Том Светерлич - The Gone World

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.