Chapter two

Despite being back at headquarters at five thirty in the morning – because he couldn’t sleep for long, and there was no point in staying at home – there was little he could do. The building was quiet, no one but the cleaning crew and the mailman coming through the bullpen so early.

The elevator dinged at ten past six, and McGee entered. Gibbs noted the shadows around his eyes; they were becoming more pronounced with every passing day. There was a slump to the young agent’s shoulders that hadn’t been there before.

He perked up when he saw Gibbs. “Anything new, boss?”

Gibbs shook his head, and McGee’s face fell.

McGee settled in at his desk, the computer chiming as it turned on. A few minutes later, Ziva arrived. Her hair was pulled back in a neat ponytail, but Gibbs saw the traces fear and worry had left on her as well. Ziva hid it better, but her eyes were expressive when she didn’t guard herself.

“Anything?” she asked as she put her bag on her desk.

Gibbs shook his head again.

Ducky came up, brow drawn with anxiousness just like the rest of them. He tried his best to be reassuring when Gibbs told him they had nothing.

“You’ll find him, Jethro,” Ducky said.

“Duck—” Gibbs said, because he didn’t think the faith the doctor held him in was deserved. Kate had died on his watch, and Jenny had died on his watch. He was far from infallible.

“You’ll find him,” Ducky said again.

Just then, Gibbs’ cell phone rang. With trepidation, Gibbs picked it up – it was the Director on the other end.

“Another body,” Vance said.

“DiNozzo?”

He could barely hear over the pounding of his heart.

“No ID yet,” Vance said. “Pennsylvania Ave, I’ll send you the exact address.”

Gibbs snapped the phone shut without saying goodbye, as always.

“Body in Georgetown,” he said, voice even more clipped than usual.

McGee turned whiter at his words, and Ziva’s eyes grew big. Ducky looked at him with worry, but didn’t say anything. They didn’t have to – all feared what they would find upon arriving.

Gibbs didn’t need to bark an order about grabbing their gear – they were already up and hurrying towards the elevator when Gibbs strode past their desks. He couldn’t get another word out; he feared his voice would break if he tried to speak. His mouth felt dry and some part of him hated Tony for making him feel this way.

He drove even faster than he usually did; Ziva and McGee hung onto whatever they could grab. Ducky and Palmer followed in the ME’s van, but it didn’t matter to Gibbs if they arrived later than he did; Gibbs didn’t need a doctor to tell him if the body belonged to Tony, or someone else.

The body had been dumped in an alley between buildings, an anonymous location. Gibbs didn’t even turn off the car before he was out of it, hurrying towards the officials standing around.

“Who are—” began one of them, trying to stop him.

Gibbs flashed his badge but didn’t stop to say anything more. The swarm of people straight ahead of him told him where the body was.

The body.

What was Gibbs going to do if it turned out to be Tony? God, hadn’t they been here enough times, thinking Tony to be dead? Tony must have used up all of his chances, all of his extra lives – even if he was part cat, he should probably be dead by now.

Gibbs’ hands were balled into fists as he strode closer, his knuckles white. He tried his best to school his face into a mask of indifference when he felt anything but.

It wasn’t Tony.

Gibbs felt his legs buckling and only the fact that he was standing close enough to a building to lean on it kept him upright.

Before him lay an unknown man, naked and wiped clean just as the other victims had been. He had his face to the side, eyes staring sightlessly, and was lying on his stomach. His skin looked bluish, pale white, blood creating dark spots on his back, butt and backside of his legs, suggesting he’d been lying on his back, at least in the hours after his murder.

He saw, and felt, Ziva and McGee come up beside him. They both let out breaths of relief upon seeing that the body belonged to someone other than Tony, and they went about their jobs as they were supposed to – taking measurements and photos, collecting any and all evidence they could find.

They hadn’t worked a crime scene since Tony disappeared – other than securing the site where Tony had been kidnapped – and it felt wrong in a way Gibbs couldn’t have anticipated to not have him there. Tony brought lightness and jokes to the scenes, and it always soothed the severity of the cases they dealt with. Of the agents on Gibbs’ team, Tony also had the most experience, and was the one with the best instincts.

“There are guards doing rounds here each night, courtesy of one of the companies in the building,” McGee said. “They didn’t see anything. One round, no body, the next—this. There are security cameras, and I’ve asked them to get me the tapes.”

“They found the body at five forty-five, on one of their routine rounds,” Ziva filled in. “They noted nothing unusual.”

“There’s a body,” Gibbs said. “I’d say that’s unusual.”

He headed over to Ducky. The ME sat hunched at the side of the body, which had been turned over so that Ducky could stick the thermometer through the pale white skin of the dead man.

“The body temperature isn’t giving me much,” Ducky said. “He’s been cooled off, like the others. But I’d estimate he’s been dead three, four days.”

All the victims so far had been placed in some sort of cooler after death. Although it did serve the purpose of making it harder to determine a time of death, Ducky had shared with Gibbs that he doubted it was the reason for the cooling.

“I believe we are dealing with a killer who wants some time to look at his prizes before letting them go,” Ducky had told him after they’d found the third body. “He cleans them, not only to remove traces of himself, but also for the cleanliness itself.”

“OCD, Duck?” Gibbs had asked.

“Possibly,” Ducky had nodded.

Gibbs looked down at the latest body – the fifth one they’d found – and briefly, the unidentified man’s face changed into Tony’s familiar one. He felt his stomach churn at the thought. Tony had already survived more things than most had to deal with in several lifetimes, and the likelihood of his luck finally running out made Gibbs’ blood run cold.

“You finished, Duck?” Gibbs asked, voice strangled and harsh to his own ears.

Ducky glanced up at him knowingly. “Yes. Let’s get this poor boy back home.”

“McGee, you’re staying here until you have those security tapes in hand,” Gibbs said.

“Yes, boss,” McGee replied promptly.

Gibbs headed to the car, Ziva hurrying after him, camera around her neck and a box of supplies in hand. They avoided the flashes of the photographers and the questions of the journalists standing on the other side of the road. The media had followed each step they’d taken since the second body had showed up. A clip of Tony and Gibbs refusing to answer questions as they left the third crime scene kept running on CNN, together with imaginative commentary about what could have happened and who the murderer was, as well as a shot of Tony with the text ‘next victim?’ written in large, bold letters.

“Do you have any leads?” yelled one of the women, holding out a microphone in Gibbs’ general direction.

“Do you have any leads on your missing agent?"

Gibbs sent her a scorching glare that had no effect. New questions rained over them.

“Do you know who the murderer is?”

Gibbs wanted to snap that if they knew, they wouldn’t be here, but he refrained. He knew it would do more harm than good; his relationship with the media had never been particularly positive; they always chopped up his answers to their own liking.

He got into the car, and Ziva seated herself quietly in the front seat next to Gibbs. They headed back to NCIS in silence.

Gibbs hated feeling helpless, but as the hours dragged on, the feeling grew. The newest victim had no traces on him of his killer, just like the others. Cause of death was an overdose of Propofol. There were no defensive wounds. Post-mortem, the man had then been cooled down and cleaned off.

“I didn’t find anything on the tox screen, other than the Propofol,” Abby said when he came to her lab for an update. She sounded as though she was about to cry. “I’m running the finger prints through AFIS right now.”

“So nothing new?” Gibbs asked.

She looked crushed, and Gibbs knew it was because she hadn’t found anything that could help them find Tony. Of all of them, she was probably the most affected by his disappearance – or at least, the one who showed it outwardly the most. She had looked the same way on several earlier occasions – when Kate died, when Jenny died, and some semblance of it when Tony had been Agent Afloat, far away from NCIS headquarters.

“I’ve figured out the way he was positioned after he died,” Abby said, her voice softer than her usual babbling loudness. “From postmortem lividity.”

“He wasn’t lying down?”

Abby shook her head. “No, he was lying down, just—spread out. It just doesn’t seem like a natural way to be lying, and he must be lying on something, because a lot of blood pooled in his feet and the lower part of his legs, which means they must’ve been lower. His upper body on the other hand seems to have been raised, almost sitting up. It’s just not a way you’d sit in a chair or anything.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know yet,” Abby said. “But I’m going to make a computer model of it. The other victims haven’t been in the same positions at all, but I’ll check over the marks Ducky’s given me, and I’ll see if I can find a pattern.”

Gibbs nodded. “Okay.”

It didn’t help much, but Abby was doing the best she could with the little material they gave her to work with. So far, none of the blood tests and other screenings they’d run the victims through had turned up anything that could be of any use. Knowing that the murderer set his victims up in specific positions was of little help, other than to cement the fact that they were dealing with one sick bastard.

His hands became hard fists as he thought of DiNozzo in the hands of the madman. They had checked other possibilities, other persons who would want Tony kidnapped and hurt, but there had been no ransom notes and no calls, and Gibbs’ gut told him that nothing of the sort would show up.

“Gibbs—” Abby said, getting him back to the present.

“Yeah, Abs?”

“You don’t think he’s—” she trailed off, perhaps realizing that she didn’t want to know if Gibbs did think Tony was dead.

She hugged him tightly, shaking against him. He ran a hand up and down her back, trying to soothe her.

When she pulled back, he said, “Let me know when AFIS gets a hit.”

She nodded.

He headed out, but stopped in the doorway. He looked back at Abby, remembering something. He didn’t believe it, he knew it wasn’t possible, but—a part of him had to ask.

“Do you have dolls?”

He felt stupid, even uttering the words.

“What?” she said, having returned her attention to the search on her computer.

“Dolls,” Gibbs said. “Of us. For—protection, or something.”

She gave him a long look, brow knitting in a frown. “Yeah. How’d you—did Tony tell you?”

Gibbs’ heart pounded a little faster, but he forced himself to stay calm and unresponsive on the outside. Abby might believe in ghosts, but Gibbs didn’t, and he couldn’t tell Abby what he’d seen. Tony must have mentioned the dolls at some other time, that was the only reasonable explanation for this.

“Yeah,” Gibbs said. “Keep him protected, Abs.”

She nodded slowly, looking at him with a piercing gaze. Finally, she returned to her computer, and Gibbs headed out.

“Believe me now?”

Only Gibbs’ sniper training kept him from jumping a mile in the air upon hearing the voice.

“Tony must’ve told me,” Gibbs muttered, striding past the hallucination.

“No, I didn’t,” it said. “Well, not until last night. Abby asked me not to – she was worried the others might think it was stupid.”

“He must’ve mentioned it.”

Tony strode past him, floating up right in front of him – and Gibbs walked straight through him. It felt odd, like walking through a sudden patch of cold, the air a bit denser for just a second. He must be imagining this hallucination as more real than he’d first thought.

“Boss, please – I need your help.”

Gibbs’ step faltered. The voice – it sounded so much like Tony, and Gibbs’ heart broke at the sound. Tony asking for help – how many times had that happened since he started working at NCIS?

He turned and looked back at the hallucination. The face, the one that looked so much like Tony, had crumbled with unhappiness. Hazel eyes gazed at him, pleading. Could a hallucination really hold so much emotion? Gibbs wouldn’t have thought it possible – but then, he wouldn’t have thought it possible for him to hallucinate in the middle of the day, while he was sober and perfectly awake, either.

“I’m real, boss,” it said. “What do I have to say to convince you?”

“Start with being solid,” Gibbs said.

He headed into the men’s room, and stood in front of the mirrors by the sink. Splashing cold water on his face, he hoped it would clear his mind enough for the hallucination to stop. He wasn’t crazy.

When he stood up, he saw nothing in the mirrors, and thought he was safe – but then, when he turned, it was there again.

“I don’t have a reflection,” it said. It floated up to the mirror, but it was blank, showing only the empty bathroom.

“Good, less time for you to spend on looking at yourself,” Gibbs said, and then he forced himself to shut up, because he was not interacting with this figment of his imagination.

“Can’t help it if I’m cute,” it said, flashing a grin that was so much like Tony, it headed straight to Gibb’s groin.

He rubbed his eyes. “You’re not real.”

It came up to him walking, but not quite because it floated above the floor.

“I’m real, Gibbs,” he said. “Please. You have to help me. Something’s wrong.”

“He’s gone,” Gibbs said, muttering to himself. “Tony’s gone, and now I’m imagining this because I can’t—”

He trailed off – even to himself, he refused to admit too much. He opened his eyes to find it looking at him, eyes wide.

“What do you mean, gone?” it asked. “Am I—dead?”

Gibbs sighed, and decided that although it wasn’t real, although this wasn’t Tony that was standing in front of him, it did look like him, and it sounded like him, and if Gibbs talked to it then maybe he’d deal better with everything afterwards. Perhaps this was his mind’s way of sorting through his emotions, or some such crap. Any psychologist would have a field day.

“We don’t know,” Gibbs said hoarsely, hating that he had to admit that he didn’t know. “You disappeared last week. You’ve been gone for seven days and fourteen hours, and we have no leads. You tell me.”

It looked distraught at Gibbs’ words. “But I can’t be—dead. And even if I was – why would I be haunting you of all people?”

“You’re not real,” Gibbs said, again. “You’re not haunting me.”

“Gibbs, come on,” it said. “I know you’re a stubborn son of a bitch, but—I told you about Abby’s dolls, and you didn’t know that before, because I never told you, and she never told you. I could tell you stuff about McGee too – you know, his birthday for example, because you sure don’t care enough to have checked that. Or Ziva, I can tell you she has this tattoo that you can’t know about, because you haven’t been under covers while undercover with her and it’s definitely not listed in her file. Come on, Gibbs – I’m real. Please, believe me.”

Gibbs regarded it, throat thick. “He never pleads.”

“I never have to!” it said, exasperated. “I have to now, because something is wrong and I need you—”

And then it disappeared, the sound simply dying as it vanished, silence filling the room. Gibbs stared at the spot where it had just been, swallowing hard.

It couldn’t be; it just couldn’t.

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