- The body of a Marine corporal, minus his feet, shows up in the trunk of a junked car; Gibbs and company investigate. Abby and McGee go to Mexico on business; Abby returns with concerns. The gang figure out who killed the Marine and others.
- At an automotive recycling yard the body of a Marine corporal shows up in the trunk of a car; while at the scene Gibbs and the gang see that someone has amputated both feet. Ducky in his shop points out several troubling items, and Tony and Ziva find a troubling cargo inside a truck. Abby goes to Mexico to conduct a class, and McGee goes to protect her; they take the students outside to do some fieldwork, and several locals interfere; Abby makes several discoveries about an old cold case, and she takes action. Meanwhile, Gibbs and the others have figured out who killed the previous victims, but not who killed the last one; then Gibbs finds out who killed the Marine. Abby goes to Gibbs's basement and talks with him from her heart.—DocRushing
- An older man shows his grandson around a junkyard, telling him he's allowed to crush anything on his birthday. The kid picks out a sedan and gets to crunching (after application of goggles and helmet). But the kid wants to know if it hurts...because the car is bleeding.
Ziva comes to work cramming on the Bill of Rights. Tony is random chatting with strangers on a web site, but he keeps getting "nexted," skipped over. He tries the Groucho Marx nose and glasses, just in time for Gibbs to come in for the body of the week.
At the junkyard, the grandfather tells them he checked the car's trunk yesterday and it was empty. Gibbs gives the grandkid his NCIS hat for his birthday.
The victim is Marine Corporal Ray Collins. Duckie expounds on the origins of the word "junk," which used to refer to any random piece of rope found in the sea.
They take the victim out of the trunk and find he's been sized to fit; his feet are cut off.
At the office, they learn he was serving in Afghanistan recently until he was court marshaled for larceny, drug dealing and assault. He had a fancy Ducati and a Harley collection, stuff he shouldn't have been able to afford.
Abby gets a call to go up to the director's office. She stalls, waiting for Gibbs, who arrives shortly. There was tissue under the victim's fingernails and it wasn't in the database, which means the killer isn't military. He was wearing a GPS watch when he was killed. He jogged on base, got food and then spent two hours standing in the middle of the street. Abby's freaked out about meeting with Vance but Gibbs says he's got her back and gives her a mini-Caf-pow, all they had.
In the morgue Duckie says the victim bled to death after his feet were cut off and he had a busted jaw, like he was hit with a pipe. His feet were sawed off. "666" was branded into his head.
Abby goes up to the director's office, trying to guess what she might be in trouble for. But his secretary tells her Alejandro Rivera from the Mexican justice department wants her to speak at a symposium. She'll have an escort. She hopes it's not McGee, but of course it is.
Tony and Ziva check out the location where Collins stood in the middle of the street. There's a truck parked there. They open it up and find a bloody table and several pairs of bloody feet hanging from the ceiling.
In Mexico, McGee is jealous to be missing out on feet stumps and Abby is delighted to see Alejandro the suave again. He's about to invite her to something when McGee interrupts. Then he breaks the bad news that there's only one room for the two of them.
Back at NCIS, the rest of the team examines the feet and the truck. There is bathtub with sulfuric acid residue, indicating the other bodies were dissolved. Tony recognizes motorcycle gang tattoos on the tootsies.
In the classroom, McGee chows down on yogurt, thinking it's good for his digestion. But Abby tells him it's unpasteurized, so he's pretty much toast. She introduces the students to the nearly 20 year old case of a gangland murder that they'll be working on.
One woman stands up and assesses Abby's all-black ensemble, asking who told her the Day of the Dead was in May. In response Abby looks her up and down and announces that the woman has three cats, is vitamin D deficient and is ovulating. She has the class's attention.
Abby says that because there's almost no forensic evidence they're going in the field.
Tony and Ziva walk into a all-chick biker bar where Tony is promptly ignored. The tough woman behind the bar with the snake tattoos asks them to leave, even after he tells a killer is targeting bikers.
The woman ushers them out and follows them. She introduces herself as Velvet Road and says that was a show for her customers. She says Collins was sleeping with "everyone" and thinks a jealous biker boyfriend might have done it.
On a dusty road, Abby lays out the cold case for her students: A drug dealer named Pedro Hernandez left a cafe, got in his vehicle and was shot at point blank range. His truck was abandoned and they're going to examine it.
She looks at the bullet hole and announces the fracture pattern indicates it was from a long range rifle, not point blank (and right about now we start thinking that maybe this is the guy that Gibbs hunted down after his wife and daughter were murdered).
Just then a truck full of tough guys with guns pulls up and their hot female leader tells Abby and the group that they're not going anywhere.
The woman tells them to line up. McGee shows her his ID, offering himself for the students. She's Paola Reinosa, of the Reinosa drug cartel.
Abby tells her what they're up to. Paola knows the case and says Pedro was killed by a sniper on a ridge 1,000 meters away. She says the sniper left a message, and takes out the giant bullet casing she wears around her neck. She gives it to Abby.
And with that, the drug cartel mounts up and drives away.
Back in the morgue, Duckie has found the feet were all salted, which preserves them and helps with odor. The first foot was cut off more than two months ago and all the feet were cut off after death by poisoning.
In their shared room, Abby has a bad feeling about the case.
She and McGee discuss who gets the bed and Abby mentions that Ziva took the couch in Paris, but Tony told McGee that he took the couch. Curious.
Abby packs up her things to go sleep on her lab table after she notices that McGee neglected to use bottled water when brushing his teeth.
Back in the office, Tony tries in vain to keep a stranger talking to him via web cam for more than 10 seconds.
Tony says the jealous biker theory was a dead end. But he sent Collins' photo to sulfuric acid suppliers and they all recognized him. Tony thinks Collins was the serial killer.
Ziva found the killings started just after Collins returned from Afghanistan.
Abby wakes up in her lab in her flannel skull pajamas and gets to work on the sniper's bullet. She looks up news stories about Pedro Hernandez and reads one that makes her say "Oh my God."
She's interrupted by a very concerned Alejandro, who just learned about her trip out yesterday. He sees the bullet and thinks she's making progress, but she tries to downplay it. She asks who assigned her the case. He says someone on his staff. She wants Hernandez' body exhumed and sent back to DC. He agrees and leaves.
She sits back down at the computer and looks again at the article about the murder of Shannon and Kelly Gibbs.
Back at NCIS, McGee comes to work chugging Pepto. Gibbs wants them to go over Collins' background to find out who might have killed him.
Gibbs joins Duckie in the morgue, where he's examining the shriveled corpse of Pedro Hernandez. Palmer tells Gibbs who it is and we see that Gibbs knows him all too well.
We flash back to Gibbs shooting him nearly two decades ago.
While poking around in Pedro's skull, Duckie tells Gibbs that Collins' doesn't have the traits of a serial killer, even if he's sure Collins is the killer. He finds a bullet fragment in Pedro's skull. Gibbs volunteers to bring it to Abby. Duckie notices him acting strangely.
Gibbs visits Abby. She's not her usual perky self and they have an entire separate conversation with just looks as they talk about the serial killer. She asks if he's brought her another tissue sample and simply says no and puts the bullet fragment down.
The feetless victims were killed with the venom of a rare snake found only where Collins was stationed. McGee continues talking about the victims as Abby looks at Gibbs with a pained expression.
They think cutting off the feet is a drug cartel move and Collins' must have been killing for hire, which would explain why his psychology didn't seem like a serial killer's to Duckie.
McGee and Tony observe the tough biker chick bartender in interrogation. McGee admits he programmed Tony's computer to jump him out of chats after 10 seconds, to get back at him for making him fall in love with a fake woman online last year.
Gibbs talks to the biker bartender, who's wearing a "666" ring just like the mark found on Collins' skull. He tells her about the DNA under Collins' fingernails.
She says Collins tried to kill her with snake venom, but she's immune. She has two pythons and a cobra and has been bit many times. She says she came home two nights ago and had a drink then woke up in the truck the next day with Collins. She whacked him with a pipe but didn't mean to kill him. She didn't think anyone would buy self defense because he was killing her dealers.
She thinks the Reinosa cartel hired Collins to kill her dealers.
Later, Abby drops by Gibbs' basement. She wants to talk, he acts nonchalant. She turns to go, but he asks why she's there. She says he knows. She tells him she matched the bullet and knows he killed Pedro in cold blood. "Gibbs doesn't do things like that," she tells him.
She says she doesn't know what to think, except that she didn't find it out by accident. He cites Rule 40: "If it seems like someone is out to get you, they are."
She asks him if he understands the situation she's in and the choice she has to make. He does. She wants him to tell her she's wrong or made a mistake with her ID. But he says he can't.
So instead she asks him to to tell her how much he loves her and how she's like a daughter to him.
"Will that help?" he asks.
"No," she says. "What I really need to know, Gibbs, is if you're gonna love me, no matter what."
He looks at her for a while, but leaves the question unanswered. Guess we'll find out.
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