Back at NCIS headquarters, agent Krieger makes herself at home and exchanges information with Gibbs’ team. McGee points out that he cannot find any record of Marvin Hinton and Krieger informs him he won’t. While prison mates at Cumberland penitentiary attest to Hinton’s incarceration in prison, all subsequent signs of him have disappeared. The FBI has had to literally assemble the man’s life manually. Krieger tells McGee that Hinton goes occasionally went by the alias Frederick LeClair, who is pulled up as Hinton on the computer revealing a lengthy criminal past.

As the crow flies, the FBI has had Hinton on their collective radar because his identity had been so thoroughly erased, indicating that a specialist in such identity reassignment was operating in the area and the Bureau was interested in finding said eraser. Krieger admits that she was just babysitting Hinton while the Bureau did its thing and he was murdered. Ziva reacts coldly to the FBI agent and her revelation while DiNozzo dutifully holds her hand. The renewed sexual tension between Ziva and DiNozzo is apparent and developed too soon after the exit of Jeanne Benoit. Krieger acts as sliding pitch in the two NCIS agents' developing relationship.

Krieger takes the team to the safe house where she was holding Hinton; the team collects evidence and identifies copious and conspicuous bodily fluids on the sheets of the bed as well as mercury. The team declares the safe house to be the murder scene. The scene breaks to Abby’s lab where all of the evidence is taken for her analysis. Abby is quite taken with the jail-house tattoo on the deceased. She senses that this is a breakthrough clue but cannot decipher its secrets. Additionally, Abby identifies the presence of hair from six different women. Up in headquarters, Krieger shows DiNozzo and Ziva pictures of all of Hinton’s contacts, all women. During an interlude, Ziva, with McGee, begins to suspect Krieger as the eraser and searches her purse for hair samples from Krieger’s brush to match to Abby’s samples. McGee and Ziva discuss the pros and cons of Krieger, McGee defending her as being new to the job and Ziva noting that Gibbs dislikes her when McGee notes that it appears DiNozzo is fond of her. Ziva’s face says it all, but there remains something askew in the Ziva-DiNozzo love angle. Things are just not quite fitting.

Gibbs goes to Fornell’s office to discuss the case and specifically Agent Krieger, ultimately revealing Krieger’s novice mistakes in reporting to her superiors (via email rather than immediately by phone). Fornell reveals that what Krieger was working on was an identity-modifying mastermind named Kamal Konkani. Gibbs and Fornell bring this information to the attention of NCIS Director Jenny Shepard (Lauren Holly) and the team has a meeting in the director’s AV room. Krieger notes the presence of her superior with fear and Fornell proceeds to brief the group on the identity and activities of Kamal Konkani, who is thought to be a Pakistani national reared in India and England. Konkani made his name working with international terrorists and was partly responsible for several notable terrorist attacks. No country’s intelligence community has ever photographed the phantom Konkani who apparently has taken refuge in the United States in the DC area, plying his trade as an identification reassignment specialist, his true talent making people’s pasts disappear. These are handy aptitudes to have when working in the terrorism area.