380"Damn it!"
Tony stopped in the doorway to the lab as Abby slammed her wireless mouse on the table hard enough to make him jump. He looked around, saw Ziva and Gibbs already there and not looking happy. "What is it?"
They looked back at him. Gibbs nodded at his leg. "You okay?"
"I'll manage." Tony limped over to them, squinting at the computer screen Abby was swearing at. "What's going on?"
"I was trying to triangulate Timmy's cell phone." Abby scowled and bent, pecking fast on the keyboard. "But it's right outside this building."
Tony frowned. "Must have left it in his backpack in the car." He stared at the screen, thinking. "He doesn't have any other gadgets we can trace?"
"No, everything he needs is on that stupid overpriced phone that he doesn't even put in his pocket-"
"Abby." Gibbs stepped up behind her, hand on her shoulder.
She turned wide eyes to him, but looked at the screen again. "They might have guessed using Tibbett's cell is what let us track them, because it's been turned off since you guys ran into them earlier. I don't know if they picked up a new one or if they're just staying quiet right now. I don't know..."
"Hey. Abs. We're going to find them. You can count on that." Gibbs squeezed her arm. "Calm down and let's figure out something besides cell phones."
"We have to find them fast, Gibbs. Really fast."
"We're trying."
"No. You don't know." She hesitated, pale and unhappy. "He can't stay with them."
Tony realized what she was stalling over. In a way he was glad he heard it from Ducky instead of Abby. He moved around to her other side and spoke softly, though Gibbs was standing right there. "You haven't told them what you found."
She turned to him, cornered and wide-eyed. "How do you know what I...?"
"Ducky." Tony drew in a breath and turned to Gibbs before he could bark at them for an explanation. "There was semen in Tibbett's stomach, boss. Matches one of the Doughertys."
Ziva murmured a faint, vehement curse in one of the many languages she spoke that Tony didn't understand.
The lines around Gibbs' mouth tightened. "Okay." He reached into his pocket, came up empty-handed, and his scowl deepened. "Damn it, where the hell is my..." He stopped, eyes sharpening.
Tony breathed in.
Ziva's eyes widened. "You gave it to McGee. You could not make the menu screen come up. You told him to reboot it before you threw it against a wall."
All three of them turned to Abby.
"And I'll bet he didn't bother turning it off." She was already hunched, already typing. "Just when I was ready to give up on tracking him." She brought up a search screen and her hands were blurs as the field filled with numbers. She only hesitated for an instant before she pressed enter, and for a moment everyone seemed to hold their breath, watching the screen.
A chirp came from the speakers, and a map appeared on the screen with Gibbs' name over a blinking triangular icon.
Abby jumped. "Yes!"
Tony leaned in, squinting at the map. "They're still in Virginia. Looks like they only made it about thirty miles past that abandoned school we cornered them in."
"They're not moving." Gibbs started for the door. "Don't take your eyes off that screen, Abby. Call me...oh. Right. Call Tony if they start moving again."
He didn't have to summon Ziva and Tony, because they were already right on his heels.
It was a twenty minute drive to the school the Doughertys had been cornered in, and then another thirty miles west following Abby's directions.
It was a long fucking trip, particularly when no one was speaking and Gibbs filled up the entire truck with his silent anger. Tony sat as unobtrusively as possible, keeping silent though it went against his big-mouthed instincts.
Gibbs blamed him and would blame him for whatever happened to McGee, and for no better reason than because Tony was there when it happened. It wasn't fair, maybe, but it was Gibbs. It was how he always operated.
The only reason Ziva wouldn't take any blame is because she had been with Gibbs himself, otherwise she would have been just as accountable. The three of them were partners. A team.
Tony, Tim, Ziva. DiNozzo, David, McGee. The three musketeers, Abby called them. They were responsible for each other in ways no one outside the team could understand. If Tony screwed something up and McGee was around, McGee took the rap right beside his partner. Same for Ziva. There was no other way to be a team under Gibbs.
Tony understood that. He liked it. There was security in it, in knowing that they would never leave him behind or let him fall, because they wouldn't let any of them fall. They had risked their careers and their freedom to help Ziva when she was being framed. They had worked themselves into the ground to prove Tony wasn't a murderer when it was him being framed. Of course they would get Tim back and run right over any obstacles in their path. He was one of them.
It was funny. When Tony was the one in trouble, sitting in an interrogation room answering for a murder he didn't commit, his FBI jailers thought he was taking the whole thing too lightly. Like he thought it was some big joke. He didn't. Tony was a cop before he was NCIS – he understood murder, and he understood that innocent people went to jail on a hell of a lot less evidence than they had against him.
But he also understood being on Gibbs' team. He knew while he sat there and joked his way through interrogation that his team had his back, and that was what kept him from worrying. Too much, anyway.
So taking the blame for McGee being taken by cop-killers? Yeah, maybe that was the downside of the way their team worked. But that was why Tony didn't protest too much - the downside of being on Gibbs' team was laughably small when compared to the upsides.
Besides, it really was his fault, wasn't it? He really had just stood there while they walked right out with his partner. Having no better alternatives was no excuse.
Hell, maybe McGee went in his place just to keep from being the one Gibbs was furious at right now. The three nutbag Doughertys would be easier to deal with than their boss when he was pissed.
Tony had a surprisingly clear mental image of McGee's face, though. A moment as perfectly frozen as any other meaningful event in his life. "If you need a hostage you're taking me." Standing there with his gun over his head steaming from the shot that shocked the Doughertys into listening to him. So fucking calm, and when the hell had that happened? McGee was McGee - stammering, nervous Probie. Rookie computer nerd, flipping through guidelines and procedures locked into his brain before he so much as moved.
But that wasn't the case, was it? Not for a while now. Tony didn't bother noticing for more that a few seconds at a time. He credited McGee with small moments – like walking out of a hostage situation in a women's prison as collected as if the whole thing had been his idea – but didn't attribute them to any bigger picture.
McGee got on his nerves as much now as he did at the beginning, but for different reasons. Back then it was his hesitance that bothered Tony. His inexperience. Even his intelligence, mostly because Tony knew that it was his smarts with computers and his habit of thinking of things from a different direction than the experienced crime-fighters on the team that had made Gibbs give him a chance. And Tony didn't get where he came from.
Worse, Tony had no idea if he could trust the guy. He covered up real doubt with jokes and sarcasm and mockery of his easy-target Probie, but the fact was he trusted Gibbs and Kate to watch his back, and he didn't trust the nerd to fire a shot when he had to.
Lately? McGee's smarts could twist into arrogance way too easily, and now that he had found his voice on the team he cut too deep with it sometimes. He still got on Tony's nerves now and then. But everything else had changed, and Tony hadn't even noticed it happen. He had no idea when he stopped regarding McGee as the uncertain element and had started feeling comfortable with Tim watching his back. Shouldn't he know when something that important had changed?
They were friends now. Tony had no problem thinking of him as a friend. They were family, too, because Gibbs' teams had to be family.
Why the fuck had Tony not paid attention to any of that happening? Why didn't he realize it before he let McGee walk into the hands of insane gingers?
"Coming up on the signal," came Gibbs' grim voice from beside him.
Tony pushed his strange introspective mood away and tugged his Sig from its holster. In the back, Ziva did the same.
Gibbs' knuckles were white on the steering wheel.
"Oi va'avoi li."
Tony stared at the dark sedan for he didn't know how long. He heard Ziva's quiet swears, heard Gibbs on the phone summoning Ducky. He knew they had to look around, case the entire area. There were things to be done.
But he couldn't take his eyes off the car. Or, more accurately, the dark spatter splashed over the rear passenger window and up the roof of the car. The thick blood that had to come from a hell of a messy shot. A high shot, high enough that the spatter had to fall down to coat the roof of the car. Which meant...
Head shot.
Instant corpse.
Tony stirred at that thought. Instant corpse, but where? No body in sight. The trunk of the car, maybe? The sun was setting but he didn't need his flash light to see the pool of blood gathered by the rear wheel of the car. He crouched, regarding the puddle.
"This is where he fell." Ziva bent at his side, her dark eyes on the puddle.
Gibbs was a stone shadow behind them. "He?"
Ziva met Tony's eyes for a moment before she stood. "I mean, whoever was shot. They fell here."
"They're not here now," Gibbs said. "DiNozzo, find them. Ziva, check the car."
Tony stood without answering. The road on either side, for miles, was narrow and lined with forest. He tugged out his flash light and swept it around, frowning at the mess of footprints. Clusters going in every direction. All four of them had been standing out here. McGee, surrounded by Doughertys in this quiet nowhere off a rarely-used highway. Surrounded on all sides, sun sinking low, silence all around, and then the shot blasted out...
He drew in a harsh breath, trying to stay focused. A few of the prints jumped into one direction, a few scattered another way. Wasn't much sense to be made of it.
But. To the right, stains on scattered leaves. Blood. Behind that, gouges in the dirt. Someone was dragged.
He ducked under some low limbs and followed the path, and his heart sank only a few steps in. "Boss, I can hear water."
Gibbs was there in a minute, his flash light out and beaming a trail parallel to Tony's. "Got drag marks here."
"Here too." Tony frowned, following thick drops of blood along the trail of scattered leaves and dented dirt. "Two trails. Two bodies?"
Gibbs just grunted.
The sound of the water grew louder, and Tony followed his trail up to a dark edge and looked beyond.
A creek, nothing there weren't a million of in Virginia woods. But it was deep, and heavy rain the last few weeks meant it was running pretty fast. A body could get carried away by it, probably a good distance. Tony shined his flashlight along the edge of the water, and sucked in a breath as his flashlight beam was reflected back. He moved on stumbling feet and crouched.
"God damn it."
"What, Tony?"
His heart sank. His ribs seemed to tighten. "Your phone, boss." He reached out and grabbed a narrow twig. Gibbs' light was added to his, and he didn't have to say a word when Gibbs saw the thin black wallet beside the phone.
Tony slipped the end of the twig between the folds of the wallet and nudged it open. There was no denying that under the glistening thick red that coated it and the phone, the dull metal inside the wallet was Tim McGee's NCIS badge.
"How much longer?"
"All we're waiting on it the DNA profiles from the blood. It shouldn't be long."
Tony moved slowly into the lab, noting the silence in the air. "Where's the music?"
Abby shot him a pale, unhappy look and didn't bother answering.
Tony took a seat on the stool next to her, keenly aware that it was the seat usually occupied by McGee when he and Abby were double-teaming some nerd thing. "You have something to compare it to already?"
Abby nodded. "You weren't here for that delightfully fun afternoon when we all thought you had blown up in your car," she said, sending him a somewhat softer look. "But it took so long to luck into proof that the body wasn't you that...that, um, Director Shepard thought it might be a good idea to get all your DNA profiles into the system. And considering how often it's Gibbs' team who end up in the middle of danger, nobody thought that was a bad idea."
She pointed at one of her screens, where the familiar marked lines of a DNA profile were displayed. Her eyes went dewy and she reached up, brushing her fingertip over the lines of the profile. "Tony, meet Tim."
Tony's eyes went from the screen to her profile.
She glanced over and her pale cheeks dusted pink. She dropped her arm. "I just need a profile to compare to that, and then we'll know for sure that it wasn't him."
Unless it was him. But there was no point in deliberately sabotaging her frail optimism.
Tony just smiled. "So we just have to wait?"
Abby nodded.
The room fell silent.
Tony looked at the lines of Tim's DNA profile. He sighed and looked away. "You sure you don't want any music?"
"Depends. Is this him?" She stared hard at the screen, as if willing herself not to look at Tony, to see some truth in his face she didn't want to see.
Tony frowned. "It's his badge, it's Gibbs' phone." He hesitated. "But I don't know. They were left there by the creek for us to find. I don't know if it's a set-up, or if they just wanted us to know exactly where they dumped him. Knowing these guys it could be either."
"But why the two sets of blood? Why two different tracks?"
"They didn't walk out of those woods," Tony said quietly, looking at that DNA profile. McGee, reduced to a few green and red lines on a screen. "Some passing driver stopped, probably thought they needed help. I'm sure they killed whoever it was and took their car. Once we get an ID on the second body we can trace the car at least. Either you get a match on the blood, or we've got some Virginia LEOs searching along the creek." Tony had been surprised when Gibbs agreed to their doing it without NCIS supervision. But they had all figured news would come from Abby before it came from the cops.
"I'll get you their DNA profile if nothing else. Should be sometime in the hour." She nodded at another screen. "I can let you know when I have something."
He just smiled, faint and thin. "I'll wait with you."
She looked over at met his eyes. After a moment she squeezed his arm. "Thanks."
He patted her hand but stood up. Staring at computer screens was an Abby thing. He moved around behind the table and cast his eyes around the lab absently. He couldn't help a small smile at the photos on the wall – leftovers from their days reassigned away from Gibbs. He made a face absently at his own picture, grinning at the memory of her taking it. Below that was McGee, smiling blandly.
Tony smirked. He spoke loudly, still looking over the photos. "I can't believe I've never asked you this before."
"Asked me what?"
"What's Probie like in the sack?"
She whirled around, staring at him. "Tony!"
"What? It's a perfectly reasonable question."
She opened her mouth and shut it again, amusement warring with the need to be serious.
He sent her a meaningful look. "I guess we could wait in silence."
She considered that. "Well."
"You have to tell me, Abs. Otherwise I'm going to go on thinking you dumped him because he was as nervous in bed as he was in the field."
"Hey!" She stood up at that, arms folding across her chest. "Just maybe, DiNozzo, he was as capable in bed as he is on a computer."
"Uh uh." Tony flashed her a smirking, dubious look. "I've seen those dreamy looks you give him when he gets into hacker mode. If he did that to you in the sack you wouldn't have dumped him."
She smiled, but it faded as she made her way to him and her gaze caught on that wall of pictures. "You're so sure I dumped him."
"I'm sure he didn't dump you."
Abby didn't argue that. "It was mutual."
"Yeah?"
She glanced at him and rolled her eyes at the expression on his face. "I'm serious. It was all very adult. We knew we wanted different things, that's all."
"Meaning he wanted you and you wanted out?"
"Stop that, Tony. It wasn't like that at all." She shrugged. "Timmy's a sweet guy who wants to...to be needed. And I don't want to need anyone. But if anyone ever made me doubt myself for that decision, it was Timmy."
"Mmm. Which doesn't answer the central question, of course."
"What central...?" She remembered and shook her head at him. "You're disgusting, Tony."
"You love it."
"You wish."
Tony grinned. "You're evading, Abs. Come on. One word, just give me a one word summary of Probalot in bed. Better, let me guess! Quick. Fumbling. Apologetic? Scared shitless?"
Abby slapped his arm, but hesitated and tilted her head to the side, her eyes going distant. "One word, huh?"
Tony's eyebrows shot up. He waited.
She smiled suddenly, slow and nostalgic. "Intense."
Tony blinked. "You're kidding."
"Oh no. You've seen how focused he can get, right? Mostly staring at computers, solving some problem. But he can turn that focus on to other things."
Tony thought about that.
Abby's slow smile grew into a grin. "I'm not into pity sex, Tony. I wouldn't have been with him if I didn't want to be. And that's the last I'm going to say about it."
She was smiling, sincerely, so he figured his job was done either way. He waved a hand in the air dismissively. "I suppose there are about a thousand things less disturbing we could be talking about right now anyway."
"Mmm hmm. You brought it up, remember."
Tony grinned. "I'll probably bring it up again. I'm like that."
Abby's smile faded. She studied Tony for a moment, then moved around him back to the table to check out her humming computers. "Your turn, DiNozzo."
"My turn what?"
She hesitated. She typed a few things into one of her keyboards and then sighed. Her hands dropped and she turned back to Tony, levelling him with a serious gaze. "What do you think of him?"
"In bed? Well, there was that one night, but we were both so drunk..."
She let out a disapproving breath, staring hard at him. Then she thought about it and her mouth quirked up. "You know, if I thought there was really a story there I'd let you keep talking."
Tony laughed. "Naughty, Miss Sciuto!"
Abby shrugged. "An entire industry is built up around entertaining men with girl-on-girl action. You really think it doesn't turn our crank to think of a couple of hot guys getting it on?" She held up a hand fast. "Don't answer that, or I'll never get back on topic."
"The topic isn't girl-on-girl? Because the minute those words are spoken I find it hard to focus on anything else."
Abby's teeth dug into her lip as she regarded him. "What do you think of him? Timmy. As a...a person."
Tony shrugged. "I'm a guy, Abs. If it's not obvious how I feel about someone then I must not feel anything at all."
"I'm serious, Tony."
He studied her for a moment. "Why are you serious? If you didn't pick up on the whole trying-to-lighten-the-mood vibe I've been going for this whole time..."
"I picked up on it. I just can't..." She sighed and left the computers behind, grabbing Bert the Hippo as she went and sitting with a huff of breath at her back table. "Let me ask you something – seriously, okay? It's not lightening the mood, but it's not blood and brain matter either."
Tony sighed, but nodded. "Go for it."
She hugged Bert hard enough that he interrupted the silence, but they were both so used to random bursts of stuffed-animal flatulence that they hardly noticed. "Why didn't Tim tell you guys about his book?"
It wasn't a question Tony had been expecting, but he shrugged easily enough. "He said we would've made fun of him."
She studied him from over the ears of her hippo. "He's been writing for years, you know that? He's got a dozen half-started novels, a couple of manuscripts that never sold. He's wanted to be a writer since high school. Do you have any idea how exciting it is for a guy who's been trying that hard to find out he's actually getting published? And that publisher of his, she's big news. He got a kick-ass advance, a three-book contract. That is huge, Tony. That's the kind of news you stop strangers on the street to tell them. He went through editing and publishing, a few tour dates locally...and then he was a best-seller. For weeks, in the New York Times and everything. That's epic. That doesn't happen to people, Tony."
Tony had an idea where this was going, and it made his eyes leave her and wander back to the outer lab. "And? He didn't tell us about it."
"Exactly. He told me. He told Sarah and his parents and some old school friends. This huge thing happened to him that doesn't happen to normal people – it just doesn't – and he couldn't tell the closest people to him."
Tony frowned. "He didn't tell us because he wrote about us without our permission. That's what he didn't want us to know."
She set Bert aside, staring hard at Tony. "You did read that book, didn't you?"
"Most of it."
"No, you scanned it for Tommy's name and stored up everything he wrote about the guy as if he was talking about you."
"He was talking about me!"
"No, he was basing on you. It's not the same, Tony. Tommy's got a great relationship with his parents, did you read that?"
Tony drew back, his frown becoming suddenly serious. There weren't a lot of topics that were off-limits for Tony, but she was threatening one. "Abby."
"Oh, stop it. I'm just saying. Officer Lisa keeps a journal with the names of all the people she's killed. Agent McGregor is claustrophobic. These people aren't us. Yeah, they're based on us, and yeah, he could have gotten a little more creative with the names. But they're not us."
"Semantics, Abs."
"I value my privacy as much as any of you, and I managed to realize that Amy wasn't me. Tim wasn't ashamed of his book. He wasn't worried you'd hate it, or you'd be ticked off about the characters. He didn't tell you about it because it was a great thing he dreamed about for years, and he didn't want you to ruin it for him." She stood up suddenly and moved to Tony, putting her hands on his arms and meeting his eyes intently. "Don't you realize what I'm saying here? Tim knows you don't like him. Knows it like it's fact. He knows you'll watch his back because you're a team, but he's odd-man-out in Gibbs' little group because he comes from a different world and you guys..." She sighed. "You don't get it. He knows...it's done."
Tony hesitated. "He knows what's done?"
"It's done!" She pushed past him and out the door, racing to her computer to bring up something she must have seen flashing on the screen.
Tony followed her out more slowly, tossing her words around in his head for a moment before giving up. Whatever McGee might have admitted to her in some insecure mood wasn't worth worrying about. He liked McGee, and McGee knew it. Like Tony said before, it was obvious. He was a guy, he wasn't subtle about his feelings.
Though it was kind of surprising, in hindsight, that he'd kept a best-selling novel quiet from the people he spent ten- and twelve-hour days with.
"Tony!"
Her voice was a sudden sharp reminder that it didn't matter what McGee thought right then – he was missing, he was maybe dead, and it was Tony's fault.
He moved to her side fast and stared at more charts, more DNA profiles. "Well?"
"Get Gibbs down here."
"Abby..."
She turned to him, a smile blasting across her face that he couldn't possibly mistake. "Get Gibbs."
"-and this is McGee." Abby beamed and stepped back from the screen, letting them look.
Gibbs squinted the way he always did when regarding some computer screen flashing evidence he wasn't expected to understand. But it was obvious – even to Tony – that the three profiles were all different.
"So whoever's blood is all over that car..."
"It isn't Timmy." She grinned. "And whoever left the second blood trail, that isn't him either."
Gibbs let out a breath, his shoulders releasing just a little of the tension that had clogged him up since the moment Tony told him that McGee was gone. "Okay. Okay, Abby. Thanks. You two, we've got some work-"
"Gibbs."
He turned back to Abby.
She straightened proudly. "Isn't there always more?"
It was a sign of his relief that Gibbs quirked the smallest of smiles. "What else have you got, Abs?"
"Thought you'd never ask. I'm running the second profile through CODIS, for all the good that will do – and unless our mystery driver with the missing car had a criminal record, it won't do any good at all. But! The first profile, the blood all over that car, I don't even have to put through the system."
"Why not?"
Right after he asked the question, Gibbs' patient smile faded.
Ziva spoke, suddenly grim. "Because you already have it."
Tony frowned at her, then sucked in a breath when he realized.
"Exactly. Already had it in my computer, and I already had a fresh version pulled up thanks to Petty Officer Tibbett. Your brains belong to Clancy Dougherty, all-around bastard and top three on the we're-not-sorry-he's-dead list."
Tony didn't even have to look at Gibbs to confirm that he wasn't nearly as happy with Abby's news as she was. "She didn't tell me that before I called you down, boss."
Abby shot Tony a smile. "I don't like blowing my whole wad at once. So to speak." Her smile faded a moment later. She looked from Tony's frown to Ziva's pale face and ended with Gibbs. "This isn't good news? One of them is dead!"
Gibbs glanced at her, but turned to Ziva and Tony. "They're brothers and they're close. Whatever happened by that car, I doubt one of the other Doughertys suddenly decided to kill the youngest."
Tony nodded. "Meaning not only is McGee still with them..."
Ziva finished. "They've now got a brother to avenge. And these men are psychotic enough without motivation."
Abby's smile had vanished, her eyes growing wide with realization.
Gibbs turned on his heel and started for the elevator. "What have we got to go on here? DiNozzo."
Tony was on his heel in a flash. "I'll go through their histories again and find out if they ever even talked to anyone in Virginia they might go to for help now."
"Ziva."
"I can monitor the morning's police reports for any missing persons called in on drivers who didn't return home last night."
They piled into the elevator, new tension thrumming what should have been a moment of relief. Tony grimaced at the sight of Abby left behind in the lab, wilting back against the table in stricken silence as the elevator doors closed them away from her.