It helped a lot that the body lying on the floor wasn't Harry.
Harry had never looked like that. So used, so old. Wadded up and thrown away.
Lines and cracks had etched themselves into the man's face in blood and sweat, adding ten years of undeserved pain and experience in a single moment. Both of his eyes were surrounded by dark bruising, extending all the way down his right cheekbone to his jaw. His sandy hair was starched with blood, and lying in matted tangles against the ground. A night wind had sent dirt and gravel over him, mixing in with the blood like glitter. Shimmer and shine.
It was almost enough to make his face unidentifiable, but the fresh bruises and sticky maroon layer of blood couldn't hide his features or the open, staring hazel eyes, locked vacantly into a meaningless expression. If it weren't for the hideous Hawaiian shirt fluid-plastered to the man's chest, Burley wouldn't have even trusted himself to provide an accurate I.D.
"You don't have to be here for this." Gibbs' voice sounded oddly distant and comforting.
Burley stood from his squatting position next to the body. "Yes, I do. It's a requirement for any active duty agent on a team." His words were official and emotionless, as if read straight from a textbook. He was white-lipped and looked colder than stone, moving around the body with his camera and snapping away at every minute feature. A dark purple-grey footprint on the chest. A dirty, bloody gash across the temple. Shards of glass littered around the fingers.
Behind him, Burley heard the desperate wretching sounds of a probationary agent throwing up. He felt his own stomach shift, and he wished that he would throw up or cry or something, anything - - but his eyes stayed dry and the initial wave of nausea passed and he lifted the camera lens to his eye and - - click. He had too many years of training, had seen too many decompositions for a recent death to make him queasy, however messy it was, and he'd spent too long trying to be Gibbs to cry: his emotions were like strangers swimming around in his head. They moved through him, sobbing, or just standing motionless in shock, and he watched them, and felt for them, but he wasn't them.
Tony could only imagine what it was like to be processing a friend. Carefully selecting and magnifying every detail of their body that made them eligible to be "dead". He knelt onto the uncomfortable, stony asphalt and snapped a photo of the way Harry's Hawaiian shirt had been pushed up around his chest. He shot his bare and bloody stomach, zooming in on each of the three awkwardly broken ribs. He framed his rugged, stubbled chin with his camera and shot those glassy brown eyes and pinkish lips twice, making sure that the angle was enough to catch the bruises on his neck. Tony looked down at the body again and took another picture, no longer sure what he was capturing but hoping to record a little of this senselessness, giving in to one blurry photo out of an otherwise perfect roll.
As if by silent agreement with Burley, Tony was the one who shot the gluey cerise pool that had formed on Harry's chest. The gunshot wound was about four inches below Harry's left collarbone. Straight through his vitals. It was a through and through, and Tony could see McGee out of the corner of his eye collecting the bullet fragments from the cement wall above him. The blood from the puncture was thicker and darker than that on his face and arms. It was blood from the heart, sticky and clotting and oozing serum, scarlet staining the bright orange sunset on his shirt and turning the rich emerald palm leaves a murky shade of brown.
Gibbs hadn't wanted Burley there at the crime scene. He didn't want an agent staring blankly at a corpse, disregarding instructions and ignoring evidence, taking up space and distracting his other investigators with pained expressions of remorse and guilt.
But it seemed that Burley's firm determination not to be affected by Harry's bloodied corpse was turning the agent into a colder, more methodical, crime scene analyser. He wasn't ignoring crime scene procedure. He wasn't ignoring trace evidence. He wasn't even ignoring the body itself. In fact, he was picking up on more than the rest of the team were together, unwavering in his objective focus. It was as if he'd temporarily forgotten who Harrison Burke was, momentarily blocking him from memory. His face, his body, his clothes. Stan Burley had never befriended the man lying dead in the alleyway behind Club Neon.
"You want to tell me about the body, Duck?" Gibbs said, finally tearing his eyes away from the agent.
Ducky squatted down, his hands folded over his knees. "Nothing you haven't seen, unfortunately. I expect the cause of death to be fairly straightforward. Our young man was shot once through his chest, probably perforating both his left lung and heart."
"And the bruising?"
"There are at least three sets of footprints on the body. I'd postulate a guess at a group mugging. It may well have been random."
They both knew all too well what it would mean if the case turned out to have been one unconnected to a motive. Random meant that they would have no place to start looking, and that they would likely finish without having found anything. They were working in the dark. His least favourite method of operations.
"It wasn't random, Gibbs. I can tell you that much," Burley said, not taking his eyes from behind his camera. "And it wasn't a gang kill."
Gibbs turned to him.
"He was shot, Gibbs. Harry isn't the kind of guy who would've deserved to be, but he was the kind of guy who easily could be if he pushed a particular someone the right way." Burley ducked his head behind his camera once more and - - click.
Gibbs was silent for a moment. The narrowed eyes told him everything he needed to know: the kid was concentrating. Good. The sudden tension in the shoulders told him something more important: Burley was angry. At least it was better than sorrowful.
"Any estimate time of death, Ducky?" Gibbs asked, turning back to his M.E..
Ducky's words caught in his throat. He hesitated, feeling clumsy and stupid, the words slipping away from him as he looked desperately at Stan. He knew Gibbs wanted Burley with him for this case because he knew the victim, but he hadn't believed that the boy would be so disconnected in his aid. He watched Stan's eyes move across Gibbs' face and then down to Lieutenant Burke's cadaver, implacable and cold. That was how they were, then. This was what happened when it didn't happen to someone else. His own despondency nudged at him, but Stan's was a maelstrom that pulled it from underneath his skin to be devoured. They had never taught him - - and he had never learned - - a platitude for this.
"From liver temperature, we estimate a little over thirty hours. I'd presume that Lieutenant Burke was killed late Friday night or early yesterday morning."
Gibbs nodded slightly.
"McGee, bag the rest of the samples and get them back to Abby. DiNozzo, Kate, I want you interviewing every single person that knew him, anyone's who's heard of him or anyone who even saw him yesterday. Start with the family. Burley, you're with me."
The team made a move to carry out Gibbs' orders.
Burley packed away his Nixon and removed his gloves, before moving to stand beside Harry's body.
Ducky let Palmer pass with a body bag and kit and Burley felt him suddenly standing too close. Ducky knew that he'd been quiet for too long, but he still couldn't summon the comforting words that seemed always readily available for strangers. He could only think to tell his old friend what he knew.
"His death was instant, Stan. He didn't pass in pain," Ducky said, touching a hand to the young agent's shoulder.
Burley turned to him with ice in his eyes. "Unless you call three broken ribs and four knife slices to the torso painless, Ducky, I beg to differ." He turned, letting Ducky's hand fall limply from his shoulder.
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