Lethal Fractures: Chapter 20
Dr. Sonja Gracy was just removing the last of her autopsy garb when the morgue doors opened. "There's a visitor for you, ma'am. He says he's from NCIS."
Thinking she knew who it was, Gracy smiled slightly before saying, "Send him in." To her surprise, it wasn't Gibbs who walked through the doors. "DiNozzo. This is a surprise."
"I was out for a drive and saw your sign, so I decided to stop by." She snorted as she walked over to the sink to wash her hands. "Actually, Gibbs told us about what you said about amputees. We got a list of names of soldiers who lost limbs prior to 2003 from the rehab center at Walter Reed. I was able to narrow it down slightly by only including combat soldiers, which was, unfortunately, most of them."
"No surprise there," Gracy commented.
"Right. Unfortunately, I don't understand the medical jargon, and Ducky's in the hospital—"
"What?" Gracy interrupted, her full attention now on the NCIS agent. "What happened? Is he okay?"
"What? Oh, no. It wasn't Ducky. Apparently, his mother fell and broke her hip." Gracy grimaced; she knew the statistics, and most elderly women with broken hips never fully recover. "So I decided to come by and ask if you could translate."
"And you drew the short straw to come venture over to the land of the dead?"
He grinned. "Actually, I needed to get away for a bit."
"Trouble in paradise?" she asked innocently.
"If you're referring to Ziva, everything's going well in that department. We're going to be moving in together."
"That should save on rent," she said with a straight face before grinning. "Congrats. When?"
"Not sure yet," he admitted. "I just got her to agree to look at apartments."
"Well, good for you. Girls don't wait around for the bad boys forever."
"I don't know if I'd classify myself as a 'bad boy'."
"Would you say that you're a good one?"
"Good point."
She grinned before getting back to the point. "Rehab isn't exactly my area of expertise, but I know the anatomy pretty well. Just let me finish up a few things here, then we can go to my office."
DiNozzo nodded and glanced around, mentally comparing this autopsy suite to the one at NCIS. This one seemed more high-tech, but both had the same cold, sterile feeling to them. "What'd this guy die of?" he asked, nodding toward the stainless steel table.
"Car accident. Don't drink and drive."
"He was drunk?"
She nodded. "We ran his blood alcohol. It was .32. In highly technical medical terms, he was blotto." She smiled slightly, then shook her head sadly. "Just got back from Afghanistan and over-did the celebration. I wish I could say he was the first I've seen in that situation." She glanced up and then over to her autopsy assistant, a tall, thin man in dark scrubs who reminded DiNozzo vaguely of Jimmy Palmer. "Sergeant Palmer, do you mind closing up? And then get the samples over to make slides, standard set. I don't need anything special for him. COD is pretty obvious."
"Yes, ma'am," the sergeant replied.
"You have your own autopsy gremlin?" DiNozzo asked in wonder. "And his name is Palmer?"
"When I got the new autopsy assistant catalog, I flipped to 'M' for 'military'. There were only two choices, the Mr. Palmer and the Mr. Sanders. Unfortunately, the Mr. Sanders was out of stock."
"Seriously?"
"No," she replied, laughing as she shook her head slightly. "It's just a coincidence."
"According to Gibbs, there's no such thing in coincidence."
"Then it's just a common last name. Come on, my office is this way." She grabbed a long white lab coat as they exited the autopsy suite and headed down the corridor.
There wasn't much exciting about the office space; there were probably a hundred offices in the building that were identical. There was a full-sized bookshelf along one wall, filled with volumes on forensics and anatomy and texts with names such as Robbins' Pathological Basis of Disease and Atlas of Histology. Gracy also had her medical degree and license displayed, as well as official-looking certificates of rank, starting with one for a 2LT Sonja A. Herzlich. Along another wall were pictures of people in uniform and memorabilia from deployment: a small pennant for the 10th CSH at Ibn Sina, a picture of Gracy and an assortment of other physicians posing with President Obama during his one visit to Iraq, and a wooden sign that said "Morgue: MAJ Sonja Gracy, MD, Forensic Pathology" and what DiNozzo assumed to be the same thing underneath in Arabic.
"Can you hand me that volume on prosthetics?" Gracy asked, gesturing toward the bookshelf as she pulled a water bottle from the small refrigerator behind her desk and took a long drink. DiNozzo found the one she was referring to and handed it over before taking a seat on the other side of her desk. "Now, unlike Ducky, I don't do psychological autopsies, but killing someone with bare hands could be symbolic of a hand injury. Maybe we should start there. It'll also give us a good place to start ruling people out—not all prosthetic hands can handle breaking a neck."
"Good idea," DiNozzo said, checking the list. "The first on here is a Specialist Tyrone Sykes, who had an amputation of the right distal ulna and radius with an anastomosis of the, uh—." He stopped at the unfamiliar medical word and looked up apologetically. "This is why I needed help."
"Here, let me," Gracy said with a smile, taking the list from him. She found the entry he was looking at. "Oh. That just refers to the nerve salvage they did. Now with the prosthetic they have listed here..." Her voice trailed off as she flipped through the text until she found the right entry. She shook her head. "Not Sykes. Not with that prosthesis. No offense, DiNozzo, but I think I might get through this faster alone."
He grinned, having suspected that that would be the case, and began amusing himself by studying his surroundings. The various certificates and commendations held no interest to him, so he found himself looking over the pictures, a collection which spanned Gracy's Army career, judging by the changes in the uniforms. "This your husband?"
She glanced up briefly, not needing to closely examine the picture he was pointing at. She had been tired and dirty, the dark camouflage of her old Battle Dress Uniform stained with sweat and dirt after a twelve mile forced road march—full uniform and boots and thirty-five pound pack through the Texas desert in the August heat to complete her Expert Field Medical Badge. Scott had taken a few days of leave to meet up with her after it was done, and was there when she was awarded the badge, his uniform still clean and pressed, his boots still shined. In the picture, his patrol cap was on backwards, and he had taken hers off completely to kiss her. She couldn't remember who had snapped the picture of one of the few times they had broken decorum while both in uniform, but she had had that picture displayed in every office she had occupied, including a dimly-lit corner of a Baghdad morgue. "Yeah. That was after I earned my Expert Field Medical Badge. Scott and Maddie came out to Texas and we all drove back to DC."
"And Nate?"
"At that point, Nate was the vague of idea of 'maybe someday we'll have another kid.'" She smiled slightly before returning to the list, marking X's next to the ones she didn't think could have done it, and jotting down notes such as "if left-handed, could indicate right-hand amputation."
"I didn't know you knew Macintosh," DiNozzo said suddenly. This time, she did crane her neck to see which picture he was looking at, a frown on her face.
"I didn't," she replied.
"This isn't her?" He was pointing at one of Gracy and a tall, slender redhead. Both were kneeling on a tarp, partially reassembled M-16s in their hands, their patrol caps at their knees to collect the small pieces of the rifles.
She laughed. "That's Shaena O'Leary, my 'battle buddy' from Officer Basic Course," she informed him. "Her maiden name was Grady, so we were right next to each other alphabetically." They had been racing to see who could dissemble and reassemble an M-16 fastest. Gracy, having been taught that particular skill by Scott before arriving at OBC, had been several steps ahead of her fellow medical student. "Everyone seems to think that all redheads look alike," she teased. "With the alliteration of our first names and our similar-sounding last names, people got us confused or asked if we were twins." To be fair, they did bear a certain resemblance: they had the same tall, athletic builds from years of competitive swimming, the same freckles, and they both had red hair, although Shaena's had been curly and bright, whereas Sonja's was straight and more of an auburn.
"Maybe it's just the hair, then, but she looks a lot like Macintosh," DiNozzo mused. Gracy shrugged.
"I guess, but it's not her. Shaena's alive and well. She left the Army a couple of years ago and is now an associate professor of psychiatry over at Georgetown. She specializes in schizophrenia treatment and research." Psychiatry had always been Shaena's career goal, even in that summer between her first and second years of medical school. She had confided in Gracy during one of their evening boot-polishing sessions about an older brother who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia during his first year of medical school, and had seen first-hand the descent of the family's golden child to a paranoid, compulsive man who thought the government was inserting thoughts into his head and would often go off his medications because he thought it was a government trick to keep him from discovering their treachery. Before they had realized that his rants were actually a schizophrenic break, the family had thought that he was joking: of course the government is putting thoughts into your head, they said. As an ROTC cadet and later a second lieutenant in the Health Professions Scholarship Program--the same program that supported Shaena Grady and Sonja Gracy through medical school--that's what the Army was supposed to do. It hadn't been until he ran off in the middle of the night before one of his exams and disappeared for two weeks that they realized that he hadn't been joking. That what was had influenced her decision to go to medical school in the first place.
About half an hour later, Gracy handed the list back to DiNozzo. "I hope this helps," she said. "I put X's next to the ones who couldn't have done it, based on the injuries or prosthetics and jotted some notes about some of the others. Gibbs told me about Wang's theory about the guy having been stationed in the northwest. Maybe you can narrow it down further with that."
"Yeah," DiNozzo said with a sarcastic snort. "No offense to the agency you briefly worked for, but I think Special Agent Wang has gone off the deep end with this. He's finding every tiny piece of evidence and making these grand conclusions from it. But I could be wrong. Maybe when we catch this guy we'll realize that he really is a left-handed former combat soldier who had been spurned by a female officer sometime after being stationed at Ft. Lewis and before being locked up for solicitation or something. Anyway, thanks. Good luck with your drunk driver."
"Thanks," she replied with a slight smile as DiNozzo ducked out of her office. With a thoughtful frown, she rose from her chair to stand where the NCIS agent had just been, her eyes locked on the bright green eyes of a smiling young medical student in Battle Dress Uniform, loose tendrils of red hair stuck to her neck with sweat and a partially assembled assault rifle in her hands. She realized with a start that DiNozzo had been right.
Shaena O'Leary and Irene Macintosh bore an uncanny resemblance to each other.