Chapter Four
Find Something Normal
Dawn gaped at her, unable to believe she'd heard Abby correctly. 'I want to look at your breasts', her longest friend had said. "You know," she forced herself to say, "I usually make guys buy me dinner, or at least a couple of drinks first."
Abby let the camera drop to her side. "Not like that, dingbat. I need to get shots of those bite marks, measurements of width and bite radius." From a black Doctor's bag on the shelf beside her she pulled a measuring square, a right angle bit of white plastic marked off in millimeters on each ten centimeter leg. Looking back at the blonde beauty, she pantomimed opening her blouse. "Come on, the faster we get this done, the quicker it's all over."
"Well…. I... I guess so." She slowly opened her blouse and pulled the material aside. Each breast bore the livid marks of bites upon them, and as Dawn saw the damage to her otherwise pristine flesh, she cringed. They hadn't hurt before, not like they do now.
Abby, seeing it for the first time, stepped closer, forgetting the camera. "Daammnn."
x
The marks of teeth were still red and scabbed over where two teeth on top and two on the bottom had pierced her flesh with merciless force, but there was something very odd about the pattern. The front teeth, both upper and lower, were straight and undistinguished, but the four tooth marks, two upper and two lower, were circles rather than horizontal dental impressions and it was these that had bled. The teeth on the outer sides were as undistinguished as those between the circles.
There were three bites on her right breast and four on her left.
Breaking herself away from the image, Abby gave Dawn the plastic try square and had her position the upper leg along the top of the upper jaw line, the other leg measuring the distance to the lower jaw. She stepped back, adjusted the focus and took the first picture. Dawn looked away, momentarily blinded by the flash.
"If these turn up on the Internet, I'm gonna kill you," Dawn quipped, trying to lose the humiliation and anxiety she felt in meaningless banter.
"Don't worry, these won't show your face." She snaps another picture. "I'm only interested in your boobs." She had Dawn hold the square in a new position.
"If mom and dad had known that about you, you'd never have baby-sat me all those years ago."
Abby lowered the camera in mock exasperation, but fought the urge to answer.
xx
Finally the ordeal was over, and Dawn could cover up. It had, at least, not been the humiliating experience the hospital had been, even if the marks of her shame were now on permanent digital record. She trusted her friend more than she did many others, and that alone made the difference.
"Abby?"
"What?"
"I hardly know what to say. Thank you. I – I'm glad I…. I..."
Abby smiled. "Don't thank me until you get my bill. You're not Navy, so I'm going to be doing this on my own time." Dawn still looked like she wanted so say more, so Abby didn't give her the chance. "Come on, don't get all sentimental. Bedroom's down that way, stow your gear. Bathroom's over there; that's the kitchen. There's junk in the fridge. It's after four, and I've got to get started on this or it'll be an all-nighter. I'll see you in a few hours."
"Okay, 'Vampirstein'."
x
Normally Abby disliked that nickname from High School and College days, but when Dawn said it there was an affection in it that had frequently been lacking. "I'll bring you back some Chinese. What do you want?"
"Garrett Wang."
"Beat it, Voyager Trekkie, he's too old for you."
She giggled and went to the indicated corridor, grateful for the normalizing influence of her friend's manner, opened the door, reached in and found the light switch, clicked it on. Before her, set upon a low stand and surrounded by several black dressers, was an open silver coffin lined in white silk and gleaming in the bright light.
Dawn whirled on her friend who still stood in the living room and all the madness she had been through today found its voice in: "YOU CALL THAT A BED?"
xxx
Leroy Jethro Gibbs turned the ignition key at precisely 2100 hours, the usual time for him though everyone else, with no active case, had left five hours ago. He pulled out of his space in the underground garage and drove up the ramp to the rear exit at his customary headlong pace. He turned the corner, went around the building and braked when he saw the lights on in Abby's lab. The windows, high near the ceiling on the inside, were only a foot above the sidewalk and partially obscured by bushes. He thought it odd for the scientist to be making a late night of it on her first day back from vacation, particularly when he knew there was no pressing cases on any of the twelve teams.
Parking, he reentered the building and descended to the lower level, passing through a short corridor and into the Forensics lab.
On the way, he passed the spot where the deepened green tiles marked the former location of the 'Caf-Pow!' machine whose insidious beverage had sparked Abby's near breakdown and enforced vacation. At Ducky's and his insistence it had been removed, and Gibbs knew that whatever was prompting Abby's late evening burst of energy was not 'Caf-Pow!'.
Striding into the lab, he found every piece of forensic machinery working. The centrifuge was separating some chemical samples, the AFIS computer was scanning hundreds of samples per minute, searching for a match for an impressive twenty selected points of distinction on a displayed sample while a DNA analysis was running on the Electrophoresis machine, all without an existing assignment.
Abby, clad in her white lab coat, was bent low over a microscope, examining something so absorbing she didn't hear him. "Abs?" he called softly, not wanting to startle her.
"Uh huh?" she asked distantly.
"What are you doing here?" His tone carried more than the immediate question and returned her forcibly to the present. She turned around, belatedly startled.
"What do you mean?" she asked quickly.
"I looked for you hours ago. You were UA."
"Well, now I'm UR," she returned with a disarming smile, "so we're even."
"UR?"
"Unauthorized Return."
"Abby, it's late." His words carried the message that as much as he liked her, it was too late in the day for foolish games.
"Gibbs, a good friend of mine was raped this morning, and I'm going to find the bastard who did it!"
x
She told him everything, twelve hours that seemed like twelve days.
"Abby, I'm sympathetic to what your friend is going through, but you left out one important point."
"What?"
"Is she Navy?"
Abby looked up at him, frustration coloring her tone. She had known that it was going to come down to this, but had hoped it would come down to this tomorrow. If she could've broken the case tonight... "No, Gibbs, she teaches Kindergarten."
He shook his head, hating to have to say it. He wasn't insensitive to her friend's plight, but he had to remind her of something she knew all too well. "Then we have no jurisdiction in this case and you know it. Give it back to Metro."
"It was never Metro, it was Virginia Troopers."
"Then–"
"What am I to do? I told you 'Hootie' and 'Blowfish' could barely be bothered to take a report, and those LEOs don't have a tenth the resources I have or the time or willingness to make this a priority!"
Had it been Tony, Tim or Ziva, he would have answered with far less patience than he did. "Whatever time or willingness they have isn't the issue. You realize – and you do realize it – that whatever you uncover is tainted evidence. Not only did you steal evidence–"
"That would have been dumped! And I did not steal it. She gave it to me, in hopes that I would find the creepazoid that raped her."
x
Gibbs didn't want to be angry with Abby, he cared too much about her, almost as a father, and he had absolutely no tolerance for rapists. Still…. "But you are taking this personally. You know that whatever you find will likely be thrown out of court for lack of jurisdiction."
"I had plenty of evidence kits in my trunk, everything I needed for off-site collection."
"Abby, that Batmobile of yours doubles as a lab on wheels," he admitted and she was unable to suppress a smile at the allusion. She'd long considered putting Bat decals on, she just hadn't gotten around to it, but the smile self-destructed at his next words.
"I'm sympathetic to your friend. If I'd been there I'd have taken the bastard's head off myself, but this is causing more harm than good to your friend's case. You know what a good lawyer will do to tainted or improperly collected or handled evidence. You know the importance of the Chain of Evidence."
She turned away to her worktable, angry because she had thought of this a hundred times, and had refused to admit even to herself. He was right. It was naïve to think that what she found could even be turned over to other authorities for action.
She couldn't meet his eyes, frustrated that she had denied what she knew, that in her concern she'd let Dawn down. But always in her mind was the thought that if he did it to her, he could be ID'd for some other attack.
"Now I'm ordering you to shut this down, return the evidence, and if you can convince your friend to file a police report and press charges, you know that's the way to go."
x
She wouldn't turn back to him, only grew quieter as her frustration and anger mounted. Finally, she clutched the microscope before her so tightly she might have bent the metal. "Gibbs, the woman teaches Kindergarten, for God's sake. The most exposure she has had to violence in that life has been playground scuffles settled by making the perps stand facing a corner for half an hour. She didn't deserve this!"
"I agree," he told her in tones unusually mild for him. He didn't want to say the words, he'd quite prefer to go to Virginia with a baseball bat, but there was nothing that could be done. Not here, not now. "Shut this down, go back home and help her." Abby forced herself to bite back the angry retort; it would do no good and only undermine her case. "But Abby, I'm also concerned about your judgment. You're back less than half a day and you step so far over the line that…."
He could say no more. His frustration with the situation, and with her, was more than he could find the words for. He shoved it aside, forced calm, reached up to stroke the back of her head.
Her eyes blaze. "Damn you, Gibbs, you slap me and I'll castrate you through your tonsils!"
x
He stopped, astonished by her fury. He wasn't sure she mightn't actually try to fulfill this threat. He slowly lowered his hand.
This, he realized, was a different Abby than he was used to. The one he'd known was joyous, passionate about her work, ready to do everything she could to accomplish her tasks, but though she was still there, now there was something more. She had come to the point where she was willing to sacrifice what she had for something deeper, something more meaningful to her.
Could he become the impenetrable wall that forced her to break with her friends, her career, what she believed in - that forced her to make the ultimate stand?
Not on his watch.
"Was her father Navy? Marine?" he asked more softly.
She shook her head. "Army, Korea."
"Did her school have an ROTC? Did she join?"
"I don't know."
"Find me a Naval or Marine connection, something significant I can tie to, and I'll see what I can do."
She nodded, grateful for his concession, realizing he was trying to do all he could. She knew he would take this all the way to the Director to help. Leroy Jethro Gibbs had little love for rules other than his own, and more for doing what was right.
Most of all, he hated anyone who abused women. That, for Gibbs, was the line that was not crossed.
"Until then, shut all this down and go home." He shook his head, cutting off her response. "You shouldn't have left her all alone in that mausoleum of yours," he told her, trying to take the sting out of his orders.
Abby shook her head, a sad smile on her lips. "She won't find the shroud."
"You'd better hope not. Sounds like she's traumatized enough as it is."
xxx
When Abby returned home it was after eleven o'clock and a knot of frustration pained her stomach. She hid it with a false smile and equally phony disposition. She had tried so hard, but Gibbs had been right; anything she collected was worthless. She could hand the Virginia Prosecutors the guy's name on a silver platter, and if there was no separate case to link him to he would walk. It just wasn't fair!
Dawn was ecstatic to see her, and she tried to grasp and build upon her friend's elation. From her radio on her bookshelf emanated not the searing beat of Def Leppard or Pearl Jam, but the happier melody of Bach's 'Brandenburg Concerto 3 in G major'; something she did not begrudge her friend for. This music, for Abby, so typified her friend that she could never listen to any of it without it invoking happy memories of long gone years. Under Dawn's early influence Abby had become familiar with the details of this music. She didn't normally play it, but she knew it well.
"How did you do?" Dawn exclaimed, meeting her at the door. "What did you find out? Did you catch him?"
"Dawn, please," she begged, holding up her hands to ward off her friend's rush, "I've barely started. Have you any idea how long a DNA match takes?"
"No," she admitted sheepishly.
"More than16 hours if I'm lucky."
"Okay," she conceded and tried not to look dejected, and sat back down on the couch but then she picked up again as Concerto 3 gave way to the not quite as spritely but still upbeat Couperin's 'Pieces of Clavecin', Suite 6 for Harpsichord. "Look, we were talking about Chinese takeout before you left, but never really settled on anything." She picked up a piece of paper, handing it to Abby. "I jotted down a few ideas; I figured we could choose something we both like."
Abby took the paper, starting to read, forcibly ignoring the fact that it was after 2300, the Great Wall, if not closed was certainly washing down for the night. She'd take anything to keep up whatever good mood the girl had. A moment later she crumpled it up into a ball and threw it at her. Dawn laughed as it bounced off her.
"What's wrong?"
She couldn't keep from laughing as she declared that "I am not walking into Great Wall, especially at this unGodly hour and asking for 'sum bik dik'!"
"Okay, how about telling him you want 'yu har kok'?"
Abby knew her friend didn't feel better after all. It would be a long time before she would be able to find any appeal in anything sexual, but she was seeking escape in High School silliness, which at this point was fine with her. "How about I serve you a large 'wak yu but'?" Dawn backed away with a giggle, hands protecting her bottom. "What do you really want?" she asked, thinking about how much cash she had. She was just happy the woman was upbeat about something, anything at all, not drowning in a pit of depression or self pity. She didn't want to do anything that would break the mood. "King Panda's about three blocks away and they're still open."
The smile dissolved from Dawn's lips. "Nothing. I'm not hungry," she said, but couldn't hold the evasion. "I couldn't eat anything. I can't keep anything down."
Abby didn't push. So far as she knew Dawn hadn't eaten anything since before the attack, but she also knew she would eat when she was ready, when hunger overrode nausea. She glanced at the clock on the left wall. "Well then, try to get some sleep."
"I can't sleep. I tried to nap, three or four times. I kept having nightmares." But then her spirits lifted. "TCM is having a Danny Kaye marathon tonight: 'Wonder Man', 'Court Jester' and 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty'. Danny Kaye was one of my favorite comedians; he always makes me laugh." She sat down on the black couch, concluding wistfully. "I need to laugh."
"All right. Well, keep it low. I'm going to bed."
She looked up, smirking. "Bed?"
"Don't start. I need my beauty sleep."
xx
Over three hours later Abby came out of her coffin room to find the light on in the living room, the television beyond the extended bookcase on low and Dawn profoundly asleep under a light sheet on the couch. On the screen, Danny Kaye was suiting up in his armor while trying very hard to remember instructions involving a poison pellet in a vessel with a pestle, while the chalice from the palace had the brew that is true. She turned off the television.
Turning around, she tucked the sheet up higher to Dawn's shoulders, bent down and gently kissed her forehead. "Goodnight, Sunshine," she whispered very softly.
She was relieved Dawn was finally asleep. She didn't want her to be awake, didn't want to face her, not when her friend had pinned all of her hopes upon her and there was nothing she could do.
She wondered if this was how Judas Iscariot, swept along by the tidal wave of irresistible Fate, had felt.