A Year of NCIS, Day 76 Witch Hunt (Episode 4.6)

Episode: 4.6, Witch Hunt

Air Date: October 31, 2006.

The Victim: Staff Sergeant Eric Niles.

Emotionally Traumatized, But Ultimately Irrelevant, Witness Who Finds the Body: A lady dressed like Cleopatra is carving a pumpkin on Halloween.  Her house is filled with creepy monster decorations and she has a black and white monster movie on the TV.  Someone is sneaking up on her and she turns, startled.  It’s a man dressed like General Custer.  He’s even bleeding from wounds.  She’s impressed but tells him the party doesn’t start for another hour. I think you can guess where this is headed.  And sure enough, he calls out her name and collapses to the floor, bleeding out of his throat.  As he’s bleeding out, the camera shifts around to all the creepy monster decorations in the room, zooms in, and dubs in some shrill, evil laughs.

Plot Recap:  It’s Halloween night in the squad room.  Tony is tossing balled up paper into the wastebasket and he and Ziva discuss Halloween.  She thinks the holiday is dumb.  He thinks that the holiday has been a weirdness magnet ever since he became a cop.  Things like grave robberies, cattle mutilations, etc. always crop up.

McGee enters with a costume in a bag.  McGee calls it a snow elf, and Tony and Ziva haze him over it.  Of course, McGee pulls up pictures of his costume party date, a Redskins cheerleader.  He met her at the Armani store, and they play on the same on-line gaming platform.

“Gear up!” comes the battle cry, and Gibbs disrupts the festivities and cancels everyone’s plans.  General Custer has been shot, after all. 

At the scene, McGee is on the phone catching hell from his cheerleader for standing him up.  Like he shot the guy or something.  The victim is Staff Sergeant Eric Niles.  The blood trail leads from his house to his neighbor’s house (Cleopatra).  She called it in.  Gibbs tells McGee to process the Staff Sergeant’s living room, including a dead John Doe dressed like a skeleton.  He tells Ziva and Tony to interview Cleopatra.  Ducky and Palmer arrive in an egged truck.  With two teenage captives dressed like ninjas and stored in back.  Ducky chased the perpetrators for three blocks and imprisoned them in the truck.  He lets them out, hands them Windex and paper towels and tells them to get to work.  Gibbs laughs. 

Cleopatra thought SSgt. Niles was play-acting.  Fortunately, she’s a doctor, so she got his jacket off and treated the bullet wound that nicked his carotid artery.  Unlike with most episodes, SSgt. Niles is still alive and has Dr. Cleopatra to thank for it.  SSgt. Niles seemed to be trying to say his daughter Sarah’s name while Dr. Cleopatra attended him.  Based on the eyes she’s making, Tony may soon have cause to get undressed for an examination by Dr. Cleo as well. 

McGee is processing the Niles house.  He takes pictures of blood spatter, the dead guy in the skeleton costume, and spent brass.  McGee turns to get gloves from his bag and then turns back around to see that his evidence tags have been tipped over and someone has policed the brass and wiped up some of the blood.  McGee pulls his gun.  But other than Palmer walking in, there’s nobody there.  McGee swears there’s someone in the room besides the dead skeleton guy.

The scene shifts and Tony reports that the basement is clear while McGee describes what happened to Gibbs.  Tony mocks him for being a victim of the Crime Scene Fairy.  Gibbs gestures to what’s left of the scene and asks McGee what he thinks happened.  McGee says there are obvious signs of a struggle, but he’s not sure how the dead guy’s head ended up that way.  Gibbs puts McGee down on the floor to demonstrate how Marines break necks and McGee is not so sure about being a practice dummy for this technique given what he has heard from Tony (See Red Cell, Episode 2.20).  And, yeah, that looks like it hurts.  McGee thinks Staff Sergeant Niles went down fighting. 

Gibbs finishes recreating the scene.  There were at least two assailants.  One shot SSgt. Niles while he was killing the other.  Tony informs Gibbs that some kids saw a car leave the Niles residence.  Ziva is getting a description.

Tony jumps as he feels something hit his foot.  He looks under the couch and a Roomba emerges, hell bent on interfering with the crime scene.  Or re-interfering.  Gibbs stomps it to death and finds the missing shell casings.

Ziva reports on the description of the car, but since the kid described it in Grand Theft Auto terms, she needs McGee to translate.  McGee says to put out a BOLO for a Chrysler Sebring sedan. 

Mrs. Niles arrives, freaking out.  Her sister, Ms. Biddles, is with her.  Gibbs informs Mrs. Niles that the dead guy is not her husband.  Mrs. Niles’s sister says they were at the nearby school setting up for a party but, importantly, the daughter, Sarah, was supposed to be at the home.  Tony darts out to set up an Amber Alert.

Mrs. Niles settles down, so Gibbs wants to ask some questions.  But then the sister reports that the child is missing.  Mrs. Niles is a bit blasé in just accepting her child has been kidnapped and she waves off all other possibilities (e.g., fleeing to a neighbor’s) because Sarah would have called Mrs. Niles’s cell phone.  The phone rings and Gibbs tells her to put it on speaker.  It’s Sarah, describing how her dad was hurt and she tried to call the police.  Then a disguised voice says they have Sarah and they’ll call back with instructions.  Mrs. Niles bends over sobbing.

In autopsy, Ducky calls COD on the dead perp as blunt force trauma to the neck.  Ducky can’t ID the guy, though.  Palmer already left to take Abby the fingerprints.  Palmer returns and says Abby’s in costume, but he’s not gonna spoil it for Tony.

And Abby is dressed like Marilyn Monroe with back tats.  To the stunned delight of Tony and McGee (McGee snaps pics when Abby isn’t looking).  Which is awkward when he hands over the camera’s memory card so Abby can run photos of the dead guy against mug shots.  Tony gets a phone call from Gibbs.  The local police have a kid who may have seen a Sebring and Gibbs wants Tony to send pictures of the dead guy so he can see if Mrs. Niles can ID him.  Gibbs asks about SSgt. Niles.  Tony says he’s still in surgery and they won’t be able to question him until tomorrow.  Gibbs tells Tony to find out what kidnappers would want with an enlisted Marine who makes $32k/year.

Mrs. Niles is with Ms. Biddles and Ziva.  Ziva’s usual victim bedside manner is not helping and Ms. Biddles chastises her.  Gibbs re-appears and escorts Ziva out of the room.  She hasn’t shown Mrs. Niles the John Doe yet because everything she says makes her cry.  In a nice blind-leading-the-blind moment, Gibbs tries to teach Ziva a little empathy.  Ziva also believes Mrs. Niles is hiding something.  And Gibbs may know why- it seems, based on SSgt. Niles’s closet, that he wasn’t living in the home.  Gibbs tells Ziva to find out why.

Tony and McGee are interviewing the guy who saw the Sebring.  He’s wearing a face-fitting zombie mask that Tony eventually tears off so he can hear the guy.  The Sebring had two people in it.  The car crashed into some Halloween decorations, hopped a curb and drove off.  Tony and McGee process the destroyed decorations and McGee finds an impression from the car on the pumpkin.

Gibbs shows Mrs. Niles the picture of John Doe.  She doesn’t recognize him.  But she’s abrupt about it.  She gets huffy with Ms. Biddles too.  Something is definitely off.  Gibbs walks over to have a quick private conversation with Mrs. Niles.  He calls her by her first name and tells her he knows what she’s going through.  She asks if he ever had a daughter kidnapped.  Gibbs pauses and says, “kidnapped, no.”  She seems to get it. And she believes him when he says he’ll do everything in his power to find her daughter.  She just hopes it will be enough.   

Tony and Abby and McGee are debating whether zombies should be fast or slow.  They also examine the pumpkin and find that the impression is the left-hand side of a Virginia license plate.  McGee runs it and gets a hit.  It’s a rental.  It’s also a stolen rental. 

Ziva reports that SSgt. Niles moved into base housing three weeks ago, and scuttlebutt is he caught his wife cheating.  The phone rings and Gibbs moves over to Mrs. Niles and tells her to ask to speak to Sarah.  She does, but the kidnapper doesn’t allow it.  Ziva is trying to trace the call.  The kidnapper asks for $100k in small bills and then hangs up.  Ziva can’t get a trace. 

In the car, Sarah is bound and gagged and crying.  The guy driving has a horror mask on, and he asks if she’s scared and tells her she should be.  Definitely rooting for an MVP scenario this episode.

Gibbs asks to speak to Mrs. Niles alone.  As he leaves, he tells Ziva to tell Tony he wants John Doe ID’d in an hour.  Gibbs and Mrs. Niles walk into the bedroom and she very self-consciously closes the closet door so that Gibbs can’t see where her husband’s clothes aren’t hanging.  Gibbs leads her to the bed and sits her down.  He asks why SSgt. Niles moved out.  Mrs. Niles says her husband wanted a trial separation after she made a mistake eight years ago right before they got married.  Four marriages in and Gibbs has made all the mistakes a man can make so he says try him.  SSgt. Niles broke off the engagement for a few weeks and she wandered back to an old boyfriend, but pretended it never happened.  Accordingly, there’s a question as to Sarah’s biological father.  The ex, Robert Miller, recently showed up and demanded a paternity test.  When Mrs. Niles refused, Miller threatened her.  She gives Gibbs Miller’s vital stats.  But Gibbs wants to know what Mrs. Niles isn’t telling him.  Mrs. Niles is about to break, but Mrs. Biddles interrupts.  Gibbs wants to know if Miller could have done this, but Mrs. Niles doesn’t know.

Ziva calls in the new lead to Tony.  McGee is trying to narrow the search given that “Robert Miller” is a common name.  Tony suggests using Mrs. Niles’s cell phone records over the last month.  McGee finds a match.

Ziva gives Gibbs the address for Miller.  He tells her to stay and keep watch, and that if the kidnappers call to tell them no money until they talk to the girl.

Tony and McGee are driving, and Tony is complaining about having to trick-or-treat in a neighborhood of palatial estates.  McGee does not feel sorry for him, nor should you.  The agents arrive at the address and meet Gibbs.  They find a Sebring with matching plates.  They search the car.  Gibbs finds a princess hat in the trunk.  McGee finds something smoldering in the ash tray.  Gibbs says, “Let’s go get this son of a bitch.”  The move upstairs to the apartment in question and kick down the door.  Ooops.  It’s a costume party.  Gibbs yells, “Federal agents!” but everyone thinks it’s a gag and takes their picture.  One guy tells them they spelled “CSI” wrong on their hats.  Gibbs asks for Miller and when the party guest gets smart, Gibbs grabs him by his throat until he ID’s Miller.  Miller is dressed like a Klingon and committed enough to the bit to brandish a bat’leth (Klingon battle blade) and speak Klingon.  Fortunately (unfortunately?  Sadly?) McGee also speaks Klingon and translates until Gibbs loses patience and pushes Miller against the wall.  Gibbs demands to know where Sarah is, but Miller at least pretends to know nothing.  Miller claims he has a right to know if Sarah is his kid, but he didn’t kidnap her and has been home all day setting up for the party.  McGee returns from searching the apartment and Sarah isn’t present.  Miller claims that Mrs. Niles threatened him, not the other way around, and she said her husband would kill Miller if he didn’t leave their family alone.  NCIS cuffs him anyway.

At the Niles home, the phone rings.  Ziva answers and Tony says the boss wants to talk to Mrs. Niles.  Ziva knocks on the door to the bedroom, but, when she enters, Mrs. Niles and Mrs. Biddles are gone, having escaped out the window.

Klingon Miller, sans wig, is in interrogation with Gibbs.  Tony wants to know if he’s crying or just sweating.  McGee says that being alone in a room with angry Gibbs would push even a Klingon’s limits.  Mostly, Gibbs has been staring at Miller.  Tony says the alibi checks out, but they don’t know why the kidnappers’ car was outside Miller’s apartment?  Did Miller hire them?  Was he framed?  For his part, Miller just wants Gibbs to talk to him.  But Gibbs keeps staring.

Ziva is in autopsy confessing to Ducky.  She knew Mrs. Niles was hiding something, but she allowed herself to feel sorry for her and Mrs. Niles took advantage.  Palmer tries to help, but he’s terrible at it so Ducky dismisses him.  Ducky wants to be practical and get back to the case.  He questions why Mrs. Niles would sneak away and then reminds Ziva of the large percentage of kidnappings that are committed by a biological relative.  Ducky also references what “they” say about mother bears and cubs, but Ziva has been hanging around with Tony and thinks Ducky means that mother bears eat their cubs in times of privation.  Ducky wanders around her wall of weird and instead focuses on the idea that Mrs. Niles is trying to protect her cub.  Her husband may want a divorce while another man entirely is claiming paternity.  Ducky thinks it’s entirely possible that Mrs. Niles didn’t want to share custody.  Ducky asks what Gibbs thinks, but Ziva says Gibbs is not talking to her.  At least Gibbs isn’t a bear, Ducky says, trying to find silver lining.

Miller is still stressing in interrogation.  Someone could be hurting his daughter.  Gibbs says, ‘alleged daughter.”  But Gibbs has been waiting on something.  His phone rings and he steps out into the hall to take it.  Abby says she has an ID for him.  Tony joins and says Miller’s alibi checks out and Gibbs is convinced Miller didn’t do it.

Abby got a hit on the ID on the John Doe.  His name is Lee Varen from Fredericksburg, VA.  No criminal record.  Gibbs wants everything on the guy from birth to the moment Ducky cracked his sternum.  Abby also ran some tests on the burnt paper from the kidnapper’s car.  It’s a note, and Abby re-creates the writing to demonstrate that it’s Miller’s home address.  Ziva thinks it was given to the kidnappers by Mrs. Niles.  Gibbs disagrees.  But he’s still pissed at Ziva for losing Mrs. Niles.  Especially because he also thinks she’s hiding something. 

Gibbs and Ziva return to the squad room and, contrary to Ducky’s statement from earlier, Gibbs is certainly stomping around like an angry bear.  McGee has run background on Varen.  He served in the USAF, got an other-than-honorable discharge and did a year of community college.  He was a security guard for the same law firm where Mrs. Niles is a CFO.  So, despite her statement to the contrary, Mrs. Niles knew Varen.  Ziva insists this means the Mrs. Niles kidnapped her daughter.  Gibbs thinks the kidnappers want Mrs. Niles to do something for them. 

They have a BOLO out for Varen’s car and McGee gets a hit from the car’s EZ-Pass for the toll lanes.  Based on the path, it looks like they perps picked up Mrs. Niles and are headed to the law firm where she works.  The agents grab their weapons and get moving. 

The team enters the law firm and Ziva notes glitter on the floor from Sarah’s costume.  Tony reports that the plates on the car in the parking lot match Varen’s.  They fan out and McGee spies Mrs. Niles and Ms. Biddle in an office under the guard of a perp with a semi-automatic weapon (seems like an odd distinction to make, since the agents’ pistols are semi-automatic as well).  McGee doesn’t have a good enough line of sight to see if Sarah is present. 

In the office, Mrs. Niles finds all the insurance money- $3 million- and the perp gives her accounts to which to transfer it.  He says Mrs. Niles will see her daughter when the money has been transferred.  He tells her to be smart.  Mrs. Niles accuses him of shooting her husband.  The perp says he had no choice. The plan was to kidnap SSgt. Niles and Sarah, but SSgt. Niles chose to fight back.  Mrs. Niles asks how she knows that the perp won’t kill her once she’s done.  Ms. Biddles pleads that they’ve come this far and for Mrs. Niles finish the job.  Mrs. Niles is certain NCIS will figure out the scheme.  The perp thinks NCIS off chasing rabbits.  Which is too bad for him because those purportedly rabbit-chasing agents emerge and tell him to drop his weapon.  The perp doesn’t surrender, and gosh, I don’t know who killed him.  Let’s watch again.  OK, it was Gibbs and McGee for a combo to the chest area. 

Tony and Ziva are searching the building.  They work their way through several rooms and finally find Sarah tied up and gagged in a conference room. 

Gibbs and McGee are leading the sisters out of the office and Gibbs gets the call that Tony and Ziva found the girl.  Ms. Biddles is trying to lead Mrs. Niles away when Gibbs makes the announcement that the team found Sarah.  Mrs. Niles punches Ms. Biddles in the face and declares that she’s not her sister, she’s “one of them.”  Then she hits her in the stomach, throws her down and kicks her in the face a few times.  Gibbs lets it go on for a second until it looks like permanent damage might taint the arrest, and he pulls Mrs. Niles away.  McGee spies a gun in the fallen woman’s purse and secures it as Sarah appears and Mrs. Niles runs to hug her.  McGee cuffs, the bloody, dazed woman as Gibbs tells Ziva that Mrs. Niles doesn’t have a sister.  Tony shrugs and says Ziva should be glad Halloween only happens once per year.

Kids are resilient, so Sarah is back at NCIS HQ the next day, still dressed as a princess, and trick or treating with Ducky and Abby (still dressed as Marilyn Monroe) at the various desks.  Tony tells Mrs. Niles that every kid deserves a Halloween.  Ziva reports that SSgt. Niles is awake and asking for his family.  Mrs. Niles says to tell Gibbs thank you and that she’s sorry she lied and…Tony interrupts to say, “Trust me.  He knows.”  Meanwhile, Gibbs is standing upstairs with his coffee, watching as the Niles family leaves.  He looks at Sarah, dressed in her princess dress, and flashes back to Kelly, also trick or treating as a princess and being excited about her candy haul.  But the memory is not sad this time, and the episode ends on Gibbs grinning broadly.

And spooky music over the credits.  After all…it’s Halloween.

Quotables:

Ducky: Two-thirds of all child abductions are by a biological relative.

Ziva: She kidnapped her own child.

Ducky: You know what they say about a mother bear and her cubs?

Ziva: They eat them when their food runs out.  I saw it in a documentary, Tony forced me to watch Grizzly Man?

Ducky: I was referring to a mother bear’s protective nature when her cubs are threatened.

Ziva-propisms: Ziva thinks “scuttlebutt” is a person.  She calls herself a “chimp,” when she means “chump.”

Tony Awards: Tony is ever-ready with his Sean Connery accent (ETA: and, according to an observant reader, it’s a reference to Darby O’Gill and the Little People (1959). It takes a village).  I lost track of who said what, but we had mentions of, or references to, Dawn of the Dead (1974), The Thing (1982), The Fly (1986) Scarface (1982), 28 Days Later (2002); Star Trek VI (1991), Grizzly Man (2005), and Worf from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Abby Road:  There is no statistical evidence that blondes have a lower IQ than any other hair color.

Ducky Tales: A man who died of heart failure, but nonetheless had an ice pick sticking out of his head from four hours after his death.  This occurred when his wife realized she had been left out of the will.  Ducky also claims Halloween originated in Scotland.

The Rest of the Story:

-Another reference is made to McGee having extra pocket money.

-Gibbs calls McGee Elf Lord again.  The name was coined in The Voyeur’s Web, Episode 3.6.

-Gibbs finally says, aloud, to another person, the words “I’ve been married four times.”

-Tony calls McGee “McFlabby.”

-Tony tells a rambling Halloween story about turning one of his father’s $3,000.00 designer ski suits into an astronaut costume.  It cost him his candy and, purportedly, the ability to sit down for a few months.

-Gibbs dual head slaps Tony and McGee.  For extra humiliation, he mimics them saying something like “Sure boss, we’ll get right on that!”

-This is our second girl-on-girl beating in two episodes.  See Dead and Buried, Episode 4.4.  I enjoy the random patterns this show falls into.

-I picked up on the “sister” being one of the bad guys a few minutes before it was revealed.  I was hoping one of the other agents would get a share of the MVP, but I guess Mrs. Niles earned the right to administer a beatdown.  The kick in the face was especially satisfying.

Casting Call: Nobody of note.              

Man, This Show Is Old: Roombas are still around, but they were new and trendy in 2006. 

Grand Theft Auto was very established by this point.

MVP: Team effort.  Gibbs and McGee killed the perp, but Tony and Ziva rescued the girl. 

Rating: This one was not as good as previous kidnapping episodes, but it was decent.  The complication of the fake sister made sense in context, but it made the team look amateurish.  Especially with Gibbs in the room with her for so long.  There was some fun reading between the lines as, once again, the bad guys had inside intel on the investigation (like Miller’s address) and we had to figure out how they got it.  But there was also annoying reading between the lines like, “What is this scheme exactly?  What money?  How do these guys know about it?”

Overall, however, the episode was entertaining.  Seven Palmers.

Next Time: Some good old-fashioned bomb-based terrorism.