Last night’s NCIS opened during a Halloween party. Kids are having fun and one runs up to a man reading a paper to pretend to arrest him for being a bandit. Right after the kid runs off, the man is shot and killed.
At the office, Ellie is eating a burrito that was named after her and Tony teases her about stress eating, especially since the burrito has a lot of ingredients in it. Ellie mentions Jake is away once again on a “need to know” assignment. They go to the bullpen, where Delilah and Tim are arguing. They have decided to move in together and Tim is having a hard time letting go of his things. Tony and Ellie are surprised when they begin arguing in binary. Gibbs interrupts to tell them they have a case and he tells Tim to compromise.
The victim is Petty Officer Adam Meyers and they conclude he was shot from a distance and think it is possible it could be the Tri-State sniper that the city has been dealing with. Tony talks to Lieutenant Rossmore, who is a friend of Adam’s that he had been visiting. They talk for a few moments before Tony shakes his hand at the end of their interview.
Tim and Ellie go to look for where the sniper’s nest could be. Ellie begins to step into some bushes when Tim realizes it’s poison oak. He avoids going in where she is, not wanting to get poison oak for a third time and have Tony give him grief. He gives her gloves and tells her they will need to get rid of their clothes to be safe. Once she puts on gloves, Ellie locates a shell casing and then they see a target, which is the sniper’s signature.
Back at the office, Tony, who begins to scratch his neck, teases Tim about a box of items he had been hiding after telling Delilah he had tossed them out. Tony takes out the items to find toys Tim played with as a kid, including an easy bake oven. When he finds a VHS tape of a dance recital, he tells Tim it is creepy to keep his sister’s recitals, only to discover Tim is the one in the videos, having been a tap dancer as a kid. A delighted Tony tries to find a VCR, but Gibbs comes in.
Ellie gives Gibbs information on Adam, who was once stationed on the U.S.S. Camden. She also tells Gibbs Metro Police would not give them much information over the phone about the sniper. Plus, Meyers’ sister, Farrah, is on her way. Gibbs sends them all to do different jobs, including Timmy the Tapper.
Ducky gives Gibbs the results of the autopsy. The gunshot wound had killed him, and just a few days prior, Adam had been involved in a fight that caused him to get his tooth fixed.
Tim talks to Adam’s distraught sister. She is heartbroken to find out what happened to him and doesn’t know who would want to kill him. Tearfully, she asks what will happen to her since Adam was her only family.
Ellie and Tony wait to talk to Metro. As she waits, Ellie is texting contacts at the NSA since there are talks of a terror attack in the same place she was able to find out that Jake is. When they are able to talk to a detective, they discover Franklin Reeves has been arrested for being the sniper. But when they find out what time he was arrested and how far away he was when he was captured, they realize he is not Adam’s killer.
Gibbs goes to see Abby, who plays a pumpkin trick or treat game with him in order for him to get the information he wants. When he successfully finds the ballistics evidence, Abby tells him the bullet used to kill the sniper’s victims was a different caliber than the one used on Adam. Plus, the target was a perfect copy of the other targets and since it had been put in the papers, it was easy to recreate.
Up in Vance’s office, Gibbs meets with Agent Maureen Cabot, who he had worked with once before on a sexual assault case. When he finds out his case may be connected, he is curious to know how. A former Ensigh named Ashley Ryan had committed suicide almost two weeks earlier and Adam Meyers had confessed to video taping her and another officer two years earlier while they were naked.
Captain Ebakkey from the U.S.S. Camden is on videoconference with Vance, Cabot, and Gibbs. He tells them the circumstances of what happened surrounding the video recording and how Meyers had been punished, which wasn’t much of a punishment at the time since it was before things had changed regarding sexual crimes. He tells them Petty Officer Peter Woodruff had turned Meyers in after his confession.
Tim and Tony go to interview Woodruff. Tim is annoyed about Delilah wanting to get rid of his couch while Tony is beginning to scratch himself even more. Woodruff tells him the Captain said to cooperate and he tells the agents his job had been to guide Meyers after what happened. They find out that the other victim of the video recording was Lieutenant Kara Giffords.
Gibbs and Cabot go to talk to Kara, who still harbors anger and resentment over Meyers. She makes no bones about being glad he’s dead, but swears she had not seen him in two years.
Delilah, Abby, and Ellie all work together, which thrills Abby to no end as she feels they are all cyber specialists in different ways. They have information that the camera Meyers bought was sold by Howard Falcanio and need to talk to him. Delilah is confused about Meyers being tech savvy enough to work with the video camera because he was running an old computer and he had a flip phone, something Ellie notes would not be used by someone who was tech savvy. Ellie is interrupted when she gets a notification on her phone.
The notification sends Ellie to MTAC, where footage of a hotel bombing in Dubai stops her. She informs Gibbs that Jake was supposed to be at that hotel. Gibbs tells her to go home, but she refuses, not wanting to get a “we regret to inform” call.
Tim tries to get information on Jake from NSA, but no one will talk to him. He asks Delilah if she can talk to her contacts from Dubai and she is quick to insist. They stop for a moment to make up, realizing how silly it was to be arguing about the move. Tony comes in, still itching like crazy but blaming it on how his dad ironed his shirts. He tells Tim and Delilah a witness saw a woman punch Meyers a few days earlier. The witness got a license plate and it came back to Kara Giffords.
Gibbs and Cabot talk to Kara, who admits she was reluctant to admit what happened because she didn’t want to get in trouble and have Meyers take one more thing from her. She tells them that Adam had come to Ashley’s funeral and it made Kara angry. She went there to confront him and he told her he wanted to make things right. Kara had punched him and thought she would feel better, but it actually didn’t.
Tim goes to MTAC to see Ellie. He tries to keep positive, but she rebukes him, telling him she only wants facts. After a beat, Tim sits beside her and tells her he knows what she’s feeling since he had gone through it at the gala the night Benham Parson used a drone attack that paralyzed Delilah. Tim had gone through all the same emotions, but the one thing that was constant was his team being there. He tells her the same is true for her and that her family is there. Ellie thanks him in binary.
Abby tells Gibbs that around the time of the video incident, $15,000 had been deposited into the joint account shared by Farrah and Adam. She had traced the money to a law firm known as Whitman and Roe. Gibbs is interrupted by a phone call from Ducky about Tony.
Tony is lying on a metal slab and his entire body is covered in rash. Ducky confirms he has poison oak, which delights Tim to no end. He takes photos of Tony and tells him that being on the other side of having poison oak is actually fun. Ducky mentions it is likely the killer has poison oak if they didn’t know about it like Tony, but he tells them he was only doing interviews. When asked if he touched anyone, he remembers shaking Rossmore’s hand.
Tim and Tony interview Rossmore. He denies having anything to do with the murder and tells them he got poison oak from going on a run. When he discovers a sniper was not the one responsible for killing Meyers, he tells them about an incident two years earlier when Farrah had been arrested for possession. Adam was willing to do anything to help his sister and needed a top lawyer. Then just days later, he had confessed to the video recording.
Delilah is in MTAC with Ellie discussing how her contacts are working as Ellie is going through pictures on the monitor. She mentions the word macaroon and how it was a silly thing she did with Jake as they left for work in the morning. Ellie sees a particular photo and stops as she looks in the background. A man is getting into a Taxi and Ellie is pretty sure it is Jake. Delilah is able to get footage from the Taxi’s camera and they figure out it is Jake and he had left the hotel just seven minutes before the explosion.
Ducky and Gibbs talk about Meyers and how dedicated he was to his sister, plus what kind of person he was. It’s beginning to look like they are unsure if Adam had any part in the video recording at all. He also tells Gibbs that the person who did the recording only recorded the two women and not all of the women who were on the U.S.S. Camden. Ducky feels the person responsible likely was someone who was a subordinate who didn’t enjoy orders from women.
Tim and Tony talk about trying to go through the list of suspects from the ship, but Tim has been unable to find anything so far. Ellie comes down to help them and tells her team that she was able to get a hold of Falcanio, who told her who had purchased his camera when he put it up for sale. The buyer was Peter Woodruff and Tim pulls up his information to find that he had been denied twice to get into the Navy’s Commissioning Program.
Captain Ebakkey meets with Woodruff and plays him as though he knows what Woodruff did and wants to help. He is able to get Woodruff to confess not only to the video recording, but to killing Adam when he wanted to settle things and admit what really happened. He gets this all on tape so Gibbs and Cabot are able to arrest him.
Tim gives Tony calamine lotion, which makes Tony extremely happy. He tells Tim he needs help putting some on since there are places he can’t reach. A reluctant Tim begins to take gloves Tony is offering when Ellie comes in on her phone. When she hangs up, she tells them that Jake will be home in a week. Tim gives her a gift Abby had made for her, which she was working on earlier in the episode for both Ellie and Delilah. Tony tells Tim they have to go since they have a night out with lotion and rubber gloves. Tim tells Ellie not to ask and leaves.
Ellie fiddles with her wedding ring as she looks at the ring that Abby made for her. After putting it in her desk, she goes to the elevator to see Gibbs. He was looking for her and they get inside together. Ellie stops the elevator and tells Gibbs how close she came to losing Jake. He hugs her to comfort her as tears run down her face.