A Year of NCIS, Day 32: Forced Entry (Episode 2.9)

Episode: 2.9, Forced Entry

Air Date: December 7, 2004.

The Victim: No dead servicemember in this episode, but military wife Laura Rowans is attacked in her home by a guy who seems intent on raping her.

Emotionally Traumatized, But Ultimately Irrelevant, Witness Who Finds the Body:  We’re off the usual formula again today.  A lady is watching an old black and white horror flick, when a home invader appears and makes clear he’s going to rape her.  The lady doesn’t much care for that idea, so, making a strong early effort for this blog’s VIP prize, she pulls a gun and puts two in him.

Open and shut, right?  Nah.  We still got 43:08 of runtime to fill.

Plot Summary: Our heroes arrive at what we learn is Quantico base housing.  Gibbs hands Tony his coffee while he goes to speak to the MPs, but tells him that if he drinks it, he’s dead.  Tony is annoyed because he was supposed to be off duty and had plans.  Kate thinks these are sexy plans with some dumb girl, but Tony was going to work at a soup kitchen.  Kate compliments Tony on being a nicer guy than advertised just as he hands McGee Gibbs’s coffee and tells him, “Coffee, Probie?  Looks like you could use it.”  McGee is touched that Tony is “starting to warm up to me,” and tells Kate that Tony even invited him to a party at a soup kitchen where some Playboy models are hosting a fundraiser. 

The MP, Sergeant Hegarty, thinks it’s an open and shut case.  The assailant is unconscious and in critical condition in a nearby hospital.  Mrs. Rowans, the victim, is at a neighbors and the MP radios for her to be brought home to talk to NCIS.  The gun is registered to Mrs. Rowans’s husband David, who is in Iraq.  There’s no sign of forced entry, but the MP thinks that’s standard since they’re on a military base and people leave doors unlocked.

Gibbs sends Tony and Kate to the hospital to get the assailant’s personal effects.  He asks McGee if he is enjoying his coffee, causing McGee to realize what’s going on.  Gibbs knows too, so McGee isn’t maimed or killed.  And since no McGees were injured in this instance of hazing, it’s fun to watch Tony and Kate bond pranking him.

Mrs. Rowans makes Gibbs coffee. Mrs. Rowans wants to know if she’s in trouble.  She says she didn’t intend to kill the guy, but she doesn’t know him.  She thinks he got in through the back door, which she leaves unlocked so she can go outside and smoke.  Mrs. Rowans and her husband have been married four years, but he’s been away for about half that.  Gibbs asks if she has a place to stay, and she decides to go to her mom’s in Maryland.  Gibbs gives her his contact info.

Kate and Tony are at the hospital.  Tony decides that a good way to get information would be to hit on the engaged lieutenant, Lt. Kim, working the admin desk.  She shows him her ring and declines his lunch offer.  Tony moves to business, and he and Kate learn that the assailant is stable, but unconscious.  Lt. Kim aggressively tells the agents they’ll have to come back tomorrow if they want to talk to the assailant or get his fingerprints;  although she does hand them the assailant’s personal effects.  Tony decides to run a con and orders Kate to go make sure that the MP guarding the assailant doesn’t screw up some made-up paperwork.  He lays it on thick, making her call him, “sir,” and then keeps flirting to give Kate the chance to get the fingerprints.  It may seem underhanded, but would you want to come back to Gibbs and say some lieutenant kept you from getting a rapist’s fingerprints?

McGee is talking to Sgt. Hegarty and can’t fathom why a rapist would pick a military base of all places to target a victim.  Gibbs wants to know how he got on base.  Gibbs asks Sgt. Hegarty to check every car in a 5-mile radius to make sure the military decal is current and matches the plates on the car. 

Kate gets the fingerprints and takes some pics, and oops, our assailant wakes up and grabs her arm.  He says to her, “It was a game.  Laura invited me over.  I thought she loved me.”

Back at HQ, Kate tells Tony and McGee about the encounter.  Tony the ex-Baltimore cop thinks its bullshit.  McGee is more cautiously open-minded.  That leads to a heated argument between the two which Kate settles by pointing out that they have to ID the perp first.  Which Gibbs walks in and does.  The perp is Jeremy Davison, and Sgt. Hegarty and the other MPs found his car parked outside the Quantico rear gate with all of his personal effects inside.  Gibbs tells Tony to trace Davison’s phone records and McGee to get a warrant (what the hell?) for his residence.

Abby looks into Davison.  He has no criminal record, no military connections, and he’s cleaner than clean.  Gibbs wants Abby to run his DNA, but there’s no centralized DNA database, so that could take a while.

Gibbs and Kate go to search Davison’s residence.  The place is a mess.  Kate looks at Davison’s laptop and finds a sexy boudoir photo of Mrs. Rowans.  Kate thinks Mrs. Rowans had to have sent it to Davison.  This makes for an interesting subliminal bit where it seems clear, at least to Gibbs, that Kate has a few such photos herself.  Kate also finds emails between Davison and Mrs. Rowans.  And they are graphic. 

A woman enters the apartment.  It’s Davison’s sister, Michelle.  They break the news.  She says she knew something like this would happen. 

But that would be getting too much of the story at once, so we shift back to Abby.  The team shows up to bring her evidence, presumably from Davison’s apartment and Kate tells Abby about the suspected on-line affair.  Gibbs wants proof it’s real before he drags Mrs. Rowans into an interrogation room.  Abby says she would need Mrs. Rowan’s computer too (really?), but McGee is on his way to deliver it. 

Tony is very impressed with the explicit emails and asks Abby for copies.  McGee arrives with the computer, and, after some flirty banter between McGee and Abby, Tony and Kate take an exit. 

Tony and Kate and Gibbs eat Chinese and recap the evidence so far.  It’s not blackmail because Mrs. Rowans would have finished Davison off if that were the case.  Kate suggests that, with on-line communication, Mrs. Rowan might not have known what Davison looked like and that the shooting might have been an accident.  Gibbs doesn’t believe in accidents. 

McGee and Abby arrive and they’ve traced the path of the relationship to where Davison and Mrs. Rowan met on a website called the Scarlet Secret.  It’s a pre-Facebook social network.  Only for sex.  Abby created an account to surf around and determined that both Davison and Rowan have rape fantasies as their fetish. 

It took a little longer than I would have guessed, but Gibbs has Mrs. Rowan in the interrogation room now.  She’s nervous.  Gibbs describes Davison by his handle, Niceguy653, and shows Mrs. Rowans her sexy photo.  Ms. Rowans plays innocent and said she sent the pic to her husband in Iraq.  Then he shows her the emails.  She denies those too.  But when Gibbs mentions the website, she starts to break, and says it was supposed to be a game, and that she never cheated on her husband.  She says she fooled around some online, but she never gave anyone her name or her photo.

Abby joins the other agents in the observation room and says she has to talk to Gibbs.  She says they’ve screwed up big time. 

Gibbs shows Mrs. Rowans the email she sent inviting Davison to the house, and she swears she didn’t write it.  Gibbs tells her they have her computer.  And then Kate buzzes in to interrupt the interrogation.  He angrily enters the observation room to receive a face full of technobabble. But it translates to Mrs. Rowans having told the truth.  She didn’t write the emails.  Gibbs looks at the woman he has broken, crying in the interrogation room, and makes a face that’s as close to contrition as he comes. 

(One wonders in real life how many forensic techs would examine the extra layer down to clear Mrs. Rowans).

The agents discuss the idea that Davison was set up, and tricked on to a Marine base to rape a Marine wife.  As Tony notes, that’s a solid death sentence, but why?  Gibbs walks Mrs. Rowans out and orders everyone to the lab.  Abby can’t find the hacker, but she can tell when the hacker overwrote Mrs. Rowan’s computer with the forged emails: right after the shooting.  McGee says the only way they can find the perp is to get access to the Scarlet Secret’s servers.  And a warrant will take months, because the website has a reputation for fighting any effort to breach member privacy.  But since when have warrants ever been a roadblock on this show?  A hack won’t work because the script says so this time of the level of access needed, but Kate realizes that the homepage is advertising for an IT specialist.  McGee is excited to be able to do undercover work, but Tony makes the valid point that McGee has cop written all over him.  Tony has some cyberporn experience, having once met a girl on-line named hotjugs24, but he can’t pass as a computer programmer.  Gibbs decides to send Abby. 

Abby goes to the location and uses “Ms. Gibbs” as her alias.  She starts immediately.  Her boss asks if she wants to model because they offer naked tech support to very special clients and the pay is double.  She passes. 

Gibbs is pleased with her work and sends Tony and Kate to interview Davison and check on anyone who has had an altercation with him in the last five years.  Abby and McGee start working together to get the hacker’s info.

Tony and Kate interview Davison in his hospital room.  Davison refuses to believe Mrs. Rowans wasn’t Mrs. Rowans.  He can’t name anyone with a grudge, though.  And as he comes to terms with the fact that nothing about his purported relationship with this woman he thought he loved was real, it’s moving.  Give the actor his due.  At that point, Michelle Davison arrives, and asks that Kate cut Davison loose from his handcuffs.  Kate agrees that they aren’t necessary anymore.

Abby finds the hacker’s code.  Whoever it is has hooks all over the system.  McGee and Abby backtrace it to a guy named Victor Grotinski.  Gibbs calls Tony and Kate to meet him at the address.  The agents move-in, which I don’t think they’ve all three done together since See No Evil, Episode 2.1. They find a dead guy in a room full of computer equipment.  And his eyes have been ripped out.

Ducky and Palmer finally have something to do.  Ducky calls the time of death at about 18 hours previous.  According to McGee, the perp was jury-rigging his own super-computer.  Gibbs finds a remote and tells Tony to find out what it operates.  Kate does a bit of profiling, but the only obvious tell is the lack of defensive wounds, demonstrating the perp knew his attacker.  Tony summons Kate because he sees something, maybe a camera, in a ceiling grate.  Kate is sad because she has to stand on Tony’s shoulders to get to it, and she wore a skirt. Tony is not sad in any way.   

A camera it is.  As we learn in Abby’s lab, it’s a camera with some amateur grade porno on it.  Followed by a good old fashioned post-coital killing and eye-gouging.  Abby promises to try and do more with the image.  Gibbs asks McGee to fins out who hired Grotinski to create the fake trail between Mrs. Rowans and Davison. 

Gibbs thinks the team is being played.  But Ducky has something.  He may have some DNA from our sexy killer, but what’s interesting is the way the knife was used to kill Grotinski.  It was very professional, and Gibbs finds it very familiar.  He tells Tony and Kate to find Mrs. Rowans, and leaves.  Ducky explains that the technique is one taught to Marines to kill sentries.  Which means Mrs. Rowan’s husband may have taught her to do more than just shoot. 

Back to Abby’s lab, where Abby has pulled an image from the tape.  But she needs more time to make it visible.  DNA testing will take about ten hours too.  Gibbs is getting impatient.         

Tony and Kate tell Gibbs that Mrs. Rowans is in the wind.  They pile into a car and head to the hospital to see if she is going after Davison.  En route, Tony calls Lt. Kim (who sounds excited to hear from him) and tells her to tell anyone asking for Davison that he was moved to another hospital.  Sgt. Hegarty calls from Mrs. Rowan’s home and tells Gibbs they have a problem.  Then he pulls a gun on Mrs. Rowan as she comes home, and we see that Grotinski’s eyeballs are sitting on Mrs. Rowan’s kitchen table (come on, why would she leave them there?)  Sgt. Hegarty does what anybody else would do in that situation and takes Mrs. Rowans into custody.  On the other end of the line, the agents reason that Mrs. Rowans hired Grotinski to make it look like she was being framed (but why? And why shoot Davison?)

Abby is still working on the video.  It sure looks like a blonde lady.  Suddenly the DNA search that Abbt originally put in for Davison comes back, and it has been linked to five murders!

In Davison’s room, the agents are updating Davison and his sister on Ms. Rowan’s arrest.  They figure they have this one solved and want to know why Mrs. Rowans fixated on Davison.  Davison says she was unhappy but wouldn’t leave her husband, so he threatened to tell him about their cyber-affair.  The agents say they’ve got Mrs. Rowans on video killing Grotinski and they’ll have her nailed as soon as the video is finished processing. They make ready to leave, but Gibbs has noticed something and is acting strangely.

Abby is trying desperately to get Gibbs on the phone. 

Michelle Davison, who, like Mrs. Rowans, is also blonde, shuts the room blinds.  And then whoa whoa whoa!  She starts making out with her own brother.  She says, “We gotta go,baby.” I think Gibbs must have seen the way she was rubbing Davison’s hand earlier, so I’m expecting him to not be too far away.  

Abby finally gets Lt. Kim on the phone, and Lt. Kim runs to the room to find Davison gone.  As Davison and his “sister” are escaping out the front door, she tells him that the first two cops were dumb but their boss was close to figuring it out.  At that point, the Davisons are staring down the barrels of three NCIS guns.  Tony feels insulted that he has been called dumb.  Michelle goes for her gun, but Kate tells her that the first slug is going in her right eye socket.  Michelle decides not to test Kate’s resolve.

Abby finally gets through to Gibbs and tells him that the DNA matched a serial rapist and murderer.  But the team already knows all this, at least well enough to make the arrests. 

Post-gaming, Kate reveals that Davison wasn’t even their real names.  Grotinski created identities for them, and they’re a husband and wife serial rapist/murder team.  Tony is amazed at the kinds of things you can do with computers these days.  McGee helps increase his amazement by revealing that he backtraced Tony’s old cybergirl, hotjugs24.  He shows Tony a picture of a tattooed, bald biker guy, and we end, once again, with the team mocking Tony for trying to hook up with people he doesn’t know are dudes.

Quotables:

Abby: Hey McGee.  Ready to plunge into the seedy side of the Internet with me?

McGee: Why…I thought we agreed never to discuss that at work.

Time Until Sexual Harassment: 15:00 or so.  Kate mentions Catholic school and Tony suggestively asks if she still has the uniform.

At 33:40, Tony has Kate on his shoulders, like McGee did in See No Evil, Episode 2.1.  But Tony is not as hesitant to look as McGee, despite Kate threatening him with a knife.

Ducky Tales:  Several South American tribes plucked the eyes of their victims to discourage being followed.  Of course, they were cannibals.

The Rest of the Story:

-Rule #23: Never mess with a Marine’s coffee if you want to live.  Weirdly, Sgt. Hegarty knows this rule, even though it was established in Missing (Episode 1.20) that Gibbs didn’t learn his numbered rules in the Marines.

-Maybe Tony’s joking, but if he’s not, there’s a numbered rule for “Never marry a woman who eats more than you do.”

-Lt. Pam Kim, the woman at the hospital admin desk will return in 2005 in a very fun episode.  Well, not so fun for her.

-During the investigation as Quantico, a football thrown by some kids lands at Gibbs’s feet. Gibbs motions a kid to go deep, and throws a nice spiral, which the kid catches on the run.  McGee seems confused that Gibbs, as always, is both comfortable around and good with kids. The scene is also notable because Mark Harmon used to play QB at UCLA. 

-In one of the scenes at HQ, McGee left his collar stays at home (or in Sean Murray’s dressing room).  You can’t unsee it.

-Gibbs kisses Abby on the head for the first time.

-Kate has at least two brothers (maybe four if memory serves).  Her brothers were also mentioned in The Bone Yard (Episode 2.5), but I forgot to note it.  She also has a sister.  That’s potentially six kids.  Her parents took their Catholic teachings on fruitfulness seriously.

-Further hints are given that McGee and Abby share a sordid and kinky, if short-lived, past.

-When Abby wants to talk to Gibbs in interrogation, McGee references the last time he disturbed an interrogation (in UnSEALed, Episode 1.18) and how he’ll never do that again.

-This show is old, but it’s ahead of its time here in the sense that it lays out a catfishing scheme 8 years before the Manti Te’o scandal forced that issue into the public consciousness.

-This week, Gibbs looks at Abby’s video work and says he has seen better pictures of a UFO.  This compared to Terminal Leave, Episode 2.6, when he compared the bad footage to pictures of sasquatch.

-Kate bounced back pretty well from having to kill an “innocent” man (who happened to be threatening to shoot her boss) last episode.  She’s all to willing too pop a cap in Michelle Davison. Maybe she really resents being called dumb.

-This is the second time that Tony has had to learn that he was making time with a male he thought was a female.

Casting Call: Lindsay Price, the actress who plays Lt. Kim, is also Cathy, the really talky girlfriend of Ted Mosby in the episode of How I Met Your Mother where the gang points out each member’s worst faults.  It’s a stellar episode in a series with a lot of gems.

Man, This Show Is Old: The instant messenger window on Mrs. Rowan’s computer looks positively antique.

Abby asks Gibbs if he thinks Davison “did it,” and Gibbs says it depends on the definition of “it.”  That’s still a joke with some currency, but it was a lot closer in time in 2004.  The remark refers to comments by Bill Clinton in or about 1998 where he bobbed and weaved on a question about his extramarital activities by saying something on the order of “that depends on your definition of ‘is.’” To my recollection, Clinton’s argument wasn’t completely specious, but when you have to start parsing linking verbs, you’ve lost.

Kate sees the photo of Mrs. Rowans on Davison’s computer and immediately assumes he wouldn’t have it if Mrs. Rowans didn’t send it to him.  Nowadays, it wouldn’t be completely out of the question for that sort of photo to be on social media, and we’re certainly more attuned to the risk of people hacking our PCs.

Related, Gibbs proposes that maybe Davison got the pics because he happens to work in a photo shop.  Remember when you had to go to a place to get film developed?

When Davison’s sister mentions him going on a date with “some girl he met on the Internet,” she says it with disdain.  Even Abby says, “Internet romances never work out.”  Such a quaint time.  Now, I think more people meet online than meet in person.

A plot point where two people flirting on-line have never seen photos of one another would be a tough sell today.

Plasma screen TVs, Baby.

Abby mentions Friendster, and not ironically,   

VIP: Abby figured it out first, but Gibbs figured it out without DNA help.  He wins.

Rating: This one is a little creaky if you stare at it too long.  It would have been better-served to maybe describe other crimes committed by the rapist/murder couple in order to better contextualize their overly complex scheme.  As is, we’re having to fill in some blanks as to what the plan was, what parts of the plan existed in the beginning, and what parts of the plan were reactions to Mrs. Rowans shooting Davison.  Did Davison find Mrs. Rowans on-line, decide to rape and kill her with his sister-wife, and then need it to look like they’d been sexting once he got shot.  If so, they put that shit together quickly since Grotinski perpetrated the hack on Mrs. Rowans’s computer almost immediately after she shot Davison.  Or is that a built-in back up plan for if he works the rape but somehow can’t kill the victim?  It seems like that has to be the answer since he woke up from critical condition and went right to his story.  Man, talk about planning ahead.  Like I said, it would be nice to have had some background on the other cases, but I get where the story structure wouldn’t allow for both exposition and a surprise twist ending.  Sometimes you gotta choose.

Still, this episode had a twist that wasn’t predictable, stayed interesting until the end, and gave us a lot of decent character work and banter.  I definitely enjoyed it. Although I don’t think I’d label it “Great” just because everything got a little crammed and muddled.

Six Palmers.   

Next Time: Tony goes undercover in jail and ends up going on the run with a murderer.