Tchotchke

After McGee finished questioning the neighbors, who hadn’t heard or seen anything, he returned to the apartment in search of Tony’s phone. Gibbs had already returned to NCIS with the evidence and the other agents. The phone hadn’t been found, yet though, despite GPS indicating it was in the apartment.

McGee hoped the phone would reveal something about what had happened to Tony and was determined to find it where the other agents hadn’t. The apartment was rather bare since practically everything was considered evidence even the tchotchkes that the intruders had scattered all over the floor while they were there. McGee had been sure that it would be easy to find the phone now that everything else had basically been removed except the furniture.

He had searched all the nooks and crannies behind the furniture even reaching into the couch cushions to try and find the phone to no avail. He stared mournfully around the empty apartment trying to figure out where the heck Tony’s phone could be. McGee wanted to smack himself when he realized he could just call Tony"s phone to find it.

Pulling out his cellphone, McGee navigated to Tony"s number and hit the call button. McGee frowned. He couldn"t hear a phone ringing anywhere. He walked through each room as he rang Tony"s phone to confirm that the phone truly wasn"t there.

McGee stared around the apartment bemused. Finally, he decided to expand his search to the surrounding streets given the gps was only accurate to 5 meters. Once he did that, he quickly found the phone laying off to the side of a street nearby. Placing the phone in an evidence bag, he quickly headed back to NCIS headquarters to get Abby started on solving the phone"s secrets.

Gibbs was stomping around NCIS in a fine temper at the lack of progress in finding DiNozzo. McGee quickly slipped downstairs and dropped the phone off with Abby. He didn’t hang around and chat with Abby. Instead, he headed back upstairs so as to avoid Gibbs’ wrath.

He immediately started electronic searches for Tony’s credit cards, bank accounts, street cameras and anything else he could think of that might give some clue as to what happened to Tony. He didn’t want to be the one to tell Gibbs that Tony was gone for good.

Gibbs hated cases like this where you had no clues. There was no ransom demand. There was nothing that pointed to where Tony was taken. The only clue they really had was the, “We’ll be back,” on Tony’s wall. Abby was still analyzing that to see what was used to make the blood like appearance.

Gibbs hoped that Abby or someone else found something that would help them either find Tony or narrow down the suspects. Frankly, he didn’t care which one happened so long as they were able to start making progress again. Most of all with cases like this he hated the inaction and watching the movie play through your head of the worst case scenarios that maybe happened to the victims.

He desperately wanted someone to find something and stop the movie in his head of Tony getting raped, killed, or worse. He’d seen first hand the kind of trouble DiNozzo could get into and it only fed his worst fears as he struggled to keep the desperation from showing on his face.