Alpha male is watching you
Gibbs came back from his coffee run and sees only Ziva and DiNozzo at their desks.
"Where are McGee and Buchanan?"
"Interrogation room four."
"Do they have a suspect already?"
"No, Probette said she needed space to work."
Gibbs turns and marches to where the interrogation rooms were located, planning to check what his younger agent and new problem child could be possibly doing.
Hearing voices, he enters the observation room.
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The opposite wall was literally covered with crime scene photos. A huge mosaic of death and blood on printouts glared at the two agents sitting side by side on the table in the interrogation room. Some papers with handwritten notes were scattered on some locations, as if they were hastily written to immortalize a thought before the idea was gone.
And apparently, she was giving him a seminary on profiling.
"Profiling is different than your normal investigation."
"I thought they were based on the same steps." He starts to enumerate them "A crime is committed, an investigation is started. Evidence is collected, which points to possible suspects. Once motive is found, suspect is convicted, end of story."
"Correct, but not necessarily complete."
"What do you mean?"
"You get facts and try to fit the suspect to the crime. In profiling, most of the times you seek the suspect first and then try to fit him to the facts at hand."
"I don't see how that would work."
"Sometimes there is no motive. Or the crime is a crime of opportunity, or gang-related. In these cases the normal relation of motive and circumstances reveal nothing, because there is absolutely no connection between the victim and suspect. Or the guy is simply a psychopath."
"And in this case, he does not need motive."
"No he doesn't."
"And how does it help?"
"We get his acts and trace it down to behavioral patterns. From behavioral patterns we track it to social, religious, cultural patterns. Somewhere, in this huge mental haystack, he left the proverbial needle we can use to nail him down."
"How would you do it?"
"Look at this picture." She points to one in the left. "Here we can see that he first attacked our victim with an upper kidney thrust. Not only that, the abrasion around the wound would indicate that he twisted the knife while it was still in the body, making the initial cut bigger than the actual length of the knife. Add to this the multitude of stab wounds on the upper torso on the front of his torso, and the form of the fist impressions on the same area of the body, we can rule out a female attacker."
"Why?"
"A woman would not be able to create such multitude of wounds, and stabbing the human body with this speed and agility would be beyond an average woman with an average strength and age."
"You are saying that a woman would not stab a man as brutally as that."
"I'm saying that statistically, women would rather shoot someone down than stab them. Stabbing is a personal way of killing, because it requires close contact with the victim."
"Ziva could"
Ziva could what?
"Stab a person and then punch the daylights out of them." He smiles. "She is, you know, a trained crazy assassin from Mossad."
Buchanan smiles.
"But Ziva is someone extraordinary. Something that our killer is not." She motions to him. "Stand up." She gets a pen in her hand and forces McGee to stand up ramrod straight. She moves her hand with familiarity on his back to align it, without the normal hunch he adopts because of being too tall. "You are a US navy officer, trained to face any adversity, you might be suffering a little discomfort from your operated foot but that's nothing to you, Navy officers walk proud of their force and their uniform." McGee smiles at her description.
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Gibbs observes the interaction from the other side of the mirror.
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"You go out for a beer, after a long self-imposed reclusion. If you get a clean medical bill on Tuesday, you get to go back to your Sub on Friday. You go for your favorite hangout bar, and are approached by him, an average Joe, who despite all your training, does not set off any alarms on your head. You don't feel threatened. "
"We already questioned everyone in the bar, nobody out of the ordinary talked to Phillips. All the alibis checked out. And he left the bar alone."
"Then you are approached on the street back home, by someone ordinary-looking, that does not ring any bell, and this someone walks by your side for some time, maybe talking about the last Knicks game or who is going to win the World Series, and then Bam!" She moves the pen like a knife and moves as if to strike McGee, who jumps with fright. "Stab wound to your lower back."
"I would have fought back, I'm a highly trained officer."
"Not necessarily. This first cut would have driven him straight into shock, regardless of his health condition. He would be defenseless." She turns to stare at the improvised murder board.
"The first cut alone would have been enough to kill him. Five minutes, eight minutes tops and he would have bled out.
"So you are saying that this was premeditated."
"The knife suggests that the attack was premeditated. The punching suggests a close relation to the victim; however your investigation did not raise any red flags on the personal or professional life of our petty officer."
"So we got nothing."
She bites her lower lip thinking. "Not necessarily. .There is something still bothering me about the attack. It is almost like…"
"Almost like what?" She´s onto something, thinks McGee.
"As if there were two people involved in this killing instead of only one."
"Are you suggesting that we have two killers for one victim? Don't you think that's literally overkill?"
"No. Look, it was overkill from the very beginning. First he stabs him with an upper thrust in the kidney, then, once Phillips was already on the floor, he kept stabbing the poor bastard in six other places just to ensure he will not be rising anytime soon. And after the stabbing, he puts away the knife and proceeds to pummel the already bleeding to death SOB into a blood pulp. There are two M.O.s here."
"Two M.O.s, two suspects."
"I would like to talk to your resident Medical Examiner before I put down any theory on paper."
"Ok, I'm sure I can arrange you to meet Ducky."
"Thanks," she says. They start putting away the papers they were studying. She stops for a second and looks at McGee. He notices she's stopped and turns to her. "What?"
"Thanks."
"You said that already. I'm taking you to Ducky, no need to be grateful about it."
"That's not what I am saying thanks for."
Oh… He steps back and sits on the corner of the interrogation room table.
She looks aside uncomfortably and briefly glances at the mirrored glass of the room before she continues. "Most people would be running to the hills if they had to deal with a hysterical stranger during their off time".
"I'm not most people."
"No you're not." Pause. "I just want you to know how much I appreciated what you did for me." She is visibly struggling with words. "The type of work I do, it consumes your soul and mind and sometimes" she pauses to look at him "you get lost in the filth of the mind of the monsters you are supposed to catch."
McGee is looking at her with his most serious face, with all his attention on her words. It is the same searching look he gave her before they left the bar. No pity, no judgment, just attention.
"Everybody has a breaking point, McGee," she continues "I was way beyond that point when we met," she says in a low voice. "Thanks for letting me fall apart in your arms and for not judging me for doing that."
He stands up and stands toe to toe facing her. "Hey," he uses his finger to lift her face to look at him. "If you, for any reason, think that you are in any danger of falling down on that proverbial abyss you mentioned earlier, or if you fell you are going under in someone else's mind, any mind, you come to me."
"I will," she says softly.
"So" he gathers the papers, and opens the door to leave the room. "Let's meet Ducky."
"Ok, but just a question."
"Yes."
"What is a Ducky?"
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