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.
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 yaw, 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 while 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?”
“Twelve ships, deployed from the late seventies until about 1989. Before my time. Three of the ships are still commissioned.”
“Aries, Cancer, Taurus,” said O’Connor. “The other nine ships never returned, hundreds of lives presumed lost. Catastrophic. And the Taurus—”
“The Taurus discovered Terminus,” Moss said. “They were the first.” She had studied crime-scene photographs of the USS Taurus. The ship had launched in late 1986 but returned from a far-future IFT with a depleted crew, only a few survivors, the inside of their ship covered in crude pictures of dead men and warnings written in their own blood.
“Patrick Mursult is listed as missing in action because he was a sailor aboard the USS Libra,” said O’Connor. “The Libra is assumed lost, Shannon.”
Lost to Deep Waters, but appearing now. “How is that possible?” she asked. Moss had observed NSC launches, had seen ships launch to Deep Waters and return within a second, nearly instantaneous—the ships merely shimmered even though the crew might have sailed galaxies and lived for several years within that time. An uncanny sensation to see a man board a ship one moment as a young man and disembark the next moment grown to retirement age. Occasionally, however, an NSC ship launched but never returned—it would simply blink out of existence altogether. Those ships that blinked were assumed lost, irretrievably. They were either torn apart by debris or cast into a burning sun or devoured by a black hole, or more likely suffered a mechanical failure that had proved catastrophic or one of any other ruins—but the ships never returned and they never appeared in another location. If a ship blinked out, then the ship was lost and the crew dead, listed as missing in action only because their bodies would never be recovered. “If Libra was lost, then Patrick Mursult shouldn’t exist,” she said. “Or he was never on Libra. Maybe he’s a deserter? Or never made his assignment?”
“We need to account for Libra, we need to account for Mursult,” said O’Connor. “That’s why you were called in. We need to apprehend Patrick Mursult, find out his story.”
“Brock says the guy’s been living off the grid, everything in his wife’s name except for a few counterfeit IDs, a fake driver’s license,” said Moss. “We have witnesses who know Mursult personally—I don’t think we’re dealing with a false identity, or anything like that. He’s been living here in Canonsburg, right out in plain sight.”
“No one’s been looking for him,” said O’Connor. “As far as anyone knew, Patrick Mursult blinked along with everyone else on Libra. You can hide a long time when no one’s looking.”
“We have a lot of people looking for him now.”
“Shannon,” said O’Connor, “Special Agent Brock mentioned you have a personal connection to the crime scene—”
“Fine—I’m fine,” said Moss. “A childhood friend lived there. And the crime scene was horrific last night, but I’m all right.”
“I can offer you more agents, if you think you’ll need the help,” said O’Connor.
“I’m handling it,” she said, thinking of Jessica Mursult, the body gouged. Courtney Gimm’s bedroom, where Moss had dreamed of ditching Canonsburg. No one would ever leave that room. “I’m fine,” she said again. “I’m focused on Patrick Mursult.”
“What’s your take on this?” he asked.
She thought of the woman’s hand gloved in blood, the missing nails. “Right now this seems like a domestic situation,” said Moss. “I think we’ll find Mursult before too long—we have his face all over the news. Whatever his military situation, whatever the complications concerning Libra, you know as well as I do that this probably comes down to a question of money, or maybe an affair. Something quick and brutal but common. He took their fingernails—I don’t know why. Let’s consider more agents when we take him into custody. You should know that the missing girl’s a looker.”
“I saw the Amber Alert,” said O’Connor.
“I’d only expect media interest to grow once Marian’s picture makes the rounds,” she said, knowing that media scrutiny was anathema to NSC. “Won’t be too long before someone starts asking about Mursult, who he is.”
“We’re already on it,” said O’Connor. “FBI has been cooperative. Our directors have been talking—we have a memorandum of agreement on this investigation. They have the manpower to handle the media inquiries, lead the search for Marian.”
“They’re having a press conference right now,” said Moss, thinking that her mother might very well be watching. Damn, she thought—her mother a gossipy hawk for local misery, news stories of maimed animals, house fires, familial slayings. I should call her. Her mother would remember Cricketwood Court—all those afternoons dropping her daughter off at her best friend’s house. Once Moss hung up with O’Connor, she dialed her mother’s number. The line rang twice before clicking to the answering machine.
“Mom, this is Shan,” she said. “Mom, if you’re there, pick up. I’ll swing by the house tonight. Don’t worry too much about the news. We’ll talk soon.”
Nestor opened the office door with a soft tap.
“Let’s go,” he said.
Moss flipped her cell phone closed. “Where are we going?” she asked.
“We have the truck,” he said. “West Virginia state patrol just called it in. Come with me.”
—
The red Ram belonged to Elric Fleece, expired license, expired plates, an address somewhere off Barthollow Fork Branch, near Dents Run and Mannington. Local cops seemed to know him, a belligerent drunk they’ve had to chase away from bars, but no arrests—a Vietnam veteran, an unlicensed electrician who worked odd jobs for cash. Nestor drove Moss in an FBI Suburban, skimming past slower traffic on the interstate as shallow Pennsylvania hills gave way to the greater swells of West Virginia. Over an hour’s drive, discussion of Patrick Mursult shifted to personal chatter. Nestor was from southern West Virginia, grew up poor. A freelance photographer a few years before he fell into steadier fingerprint and crime-scene work with the Phoenix, Arizona, police department. Back home to West Virginia when his father was dying. Moss was circumspect in everything she offered of herself—she was drawn to share with Nestor, an attentive listener, but she knew how easily the covers for her life and career could fray.
“I guess I’m not much of a talker,” she had said.
“You’re guarded,” said Nestor. “I respect that.”
They came up on the junction with Barthollow Fork Branch and seemed to leave the world behind, swallowed by woodland. Barthollow Fork Branch tapered as they drove, the tree line butting against the road, reedy trunks, a canopy of branches that choked out light. Moss peered through the veil of woods to houses built far from the road, isolated places. They passed a series of houses propped up on cinder blocks—pastel siding faded and streaked with water damage from rusted gutters. Yards that looked like junk sales. Moss wondered what all these trees sounded like when they swayed. The road was little more than a mud path by the time they crossed a wood-plank bridge that bounded a dry creek bed. Nestor turned down a track that split away from Barthollow Fork, just two strips of dirt through the undergrowth.
“I can’t really see where I’m going,” he said. Moss felt the SUV’s tires run up against large stones and knots of growth, felt the SUV correct back to the furrows of the path. Branches reached across the road and slapped at the windows.
“Wait, wait, wait,” said Nestor. “Here we are.”
A flash of red as he brought them into a clearing—the rear hatch of the Dodge Ram. An older model, something from the eighties, but it fit the description, cherry except where rust had chewed the doors, the Confederate flag just one of dozens of worn and half-peeled stickers. THE SOUTH WILL RISE. A sticker of Calvin taking a piss on a Ford logo. A pistol, THIS TRUCK PROTECTED BY SMITH & WESSON. The gun rack a thing handmade from lumber nailed together, empty of guns but well worn.
“Look at that,” said Nestor. “What is that?”
Moss followed where Nestor pointed. “What the fuck,” she said, climbing from the SUV, spotting the skeletons in the woods. Sculptures. Stag skeletons taken apart and refashioned with wire so they looked like men with antlers, veined with copper. Four of them hung from the trees by their ankles, arms spread wide—upside-down crucifixions. Terminus, she thought. This guy knows the Terminus. The house was ramshackle, the roof sagging in like the place was melting. Moss followed Nestor up the front walk, a series of stone slabs half sunk in mud. A slew of rodents’ bones near the front door—groundhogs and squirrels mostly. Deer skeletons were laid out in the grass to dry in the sun.
“You think he’s here?” said Moss.
“I don’t know. The truck’s here,” said Nestor. “He could be taking a walk.”
“What’s with all the bones?” said Moss.
Nestor laughed. “Hell, I don’t know—”
The bright stench of rot hit Moss and Nestor like a rolling wave—death. Moss thought, Marian. She drew her weapon, Nestor did the same. The front door was a flimsy screen over a sheet of plywood, the plywood warped and crawling with flies that leapt buzzing as Moss pushed through. The smell was heavy, seemed to weigh bodily on her—coated her tongue, her sinuses, seemed to grow spongelike in her mouth. Death, wet fur, shit. Her eyes watered.
“Marian?” she called out.
The air was alive, humming—flies bumped against her, Nestor with her. A dim front room. A carpet of animal pelts covered the walls, striped raccoon hides, the slate gray of squirrel, groundhog browns—the realization lit that she was looking at a mural made of fur, of vales and hollows, the skin of white rabbits as snow-capped peaks. Mountains—a mural of mountains made of fur.
“Marian?” she called out, the rot-infused air pouring into her lungs as she breathed. A fly crawled across her lips—she flinched, blew it aside. She feared them, feared what the flies might mean—feared discovering Marian’s body. Not here, not here—
“FBI,” said Nestor. “Federal agents.”
Moss moved through into the adjoining room, gun leveled—a larger room with a corner kitchen and a television with foil-wrapped rabbit ears. Family Feud. Nazi flags draped the walls and were stapled to the ceiling. Black flags, SS in white bolts. Emerald flags with white stags’ heads, antlers cradling swastikas. Lunatic, she thought—but she was scared, like she’d found the gateway to Hell. Mountain Dew and Pabst empties covered the floor, writhing with black ants.
“Here,” said Nestor. “Over here.”
A hall extended to the back rooms of the house, a hall lined with mismatched mirrors hung in a random scatter. Something on the hall floor was wrapped in garbage bags, a body, the plastic so thick with slivers of white maggots and flies it looked as though the bag crawled. Nestor wrapped his hand in his sleeve, pulled at the plastic—Moss expecting Marian’s pale face, but the face was covered in black fur, toothless red gums, its black eyes like glass marbles.
“Jesus,” said Nestor, jumping back. “What is that? A fucking bear?”
Moss continued down the mirrored hall, her image a multitude of reflections. What is this place?—but on some level Moss understood the design, on some level recognition bloomed. The mirrors in the hall, her reflections—something about this place tugged at her memory, and she thought of snowy climes, hiking through drifts in her orange space suit, so cold the wind was sharded with ice. She passed a bathroom, then a bedroom—a mattress on the floor, a duffel bag at the foot of the bed. She followed the mirrors to the back bedroom, the master, and when she looked inside, she heard herself scream.
The man had hanged himself from a tree made of bones—a sculpture of a tree, bones and iron and copper wire, the walls and ceiling of the room paneled with mirrors so the hanged man’s reflection was an endless recursion. He dangled from skeletal branches, his face bloated, his tongue a purple bulge. Obese, his great white body wriggling with flies. Moss stepped closer, her weapon leveled but her hands shaking, and saw herself reflected with the dead man. This place was a representation—she was overwhelmed with the sensation of returning—the mirrored hall and the bone tree in the mirrored room uncovered memories Moss had worked to diminish over the years, the memory of her crucifixion, the roar of the black river beneath her. These rooms, however, were like a prodding finger. She remembered ice, remembered the air around her shimmering like a panoply of mirrors. She had seen the tree when she was in the Terminus, a tree the color of blanched bones, infinitely repeated. Fleece had reconstructed the scene as if he’d pulled the landscape from her mind.
“Let’s go,” said Nestor, putting his hands on her shoulders, leading her from the room. “Marian’s not here. Let’s go.”
—
The Brooke County sheriff blocked off the property at Barthollow Fork Branch, barred access until the FBI Mobile Crime Unit arrived. They pulled the body of the decomposed black bear from the house and dragged it to the woods before cutting down Elric Fleece, an operation for several men because of the corpse’s girth. The bear had been disassembled—skinned, boned, the organs removed. The technicians documented Fleece’s residence like a crime scene, but the opinion spread quickly that his death was suicide, that he’d been hanging from the bone tree at least a full day, if not longer. Moss watched the men carry Fleece’s sheet-wrapped body on a gurney, load it into the back of an ambulance for transport to Charleston for the autopsy. Everywhere I look will be turned to ice, she thought, and it was almost as if she could feel the ice encroaching from some future time. She walked the edges of Fleece’s property, out into the woods, where she followed a path that led to the four skeletons hung from branches by their ankles. They had been crafted with horrific ingenuity—the copper wire wrapping the deer bones hinting at veins and musculature. How had he known about the Terminus, the hanged men? Moss imagined Patrick Mursult haunted by the future death of the world, whispering his visions to Fleece—or maybe Fleece had seen for himself, maybe he was another sailor aboard Libra appearing now, an apparition. NSC sailors suffered a high rate of suicide. Moss had observed several autopsies of men who had hanged themselves or cut open their own wrists, or who had ended their lives with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, broken men who couldn’t readjust to the creeping pace of normal time. O’Connor would be able to verify if Fleece was NSC, but Moss felt increasingly certain here was another sailor whose record would read “missing in action.” She heard footsteps—Nestor tromping through the underbrush, coming for her.
“Hey, are you okay?” he asked. “You disappeared out here.”
“Collecting my thoughts,” she said. “You ever see anything like this before?”
Nestor’s forehead rippled as if the question had been a stone tossed into the lake of his thought. “That room reminded me of something my dad used to talk about,” said Nestor. “This recurring dream he called the ‘eternal forest.’ Come on, let’s get away from these statues—or whatever they are.”
They walked together along the path, through the shallow woods back toward Fleece’s house. “What dream?” she asked.
“We lived in Twilight, this little coal town. My dad worked the mines, always had dreams he was in the dark,” said Nestor. “So he wakes up in the night screaming—I hear him get up, and he comes into my room, sits on my bed, and looks at me. I was nine or something, just hoping he would think I was asleep, but he was drunk, and he says he was caught in a cave-in and he couldn’t get out through the mine, so he crawled deeper until the mine ended and he came out into a forest. He tells me about the trees like they were there in my room, like he could touch them.”
“The eternal forest,” said Moss.
“There are doors in the trees,” said Nestor. “And when he opened a door and stepped through, he stepped into a whole new forest. He said he was lost, and he asked me to find him. I told him I would and waited until whatever dream had a hold of him started to clear and he left my bedroom. He went to the bathroom, and I heard him back down the hall. I heard him start to snore and knew he was asleep. I never went back to sleep.”
“You were nine?” asked Moss, imagining the child, imagining his father.
“Sometimes he talked about this dream like it was a place you could go to, like it wasn’t a dream at all, so when I saw those mirrors . . .”
She wanted to unburden herself, but she said, “Don’t think about Fleece’s bullshit. You don’t want this in your head.”
She steeled herself before reentering the house. Even though the immediate sources of putrefaction had been removed, the other odors remained: the fur walls, the festering garbage bins. The techs had pulled cardboard boxes from Fleece’s front closet. Moss wore latex gloves, picked through the contents. She found an album of yellowed photographs, of Vietnam—pictures of PBRs, the four-man river patrol boats called swift boats. Mekong and Rung Sat, labels in blue ballpoint. Navy, in Vietnam—a connection to Mursult, she thought. She wondered if Mursult and Fleece had served together. Matchboxes filled with dead spiders, beetles, one of the other techs discovered a pillowcase stuffed with dead birds. Filth, she thought. His “art” covered the walls, not only the large mural made of animal hides but framed pictures, photographs he had doctored. Two hung in the bathroom. A still image from the Zapruder film, the moment Kennedy was struck by the second bullet, his face fleshy pink and opened outward, like his face was a door with a hinge. Fleece had painted a halo around Kennedy, oxidized brownish blood radiating from the president’s head. In the other picture, he’d painted seven halos over a photograph of the Challenger—the explosion puff a burst of cloud and shuttle pieces in curlicues of smoke, odd trajectories.
“We found something,” said Nestor. “Over here.”
Nestor had been working in the smaller of the two bedrooms, a relatively clean room—the mattress on the floor had been made, the sheets and comforter tucked tightly at the corners. The largest of Fleece’s doctored photographs hung here—she recognized an enlarged photograph of Fleece’s Vietnam swift boat, but it had been coated with crescent-shaped nail clippings and the nails and claws of animals. A plumb line of sorrow dropped through her—she thought of the fingers of the Mursult family, their fingernails removed. The picture was labeled, This is the Ship of Nails that will Carry the Bodies of the Dead.
“We’re figuring Mursult stayed here,” said Nestor. “That this is his stuff.”
The contents of a black duffel bag were spread out across the mattress. A few thousand dollars in stacks of twenties, clothes, toiletries, a pager. Twenty-four Polaroids were laid out in a grid—graphic in their portrayal of a woman. A black woman, thin. Her face was never shown. Her breasts were beautiful, thought Moss, her belly taut—Moss studied the smooth, dark lines of the woman’s thighs, the images of her genitals, how she spread herself pink. Intimate rather than pornographic—pictures no one other than the photographer and the subject were ever meant to see. They had been taken in a cabin, it looked like, not here. A rental cabin, maybe. The walls were exposed lumber, a glimpse of a bedside table, a pad of paper, a phone.
“Can you ID the woman?” she asked.
“No.”
“What makes you think Mursult?” she asked.
“The first few numbers we recovered from the pager are Mursult’s home phone number,” said Nestor. “I’m thinking he called himself a couple of times, made sure the pager was working.”
They stepped outside. Nestor was staying to oversee the evidence collection, but he made an arrangement with one of the sheriff’s deputies to ride Moss back to Canonsburg. Late afternoon, the day bleeding away from them.
“Did you catch the picture of the boat?” asked Moss.
“The fingernails? Yeah,” said Nestor. “We’ll have our guys test the fingernails, see if any of them are from the Mursult family—it will take a while. I don’t see this guy Fleece being able to kill three people without using a gun, though, do you? Out of shape—he didn’t look like he could have caught them or defend himself if any of them fought back. The wife, Damaris Mursult, was athletic. The son—”
“I’ll bet the autopsy says he’s been dead too long to be our guy anyway,” said Moss.
“What was that he wrote on the picture? A ship of nails?”
“A ship of nails to carry the dead,” said Moss. “I don’t know. Jesus Christ, we’ve seen a lot of death today.”
“Are you religious?” asked Nestor.
“What?” she said—she realized she’d blasphemed, was worried she might have offended him. Several men she’d met in law enforcement were Christians, evangelicals. “I’m sorry, I—”
“My faith is the only thing that sustains me,” said Nestor. “Thinking about the boy and girl, thinking about Marian. It breaks me, but I believe in eternal life, I think of how God will care for these victims, and it helps me—it helps me stay focused. I imagine a new life for them. Do you believe in the resurrection of the body?”
Moss thought of all of humanity in a funnel leading to a singular point.
“No,” she said.