Episode: 2.16, Pop Life
Air Date: March 1, 2005
The Victim: Petty Officer Second Class Manda King.
Emotionally Traumatized, But Ultimately Irrelevant, Witness Who Finds the Body: They arrest him for murder, so Willie Taylor is hardly irrelevant.
Plot Summary: A naked man wakes up in bed with a naked woman. Good for him. He kisses her and notes that she’s freezing. Then he finds blood on his hand. And there’s a knock at the door. And he turns her over, and she’s dead. And he opens the door and it’s the cops. And there’s a big ole’ spot of blood on his head.
Not so good for him.
Today on Kate n’ Tony, Tony has been stealing Kate’s lunch. They both barge into autopsy and anger Ducky with their squabbling. But they need a mediator or Kate is threatening to go to employee relations (what took her so long? And stealing her tuna fish sandwich was the breaking point?) Which Tony calls tattling.
Ducky is elbow deep in a body, but there’s no way Gibbs will referee this, Tony and Kate don’t have any respect for McGee, and Abby already said no. Palmer takes the hint and exits. Ducky compares the experience to marriage counseling and seems unconvinced when Kate swears it’s just a work relationship. In any event, Kate relates that she brought a sandwich to work and Tony ate most of it. Which is a pretty clear indicator that Kate is in the right, and Tony’s defense is ridiculous (essentially, we’re buddies, so why is she mad?). Ducky, rather than taking the easy route and ruling in Kate’s favor, wants to analyze what he views as a sibling rivalry, filled with juvenile and “sexually charged” bickering. They both want to please a father figure.
A father figure who then enters autopsy, and announces that there’s a body.
Finally, NCIS can start.
The victim is PSC Manda King. The suspect is Willie Taylor, who tends bar at Sugar Street, a nearby establishment. Ducky figures the COD is the obvious: stabbed to death. Palmer finds a trace of something around the victim’s nose. Ducky calls the TOD in the early morning, and the detective on the scene, Detective Mauceri, said a 911 call reported screaming about 5:30 AM.
The team continues to work the scene. Gibbs tells McGee to trace the 911 call. Palmer thinks the body shows signs of having been moved. Tony finds at least three condoms in the trash can. Kate spoke to PSC King’s CO and she was an excellent sailor with a great reputation. She was about to be promoted to Captain’s Yeoman, which doesn’t track with participation in some kind of drug crime. Kate says PSC King told her crewmates that she had business in Norfolk.
Gibbs interrogates Taylor at Det. Mauceri’s precinct. Taylor swears PSC King is not the woman he took home the night before. He also denies that the knife was his. Taylor met the girl he took home in the parking lot and she said she lost her keys. He had never seen her before. She said her name was Manda, like our dead sailor, but Taylor swears the actual Manda was not the girl he slept with. He doesn’t know anything about her, and nobody can verify his story. Det. Mauceri says the tox screen found traces of meth in Taylor’s blood (along with a 0.12 BAL), but he adamantly denies doing drugs or giving the girl any drugs.
Back at Abby’s lab, Gibbs wants the inside and outside of the condoms tested to make sure there’s a match for both Taylor and PSC King. The 911 call came from a payphone near Taylor’s apartment. But there are no prints on the phone or the knife. The blood on the knife is PSC King’s and Abby is certain the trace substance Palmer found is going to be meth.
Gibbs and Kate go to interview the family. PSC King’s father has state 4 cancer and is in the hospital. Her sister, Samanthat is there as well. Neither takes the revelation about drug use particularly well. But they don’t know anything about any drugs, so Gibbs and Kate leave.
Abby doesn’t have DNA results, but her analysis of the condoms found a blood marker that indicates that there’s no way PSC King had sex with Willie Taylor. Gibbs declares that “Willie was set up.”
Ducky reverses his earlier supposition and reports to Gibbs that the knife missed PSC King’s vital organs. She didn’t bleed to death. In fact, she was dead when she was stabbed. Ducky says that Abby confirmed that the substance in PSC King’s nose was meth, and that it was a lethal dose. Moreover, Ducky doesn’t think the overdose was an accident. Given the large amount, Ducky thinks suicide.
Gibbs and Taylor reconvene in the NCIS interrogation room. Gibbs tells Taylor what their evidence has found. Gibbs wants to know who would set Taylor up. Taylor thinks it’s a competing bar, Tease, owned by a guy name Ian Hitch. Because of the proximity to Norfolk, if anything bad happens to a female sailor, NCIS will shut down a bar. So, Taylor thinks if PSC King died at the rival establishment, Hitch would be looking to dump the body. Getting Sugar Street, Taylor’s bar, shut down in the process would be gravy.
Hitch’s alias is Bulldog. He has a record in the U.K., but has dual citizenship in the US. McGee is familiar with Hitch’s bar from his time at Norfolk, and it apparently has very attractive dancers. Tony thinks that if Hitch set up Taylor, he would have used a girl from his club for the seduction. So, all they have to do is get Taylor to ID the girl, flip her, and work their way back to Hitch. But Gibbs doesn’t want Taylor anywhere near the club, and dancers don’t exactly have DMV photos, or W2s or real names. They need somebody to go to the club in person.
Yeah, there’s only one agent for this job.
Two in fact. Tony and Kate with video glasses. They walk around the club pretending to be patrons while Abby and Gibbs take the photos from MTAC and manage the surveillance. And then Samantha King, PSC King’s sister, comes out on stage as the headliner and puts on a show. And she’s good.
Kate and Tony confront Ms. King and want to know what Ms. King is doing at the club a day after her sister’s murder. Ms. King isn’t interested in talking to them even when they say they’ve tracking her sister’s killer to the club. Some of Hitch’s goons come out to intervene and Tony pulls a gun and pretends that he and Kate are trying to sign Ms. King to a record deal. Kate continues to talk to Ms. King while Tony covers the goons. Ms. King says Kate is going to get her killed but swears Hitch wouldn’t kill her sister. Kate tells Tony that Ms. King isn’t interested in a record deal, and they both leave.
Back at HQ, Taylor is looking at pics with Gibbs. He’s not taking it super-seriously until Gibbs gets in his grill. Then he picks out a girl, but he isn’t entirely sure. Tony starts coaching Taylor in Gigolo 101 and telling him there’s always one thing a guy remembers about a girl, even if it’s just one little thing. Taylor remembers a tattoo of a bulldog on the girl’s ass. Gibbs sends Tony and Kate to pick up the identified dancer.
Gibbs interrogates the dancer, Summer Diamond. She claims not to know Taylor. And every dancer at the club has the tattoo Taylor identified. Summer’s playing it cool when Abby walks in to collect a DNA sample.
Ducky appears, and urgently wants Gibbs to come with him. He found a mark in PSC King’s nose that demonstrated that the meth was funneled into her nose. She was held down and murdered by drug overdose.
Kate meets with Ms. King to explain the circumstances of her sister’s death. She also explains Taylor’s frame-up theory. But Ms. King has a different view. She got hooked up with Hitch because she thought he had record connections and signed a contract. PSC King was trying to get her sister out of the contract. Kate suggests that this was the motive for PSC King’s death. Kate wants to help, but Ms. King says Hitch owns her. And sure enough, he catches them together. Ms. King tells Kate she’s dead if Hitch finds out that Kate is a cop. Kate pulls her gun under the table. But she continues with the charade of trying sign Ms. King to a contract. Hitch tells Kate that Ms. King’s talents are spoken for and that she and “Bruce” (Tony’s alias) had better leave town.
Gibbs gives Kate hell at HQ for not having back-up when she met with Ms. King, but accepts her apology. Gibbs asks McGee how Hitch tracked Ms. King, and McGee says Ms. King’s cell phone is registered to Hitch, so he probably tracked her with the embedded GPS.
Gibbs gets a call from Detective Mauceri and he and the team arrive to find a deceased Summer Diamond. It looks like she was run over with a car. The Detective called Gibbs because she had his business card in her bra. Detective Mauceri and Gibbs have a measuring contest because Detective Mauceri has had no success in catching Hitch and seems to have given up. But Detective Mauceri turns the scene over to Gibbs to see if NCIS can make a bust.
Tony thinks there’s no way Summer’s murder is a hit and run because Summer isn’t wearing much clothing and it was freezing that morning. Ducky says the bruising on her arm makes it look like someone either held her in front of a car or threw her in front of one. McGee gets tested on practical application of crime scenes and notes the absence of skid marks. So yeah, not a hit and run.
Back at HQ, Gibbs wants to know what Hitch’s alibi is for the two murders. At that point, Kate brings in Ms. King, who is scared she’s gonna get killed if Hitch finds out she’s at NCIS. But McGee rigs her GPS to show her at the hospital with her father. Then Gibbs takes Ms. King downstairs to see Summer’s body. The team tells Ms. King that they can help her, but she has to turn on Hitch. She refuses and starts walking out. McGee stops everyone in the cubicle room and tells them that Hitch has an airtight alibi for the time of Summer’s murder- he was in NYC with lots of witnesses. Ms. King says that Hitch always wins and that she tried to tell her sister that. She hopes NCIS listens before she ends up dead.
Ducky says Summer’s COD was internal bleeding, and the injuries were consistent with a vehicular homicide. The tox screen came back with alcohol and meth, but not enough to kill anyone. Ducky points to the arm bruising and points out that there’s a procedure by which Abby can get prints off the dead skin. But it’s expensive, and rarely works. Gibbs gives the go-ahead.
McGee hacked Ms. King’s GPS when he had her phone earlier, so now they can track her. Gibbs sends McGee to help Abby. Gibbs takes Tony and Kate to confront Hitch. It will blow their cover, but if Ms. King is there, Gibbs is taking her into protective custody regardless.
Abby is in autopsy trying to lift the fingerprints off Summer’s arm with Palmer “assisting.” The process involves bonding super glue to the prints. What happens next is difficult to describe, and kind of stupid. The end result is Palmer and Abby end up getting super-glued together. It sorts of looks like they’re in an embrace and when McGee comes in, he yells at Palmer.
Gibbs and Kate and Tony are driving to Hitch’s club. Tony is asleep in the backseat, so Gibbs wakes him up by accelerating and then slamming on brakes. They get in touch with Abby and McGee and learn that the print on Summer’s arm belongs to Hitch’s bodyguard Blue. The agents are feeling good about their case, and continue to the club.
Back at the lab, Abby tells McGee that Jimmy is terrified of McGee now. Abby seems impressed, and McGee is happy about it, but promises to apologize to Jimmy later.
The agents arrive at the club. Meanwhile, inside, Ms. King is chatting with Blue the bodyguard, who tells her that Hitch has summoned her. Ms. King seems sad and Hitch tells her it will all be worth it when she’s a star. Ms. King joins Hitch in his office. Hitch knows Kate is a Navy cop, and he wants to know what Ms. King told them. He wants to know if Ms. King told NCIS that Hitch killed her sister. Then he asks if she knows that Summer was dead and smiles and says, “Of course you do.”
The agents are entering the club when shots ring out. They follow the noise and find Hitch’s office. Hitch is dead in his chair and Blue claims he had to shoot Hitch or Hitch was going to shoot Ms. King. Kate comforts Ms. King.
So that looks like case closed. Except we return to the lab, and Abby reveals that Summer’s DNA doesn’t match the DNA on Taylor’s condoms. But the DNA on the condom did get a near match from the Armed Forces database. The screen shows 70%. Which means a sailor set up Taylor.
Or maybe not. Ms. King is with her dying father at the hospital. She’s telling him she’s gonna be a star and that everybody will know her name. Gibbs appears and summons her outside. There he reveals that the condom DNA had a 70% match to PSC King. And 70% equates to a sibling. Summer Diamond didn’t set up Taylor and kill PSC King. Ms. King did. To get the full inheritance from their father (I missed the part where he was rich), and, later, to frame Hitch and get out of her contract with him.
(McGee’s GPS hack also placed Ms. King at both murder scenes. But that won’t stand up in court and McGee is in for a hard cross examination on how he switched the GPS to fool Hitch, but didn’t switch it to place Ms. King at the murder sites).
Gibbs is humane enough not to bust Ms. King in front of her father (for his sake), and he tells her to go back to his bedside and keep lying to him. The episode ends with the father telling Ms. King she’s going to be a star and that he has always believed in her. Ms. King, knowing her dreams are ashes, watches her father die and says, “That’s right, Daddy. I’m gonna be a real star.” Gibbs looms in the background, ready to take this perp to jail.
Quotables: Honestly, there was nothing particularly quotable in this episode.
Time Until Sexual Harassment: 5:50. When Taylor says he went to bed with one girl and woke up with another, Tony makes a lewd joke. It’s tame by his standards, but Kate is offended enough to write it down. She’s keeping a journal, allegedly for their counseling with Ducky, but, in reality, probably for her lawyer.
21:00 or so. Tony starts to tell a story about a girl who squeaked during sex. Kate asks if he wants Ducky to hear this story, but then Gibbs says Ducky and everybody else has already heard the story.
Ducky Tales: No tales today.
The Rest of the Story:
-Ducky mentions studying psychology. He will ultimately become the team’s profiler, so this is useful information.
-I continue to maintain that Tony’s and Kate’s bickering is not sexually charged.
-This being an even numbered episode, Abby and McGee make TMI references to a prior or ongoing sexual relationship. Abby describes a metaphorical instance of going to bed with one guy and waking up with another (in the sense that his tattoos are fake and he works at a bank). McGee says he used to work at a bank, but Abby notes that his tattoo is real and he doesn’t disappoint her.
-I suppose it has been hinted that Jimmy has a crush on Abby, but they really made it clear in this episode. And McGee got super-territorial.
Abby uses the Armed Forces DNA database to match the DNA on the condom. As we learned very early in Season One (Hung Out to Dry, Episode 1.2), the database is only supposed to be used to identify remains. I don’t know if that changed in real life or if the writers decided not to care anymore.
-For all Ducky’s talk about the fingerprint analysis technique being expensive, it appears to be the same gaseous super glue trick that Abby has used on several different episodes now.
Casting Call: Ms. King King is played by Mya, a real-life R&B singer. Not one I’m familiar with, but the real deal nonetheless.
Man, This Show Is Old: Pay phones. Only a few more years until burn phones.
All phones are trackable with GPS now, but it was a bigger deal in 2005.
Tony makes reference to singer and actress Brandy, who was in her heyday in the early 21st Century.
MVP: Abby made the DNA match and caught the killer.
Rating: This one is tough to rate because, unlike with a lot of these older episodes, I remembered the twist with Ms. King being the murderer. It’s a decent episode, and the twist is relatively well-hidden. But that’s largely because Ms. King’s motives are obscured. I completely missed that there was an inheritance in play (and frankly, so did our agents since they never considered it as a motive). And Ms. King would otherwise have no reason to kill her sister. It all seemed a little fast and loose.
But it’s a good episode and the bad guys gave us some compelling character work. And I think, absent remembering the end, I would have been surprised by the killer’s identity. Six Palmers.
Next Time: A package full of eyeballs. From Paraguay no less.
A Year of NCIS 