Chapter Fifteen
Domestic Bliss

"It's nice to know," Meredith Brody says to her partner from behind the wheel as they wait in the black Stratus, standard issue assigned to them from the NCIS lot when they'd arrived, "that Stakeouts are as dull up here as they can get in the Big Not-So-Easy."

"There are two kinds of Stakeouts," Chris LaSalle philosophizes as they sit in the air conditioned car in the early afternoon sun bake. "Stakeouts where absolutely nothing happens for hours and Stakeouts on a Sunday afternoon when you could be anywhere else in the world where your life isn't wasting away."

The car is, fortunately, under the shade of a tree so the temperature on the outside is only broiling instead of volcanic, and they watch a green two story suburban house across the street which, to the best of appearances through drawn shades on both levels, could well be empty.

Pedestrian traffic appears limited to the young, possibly because those mature enough to know better will not venture into the furnace. The only ones the agents see passing in front of said house wear somewhat less than what's legal on most beaches, but neither of them can blame anyone as the sidewalks radiate heat upward to compete with the downward blaze.

x

"So," Brody says, noting her partner's attention on a comely trio of women approaching across the street, who among them wear a square yard's worth of clothing, "you think he did it?"

LaSalle won't shrug, but it's a near thing. "You read the same reports I did. He was the only likely one they found whose alibi couldn't be independently verified, just family and relatives, so his I think starts out pathetic and lost ground over the years. Come on, 'Game Night'? Who does Game Night? King and the others noted anger issues, though in those days it meant 'easily pissed off at the drop of a hat'. He was dating her and was among the last to see her. Add to that, Doctor Mallard and his team found a broken arm and broken rib and the diaries showed she was out of the Ambulance work and the Clinic for a couple of weeks the year before but she was at the Clinic the day before she disappeared."

"If she didn't report the injury to the Clinic," she says, "but Ducky found the dislocated shoulder to be 72 hours old, give or take, then she was injured during the days she was off from Aventine, so they may never have known if she didn't call out yet."

"Though you can pop the rotator back in, you'd be hurting like hell." That much he remembers from several years ago.

"But if there's anyplace to go for pain killers, it's her job. From what I gleaned from her diaries, she'd do it, go to work and tough it out."

"Sounds like someone I know," he says with a sly glance.

"I say Devlin's excuse is going to fall apart when David and DiNozzo press the cousin." She sighs. "Twenty one years. I don't remember what I was doing twenty one years ago."

"Who remembers kindergarten?"

She gives him a flattered smile which crashes into alert attention. "There they are."

x

'They' are walking along the sidewalk from the right and approach their home from beyond the Willis' house. Jerry holds his wife's forearm, LaSalle thinks, somewhat too tightly as he directs her along the sidewalk. In the furnace-like heat that smothers Washington he wears shorts and tee shirt, Debbie is in a short white skirt and red blouse and as she walks he can see she's quite unencumbered by a bra. Part of that certainty comes from the way Jerry pulls her, turns her and herds her toward the house.

"I don't think we're going to have to watch for very long," Brody says, hand on her door latch.

"Ease up on the reins, pardner," LaSalle advises as Jerry forces the woman in before him and shuts the door.

"I want to be close enough if something happens," she declares.

"Not as much as I do." He looks back for oncoming cars before opening the passenger door onto the street, but Brody is beside him before he gets the car door closed again. The cool air of the car mocks them now that they've abandoned it for the furnace that immediately heats their clothes, leaving them only seconds to enjoy the remnant of the AC before they'll start to bake.

They cross the street, avoid the direct path up the paved stones in favor of approaching each front corner so they can look in through the edges of the drawn curtains. When Chris looks in the larger window's edge he sees movement in his slice of the living room and waves for his partner to come closer.

Inside Devlin shoves his wife against the left wall of the living room with enough force to shake the pictures hung upon it and slaps her so hard the noise can be heard through the closed window. He backhands her even harder, then grabs both breasts in so tight a grip that she covers her mouth in an attempt to contain her shriek.

LaSalle breaks from his position. "Son of a Bitch!"

x

He draws his Sig as he cuts around Brody, arcs out to the lawn and curves in so his kick to the door carries his full inertia and weight. The portal slams open with a blast of fractured wood and he's through before Brody, in a straight line, can reach the door.

"FREEZE! NCIS!" LaSalle's command fills the large house to overflowing as he holds his weapon on the man. Debbie has collapsed to her knees and both freeze in surprise, crushing fists still clenching her breasts, before the echo of the agent's order fades.

"What the hell–?"

"Let her go! Back away, slowly."

Devlin does release his wife but turns on LaSalle, fists clenched as he advances on the agent. He's still some feet away. "You son of a –"

Brody, wanting to move in to help Debbie who leans crumpled against the wall clutching her breasts, is amazed to see her partner lower his weapon and shove it back into its holster.

"Take a swing at me," LaSalle commands. "Please."

x

Angry as Jerry Devlin may be, he hesitates against that fury and Brody gets past him to bend down to reach for Debbie. LaSalle pulls out a set of handcuffs from his back pocket.

"Jerome Devlin, you're under arrest–" is as far as LaSalle gets before a screech assaults both agents' ears and Meredith, distracted for an instant by the arrest, doubles over from the titanic impact of a fist slamming into her stomach. A hand clutches her short hair and she's yanked face first onto the floor.

Chris, as distracted by the woman's assault on his partner, doesn't see the punch he'd invited until it's an inch from his face and in the next second he topples over a chair, his face immediately going numb.

Meredith tries at first to block punches from the insensate woman who lands atop her before it's clear this is no considered attack but a wild assault of scratches, bites and slaps interspersed with punches to her head. Going from rescuer to warrior, she shoves the wildcat off her, draws her fist back and hits as hard as she can, knocks the woman aside and gets to her feet, barely ready in time to meet a wild charge.

Chris, rolling out of the first punch to gain some distance, is on his feet before Jerry, in a boxing stance, gets around the overturned chair. Boxing, for those who follow the rules, can be formidable but it in no way stands up against techniques designed to use all body parts in putting an enemy down so he doesn't get up again.

The two battles are short and decisive, leaving both Devlins unmoving on the floor and the disheveled agents standing over them.

Chris turns from their motionless prisoners to his partner. In the furnace blast that comes in through the destroyed door - they are going to have to arrange a proper seal for the door as well as put up yellow 'Crime Scene' tape to keep the curious away and post an Agent to protect the house - the perspiration runs down the agents bodies in mini-rivers.

"I hate domestic arrests."

xxx

David and DiNozzo step off the elevator on the 6th floor of the huge apartment house on First Street between Randolph and S and walk to their right down the corridor that stretches along ten apartments, the second on their left being the residence of William Boyer and his family. They have not called ahead, preferring to leave the Sunday afternoon contact with Boyer to the actual encounter.

The door is opened by a large and bearded man whose tee shirt struggles to contain its load. "Yes, may I help you?" he asks, looking at the pair who are quite obviously strangers to him and the man's surprise mounts at the sight of their distinctive caps.

"NCIS," Ziva says as they display their badges.

Boyer puts his hands up. "Hey, my Manager handles all the business. I don't even deal with that end. By the time they get to me they're not new, they're old. Besides, I'm just the Butcher. If there's a problem, you'll have to talk to him."

"Wrong NCIS," DiNozzo tells him, deciding that this time, since he's a butcher, he'll give Boyer the point. They're not from the New Cattle Inspection System.

"Naval Criminal Investigative Service," Ziva clarifies, which only confuses the man further.

"Navy? If we supplied you with any meat and there's a problem, I'm sorry but I know nothing about it."

David and DiNozzo exchange a long suffering glance before Ziva tries again. "May we come in?"

Apparently he can think of no reason to deny them. "I guess so. Come in."

x

A corridor with kitchen on the right opens, followed by a few more steps into the living room, left wall flush with the hall and right extending outward. A closed door further on goes to the rest of the apartment but the air conditioner in the left window to their right works to keep the room cool. Beside them is a computer work station and printer, the right wall has two windows and a cable television with an assortment of stacked DVDs and Videos. The wall before them has a stereo and various book cases, repeated on the left wall beside the couch. Upon that couch sit a middle aged woman beside a teenage girl. On the television before them is a show Tony recognizes as a decades old episode of Airwolf.

"Is there someplace we might speak in private?" he asks the standing man as the women look on curiously.

Boyer picks up the remote control, turns off Airwolf to the daughter's very evident annoyance but she says nothing. "Anything you want to say you can say to all of us," he tells them, glancing hard at the aggravated girl. Her aborted move to leave, intercepted by her mother's hand on her arm, transmutes into a glare at Tony and his partner.

"Okay." He likes additional unguarded faces. "Do you remember an Annette Saunders?" Three blank looks. "She was dating your cousin Jerome Devlin when she disappeared twenty one years ago."

Surprise expresses itself in blinks and then raised eyebrows. "Twenty one years ago?" he asks in heavy disbelief. "I barely remember last Tuesday."

Tony and Ziva see that the wife isn't as well informed. The find no understanding in the evidently mid-teen daughter seated beside her mother.

"She was a Naval Lieutenant," Ziva clarifies. "Her disappearance was investigated by the then Naval Investigative Service." She gives the frowning Boyer time to search his life.

"Vaguely," he admits. "I remember Jerry was pretty worried."

"Worried?"

"Well, his girlfriend disappeared, as you say. I don't even know if anything developed. I remember talking to some people but..."

x

"But what?" DiNozzo asks after several seconds.

"Give me a break," he appeals. "I don't remember a tenth of it. Jerry was dating her, she disappeared, Police and Federal Agents investigated." His vagueness gradually fades, his tone growing in determination as the memories come back. "There was a search. I helped out because Jerry and I were - are – cousins, but I didn't know her. I was given a picture or two, otherwise I could have passed her six inches away on the street and have no clue.

"But nothing happened, or if it did no one ever told me. I only remember that, for a while, if I saw someone I thought could have been her I'd look at the picture, but it was never her. I heard a couple of months later that he'd moved on."

"Did you keep in touch with him about it?"

"Naaaa. What for? If he didn't bring it up I wasn't going to. I kept my eyes open, as I said, because he cared about her, was upset. We're family, so I helped out. But eventually, well, when there's no word and all I could do was look at women passing on the street, it faded. I mean, we weren't truly tight. I think I was in my mid-thirties–"

"You were 32."

Boyer gives him a rueful smile. "You guys are better informed than I am. But Jerry's 7 years younger, that'd make him 25 then. At that age you move on. You may hurt, but you move on."

"Do you still keep in close touch with Jerry?"

He shakes his head. "Not really. No." He glances at his wife. "Well, Jean keeps up with the birthdays. We'll exchange Christmas cards... most years. But honestly, if he moved I wouldn't know it until the cards came back, and then I might follow up just to keep the records straight if I ever did have to get in touch. But he has his circles and I have mine."

"When was the last time you spoke to him?"

Boyer looks back through the past, but after several seconds he shrugs. "Months. Maybe over a year."

x

"The night Annette Saunders disappeared," Ziva says, "the Investigating Agents record there was a family gathering at the Devlin home, a 'game night'."

"Could be. I remember a couple in those days. My mother and his, being the ones who married into the clans, as it were, tried to keep the Devlins and the Boyers kind of together. In fact, they did it with the Carsons and the Woodburys too, my and his mom's sides. It was kind of fun. I remember there were several over those years, when I didn't have dates." He glances at his patient wife. "And no, we met well after those days."

"Do you remember if, that night, Jerome was there the entire evening."

Boyer shrugs. "I don't know." He spreads his hands. "We could have played the same games all night or not but..." he shrugs and spreads more widely, "I don't know."

xxx

In NCIS' sub-basement Interrogation section, the orange cinder block walls setting a gloomy tone before one even reaches the confrontation site, Gibbs faces the handcuffed Jerome Devlin across the table, a beige folder laying before him. Chris LaSalle stands behind their prisoner, his presence in the huge mirror heavy. Devlin glares at the reflection in the one-way mirror beyond which Tina Larsen stands beside the monitoring technician.

The Devlin home, with a smashed in front door, is under the watch of three shifts of agents until repairs can be arranged.

Gibbs had wanted to meet with Paul Saunders, but Devlin had been delivered into his hands first.

"You had no business breaking in and invading my privacy."

"Privacy. That's what they call it these days."

"Yes." He looks back to LaSalle. "And you broke down my door, assaulted my wife and I–"

"We stopped you from assaulting your wife."

"HEY," Gibbs barks, pulling Devlin's attention. "Over here."

"You going to make good on your crimes?" the man challenges him.

Gibbs hadn't been pleased to learn how the man had been captured, but he won't drop from a hard line. If Devlin has a grievance he wants to pursue, he can do it later through proper channels – if he beats a Murder charge.

He doesn't believe the man will.

x

"Special Agents LaSalle and Brody halted your assault on your wife."

"So what? What if they did? That's our business, not Federal Agents'."

"True. Unless she makes a complaint–."

"She won't."

"Then we hold you as witnesses and turn you over to Metro PD. Take a two minute phone call."

"What is your beef? What we do in our own home is our business, not yours."

xx

Debbie Devlin would have been in the Conference Room for this interview with Dwayne Pride and Meredith Brody if not for her attack on Brody, so the conversation between them takes place in Interrogation 2. The young woman has taken on the added status of 'Leverage' against her husband and looks even younger and smaller opposite the two stern agents, her wrists shackled on the tabletop.

Michelle Palmer observes the recorded interview through the one-way mirror in Ob 2.

"Assaulting a Federal Officer is a serious crime," Pride tells the woman, who brings her hands back, clutches them upon her lap. His voice is masked of emotion, which drives Devlin's fear to greater heights.

"I'm sorry I hit you," Debbie says in a trembling whisper. "You people were going to hurt my husband. He didn't do anything!"

"We came in when he had you backed to a wall, slapping you around and trying to pull your breasts off."

She shakes her head. "Jerry doesn't hurt me that much. He wouldn't."

Pride and Brody exchange disbelieving glances. The woman's been told that Brody and LaSalle came upon her being hit, if Brody asked her to raise her tee shirt they could show her, and document, bruises and worse. Reasoned denial is one thing, this is madness.

"Mrs. Devlin," Brody tries again. "He was hurting you."

"No he wasn't."

"He had you backed to the wall and was hitting you, then squeezing your breasts and you were screaming."

"No. You don't understand. He was not hurting me. And if you say I was being 'abused' then you can't arrest him because I know I was not being abused and I'll tell everyone that, so you can't hold him."

"Not exactly," Pride tells her. "My agents, as witnesses, can press Charges. We don't need your cooperation." This isn't true, at least in the long term, but part of this technique relies upon Ignorance of the Law.

"Stay out of this. He was not hurting me."

"Well, unless you and I have different definitions," Pride says, "from what my agents told me it certainly sounds like he was hurting you."

"He wasn't."

"What would you call it?"

"I call it being a good husband. "

x

'This isn't working,' Brody decides and moves on to 'Plan C', the one she, Ziva and Michelle had tried the last time they'd been at the house. "Mrs. Devlin, if you're afraid, we can help you. You're not alone."

"I've asked you to stay out of this. Why won't you?"

The honest answer, that this is a key to investigating the Saunders murder, would be the wrong thing to say. In fact, this woman's case has become an issue in its own right, and one she's uncomfortable stepping away from, not until she's exhausted every avenue of help. She's heard about and read the complaints from neighbors and reports from the Police, and she cannot sit here and do nothing.

"I've known women like you, who believed you had no way out, who believed they had to take the abuse, who believed it's their husbands' Right to beat the hell out of them for the slightest provocation - or for none at all. But we can help you. Just say the word and you'll have all you need."

"Jerry is a good husband."

"I'm sure he started out that way, and I'm sure he says he loves you. Maybe in some way he does, but you've been to the Bell 'Treat and Release' three times already for injuries. You had an injured arm and, our Pathologist says, a fractured wrist. You've had x-rays and MRIs together with very powerful pain medications and two Gynecological treatments for injuries that all have the same source: your husband."

"NO! You're wrong! That's not true!"

Pride and Brody exchange a very brief glance, enough to agree that they must settle in for a very long session.

xx

"I have to think that if you do this to your wife," Gibbs presses their prime suspect in I1 as he prepares a closed file folder before him, "what did you do to Annette Saunders?"

It's obvious this catches Devlin unprepared. "What does she have to do with any of this? I told you before I had nothing–"

Gibbs has slid an 8 x 10 photo from the folder. In the dark secret room the camera's bright flash renders Annette Saunders' white uniform stark against her wizened face, the parchment-like flesh pulled tight to her skull. Her closed eyelids are sunken since her eyes have condensed to the size of peas. Her lips have shrunk away from her teeth, giving her a chilling smile. Everything, including her spread blonde hair, is covered with a fine film of dust, the accumulation of two decades of stagnant air.

"Oh my God." The next photo, a full body image that slams stark contrast between the white uniform and dark, shriveled face, hands and legs, flesh gone and skin shrunk tight to the thin bones. Devlin looks up, white face drawn in horror. "What happened?" is a sick whisper.

Gibbs knows what he'd asked, but doesn't intend to answer the question as such. "When you die in a dry place, the body doesn't always decay. Organs, flesh, fluids, everything dries out and the skin contracts and pulls tight around the bones. You get a mummy. The room you put her in has no circulation, the dust settled like a blanket–"

"I didn't do this. I had nothing to do with this. I told you, I was with my family the day she disappeared."

"We checked on that. Your only witness doesn't remember you being there the whole night."

"I never hit her! I never did anything to her!"

"Like you never hit your wife?"

"You don't understand."

"The same kind of injuries your wife suffers were found on Saunders." This is an exaggeration, but if it brings a confession or even good clues he'll sleep well tonight.

"No. That can't be. No. I see what you're doing. I want a Lawyer. I'm not answering any more questions. I want a Lawyer down here now."