Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

There was a brand-new tissue analyzer clunkily named Inductive Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometer.

Very expensive.

There were microwave digestive systems for prepping samples, top-notch chemicals and compounds, high-purity reagents.

All of it was intended to help the military pinpoint toxins, contaminants, and environmental risks that might threaten the nation's soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen.

[buzzer] [door opening] After buzzing through security on that spring day in 2003, the chemist, Todor Todorov, took the elevator down to the basement to his lab, the Department of Environmental and Toxicologic Pathology.

It was there he would spend months analyzing tissue samples that had been harvested from the body of Marine Sergeant Todd Sommer.

The labels on the sample containers he pulled from the freezer indicated this particular marine had died a little more than a year earlier.

However, the labels said nothing about the circumstances.

The chemist did not know the marine had left a wife and four kids behind.

He did not know a lot of NCIS investigators had been left scratching their heads.

One thing he did know was that NCIS wanted Todd Sommer's tissue samples tested for toxins and trace elements.

He had never tested human tissue before, but he was eager to give it a go.