Forensics and criminology textbooks during her lunches in Market Square. A waxed-paper basket of fried oysters and french fries on the afternoon she was approached by a man in a sports coat and a paisley tie. He took the chair opposite without bothering to ask permission to join her. He lifted the cover of her book, Introduction to Criminology: Theories, Methods and Criminal Behavior, 2nd Edition.
“Have you learned why men do what they do?” he asked.
Accustomed to businessmen and lawyers from Grant Street insinuating themselves into her company, men who thought downtown secretaries existed only to serve their pleasure, she’d been dismissive until the man showed his badge—NAVAL INVESTIGATIVE SERVICE, something she’d never heard of. Even then her first thought was that something had happened with her mother on one of her benders.
“We’re recruiting the best and the brightest,” he said.
Moss wondered what that had to do with her. “All right,” she said. “Yeah?”
He introduced himself as Special Agent O’Connor. “One of your professors put your name forward as a possible candidate for federal law enforcement,” he said. “She’s been impressed with your work.”
“Okay,” said Moss, wondering which professor, wondering if this was some sort of scam. “Don’t you have pamphlets to mail out or something?”
“I have you in mind for a specific division within NIS,” said O’Connor. “I wanted to meet you personally before I made the pitch. I don’t always recruit like this, but I already have reason to believe you’ll make an exemplary agent—still, I have to be sure to actually recruit you.”
A sales scheme maybe—give out her name and address and get hammered with junk mail and cold calls. Any minute now he’ll ask for twenty bucks to “ensure space in the program” or ask for a donation.
“My record can’t look that good to you,” she said, trying to call the man’s bluff. “I almost didn’t graduate high school.”
“Your past plays a role. I’m interested in your renewed focus, your dedication now. Some people wilt in high school, bloom in college—that suits me. I don’t want brilliant kids who will flame out in a few years. I read a paper you wrote about the responsibility of a strong society to defend the rights of the vulnerable, the victims of violent crime being the most vulnerable. Did you copy that from somewhere or are those your original thoughts?”
“I didn’t copy anything.”
“I found your paper moving,” said O’Connor. “Passionate. I’m interested in that articulate passion of yours, Shannon. I think your passion might see you through what I have in mind.”
“I had a friend,” said Moss. “She’s the reason I’m interested in criminal justice.”
“As it turns out, Shannon, I do have a pamphlet to give you,” said O’Connor. “You have—what, another year before graduation? By the time you apply, we’ll have reorganized from NIS into NCIS. If you’re still as passionate then as you are now, and if you decide to apply, send your application directly to me.”
He jotted down his mailing address, Building 200, Washington Navy Yard, on the back of the glossy advertisement—men and women in windbreakers, sentinels on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Her father had been in the Navy, a sailor on the battleship USS New Jersey in the late sixties, but Moss knew little of his service.
A month before graduation, she mailed her NCIS packet along with applications to local police departments and to the district attorneys’ offices in both West Virginia and Pennsylvania. O’Connor called within the week, asked her to report to Oceana, Virginia, to begin the interview process—“Clear your schedule,” he’d said. Lost in daydreams of deployment aboard hulking ships cutting through steely ocean waters, imagining that her father’s naval experience somehow ran in her blood, she was surprised on the appointed day to find herself passing through the gates of the Apollo Soucek Field just as a squadron of F/A-18 Hornets screamed overhead.
O’Connor had recruited a class of twelve, Moss one of only three women, and within a few days two of the men had dropped out rather than endure the physical regimen the instructors demanded of them. Moss realized she wasn’t being interviewed but rather weeded out. Hours swimming in the tank wearing scuba gear over her bathing suit. Bouts of spinning in the g-force simulator bearing mounting pressure until her eyes rolled backward and she lost consciousness, only to wake and spin again. The recruits were given small meals and bunked together in a dorm with room enough only for six—one toilet to share among them, a carton of wet wipes instead of a shower. The spartan conditions frayed some nerves, but Moss adapted well enough, her track-and-field experience having trained her for endurance, conditioned a strength of mind over body. Only seven of the recruits remained at the end of five weeks, Moss the last woman. In a ceremony held in one of their classrooms, O’Connor presented each recruit with a choice: “Report to the Navy Yard, Building 200, and be welcomed with open arms to begin a fulfilling career as a federal law-enforcement agent,” he told them, “or stay seated.” One of the men did stand and leave, but the others remained at their desks, perplexed and excited as O’Connor handed out forest-green T-shirts and certificates printed with their names.
A reception with coffee and sheet cake in the hallway, instructions to change into their flight suits within the hour. After nightfall the graduates boarded a jet called Ogopogo, a sea serpent painted along its tapering nose cone—the jet was called a Cormorant, long and sleek, the color of obsidian, it looked like an SR-71 Blackbird but larger, the size of a small airliner. O’Connor and his class strapped into their seats and the Ogopogo lifted from the runway. Moss was utterly delirious when the Cormorant entered an accelerated climb and pulled from the tug of gravity. A crescent shine of earthlight, the scattered diamonds of city lights on the distant globe. Moss felt the dizzy bliss of weightlessness in her chest, her hair rising around her like a blond dandelion puff until she gathered it into a bun. O’Connor had been the first to unfasten his harness and float freely, his aged features suddenly childlike, the others following his example, whooping up the free fall like children on a trampoline. Moss rose from her seat and wept openly, gleeful, but her tears glommed like sticky balls over her eyes and stung until she wiped them with her sleeve and laughed.
—
The moonscape was a lake of darkness. They approached the Black Vale station, the lunar outpost like a secret city built into the Daedalus crater, a crater sixty miles wide and centered in the hemisphere of the moon that never faced Earth. The downslopes from the crater’s raised ridges were terraced, like massive stairs descending two miles to the wide basin floor. No one spoke as they caught their first glimpse of the lunar launching sites. The Black Vale was outlined with lights, the buildings and runways, the layout reminding Moss of the oil rigs of West Virginia and Pennsylvania, the flight tower a spire of steel and bright lights like the scaffolding of a derrick. Seven ships were docked at the Black Vale, massive vessels the size of Ohio-class submarines—sleek and angular, the ebony ships built as if from origami.
“Those are the TERNs,” said O’Connor, pointing out each of the seven ships. “Look there—”
Their engines were the Brandt-Lomonaco Quantum-Foam Macro-Field Generators, he explained, the military technology that allowed travel to Deep Space and Deep Time.
A cloverleaf of launch and landing pads spread out from the tower, networked with roads and taxiways that led to the hangars and a scattering of white domes, the dormitories and machine shops, offices and labs. O’Connor explained that the designs for the Naval Space Command ships—the Shrikes, the Cormorants, the TERNs—had been conveyed back from a point nearly six hundred years in the future, retrofitted for the nascent industrial capabilities of the 1970s and 1980s, when most of the fleet was built—skunkworks engineering projects carried out by Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. The Cormorants used enhanced Harrier engines for their reaction-control system thrusters, short bursts adjusting the ship’s roll, pitch, and y
aw, the Ogopogo settling on Pad 4 like an insect alighting on a leaf. The views from every portal were vast plains of gray dust lit by floodlights. Everything fell slowly on the moon; in the weaker gravity, Moss fell like she was dropped through water. She was twenty-two years old, overwhelmed by the secrecy and miracles of the military, the complexity of the Naval Space Command operating just beyond the realm of public knowledge.
Dreamlike, those first few weeks of continued training, lectures in the sunlamp solarium, bunking in the dormitories, finding her way through the greenhouses and corridors and learning about the ships of the fleet. Moss was assigned O’Connor’s TERN battle group afloat the USS William McKinley and launched to Deep Waters. Within two months of her arrival in Virginia Beach, she had time-traveled to the Terminus of humanity and sailed the farthest reaches of the Andromeda Galaxy, bathed in starlight that wouldn’t touch Earth for another two and a half million years.
—
Newsmen glutted the Canonsburg Borough Building’s central hallway, reporters begging quotes about the multiple homicides and the missing child. The mayor’s office was housed in the Borough Building, as was the Canonsburg Police Department, but they seemed unprepared for the sheer amount of news interest, Moss thought, pushing past a throng of photographers. She showed her credentials to a police officer and signed her name to a printout list of authorized personnel before she was allowed through to the conference room. An older man, someone from the borough, noticed her prosthesis and stepped aside. He laid his hand on the back of her blouse as she passed, and she stiffened at the touch, too familiar, at this man’s fingers lingering on the contours of her bra strap. He smiled, gesturing her to go ahead—chivalrous, he must have thought, or fatherly, but his touch remained between her shoulder blades until she managed to separate herself to the far side of the meeting room. Still a few minutes before nine. Several of the joint task force had already taken seats around a horseshoe of a half dozen banquet tables. Moss recognized faces from the night before, FBI men mostly, but their demeanors had changed, the dolor of the Mursult deaths dissipated in the light of day, replaced by fresh hair gel and changed clothes, Styrofoam cups of coffee, doughnuts from white boxes on the back table.
Someone waved to catch her attention, a man with sandy blond hair, his jaw shaded by stubble that prefaced a beard. He had a warm smile, Moss thought, a smile that softened his otherwise rugged features. Bright powder-blue eyes—hooded eyes, thoughtful.
“Are you Special Agent Moss?” he asked. “Philip Nestor. We spoke on the phone last night.”
“Oh, of course,” she said. “Shannon.”
“I have a seat for you,” he said. “Brock asked me to take care of you.”
Bristling at being taken care of and unwilling anyway to negotiate the gaps between chair legs. “I don’t want to fight my way up front.”
“Oh, all right—okay, sure,” said Nestor, leaning against the wall beside her. “And not like that, not ‘taking care of you,’ more like a liaison,” he said, quick to read her tone. She remembered his voice from last night’s call—disturbed, edged with sorrow. Calm now. A nice voice, she thought. “Brock says you should have full access, but since he has a lot to juggle,” he said, waving at the room, “I’ll be your conduit.”
An outdoorsman, she guessed—he had an easy athleticism, unlike the gym rats with their burlier bodies. He wore chocolate-brown corduroys, a contrast to the gray or beige slacks his colleagues wore—shirtsleeves rolled to his forearms, a sweater-vest, and a tie, professorial despite the FBI tags he wore on a lanyard.
“I don’t remember seeing you last night,” she said.
“I was there—I saw you when you came in,” he said, “but I was”—gesturing to indicate a Tyvek suit—“taking photographs. You wouldn’t have noticed me. I have to ask you if it’s true, what Brock told me.”
Fuck, thought Moss, wondering at what had gotten around. “That depends on what he told you.”
“That you knew the family over on Cricketwood Court.”
“The family that used to live there,” said Moss. “My best friend lived there, years ago. I was over at that house almost every day.”
Nestor sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That must have been a shock.”
“What else did he tell you?”
Nestor raised his hand, a gentle conciliation. “Only to be respectful, said you were taking it hard.”
The clamor of conversation silenced when Brock made his way to the lectern. His clothes were the same as from the night before, rumpled—he’d maybe splashed water in his face before this meeting, cologne, but he hadn’t showered, hadn’t rested. A film of exhaustion clung to him, his eyes underscored by plum-colored bags that stood out stark against his dark skin. He dimmed the room to half-light.
“Good morning,” he said, switching on the overhead projector, a block of light appearing on the whiteboard behind him. “I’ll keep this brief. Special Agent in Charge William Brock, FBI. My team will be working closely with Canonsburg PD and the Pennsylvania Bureau of Forensic Services in the murder investigation of the Mursult family and in the search for Marian Mursult. Our lead investigator is Special Agent Philip Nestor.”
Brock’s first transparency showed the image used for the Amber Alert.
“Marian Mursult,” he said. “Know her face. Thirty-eight hours gone.”
Brock sipped from a water bottle, paused in his talk until he registered all eyes on the image of the young woman. Silence except for the whirring fan of the projector.
“We already have significant media interest in this young woman, most likely on a national scale. She was last seen on Friday afternoon leaving her shift at Kmart in Washington, where she’s a cashier. Clocked out at seven p.m., and that was the last confirmed sighting we have. We have recovered her car from the parking lot—so she left with someone, or was taken. Her shift supervisor and her coworkers don’t recall anything unusual about that afternoon. She has no regular boyfriend that we know about. State police are following up with her extended network of friends.”
He switched the transparency. A cropped photograph of a man wearing a zippered blue sweatshirt, his hair dusted gray. He was smiling, squinting in the sunlight.
“This is the most recent photograph we have of her father, Patrick Mursult. Petty Officer First Class, United States Navy. Born 1949, August third. Patrick Mursult is on the board as our primary suspect both for the abduction of Marian and for the murder of his family. An arrest warrant has been issued. We do not have any solid information as to his whereabouts.”
Another transparency. A Polaroid, jungle fauna, Mursult in drab green, his skin tanned leathery—he looked like a child, Moss thought, despite the cigarette and the M16 slung casually over his shoulder.
“Triple homicide,” said Brock, showing a transparency of the woman’s blood-slathered face.
A close-up of a hand gloved in blood.
“The actor removed the fingernails and toenails from the woman and children,” said Brock. “That information is not to be given to the media. Is that understood? In case we’re wrong about Mursult, we’re holding this piece back to weed out false confessions that come through the tip line.”
An air of disquiet simmered in the room—the missing fingernails bothered the men gathered here, pushing these deaths from common brutality to something more bizarre, with unfathomable intention.
“Are you all right?” asked Nestor, his eyes troubled.
Moss asked, “Are you?”
Brock held his press conference a half hour later, the conference room’s whiteboard screened with an FBI backdrop. He focused on the only substantive lead they had, the neighbor statements about Mursult’s unidentified associate, a white male, bearded, who drove a red Dodge Ram with West Virginia plates. Brock described the truck as covered with bumper stickers, including a prominent sticker of the Confederate flag. Moss joined a few cops watching on the break-room television. She filled a mug with the oily dregs from the pot w
hile reporters from Pittsburgh and Steubenville-Wheeling peppered Brock with questions about Marian Mursult, her family’s murder.
Moss drifted from the break room, found a vacant office in the downstairs bullpen. She dialed her supervisor’s direct line at NCIS headquarters. O’Connor had recruited Moss to NCIS, their afternoon over fried oysters, had mentored her during the training that followed, had sailed Deep Waters with her afloat the William McKinley—he had accompanied her on her first space walk, the two of them floating far from their ship, tethered to the hull like spiders suspended on silken threads. O’Connor was born only a decade before Moss, but he was well traveled in Deep Waters and IFTs, had already aged while the rest of the world stood still. His hair was a thatch of white curls, his face deeply wrinkled, but his deadpan glare broke easily into the crooked grin of a mischievous child.
“O’Connor,” he answered.
“This is Moss. I need information about Mursult, if you can get it for me. The information I have was redacted. He’s listed as missing in action.”
“I have something for you,” said O’Connor. “I’ve been meeting with NSC through the night. Mursult turning up is a major problem, Shannon.”
“What do you have?”
“Patrick Mursult was a major player when NSC was part of Star Wars, flush with cash because of Reagan,” said O’Connor. “The early days, part of the broader DoD space initiative—before Challenger and the consolidations. Mursult participated in the air force’s Manned Spaceflight Engineers program out in Los Angeles, he also had his hand in the military floor at Johnson Space Center. But, Shannon, his record ends with the Zodiac missions. Are you familiar?”
The Gone World Page 4