McGee adjusted the camera strap where it was digging into his neck and tried to focus on the scene he was supposed to be photographing. Most of the store looked untouched, as if nothing had been different this morning than any other morning, but he knew as soon as he turned the corner toward the refrigerators, that would change. He'd already seen the carnage once, as he did a walkthrough after his arrival. Now, he needed to not only see it, but study it through his camera. It was important, and he knew that, but that didn't make the prospect of photographing a pool of Ziva's blood any easier to stomach.
He took a deep breath and forced himself to round the Hostess rack toward the area of the shootings. Doing his best to observe the scene with an investigatory eye, he lifted the camera and began shooting.
A spilled cup of coffee lying on the ground, undissolved sugar peeking out of the cup and beginning to harden in the pool of machine-made cappucino. He crouched down to get a better angle and snapped a picture. The cup had rolled across the floor from where Ziva had been standing, preparing the four cups she would bring to work with her, when she dropped it. She'd only gotten as far as filling cup number one.
A small pile of still-wrapped Twinkies that had been knocked off the shelf by someone rounding the corner too tightly. Snap. Someone had come around the rack in a rush. Friend or foe?
He straightened up and turned slowly in a circle until he was looking at the coffee prep area. Two fallen canisters of sugar, one with a bullet hole through its center still standing by the coffee machine and one that had burst open as it fell to the ground. Their contents had mixed into a pile on the ground. They must have been situated behind at least one of the people who took a bullet; the sugar that had spilled out onto the floor was stained red with someone's blood. He shot a photo of the whole area, then leaned over for a closer shot of the canister that had taken the bullet. He could just make out a slug buried in the sugar that remained in the canister. He took a picture of that too.
"Ducky?" he called as he lowered the camera.
The medical examiner looked up from the body he was checking over a few feet away. "Yes, Timothy?"
"Got a bullet here. Any of your bodies missing one?"
Ducky blinked, then looked down at his body. "As a matter of fact, yes. John Doe Number One here has a through-and-through in the shoulder." With a groan, he adjusted his position to get a closer look at the wound. "Perfectly placed to hit nothing in particular of any use."
McGee nodded and lined up the camera for another shot. "I think that's Ziva's bullet in his shoulder. The girl says Ziva had him down before his buddy came around and surprised her." Confident he had documented the bullet's original location well enough now, he picked up the sugar canister and bagged it.
The doctor pursed his lips and looked back down. "Unusually bad aim for her, isn't it?"
"I don't think she was going for a kill shot." He lowered the camera again and narrowed his eyes, trying to visualize the scene as it had been at the moment of the shooting. "If she wanted to kill him, she would have. She was probably trying to disable his gun hand."
"Yes, I suppose you're right." Ducky wedged one hand under the body and began to lift it to get a better look at the shoulder's exit wound, then paused at the unexpected lump he felt in the man's pocket. "Hello, what's this?"
"What?"
"I believe I've found our friend's cellular phone. Would you -"
"Hold it," McGee interrupted, taking a quick step toward him. "Let me get a picture."
Between the two of them, they managed to get photos of the phone in every stage between being a lump in the man's pocket and a full-fledged phone in the doctor's hand. Finally, Ducky sat back on his heels and held the phone out to the younger man, carefully arranging his fingers around where blood from the pool the body was in had leaked onto the back.
McGee handed him the bag containing the sugar canister in exchange. "This needs to go to Abby," he said without looking up from the phone's interface. It was a touch-screen model unfamiliar to him, and he had to do a little hunting to find the useful areas. After a series of misguided clicks and a disbelieving laugh he couldn't stifle at the phone's wallpaper of a tiny, fuzzy kitten, he finally zeroed in on the messaging menu. "He's been texting up a storm," he remarked as he eyed the long list of message headers. "It's like - Ducky?" he broke off as he belatedly noticed his lack of audience. Looking around, he found the doctor focused on the second body's head wound and no longer paying attention to him.
Lowering his voice, McGee settled for talking to himself as he examined the phone. "Texts came from a variety of contacts...'Mom,' 'Angie,' 'Harry'..." He selected a text marked "Harry" and opened it to find a surprisingly normal note regarding who was providing the beer for a night on the town. "With friends like these..." he mused, closing that text and moving down the reverse-sorted list looking for anything that looked less normal. He stopped on the last text the phone had received, which had a From field that contained a phone number, not a name - which meant it was a message from someone who wasn't in the phone's contacts.
He opened the text with a click, read it, and nearly dropped the phone. As he scrambled to keep it from hitting the ground, his fingers hit a half-dry blood stain on the back and he nearly lost it again. He made a last, desperate grab for it, managed to get a good hold, and looked down to find that his grabbing fingers had managed to tell the phone to call the number associated with the highlighted message. "Shit, shit, shit -" He fumbled to find a button on the keyboard that would disconnect the call before it went through.
At the front of the store, a phone started playing a cheerful beeping ringtone.
Startled by the confluence of circumstances, McGee looked up at the noise and then down at the phone he was holding, finally spotted the "end call" button, and hit it.
The ringing stopped.
To test the hypothesis that had just occurred to him, he hit "send" again.
The ringing re-started.
Sure now, he started tracking the noise. It was definitely coming from close to the door, which meant the ringing phone wasn't on the other body, which lay mere feet away. He walked out of the aisle, into the open floor space, and paused to listen again.
Whoever the phone belonged to, they had boring taste in ringtones - he recognized the tone as a common one that many phone defaulted to. He continued tracking, around the Hostess rack, down a wall lined with soda machines, and toward the register. He paused there as the phone skipped to voicemail and the ringing stopped, then he hung up and re-dialed to start it up again. A musical intro played, and he listened closely. No, it wasn't behind the register. It was further away. He passed the register and paused again in the doorway. Yes, now it was closer - almost right next to him. He looked around and spotted a pile of garbage bags near the curb in front of the store. The ringing was coming from there. Ignoring the curious looks bystanders were giving him, he closed in on the trash pile and started lifting up bags. The third one he lifted revealed a small, silver phone.
McGee smiled victoriously and lifted the camera from around his neck. "Gotcha." He photographed the phone, then bagged it. He was just lowering the camera when he spotted Gibbs disengaging from his interview with Carlita Alfaro. "Boss!" he called, waving him over. "Found something!"
Gibbs jogged over and pulled to a stop a few feet from McGee, raising his eyebrows at the phones the other man had in each hand.
"This," McGee explained, holding up the bloodied phone, "was found in the pocket of John Doe the robber. While I was checking out the text messages on it, I found one from a number that wasn't identified in the contacts list, and -"
"In English, McGee."
In answer, he navigated back to the messaging menu, opened the text message that had set this whole sequence off, and turned the phone so that Gibbs could read it.
Gibbs took the phone and squinted at the small text on the screen. " 'She's here'," he read. " 'Move in now'." Eyes narrowed thoughtfully, he handed the phone back to McGee. "When was that sent?"
McGee turned the phone back to himself and read the smaller print that was showing under the message. "Seven-oh-two this morning. Which...here, hold this." He handed the bagged cell phone to Gibbs and reached into his pocket for his own phone. With a few taps on the screen, he had opened his messaging menu and navigated to the text Ziva had sent that morning. "Yeah." He nodded and showed the screen to Gibbs. "Seven-oh-two is just about a minute before Ziva sent her SOS to us." He looked up as the reality hit him. "The text was about her. It had to be."
Gibbs nodded and looked down at the bag he was still holding. "What's this one?"
"Oh." McGee pocketed his own phone and reached for the bag. "This," he said, gathering the bag so Gibbs could see the face of the phone, "is the phone that sent that text."
"How do you know?"
He nodded and held up the bagged phone. "Watch this." He hit "send" again on the unbagged phone and waited.
On cue, music blared out of the plastic bag.
"It's the phone that sent the text," McGee repeated. "I just told the phone to call the number that sent it the text. And that's this phone. I found it down there." He pointed to the pile of trash. "Whoever was using it dumped it. Maybe the second robber?"
"John Doe Number Two never had the chance to get back outside that door. He could have dropped it on the way in, though," Gibbs said.
"But that's not likely," McGee said, trying to think through the sequence of events. "Why would he purposely dump a piece of evidence right at the scene before going in to commit a crime?"
"Only one other option," Gibbs said with a shrug. "Someone else used that phone and gave the robbers a heads-up."
McGee nodded. "Which means they weren't working alone. And if they waited until they knew Ziva was inside, they weren't just here to rob the cash register. Boss, that means -"
"I know," Gibbs said, looking around the scene with new eyes. "It means she was the target."