ncis
smoked (10/24)

Continuing this evening is the fourth season of the hit drama series following a team of special agents who investigate Navy and Marine Corps-related crimes. Tonight, the team struggles to identify a mummified corpse found lodged in a chimney on a naval base. The case takes a sinister turn when a pair of FBI agents arrive and inform Gibbs that the dead man was wanted for the deaths of 14 women over a 12-year period.

Gibbs and the gang have a mystery on their hands when they are called to a marine base where a mummified body has dropped out of a chimney. Builders discovered the body while working at the base’s high school. Ducky reports that the corpse was almost perfectly preserved by smoke from the furnace. “He was quite literally smoked inside that chimney... like a fine cut of meat,” he says.

Ducky suggests the man may have died five to six years ago, and Abby finds a match to the victim’s fingerprints in the national criminal database – only to discover the record is being deleted by another user. “Looks like some agency doesn’t want us to know who your mummy is, Gibbs,” she tells him.

The team soon realises who deleted the file when a pair of FBI agents arrive and attempt to seize control of the case. Special Agent TC Fornell (Joe Spano, ‘NYPD Blue’, ‘Hill Street Blues’) and his partner, Ron Sacks, tell Gibbs that they believe the man is a serial killer who preyed on women. “Fourteen kills – all of them drugged, strangled, left to rot,” Fornell says. The killer’s trademark was to gnaw off the toes of his victims’ left feet – a trait that may explain the severed digit found in the mummy’s stomach.

Gibbs and Fornell agree to work together, and Abby soon provides a breakthrough when her imaging software reconstructs the mummy’s face and matches it to that of a missing person. The dead man is Charles Bright, a building inspector who disappeared five years ago.

When Gibbs and Fornell visit Bright’s widow, Karen, they are shocked to find she bears a likeness to his victims. “A loving husband, murdering and eating women who looked like his wife,” Gibbs muses. A search of the Bright family’s backyard soon unearths four more bodies, and Abby sets about identifying them and establishing their time of death.

Meanwhile, the question remains: how did Bright end up in the chimney? Ducky thinks he has found the smoking gun when he reveals that Bright was stabbed repeatedly by an object resembling a screwdriver. “Somebody killed your serial killer,” Gibbs tells Fornell. Ducky thinks the killer must have been somebody that Bright knew. “How else would someone get close enough to him to stab him to death with a screwdriver?” he asks.

Tony searches for people who had access to the high school at the time Bright disappeared and discovers that Karen Bright worked there as a substitute teacher. The distraught widow is grilled by Gibbs and forced to reveal her terrible secret. “That thing was not my husband,” she whispers. “It had to be stopped!” Have Gibbs and his team smoked out Bright’s killer, or is there more to the case than meets the eye?

Also this week, the gory details of the serial killer’s deeds take their toll on the NCIS crew. Tony turns to his lover for solace, Abby makes friends with a diminutive botanist, and Ziva urges Ducky to patch up his friendship with Gibbs, which has suffered ever since Gibbs’s brief retirement. “You need to cut the guy some slacks,” the idiomatically-challenged agent says. Plus, McGee discovers that his colleagues are less than happy with the way he has portrayed them in his thinly disguised novel about NCIS.