1.12: "My Other Left Foot"

by Sammie

Tony overheard Kate on the phone setting up a date and must've told Abby, because both are asking about her date. He had to cancel because of "surgery" - Tony likes surgery excuse, and Abby is impressed, too. Huh. The date had to PERFORM surgery. Hehe.

A leg belonging to marine was discovered by a junk dealer in Clarksburg, West Virginia. Ok, look. Not everyone in West Virginia is a hick. This is getting a little old. The leg is tattooed.

TONY. I don't get the whole tattoo thing.
KATE. Let me add that to the ever growing list of things you don't get.
TONY. Being stuck with a needle a thousand times for a piece of artwork? No, thank you.
KATE. It's more than artwork, Tony.
TONY. On a woman, maybe.
KATE. What?!
TONY. You know, on a woman. Means she's up for anything.
KATE. [GRINNING] Abby's got tattoos.
TONY. [LAUGHING] No comment.
KATE. Okay, what about me? You think I'm up for anything? [GRINS]
TONY. You don't have a tat.
KATE. And if I did, that would just blow your theory to h-ll now, wouldn't it.
TONY. Okay, say for a minute, I believe you got one. Where is it?
KATE. Nowhere you will ever see.

Abby's using Superglue to lift prints off the leg. Haha...look, dramas like CSI are all good and well and I think I remember seeing them do the same thing with heated, aerated Superglue. But you will NEVER hear a CSI tell how she superglued her brother's head to a helmet and to a beam...and called him Kojak after, y'know, the incident left him...with a shiny pate. I love Abby!

The leg was hacked off post-mortem - death being less than 24 hours before. It's still 'ick'! Tony is trying to guess Kate's tattoo, and she tells him it's a butterfly on her hip. Twenty bucks it ain't. "It's not a butterfly, is it." Very good, Tony!

Gibbs is at the hospital talking to the doctor who put the steel...screw...something into the leg. Leg belongs to PFC Thomas Dorn...who died two years ago. Of a heart attack. At age 22.

No autopsy report - just a death certificate. So Gibbs sends Kate and Tony off to the little town of Harmony, where Dorn died and was cremated.

TONY. What are you so happy about?
KATE. Oh...just looking forward to Harmony.
TONY. You really like small towns?
KATE. Peace and quiet, people who know you by name. No Blockbuster or Starbucks on every corner. What's not to like?
TONY. It's too quiet, everyone knows you by name, and no Blockbuster or Starbucks on every corner.
KATE. A big city just can't give you what small towns can,
TONY. It's a simpler way of life, a slice of Americana.
TONY. Hm, one that doesn't include fifty-yard lines, seats [to?] the Redskins, and women with full sets of teeth.
KATE. It always comes back to that, doesn't it.
TONY. See? You do get me.

The only doctor for forty miles is a little ole lady named Dr. Sylvia Chalmers. She tells them Dorn came in and just got his heart attack right there on the floor. His half-sister Melissa was so distraught she had him cremated immediately.

TONY. It's perfectly normal.
KATE. On a race track, maybe.
TONY. Women will never understand taking a ltitle car ride and trying to beat your best time.
ABBY. I HATE it when men do that.
TONY. See, this is a woman thing.
GIBBS. How did you do?
TONY. Pretty good. Beat my time by four minutes, including construction detours.
GIBBS. In HARMONY.

Gibbs takes Kate with him to see the redhead. Mm. Good idea, Gibbs. You should've taken her when you interviewed that blonde bimbo in "Doppelgänger".

MELISSA DORN. You have any brothers or sisters?
GIBBS. No.
MELISSA DORN. An only child? I figured as much.
GIBBS. Hm. [SMILES AND STRAIGHTENS] How so?
MELISSA DORN. You have all the classic traits of a firstborn. Confident, pays attention to detail, perfectionist. [BEAT] Difficulty sharing.
GIBBS. Guilty guilty guilty. Depends.

Ha. Look at Kate. I think she's as shocked as I - Gibbs is flirting? Huh. He continues his flirting with the redhead - unlike the "Doppelgänger" one where the blonde had me rolling my eyes so much they kept going after the episode was over - this one was kind of funny. Gibbs doesn't like the way cats look at him, he knows Chinese, and he can sample frosting on a cake without leaving a fingerprint. And as gross as this woman turns out to be later, she doesn't seem fake. Just weird.

Kate, however, is unimpressed. She's got the eye-roll going. Hm. One fan once mentioned about Gibbs and the blonde from "Doppelgänger", and how Kate most likely would have seen through Karen Wilkerson's phony innocent act. I agree. Look, a blind and deaf woman would know. It's called female BS meter. With poor McGee distracted by the petty officer who wants to meet Abby, leaving Gibbs to Wilkerson's clutches.... I mean, if Kate thought this redhead was dopey, can't wait to think what she would have done with plastic Barbie.

KATE. You weren't buying any of that, were you?
GIBBS. Any of what?
KATE. You know. Her...charm.
GIBBS. [SMILING] Is it that hard to believe, Kate, that I might be attractive to a woman?
KATE. That's not what I meant.

Kate, unfortunately, hasn't found enough evidence to pin down a warrant, but Gibbs has - he has Abby test a sycamore burr he gets from the tree in Dorn's front yard against the one found on Dorn. Abby says that plant DNA can be matched like human DNA - each one's unique. Gibbs gets her two samples, tells her to run the test twice.

Tony's found that Dorn had a life insurance policy his sister got to collect. Kate figures it out: Dorn and his half-sister fed some sucker digitalis, enough to kill him in Harmony, "that small, CRAPPY town" according to Tony, and then she identified the dead man as her brother, had him cremated, and collected the insurance money...for herself and PFC Dorn. Gibbs sends Kate and Tony to talk to the insurance company.

TONY. C'mon, Kate, you're only going ten miles over the limit!
KATE. And that's pushing it!
TONY. What's the point of being an armed federal agent if you can't drive fast?
KATE. You get to shoot bad guys.
TONY. True.

KATE. You think he could really be attracted to...Melissa?
TONY. You can't help who you're attracted to. The whole Julia Roberts-Lyle Lovett thing proves that. (You're telling me! Ugh.) Billy Joel-Christie Brinkley -
KATE. I get it.
TONY. - Angelina Jolie-Billy Bob Thornton -
KATE. You haven't answered my question!

The insurance company didn't want to play the claim, but the sister threatened to sue, so they paid her - instead of having to pay her some multi-million dollar settlement.

Haha...Gibbs is talking to a Gunny about Dorn. Aha...when Gibbs was with the military police, he tossed the guy into the brig for a week. No hard feelings, though, because Gibbs gave them smoke breaks. He says Gibbs' hair is a little long - "Seen sheepdogs shorter." (Hehe.) Seems Dorn and his half-sister often hung out with a Cpl. Morgan...who went UA the same time Dorn did.

GIBBS. What's wrong?
ABBY. Look at it.
GIBBS. Looks like a match.
ABBY. Precisely.
GIBBS. Good work, Abby.
ABBY. No, it's not! You gave me 2 samples form the same tree. B matched and A didn't. I screwed up.
GIBBS. Sycamore A was from a tree down the street. [OOH! That was MEAN!]
ABBY. What?!
GIBBS. The idea of matching plant DNA was a bit...hinky for me!
ABBY. Oh, ye of little faith!
GIBBS. Abby, c'mon! All I did was give you a blind test!
ABBY. Well, you could've done that by not telling me which sample was from the suspect's sycamore!
GIBBS. I didn't think of that.
ABBY. [whacks him]

Gibbs gets Melissa Dorn to give up fingerprints by a little "give her a glass of water" trick - he gently offers her a cup, she holds it and takes a drink, and he takes it back with gloved hands. Kate shows up with an empty pitcher - he pours the water in and drops the glass into an evidence bag she's holding. Tony's looking over the barn, and when he comes back, he announces that that was where she did her slicin' and dicin'.

HIGHLIGHT BETWEEN ~ FOR THE ENDING: ~ Tony arrives inside the house, and he's not there just a minute before he says definitively that there's someone else in the house - because he SMELLS something off. He looks very suave turning around as he pulls his gun, looking up the stairs!

He and Gibbs find Dr. Chalmers hiding in a closet. Turns out SHE was the one who killed Dorn.... She's Melissa Dorn's biological mother! (Thomas Dorn and Melissa Dorn shared a father.)

Melissa was really in love with Thomas (EW), and she ends up telling the team everything - and her mother slaps her, and I mean, HARD! across the face. Gibbs lies, saying that they traced the digitalis in Dorn's leg to Chalmers using a chemical marker companies put into their batches so they can be tracked. ~

Back at the office, they're getting an update on where the rest of Dorn's body parts were found, scattered around in different dumpsters around the towns.

ABBY. Did you check Hooterville?
TONY. [puzzled] Where's Hooterville?
ABBY. You guys. Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, Hooterville.
KATE. [puzzled shrug]
TONY. I prefer TV shows from this century.
ABBY. Oh c'mon, they're hilarious. When we were in college, we had this drinking game. [Uh-huh...look, NOW Tony is interested, after she mentions drinking games!] And - the - drugs collect in a solvent layer, and that leaves proteins and biological material behind.
KATE. [turns a little, see Gibbs coming and understands Abby's sudden switch] That's great, Abby, I'll make sure to get that in the report.
ABBY. [nods at Kate]
TONY. What report?! Humpty Dumpty isn't all back together yet...Gibbs asks (lightly) whether there are any more tattoos.
TONY. [grinning] Just the rose on Kate's butt.
KATE. [shoots him annoyed look]
GIBBS. It's not a rose. [BEAT]
KATE. [turns to look at Gibbs, then back to Abby and Tony]
TONY. [grinning; bounces his eyebrows at her].
ABBY. [grinning and nodding, rolling back and forth on her feet]
KATE. [nervous chuckle] He doesn't know.
TONY. [Raises a disbelieving eyebrow]
KATE. He's lying, just like he did about the digitalis! [BEAT; Abby and Tony don't reply; turns to Gibbs] Okay, tell them.
GIBBS. [smiling to himself]
KATE. Gibbs!

______________________________________________________________

Crazy Credits

• Bonnie Bartlett (Dr. Sylvia Chalmers) is credited with Harmon for "St. Elsewhere" and "The Deliberate Stranger".

• from LACoroner:
  IMHO, dismembering a body makes it easier to handle and easier to dispose of and less likely to draw attention in a dumpster or landfill. Once you find a body part/portion, you are then faced with the daunting task of trying to associate it with any number of missing person reports or more likely, a missing person report that was never filed....because no one yet knows that the person is missing. If you are lucky enough to live in an area served by multiple jurisdictions, the chance that recoveries are spaced out over a period of time and no one talks to each other is probably in your favor as well. Fingerprints are not always a sure thing...after that, you really need to have some idea who the person/parts might be before you can work toward identifying them. If you live in an area serviced by coyotes, mountain lions and other connoisseurs of carrion, your job may be complicated yet again.

  We had a case involving two found whole legs that in most cases, absent the rest of the body (which never did materialize) would be forever known as a "specimen". Were it not for an unusual condition where a toe overlapped the one next to it and the person filing the MP report having the presence of mind to include it in the MP report, we would not have been able to successfully ID the legs (which we did by taking a pair of the deceased shoes, opening them up and fitting the foot into the impression left by the wearer).

  Forensics is only partially about the "who done it" and in many cases, absent the "who, what, where, when and how" the "who" of the who done it and "why" may never be known.

  In reality, the solve rate for homicides is depressingly low in many large, dense, and busy jurisdictions...so leaving questions unanswered in some cases is a lot more realistic.
   

  Body parts are not unusual finds in this County. We get them sealed in concrete, partially burned, and thrown into the ocean. Scattered skeletal remains aren't unusual either. Even today, finding a Native American burial site is quite common.

  Most of our dismembered bodies were found by dumpster divers who chose to open the plastic bags looking for aluminum, beverage containers and other treasures. Wrapped or unwrapped, this guy was a professional...he would have found the leg... Most "unwrapped" body parts are found on the ground, vacant lots, drainage culverts, etc, probably thrown from a moving vehicle or a vehicle that didn't stop for very long. Some are wrapped...but usually it is either/or. Some bodies are found at the dump when the truck discharges its' load.... And then there are those others...the ones that are never discovered...sealed into landfills for all eternity, forever a missing person....