Another crime scene had twinned within her.
Cricketwood Court with her past, this house in Buckhannon with her future. A false future, she told herself.
I failed her. The failure was real, the finality of Marian’s death was leaden, suffocating.
Too late to save her, I was too late.
She tarried on the front porch, alone, the expansive lawn a lake of darkness. Do you believe in the resurrection of the body? Nestor had asked. Across the shadowy lawn shone the garish interior of an ambulance. Moss watched as EMTs tended to Nestor. His right bicep had been torn in the firefight, the bullet passed through. They removed his shirt, revealed bruising across his sternum, purple welts where bullets had struck his vest, lumps swollen red at the edges. He would be taken to St. Joseph’s, examined for internal bleeding.
Nestor, why would you live here? Of all places.
She studied his face in the ambulance light as he laughed with the paramedic who checked his bandages—so much younger now. This wasn’t the same man she had known, this was only a shade of him, younger even than she was. And he was innocent now, innocent of whatever threads would one day stitch him to this place. She had confronted Nestor in the moments following their discovery of Marian—out near the pear tree, she’d asked if he knew this house, but no, Nestor had never been here, he’d never been to Buckhannon before.
But you would have known about Marian then, Moss thought, when we were together. All their nights together here, he would have known that Marian’s blood was in the soil. Ill at her memories of him, humiliated. He had been beautiful then, their brief life together, serene, but it had come to this: six corpses in a Ryder truck.
Nestor’s ambulance pulled from the property, and she watched its sirens spark red, recede. A trick she’d learned as a child: someone had told her she would never fold a sheet of paper more than eleven times, no matter how large the sheet. She’d tried wispy leaves of newsprint, giant rectangles, folding, but never past eleven, the last folds minuscule and difficult, the paper compressed into a small brick. The seams of her life were folding in on themselves, Nestor’s house and the house where Marian had died, Courtney’s house and the house where Marian’s family had died, her emotions roiling and overwhelming, so she envisioned her life as those sheets of paper folding, as large as white sails folding, until her emotions compressed into a small brick without folds, diamond-hard in her heart.
A tense several hours followed the discovery of the mass killing, the forensic technicians and investigators anxious for access to the crime scene, the state and county medical examiners instructed to remain on hand and wait. There had been some initial confusion over what chemicals were inside the barn, stored in plastic drums, some questions, too, about the purpose of the lab equipment, so Brock had cleared the area as a precaution. On Brock’s call Governor Underwood requested the assistance of the nearest bomb squad, the West Virginia Army National Guard’s 753rd Ordnance Company. Lockdown while guardsmen in padded armor worked the barn, their line of swamp-green trucks edging 151, idling engines, diesel fumes.
The house was accessible, the basement taped off, the stains marked. Miss Ashleigh owned this place, purchased ten years ago. She had lived here while prisoners languished in the basement. Had she fed them, kept them clean? Moss recognized Miss Ashleigh’s touches throughout the place: varicolored glass decorating the windowsills, the dinner plates in the sink—Moss had used those plates years from now. The painting of the dead Christ was an oddity. Agents cataloged the Nazi artifacts in the bedroom—firearms, bayonets, service patches, flags in glass cases. In the future Nestor had told her these guns were his father’s—a lie. The service patches reminded her of what she might find here, in a house where Jared Bietak and Charles Cobb spent time, and so she opened closets and drawers, sifted through boxes she found beneath the bed, hoping to find evidence of Libra, a flight patch or the album of photographs she’d seen in the house at the orchard. She came up with old shoes and costume jewelry, bills, receipts, medical records. There was nothing.
Dawn broke. Fog hung knee-level over the grass, the surrounding landscape looked flooded with watery milk. A search-and-rescue team had arrived from Charleston, the handler of a cadaver dog swept through the property, out in the side yard, where the ground was furrowed with mounds and would one day be covered with wildflowers. A clamor of emergency when the dog stood immobile, staring. Men with shovels, eventually a backhoe, uncovered the remains of twenty-two people, their skin liquefied with lye. They had been killed in the Ryder truck, they had been buried beneath the mounds in the yard. Brock found Moss watching the dig. He wore his exhaustion openly, just like the first time she’d seen him, at the house on Cricketwood, crossing steel risers over blood—he was washed out, his eyes weary, but he wasn’t a broken man, not like the version Moss had known in the future. Brock was the center here, the calm. The forensic techs and Buckhannon cops and the National Guard in their bulky green seemed to swirl around him like ghosts in the early-morning vapor.
“Shannon, you stuck your finger in a hornet’s nest,” he said.
“Did they finish with the barn? What is it?”
“Chemical weapons,” said Brock. “No, they haven’t finished. They’ll be at this all day. Blasting caps, C-4. And the chemicals.”
“What are we talking about, Brock?”
“Sarin, mustard gas, all in small batches. Ricin. They found Ebola,” said Brock. “Our guess is they were making small doses of various agents, testing their lethality in that truck, the Ryder truck. Maybe testing dispersal methods to see what would reliably deliver a lethal dose.”
“Testing on a seventeen-year-old girl,” said Moss. “Jesus Christ.”
“Copycatting the Japanese subway cult from a couple years back,” said Brock. “In the production of sarin at least. We have people coming in who worked with Tokyo during that investigation. They want to take a look at what we’ve found.”
Sarin released in the Tokyo subway system, Moss remembered images on the news. The sarin had been liquid, stored in plastic bags the cultists had tossed to the subway floor and punctured with umbrella tips, gas seeping into the air.
“I’m taking a team with me out to the Blackwater, where we found the cairns,” said Brock. “I’ll bring the K9 unit with me, the cadaver dog, search a wider area. I’ll need to know how you knew about this place, Shannon. I’ll need everything you know.”
“I want to help you,” said Moss. Towers of stones marking the wilderness. She’d thought the cairns marked the location of Marian’s body, where she had been dumped—but Marian was here. What did the cairns mark? Other victims? Six in the Ryder, three at Cricketwood, Fleece in the mirrored room and Mursult at the Blackwater . . . bodies in the side-yard mounds, a swelling atrocity like discovering a rush of worms in a dead dog’s heart. “I’ll tell you what I can, but I’m still catching up with all this.”
“Come with me. I want your take on something.”
A haunted image, the Winnebago emerging from the milky mist. She remembered where she had recognized the Winnebago; she had noticed it at Miss Ashleigh’s, dust-caked in the orchard barn. “Three hundred rounds, a conservative guess,” said Brock, guiding her inside. The Winnebago’s entire wall was shredded where the barrage of bullets had pierced it. “He was only hit four times. You can ID him?”
“Yeah, I can,” said Moss, approaching the corpse in the sleeping cabin through the galley kitchenette. “His name’s Jared Bietak.”
“One of yours?”
“Navy,” she said. “NSC, just like Mursult.” Bietak’s body was a waxy presence, cooling, not yet cold. Nicole had once confessed that Jared Bietak’s tattoo had impressed her; to Moss it looked like the logo of a Pontiac firebird. There was another tattoo, script: NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM, a new order of the ages. Moss thought of the days of the dying earth, when pyramids would wander for water, but she thought, too, of this age, of the paranoiacs who believed in the imminence of the New World Order, a world government as enslavers of mankind. Two bullet wounds on his chest, another through his neck, she couldn’t find the fourth. Jared Bietak’s blood filled the foam bed cushion. His eyes were half closed. The West Virginia state medical examiner would perform a forensic autopsy on him, and Moss wondered if they would find evidence of the thyroid cancer that would have otherwise taken his life. “Jared Bietak is Nicole Onyongo’s husband.”
“She’s gone,” said Brock. “I sent a team to her apartment, on your request. She hasn’t shown up to work either.”
“Gone,” said Moss, remembering Nicole’s eyes glassy, her manhattan, the smoke of two Parliaments rising to the ceiling. But then, she might appear before too long. Nicole had continued working at the Donnell House in her IFT, had become a regular at the May’rz Inn. But the chemical weapons hadn’t been discovered in that timeline; who knows what that would change? “All right, keep looking for her,” said Moss, fearing how radically the future might already have changed from her experience of it. “We need to find her.”
“Come over here,” said Brock. “I want you to take a look at these.”
They wore blue nitrile gloves to study the sheaves of documents Brock had recovered from an unlocked safe in the front of the Winnebago. They sat together at the dinette table, Brock spreading out maps and sets of blueprints. The Red Line of the D.C. Metro, the Capitol Building, detailed notes on the Senate chamber.
“And this,” said Brock, unrolling schematics of NSC launch pads in Kodiak, Alaska. There were others: the Air Force Space Division headquarters in Colorado Springs, the Naval Space Command headquarters in Dahlgren. There was information about Cape Canaveral, the military floor at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Maps of their ventilation systems, security profiles. Brock showed her similar information about the United Nations General Assembly in New York, but it was the blueprints of the FBI CJIS facility that chilled her. On some level she knew. On some level, throughout the hours of waiting here, as rumors stirred about what had been discovered in the barn, the contiguous pieces of her investigation started to meld. Moss absorbed the rich irony of Brock’s having discovered these plans—that he was preventing the attack on CJIS that one day would have destroyed his wife and daughters.
“They’re a terrorist militia,” said Moss. “Ex-military.”
“And these are the targets?” asked Brock.
“Yes,” she said, “or potential targets.” These other locations hadn’t been attacked in the IFT she’d traveled to, but she wondered if other IFTs would have played out differently; she wondered about the cataclysms that might have been, or still might be. The enormity of her mistake rushed into her like water rushing into a gap: she had hurried to this house, heartbroken at the doubling of Buckhannon, hurried here in a mania to try to save the girl, but she shouldn’t have. She should have been methodical, should have called O’Connor, should have waited. Jared Bietak had been here, Cobb had been here—who else would they have found if she’d waited? Now Bietak was dead and Cobb and Miss Ashleigh had scattered, seeds to the wind. She had lost touch with the greater mission.
“White supremacists?” asked Brock. “The Nazi paraphernalia in the bedroom here.”
“No, I don’t think so, not primarily,” said Moss, trying to recover, to see past those missed chances. “Antigovernment for certain. Karl Hyldekrugger. He acquired blueprints for CJIS two years ago, sold by a member of the Mountaineer Militia shortly before your people arrested him.”
“We’ll try to track these chemicals, try to track the sale of the equipment,” said Brock. “I’ll run Hyldekrugger’s name by our domestic-terror people, see what they can come up with. We’ve learned a lot since McVeigh.”
Moss remembered the name of the CJIS suicide bomber, memorized from books that would never be written: Ryan Wrigley Torgersen. He worked at CJIS, would have reported to work with explosives sewn into his body. There were constitutional protections against pre-crime, Fourth Amendment applications that complicated NCIS investigations. She would have to talk with O’Connor, apply for special warrants through the military courts to arrest this individual.
“Alert your colleagues at CJIS immediately,” said Moss. “I think the discovery of these blueprints is enough to suggest you search the ventilation system and the fire-suppression system. I doubt you’ll find anything. But they should increase security, they should consider CJIS an active target. There is an individual to consider a person of interest, a potential bomber. He’s an FBI employee, Ryan Wrigley Torgersen.”
“Torgersen, I know him,” said Brock. “I’ve met him. He works in my wife’s department at CJIS. Are you sure? He’s meek, Shannon. Torgersen . . . I’ll ask for surveillance, see what we can dig up about him.”
The National Guard allowed access to the barn much later that afternoon. They had rendered safe the recovered chemicals, had eliminated the threat of explosives. The medical examiner of Upshur County had been waiting on site since the bodies were first discovered. He was a young man, a skinny doctor who wore a shirt and tie and a cowboy hat the color of calfskin that he removed and held reverently as he approached the barn doors. He’d been told there were a number of bodies, and he’d brought three men with him, older men who seemed more like ranch hands than medical techs. They wore protective suits, a precaution against chemicals that might still be trapped in the victims’ hair or might escape from the cavities of their bodies.
Moss stood at a distance, examining the Ryder. A hole had been drilled through the passenger side of the cargo space, and a rubber tube dangled from the hole. A mobile gas chamber. The barn itself was equipped with a ventilation system and safety showers, protective suits in lockers. Moss imagined Jared Bietak and Charles Cobb in these yellow suits dispersing poison gas or acid or disease into the back of the truck, measuring their victims’ suffering.
They would have moved Marian from the basement in the middle of the night, the barn floodlight disconnected, the house lights off. She would have been bound, gagged, and no one would have heard her anyway, not out here. A favorable wind might have carried her screams—but only so far.
This is how my life will end, Marian would have thought. In the back of a Ryder truck, gagging on the stink of the previous dead. She might have realized she smelled her own death. She might have scratched at the walls of the truck, she might have been senseless with terror—Moss imagined Marian weeping for mercy. She would have heard the purring of an engine or the whir of a box fan pushing gas through the rubber hose. Marian’s photograph had anchored Moss to terra firma those nights when she felt adrift in her IFT. Life is greater than time, she had written. A false hope.
The Upshur ME and his men wearing hazmat suits laid out plastic sheets, gingerly removed each body from the truck. Four males, two females—one of them Marian. All were naked, all significantly damaged by chemical or acid burns, most of the bodies bloated and glossy, facial features distorted or altogether missing. Some of the bodies fell apart like jelly in their hands.
—
KDKA News: Marian’s picture cycling with helicopter shots of the house and barn, maps of Buckhannon, interviews with neighbors, sound bites from Brock. Mug shots of Ashleigh Bietak and the man she had fled with, Richard Harrier, captured hiding beneath the front porch of a property three miles down 151. Harrier a Home Depot cashier, shots of the Home Depot in Bridgeport. Blanket coverage of sarin gas, reprising coverage of the Aum Shinrikyo subway attacks, of Oklahoma City, and soon the house on Cricketwood Court had become a shrine to the slain family. At first just a few bouquets wrapped in green tissue and cellophane, pops of color left on the front stoop, but within a few days the stoop was mounded with flowers, framed photographs, white crosses. Moss sat in her truck and watched as people arrived and departed from the makeshift memorial, remorseful that no memorial like this had been made for Courtney, a personal regret that she had never laid flowers here. Later that evening Moss returned and added her own bouquet, a burst of roses.
—
She worked the phones late that afternoon, tracking down the owners of the apple orchard where Miss Ashleigh had lived years from now, where she had hosted the memorial for Jared Bietak. Moss remembered Nicole mentioning that the place used to be owned by ceramicists and soon found that the property was still owned by Ned and Mary Stent, the proprietors of the Pot and Kettle. She tracked Ned Stent to an art fair in Atlanta, Ned speaking with her from his hotel room, explaining the differences between earthenware and raku, describing the ceramics classes they offered at their orchard, the dimensions of their kiln. No, they’d never met anyone named Ashleigh Bietak, had never met Jared Bietak, and no, they weren’t planning on selling their property. “Not for a few years as of yet, at least.”
—
There was no viewing of the Mursult family’s bodies, though their five caskets were established in separate rooms of the Salandra funeral home on West Pike for a gathering of friends and family before the funeral Mass across the street at St. Patrick’s. So many children had come to grieve. High-school and middle-school children in their nice clothes, their church clothes, outfits that would double as Easter clothes in the next few weeks. Posters covered with the Mursult family’s pictures leaned on easels next to their caskets. Moss touched the lacquered wood of Marian’s coffin. She stood with her head bowed, falsifying prayer for the sake of the other mourners in line to pay their respects.
At the funeral Mass, Moss sat alone in the back pew while the priest blessed each of the five caskets, as the faithful took Communion and prayed. St. Patrick’s was Moss’s childhood church. She’d been raised Catholic, had memories of Sunday school here, remembered her Communion dress, the taste of the Eucharist. St. Pat’s wasn’t a stone colossus like the older churches of Pittsburgh, but rather a contemporary remodel, with ocher walls and cobalt trim, stained-glass windows of pink, green, and yellow squares. The altarpiece was a brash design of crimson and gold diamonds. The sculpture of the Crucifixion above the altar held Moss’s attention through the service, a crucifix bathed in color cast by the sunlit stained glass. Christ seemed to levitate above the altar, as if the arms of the cross were wings—if it weren’t for the pins at his ankles and wrists, she imagined he might simply float away.
Suffocating, the agonized sound of children crying, the unbearable sorrow. Moss left the service before it had concluded—a familiar release she remembered, escaping church. News vans had set up across the street, parked where they could capture establishing shots of the funeral home, the church, probably hoping for shots of children leaving in tears.
Chilly air but warm in the sun. She walked West Pike, to clear her head. She crossed the tracks and the busier intersection at Morganza. The parking lot of the Pizza Hut was full, families eating lunch together. A ridiculous place to mourn, between the blue dumpsters, but this is where Courtney had died, this is where Moss had found her friend’s body. One of the dumpsters had been replaced in the past several years, but the other looked like it could have been left over from 1985, nearly twelve years ago. Moss leaned against the brick wall, remembering—and she cried for Courtney, for Marian, for Marian’s family, for her own. She remembered her father in dim flashes, how he would lift her from bed, how he would lift her and spin, wintergreen on his breath and pipe smoke in his hair. She cried for every lost thing, everything gone. Chartiers Creek ran behind the Pizza Hut, a narrow trickle of water bounded on either side by weeds. Moss sat on the bench of a picnic table that the Pizza Hut kids used on their smoke breaks. She watched the murky water. Trash littered the muddy banks. Peaceful, in its way—she felt removed from Canonsburg, the noise of traffic just a background of white noise. Sunlight hit the water like a speckle of silver fire, glorious. But Moss resented the thought. This place wasn’t beautiful—it was the end of everything.
Her cell phone rang, the sound startling her. She let it ring. A few moments of silence before it started ringing again. She checked the number: BROCK.
“Hello?” she said.
“Moss,” he said, his voice cracking with enthusiasm, ecstatic. “Moss, is that you?”
“I was at their funeral,” she said. “Marian and—”
“Shannon, I have wonderful news,” he said, overcome by emotion, ebullient. “I don’t understand this, or how it happened, Shannon, but I have truly wonderful news. We found her.”
Moss didn’t answer, only tried to puzzle out his meaning. We found her. Trees grew like a canopy over the water. Their leaves dappled the muddy banks and swept into the creek. She watched the leaves clot in an eddy before disappearing beneath the shadows of a corrugated-steel tube that took the creek underground.
“We found her,” said Brock. “She’s alive. We found her in the woods, but she’s alive, Shannon. We found her.”
“Who?” said Moss.
“Marian,” said Brock. “We found her. Marian’s alive, Shannon. She’s alive.”