Tonight on CBS NCIS: airs with an all-new Tuesday, March 31, 2026, season 23 episode 14 called, “Fleeting” and we have your weekly NCIS recap below.
In tonight’s NCIS season 23 episode 14, “Fleeting” as per the CBS synopsis, “Navy Week turns electric when a stolen squad car flips and reveals a sailor stabbed in the trunk. As D.C. spirals into chaos, the team chases a killer while carrying the weight of recent events”
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In tonight’s NCIS episode, the post-Vance era began with tonight’s all new episode. It was hard for the team to carry on like everything was normal. However, they found themselves doing that very thing because the rest of the world wasn’t in mourning like they were. There was still Fleet Week to deal with after all.
It was a week in which a bunch of sailors docked in town and they partied like there was no tomorrow. This year was the worst. The entire second fleet was in anchor. There was more of them than there was cops and that was important because they stole a cop car. The rookie had accidentally left the keys in the ignition.
Parker had to promise the police chief to find the squad car. It was eventually found in the heart of DC. Parker and his team responded to the scene.
It was abandoned after it crashed into a restaurant. Everyone had hoped that would be the worst of it. They were proven wrong when a dead sailor was found in the trunk of the squad car. They didn’t know if that guy was one of the two that stole the vehicle or if he was a buddy picked up along the way. The only thing they did know at the time was that this clearly murder.
There was a knife sticking out of the victim’s chest. He was identified as Petty Officer Third Class Kyle Rivas. He was a dedicated sailor with a perfect record. Only his prints was found all over the passenger seat. He stole the car with his best friend, Seamen Daniel Harvey.
The two were liberty buddies. They were supposed to keep each other out of trouble and that didn’t happen there. NCIS wanted to know what happened to Daniel. Did he ditch Kyle or did he kill Kyle? They were last seen in a photo they took on one of their cell phones with a young woman.
The woman was wearing her sorority sweater in the photo. They tracked her down using it. Her name is Annie Carson. She said she was hanging out with the guys until they began arguing about nukes.
She had no idea what “nukes” meant. NCIS did. The program was called Navy Nukes and it trained naval officers to deal with the nuclear program. Kyle had signed up without telling Daniel about it.
It meant he’d be transferring off the ship and going to South Carolina. NCIS eventually found Daniel and they asked him if he killed his buddy because he was drunk. And felt he was abandoning him.
Daniel didn’t even know that Kyle was dead until they told him about it. He had no memories of the night before. The one thing he did know was that he would never kill his best friend. Transfer or not. It was Kasie who determined something else had happened. She had a tox screen on the victim as well as Daniel.
They both came back positive for a toxin. Most of the sailors from the USS Allegiance were all poisoned with that same toxin. They were all sick. It mimics the high of amphetamines. It’s also why there was a sudden uptick in sailors gone wild.
The stronger dose could lead to death. The lighter dose will just give them a delayed reaction of illness. Now, the sailors were all over the Metro area. There was no telling where they went.
Jimmy soon realized the one thing they all had in common was fresh ink. Getting a tattoo was shore leave tradition. These sailors all got a new tattoo from the same place and Daniel remembered where. It was a mobile tattoo place. He was all over town. Its why the sailors got infected on different routes. Daniel described what the van looked like.
NCIS found it without a problem. They actually stopped two sailors from getting fresh tattoos themselves. Not that they would’ve gotten it anyways because someone killed tattoo artist.
They stabbed him in the chest. Like Kyle. They also left a message carved into him and it was in Russian. It was the Russian word for “purge”. They linked that word to a Russian terrorist group called Pale Sun Brigade. They believed in purging the world of other ethnic groups and religions. NCIS also determined that Daniel didn’t kill Kyle.
Both victims were killed the same way with the same knife. The tattoo artist was killed when the sailors were stealing the cop so that put Daniel in the clear for both murders.
What they couldn’t understand was why a terrorist group was killing a tattoo artist as well as one of the sailors. They didn’t kill other sailors. Why would they wait to kill him long after his tattoo? It didn’t make any sense. Then they made the connection to Annie Carson. The sorority girl from earlier. She was behind the technology.
The tattoo ink wasn’t just to poison them. It was a nanotech. They were tiny machines tracking their every movement. The man behind it had used the sailors as test subjects.
He wanted to prove to SecDef that the tech works. It does. Annie may have created it, but one of her sorority sisters found out what she did and tried to get the ink to sell on the black market.
She killed the tattoo artist because she thought he had the ink. When she couldn’t find it, she looked at the closest singal and found Kyle that way. She killed him too then tried to slice off his tattoo.
She was stopped by Daniel who released a herd of goats her way. They were the missing goats from the area. Daniel ended up stopping Samantha from selling the tech to the highest bidder on the black web. There were no terrorists involved at all.
And the team ended this case with a drink that Vance had been holding onto for a special occasion. He never got a chance to drink it so they did it in his honor and they said goodbye to him that way.
THE END!
