While at a highbrow social function honoring the retiring Secretary of Defense (who looks suspiciously like Donald Rumsfeld) held at a local DC hotel, NCIS Director Jenny Shepard (Lauren Holly) is nearly hit by the falling body of a veteran Marine, Sgt. Ryan Wright. Shepard informs Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs (Mark Harmon) that congressional aide Andy Nelson (Jonathan Woodward), who works for Congressman Frank Getz (Ned Schmidtke), encountered Wright, providing Gibbs with his first witness. Gibbs questions Nelson, who reveals that he was attacked by Wright while on the sixth floor delivering some papers to a congressional subcontractor. During the questioning, the congressman spins the incident as a damaged veteran committing suicide. Gibbs bristles.
While inspecting the dead Marine’s possessions, Dr. "Ducky" Mallard (David McCallum) discovers Wright was missing a shoe, had no wallet, but did have a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart with two Marine Stars, indicating that Wright was a recognized soldier if not a war hero. This steels Gibbs in defending Wright as a plot unfolds pointing in Wright's direction as an antagonist.
Back at NCIS headquarters, Special Agent Anthony DiNozzo (Michael Weatherly) reports Wright was not formally registered at the hotel. McGee obtains Wright’s medical records which indicate he was on medical leave for the past four months after serious shrapnel wounds to his head, but had not been seen by VA medical officials for the past three weeks. Gibbs’ patience with the poor treatment of this fellow Marine intensifies when discovering Wright was homeless, living hand to mouth.
Gibbs reasons that perhaps Wright was staying at the hotel all along. Gibbs and McGee return to the hotel to find a maintenance man, Luis Romero (Francesco Quinn, actor Anthony Quinn’s son), who was a former Marine (the only one on staff at the hotel) and who admitted to allowing Wright, in the Marine fashion of always helping another Marine, to stay in rooms undergoing repair. While Romero shows Gibbs and McGee the room Wright was using, he receives a frantic call from the house staff that has discovered the dead body of a young Southeast Asian woman apparently strangled.
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