A/N: Ok, sorry for two reasons; one, that it's been over a week since I posted anything on this story, and two, that this chapter is so short!
Inspiration for this story deserted me for a few days. 'Creative stifling' is a killer, lol. Now I've figured out some more of the story, hopefully I can get some more posted soon.
Thanks for your patience! F.
Gibbs growled in frustration. What should have been a simple matter of finding who had signed out the pool car that had hit Abby was rapidly turning into a farce.
Only a few people in the Agency had a regularly assigned car; the field teams, senior administrators, and of course the MCRT and ME trucks. Other employees could requisition one as needed. All they had to do was provide the proper Agency ID to the motor pool, collect the keys and leave. They were supposed to sign the cars back in before the Agency motor pool closed, but as per usual, there were a few cars that were still signed out from the day before. To make matters worse, the checker on duty yesterday had been brand new; he hadn't checked and recorded the ID of people signing out cars properly, and some of the signatures on the sign out sheets were illegible. Needless to say, that particular checker no longer worked at the Agency.
That left them with the task of checking the security footage for the motor pool and matching every face with the people known to have taken cars that day. Hopefully that way they'd end up with a suspect.
The problem with that was that Tony and Ziva just did not have the same tech skills as Abby and McGee. Hell, McGee's tech skills were the reason Gibbs had wanted him on his team in the first place, although the young man had turned into a good field agent. Tony and Ziva were struggling to pinpoint good still frames of the people they needed to match. Instinctively, Gibbs turned to McGee's desk to tell him to take over, then cursed under his breath. McGee was still out at Bethesda; Abby had gotten out of surgery late last night and was still unconscious.
He watched his two remaining agents carefully. Ziva was more accurate, when she could get the remote for the plasma screen off Tony. Standing, he stalked over to the two constantly quarrelling agents and took the remote off Tony, handing it to Ziva and giving Tony a warning glance as he began to protest. He didn't have time for their games right now. The need to catch the person who had hit Abby was rapidly becoming an obsession. No one hurt one of his people and got away with it.
Unable to stand the tedium of the search any longer, he went for coffee
True to form, he returned to the bull pen as Ziva stopped the tape on the blurred image of a man. She looked around as he entered
"Gibbs, I think we have something. We have gotten photographs of every single person that visited the motor pool except this one. He seems to have avoided every single camera. All we can tell is that he is male, roughly 6'2" to 6'4" in height and has dark hair. That description includes almost 30 men from this office"
"What's the timestamp on that, Ziva?"
"40 minutes before McGee found Abby" she replied
He stared at the screen briefly, trying to imprint the image on his memory. This was the bastard, he was sure of it. He could feel it in his gut.
"Get me an ID on that guy" he demanded "I don't care if you have to interview every person matching that description in this Agency. Just find him"