Later
The two American Agents and their Austrian colleague had assembled at the police station again after questioning everyone who had been present when the skull had been found. The curator of the Gebeinhaus insisted that it hadn’t been there yesterday and that it was impossible that it had been buried at their cemetery beforehand. Not that Gibbs had thought so, there wasn’t a big enough time frame for the usual ….well. The old adage about never knowing when a seemingly obscure piece of information would come in handy was holding true again. “Our Petty Officer was alive one week ago, so that rules out your traditional methods.”
All three of them stared down at the polished bare skull on the desk in front of them until Brunner broke the silence with a question. “Do you like to hunt, Agent Gibbs?”
Gibbs just shrugged his shoulders. Seeing Gibbs' reluctance to reply to the query, Tony was the one who answered, "I always thought it unsporting. Deer can’t shoot back.” Gibbs guessed that Tony was reluctant to tell her that the adversaries his boss used to hunt with a rifle ran around on two feet.
“To each their own,” Brunner didn’t look like she cared one way or the other about their preferences. “About your question of how someone could prepare a skull like this. You are staying at the Pension Weißenbach? So you might have seen the decorations of the,” she faltered and visibly searched for the right words, “hunting saloon.”
“The bare deer skulls.” Tony exclaimed. “They look like props from a Dallas episode that mated with Sound of Music.
One of Brunner’s flunkies began to babble in his native tongue and it started a heated discussion among the locals that ran on for a while before the Inspector stopped to translate what had been said to her visitors.
“Ok, Karl said there is a fairly simple method. Remove all the soft tissue and skin you can remove without too much effort, stuff the head into a big enough pot, fill it with water. Boil until everything but the bone liquefies. You might want to pull out the brain beforehand, it speeds up the process. Easy enough.”
“That’s… disgusting. So much for the soup at my hotel. I liked that soup.... And the rest of the body? I hope you don’t have big enough pots lying around to dissolve a whole body.” Tony groaned. “Any good dumping grounds that might have been used?”
“The lake. Caverns, currents, cloudy water and the unusual depth of the lake dare the divers to challenge their skills. But the lake is dangerous and tends to, well, swallow bodies." The slightly pained and sincere expression on the inspector’s face indicated that his tale was not another urban legend but the truth. “Every year sport divers try to beat the Attersee and unfortunately sometimes the lake wins and we are not able to find the bodies until they rise as floaters, if they rise at all.”
Tony leaned back in his seat. “Doesn’t that make it the ideal dumping ground for bodies? Al Capone style.”
It took some time until Insepector Brunner managed to figure out what her American visitor meant with his words. The woman’s grasp of the English language was good but Tony’s movie references added another communication hurdle the Austrian had to overcome. “Betonpatscherl verpassen…” was the conclusion she came to and now it was the two foreign agents' turn to blink and look confused. “To give someone cement shoes. That’s what we call the practice of weighting down someone before throwing the victim into the water to drown. A mafia practice, that’s what you meant, yes?”
Gibbs didn’t want them to deviate too much from their original topic. “Can we go back to the case at hand? We have to find the body. A bare skull doesn’t give us too many clues.”
The inspector blushed a little bit.
The younger agent threw a contrite look at Gibbs. His boss just shook his head. Tony wouldn’t be Tony without his irrepressible need to bring up parallels to his beloved movies.
Brunner pondered the question and then answered slowly. “It would be an unreliable way to make a corpse disappear. The currents and underwater caverns I mentioned? Nobody can guarantee which way the situation would develop, short of using actual cement shoes to weight the body down permanently. It could wash up. It could stay down long enough that the fish eat the body and the bones sink into the silt. It might happen that the body is drawn into a cavern where no fish dwell and stay there for months before washing up.” The woman shrugged her shoulders. “A ravine or a secluded place in the woods would be other possible options.”
Tony had listened closely but now he was staring off into space, biting down on his lower lip.
“Agent Gibbs?” The inspector looked at him with a raised eyebrow.
"Let him be, he's working an idea." Gibbs answered her and thought with longing about his missing team members. The Austrians appeared to be eager to help and competent enough but it wasn’t the same. Abby would be very useful, she could analyze the skull with one of her gadgets. Of course, the locals could too, but part of the Abby magic was that she intuited where to look and which of her doohickeys to use. Ducky might see something the local M.Es missed. Same for McGee and David and the local L.E.O.s. Yeah, Gibbs wished that he could have his full team at his disposal. If wishes were horses… Oh well, they had worked cases as a duo in the past, whenever Gibbs had managed to scare away another candidate for his team, or gave them the boot himself, they would manage now.
“Ok…ok.” Tony straightened. “Boss… I think I know why I asked about the lake. I couldn’t grasp it before but now-
“DiNozzo, stop babbling, start making sense.” Gibbs interrupted him.
Tony gave him a mock-hurt look, “I always make sense! I am made of sense. My middle name is-”
One speaking look and his partner rolled his eyes and was afterward all business again. “I think we should search the lake, especially those dangerous parts you talked about. You have experienced divers at hand or should I request some from our German base?”
“That won’t be necessary. We have a good team, as I said, we are unfortunately used to searching the water for missing people. They know the lake very well.” Brunner assured them. “But why do you think the murderer would go this way?”
“Our murderer is all about symbolic gestures. He didn’t have to paint the name and dates on the skull. He used the wrong rank on purpose and I'm guessing that we'll find the reason behind the murder back when Grant was a Petty Officer. The murderer didn’t have to put the dog tags between the teeth and use the chain to wire them shut so the tags wouldn't fall out. I'd even bet the shelf he put it on was deliberately chosen.” Tony’s expressive hands accompanied his reasoning with gestures and his eyes shone with enthusiasm. The younger agent was in his element.
“So? How does that point in direction of the lake?”
“Well, Grant was passionate about two hobbies. He was a hunter and, judging from the pictures we saw of his hunting cabin at home, loved to mount trophies of his kills on his walls. He even named them.”
Gibbs, in one of the typical mind reading moments that made them such a fantastic team, suddenly knew where Tony was going with this. “The perp used his own preferences against him. Grant was also a passionate diver. The lake would be the ideal symbolic resting place for the rest of Grant’s body.” They grinned at each other. Working as a team of two again wasn’t that bad at all.
.-#-.
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