We open NCIS season 24, episode 4, in the bar as a man named Vince arrives to collect an envelope of cash from the bar’s owner. After pressing the man about being short on his payment, Vince heads to the bathroom, where he’s attacked and killed by a man who turns out to be Torres.
We return to the present day, where Torres and Knight are ribbing McGee about the looming promotion to SecNav. We learn he met with SecNav, who is apparently vetting him as a possible replacement for when her tour ends in two years. He’s definitely excited about the possibility of becoming SecNav, which could be quite a life-changing opportunity for him.
The team rolls out to the crime scene where a body has been found burned in a car, and Tony crashes the crime scene on his way to golf with a well-connected potential donor. The victim seems to have been killed before being put into the trunk of the car and their body burned to eliminate evidence. That’s when things take another turn as a hit comes in revealing that the car was registered to a man named Dante Navarro, who happened to be one of Torres’s old undercover aliases.
Dante was a hitman persona that Torres retired for good when he made his way to NCIS, but the question is why someone resurrected the old alias. Torres notes that there are only two people who knew about his alias: him and his former handler, Walt Keller (guest star Mike O’Malley). As Parker makes it clear they need to track him down, it becomes apparent that he and Torres didn’t exactly part on the best of terms.
Down in the lab, Jimmy has gotten a match on the victim via dental records, a paralegal named Mandy DuBrow with no criminal record. Palmer’s early inspection of the body also indicates that she was strangled using some sort of sharp wire, like a garrote wire—aka Torres’ alias’s weapon of choice.
McGee drops in to check on Kasie, who has found that the name Dante Navarro has come up in connection with several unsolved murders from the last two years. The killings seem to be unrelated, but one victim got a message from a burner phone right before his death warning him that Dante was looking for him and asking about Grace.
Torres' past comes back to haunt him
Torres is able to track down his old handler and heads up to his cabin with Knight to speak with him. As they prepare to speak with him, Torres warns Knight that Keller is a little rough and likes to push buttons. While he taught Torres everything he knew about undercover work, Torres isn’t the same guy he was back then, and Keller has struggled to accept that. When the pair reaches the door, Torres prepares to knock, but the door is unlocked, and they enter the room to find Keller lying on the ground. Only he’s not dead; he was playing possum as one of his old tricks.
Keller reminisces about how much of a great team they were until Torres left him to join NCIS, as Torres informs him that someone is using Dante Navarro to kill people. The news shocks Keller, who notes that he burned the identity personally after they were through with it, noting that the only copy is on a secure federal network somewhere.
Knight shows him the list of people. Dante has killed, hoping he can identify a pattern, and Keller notes that there’s a good reason they can’t figure out the pattern: these aren’t the victims’ real names; they’ve been changed, as these names are all connected to Cimino. Sergio Cimino was the head of a Baltimore crime family connected to an old case in which Torres went undercover as Dante to infiltrate the family and build a case that put the family away for life. Each of their victims worked for the family in some capacity and offered sealed testimony in the trial. The question becomes why take out the B team now and why use Torres’ alias to kill them all?
Tony notes that the killer is using the alias to invoke fear, as the name itself has become the weapon. Turns out Tony and Keller go back as they crossed paths back in the day as Tony encourages them to pull all the case files on Cimino as Torres notes they need to warn his informant, Ray, the bar owner who was put in witness protection. Keller notes he’s already put a call out to Ray and a bunch of their CIs to give them a heads-up.
Jimmy drops in on Kasie, and she’s a bit shaken listening to Torres’ old wires as he sounds so different. Jimmy notes that he was undercover, but she remarks that it all feels so real as she cues up a recording and we flash back to a conversation between Torres and a man named Mikey. He stabs Mikey in the hand and presses him about stealing from Cimino as Mikey admits to stealing the money for Johnny Russo, who said the money was going to Grace. Jimmy and Kasie are both shocked by the audio, which proved Torres was actually torturing the guy, as Kasie realizes that the man said "Grace," which was the same name in the text. Keller brushes it off as nothing but a coincidence as he offers to take them to see Mikey, who has recently been released from prison.
Keller and Torres head out to meet with Mikey, and he tries to recruit Torres to return to undercover work, but Torres turns down the offer. Mikey spots them and runs off, but Torres is able to catch him. He asks for Mikey’s help as he shows him the injury to his hand, which severed his tendons and left him unable to use the hand. Keller presses him, and Mikey admits to stealing over $10 million from Cimino with help from a partner. Grace wasn’t a person, though; it was the name of the boat where they kept the money. As Torres presses him for information on the partner, Mikey is killed and another woman shot, allowing the shooter to get away.
Back at NCIS, Torres and Keller regroup with Parker and the rest of the team as Parker informs them that while the woman injured at the scene is going to be fine, Mikey is dead. The shooter is in the wind, as Keller calls Torres out for letting the killer get away. Tony shuts the fight down as Parker notes that the person impersonating Dante is looking for the money.
The team found a bookkeeper with a connection with the Cimino family who hasn’t reported for work in several days and is the team’s best shot at finding Dante. After breaking from the briefing, Torres confronts Keller for his behavior as Keller calls Torres weak. He claims that NCIS has turned Torres into a house cat and that the danger he felt while undercover was the high that he craved. Torres is adamant that all the stuff he did in the past was never him; they were part of his cover, as Keller quips that Dante is the real him and Nick Torres is the real cover. As Keller lays his hands on Torres, Torres pulls his gun on Keller, to which he quips, “There he is; I knew you were in there somewhere,” as Torres backs down and walks away.
Out in the bullpen, McGee hasn’t had any luck in finding a clue to help lead them to the bookkeeper, and Knight’s interview with the bookkeeper’s wife wasn’t much help. As McGee continues digging in, he notices several bakery receipts for a place named Sugar Buns, an adult erotic bakery. Given Knight suggested the bookkeeper and his wife were heading towards divorce, it’s clear he wasn’t buying the cakes for her, so who was he buying them for?
We put a pin in that question as we head down to the lab where Parker finds Torres. Parker encourages Torres not to let Keller get to him, as Torres admits that he did some horrible things in his past, which he justified as being done in the line of duty, but he was always troubled by how much he enjoyed it and the feeling it gave him. Parker reminds him he had to go to those places to do the job, and they all have darkness in them as they get a ping from Knight, who has found the bookkeeper.
McGee and Knight sit down with the bookkeeper to question him, and he admits to being in hiding as Knight notes it’ll be hard to protect him from himself. The bullet that killed Mikey was the same make and model of rifle that the bookkeeper owns. He admits that there is no money, as he had to give it all away, as a federal agent offered him a deal: $10 million for full immunity. The agent’s name was Bob Graves, a name that immediately caught Torres’ attention as he informed Tony they needed to send agents to his cabin right away, as the alias was one that Keller used back in the day. Tony isn’t surprised by the revelation, as he had been tailing Keller and found that he had been ducking out at odd hours and making calls on a burner phone. He played them, and now he’s on the run.
With Keller in the wind, the team quickly begins working to track him down. McGee was able to confirm that the bookkeeper withdrew $10 million from his account 13 years ago, but Kasie is still working on tracking down where the money went. Torres is convinced Keller is the dirty one, as they point out that Keller was with Torres when Mikey was killed, and therefore he can’t be the murderer.
Kasie was able to track the money to an offshore account, but she’s still not been able to figure out the account’s owner. What she has found is that someone has been making monthly transfers to a custodial account for an eight-year-old girl, Sasha Norris. Torres seems to immediately recognize the woman and excuses himself, heading out to the bar from the very beginning of the episode.
Torres makes an unexpected decision that has us questioning his NCIS future
Inside, he finds Keller, who informs Torres that he shouldn’t be here. Torres pieced together that Sasha was Ray’s daughter, and she’s the one who has been killing under the name Dante to get revenge for her family. Turns out Ray and his family are all dead, as the Ciminos had him and his family killed years ago after they found out he testified against them. Sasha survived as she was hiding under the bed, but she saw the whole thing. Keller confesses to stealing the $10 million and giving it to her monthly, but he’s not come here to kill her but to arrest him.
As they’re talking, Sasha arrives and shoots Keller as Torres reveals himself to be Dante and apologizes for failing her father. Just as she puts down her rifle, Keller fires off a series of shots and kills her, revealing to Torres that she had pulled a side piece and was about to kill him, an observation that proved correct.
Torres and Knight debrief Tony on the details of the case as Tony questions whether Keller indeed killed Sasha in self-defense. He backs Keller up for making the right call as Tony dismisses them both for the night.
After work, Torres heads out to the middle of nowhere as he takes a call from Parker, checking in on him after the hard day. Parker asks him why he didn’t tell him about Sasha when he put things together, as Torres notes that some things are better left to be handled alone. Torres notes that in a weird way this case helped him figure out who he is as he hangs up.
It turns out that Torres has gone to see Keller at his cabin, the episode ending as Torres asks if the side job with the CIA is still open.
What might this mean for Torres' future at NCIS? Well, that is a mystery we're going to have to wait to see unravel as season 24 continues!
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