Том Светерлич - The Gone World

Moss had long ago learned the dissociative technique of viewing bodies through different lenses, divorcing the mutilation as much as possible from the personalities they once were—seeing her colleagues around her through the lens of humanity, seeing the bodies through the lens of forensics. Moss objectified the corpses. The kill stroke for the woman had been one of two blows to her head, either to her left zygomatic or to the parietal on the same side. The woman’s left pupil had dilated to a wide black saucer. Moss noticed that the boy’s fingernails had been removed, all of them. And his toenails, too, it looked like. She checked the woman and found that her nails had been removed as well. Someone—a man, no doubt—had killed these people, then knelt in the gore to pluck their nails from them. Or had he taken their nails before he’d killed them? Why had he done that? One of the technicians ran lengths of thread from the blood spatter on the ceiling and walls, creating a web of thread that delineated an area of convergence—it looked like the victims had been on their knees when they were struck, an execution. The room they had died in was bland, tasteless—nothing like the room Moss had once known, the comfortable, cavelike rec room kept by her best friend’s family. Oatmeal tones now, track lighting. Nothing on the walls, no artwork, no photographs; the room didn’t look lived in, it looked staged for resale.

“Shannon Moss?”

One of the men in Tyvek had paused in his work. Bloodshot eyes, nearly crimson, his dark skin ashen, VapoRub daubed beneath his nostrils in twin greasy streaks.

“Special agent, NCIS,” she said.

He crossed the living room on stainless-steel risers the investigators used like stepping-stones over the blood. He chewed gum, said, “William Brock, Special Agent in Charge. Let’s talk.”

Brock led her through the narrow kitchen, the few men gathered there no longer wearing their Tyvek, their shirts and ties rumpled from hours of work, their faces wan with sleeplessness. Brock, however, seemed tireless—like he would charge bullish until this killer was caught. Angry, almost scowling as he led Moss, as if personally offended by what had happened here. He was sizeable, his voice a resonant baritone in a room of hushed voices.

“Right through here, in this little den,” he said, pulling aside the flimsy accordion door of a room that branched off from the kitchen.

The rest of the house had been soullessly updated over the years, but the den remained unchanged, seemingly untouched since Moss had seen it last. The effect was unnerving—like this little patch had been forgotten when the rest of time had passed on. Faux-wood paneling, a gaudy light fixture that cast the room in amber. Even the particleboard desk and metal filing cabinets were similar, if not the same pieces left over. Courtney had once found a stash of letters in one of those cabinets that her parents had written as they were divorcing. The girls had sat on the front stoop and read them aloud to each other—Moss struck by how earnest, how almost childish a grown man’s letters to his wife could be, nothing different from high-school breakup letters, she’d thought, no difference at all. Nothing changes. The human heart doesn’t age.

“Do we have pictures of the victims?” asked Moss. “Anything recent? It’s impossible to tell what they might have looked like.”

“We have some albums,” said Brock. “Fotomat receipts and negatives. We’ll get them to you once they’re developed. Have you had a chance to see the entire scene? Upstairs?”

“I’ll need to see upstairs,” said Moss.

Brock folded closed the accordion door. “I need to talk with you, clear up a few things,” he said, taking a seat behind the particleboard desk. “The FBI’s deputy director called me in the middle of the night, pulled me from bed. I don’t receive calls from him on a regular basis. He told me there’s a federal crime scene in Canonsburg, told me to lock it down.”

“But that’s not all he told you,” said Moss.

Brock bared his teeth—meant to be a smile, an easing, but it looked like a pained expression. He wadded his gum into its silvery wrapper, replaced it with a fresh black stick. Licorice wafting on a cloud of breath. Moss noticed tooth marks on his pencil—maybe he’d quit smoking, she thought, or was trying to. Early forties, maybe mid-forties, muscular—a regular at the gym, she figured. She imagined him sparring, a boxer. She imagined him running miles on treadmills in empty exercise rooms.

“I’m struggling to understand what the deputy director told me,” said Brock. “To wrap my mind around what we’ve found here. He briefed me on a Special Access Program called ‘Deep Waters.’” Brock spoke the words like an incantation, a shadow of fear passing over his eyes. “A Navy program—a black project. He said our primary suspect, a SEAL named Patrick Mursult, is connected with the Deep Waters program, part of the Naval Space Command. He said to include Shannon Moss in the investigation.”

The scope of the possible world had opened for this man just a few hours ago, thought Moss, seeing Brock struggle to believe the unbelievable. He’d been brought into the secrecy of Deep Waters—but how much had he been trusted with? Moss remembered her first dreamlike glimpse of sunlight glaring off the hulls of the NSC fleet in space, like a spill of diamonds on black velvet—a sublimity few other people have witnessed. She imagined Brock taking the phone call at home, imagined him sitting on the edge of his bed listening to his superior describe what must have sounded like miracles.

“Mursult was… some kind of astronaut,” said Brock, his jaw grinding his licorice. “Deep Space—I understand deep space, I can understand we’ve been farther in the solar system than has been reported, but I don’t understand how . Quantum foam—”

So he’d been told about Deep Space but not Deep Time, thought Moss. Naval Space Command had a public face, had been involved in Star Wars under Reagan, line items in Department of Defense budgets along with the Air Force Space Division and NASA, but the bulk of its operations were closely guarded secrets. Moss had traveled to Deep Space, but she had also traveled to Deep Time—had time-traveled to versions of the future, not only to witness the Terminus but for her criminal investigations as well. IFTs, these futures were called, pronounced like the word “If” — inadmissible future trajectories. “Inadmissible” because the future was mercurial—the futures NSC traveled to were only possibilities stemming from the conditions of the present. She was prohibited against using evidence gleaned from a future to build a case for prosecution in the present because the future she observed might not ever occur.

“Think of me as a resource,” said Moss. “That’s why I’m here, that’s why you were asked to call me. My division within NCIS investigates crimes relating to the Deep Waters program.”

“I don’t know what to believe,” said Brock. “I don’t know what to believe about Patrick Mursult, about a black-ops space program—it all sounds… I don’t know how much of this I’m understanding.”

“There’s a missing girl,” said Moss. “She’s our priority.”

The reminder of the missing girl focused him, the thought of something actionable. “Marian Mursult,” he said. “Seventeen…”

“Marian,” said Moss. “We’ll find her. Let’s start with tonight.”

“Locals were first on scene,” said Brock, any fog of bewilderment dissipated now, “pegged our person of interest right away as Patrick Mursult—figured he killed his own family. Once Canonsburg PD found paperwork suggesting Mursult was a sailor, they called the reserve center, to keep the Navy in the loop. They ID’d him—served in the Navy during Vietnam, he must have been just a kid.”