Lethal Fractures: Chapter 18

A/N: Yesterday I took my last test of medical school! Well, assuming I passed, of course. It was a very exciting moment for me. Means I'm all that much closer to ending this four-year-long purgatory and getting on with my life.

But I digress. Back to the story.

Saturday morning was clear and breezy; perfect weather for sailing, but Gibbs wasn't feeling up for it that day. He couldn't remember the last time he had taken a day off while in the middle of a case, or even if it had ever happened. He reached for his phone at least half a dozen times that morning, meaning to call Sonja Gracy to cancel, but put it down each time before he could hit 'send'. He doubted he would be good company that morning, but he just couldn't bring himself to back down. Still brooding about the fruitless interrogation the day before and all the work he could be getting done, he headed out for the marina.

Gracy and her children were already there when he arrived, despite the fact that he arrived ten minutes prior to their scheduled meeting time. He raised his eyebrows at that as he approached. Seeming to know what he was thinking, Gracy just shrugged. "The kids were excited and ready to go," she said as an explanation.

"There are lifejackets for us on the boat," Gibbs said as they headed down toward the docks. "But there aren't any Maddie and Nate's sizes. They'll have them at the marina office."

"No need," Gracy said, holding up her arm. He hadn't noticed the two children's sized lifejackets that she had been carrying until then. "We went boating quite a bit in Hawaii. Maddie informed me last night that the lifejackets made the move as well. Amazing how we can manage to get two kids' lifejackets from Hawaii to DC, but somehow a couple of frying pans and a blender didn't quite make it. And don't worry, I didn't forget lunch. Or this." She pulled out a thermos from her large bag and grinned. She really had thought about everything. Even the coffee.

The kids didn't complain about the lifejackets, a fact Gibbs commented on as they were underway. "They've gotten plenty of boating safety lectures from their uncle," Gracy explained. "Mark, my younger brother, is a lieutenant in the Coast Guard reserve. He's a DEA agent down in Miami in his real life and spends a lot of time on the water for that job, too." She continued to chat easily about her family her childhood, and Gibbs couldn't help but notice how relaxed she seemed out on the water, sipping her coffee and watching her children have a good time. In the three months that they had worked together, she had never looked so calm. It wasn't long before he felt himself starting to relax as well, the stress of the case seeming to ebb away.

"Agent Gibbs?" Nate asked, his head tilted in an expression of curiosity. "Is this the boat we worked on before?" While Gracy was in the ICU recovering from an episode of hypothermia years before, Maddie and Nate had stayed with Gibbs for the night.

The NCIS agent chuckled. This boat was quite a bit larger than his basement, and that boat obviously hadn't had a mast for a sail. "No," he said simply. "This belongs to a friend of mine."

"What happened to that boat?"

"It's a secret."

"How'd you get it out of the basement?"

He grinned. "It's a secret," he repeated. He heard Gracy chuckle at the explanation from her position beside him. "You want to steer?" he asked, gesturing toward the wheel in his hands. Nate's eyes widened.

"It's just like Uncle Mark's boat," Gracy said encouragingly. "And he let you man the wheel. He even gave Michi a try, and she's only four."

"Yeah, but I did it all by myself, and he had to help her," Nate replied indignantly. "Okay. What should I do?" Gibbs positioned the boy at the wheel and pointed out the compass, giving him a direction to stick to.

"What happens if I don't?" Nate asked seriously.

"Then we'll have to call the Coast Guard to come rescue us." Nate nodded gravely and gave the compass his full attention.

Gibbs accepted a cup of coffee from Gracy as he joined her on the low bench, where they watched as Nate made minute adjustments to keep them on course. "Not bad, Nate," Gibbs commented. "Navy might be in your future."

Gracy chuckled at the words. "I can see five generations of Gracy men rolling over in their graves at the thought." Five generations of Gracy men, all of whom proudly wore Army uniforms. Four of them died in them. None of the five had lived long enough to see the birth of their first grandchild. Although she didn't believe in fate or destiny, Gracy couldn't help but look at her son and hope there wouldn't be any wars in twenty to thirty years. Gracy men didn't seem to have much luck on the battlefield. "So, where are we heading, anyway?" Gracy asked to distract herself from the sudden morbid thought. Gibbs gave another grin.

"It's a secret," he repeated. She just chuckled and shook her head slightly, but seemed to accept the explanation. Days that she could have completely off, without needing to plan or do anything, were hard to come by, and she was bound and determined to enjoy this one.

---

While Gibbs and the Gracy family was out on the water, Hollis Mann was sitting in a conference room a stone's throw away from her old office at CID, staring intently at the pictures of four female Army officers on the white board. There was something she was missing about them, she could feel it, but it wasn't anything she could put her finger on. A captain, second lieutenant, first lieutenant, captain. Redhead, brunette, blond, brunette. Nurse, quartermaster, musician, veterinarian. Twenty-seven, twenty-three, thirty, thirty. All unmarried, all found dead with their boyfriends. All killed by a violent twist of the neck after their boyfriends had been shot in the head. All currently living in the DC area, none of them raised there. All graduates of ROTC programs.

All killed by a violent twist of the neck... The words rang through Mann's mind, accompanied by the memory of the first time she had seen Dr. Sonja Gracy. "I'm sorry to interrupt, Doctor, but I had a question about the Hamilton autopsy."

"Hamilton?"

"Lt. Amanda Hamilton, the quartermaster with the broken neck."

"Oh! Right. Sorry. It's been a busy week, and to make matters worse, both of my kids are sick and my husband is completely useless in that department. He seems to think that since I have the medical degree, I can cure anything." She rolled her eyes before turning to her assistant. "Let's take a break, Sergeant. This guy is going to be just as dead in another half hour."

"Yes, ma'am." Gracy lifted her clear plastic face shield and shrugged out of her blue autopsy gown.

"I don't think we've been properly introduced," the pathologist said and she removed her gloves with a resolute snapping sound. "Captain Sonja Gracy, forensic pathology fellow."

"Colonel Hollis Mann, CID." Mann offered her hand, but Gracy chuckled and shook her head slightly.

"Never shake hands with a pathologist, Colonel. Or a proctologist." She grinned before walking over to the sink. "You said you had a question about the Hamilton case."

"You mentioned some bruising around the lieutenant's neck in your report."

"Hold on, let me pull up the complete dictation. I do a lot of autopsies, ma'am. I don't want to accidentally get them confused." She walked over to a computer and logged on before bringing up a lengthy document and scanning it quickly. "Yeah, there was some bruising along the mandibular portion of her jaw and her posterior neck."

"Meaning?"

Gracy gave an apologetic smile. "Her lower jaw and the back of her neck. Considering how she was killed, that's not surprising. That would be consistent with the placement of the hands in order to snap the neck. Was there anything else you needed, ma'am?"

"No, that was all," Mann said thoughtfully. "I'll give you a call if I think of any other questions."

The pathologist nodded. "Sorry I couldn't be more of a help."

Mann blinked, remembering the nagging feeling she had had then that the bruising was somehow significant. She frowned as she began searching through the folders Wang had neatly arranged in a portable filing cabinet in the corner of the room. She grabbed the four she was looking for and spread them out in front of her. Each autopsy report, the portions she was able to understand amidst the heavy medical jargon, mentioned that same bruising, but she still couldn't figure out what was bothering her about it. With a determined air, she picked up her phone and dialed.

---

They had arrived at a small island—likely part of some national or state park, knowing how much that part of the country liked those—a little before noon. After swimming in the roped-off recreation area for a short time with the kids, Gracy declared that she had had enough of the cold water—"It's not as bad as Norfolk in January, but I still prefer Hawaii or southern Florida anytime,"—and got lunch ready, which consisted of fried chicken and an assortment of various salads from the deli.

"Any progress on the case?" Gracy asked as she set aside a chicken bone and glanced into the container, contemplating another.

"You're not following it?" Gibbs asked, mildly surprised. She laughed slightly and shook her head.

"I do between five and fifteen autopsies a week, Gibbs," she said. "Which includes all of the reports and documentation. I also give expert opinions, do depositions, peer-review journal articles prior to publication, and all of the administrative crap that comes with being a deputy director of a national institute. I swear, I do more paperwork now as deputy director of forensic pathology here than I did as the director at Tripler. I think Colonel Slide is passing along some of his stuff to me to see if I'll notice. Makes me wish I had a deputy back in Hawaii." She decided against another piece of chicken and grabbed one of the Little Debbie cakes Maddie had insisted on instead. "There aren't enough hours in a day for me to follow investigations of each of my cases as well."

He nodded as he filled her in on Agent Wang's theories and explained how they had gotten their hopes up about Sergeant Emerson, only to have discovered that he couldn't have done it. He asked her about the experiments Dr. Lester had mentioned.

"Oh, at the Body Farm?"

"Body Farm?"

She nodded. "The University of Tennessee's anthropology department has essentially a large-scale laboratory for investigating how various conditions affect decomposition. It has an official name, but everyone just calls it the Body Farm. I spent some time out there during my fellowship and co-authored a publication with an entomologist—someone who studies bugs—about the effects of stab wounds on larvae development and staging in order to better pinpoint time since death of stabbing victims."

"What would they have to do with neck fractures?"

"They have a good number of donated corpses to experiment on, and pathologists and anthropologists from all over the country—well, the world, actually—will contact them with questions about bone conditions or decomposition, and if they haven't already done a similar experiment, they'll design one. If I were to design this one, I'd get two ROTC cadets, or midshipmen, I guess—one right-handed and one left—who aren't squeamish about touching dead bodies, give them a crash course on breaking necks, and have each break one from the front and one from the back, and then study the bones and look for any differences based on the position of the assailant. I don't know how they'll design it, though. Either way, we should hear something by Monday." She seemed to think about that for a minute as she calculated days in her head. "Well, maybe Tuesday. Getting bones clean enough to study isn't always a quick and easy task." He nodded, not bothering to hide his disappointment that things couldn't happen faster. Well, there was nothing that they could do about it now.

They packed up everything they had brought and loaded it back onto the boat and set sail back for the mainland, with Gracy at the helm and Gibbs standing behind her, his arms loosely around her, his hands also on the large wooden wheel. "Gibbs, I've been sailing since I was younger than Nate," she said with a laugh. "I think I know what I'm doing."

"I know," he replied with a grin. She shook her head slightly and chuckled, but didn't move away. She had forgotten how nice it felt to have a man's arms around her, even with the bulk of the lifejackets between them.

And then his phone rang, and the moment was ruined. "Gibbs," he barked into the slim device. He listened for a minute, giving short "yeah"s and "um-hmm"s, before he said, "Just a minute." He held out the phone. "It's for you."

She snorted. "Right. Funny, Gibbs."

"I'm serious." She frowned and accepted the phone, handing over the wheel to step away.

"This is Major Gracy," she said, instantly all-business.

"Sorry to interrupt your sail, Doctor, but I have a question for you." It took Gracy a minute before she placed the voice of the former CID agent.

"Okay, Colonel. Maybe I'll be able to answer it."

"It's about the bruising on the victims' necks."

She sighed and shook her head slightly. "Colonel, I've done literally thousands of autopsies since Macintosh and Hamilton, and more than half a dozen since Rodriguez. I remember there was bruising, but I'm not exactly in a position where I can look up any of the specifics."

There was a pause, and then, "Do you think it's something you can check when you get in?"

"Just how urgent is this?" Gracy asked, already feeling her weekend slipping away. This was one of the things she had forgotten about her short time as an investigator but was quickly coming back to her, and one of the things she didn't miss.

"I think it might be significant."

She sighed again, a litany of excuses coming to mind about why she wouldn't be able to get to it until Monday. She wasn't working. She didn't have a nanny yet to watch the kids. The victims weren't going to be any more dead in a couple of days. She doubted it was anything that would change the outcome of the case. Still, she bit back a groan as she pinched the bridge of her nose. "Tomorrow, Colonel," she heard herself saying. "I'll go in tomorrow and have another look."

So much for the easy life of a forensic pathologist.