Lethal Fractures: Chapter 3

"Do you have the x-rays for the second case, Ducky?" Dr. Sonja Gracy asked the NCIS medical examiner as she latched the door to the small refrigerated compartment where Staff Sergeant Nicholas Jasper would be staying for the next few days, now that his autopsy was complete.

"Of course, my dear. I'm looking at them now," Dr. Donald Mallard replied patiently. She turned to find him standing by the x-ray light box, his glasses on as he squinted at the black and white image there.

"If you had a digital x-ray system, like the rest of the Department of Defense, you could magnify the images," Gracy said with amusement.

"Maybe I'm just a little old-fashioned, Sonja, but I find something comforting about looking at the actual images on film. It reminds me of when my rural hospital back in Scotland first got an x-ray machine. Although us younger physicians were quite eager to test out our new piece of equipment, some of the older faculty were a little more reluctant—"

"Progress at its finest, Duck," Agent Gibbs said as he strode into Autopsy. "What've you got?"

"I hope you're not expecting that we've completed both autopsies already, Gibbs," Dr. Gracy said lightly. Her smile faded slightly. "Oh. That is what you're expecting."

"Our Jethro has rather unrealistic expectations, my dear," Ducky told her, "as I'm sure you remember from your time with us."

"It's starting to come back to me."

"But anyway, Jethro, a thorough forensics post-mortem examination is not something that can be rushed. There are many things that a body can tell you, if you only take the time to listen—"

"What are these saying?"

Ducky and Gracy glanced at each other before she spoke. "We flipped to see who would do the autopsy first, and Ducky won, so we did Staff Sergeant Jasper, although now that I think about it, that was probably the best approach anyway. It's most likely the chronological order that they died."

"'Most likely'?"

She sighed. "Time of death calculations aren't down to the minute, Gibbs, and Jasper and Captain Rodriguez, our Army officer, likely died within minutes of each other. I'm afraid that you're going to have to make do with our assumptions on this one, and before you say anything, I know that violates one of your all-precious rules." She smiled thinly. If Ziva and Tony were any indication, Gibbs had lightened up on his rules in the last couple of years. "What leads us to believe that Jasper died first is the cause of death. Jasper was shot point-blank to the forehead, and while we haven't even begun our post on Rodriguez, I am fairly confident that she died when her neck was violently broken. If we have only one assailant, the assumption would be that he would take out the biggest threat first, and that would have been Jasper." She paused. She hated to assume things without facts, but she felt the need to explain her reasoning further. "If this death is related to CID's other three cases, then our killer would have another reason to kill Jasper first. In the past, he seemed only interested in the woman—the Army officer—and not in the man she was killed with. Like Jasper, they were shot point blank, the women killed by having their necks broken. The CID special agent in charge concluded that the men were killed quickly at the beginning to get them out of the way so the killer could give the woman his full attention."

"So what do we have?"

"Well, as Sonja was saying, we have only completed our examination on our staff sergeant, who was killed by a 9mm bullet sent through the frontal lobe to exit through the occipital lobe."

"A slight downward angle," Gracy added, "which suggests that the killer was taller than Jasper."

"How tall?"

The two pathologists looked at each other and shrugged. "We'd have to know the exact distance he was standing from Jasper to be able to say," Gracy said. "We sent his clothes to Abby to do a GSR analysis, but that will only give us a range. Jasper wasn't too tall though, only 1.7 meters—"

"In English?"

"About five-seven. That puts him below average height for an adult male, which means over fifty percent of the male population is taller than him."

"I do know what below average means, Gracy."

She shrugged as Ducky took over. "The bullet passed through his skull, as I previously mentioned. I'm afraid CID didn't send Sonja to us with a bullet, so you will have to speak to them if you would like Abby to examine it."

"I'll do that," he grumbled. He was still upset that nobody there had called him about the case. "Is all of this consistent with the previous cases?"

Sonja shook her head slowly. "I don't remember specifics," she admitted. "And I don't feel comfortable looking through my old autopsy notes, or the notes from Alicia Gordon, who did the third autopsy, until we've finished with Captain Rodriguez."

He nodded and turned to leave. "Let me know when you're done."

"Gibbs," she said, stopping him. "I'm afraid an autopsy isn't going to answer one of the biggest questions about this case: what was Captain Rodriguez doing with Staff Sergeant Jasper?"

He smiled thinly, knowing what she was getting at—relationships between officers and enlisted, even those in differing branches or services, was forbidden on paper. In practice, though, things usually worked a little bit differently. "Hell, Major, I don't need an autopsy for that one. Same reason it always is. Sex."

---

Dr. Gracy placed her scalpel on the table after cutting through the last of the major blood vessels. She lifted the heart out of the chest and placed it on the scale. "Two hundred seventy-two grams," Ducky read. "Average size for a woman of Captain Rodriguez's height and age. And I'm afraid that does little to answer your question."

"About what she was doing with Jasper."

"Exactly." They both worked silently for a moment before Ducky spoke again. "I find it hard to believe that you of all people would have a problem with fraternization."

"Meaning what, exactly?" Her voice was harsher than she anticipated, and she toned it down before continuing. "I've never been involved with a non-commissioned officer, and I don't intend to start." She began to cut out the right lung. "Hell, Ducky, I got married a couple of months after I became an officer. And I married another officer."

"I didn't mean to imply otherwise," Dr. Mallard said gently. "I just meant that you hardly seem like the type of person to follow rules blindly."

She had to think about that for a moment before she spoke again. "I guess I don't really have a problem with it," she finally said, "and I don't think most people who do know why the rule exists in the first place. It's not an elitist thing—you know, a 'we're better than you because we're officers' mentality. I doubt the rule was made to keep the officers from mingling with the commoners." She smiled slightly. "As I understand it, the reason is to prevent problems in the chain of command. Even if the enlisted member of the relationship isn't directly in the chain of command of the officer, the military is a very hierarchal society—what if the husband is a major and the wife a sergeant, and the wife's commanding officer is a lieutenant? That puts the lieutenant in the awkward position of commanding his sergeant while not insulting a major's wife. And then there's the all-important 'image of proprietary'." She lifted out the lung and Ducky recorded its weight. "That being said, there are times and places where I think it's a little ridiculous. For example, doctors are officers, but we're not in anybody's chain of command, and we really have no influence." She removed the left lung. "And what about relationships between officers? As long as they're not in the same chain of command, there's no rule against a colonel being involved with a lieutenant, and I'd say that's a bigger power differential—not to mention larger age difference—than a colonel and a first sergeant." She shook her head slightly. "Other than the lectures about fraternization during Officer Basic, it's not something I've given much thought to. Like I said, I got married a few months after I became an officer, and Scott and I were never more than a year apart in rank."

"But you've been single for almost four years now," Ducky said gently.

"Widowed, Ducky. That's different than 'single'." She chuckled and shook her head slightly. "And it's not as if I've been putting much thought into dating."

"A young, attractive woman such as yourself? I find that hard to believe, my dear. I should think you have far surpassed the appropriate waiting period."

"I think they say a year," she agreed with a nod. "But after a year went by, I was still dealing with a lot of issues, and dealing with a kid with a lot of issues. Then I was deployed and made a strict 'no-dating' policy while I was in Iraq." She glanced up to see him looking at her curiously and shrugged. "We joked about 'deployment goggles' while we were over there. Same basic concept as 'beer goggles'—you drink enough, and every woman in the bar begins to look attractive. It works that way with deployments. You spend enough time in the sandbox surrounded by other men, and every woman you happen across begins to look attractive. We were somewhat isolated from it, being stationed at a hospital; and maybe me more so than others, since most of my patients were dead, but it was still there. It was best to just put up a very large and clear 'do not touch' sign from the beginning."

"I guess that would be an unforeseen consequence of allowing women to be deployed to war," Ducky commented.

"Right. And then after I got back to Hawaii, some of my friends tried fixing me up on blind dates. I went on two before I told them to stop." She chuckled again. "Apparently, there are a few things that shouldn't have been discussed on a first date. One is that I cut up dead people for a living, and the second is the fact that I have two kids. Unfortunately, my job and my kids are the only interesting things I have to talk about." She shrugged slightly. "Prior to those two unfortunate events, on my last first date, I still had a fake ID in my purse. Not that I used it, of course. I was far too scared about getting caught and losing my scholarship to even try. I think I just got one for the thrill of having it. But anyway, dating at thirty-six is completely different than dating at twenty." She glanced down at the body splayed open under her hands. "Maybe our captain wasn't having much luck on the dating scene, either. I would never regret my decision to go into the Army, but being a woman in the military isn't always easy. There are unspoken differences in the expectations for what you do and how you act. Boys could be boys and do whatever they want—and there were times that Scott seemed bound and determined to prove that—but women are expected to be physically fit, mentally disciplined, good leaders and role models, and are still expected to be feminine. Maybe while dealing with all of that, Rodriguez meets this guy—maybe through work, maybe not—who is clean-cut and respectful and doesn't question what she does for a living or her motives for going into the military. You know, there are some days I think that if I came across a man like that, I'd snatch him up without a second thought."