Chapter 2
Gibbs' face darkened reading the note, then he turned to his team watching behind him. The case had suddenly taken on a new dimension, they weren't just looking at a random act of violence anymore. Commander Boyd had been targeted. But now the questions remained: Who was after her and her son and why?
He also knew that finding the answers to those questions paled in necessity when it came to keeping her son out of danger. Someone wanted this family dead and they had already succeeded once, but he wasn't about to let that happen again.
Without turning around, Gibbs barked out commands to his team.
“McGee, you go back to the office and dig into Commander Boyd's personnel file and past cases, see if there have been anyone that made any sort of threats against her. Ziva, you're staying here with me, we'll finish processing the scene then question all the neighbors and see if they noticed anything unusual this morning” Ziva and McGee nodded and headed out of the bedroom to get started on their tasks, leaving Ducky and Palmer to bag up the body and get it read for transport. Carefully placing the note inside of a bag, Gibbs tagged it for processing later when he brought it back to Abby's lab.
Gibbs then turned around, looking for his senior field agent, but he was nowhere in sight. Still concerned about the way Tony had been acting earlier, he thought it best to give him a job that would send him out of the scene, but it was one that he knew would be best suited for him.
“DiNozzo!” He called out. Tony poked his head back into the room, his eyes darting involuntarily back towards the body, his discomfort with being in the room not going unnoticed by the older man. Gibbs decided then and there that he'd have to keep an eye on DiNozzo, whatever the problem may be.
“Yeah, Boss?”
“You take Jason back to the office and stick to him like glue. Don't let him out of your sight, got it? Our killer wants him next, so he's under our protection until we get a safe-house set up or we catch this bastard. He's you're responsibility, got it?”
“Uh, Boss...you think that's such a good idea? I mean, me and kids?...You know how I am with them...we just don't mix....”
“He's sixteen, Tony. You don't need to change his diapers, just keep an eye of him.” Gibbs turned and glowered, cutting him off. “I also want you to find Commander Boyd's husband, according to Jason, he's in the field. Talk to his CO and have him sent to us ASAP, he might be a target too if this is a some kind of revenge killing. Also, see what you can get out of Jason, he might have more info about his mother's work that might help us.”
“Got it, Boss.” Tony relented and turned to leave.
OOOOOOOOOO
Ziva had been standing just outside the bedroom door, watching her partner and she didn't miss how he hesitated to go back into the room as he talked to Gibbs and as he turned to leave after getting his instructions, she took that opportunity to grab his upper arm and stop him, locking onto his eyes and finding them unsettled.
“Are you certain that you are okay?” She asked pointedly, but with genuine concern. “You seemed a little...'off' in there”. Tony shrugged out of her hold and grinned a fairly dim rip-off of his usual mega-watt smile.
“I'm fine.” He replied, meeting her gaze and telling her with his eyes just the opposite. “I gotta go.” Breaking eye contact, he then headed down the hall again, pausing before entering the living room to collect his young charge.
At the other end of the hall, McGee stood by watching Tony until he was out of sight then closed the distance between them, addressing Ziva in a hushed voice.
“Is Tony acting weird or is it just me?...Not that he ever acts normal, but....”
“No...you are right, he is not his usual self.” She agreed with concern.
“What should we do? Think we should tell Gibbs?” Ziva raised her eyebrows and turned to give Tim a look that said all that he needed to know. “Right, he's Gibbs...he already knows.”
OOOOOOO
Jason sat with his hands folded in between his knees, seemingly unaware of all of the activity happening all over the house as the investigation continued. Tony watched from the hallway, hesitating before approaching, he wasn't sure what he could say that break through to the kid. He knew there wasn't anything that could help him at this particular moment. Words of comfort would only be hollow platitudes and useless to a young man that just discovered his mother's body, they couldn't bring this mother back to him, which Tony knew was all he wanted.
Tony knew he was lost. His mother had just been torn from his life and there was nothing anyone could do about that.
Tony took a seat beside the young man, eliciting no response from him.
“Hey... it's Jason, right?” Tony tried to ask casually to put the boy at his ease, but didn't get very far as Jason continued to ignore him.
“My name's Tony.....Look, I need to take you back to our headquarters. We'll call your dad when we get there and have him brought back as soon as possible, okay?”
Jason made no move to respond or acknowledge his presence, continuing his vacant stare forward.
“I know, it doesn't really help right now....but we'll find out who did this...see, my boss back there isn't the kind of guy that gives up very easily, so we'll catch the guys responsible.” He told him with all sincerity.
Jason was quiet as he closed his eyes.
“You promise?” Was all he asked quietly, his voice barely above a whisper.
“I do, Jason.” Tony replied just as quietly, letting the truth come out in his voice. “We will find out who did this... I promise.”
That seemed to connect with Jason and after that, it didn't take too much prodding to get him to follow Tony to the car outside. McGee came along as well and took up the passenger seat as Tony drove. He could see that the boy was numb to everything and he could have led him over the edge of a cliff and not have received so much as a questioning glance as Tony knew he was still swimming in a sea of emotions. After all, he had been in his shoes before and knew what he was feeling. That's when it clicked in Tony's head why he was seeing so much of himself in Jason. He had been just like him.
For Tony, that lingering memory that had struck him earlier hadn't left him as he drove them back to the office, it seemed to flash in front of him more and more as they continued on. He tried his best to push it aside, but the silent presence of the boy sitting behind him and McGee's lame attempts at small talk did little to push those thoughts behind him. If anything, they only made them that much more pronounced.
He was beyond disturbed that he had suddenly remembered seeing his mother nearly twenty-five years ago, lying much the same way Commander Boyd had in her bed, her glassy eyes staring straight at him when he hadn't recalled all of this before until that evening. Was it even possible to forget something like that and then suddenly remember it like it was yesterday just because a woman looked a little bit like her?
McGee was still talking as he pulled onto the expressway, but Tony wasn't paying any attention to his babble and after a few more minutes of uncomfortable talk about nothing of consequence like the weather and traffic, Tony snapped at McGee to shut up and demanded that he give up trying to fill the vacuum of quiet inside the car.
"God, what's your problem anyway, Tony?" Mcgee asked in a mixture of concern and annoyance. "You've been acting weird all day. What gives?"
"Maybe my problem is you yammering on about stupid things that have nothing to do with getting our job done, Probie. So how about you do a whole lot less talking and a ton more shushing." Tony snarled back as he gripped the steering wheel tightly until his knuckles turned white. After that, McGee refused to say anything else, but uneasily shot Tony several sidelong glances in his directions until quiet settled upon them like a fog and Tim took to looking out the window.
Now that it was silent again in the car, Tony couldn't stop his thoughts from coming back to the woman lying on the bed back at the scene. He couldn't even recall if she really did look anything like his mother. If he tried to come up with a mental image of what she looked like all those years ago, all he could come up with was a fuzzy feeling, not a clear picture of what she actually looked like. He knew she had dark hair and green eyes, but he didn't think he even had a photo of her anymore to refer back to, much less a clear memory of her face.
While things had always been fuzzy surrounding the day when she was found and it had always been a blind spot in his childhood that he had never dared to examine too closely, he could remember clearly the sights and sounds of the days after his mother died. Those days had been burned into his memory like a brand. He remembered going to her funeral, placing a rose on her coffin and his father telling him not to cry as they watched her casket being lowered into the ground because he wouldn't tolerate a DiNozzo being a crybaby.
He guessed he always just blocked it all out because it just had been easier to forget about it all and for most of his life, he tried not to dwell on the fact that he couldn't recall much of the day she died.
But what confused him most now about these newly minted memories was the discrepancy between what he was recalling now and what he had always been told had happened. So were these even real memories?
One time a few years ago, he had been curious to know more and he had dug into the police reports when he was still working in Philadelphia. He knew that it had been reported that Rosita, the household maid had found his mother unresponsive in bed and that she had called the paramedics but she was already dead by the time they got there, or at least that's what the police report had stated. But now, in this new flash of memory, he could remember walking into his mother's bedroom, seeing her sightless eyes....then the rest was still a blur, like there were still pieces missing to the puzzle and he still wasn't seeing the complete picture. But, wondered now if Rosita had in fact been the first one to find her, was everything he had thought had happened wrong or a lie?
Was there something else that had been left out of his memories that he would remember too? And that also begged the question: Why now? Was he going crazy?
For now, he knew he would have to push these thoughts and questions away as he still had a job to do. Sorting out his messed-up brain would just have to wait until the case was put to bed, whenever that would be. In some ways, he prayed that he would be distracted enough by the case to forget his unwanted memories again, then he wouldn't have to deal with them anymore, but with the silent reminder of his childhood pain sitting right behind his seat, he figured that would probably not happen anytime soon.
Tony was so immersed in his own thoughts as he drove, that he hadn't even realized that he had driven them all back to headquarters on autopilot until he pulled up to the front gate and showed his ID to the Marine guard.
Finding the parking spot for the sedan, Tony looked behind to Jason, who made no move to leave the car.
“We're here.” Tony announced.
Jason made no sign that he had heard Tony, so he got out of the driver's seat and opened the door for the kid. McGee came up behind Tony and helped Jason out of the car with a gentle grasp of his arm.
Tony led them to the elevator and a few moments later it deposited into the bullpen. McGee went right to his computer to begin his search into Commander Boyd's history while Tony grabbed Ziva's chair and pulled it up to his desk.
“Have a seat Jason, I'm going to get a hold of your Dad, okay?” Tony swept around to the other side of his desk to look up the file on his computer.
“He's not my Dad.” Jason spoke with a sad sigh, correcting Tony's assumption. “He's my step-dad. My real dad died when I was little.”
“Oh...Sorry.... But I still need to call him. He's in the field right?”
“I don't know...I'm not sure where he was going this time....Mom just said that he'd be gone for a couple of weeks.”
“Well, we'll get him here from wherever he is.”
"Whatever...." Jason muttered, looking away. Tony caught a sense that all was not perfect between he and his step-father.
Ten minutes later, Tony located the step-dad's unit and where they were currently training, speaking with a gravelly voiced Colonel that told him that he would inform Major Sanders of his wife's death and would put him on the next transport out of the Joint Readiness Training Center in Fork Polk Louisiana, but that the next flight wouldn't be until the next day.
After hanging up the phone, Tony looked to Jason, seeing him staring despondently out the window. Sighing and feeling a headache coming on, Tony realized he was going to have the boy attached to his side for at least the rest of the night.
At least that meant that there would be plenty of time to fulfill Gibbs' other instructions to get the sixteen-year old to talk to him and glean as much info from him about his mom as possible. It wasn't going to be easy to break through the trauma he had experienced and the shock he was still in, so there was only one thing Tony could think of that might make a connection between them as the silence stretched on.
“You hungry?” He asked the boy.
OOOOOOOO
It was nearly an hour later when Gibbs and Ziva strode into the bullpen. They hadn't learned much from the neighbors, who hadn't seen or heard anything out of the ordinary. Also, Gibbs was disappointed that there really hadn't been much in the way of physical evidence from the crime scene aside from the note that helped them out much yet, at least not until Abby had a chance to go through it all and Ducky performed the autopsy.
Even though there was still a lot of missing pieces to this puzzle, Gibbs had come to the conclusion that whoever did this was a pro. There was no sign of a forced entry and it appeared that the killer was most likely allowed in then took the victim by surprise. It was that fact that disturbed Gibbs and sent his mind whirling the most. If someone had been targeting the family because of something related to Commander Boyd's job as a defense lawyer, she apparently had no idea of any threats made against them nor was worried about any of her former cases coming back to haunt her.
Without much to go with from the scene, he hoped that McGee or Tony might have found something by now from the commander's background and help fill in some of those unanswered questions. Gibbs was already in a pissy mood when he walked in thanks to a lack of caffeine that evening, but seeing Tony's empty desk and Jason nowhere in sight, made him all the more irritated.
“McGee.” He barked. “Where's DiNozzo?” He nearly raised his voice to a shout and McGee was on his feet a heartbeat later.
“Ah...Tony took Jason to the conference room to give him some privacy and feed him some dinner. I think he was going to try and get some more information out of him, but he's not talking much....”
“He just found his mother murdered in her bed, no one's expecting him to be sociable, McGee. Now, tell me something I don't already know.” Gibbs demanded of his youngest agent.
McGee came from around his desk as soon as he saw the look of frustration on Gibbs' face and headed for the plasma with the remote. Gibbs and Ziva walked up to the large screen.
“Well, I looked up Commander Boyd's file. She's been assigned to the JAG office at Norfolk for the last two years.” McGee brought up a file photo of Commander Boyd in her white naval uniform from her military ID. “her husband is a Marine Major stationed with MARFORCOM.”
“MARFORCOM? What is that?” Ziva asked as she was still struggling at times the American military's obsession with acronyms.
“Oh, uh...It stands for the Marine Force Command, it's the Marine component of the USJFCOM.”
“USJFCOM?” She was lost again.
“Oh, sorry.... US Joint Forces Command. They work with the other branches of the military for deployment readiness training with the Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast..."
“McGee!” Gibbs, cut his explaination off, losing patience with his agents as time was slipping away from them and he sighed impatiently then gestured to the monitor for him to continue relaying the info he had learned.
“Sorry Boss...” McGee cleared his throat to move on. “Anyway, her husband is Major Nathan Sanders and he's overseeing a joint exercise right at the moment. Tony contacted his commander and he should be heading back tomorrow morning from JRTC in Louisiana.
“JRTC?” Ziva asked, confused again b yet another acronym, but when Gibbs shot another annoyed look at his agents she let it go, she'd look up later. “Then Jason is not Major Sanders' son?” She asked.
“No, he's his step-son. Jason's father was killed in a car crash about ten years ago. According to her CO, Boyd and Sanders met on base at Norfolk eighteen months ago and were married about six months later. Apparently, Commander Boyd had requested leave for this week to coincide with her husband's training and her son's baseball trip. Seems that she wanted to have a week of peace and quiet to herself at home and she had been talking about it to her colleagues for quite some time. Her friends seemed to think that she'd been under some stress lately, all of them saying that she was happy in her marriage, but that she had been having some trouble with her son.”
“What sort of trouble?” Gibbs asked.
“The usual teenager stuff. Mostly arguments with him over grades. He was close to being kicked off his baseball team for academics, but has been allowed to stay on probationaly as long as he keeps a C-average. She also complained to her colleagues that Jason and his step-dad didn't always get along."
“Nothing too unusual there. You check out her prior cases yet?” Gibbs asked.
“Ah...well...I'm still waiting on the files to come in from Norfolk...” McGee began with an apologetic face as he tried to explain.
“Then light a fire under their asses and get those files here ASAP, we're wasting time.” Gibbs ordered.
“It's just that it's getting close to 2100 already, Boss. Boyd's CO was going to get someone to go and retrieve them, but, uh....”
Gibbs only had to step a little closer into McGee's personal space to get him moving.
“But, I'm getting right on it.” McGee hurried off to his desk to call Norfolk once again.
Gibbs turned to Ziva.
“Dig a little deeper into Sanders' and Boyd's personal lives. Bank accounts, emails, everything. There's someone out there that has a score to settle and we need to find them before they even think of going after the boy.”
“I shall do my best.” Ziva responded with a quick nod, going back to her desk.
Leaving Ziva and McGee to their tasks, Gibbs headed for the conference room to find his senior agent and maybe get a few more answers from Jason Boyd. The teen hadn't been able to give more than a few yes or no answers at the scene and Gibbs hadn't pushed for much then as the trauma of finding his dead mother was still too fresh. However, Gibbs knew that despite DiNozzo's claim that he wasn't good with kids, which was true for the most part for kids under the age of ten, he had a feeling that Tony would get him to open up since he was at most times, little more than a teenager trapped in an adult's body. That had been his main motivation for assigning him to Jason in the first place.
He just hoped that whatever had been bugging Tony at the crime scene wouldn't keep him from finding that connection with Jason. He hadn't been blind to Tony's pale features and tremulous hands when he caught him outside by the truck after storming out of the house. Whatever it was that had set him off, it had been bad enough that Tony had tried and failed miserably to brush it off with a joke and that more than anything had Gibbs worried. When Tony couldn't make light of things, they had to be bad.
TBC....
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