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“Gibbs, Gibbs, Gibbs! You won't believe this!” Abby's pigtails bounced with her excitement as she pulled up a set of diagrams on her computer screen. “Look at this.”
Waiting for an explanation of the lines and curves before him, Gibbs raised his eyebrows.
“Okay, let me enlighten you. This”—Abby pointed at the first picture—“is our dead Private's tox screen. It was negative for drugs, so I put it aside. But then, Major Mass Spec spat out an interesting detail concerning the powder found on that ring dagger.” She nodded at the second diagram. “It contained nepaline, a toxin found in the Aconitum ferox plant. So I ran another tox”—the third graphic—“and got a match. A low dose, not lethal. Normally, should say.”
“So it's what killed Private Cooper?”
“I can't say how, but it's all we have since Ducky ruled out the stab wound. And, oh, are you ready for something really hinky? The tissue we found between Cooper's teeth wasn't his attacker's. It wasn't human.”
“What else was it?”
“Rabbit. Very much alive. At least when it was bitten. Ducky found raw rabbit flesh. And fur. We found fur.”
“Are you telling me the Private ate a live animal?”
“Sure looks like it.” Abby pulled up a picture to overlay the diagrams on her screen. It was a blurred candid shot of a man in his forties leaving a nondescript building. A few quick keystrokes enhanced the face and cleared up the image. “Now, lastly, meet Chris Argent, an arms dealer from California.”
“How's he in the picture?”
“Handsome?” Abby wiggled her eyebrows at Gibbs, but refocused on the screen when he gave her an I Don't Have All Day stare. “Not your type. Gotcha. I pulled the image from the Private's cell. From his emails, to be precise. Tim is trying to identify the sender as we speak, but . . . who ever it was, he labeled Argent as 'werewolf hunter.'”
“Abs. Stick to—”
“I know.” She waved him off. “I know, Gibbs. But it makes sense. Especially when it comes to the nepaline poisoning, which shouldn't be a legit CoD. Take a guess how Aconitum ferox is called in the vernacular.”
“You tell me.”
“Wolfsbane. It was historically used to kill wolves, Gibbs.”
He gave her an incredulous look. “You know that werewolves don't exist.”
“But someone might think so, and this someone, according to the prints I pulled from the dagger, is . . . Chris Argent.”
“You could've cut to that detail right away,” Gibbs growled, already heading out of the lab.
“Whoa.” Abby gave his back a frown. “Patience is a virtue, you know? Besides, I figured you wanted to hear all I got. But I guess you're not interested in knowing that Argent was linked to a couple of similar crimes across the country in the past few years.”
Gibbs stopped, turning to face her. “Ever convicted?”
“Never even charged.”
~ ~ ~
Chris Argent didn't have anything to hide—or so he said—but he was too calm for Gibbs' liking, and his gut told him there was more to the man than meets the eye. They could link him to the dagger all right, but it wasn't a murder weapon, technically spoken. Even if it were, Argent presented a receipt that proved he'd sold the very weapon to the very dead Private a few days ago, a sufficient explanation for his prints all over it. Searching his hotel room hadn't brought up anything noteworthy; there was a variety of firearms and other weapons, all of them legal and accounted for. No wolfsbane. Nothing that could be used against him.
“I have clients to meet, business to make. Unless you want to arrest me, I'd say this conversation is over.”
“Tell me just one more time, Mister Argent. What exactly did you deal with last Friday night?”
Two pairs of steel-blue eyes met. Neither man blinked.
“You can't pin me to that murder, Agent Gibbs, and you know it. There's no blood on my hands.”
“None that we can see—yet.”
~ ~ ~
The NCIS couldn't hold Argent for long, but maybe, the team agreed, it was better to let him go. Maybe he'd lead them to his secret; he definitely wouldn't spill. Thus, Ziva and Tony took turns tailing him, without any results. Argent seemed to be a business man and nothing but. The people he saw, the places he went—nothing was suspicious.
Until that night in the warehouse by the docks. Until the howling that filled the place, making the hair on Ziva's arms stand on end. Until the thing that lunged at her so fast that all Mossad training failed to be helpful. She lost her weapon when it threw her down; it slid across the concrete floor and underneath an empty shelf. Argent yelled something, the creature snapped at Ziva's throat, and a gun went off, again and again.
Later, in Gibbs' 'office,' Ziva found it hard to recall what had happened in which order. She was a little shaken, but uninjured, and very adamant about what she'd seen.
Argent left D.C. the following week. The case officially went cold.
A year later, when Gibbs' team investigated in the case of a Marine literally ripped apart up in Shenandoah National Park, he believed in an animal attack—but he still called the hunter. Just in case.