you're wrong. We don't have nothing. You've been working too hard for us to have nothing. What we have is a hell of a lot of something; we just don't understand who or what it means."

Tim closed his eyes and dropped his head. "Someone in law enforcement. Someone big. Someone who hasn't known Gibbs and Tony long but hates them already. Someone with knowledge of the Brewer investigation and access to the …"

Fornell shook his head as he flipped the switch again and pushed the button to go back up. "Didn't I say after a nap?"

"Access to our security feed." Tim was mumbling, but his voice was just loud enough for Fornell to make out the words. "He was watching the security feed. The cameras." Tim raised his head, and excitement flashed in his eyes. "Someone with access to our security cameras!"

The doors opened, and Tim was through them and running toward his desk before Fornell even moved. "McGee!" he called out. "I thought I told you to sleep!"

The younger man was still mumbling and muttering to himself, but Fornell couldn't hear him anymore. He was typing frantically at his keyboard, and the three other members of his team were gathering around him.

"Timothy?"

"You have found something, McGee?"

"What is it, Timmy?"

Fornell walked up and took his place between them. "McGee, unless you want to spend the next six months picking up dog crap on the National Mall, you will lay the hell down and …"

Tim lifted his head as he hit one last key on his keyboard. "Law enforcement background, check. Graduated from the police academy three years ago; washed out of FLETC ten months ago. Works here, check. Hasn't been here long, check. He was hired seven months ago, to be exact. Knows Gibbs and Tony, check. Was working the day we went out on the Brewer murder, check. Had access to the security cameras, check. And he just so happened to abandon the monitors at the exact time Tony was being attacked, and he didn't bother to review them when he came back."

A picture popped up on the plasma, and everyone turned toward it. Fornell had never seen the man before, but it was obvious that everyone else had. Abby's jaw dropped, and she looked between the picture and Tim with something close to awe on her face.

"Robert Duncan."

Fornell turned around, and he was somehow unsurprised by the wide smile that suddenly dominated Tim's expression.

"We need to find Robert Duncan."