A Year of NCIS, Day 132: Hide & Seek (Episode 6.19)

Episode: 6.19, Hide and Seek

Air Date: March 24, 2009.

The Victim: Some punk named, Dylan Bates.  Jurisdiction is unorthodox here, but the murder weapon was found on a Navy base, crossed paths with the NCIS evidence locker, and the suspects are all Navy-related.  Actually, the body may have even been found on-base.  It’s tough to tell how much undeveloped land these things encompass.

Emotionally Traumatized, But Ultimately Irrelevant, Witness Who Finds the Body: A Naval officer appears on a monitor and giving an aggressive lecture on proportionate responses to attack.  But he’s clowning.  He’s skyping with his daughter and talking to her about her domestic squabbling with her mother, who is also playfully listening in the background.  The young girl says goodbye and signs off.  And, before mom can get in a word to her husband, the signal drops.  Her attention is then caught by her younger son, Noah, playing a shoot ‘em up video game in the next room.  Noah passively declines to respond to an order to clean his room.  Mom gives a master class in bad parenting because she doesn’t pull the plug on the electronics, but instead announces her intention to go clean Noah’s room for him.  No wonder he does whatever the hell he wants. 

Then, Noah emerges from video game stupor and anyone who has ever hidden booze or porn in their room recognizes the look on his face as he jumps up and dashes in after his mom begging to be allowed to perform his chores himself.  He’s pretty unsubtle too, so even this doormat of a mom figures out that something is up.  And then she pulls out a drawer Noah is clearly trying to hide and finds his porn.  Playpen in the NCIS universe.  It looks pretty soft-core when she opens it, though.  Like a Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.  Noah does what we all did and blames his friend.  Mom, in the midst of this lecture, is holding the entire drawer and not just the magazine, so Noah eventually panics and tries to take it from her.

And that’s when she finds his pistol.  Strong work, Noah.  And a strong opening.

Plot Recap:  In the squad room, Tony would like to know why glue doesn’t stick to the inside of the bottle.  McGee is on eBay, bidding on a set of golf clubs to replace the set he borrowed from Ducky and backed over with the cart before making it to the first tee.  McGee doesn’t plan to tell Ducky until the clubs are replaced.  Then he gives Tony a TED talk on sniping the bid at the last second.  And a practical example of failing to accomplish a sniping.  Sad trombone.

Speaking of sniping, Ziva wonders where Gibbs is.  Abby arrives and decides to be Gibbs.  She growls and drinks coffee and tells the team to “Gear up.”  But her Gibbs-voiced descriptions of the scene don’t give rise to a case- gun found on Norfolk base housing, kid’s room, loaded, etc.  None of that counts.  The real Gibbs arrives to retrieve his coffee from Abby and to give the report of there being brain matter on the barrel.  The team gears up, while blaming Abby for burying the lede.

At Norfolk, our mom is Mrs. Taffet, who answers the door and admits the agents when they ask about Noah.  Rebecca, the daughter clears out and ignores Mrs. Taffet’s request that she be home by 11.  That’s not what she and her dad agreed to after all and Mrs. Taffet limply continues to non-parent.  Although give Mrs. Taffet credit for saying, “Next time, I’m going to Iraq.”  Gibbs smiles at that. 

The team interviews Noah, who says he found the gun in a storm drain at the playground.  He took it because he thought it was cool.  Gibbs asks if he would still think it was cool if the gun was used to kill someone.  I mean, I would, but we don’t get to hear Noah’s answer.

Instead, we move to Noah’s room, where Tony and McGee are comparing childhoods.  Tony had (presumably fake) guns and (presumably photographs of) naked girls versus McGee, who had Scouting Life magazine.  Tony was one of several kids at boarding school who split baby’s first Playpen subscription.  McGee figures his old man, the Navy officer, would have rolled up the magazine and struck him with it.  Tony feels like this punishment sounds familiar and, just like that, Gibbs summons them.

The team takes a field trip to the storm drain.  Noah’s story goes a little wonky and he can’t seem to describe exactly how the gun was placed.  Mrs. Taffet tries to run interference and talks about the difficulties of parenting one kid entering puberty and one kid entering the house at five in the morning.  It’s like she wants the agents to report her to social services.  And maybe she does.  Nothing provides peace and quiet like having your kids fostered. 

Gibbs notices some other kids watching and asks if they’re Noah’s friends.  Mrs. Taffet identifies them as Zane Wilson and Travis Buckley, Noah’s best friends. 

They split the kids up and Gibbs talks to Zane.  Zane’s dad is also deployed.  Gibbs goes over the idea of telling the truth and makes clear he knows the storm drain is not where Noah found the gun.  We learn pretty quickly that Travis found the gun.  Travis, meanwhile, wants a lawyer, and his mom is a lawyer.  Which is good, because you can’t interrogate these kids to in-depth without at least having their parents, and preferably a lawyer, present.

Between Ziva tricking Travis, Tony noting the evidence doesn’t match Noah’s story, and Gibbs working Zane, we learn that the boys found the gun next to a dead body.

Off to the woods.  McGee channels his side gig as a scoutmaster and talks about the things the boys should try to remember for purposes of locating the area where they found the gun and the body.  The boys remember a tree that looked like a naked woman, which made me laugh.  Their moms are on their way and while Tony expresses confusion as to why the moms are necessary to help find the body, Gibbs, who has no empathy but still has more than Tony, notes that moms should probably be present when pre-adolescent boys wander up onto decomposed corpses.

The moms arrive and join the search.  Gibbs gets a call from Abby and he and Ziva leave Tony and McGee to find the body.  That’s not such a great idea because Tony is overheard by the mothers referring to their boys as “The skinny one, the quiet one, or the one with the hot mom.”

Why Gibbs and Ziva needed to return from the field for this is unknown, but Abby knows who the victim is.  Well, a victim.  Leonard Caswell was a postal worker shot by Robert Perry, his neighbor, using the gun found in Noah’s room.  It’s a 4-year old case, but NCIS handled the case and had the evidence and the gun in its evidence locker.

At the scene, McGee continues to market the scouts with animal trivia and tracking tips and such.  Eventually, they find the spot where the gun was located, but no body.  No full body.  There’s plenty of maggots and the piece of an ear.  There are also tire tracks.  Narrow tire tracks.

In the squad room, Ziva has done her diligence, and we learn that the NCIS case involving the gun was Paula Cassidy’s.  She has been dead for a while (Grace Period, Episode 4.19), but one can’t help but see Gibbs, who didn’t like her, sort of shift in his chair at the idea that Paula mishandled evidence.  In any event, Perry, the shooter, worked for the Navy, and stole the gun from its owner.  NCIS returned the gun to the original owner, Peter Draper.  Draper claims his wife made him sell the gun to a pawn shop, and it matches two separate convenience store robberies. 

Abby arrives and gives orders as Gibbs again while she and Ziva snicker.  Gibbs lets it go but tells Abby not to get used to doing impressions.

Tony and McGee continue their odyssey and is this the longest it has taken the agents to find the damn body in the history of this show?  Ranger McGee lost the trail on the asphalt and Tony wants to call the cadaver dogs.  McGee sees circling vultures, but his hopes are dashed when they find a dead animal.  He tells Tony to just call the damn dogs, but Tony thinks McGee needs to be more observant and points to a corpse lying in the woods. 

Back in autopsy Ducky is chatting with our body.  Gibbs identifies as the corpse as Dylan Bates, 19, possessor of a criminal record.  Bates made a lot of enemies and Ducky enumerates his bad habits as smoking, drinking, and shooting drugs to excess.  The COD is a single gunshot to the head, .38 caliber.  The TOD: 2-3 weeks, which is not helpful, but the elements and wild animals damaged the scene.  Ducky thinks the maggot larva may help narrow down the timeline.

Speaking of maggots, Abby is examining them in her lab.  She has named them too.  But Gibbs is interested in the slugs.  The bullets, that is.  Abby hasn’t run them yet.  Right now, she’s burning sage around the gun to get rid of the bad mojo before her maggot babies are born.

In the squad room, McGee is researching the tire tread from the scene.  Ziva has determined that our gun was sold at a pawn shop to a guy with the name Eddie Felson.  Since that’s Paul Newman’s character’s name in The Hustler, Tony figures out pretty quickly that it’s a fake name.  For the two robberies committed with the gun, there are five suspects…and one of them matches the ID on file with the pawn shop.

In interrogation, Tony and Ziva present the gun and the picture of Bates’s body to Ron Nowakowski.  Ron knew Bates and figures Bates finally got what he deserved.  He denies the killing, but admits Bates stole his car and his girlfriend.  So, we have motive and a weapon and Ron doesn’t offer anything else.  Tony and Ziva make to leave, but Ron calls them back.  He admits he robbed the convenience stores, but he’s not going down for murder.  He ditched the gun a month ago, in a dumpster behind a Safeway.

The plot can’t linger after taking that long to find the body, so NCIS conveniently has CCTV of the alley and they quickly confirm both Ron’s disposal of the weapon and its subsequent acquisition by a chicken restaurant employee with “Joey” on his uniform.

In the lab, Abby has clearly been reading outdated parenting literature and is playing classical flute music for her baby flies.  She reports to Gibbs that the gun matches Bates’s corpse, but the brain matter does not.  So, there’s a second victim somewhere, and Abby continues to be unimpressed with the bad mojo of this gun.

Back in the squad room, Gibbs tells McGee about the second victim and McGee says he’ll talk to local LEOs about any unsolved cases.  Tony and Ziva return from the Chirping Chicken and report that Joseph K. Ellis, or Joey, hasn’t come to work in two weeks.  Ellis is a Navy brat who also lives in Norfolk base housing.  He was denied enlistment because of a criminal record for juvie armed robbery, which he conducted with our victim, Dylan Bates.  Gibbs says to bring Ellis in.

After everyone leaves, McGee matches the tire tread.  So, we head down to the evidence garage, where McGee, in the interim, has collected every Wagon Boy all terrain wagon at Norfolk.  When Abby arrives, they begin searching the wagons for traces of blood.  This search appears to be successful.

Which takes us to observation, where Mrs. Taffet is watching.  Inside interrogation, Noah sits with D’Arcy McKinna, a juvenile lawyer Gibbs has dealt with before.  He even remembers what soda she likes, classy fella that he is- “I remember what’s important.”

Gibbs is playing it light and easy because he’s good with kids.  But he outlines for Noah that he has Noah’s fingerprints on the wagon along with blood that matches the body.  Noah is crying now, and Gibbs points out that this means “you lied to me.”  As additional incentive, Gibbs lets Noah know that he has sufficiently proven by now that he will get to the truth, but the longer it takes the further away the killer gets.  He demands to know who Noah is trying to protect.  McKinna wants to take a break, but then Noah gets pissed.  He claims he killed Bates because Bates was always picking on him and his friends.  Of course, when Gibbs presses, Noah is unable to describe things like Bates’s last words or how he looked before he died.  Noah is really crying now and give either the actor or the make-up people props for the snot dripping off his nose as he sobs.  He reveals that the killer did it to protect Noah.  And the killer was his father.

Well, maybe.

In the lab, Abby’s flies are hatching.  It’s a funny scene, with Ducky mugging for the camera with the vial like a proud papa and Abby saying she’s unconcerned with gender as long as the baby is healthy.  They name the fly “Regina” because of a genus species reference.

In MTAC, Gibbs and Tony have Commander Mike Taffet on screen, flanked by an armed escort.  Commander Taffet is in Iraq.  He admits nobody liked Bates but denies killing him.  We get the rest of the story here as Gibbs tells Commander Taffet that Noah overheard him threaten to kill Bates two weeks before the murder.  So, Noah thinks the old man kept his promise, but he didn’t actually see anything.  Commander Taffet, like his son before him, also gets mad and starts ranting at Gibbs about having no idea what it’s like to be away fighting for your country and not able to protect your family.  Tony squirms uncomfortably, but, as always, Gibbs keeps it professional.  He asks why Commander Taffet took an early deployment.  The commander said his family needed the money, so he took a hazardous duty slot when it came up.

And that ends up being the truth.  Thanks to our fly babies, Ducky has the time interval for the murder.  Bates died 15 days previous and three days after Commander Taffet left the country.

Back to square one and back in the squad room.  The team still can’t find Joey Ellis.  They’re waiting on a warrant for his residence (which seems out of character), but his co-workers haven’t seen him in two weeks; and his mother has been deployed and hasn’t spoken to him in over a month.  Joey’s father died in combat when Ellis was a child.

McGee can’t find a second victim either.  There are no local unsolved murders where the victim was shot in head.  They’re trying to match the DNA from the gun barrel with the missing persons database, but that’s a long shot.  The agents flip through a yearbook they obtained from a local base resident.  It contains pictures of Bates and Ellis together, playing basketball, so they clearly knew each other. 

McGee notes that even though Joey’s mom is deployed, there have been calls form her house, as recently as three weeks ago.  Gibbs sends Tony and Ziva to check it out, but then picks up the yearbook and notices that, in the background of the basketball photo, Rebecca Taffet, Noah’s sister, is dressed as a cheerleader.  Gibbs summons McGee,

At the Ellis house, Tony and Ziva enter, and notice an unpleasant smell.

At the Taffet house, Mrs. Taffet answers and says that Noah is in no shape for further interrogation.  But Gibbs says they’re here for Rebecca, who has appeared behind her mother.  And the look on Rebecca’s face says it all.

Back at the Ellis house, Tony and Ziva find a gruesome scene.  A decomposing Joey lies slumped on a desk next to a computer, with blood and brains spattered on the wall.  They call Gibbs to tell him Joey has been dead for a while.  Gibbs asks if it was a gunshot to the left temple, and when Tony asks how he knew, Gibbs says his shooting hand in the yearbook photo marked him as a southpaw.  This wasn’t murder.  This was suicide.  Tony says, “No gun here, boss,” but Gibbs didn’t expect one.

At the Taffet house, Gibbs asks if Rebecca would like to tell him something.  Noah is surprised Joey’s dead.  Gibbs has already surmised that Rebecca found Joey’s body.  Rebecca says that Joey was her best friend and that Dylan tortured him all his life- got him into drugs, convinced him to commit the robbery that stopped him from getting into the Navy and then threw it in his face.  Joey couldn’t see a way out, and Rebecca shows Gibbs the suicide note, written on his mother’s Navy stationery.  Gibbs believes Rebecca blamed Bates for Joey’s suicide and killed him.  Rebecca denies this, claiming she just wanted Bates to know what he’d done.  She showed Bates the gun, he tried to grab it, and it just went off.  

Back in the squad room, the team debriefs the case.  Per Gibbs, legal likes the case for involuntary manslaughter, but Rebecca will need a good lawyer.  And Noah’s friend Travis’s mother is a lawyer, as we learned at the beginning of the episode.  Ziva is the only person being realistic and wonders out loud why when two people struggle for a gun, one person never shoots the other.  The gun always just miraculously goes off.  Ziva’s point is emphasized by the evidence from the beginning of the episode.  Bates died of a head shot, way too clean to have been the result of a struggle.  But Bates seems like someone who had it coming (even if Joey has only himself to blame for his lack of agency in the events that kept him out of the Navy).  Accordingly, it’s hard to get too upset if Rebecca skates.

We end the episode with Tony sniping on eBay and winning the auction for the golf clubs McGee was trying to find for Ducky.  Tony is thinking $100 finder’s fee.  Except he won an auction for left-handed clubs and Ducky is not a Southpaw.  McGee declines to reimburse, so Tony moves to threatening to tell Ducky…who is standing behind him.  But Ducky calls it even.  He borrowed some classic record from McGee and destroyed it.  Classic golf clubs, classic records, a useless $1200 auction victory: at the end of this episode, pretty much everyone is a loser. 

Quotables:

(1) Ziva: This reminds me of the forests I used to have fun in as a child.

Tony: Find that hard to believe.

Ziva: What, that Israel had forests?

Tony: No, that you had fun as a child.

Ziva: Oh, sure. My father used to blindfold us and take us into the middle of the forest. And then we had to find our way out, by ourselves.

Tony: I stand corrected.

(2) McGee: Do you have any idea what world of pain these kids will be in when their dads get home?

 Tony: You ever see The Great Santini?

McGee: Don’t need to see it. I lived it.

Tony: Yeah, I forgot old man McGee was navy, wasn’t he?

McGee: That’s right. Yeah, this was my childhood. I was just like these kids.

Tony: Which one were you? The skinny one, the quiet one or the one with the hot mom?

Ziva-propisms: There’s a near miss with “stone wall” versus “brick wall” but Ziva was being literal.

Tony Awards: Tony references Stand By Me (1986), The Great Santini (1979), Seven Years in Tibet (1997) and Blue Velvet (1986).  He identifies the suspect, Eddie Felson, as the character Paul Newman played in The Hustler (1961). 

One wonders if Abby’s naming of two flies “Charlie” and “Xavier” is a reference to X-Men (2000).  Or the character of Charles Xavier from the comics, at least. 

Ducky saw The Lion King (1994) and his mother really liked it.

Abby Road: Abby’s family had a tortoise instead of a wagon when she was a child.  His name was Herman and they used to ride him everywhere, except to Grammy Sciuto’s house because he ate her prize-winning petunias.  Abby’s father said the Sciuto kids could get a wagon after Herman died, but tortoises live a really long time.  Abby is a national treasure.

McNicknames: McSneaky.  McRanger Rick.  Daniel McBoone

Ducky Tales: Ducky talks about taking his mother to see The Lion King (1994), and how much he liked liver as a child.

The Rest of the Story:

-McGee’s dad was Navy.  We meet him later.

-McGee is a scout leader, as we learned in Lost & Found, Episode 5.9.

-Agent Cassidy is Agent Paula Cassidy.  She appeared in 4-5 episodes beginning with Minimum Security, Episode 1.8, hooked up with Tony off-screen a few times, briefly filled in after Kate died  in Mind Games, Episode 3.3, and died in Grace Period, Episode 4.19.  Gibbs always thought Paula was a bit of a schlub agent, so he initially doesn’t seem surprised at the possibility that evidence in one of her cases went walkabout.

-Attorney D’Arcy McKinna will be seen again.

-“You don’t know what it’s like.  Going off to the other side of the world.  To protect your country.  But then you can’t be there to protect your own family.”  That’s a mean thing for Commander Taffet to say to Gibbs.  See Hiatus (Part One), Episode 3.23.  Not that he knows, but still…

Casting Call:  Rico Rodriguez is Travis Buckley, and that makes the second Modern Family co-star we meet on this show scant months before they hit it big with a ten-year sit-com run.  See also  Eric Stonestreet (Silent Night, Episode 6.11).  Rodriguez plays Manny Delgado on Modern Family.

Man, This Show Is Old: No so much a dated idea, but when Noah’s mom begins lecturing him on how women in magazines are idealized and not at all representative of real women, it feels a little progressive for network TV, even for 2009.

Abby’s reference to classical music turning her into a psycho killer is a callback to the 1980s when parents and religious zealots claimed that heavy metal (of the type Abby occasionally enjoys) would turn kids into psycho killers.

MVP: Between tracking the body, ID’ing the wagon, and determining that somebody at Joey’s deployed mom’s house was using her phone, McGee was extra competent this episode.

Rating: This one is unremarkable in almost every respect.  Even writing about it seems like more trouble than it’s worth.  It’s not terrible.  Just flat.  It also has the misfortune of appearing at the tail end of some very good episodes and in a lull period before the season winds down.  Four Palmers.

Next Time:  CIA’s Mr. Popularity Trent Kort calls in that favor from Broken Bird, Episode 6.13.