Chapter Nine
Seen and Not Heard

Gibbs enters through the rear door of the Forensics Lab at 0702 carrying a large coffee cup in one hand and a larger 'Caf-Pow!' in the other. The first thing he notices about Abby, turned in profile to him, attention fixed on Major Mass Spectrometer, is that she's wearing a black tee shirt and the bands at her throat and wrists are the black with large silver spikes set. This is her aggressive combination, the one that says she demands answers and heaven help the evidence that doesn't give them up.

Yet when she sees him coming her scowl morphs into a broad smile that he senses has little to do with the 'Caf-Pow!' in his hand. She turns to him and her black shirt has a single thin white line pressed out by her breasts. When he reaches her, he sees the line consists of tiny white letters. Attention captured, he leans a bit closer but has to squint as she smiles at him.

::If you're close enough to read this, my friend Gibbs will slap you::

He hadn't known that he'd been better off with yesterday's Devil / Angel tee. He straightens up, gives her a long suffering stare that completely fails to diminish her smile.

In fact, it broadens. "Wait'll you see what Sammy has printed on today's panties."

He never wants to know.

x

"What's with the scowl?" is what he wants her to answer first.

"What scowl? I never scowl."

"Abs, I've been working on this case for over two decades. I'm tired. What've you got?"

"Have you seen Ducky yet?"

"Always come to you first."

"That is so sweet."

"Where's Rae?"

"I asked her to see if Ducky's ready with the skeletal samples. It's fun having her here, much better than Chuckles and we've made a good bit of progress on our dozen cases, but you're always on my front burner." She gives him a saucy smile he does his best to ignore. "Anyway, if you'd seen Ducky already he'd have told you that they're working their way layer by layer into Annette Saunders. Working on a mummy is a lot different from a fresh corpse, but at least it's not rotted. I don't want to steal all his thunder, but the samples Sammy brought up to me–"

"She still here?"

Abby's expression isn't her usual happy one. "Yes, Gibbs. Ducky's practicing for retirement. He's making sure they can solo as a team."

"I know," he says, ignoring the contradiction.

She doesn't mind his look; they both know there's more than the declared level to this plan. There had initially been quite a bit of tension between the two young Pathologists, mostly because Jimmy had seen Sammy as a threat to his position, so they had very rarely worked together. But they seem to have come to a good accord, making use of outside friendships such as Sammy's and Michelle's.

"Anywho, the samples show some interesting things. Yesterday we thought she was tortured by electricity, this morning I'm definite. The burnt tissue from the left side of her torso definitely shows indications that the burns were electrical. Someone shocked her to death."

"What did you make of the physical evidence from the first Investigation?"

"What physical evidence?" At his look, half aggravation and half frustration, she decides to have mercy. "Everything from the NIS era is in Annapolis. I put in a Rush request yesterday. They understood when I said it was a 'Gibbs Rush'; they asked if there was any other kind." She smiles into his glare. "They say it'll be here sometime this afternoon. I'll let you know what I dig up, but don't get your hopes up; Harry Little wrote the book on this lab."

He remembers the old man fondly. "But you perfected it."

"Thank you, O Argento Zorro."

x

He won't go into this mixed Italian/Spanish reference for fear that she'll explain it and he truly doesn't want her to. "What about that broken arm and rib?"

"Well, when bones, particularly in someone in her early twenties, heal from hairline fractures, which is all these were, they take an average of five weeks. Now when a bone heals it not only rejoins at the break but forms layers of calcium – which is what bones are made of anyway – around to break to make it stronger. That's why it's extremely rare to break a bone in the exact same spot as a previous break. You're more likely to break the second time next to the calcium buildup rather than through it."

"How long ago did she have those breaks?"

"I have to get back to you on that. At this moment I don't have the bones, just the x-rays. That's what Ruby has gone for."

"So you can't tell me if Jerome Devlin did it."

"I don't even know when she broke them, or when she started dating him, so all I can give you is a definite 'maybe'." She shrugs. "Kind of."

xxx

When Jimmy Palmer steps out of the silver doored Store Room where he had changed from his street clothing – today shorts and his thinnest tee shirt – he sees Doctor Mallard and Sammy Sky over by the X-Ray panels, Ducky in his 'non-Autopsy attire' as he sometimes calls it and Sammy in white sleeveless blouse accented by a green lariat tie and miniskirt.

"Jimmy!" she exclaims the instant she sees him, crosses the room to hug him, then reaches up and grabs his ears. This is enough of a surprise as she pulls lightly to get him to bend into reach and kisses him.

It's a soft, tender kiss but when she lets him up he's so stunned she might well have punched him for as close as he is to falling. He can see Dr. Mallard by the board and the man's expression is very much like he thinks his own face looks.

"God, can you keep a secret." she says. "Michelle told Abby and I last night."

"I know," he says, the world righting itself.

"Well, if this is an open secret," Ducky says, "I do not know it. And if it is an impetus for this display, I think I should."

Sammy gets out of the way of the two men.

"While we were on the Pacific Princess 'Chelle got – well - that is - she insisted I not tell anyone until she did – but - that is..."

"Those two proved the nickname of that ship, the 'Love Boat', is well earned." Sammy won't reveal the mystery, but her few seconds give Jimmy what he needs to get the words right.

"'Chelle's pregnant."

"My dear boy," Ducky says as he crosses the room to them, hand extended, "that is wonderful news. Congratulations."

"Thanks. I'm sorry I couldn't say anything. 'Chelle–."

"Think nothing of it, my boy. This is a true cause for celebration." He pauses and glances about the room before deciding "This evening."

"Great."

xx

When Gibbs reaches Autopsy he sees what Abby had meant by 'practicing for retirement'. While Jimmy and Sammy work their way into the desiccated torso of Lieutenant Saunders, whose browned skin has wrapped itself around her bones. Ducky is still in his blue shirt and tartan bow tie, supervising from the comfort of his desk chair.

"Enjoying a life of leisure?" he asks as he walks past the young pair with barely a glance at the corpse between them. This is little change from yesterday afternoon and hints at a new phase in Autopsy's operations, at least until Sky goes back where she belongs.

"Immensely," his friend assures him. "Doctors Palmer and Sky are doing reasonably well with the challenge of our mummified Lieutenant. They almost make me consider them competent."

"Hey," Palmer protests.

"Yeah, right. Hey," Sammy agrees, not sounding at all slighted, for the man's jocular tone had taken all the sting from his words.

"Pipe down," Gibbs commands, not looking back to the pair.

"It is a truism," Ducky declares, "that children should be seen and not heard. Or do you perhaps have an interim report ready?"

"We do," Jimmy declares. With a look, Ducky sends the Investigator over to hear it.

x

"We think we've settled on a Cause of Death."

The pronouncement is enough to bring the older man over as well. "Indeed. What have you determined?"

"Boyfriend had a violent temper," Gibbs points out. Perhaps he's responsible for her arm and rib. They're long healed before she'd died but did he break them?

"Well, if he did anything to her it didn't come out in the External Exam," Sammy counters. "Any bruising would be masked by the mummification, but once we got inside her we were able to find something."

"I think it was a defibrillator," Jimmy says, perhaps to forestall further speculations.

Gibbs turns to the Senior ME, but he returns a look as though to say 'they're doing fine, and if they need me I'll step in'.

"That's supposed to restore rhythm to a heart," he says, trying to put things into some kind of order.

"True," Jimmy confirms. "If the natural rhythm is interrupted and the heart goes into fibrillation, as in arrhythmia or tachycardia, a defibrillator will restore it in most cases, or at least it's supposed to. It produces a momentary asystolic state, meaning it stops the heart briefly, like for a second or two. This allows the heart to resume beating in its normal rhythm."

"Right," Sammy says. "Only in television and movies do they use it to restart a stopped heart, mainly because writers, directors and actors who play doctors are idiots."

He's surprised by the iron in the usually delighted woman.

"An electrical shock has no effect on a stopped heart," she says. "That's what you use CPR or some drugs for. It's like on TV when they shock the victim and he jumps. He doesn't really, the charge isn't nearly that high or long enough to make the body convulse. That's just more television idiocy."

This surprises him even more. "What've you got against television?" Actually, for him, what there is in favor of it would be a shorter list.

"It's my favorite pet peeve. When I'm watching a hospital scene and the patient flat lines and instead of doing what they should do they use a defibrillator, especially if the so-called Doctor calls for 'again' and 'again', I turn it off. I figure if they don't know something so simple, there's no point in watching it."

"No one on scripted television seems to know," Jimmy concurs.

"Plus, I have a friend in the Orchestra who never seems to know better than to debate me."

x

"But they can also kill," Jimmy says, pulling him back. "I think someone kept shocking her with bursts of electricity. If it is a defibrillator then even one or two jolts at 1,000 volts would kill her, though the heart can restore its rhythm once, maybe twice if you've really lived a good life, as Mother McGee would say. Maybe whoever it was kept bringing her back with CPR; we can't know that for certain with a desiccated corpse like this without deeper examination and Abby's analysis. But I'd say these shocks were delivered over and over until she did die."

"You're saying whoever did this might not have intended to kill her?"

"I'm not saying they might or might not have, but I'm seriously thinking it."

"Yes," Sky interjects, her tone still sharp enough to draw blood. "These irregular red marks resemble the general shape of defibrillator paddles if you map all of them and look for common points. Normally the paddles are coated with a defib cream, a gel to spread the charge over a smooth area. If you don't use that, you often get burns like this from the points of charge, and if there is a burn – there isn't always – it's normally a defined shape of the paddle, rectangular or circular." Her fire fades as she gets more into channeling Ducky's pedantic style. "No cream was used on her, that's why the burns are smaller and in different shapes, like when they're used on different ribs and don't lie the same way twice. It's like reading newsprint under a microscope; what looks like letters are really shown to be blobs of ink like clouds in the sky."

Her normal tone is back. She's rarely able to maintain anything else for long, and it had come back in her dissertation. He looks down to her and she grins, but he doesn't share her pleasure in the pun.

"But if these," Jimmy picks up, waving his hand above the collection of burns, "are from a defibrillator they're all over the place. When you use a defibrillator to momentarily stop the heart you put one paddle up here," he indicates a spot below the clavicle, "and the other here," he points to a spot on the side of the body low on her ribs and nearer her back, "and the charge goes through the heart. That's not what was done to her."

"Plus, you do this only once," Sammy declares, "twice if you really have to. Three times is too many. I've never seen three times - that is unless I watch television. There it seems the sky's the limit," she concludes with a sudden grin.

He'd glare the pun down if he thought it would do any good.

x

"How many times was she shocked?"

"We count forty three burns or more than twenty one sets," Jimmy says, "including her feet and right hand. Except for those three, all the others were to her torso. But we can't tell how many times she was brought back by CPR. But in the end it was too much."

Gibbs wants to look back to Ducky but restrains himself. There's checking and then there's being insulting. If Ducky hadn't reached the same conclusion as his assistants, he'd have said something by now. "Saunders was a Physician Assistant at the Sewells Point. Would she have had a defibrillator?" This time he does include the older Doctor.

"Defibrillators were portable at that time, approximately twice the size of current ones," Ducky confirms, "but wasn't she a Medic outside the Clinic?"

"Aventine Volunteer Ambulance."

"It is possible she might have had the equipment on hand. It is not common for Volunteer Ambulance personnel to keep themselves outfitted off duty but it's not unknown either."

"That's why I have DiNozzo checking with the Ambulance. I want to know if she had her own device or if the killer brought it with him."

"Well, I can tell you two things about the defibrillators back in the day. They were big enough to need their own moderate sized suitcase and they were expensive."

"Not on an heiress' budget."

"There is that."

He'll have DiNozzo and his sub-Team double check that with John Gage. If she did keep such extensive equipment with her, they may be looking at a crime of opportunity, a murderer using her own equipment against her.

Rule Number 8, 'don't take anything for granted', warns him that he's working off a lot of suppositions, but in his gut it feels right. He has the feeling that whoever killed Saunders tortured her and did her in right in her own home. If someone had a motive to kill her, it's certain that it's someone who also knew about the secret room. If Annette Saunders had been using it for private dates with Devlin, things that her bedroom was not sufficient for; or if she had a reason for secrecy, then perhaps their last date had not turned out well.

xxx

McGregor House being for the foreseeable future a Crime Scene in which the Forensics Team is still gathering minutia, Paul Saunders has had to seek accommodation in a hotel and to send his small staff elsewhere. It is from that hotel that DiNozzo and McGee bring him this Saturday to the Conference Room where Gibbs and Pride wait. McGee has obtained Saunders' Cell Phone under the pretext that signals from it can interfere with electronic systems in the Cyber Crime section. He'll return it when the man departs and won't mention that he used the opportunity to download Saunders' Contact List.

Saunders, when he sits down at the Conference table, doesn't look like he has managed any adjustment since Thursday night. He looks like he hasn't slept at all, a conclusion Gibbs is fairly confident in.

"Good afternoon," Pride says. "Thank you for coming."

"Coming? I turned everything over to my Office Manager 'cause I can't face anything else."

"What does your company do?" The intent, by having Pride take the lead, is to disarm. Saunders has already been confronted by Gibbs in the earliest hours of yesterday morning and likely thought he knew what to expect. While the man isn't a suspect, it helps to always keep witnesses off balance by doing other than what they expect. This is Pride's Rule Seventeen, Gibbs' Forty Nine.

"Our main project right now is a micro copier, a portable rod twelve inches long that'll render perfect duplicates at 1,000 pixels per millimeter, 8.25 inches leaving 3.75 for the software and none of that matters. Tell me about my sister. Are you really sure it's her?"

"We're sure."

"What can you tell us" Gibbs asks. "about the last time you saw your sister?"

He shakes his head. "I don't remember a last time. Up to then, things were normal. I only remember how the nightmare started. I remember Police, Detectives coming to the house, a lot. The Navy came. Investigators. I remember there were a lot of questions, but after the first day or so I'd be sent to my room when anyone came."

"Do you remember how your family took it?" Pride asks.

"They were scared. No answers. No one had any idea. She was gone and no one knew where. Navy Agents – from your organization. I do remember that."

"That was us," Gibbs tells him.

Pride nods in confirmation.

Saunders looks closely, studies their faces minutely. "I don't remember you. I was a kid. I don't remember anyone. I don't remember any question. I only remember that she was never found. Year after year of praying and my grandmother and parents crying and - and nothing. And now it turns out I was passing her over and over again every day for dec–."

He's silenced, fights grief and it's a minute before his gruff voice becomes loud enough to hear. "How can this be happening? It's a nightmare."

x

"Your sister was a Physician's Assistant," Gibbs tells him, determined to keep him in focus. The term is broad enough to cover Doctors, Nurses, Paramedics, EMTs and others, as there is only one official Physician at a facility. PA is a significant step down from Heiress.

"Yes," he replies, a little less vague.

"Did she keep any equipment at home?" Such as a portable defibrillator, he doesn't say.

Paul shrugs, head down. "I don't know what she kept. She had a closet in her room I wasn't allowed anywhere near. After she was gone... After she was gone I did look in there, but it was empty. Stripped to the bare walls." He looks up. "Since her room was never used again, I guess I couldn't give up hope that she might one day come back, the closet's still empty."

x

"You did a lot of renovating in the past couple of months. How is it that no one found the secret room?"

"It was surface renovation, no structural changes. Mostly outside. They spruced up the rooms, replaced some woodwork that had seen better days, some dry wall, a lot of paint. That wall was only painted, I brought in some artists to bring up the pictures which had faded. I'm going to open the house for tours, keep the Saunders name in the public eye, like it used to be."

"Did you know about it?" he asks, paying such strict attention that Saunders should feel his eyes boring into his skull.

"I was surprised when you showed it to me. I had no idea."

Gibbs reads no deception, but he's not done. "Did you know anyone she worked with, anyone she was close to?"

Again that head shake. "My life revolved around school, television and playing. I had my friends, we were eight, nine and ten. I'd hop on my skate board down the long driveway and skate over to meet them. We'd go off and do our things. If she was dating anyone or anything like that, I neither knew nor cared. I'm sorry."

Gibbs can't fault him. He had been nine, had probably barely related to a sister two and a half times his age.