Poor girl. Poor girl . . .
“Are you all right?” asked Brock.
“Where are their nails?” asked Moss, her focus watery but noticing that the girl’s fingernails and toenails had been removed as well.
“You’ve gone pale,” he said. “Do you need to sit down?”
“I’m all right—”
She wavered, Brock steadied her, a hand on her back. “Thank you,” she said, though still unmoored. A heat of embarrassment flashed through her. Pull it together, she thought. “I’m . . . I don’t know what’s wrong,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
Brock shepherded her from the bedroom into the hall. “Listen,” he said, shutting the bedroom door, “a scene like this is hard for anyone to take, let alone if you aren’t used to it. It’s all right if you’re a little weak in the knees.”
“I have to tell you something,” she said. “This is . . . I’m having some trouble tonight, this is uncanny. I know this house.”
“Go on.”
“I grew up around here,” said Moss. “I practically lived in this house when I was a kid. My best friend lived here. Courtney. Her name was Courtney Gimm. This was her room. I spent a lot of time in this room. Her bed was right over there.”
“No shit,” said Brock.
“I’m unnerved by this, but I’m all right,” said Moss. “When Nestor called and said the crime scene was on Cricketwood Court . . .”
She steadied herself against the wall—touching the wall, she felt like she could tear this present world away and see her friend again, be with her friend as if no time had passed, as if she could step into the old bedroom, the gone world. Slap bracelets and jelly shoes, colored bands in Courtney’s braces.
“We used to hang out in the woods behind these houses,” said Moss. “We’d share cigarettes back there.”
Sunbathing on lawn chairs, sharing High Life. Courtney’s dad worked night shifts, so they had this place to themselves, her mom living up in Pittsburgh with her boyfriend. Pot some nights when Courtney could score, but most nights just staying up too late watching TV—school the next morning with bloodshot eyes. They partied with the other girls on the track team some nights. Neighborhood boys some nights. Some nights Courtney and Moss and whatever boys they’d picked up at the mall would get high and drink and fool around while Letterman played, nothing too serious, just petting and kissing and hand jobs, late nights ending with the smell of hand soap and semen.
“Christ, I lost my virginity in the room down the hall,” she said. Courtney’s brother, Davy Gimm—she could see his face as clearly as if she’d been with him just yesterday. A senior when she was a sophomore, when he took fistfuls of Moss’s hair and kissed her, when he ran his hands under her shirt and unbuttoned his jeans and placed her hands on him. Hardening in her hands. Feeling his weight press on her and feeling him push into her. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Let’s get some fresh air,” said Brock. “Can you make it down the stairs?”
“I’ll be fine,” she said. “I’ll be down in a moment.”
Her first night with Davy Gimm had been in the small bedroom at the end of the hall, more of a closet or nursery than a proper third bedroom. Knives that Davy Gimm had bought from flea markets, she remembered, a poster of Christie Brinkley from Sports Illustrated. Lying on the creaking twin bed, his eager fingers searching beneath the elastic of her shorts, his wet breath heavy on her neck. Remembering the sound of his sleeping, lying awake as moonlight crawled across the swimsuit model.
Moss waited until she heard Brock’s voice from downstairs before she opened Davy Gimm’s old bedroom door—stepping into his room was like stepping into the cosmos, star clusters and the constellations of the zodiac bursting from the infinite darkness. She flipped on the light switch—maybe a part of her expected to see the swimsuit poster and the collection of knives, but she found the room of a little boy instead, walls covered with glow-in-the-dark star stickers. Foolish, regretting what she’d confessed to Brock—realizing she should have just kept her mouth shut, that she shouldn’t have mentioned anything about this house at all. Unprofessional, a moment of weakness. She saw the room not as it had been but for what it was: the room of a dead child.
She found Brock outside. The lawns of Cricketwood Court were touched with frost, crystals feathering the windshields of parked cars. An upstairs light in a neighboring unit had flipped on.
“Where was Marian through all this?” she asked. “Has anyone seen her?”
“All the neighbors know who she is, but she hasn’t been around,” said Brock. “Not since Friday. We’re waking friends and family, trying to track her down.”
“You mentioned that Mursult has a friend who drives a red pickup truck,” said Moss. “No one knows this guy?”
“No one,” said Brock. “Neighbors noticed the truck because it was often parked out on the street, but Mursult and his friend kept to themselves.”
“I think we should go ahead and create the Amber Alert,” said Moss.
“She might turn up,” said Brock. “She might be at a friend’s house. We’re checking everywhere.”
Amber Alerts were new, Moss reminded herself, not as familiar as they would become. “It will help us,” she said. “Someone might have seen her.”
Brock checked the illuminated dial of his watch. “Moss, your office is at CJIS, isn’t that right?” he said, pronouncing the abbreviation like the name “Jesus.” CJIS was the Criminal Justice Information Services building, the nerve center of the FBI—a newly minted campus, a crystalline oddity nestled in the middle-of-nowhere hills just outside Clarksburg, West Virginia. An FBI building, but without a Navy or Marine Corps installation in the region, Moss’s NCIS office was co-located there. “You live out that way?” he asked. “Out near Clarksburg?”
“That’s right.”
“My wife Rashonda’s at CJIS, in the print lab. Maybe you’ve crossed paths.”
“You’re Rashonda Brock’s husband?” Moss said. A few thousand with offices in the CJIS facility, but Rashonda Brock was well known, the deputy assistant director of the Laboratory Division. Moss’s office was near the facility’s day care, so although she had never met Brock’s wife, she saw Rashonda drop her daughters off most mornings, a flurry of kisses and hugs. “I think I’ve seen some of your kids’ paintings,” she said. “Brianna and Jasmine, right? Their name tags are hanging on a corkboard near my office. Purple dinosaurs—”
“Barney,” said Brock, smiling now, chuckling. “Everything’s Barney the dinosaur—Brianna’s room is covered with him.” Moss understood how Rashonda might fit together with Brock, Rashonda always radiant, a plump woman, tall—she must feel a warm sense of satisfaction whenever she drew laughter from this serious man.
“So you drove in from Clarksburg, thereabouts? That’s, what . . . an hour, an hour and a half from here?” he said, fishing out a key card from an envelope in his jacket pocket. He offered it to Moss. “We rented a block of rooms nearby—don’t make the trip home to Clarksburg tonight. You’ll need to be right back here tomorrow morning.”
“I’ll crash for a night,” she said, weighing the change in Brock’s demeanor. He’d softened since noticing her prosthesis, since mentioning his wife.
“Deep Waters,” he said, glancing skyward, though cloud cover occluded any chance of stars. “My boyhood dream was to be an astronaut. My grandparents took me to see a rocket launch at Cape Canaveral. It was the most beautiful sight I’d ever seen until my daughters were born.”
Moss had seen the flares of firelight streak across the dawn, rockets lifting and vanishing from view. “It’s always beautiful, every time,” she said.
“Get some sleep,” said Brock. “My team will continue through the night. Progress meeting at nine a.m. with everyone involved, and then we’ll do the presser.”
—
A desire to put distance between herself and that house prickled her shoulders, her spine, as she pulled away from
Cricketwood Court, from Hunting Creek. The hotel Brock had booked was a Best Western nearer to Washington, Pennsylvania, but before picking up 79 she looped through the parking lot of the Pizza Hut that edged Chartiers Creek. Courtney had been killed here, November of their sophomore year. The Pizza Hut was as it ever was, unchanged since the last time Moss had swung through here, a brick building with a Quonset hut roof, two dumpsters around back, blue dumpsters illuminated by Moss’s headlights. Courtney’s body had been left between those dumpsters. Moss counted hours—nearing thirty-three since Marian Mursult had last been seen. Marian was seventeen, Courtney had been sixteen when she died. Moss drove to the hotel, thinking of her dead friend, thinking of the missing girl. Fingernails and toenails missing from the bodies of the dead. Had Patrick Mursult killed his family? Where was he now?
Moss kept her go bag in the trunk, two changes of clothes and a toiletries kit, ready to travel at a moment’s notice. She undressed in her hotel room, removed her prosthesis, removed her liner—a whiff of moist, pungent sweat knocked her awake for a moment. The shower was tricky without safety bars, but once the water had warmed, she sat on the edge of the tub and swung her leg in, sliding down the porcelain to sit on the nonslip mat. Hot water streamed over her. She washed her hair, using the full complement of shampoo, tried to wash away the smells of putrescence and blood. Without her crutches or wheelchair, she hopped across the hotel carpeting before slipping between the bed’s crisp sheets, bundling into the comforter. With the blinds drawn and the lights out, the room was miraculously dark. Cold. She turned over to sleep but saw the bodies of women and children unspooling in great bloody arcs and flowering wounds. A rising disgust and hopelessness burned acidic in her throat. She thought of Marian—still alive, please still be alive—but she didn’t know what Marian looked like, so her imagination filled with the image of Courtney Gimm and her mind raced to ax blades biting through bone and wounds that opened like mouths. Clammy, tossing against the mattress and tangled in her sheets, the smell of her prosthesis liner wafting over from across the room, sour. She sat up and fumbled in the darkness for the remote control. The local channels were all reporting about the family killed in Washington County, just outside Canonsburg. Moss squinted as the growing television brightness stabbed her eyes—aerial shots of the neighborhood roofs and film of the sheriff’s blockade, the deputy with the Chaplinesque mustache hitching up his pants near the sawhorses.
The Amber Alert was first broadcast nearing 5:00 a.m. Marian Tricia Mursult, seventeen, of Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. An image sun-kissed and freckled, cutoffs and a tank top, her straight hair the color of coal. Moss’s breath caught at the similarities between her friend and the missing girl—casually beautiful, each with that long, dark hair. Moss had been trained in time travel—accustomed to reliving future events as they played out in the terra firma of the present, but this déjà vu was something else, like she’d caught the world repeating itself, the house, the girls, like she had seen something she wasn’t supposed to see, the repetitive mechanics of cyclical time. Or maybe the similarity between the girls was something more rare, something like a second chance. She had lost Courtney, but she could still save Marian. Moss relaxed into bed, comforted knowing that people would be looking for the girl, that someone might already have seen her, might know where she is, safe, safe—but as she drifted off for only a few hours of sleep, Moss could almost feel the girl’s body grown cold.
TWO
Listless after Courtney died, Moss just shy of sixteen. The Gimms invited her to stand with them at the funeral home, an exhausting honor—awkward next to Davy in the reception line, Courtney lily white from concealer, laid out in an approximation of sleep. Courtney had always said she’d wanted to be buried in blue jeans, but they dressed her in a crushed-velvet dress with a high lace collar, necessary to cover what the makeup couldn’t hide of the slash across her neck. The stillness of the body so complete, so unnaturally still, that Moss almost expected her friend to sit up, to somehow stir or breathe.
Coming from the funeral home, Moss imagined that a version of herself had died and would be buried alongside Courtney. Despondent, isolated, uninterested in the new version of herself, the self who survived. She lived alone with her mother; her father had abandoned them when she was five. Friendly enough with her mother, but her mother was never around, either at work or at McGrogan’s for happy hours that melted into long nights of drinking. Moss grew inward, every night escaping to her room alone with her expanding collection of records: the Misfits, the Clash, the Sex Pistols, the Pixies, punk albums she picked from vinyl bins in CD stores—just lying in bed with her headphones in the dark, lost in soundscapes. Utterly wasted years, those remaining years of high school—drunk on Jack and Cherry Coke or whatever alcohol someone snuck in the parking lot at lunch. Vacant in her own skin, almost failing out of school but not quite—ready to just keep living at home if she had to, ready to work at the same telemarketing firm her mother worked for, but her track-and-field coach had taken notice, pulled some strings, secured a partial scholarship for Moss to attend WVU.
Three years after she lost Courtney, Moss was called to testify against her friend’s killer. She sat in the Washington County Courthouse wearing her mother’s work clothes, answering questions about the night her friend had died—Courtney’s parents listening to her testimony, Courtney’s mother weeping, Courtney’s killer listening unimpassioned. Moss never questioned her lack of empathy for the man who’d killed her best friend—a junkie, a vagrant. She’d wanted him to die, horrifically, or to serve life without parole, some sort of revenge, some sort of justice. She learned about the sentencing only later, the killer given twenty-eight years to life, but the sentence hadn’t seemed enough. Her rage at the idea that this man would live and might someday gain his freedom sliced through the fog of grief that had been suffocating her. The first semester of her sophomore year of college, drunken weekends and dorm-room dime bags gave way to coursework. She declared her major as criminology and investigation, secured an internship at the Washington County Coroner’s Office per her course requirements.
Intimidated by the internship at first, but the coroner’s office was an enjoyable way to spend an afternoon—the women there grateful for the help and eager to spoil her, chatting with her about birth control and music as she scuttled on her hands and knees reorganizing their filing cabinets. Dr. Radowski, the coroner, greeted her every morning but kept a cordial distance—an alcoholic, some of the clerks had told her, a homosexual, it was generally known, and while Radowski’s face was often glowing reddish when he arrived back from longer lunch hours, he was unfailingly kind. Some of her roommates had been appalled at the idea of what she was up to, squeamish at the thought of cadavers, but Moss readily scheduled classes around her internship and found she anticipated 12:20 every Thursday afternoon, when she would drive up 79 to Washington in her banana-yellow Pontiac Sunbird, to make it to the coroner’s office by one o’clock.
Nervous but not fearful the first time Radowski had allowed her to assist in an autopsy, dressed in a lab coat and goggles and gloves like a child playing scientist, standing only a few feet away as Radowski prepped the body, the decedent a sixty-four-year-old woman who’d been found only when the family in the adjacent apartment had called to complain about a smell. Moss’s first whiff of human putrefaction had taken root in her, a sickly-sweet pungency—but her curiosity made the leap over her disgust. The procedure had been surgical at times, scalpel slices and dissections, had been unexpectedly brutal when Radowski used hedge clippers to break through the rib cage and an industrial saw to cut through the skull, the sound a high-pitched squeal that powdered the room with dust. Radowski’s assistant had irrigated the woman’s viscera, running water through armfuls of colon in the sink, filling the room with the smell of feces—the same assistant cracked a joke when he found partially digested Twinkies in the woman’s stomach: “They would have lasted for eternity.”
Radowski allowed Moss
to hold the woman’s heart. She cupped it in her gloved hands carefully, more like she was holding a bird with a broken wing rather than a dead muscle. Surprised by the heft of it, how much heavier a heart was than she would have imagined. Radowski had needed to scalpel through a protective sac in the cadaver’s chest to reach it, the pericardium, spilling fluid across the stainless-steel slab and onto the tile floor.
“Place the muscle here, please, so I can weigh it.”
Moss had done as Radowski instructed, setting the heart in a drip pan to drain.
“Take a look here,” Radowski said some time later, lifting an organ for her to see. “You’re looking at what amounts to the cause of death. The liver. Notice the deeper purple coloring, the texture like crushed charcoal. A healthy liver looks like a cut of meat you might pick up from the supermarket, pinkish and smooth. This is cirrhosis. She drank herself to death.”
Death is an unshared intimacy, Moss would sometimes think, finding a center of calm in the science of the morgue. Death and loss close company for her, her best friend dead, her father gone. The autopsy procedure helped bring closure to her experiences with mortality—death might still be a mystery, but the entirety of people’s lives could be summed up in file folders, in weights, in measurements.
Campus dorms in Morgantown, but summers she rented the upstairs unit of a Dormont duplex, commuting downtown to Pittsburgh to support herself. One of dozens in the secretarial pool at Buchanan Ingersoll, a law office in the USX Tower—her desk was cluttered with a boxy computer monitor and an electric typewriter, the steel shelves behind her a manila sea of alphabetized folders. A fashion plate back when she was twenty-one—military jackets with decorative epaulets, chunky gold earrings, glossy red lipstick, and leopard-patterned press-on nails. The older women called her “Madonna”—a compliment maybe. An hour every morning in the bathroom and several visits to the ladies’ room throughout the afternoon, teasing her hair, then blasting it with Aqua Net, fluffing her mane into puffed-out curls she gathered into a scrunchie. Coworkers gave her distance on smoke breaks, fearing her head might ignite.
The Gone World Page 3