Sunday, 1631, NCIS Headquarters
Ziva looked up as Jeanne approached, raising her eyebrows in polite inquiry, her emotions seething under the surface. "Agent Gibbs wants you to take me to Tony's place to get him some clothes, but we don't have any keys," Jeanne said, and Ziva's eyes narrowed.
"Keys are not a problem," she said, and she reached into her desk drawer to gear up. "But why would you be going?" she added, glaring.
Jeanne shrugged with a maddening smile. "Gibbs told me to," she said sweetly.
Ziva rose and began arming herself. "But why you?" she demanded, wondering at the woman's chutzpah. "I could manage fine without help."
"I'm sure you could," Jeanne replied, still maintaining that pleasant tone, though Ziva could see an arch look in her eyes. "But I offered to do it and Tony accepted."
Ziva grabbed her bag. "I see. Let us go. McGee, let me know if anything comes up."
"Sure, Ziva," he replied, watching them with wide, slightly anxious eyes. Ziva found his innocence endearing sometimes. He had no real experience with women, and it showed.
She led Jeanne down to her car, and as soon as they were underway, Jeanne pulled out her phone. Ziva listened with one ear, still unsure that the woman beside her was entirely to be trusted. "This is Jeanne Benoit, room 943. Yes, everything's fine, but I need to move to a larger suite, one with two bedrooms." Ziva gave her a startled look. A honking horn drew her attention back to the road, but she continued to listen to Jeanne. "Yes, both should have king beds, no smoking, exactly the same as my current room, but with a second bedroom." She paused, listening. "That will do very well, thank you. Now, I'm going to need you to stock the fridge with LaPure water rather than your house variety, and I'd like pretzels, Moon Pies and Acadia brand kettle chips, some of all varieties. Oh, and Kona Café blend coffee please." She nodded. "Very good, but I'll need it in an hour or so. Can you have it ready then? Good." She listened for a moment. "If that's not a problem, I would appreciate it. Thank you." After hanging up her phone, she put it away.
"Feeling cramped, are we?" Ziva asked acerbically. "And a little hungry?"
Jeanne gave her an odd look. "It's for Tony," she said. "He'll be staying with me for a while, since he's concerned that staying with one of you will cause problems for Agent Gibbs."
"Staying with you?" Ziva exclaimed, horrified by this turn of events. She opened her mouth, but no words came to her – or at least no words that Jeanne would understand.
"Agent Gibbs doesn't seem to have a problem with it," the other woman said quickly, as if to head off an expected explosion. "It's just a stopgap until a better solution can be contrived, or until that bastard's allegations are shown to be the bullshit they are."
Ziva almost asked why Tony was not returning to his own apartment, but her common sense kicked in before she asked so foolish a question. At least she was arranging for Tony to have his own bedroom. If she had been expecting to restart the relationship, she would surely not have done that.
Ziva parked in front of Tony's building and got out of the car. Jeanne was looking up curiously. "Have you not been here before?"
"No, he always came to my place."
"And that never seemed odd?"
"It did, later, but at the time he managed to charm me out of thinking about it."
Ziva snorted. "That is Tony," she muttered, leading the way into the building. They took the elevator to the fifteenth floor and then Ziva led off again towards Tony's door. She made short work of the lock, enjoying the startled sound Jeanne made when she realized why their lack of a key didn't matter, and opened the door.
She had spent several hours here on Friday night, and looking around now, she felt anger stirring. What need could there possibly have been to dust every surface for fingerprints? Neither man denied that Harris had been in the apartment, so far as she knew. Jeanne came in behind her and let out a heartfelt curse. "I hope his clothes aren't messed up," she said. "Which way to his bedroom?"
"This way," Ziva said, pointing. "I will gather his toiletries."
Jeanne's eyes widened. "Right. I hadn't . . ."
Ziva shrugged and went into the bathroom. All the drawers had been looked into, but things seemed to be largely in their normal places. She was looking for the case Tony always used on long trips when a noise in the doorway made her jump and look up. Jeanne stood there holding the very case she'd been looking for. "I think you may need this," she said, politely not noticing Ziva's discomfiture. "I found it in a suitcase."
"Thank you," Ziva said, taking it, and Jeanne left again. This whole situation put Ziva very much on edge. She gathered up Tony's things and stowed them carefully in their places. He had a bit of a mania about his toiletries. Normally, she might play a few games with that, but now was not the time to disrupt that kind of routine. When she was done, she carried the case with her into Tony's bedroom. The sheets and blankets were all off the bed and gone. "Did they not realize that Harris has not been in the apartment for at least five weeks?" Ziva asked incredulously.
"For all we know, he claims that the relationship was continuing up till Friday night," Jeanne said. She was carefully placing suits and shirts into a garment bag.
"He only needs a few things," Ziva pointed out, a little startled by how thorough the other woman was being. "This is not permanent."
"He said he's not coming back to this apartment," Jeanne replied. "If we take everything now, it will save time."
Ziva blinked. "He said he's not coming back?"
"Why do you think I'm getting his stuff?" Jeanne asked. She looked up with an air of humor. "Or did you just think I was being officious?"
"I . . . I did not . . ." Ziva stopped talking. The thought that Tony didn't even want to return to his own home infuriated her. How could that bastard have so completely destroyed his sense of security and self? She walked into the living room and picked up a few things she thought he'd want to have if he was not returning. Jeanne looked up as she placed them on the bed and went digging in the closet for a leather duffel bag she knew Tony had.
After placing a final suit in the garment bag and zipping it closed, Jeanne walked over to pick up the few items Ziva had brought in. "Who's this?" she asked.
Ziva glanced over. "That is his mother," she said. "And the other picture is of him with his grandmother. I do not believe he would want them left behind."
"This is obviously the team, but . . ." She paused, looking at a fourth picture. "Why aren't you in this one?" she asked. "And who is this woman?"
Ziva had started pulling pairs of jeans out of the closet and rolling them to go into the duffel. "That is Kate," she said. "She died just before I joined the team."
"Kate?" Jeanne repeated, sounding startled, and as if she recognized the name.
Ziva turned and stared at her. "Yes, Agent Kate Todd. What do you know of her?"
"Nothing, really, except . . ." She shrugged, staring at the picture. "Tony mentioned a woman named Kate a couple of times, mostly when he was making fun of himself. 'Kate would say . . .' whatever. I asked him who Kate was, and he said she was a really good friend."
Ziva couldn't speak for a moment, then she cleared her throat. "That is . . . surprising. I have never heard him speak of her."
"Why not?"
Shaking her head, Ziva shrugged. "I do not know." She dug out Tony's second leather duffel. "Here, perhaps you should start on the dresser."
Jeanne put the framed photographs back down on the bed and took the bag Ziva held out. She grabbed a nearby chair and put the bag down on it, then opened the top dresser drawer. Neither woman spoke for a while. Jeanne finished with the top drawer, socks and underwear, and started on the next. Ziva was considering starting at the bottom of the dresser and working her way up when she realized that Jeanne had stopped dead, holding a small box in her hands. Ziva walked over to stand at her shoulder, curious what had arrested the other woman so completely. Seeming entirely unaware of being watched, Jeanne opened the box very slowly. Inside was a bracelet wrought of silver. It had an odd shape to it, but Ziva couldn't see it clearly because Jeanne reached in, covering the bracelet with her hand and starting to cry.
"What is it?" Ziva asked, and Jeanne turned, eyes wide, clutching the box to her chest protectively.
She stared at Ziva, clearly deeply affected by what she had found. "I . . . he . . . he kept . . ." Reaching into the box, she pulled out a little band of plastic that had been much handled. It was barely recognizable, but Ziva blinked at it in astonishment.
"Is that a hospital bracelet?" she asked, perplexed by its presence in a jewelry box in Tony's dresser. Why would he keep such a thing?
Jeanne nodded. Almost absently, she put down the jewelry box and pressed the tattered hospital bracelet to her lips, tears continuing to stream down her cheeks. Ziva picked up the box and looked at the bracelet inside. So far as Ziva was aware, Tony never wore any kind of jewelry, or at least, nothing more than a watch, so she was curious to see what it might be. It was a wide silver band, a cuff bracelet, and it was fashioned in the shape of a hospital ID bracelet like the one Jeanne was weeping over. On it a name was inscribed. DiNardo, Anthony, in true hospital fashion, putting the last name first.
"I don't understand," Ziva said, looking over at the other woman.
"I gave him . . . one day when he was making excuses for why he couldn't keep a lunch date, I put this bracelet around his wrist and told him he had to keep it on until I saw him again. He . . . he did." She lifted the plastic tape in her hand. "And he kept it. If none of it had meant anything to him, he would have thrown it away. Even if it had, he still might have thrown it away. But he . . ." She buried her face in her hands and turned away.
Ziva looked down at the box in her hands. Jeanne had given Tony this bracelet to commemorate that tattered and dirty piece of plastic tape. The very unique nature of the gift opened up a whole new door on the relationship the two had shared. That Jeanne knew Tony well enough to know how much this would have meant to him told Ziva more than she wanted to believe about how very much Jeanne had loved him.
Then a memory occurred to her suddenly, and she looked up. "It is your fault!" she said. Jeanne turned in surprise. "I was so worried that day, I thought he was ill and not telling us or something, but you put the bracelet on him as a . . . as a . . ."
"It was a joke," Jeanne said. "A reminder that he had a date with me in the evening."
"I watched him like a hawk for symptoms of trouble, I dogged his footsteps at work, I looked up everything I could find on . . ." She trailed off. McGee seemed to think they should not tell her the specific illness.
"Plague?" Jeanne asked, and Ziva nodded, startled that she knew. "Tony told me."
"Yes. I looked up articles and case histories and . . . and it was a joke?"
Jeanne stared at her and started laughing even though tears still ran down her face. "I didn't know," she said. "How could I know? It's not even . . . it's for the psych ward."
Ziva's eyes widened, and she lifted the silver bracelet to her eyes and read the tiny letters on it. "I do not believe this."
"I guess I'd better put this back how I found it," Jeanne said, holding her hand out for the box. Ziva let her take it and watched her put the ID bracelet tenderly into the middle of the silver one. Closing the box, Jeanne tucked it into the bag she'd been filling. She gazed at the box for a long moment, then looked up again, tears flowing afresh. "It's not even his real name," she said helplessly and went to the bathroom. Ziva heard her blowing her nose. A few moments later she came back and started working again without saying anything. After that emotional scene, Ziva felt very awkward. Respecting the other woman's silence, she knelt down to check the bottom drawer.
After a while, though, the quiet got to her. She looked up. "Tell me, why did you not believe him when he told you he did not care?"
Jeanne turned towards her. "I did, at the time. Later it occurred to me that I'd believed all his other lies, too. And when I'd had a chance to think about it, I didn't believe it at all." Jeanne went quickly through the remaining drawers, grabbed a few things out of them, then closed up her duffel with some difficulty.
"We shall have to carry these ourselves," Ziva said.
Jeanne shrugged, picked up the smaller of the duffels and draped the garment bag over her shoulder. "I can manage." Ziva took up the remaining duffel and they went down to her car. The two duffels went into the trunk with Jeanne's bag and they draped the garment bag along the back seat. "Maybe we should drop this by the hotel," Jeanne suggested.
Ziva's lips tightened, but she nodded. Her phone rang and she picked up as she started the car. "Did DiNozzo's apartment swallow you both whole?" Gibbs asked dryly.
"We thought it would be best to gather a large quantity of his clothing so that this would not have to be done again."
"Has Jeanne gotten the second room yet?"
"She has requested it, but I do not know if it is ready."
"Find out. Tony and I will meet you at the hotel."
When Ziva hung up and turned, she found the other woman already on the phone. "Yes, immediately," she was saying. "Good. I should be there in about a half hour, and I'll need a cart and a bellhop when I arrive. If Agent Gibbs and Agent DiNozzo get there before I do, please show them up to the suite without delay." She hung up and put her phone away.
"How did you know they were going to the hotel?" Ziva asked.
Jeanne gave her an odd look. "He doesn't talk quietly on the phone, does he?" she asked.
Ziva blinked. "Not really," she said.
"Does Abby really sleep in a coffin?" Jeanne asked suddenly, and Ziva's eyebrows went up.
"Yes, she does," she said.
"That's just a little weird, don't you think?"
Ziva nodded. "More than a little."
"Oh." Jeanne looked out the window while Ziva continued to drive. She did not know what to make of the woman beside her. For months she had been nothing but a first name and a certain light in Tony's eyes, a spring in his step. Ziva had wondered about her, but nothing had seemed to require her attention. If the relationship had seemed more serious to her, she might have looked into this mysterious unknown girlfriend, but Tony had never been serious about anybody. Besides, all the hospital calls and nonspecific appointments had seemed more urgent.
Then the director's operation had come crashing down and chaos had reigned for a time. Tony's car, their belief that he was on Ducky's table, his sudden appearance and the CIA's abrupt involvement . . . and Jeanne's ultimatum, followed by her utter abandonment of Washington D.C. It had been over and Tony had been devastated. After that, her return, the accusation of murder and all that went with it, including Tony's emotions boiling up again.
Looking at the woman in the passenger seat, the pensive expression, the way her hands twisted together, Ziva wondered if she'd been as right in her advice to Tony as she'd thought at the time. If telling him to cut off the emotional connection – to pretend it had never existed – had been the right move. Certainly it hadn't stopped anything on either side. There was no denying that Tony still loved Jeanne, nor that Jeanne still loved Tony.
"There's a stoplight ahead," Jeanne said suddenly.
Caught staring at her passenger, Ziva jerked her attention forward and braked to a relatively smooth stop.