Chapter Fourteen
I Am Going To Kill You
"Really hit by the grouchy stick, weren't you Ziva?"
"I was not hit by any stick, Tony," the woman counters as she goes around her desk, "and if I had been I assure you I would have hit back." However, she has to grant that throwing her backpack behind her chair is not the sign of someone having an excellent morning. It's not just the power shirt plastered to her torso announcing to one and all that it is far too hot for a bra, or that pulling her hair back into a pony tail offered absolutely no help. Come to think of it, it is all of those things - and more.
"What's wrong," Tim asks solicitously. It's rare for the woman to be late, rarer for her to break upon the bullpen with a tsunami of anger. He's annoyed too, doesn't like to be split up from his wife while she's at the Altar and he's here at his desk so there's no weekend together but there's no help for it. At least he'd had the Sacrament from a reserved Host from her Home Visit Pyx before leaving home but for the rest of it he's quite put out by whoever did in Annette Saunders, but by no means does he approach the depth of Ziva's ire.
"I had to take the Metro in today," Ziva declares, "because my car would not start and I had to take a cab to the Metro station and then there was no seat available. It is Sunday service so they run trains only occasionally, so of course it was crowded worse than in rush hour so I had to stand the entire way. And there was no air conditioning to be had." She plops down into her chair, which helps the frustration and aggravation not at all. Forty five minutes late on a day when Gibbs has spent twenty one years on a case; she is going to hear about this as soon as he walks in.
"Why didn't you call?" Tony asks. "I would have picked you up."
"My cell phone was dead," she growls, pulling the wire from her drawer and plugging the unit in. Thank God it is a fast charge. "And as the final aggravation, not that I needed one, a man, seated right in front of me, was doing his man spread and blocking the seat next to him."
"Why didn't you just move him, Zee-váh?"
"I was tempted to, Toe-knee, but I did not wish to put him in the hospital because I was in a foul mood." A weekend without progress or even the prospect of progress doesn't help.
"I hate that too," Michelle says, trying to show with her tone that she commiserates with the other woman. "Two weeks ago I was on the bus and this guy next to me, well I had my legs crossed so it was essentially just one leg and still I was squished."
"I do not mind 20 degrees or even 30, but when it passes 60 I start to get aggravated. Why can men not be like women and sit properly in public?"
"Well," Tony says, "we have something in the way."
Michelle turns to him. "It's in our way too sometimes," she bites, but doesn't finish quite in time before Gibbs and Dwayne Cassius Pride arrive with the latter's team.
"What's in your way?" Gibbs asks.
"Err ahh ummm, Jimmy's bicycle. He keeps it in the bedroom right in front of my closet."
"I didn't know the Gremlin has a bike," Tony says, determined to enjoy tripping the woman up. "There was none when we checked out your bedroom when Alan Stephens exploded in it."
"Er, nahh, never mind."
"Right, we've got work to do," Gibbs declares.
The enhanced team had been widely separated for the past two days, so this morning's recap is intended to make certain everyone has the full compiled information.
"Ducky and his team," DiNozzo tells his boss, "which will soon be bigger than SSA Pride's–"
"Not in the Budget. She goes back after this case."
"have concluded that death by defibrillator is the most likely cause, but whether someone was interrogating her or torturing her it comes down to the same thing. Captain Gage from the Aventine Ambulance Service confirms what Ducky says. As an Interrogation method it's totally useless. The thing would only fire when fully charged and a one thousand volt or four hundred Joule burst, no matter what scale you prefer, would stop a normally beating heart if the charge ran through it. You then need CPR or Meds to get the heart started again, with no guarantee that you could.
"Now granted she was shocked all over her torso from collar to diaphragm and down both sides but I doubt she'd've been in any condition to answer questions after each jolt."
x
Gibbs sees Tim's nod of confirmation at this and is well aware that the man's in an excellent position to concur. Last year he'd been held for several days and his interrogators' weapon of choice had been a cattle prod. He still hasn't fully healed from some of the more severe marks and keeps breaking Plastic Surgery appointments.
"We feel that torture is the most likely purpose of the burns," Meredith Brody says, "but as has been said it's overkill for torture. It doesn't make any sense. Plus, as a Physician's Assistant working in Norfolk she had no access to Secrets, and if it was information on a Patient there are far more efficient methods of obtaining information."
"Furthermore," Ziva declares, "high ranking officers are less likely to use a Clinic, so who might she be interrogated about?"
"The shape of the burns," Michelle says, "indicates that the gel that is normally used on defibrillator paddles was not used. Jimmy says that without it the process is too inefficient. Had it been used, the marks would have adopted the shape of the paddles, yet in the majority of cases there would not have been burns at all."
"Consensus has it," DiNozzo brings it home, "that if she had been tortured twenty or more times her heart would have stopped several times, and whoever did it would have to use CPR, maybe combined with adrenaline or other drugs, to bring her back each time. Ducky and company found nothing under the skin that hints that this was done, but he's only eighty percent sure, since not much time expired between the efforts and final death, and the drying out changes colors and lots of other things."
DiNozzo has control of the plasma remote though the image already under scrutiny is an interior shot of the secret room in which Lt. Annette Saunders had spent the past two decades. The woman lies supine, her mummified body coated with a layer of dust, she still wearing most of her white Naval uniform. The only things that give color are the epaulets, crossed tie, the lines of colorful medals on her jacket and her gold belt buckle. Her white jacket lays with one arm across her legs, the rest on the floor beside her and her white shoes are scattered, one midway along the right wall, the other near the back corner as though they'd been thrown in with her and the jacket. Her shriveled feet, found after stripping to be as dark as the rest of her skin from the exclusion of all moisture and drawn tight about the bones, are loosely enclosed within the sagging white socks she had been wearing.
x
At a push of the button linked to Ziva's computer the image on her screen is enlarged upon the plasma. It's the outer front of the Aventine Ambulance, surreptitiously taken on the first visit, showing the open bay door and the staff working on various parts of the white vehicle.
"Lieutenant Saunders had not been seen since four days prior to her disappearance," Ziva recaps, "as she was not scheduled to serve until three days subsequent. In the twenty one years since she was reported AWOL, eleven of the staff have retired or moved on. Two are since deceased. I am still compiling the current locations of the remaining nine. There have been three commanding officers of the Service since the year she joined. She served all of her seven years there under Captain Nathaniel Dahl, one of the deceased though he died fourteen years ago. He was succeeded by Captain Ronald Stringer while Captain John Gage, a retired California Fire Department Battalion Chief and one of the first LA Fire Fighter Paramedics back in the 1960's, took over four years ago and therefore never met her."
"He confirmed," LaSalle picks up, "that while it would have been very unusual for a member of the Ambulance Service to have her own personal defibrillator and any number of other medical supplies and devices, it would not have been forbidden."
"According to the brother, Paul," Pride says, "Lieutenant Saunders had a whole closet of things that were off limits to him. No clue as to what they were but at some unknown time after she went missing the closet was emptied out."
Gibbs declares that "The only ones who knew what was in it are dead. How are we on suspects?"
x
DiNozzo, still in command of the remote, sets it to pull from his own screen. It displays a Virginia Driver's License for Jerome Devlin, then photographed at age 43, now 46. Saunders would be 43 today had she not been walled up in her home.
"He was our best suspect," Pride declares, "and I hated to let him go. He had a bad attitude and a short temper back then. The case was a Missing Person one and while we did a full workup on him, his car, his apartment house from basement to roof; we never found anything."
"Now we have neighbors telling us he beats his wife," Gibbs says, his tone saying the too obvious but Michelle puts it into words.
"What he is allegedly doing today may have no bearing on this case. He and his wife both deny anything is happening and we have insufficient Probable Cause to get a Warrant. Jimmy also says that though Saunders had that fractured and healed rib, Radius and the dislocated shoulder he can't find any evidence that she was abused."
"According to her diary she wasn't," Meredith Brody reports to the agents who'd been on the road during the Psychological Autopsy. "She didn't assign any blame for her shoulder injury, her arm or her rib to him. In fact, she gave no clue at all about what caused the injuries."
"What does your Profiling class tell you about that?" She'd claimed to learn more from Ducky in an afternoon than from her Professor over the past several weeks. He has no doubt that the man had maintained an ongoing lecture throughout the search for details.
"That she was withholding the details." Her shrug admits the obvious. "I'm not saying he did it or didn't do it, I'm saying she didn't want anyone to know how it happened. In fact, she seems not to have wanted anyone to know that it had happened."
"Meredith, Michelle and I tried to meet with Debbie Devlin yesterday evening," Ziva says. "She is in considerable pain but she denies she is being abused. It is a common situation among victims of domestic violence, but if she will not speak out there is nothing we can legally do." She pauses to get Michelle's nod of confirmation. It helps to have a Lawyer on the team, for American Law is not the same as Israeli, and Mossad methods of gaining confirmation are more direct than NCIS - or most Federal Agencies - are willing to use. "And even if we can prove she is being abused we cannot act on suspicion that her husband hurt Annette Saunders without at least some measure of evidence. And even if we could, Ducky's autopsy cannot prove she had been assaulted other than with the alleged shocks that killed her." That punching bag downstairs in the gym grows more appealing even after last night's thorough workout.
x
DiNozzo touches the control again. "Paul Saunders, unmarried, not dating, is the final living member of the family, but he was nine way back then with a nine year old's perception of what was going on. As he said, his life revolved around school, play, television and his friends, and his parents sent him to his room any time Investigators came."
"What about the family?" Gibbs asks.
"If anyone was in a position to know about the secret room," McGee points out, "it would have been them."
"McGee, when was that room put in and why was it closed off?"
"I'll find out."
As he and Pride leave, Gibbs' hand comes up quickly behind DiNozzo's head.
"OW! Thank you, boss. But what was that for?"
"Just manspreading it around. Come on, you're with us." But as Tony follows, he doesn't like the way Michelle and Ziva smirk at him.
xx
In the Forensics Lab Abby is coming into her ninth hour of work, Ruby Rae is across the room with the Gas Chromatograph while 'Psyko Babes' keeps them company, but she doesn't hear her visitor until the woman declares into her left ear "I am going to kill you."
She whirls to the petite blonde looking up to her. Sammy's already wearing blue scrubs and her outlandish cross tied pink ballet slippers. "Oh Hiiiii, Sammy. How was your night?"
"And why do you want to kill her?" Ruby asks.
Sammy holds a plastic Evidence box containing vials of blood and Petri dishes with other specimens in her hands. "You know how my night was," she says. "It's why I'm going to kill you."
"Did Bill have a good time?" Abby asks, looking forward to a blow by thrust description of the main event.
"Don't play coy with me."
"I hope you didn't spend the whole night on the table." She's not sure the coffee table could take the abuse.
"No, I did not spend the whole night on the table. After he finished with the strawberries and cream, and the flower and cherry – and another hour – we moved to the sofa-bed. BTW, you're doing the laundry this week."
"At least I don't have to buy a new one after you broke the legs off."
"Okay," Ruby says from near the Ballistics Lab door, "I don't normally break in on private conversations, but this really deserves a 'Huh'?"
Sammy turns to her. "Last evening she got me out of a bath, tied me up - naked and spread out like a welcome home present - decorated me with whipped cream and strawberries and left me as a birthday cake for my boyfriend."
Ruby's eyes had been slowly widening at this rendition, and her mouth falling open. Finally she manages to tell the women that "We don't do those things in Edenvale."
Abby presses the remote control and Psyko Babes increases to mask the conversation. The Lab is security monitored from above, and she can't be completely sure of everything in the building. Some Agents can get nosy, and this is becoming a really private conversation.
Sammy turns on her room mate. "If you ever–" But she's blasted by an explosive guitar strum and has to cover her ears. "Oh, My GOD," can barely make it through.
"You do seem more relaxed than you were last evening," Abby calls before Sammy can recover. She's more experienced at projecting when she wants to be heard.
"Relaxed? I can't walk straight! But that's not why I'm sending you down to Ducky. How dare you do that to me? To say nothing of what you did, you took it on yourself to do what I expressly told you I didn't want anyone to do! I told you I wanted to wait, perhaps not ever bring it up at all!"
"You're welcome."
She shakes her head, projecting her issue to Ruby. "I'm gonna kill her. I swear I'm gonna kill her before the night's over."
"So, how did Bill take it?" Abby calls, ignoring the threat.
"He took Me, until after midnight!" But she can't keep up the faux severe tone any more than she can the mask that would hide her feelings. The tone and expression morph into a grin that's as much satisfaction as pleasure. "It was incredible, though you amazed the hell out of me. It was like you were a completely different person."
"It's fun sometimes to play," she declares, hoping she won't lose her voice before this conversation is over. Maybe she should turn the volume back down?
Naaaaah.
"That was not play," Sammy shouts into the din.
"Sure it was."
"Don't do it again!"
"It was a game. It has rules. So how did Bill take it?"
With a glance to Ruby, allowing her into the admission, she presses the junction of her scrubs. "I'm gonna need a week."
But her grin says she doesn't mind at all.
x
Psyko Babes rocks off the walls from the radio on the shelf by the door at the very moment that Sammy sees that rear door open and Gibbs leads Pride and DiNozzo into the Lab. Rather he tries, for at that moment an especially stunning electric guitar chord makes him cringe, duck and he comes back up in time before the next shattering note to twist the dial on the device. The silence makes the six people slightly uncertain whom, if any, has gone deaf this time.
"You are going to deafen yourself some day," Gibbs declares loudly, though perhaps not from the lingering assault upon his hearing. Ruby looks to him in deep gratitude.
"Come on, Gibbs," Abby says in normal volume, "it's just our woofers and tweeters."
"We don't have tweeters," Sammy counters with a leading smile, including Ruby Rae across the room in her deviltry. "We have woofers."
She grins when she reads on Tony's face that whatever he wants to say is trapped behind his teeth because the two senior agents stand before him, but Gibbs notices her interest and turns to the man.
"You got a problem, DiNozzo?"
"No, Boss," he says too fast. He should have learned his lesson about the balls.
x
"What're you doing here?" Gibbs asks Sky instead.
"I was bringing Absie some samples."
He thinks that she chose this because he doesn't like her new, or at least recent, references to him as 'Gibbsie', but the blood and other body samples that line the small plastic box before her are too moist by far.
"They're from Agent Higgins' case."
"Fine. Goodbye."
He thinks Sammy is in too good a mood – when is she not? – to let the curt dismissal hurt. For a moment she looks as though she'd blow him a kiss but evidently - and prudently - realizess that'll be pressing her luck too far, so with a small shrug to Abby she hands her the Evidence box, turns and departs.
x
"What are you doing?" he challenges Abby about the not dry specimens.
"Gibbs, you know perfectly well Ruby and I are jiggling–" she directs an evil smile to Tony, "about a dozen cases."
"Concentrate on the important one first," he commands, taking the box from her and passing it to Ruby.
"Don't I always?" Deciding to have mercy, she leads the three men to her Evidence table where a half dozen Petri dishes contain specimens as dry as the others are moist. "There honestly isn't much more I can tell you. Lieutenant Saunders' tox screen, once I hydrated her sample not at all sufficiently but I know how you like answers a week ago Tuesday, revealed no drugs, poisons, contaminants; it's just really, really dry skin."
Dry is one thing, but they still don't have the advantage they'd had when Charles Bright's smoked body had been found in a chimney in Puller High School, Quantico. There the conditions of the body had been similar to Saunders' other than in years and degree, but Ducky had found 5 stab wounds he'd identified as being from something like a Phillips screwdriver or an ice pick, though the wounds had closed down to the diameter of pinpricks.
This time, with memory of that other case, close magnifying glass examinations by the three Pathologists has revealed no wounds, shrunken or otherwise.
"So, nothing beside the burns."
"I examined one of the burns," she says, "and I found that the flesh under it had less adenosine triphosphate than an adjacent unburnt portion. ATP, as you know from my many lectures, is what controls muscular contraction. It indicates that a sharp contraction had taken place in that particular spot."
"Supports the defibrillator theory?" Pride asks.
"No, Dwayne, it doesn't."
"Then what–?"
"It confirms it," she announces with all due relish. "She was definitely shocked with high voltage electrical current of short duration. No doubt about it; this was death by AED. Come look."
x
She leads the men to where the shirt Annette Saunders had worn lays on her microscope and the feed is directed out to the plasma screen on the wall. "Now normally when using an AED you remove everything from the torso, particularly jewelry and chains. The charge is brief, less than half a second, but you need paddle to skin contact for maximum effectiveness. I don't know why whoever did it didn't do it." She pauses for a moment, runs the line again in her head and gives it up.
"Now here we have a pristine portion of her blouse. See on the screen, the uniform fibers are pretty uniform." She looks up at each of them. "Tough room. Anyway, that's the way the material is supposed to look. Now watch."
The view becomes dizzying as the vastly enlarged threads shoot across the screen, and when the image resolves the threads, at this magnification resembling cables, are no longer of uniform thickness or the straight lines they should be. Very evident bulges are visible in portions of the threads, and many are fused to adjacent cables into somewhat distorted paths. On several spots the threads are expanded to resemble the cross sections of footballs.
"The charges weren't long enough to actually burn the material, they did more spot damage to her skin than to the shirt, mostly due to moisture in the skin as opposed to the shirt. But we mapped the marks collectively and you are very definitely looking for rectangular rounded corner defibrillator paddles."
"That's good work, Abs." He kisses her cheek but, as he starts out, he delivers an especially sharp wake-up call to his SFA.
"Ow! What was that for?"
"Keep your head out of their bras."
xxx
When Gibbs leads Pride and DiNozzo back into the bullpen, they find LaSalle and Brody standing near McGee and Palmer's desks rather than across the partition beyond Gibbs' and David's desks, and he extends his hand to his former partner to take point.
"Abby has definitely ruled out other causes and confirmed that Annette Saunders was killed by a series of electric charges from a defibrillator."
"McGee," Gibbs calls.
"I've looked into the records from that time," he says, "and I'm still looking. The problem is that there's no record that she ever bought one and, if there were, there's no record that the family sold it. All I have is Credit Card information, and everyone but Paul had several. But a defibrillator is not a controlled instrument so there's no need for a record and if they paid or got cash there's no trail. The family had a ton of money in those days and we're talking the equivalent of pocket change for any of us."
"What about the house?"
"That gets more interesting. The McGregor Mansion was so named for the original builder and occupants, the McGregor family through the 1700s to late 1800s, when ownership was transferred to the only daughter Edith McGregor in the fourth generation, who later married a Warren Saunders in 1902 and the family maintained the original name. Society was very big in the period. The original plans of the mansion from the 1780's show a room there but plans from the Building Commission in the 1940's do not, nor do the most recent Renovation designs. It seems there were three rooms to a side, then it went to two on that side and I find no record that when the two other rooms were extended anyone made an issue of the fact that they didn't touch. For whatever reason the family did a redesign, or when they did it, they took that reason to their graves. Twelve feet might well have been ignored."
"Ignored." He doesn't think so. How can a family live for generations in a Mansion like McGregor and not notice that the rooms don't line up? "Where's Saunders?"
As the man turns to his computer, Ziva pulls his attention. "Gibbs, I have found a cousin of Devlin, a William Boyer, who the NIS record shows was at the Game Night at the Devlin residence. He is a Butcher, 53 years old and resides with his family on First Street between Randolph and S."
"DiNozzo, you and Ziva. See if he still remembers if Devlin was there the whole night."
x
"Sir," Michelle cuts in diffidently, "I managed to get the Warrants you asked for through Agent Arnell's team at Night Court. I've searched the Insurance records for Jerry and Debbie Devlin. She has been treated at the Bell 'Treat & Release' two miles from her home on three occasions since the beginning of the year."
"What for?"
"The Insurance records list certain tests, but they don't specify details. I can't tell from them what the–"
"I didn't ask what the Insurance company said. What do the Doctors say?"
"Sir, it's Sunday. They're closed. All I have are the dates and costs and the names of the tests and treatments."
"Well? Get downstairs and have your husband translate."
"Yes, sir," she answers in a whisper and leaves quickly by the long route to the elevator.
x
"Chris," Pride directs, "you and Meredeth stake out Devlin's house. If you can find any proof that he's abusing her, bring them in. Maybe with her we can sweat him."
"You got it, King," LaSalle assures him, his tone saying he's looking forward to catching the large man hitting his smaller wife.
"McGee, you find Saunders?" He's given him enough time to find the man twice.
"I spoke to Dorneget, boss. He's at his Company, Dorneget is staking it out."
xxx
Michelle steps into the unusually crowded Autopsy suite, the sighing pneumatic doors attracting all three Pathologists.
"Hi, Shelly!" Sammy, at the far table, greets her in a high falsetto voice. She's doing the External Examination of a middle aged black man while Ducky and her husband explore the inner workings of a younger man on the middle table.
"Oh, please; not that," she appeals, crossing the room to the young woman.
"What's wrong?"
"I like Tim as a partner, but after Una Eilidh Nimah I've had all his versions of me that I can take."
"Okay. As long as he doesn't do that to me, I'm happy." Michelle knows her face betrays her, as usual, for Sammy's "What?" stings her.
"You haven't heard."
"Heard what?"
She glances back and sees she has everyone's attention, that Ducky has turned off the recorder over his table, and she truly regrets her life.
"Tim's doing another book, and you're the star."
"I am?" She sounds pleased (when does she not?) but Michelle hopes she'll feel the same when this conversation, which she really wants out of, is over. Samantha Sky is fluent in the language of Emphatics, but she has a feeling that she's going to hear a very different manner of expression very soon.
"That is not necessarily a good thing," Ducky cautions his apprentice. "The inspirations for pivotal characters for his second book were subsequently murdered in real life."
"He's doing an adaptation this time, and I really don't know why so please don't ask me, of the case in February when Staff Sergeant Wendy Langley was murdered."
She's never before seen all pleasure fall off Sammy's face but this time it crashes hard. "What?"
"Miss Sky."
She ignores him, a surprise in itself, to step out and around the foot of the table. "The time I was accused of killing Karen and Langley?"
"Miss Sky."
This one she cannot ignore, and when she looks past his clear face shield his expression is stony. "Yes, Doctor," she says meekly and returns to her place, but she's not done. "But tell Tim I'm going to talk to him."
"Honey?" Jimmy says, reminding Michelle she didn't come down to deliver the bad news about her partner's new 'Work of Friction'. None of the first three had been received without consequences and she has no high hopes for this one.
"Oh, yeah." She would far prefer to ask her husband, but it is definitely not a good idea to bypass an annoyed Ducky. "Doctor, I have the Insurance records for tests and treatment that Debbie Devlin had. Would you tell me what it means?"
He raises the plastic shield from his face. "I shall be happy to," he assures her graciously as he pulls off the bloodied gloves and tosses them into the wastebasket below the head of the table. He takes the pages from her and peruses them for a few moments. She can see he isn't pleased by what he finds.
"As you have no doubt seen," he says by way of bringing his Apprentice and Journeyman into the update, "Mrs. Devlin has been seen at the Bell 'Treat and Release' three times in the current year. I see charges for X-rays; MRIs, one with and another without Contrast; three blood tests; prescriptions for 50 mg doses of meperidine, which is an exceptionally powerful pain medication, this was given to her on all three occasions. Treatments to her left arm and a cast to immobilize a fractured wrist. Two Gynecological examinations, on her first and third visits. There are other references, but I would have to see the actual Medical Record to determine the exact natures of those injuries and the specific treatments given."
"So what you're saying, in your inimitable gentlemanly way, is that someone kept beating the hell out of her."
He hands the papers back to her. "Essentially correct."
Author's Note: The case that Tim McGee is adapting for his 'The Other Locked Room' is depicted as my episode 'Accused'.