The Hollow Ones(14)

The agents watched Leppo’s body as it was being photographed. His gun was in his holster. They looked down at their fallen comrade, killed in the line of duty. Then they looked back at Odessa.

Odessa found a bottle of water someone had offered her earlier and drank all of it at once. She felt more than self-doubt. She actively questioned her own sanity in that moment. She felt shaken to her core.

After conferring with the first two agents, the supervisory agent returned with some follow-up questions for her.

Where were you standing when Walt tried to stab the girl?

Where do you think he got the knife from?

Had Walt been acting strangely at the restaurant before the shooting?

Odessa realized they thought she was inventing part of the story to cover up a bad shoot. That maybe she had accidentally shot Leppo, mistaking him for a second assailant in the dark bedroom. Odessa didn’t address or refute it. But she knew what was happening.

The girl would vouch for Odessa’s story. She was the only living witness. The wound on her shoulder, from the blade of Leppo’s knife, was clear evidence of justifiable force.

They draped a sheet over Walt Leppo’s body. The sheet dropped over his unblinking eyes.

Walt, what happened?

Odessa was led out of the bedroom.



Odessa rode back to Claremont in the responding agents’ car. Nobody spoke.

The Newark field office was among the FBI’s largest, with more than 350 agents and including resident agencies stretching from Atlantic City to Peterson. They had jurisdiction over most of the state of New Jersey, with the Philadelphia field office responsible for a corner of South Jersey.

Up on the sixth floor of Claremont, in a windowless room still imbued with the faint redolence of cigarette smoke from a vanished time, Odessa told the story again, twice. Exactly the same, but for a few details that came back to her upon each retelling. The thumping noises she heard overhead as she moved from the Peters kitchen to the stairs, like sounds of a struggle, for example. The beep-beep of a passive “door open” signal as they entered the Peters house. Leppo requesting leftovers from the lunch rush instead of a freshly made meat loaf.

Odessa started to cry. Once she began, she found she could not stop. She could still speak, but the tears fell and her nose ran into tissues pulled from a box she held in her lap. This was a room normally reserved for interrogating suspects.

Her questioners’ faces were expressionless. She had never been on the other side of this. A few questions raised her antennae.

Did either of you drink any alcohol at dinner?

Are you on any medication right now?

She surrendered her sidearm for ballistics testing, which was standard procedure. They suggested she give a blood sample, claiming it was for her benefit. The way they said this didn’t sit well with her. But the blood test never came about anyway.

The sun rose, the morning shift arrived, and agents who never gave rookie Odessa the time of day came by the sixth floor just to get a look. That was when she knew—really knew—that she was in trouble. Even though it was justified, she was still implicated in a bad shoot. A fellow agent was down—and she had done it.



Around ten A.M., word came down that Odessa should be sent home. When she stopped at her cubicle to get her phone charger, the thought crossed her mind to retrieve whatever else she thought she wanted from her desk drawer in case she was never allowed back in here. Ridiculous, she told herself, but was it? From the window she could see down to Center Street, where television trucks were set up for live reporting.

Nobody told her Linus was waiting for her. She saw him in the lobby, wearing a suit without a necktie, as though he had dressed quickly and half for work, not sure what to do. He looked up from his phone and jumped to his feet when she approached, and she held him and broke down a little. She had no idea they had called him.

She had met Linus Ayers in law school in Boston, where he was from. They dated until graduation, broke up, and within a year were living together. It was love but it also made great financial sense for two young attorneys, one drawing a government salary from the FBI, the other a second-year lawyer in a white-shoe firm across the river in Manhattan.

“Thank you,” she whispered in his ear.

He rubbed her back reassuringly, still holding her. “They called me. I thought something happened to you—you were hurt.”

She shook her head and buried her face one more time in his shoulder.

“It’s bad,” she said.

“You need a lawyer,” said Linus.

She pulled back a bit to swipe away her tears and look at him, his fair brown skin and concerned eyes. “I have a lawyer,” she said. “You.”

He almost smiled.

They walked out an unmarked door on River Street, past a television reporter scrolling through her phone with her earpiece dangling from her blouse collar between broadcasts, unnoticed. The rain had cleared out the humidity overnight, cooling the air. Odessa leaned on Linus on the short walk to Newark Penn Station, where they caught a PATH train one stop into Harrison. They didn’t speak much. Odessa didn’t remember much of their short journey. Exhaustion was starting to hit her now.

She thought she might feel relief upon closing their apartment door on the world outside, but it didn’t happen. Linus asked if she wanted to eat anything, but she sure didn’t. She climbed into bed with her clothes on, something she had done once before in her adult life, when she had the flu.