Chapter 1: The Body on the Dock
@Crossover Premise @Teresa Lisbon @Case Opening @NCIS Team
The steam from her coffee cup coiled into the cold, salt-tinged air, a tiny pocket of warmth in the damp, gray world. Teresa Lisbon’s boots thudded on the warped, rain-slicked planks of the dock. The single flickering streetlamp turned everything into a wash of jaundiced yellow and deep shadow. The mist felt like cobwebs against her skin.
Deputy Miller, a kid with a perpetually earnest face, stood sentinel over a shape on the ground. He looked relieved to see her. A uniformed officer was gently steering a lone, shivering fisherman in a thick coat back toward the shorefront.
“Nobody touches anything!”
Her voice, rough with sleep and the hour, cut through the low groan of the water and the distant cry of a gull. It wasn’t a shout, but it carried, a clean, surgical command. The responding officer nodded, his steps quickening. Miller straightened up.
She stopped beside him, taking a long, bitter sip of coffee. The liquid was already cooling. “Who found him?”
“Old Man Frye,” Miller said, hooking a thumb toward the retreating fisherman. “Came to check on his lobster pots. Saw the shoes first, he said. Knew they weren’t driftwood.”
Teresa’s gaze was already past him, cataloging the scene. The body lay supine between two rotting pilings. Male. White. Late twenties. His suit and tie were a grotesque parody against the filthy dock boards.
“Get crime scene tape wider,” she said, her eyes not leaving the body. “I don’t want dock traffic anywhere near this. I want the entire pier sealed, from the streetlamp back to shore. No gawkers. No early joggers. Not the damn coffee cart guy.”
“On it, Chief,” the other officer said, moving off with a roll of yellow tape.
She handed Miller her coffee cup. “Hold this. Don’t drink it. It’s terrible, but it’s mine.”
He took it without a word.
”You and Peters secure the perimeter,” Teresa said, her voice low. “From the streetlamp all the way back to the parking lot access road. No one comes in. I don’t care if it’s the mayor’s cousin. You stand there and you look like a wall.”
“Yes, Chief.”
She watched Miller stride off, already calling to the other officer on his shoulder radio. Then she froze. Her hands flexed at her sides. Empty.
Idiot. Gloves. Bags. Kit. All in the trunk of her sedan. Eighteen months of quiet paperwork had sanded the edge off her routines.
Muttering a curse under her breath, she turned and headed back down the dock, the weathered planks groaning. She passed Miller at the tape line, giving him a tight nod and took her coffee. The cold was seeping through her jacket now, the pre-dawn hour a physical weight. She gulped the last of the tepid, bitter coffee, crumpling the cup in her fist. Stupid. Forgetting a basic kit.
The fog in the parking lot was thicker, swallowing sound. Her car was an island. She popped the trunk, the interior light harsh. She shoved her nitrile gloves in her back pocket along with a handful of bags and her camera, and slammed the trunk shut. The sound echoed, then was eaten by the mist.
Back at the body, she turned on her camera and began to circle, her eyes sweeping the dock boards in an expanding grid. First, the blood—or the lack of it. The dark stain beneath the neck was contained, a soaked-in patch. No major pool. She scanned the pilings, the railings, the nearby crates. No fine mist of arterial spray. No dramatic arcs of cast-off. Just transfer. He hadn’t bled out here.
She crouched, not touching, her gaze level with the body. The way it was propped against the piling was off. It wasn’t the slack collapse of a dumped weight. The feet were angled inward, one heel slightly raised as if caught mid-step. The torso leaned with a weird, almost seated rigidity. If the current had brought him in, he’d be slumped flat, or tangled. This was arranged. Displayed. The killer wanted him found, and soon. She snapped some images from several angles.
Next: the water. She looked for a tideline on the skin, the crisp uniform. The fabric of his trousers was soaked dark from the knees down, clammy-looking. But the front of his jacket, where it would have floated face-up, was only damp in patches. The hair at his temples was wet, but the crown was merely matted with mist. She photographed it all , noting that it looked like someone had hosed him down unevenly. Transport after death. Dumped from a boat, maybe, but not in the water long.
She stood, her knees popping, and shifted her attention to the dock itself. Her camera continued to flash as she found more evidence. She looked for scuffs, fresh scrapes in the centuries of grime. Near the piling, just beyond the body’s feet, she saw it. Not a drag mark, but two parallel streaks, about four feet apart, in the greasy film. Then, a faint, smeared arc. Something with wheels? A dolly? A hand truck?
She moved closer, the beam of her flashlight cutting a stark white circle. There. Between the streaks, a series of short, sharp scrapes in the wood, as if something with a corner had dug in and been twisted. The kind of mark you get when you’re maneuvering a heavy, awkward load and you lose control for a second.
Someone had rolled him here. Positioned him. Stepped back into the fog.
Teresa returned to the body, the cold of the dock seeping through the knees of her trousers as she knelt. She pulled the nitrile gloves from her back pocket, the snap of the latex against her wrists a familiar, grim punctuation. Her world shrank to the space between the pilings.
The man’s hands were secured in front of him with a heavy-duty white zip tie. Not behind. That was important. Restraint from behind is for transport, for kidnapping. Restraint in front is for control. It allows for movement but not effective defense. It suggests conversation. Interrogation. Someone wanted his hands where they could see them, maybe where he could use them to plead. This wasn’t a spontaneous robbery gone wrong. This was a process.
She leaned closer, the beam of her flashlight painting his hands in stark relief. The knuckles on his right hand were scraped raw, flecks of blood and dock grime ground into the broken skin. Defensive wounds, shallow and sharp, traced his left palm and the outside of his forearm—the instinctive, futile block against a downward slash. Several of his fingernails, neat and short, were torn or broken. Not from a fall. From grabbing, clawing at something, someone. Her mind tagged it: possible foreign DNA under there. Hope, in a microscopic form.
Her gaze traveled down. His shoes were black, polished under a layer of grime. Government-issue. The soles were thick, tread aggressive. Standard military footwear. They were coated in a smeared, blackish grease—marine grease, the kind used on winches and davits—and a crisp, gray-white crust of dried salt. But there was more, a gritty, dun-colored mud caked in the grooves. It didn’t match the oily, silty muck of this dock. It was from somewhere else.
She shifted her light to his clothes. A good wool-blend suit, now ruined. A crisp white shirt gone crimson at the collar. No overcoat, no jacket. The air had held a biting chill for three days, a damp cold that seeped into bones. He hadn’t dressed to be outside for long. The fabric of his trousers and sleeve was torn in a few places, rough rips as if caught on a nail or splintered wood. But there were no corresponding stains, no dirt or grease transferred into the tears. The tears happened after the fabric was already dirty, or they were made deliberately, elsewhere. Stage dressing.
Finally, she made herself look at the neck.
The wound was a single, terrible statement. It was clean. No hesitation marks, no ragged sawing. A deep, decisive slash that began just below the left ear and traced a brutal, perfect line across the trachea to end on the right side. The angle was precise, almost surgical. The blade had been sharp, the hand steady, the knowledge of anatomy exact. This wasn’t panic. This wasn’t rage. This was methodology. It was the closing punctuation of an interrogation. An execution.
Her camera whirred and clicked, capturing each detail: the zip-tied wrists, the abraded knuckles, the defensive cuts like pale parentheses on his skin, the broken nails, the coded grime on the standard-issue shoes, the incongruous tears in the expensive cloth. Each shot felt like closing a door, sealing the scene into pixels before the world crashed in.
She took a steadying breath, the air cold in her lungs. With careful fingers, she slid her hand into the inside pocket of his suit jacket. The wool was damp. Her fingertips found the leather. She drew out the wallet.
It was slim, black, worn at the corners. She opened it.
The photo on the laminated ID card was of a younger, smiling version of the pale face beside her. His name was printed beside it. His rank. And across the top, in bold, uncompromising type: UNITED STATES NAVY.
Teresa’s stomach dropped through the dock planks. A cold, heavy certainty settled in its place.
“God damn it.”
The words left her mouth in a cloud of vapor, swallowed by the indifferent fog. She stared at the ID, then at the body, then back at the ID. Eighteen months of quiet. Eighteen months of traffic tickets and petty theft and mediating disputes between neighbors whose goats got loose. Eighteen months of building a wall of mundane paperwork between herself and the world she’d left.
This one body, this Navy officer with his precise death, was a battering ram.
Calling this in wouldn’t just mean a report. It would trigger a protocol. The Navy would be notified. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service would deploy a team. Federal agents with federal jurisdiction and federal curiosity would descend on her town, her crime scene, her life. They would ask questions. They would look at her sealed file and their eyes would narrow with professional, bureaucratic interest.
She closed the wallet, her gloved fingers pressing hard against the leather. She looked at the dead man’s face, the pale skin waxy in the dawn light.
“Why?” she asked the empty air, her voice flat. “Why did you have to pick my town to die in?”