A Year of NCIS, Day 59: Deception (Episode 3.13)

Episode: 3.13, Deception

Air Date: January 17, 2006.

The Victim: Lieutenant Commander Amanda Wilkerson.

Emotionally Traumatized, But Ultimately Irrelevant, Witness Who Finds the Body: Oddly, we meet them midway through the episode, as the partying teens who usually discover the body end up with the victim’s cell phone and win a trip to NCIS to be interrogated.

Plot Summary: A woman is captive in the trunk of a car and trying to dial NCIS on her cellphone.  She loses the signal and has to call back, and the operator can’t understand her because she’s trying not to be overheard by whoever is abducting her.  The car stops and the victim and the NCIS operator try more frantically to communicate as a masked assailant opens the trunk.  The woman screams, and we head to credits.

Ziva arrives to work on a Sunday in another silly hat.  Tony is in jeans and sneakers and claims he was playing football.  But he really wants to know what Ziva was doing.  She says Pilates, but she thought that was a marital art, and, when she takes off her shoes, we see her feet are bloody and bandaged.  Her hands also, but she claims none of the blood belongs to her.  Tony has not been able to reach McGee, which is not going to serve him well with Gibbs, who arrives in a suit and tie.

Tony gives the update.  The kidnap victim is Lieutenant Commander Amanda Wilkerson, stationed in D.C., currently on liberty and scheduled to be back the following day.  Tony stops and admires Gibbs’s suit and asks if he got married again.  Gibbs suggests it might be in Tony’s best interest to continue with his report. 

Ms. Wilkerson’s cell isn’t GPS enabled, but the carrier was able to narrow the location of the call to a small radius and they’ll alert NCIS if the phone comes back on.  Gibbs asks after McGee, and then sends Tony and Ziva to Cmdr. Wilkerson’s home to look for clues.

Abby arrives dressed like the construction worker from the Village People. She has been volunteering at Habitat for Humanity.  She says hello to Tony, but not Ziva.  Ziva looks at Tony like, “WTF?”  Gibbs asks Abby to do acoustical analysis of the taped call from Cmdr. Wilkerson. 

At Cmdr. Wilkerson’s house, she’s obviously not home.  Tony finds the spare key, but Ziva has already picked the lock.  Tony says there’s no alarm because there’s no sign in the yard.  They enter.  I’m not going to make a joke about breaking and entering because an abduction likely amounts to probable cause.  The agents clear the house.  Then, apropos of nothing, they flirt a bit, and the lock picking leads to a discussion of who likes to be handcuffed. Ziva’s aggressive sexuality clearly takes Tony off balance and she clearly enjoys it.

The agents search the Commander’s very neat house, and Tony begins messing with a laptop as the scene shifts to MTAC.  Gibbs has not confirmed that the person on the phone is Cmdr. Wilkerson and he is discussing the potential abduction with Captain Martino, her CO. Captain Martino hears the taped distress call and confirms that the voice belongs to Cmdr. Wilkerson.  She’s a force protection officer and one of a handful of people who know the location and destination of a shipment of nuclear fuel rods.  Captain Martino is coming to NCIS to brief Gibbs.

Tony is trying to break the code on Cmdr. Wilkerson’s computer.  He asks Ziva if she has any expertise, but then stops responding to her follow up questions.  Ziva looks up and sees an exasperated look on Tony’s face.  He also has his hands raised.  A neighborhood security guard has just entered the house and tells Ziva to put her hands up as well.  The guard fancies himself quite the law enforcement officer and, despite Ziva’s badge, doesn’t want to hear about NCIS since he has no idea what the acronym stands for.  He throws a pair of handcuffs to Ziva and tells her to cuff herself to Tony, who grins.  Ziva says she’d rather be shot, and the guard says, “Cuff yourself, dirtbag,” which causes Tony’s grin to widen.  The guard throws out another pair of cuffs and tells Tony to cuff himself to the chair.  Tony laughingly says, “You’re making a big mistake.”  The guard says they made the mistake setting off the alarm, and now Ziva laughs at Tony. 

The guard tries to call in the arrest, but he can’t make his radio work.  Tony mocks him while Ziva works the cuffs with her lock pick.  Tony tells Ziva to calm down, and not to unnerve the jumpy guard with any sudden moves.  Ziva frees herself, kicks the gun out of the guard’s hand, pins him to the floor, and puts her gun to his chest.  Tony looks at the now empty cuffs in confused awe.  He recovers quickly though and rolls his eyes as he tries to de-escalate the situation.  Ziva is not pleased at being called a dirtbag and the guard is about to wet himself, and we segue to…

…Abby’s lab.  She isolates a tire skid on the recording of the distress call.  And a trunk opening, thus demonstrating Cmdr. Wilkerson is in a trunk (which we knew).  And then the car is shut off.  Which means whoever abducted the Commander left her.  Abby thinks Cmdr. Wilkerson has 12-17 hours of oxygen. 

And we switch scenes to the commander pounding on the trunk from the inside. 

Gibbs is getting briefed by Captain Martino.  The nuclear fuel rod train has been stopped and it’s defended against small arms attack.  But a heavy assault that managed to detonate the fuel rods would irradiate the immediate area.  People who know the train’s route are the people with the train, including the armed helo escort, and the Captain’s staff.  Cmdr. Wilkerson put together the routes.  Gibbs wants to know why she was on liberty.  Captain Martino says she wasn’t necessary for operations and specifically requested this day off.  That makes Gibbs’s spider-sense buzz, but Captain Martino says Cmdr. Wilkerson is one of his finest officers and couldn’t be involved in anything treasonous.  Captain Martino wants to move the train back to its origin and reschedule delivery of the rods but wonders if they’ll get hit on the way back.  Gibbs suggests finding Cmdr. Wilkerson before moving the train.

Cmdr. Wilkerson’s clean house does not translate into an organized computer.  McGee arrives.  Gibbs lets him have it, McGee grovels, and Gibbs then tells McGee to help Abby.  It’s mercifully brief. Tony’s reaction to McGee’s tardiness is not so brief, because McGee has arrived wearing a tweed jacket over a turtleneck and has his writing pipe in his pocket (See Red Cell, Episode 2.20).  They bicker over whetehr McGee is a novelist or just a dork in a tweed jacket (can’t he be both?) Ziva tries to blunt Tony’s assault by telling McGee he looks sexy.  But this just pisses off Abby, who angrily gets everybody on task.  Quite the love rhombus Ziva’s presence has created. 

Abby updates McGee, and he cuts right through the nonsense on the computer and finds Cmdr. Wilkerson’s datebook.  Her last appointment was at a nearby mall at 8:30 AM.  Ziva drives Tony there, once again frightening him (See Silver War, Episode 3.4), but he seems to have avoided puking this time.  Ziva speeds through the parking deck looking for Cmdr. Wilkerson’s Jetta.  Tony discourses on what’s a guy car versus what’s a girl car.  They find a car with a matching plate.

McGee and Abby are listening to Cmdr. Wilkerson’s call again.  They hear the car hit something in the road.  Then they get in a fight over McGee’s pipe, even though McGee doesn’t smoke.  Ohhhh…actually what they’re really fighting about is McGee missed the Habitat build.  Abby, making my obvious joke from above, notes that she’s not trying to dress like the Village People.  McGee grovels again.  And Abby makes him wear the construction hard hat.

Ziva looks in Cmdr. Wilkerson’s trunk.  “There’s no Commander in here,” she hilariously deadpans.  Tony is trying to break into the driver’s side door.  He lists the number of reasons that, as a cop in Baltimore, he had to break into cars (they’re all heartbreaking).  Of course, then he screws this one up and clumsily flings his tool away from the car.  By the time he retrieves it, Ziva is nonchalantly sitting in the passenger seat, having found a camcorder.  She does not let Tony in the car to look at it with her.  But she does eventually get out. 

They watch the tape.  Cmdr. Wilkerson is filming the parking lot and says her target, whoever that is, has promised money and a place to stay in exchange for the Commander’s willing cooperation. And then the camera fades out.

Cmdr. Wilkerson has a LOT of stuff on that computer.  So it will take a while to get through it.  Gibbs says the Commander has about eight hours of air.  Ducky appears in the squad room to quash those hopes.  See, Abby’s survival estimates were dead on for a healthy trunk person.  Ducky, in light of the circumstances, abandoned his Sunday golf game to see if we’re dealing with a healthy trunk person.  We are not.  Cmdr. Wilkerson is recovering from bronchitis.  So she maybe has five hours. 

In the trunk, on the roof of a parking deck, with no cars around her, an ailing Cmdr. Wilkerson continues to pound on the trunk.

Tony backgrounds Cmdr. Wilkerson.  She’s not super-social.  McGee finds a number of emails from Cmdr. Wilkerson sent the previous night.  They’re encrypted, but McGee figures out that she sent them from a place called PBJ, and gets the address.

Tony and Ziva go to check it out.  The acronym stands for “Perverts Brought to Justice.”  They’re a non-profit that helps law enforcement track down online pedophiles.  Ross Logan, upon realizing Cmdr. Wilkerson is involved immediately wants to know if she’s in trouble.  PBJ monitors but doesn’t engage perps, but, per Logan, Cmdr. Wilkerson isn’t great at following that rule, and often puts herself in danger.  Cmdr. Wilkerson has been with the organization about two years since her teenage niece was raped by an on-line predator.  Logan confirms that Cmdr. Wilkerson was present at the PBJ office the night before, on-line chatting with a target. He shows them the dialogue from the pedo who thought Cmdr. Wilkerson was a 14-year old.  But even PBJ’s best hackers can’t track the guy.  Tony thinks McGee can and asks for PBJ’s servers. 

Ziva is underfoot while McGee works with the PBJ server in Abby’s lab.  She wants to improve her computer skills.  But mostly she’s underfoot.  And actually standing on McGee’s foot at one point. Abby jealously watches McGee and Ziva sitting close and talking from the next room.  Tony eats a sandwich.  Abby plays the bumping sound from Cmdr. Wilkerson’s distress call.  Tony suggests a railroad track, but that’s not quite right.  Tony thinks he heard something else, but Cmdr. Wilkerson’s scream covered it up.  When Abby adjusts the frequencies to downplay the scream, the second sound makes clear that the car passed over a railroad track.  Abby cross-references railroad tracks and there’s only one set crossing a road close enough to the mall to have created the sound.

Ziva reports to Gibbs and works the car’s path.  Tony found some ATM footage and it shows the car passing by.  Tony IDs the make and model, but the plate is blurry.  Gibbs is able to recognize the blurred view of the plate because nine cars were reported stolen this morning from the Fairfax area, including the Mercedes model Tony ID’d.  The team gets moving.

Cmdr. Wilkerson is starting to fade.  The outside view of the car shows it’s still on top of a deserted parking deck.

The team checks in with the owner of the stolen car.  The owner, William Lafferty, last saw the car around 9:00 the night before.  Nobody else has keys to his car and he has been home all morning.  Mr. Lafferty has figured out by the presence of the three feds in his home that somebody used his car in a crime and becomes defensive when Tony starts cross-examining his alibi.  But his only real witnesses are the clown fish he breeds in a nearby acquarium.

Gibbs takes a phone call.  Someone is using Wilkerson’s cell phone and McGee has gotten a fix.  The team pulls into a wooded area and fans out.  It’s two punk kids drinking beer.  They claim they found the phone.  Ziva asks who is on the phone and one of the kids says it’s his girlfriend.  So she picks up the phone and pretends that she’s there fooling around with both boys just to ruin their day.

Tony confirms the phone is Cmdr. Wilkerson’s phone.  The agents have a mini-debate about how culpable these children are and what they know as Gibbs pours out their beer.  And even Ziva has standards so she declines to use her special interrogation techniques on children.  Even if they’re, as Tony points out with some disdain, teenagers.  Gibbs says you don’t interrogate children, you talk to them and moves off towards the kids. 

Back in MTAC, McGee is updating Captain Martino.  The Captain is very confused but thinks Cmdr. Wilkerson’s actions are benign and that her abduction has nothing to do with the fuel rods.  Ever the suspicious one, Ziva wonders if Cmdr. Wilkerson was using the PBJ job to communicate with members of her terrorist cell.  Captain Martino thinks that’s goofy as hell. Gibbs, in an abundance of caution, says the train won’t move until they find the Commander.

Tony continues to interrogate the two punk kids.  He’s terrible with small kids, as we learned in Honor Code, Episode 3.7.  But give him teenagers and he’s in his element.  The kids won’t tell him who gave/sold them the cell phone.  Then, Tony receives a fake phone call at his desk and asks if the genital cuffs and tasers are ready.  He hangs up and then asks if the boys have a history of testicular cancer or high blood pressure and then leaves to go get a drink.  He has subtly left his speaker phone on, however, and he and Ziva, around the corner, listen thorough her phone while the boys freak out and say the name of the guy that gave them the phone.  Ziva also catches one of them saying she’s hot.  And really, she’s a teenage boy’s dream.

McGee is trying to track the pedo Cmdr. Wilkerson was chatting with.  And not having much luck. He gets so frustrated, Abby gives him a timeout by pushing his swivel chair, with him in it, into her office area.  Gibbs arrives and says, “How many times have I told you, he’s not a toy?”  McGee cannot be contained, so he comes out and they complain about being unable to trace through malfunctioning international servers.  But, as Gibbs notes, if they know that the pedo is in Fairfax, and they do, then [technobabble].  

Beavis and Butthead get to go home with their moms.  And McGee traced the pedo’s home address.  And our pedo is Mr. Lafferty, the guy whose Mercedes was stolen. 

The agents raid Lafferty’s house.  The house is clear and Lafferty is in the wind.  He even killed his fish because, per Ziva, he’s such a narcissist taht if he can’t have the fish, nobody can.  The team searches the house.

McGee interrogates Jason Geckler, the kid that gave the phone to Beavis and Butthead.  Geckler is not forthcoming.  So McGee zones in on the fact that Geckler bullies the other boys.  Geckler is proud of it and McGee eggs him on.  McGee says Geckler will forget his victim’s names, but they’ll remember his name their whole lives.  Then McGee gets scary and talks about how he was one of the geeks and he can’t wait to charge Geckler with all sorts of shit that will get him sentenced as an adult.  So Geckler can lay awake at night in prison and remember McGee.  And then he thumps him in the back of the neck, which is a nice touch.  Geckler caves and says he can tell McGee where he found the cell phone.

The agents are driving.  Tony puts out a Bolo on Lafferty.  Ziva says his passport is expired so he can’t leave the country.  McGee calls Gibbs and says Geckler found the cell phone around noon at the mall.  Meaning the kidnapper drove Cmdr. Wilkerson back to where he found her. 

At the mall parking deck, man puts on a ski mask as he emerges onto the roof.  He makes his way over to the parked car and…wait, why would he come back for her at this stage?

It doesn’t matter because Ziva is in the trunk.  And then Tony and Gibbs are there and our perp goes down and it’s…

…Ross Logan from PBJ?

Yup.  He wanted to teach Cmdr. Wilkerson a lesson about engaging with the pedos instead of letting the cops handle it.  Too bad he taught her right into a coma at Bethesda Naval Hospital. 

When the team gets Logan back to interrogation, they think he was working with Lafferty. But no, Logan is the real pedo-hunter deal and hates everything the degenerates stand for.  Lafferty ran from Logan as soon as he was confronted, which is par for the course for these worms in the real world too.  So, Logan figured he could teach Cmdr. Wilkerson a lesson AND frame Lafferty for the kidnapping, which would get Lafferty a stiffer sentence than pedos often get (because of proof issues and witnesses declining to testify and so forth). Logan can’t believe NCIS isn’t letting him go for he is one of the good guys you see.

Sigh.

In the squad room, McGee reports the good news that Cmdr. Wilkerson is out of her coma. And very thirsty.  Everyone is headed home but nobody knows where Gibbs is.  The thought is that he went home already, but Abby says there’s no way Gibbs went home with a pedo on the loose. 

And sure enough, Gibbs is in MTAC, identifying Lafferty in an airport security line and directing a team of federal agencies to tackle him.  Lafferty stares up at the security camera, enraged, and Gibbs smiles, having accomplished two good deeds for the day.

Quotables:

Tony: On the odd chance that I can actually see something traveling at warp speed, what kind of car are we looking for?

Ziva: Lt. Commander Wilkinson drives a 2002 silver Jetta.

Tony: Figures…

Ziva: What figures?

Tony: Chick car.

Ziva: Meaning?

Tony: There are guy cars and there are chick cars. It’s a known and irrefutable fact.

Ziva: Was it a government study?

Tony: It’s just a thing you know, you don’t know how you know it, you just do. Sebring, Liberty, Jetta and Bug; whole VW line are all chick. Mustang, Camaro, Escalade, PT Cruiser: all guy. Hummer is very guy, but with adequacy issues, and then there is some that go both ways.

[Ziva points at a silver car]

Tony: It’s an Accord, not a Jetta. But, case in point, Mini Cooper and Acura follow the same category.

Ziva: You’ve giving this a lot of thought, it’s very sad.

Tony: Then there is the Miata, it’s a special case: Leans to chick, but can go guy, usually means he’s in denial, though. STOP!

Ziva: Gladly, if it means I don’t have to listen to your automobile gender issues.

Ducky Tales: None today.  But we’ll fill the space with our TWO NEW CATEGORIES!

Ziva-propisms: Ziva, asking about Tony’s phone, wants to know, “Do you always keep it in your pants?”  She confuses Gibbs’s question as to whether she’s waiting for an invitation (to join Tony and do some work) with him inviting her to a wedding.  She tells Abby it’s hard to see the jungle for the ferns.  When Logan asks if Mcgee is a good hacker, Ziva says, “Does a bear sit in the woods.”

Tony Awards: Tony references Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.

OK, so it was more moving bits I was already doing into their own categories, but whatever.  It’s still fresh.

The Rest of the Story:

-Rule #3: Never be unreachable.

-It seemed Abby and Ziva’s beef had thawed at the end of Boxed In, Episode 3.13, but things seem frosty at the beginning of this episode.  Ziva is sure trying hard, though.

-After Abby uses a bunch of nonsense conjugations of “thunk,” itself a nonsense word, Tony makes a reference to Dr. Seuss.  I note it simply because it’s Theodore Geisel’s birthday this week, so my kids and kids all over social media are mainlining Dr. Seuss all week.  It seemed fitting to encounter this episode and this reference this week.

-Tony and Ziva both get headslaps, but Ziva’s is not as hard and Tony notices.

-Ziva hates clowns.

-Gibbs drinks some of Abby’s Caf-Pow.  He winces, takes the top off the cup, and spits it back.

-What’s with the claustrophobia theme? Last episode, Tony and Ziva are trapped in a cargo container.  Today, we stuff a Lt. Commander in a car trunk.

-Wonder what made the agents think that somebody would come back for Cmdr. Wilkerson so as to lie in wait?  Did they get Logan’s prints off the trunk or something? Or was it more that the trip away from the mall and then back made more sense as a prank/lesson than an effort to dispose of a witness.

Casting Call: Some young talent in early roles here. Jason Geckler is played by Jesse Plemons, who has had recurring roles in Fargo, Breaking Bad, and Friday Night Lights.  And yes, that is Hollywood heartthrob Zac Efron playing Jason Austin.  

Man, This Show Is Old: Tony compares Cmdr. Wilkerson’s house to Martha Stewart’s jail cell in terms of its neatness.  Martha Stewart went to prison for insider trading in 2004.

While interrogating the two punk kids, Tony refers to one of them as Beavis, from the old Beavis and Butthead show that was popular in the late 90s.

While using Cmdr.Wilkerson’s stolen phone, Beavis and Butthead called a chatline. Remember chatline? I mean, rememebr eharing about other people calling chatlines.

Cmdr. Wilkerson had a handheld camcorder.

MVP: Gibbs.  He stayed late and caught the pedo. He didn’t shoot him, but prison is never good to those people.

Rating: It says a lot about the quality of this season that this episode was pedestrian, comparatively speaking. But it still managed a fun mix of characterization, tension, a last second twist, and the joy of watching a pedo get busted. 

Six Palmers.

Next Time: Uh-oh.  We got dead Marine wives. Who’s stupid enough to kill a Marine’s wife?