The Hollow Ones(26)
Odessa almost teared up, thinking about the girl. She was torn by a great desire to meet her, imagining that such an encounter could be healing for both of them…and terrified of such a meeting, knowing it might offer no relief, and could even be further traumatizing.
Courtney appeared to be scrolling through her notes, using her track pad. “Is there anything you’ve left out of your account?”
Odessa shook her head. She said nothing about the heat signature departing Leppo’s corpse.
“And you’ve already stated this, but for my benefit,” said Courtney, “you were not under the influence of drugs or alcohol that night. And you are not taking any prescribed psychotropic medicine, and are not currently under the care of a psychiatrist…?”
“Not yet,” said Odessa.
“And—forgive my directness—were you and Agent Leppo involved romantically in any way…?”
Odessa looked to the side, at nothing. Trying to control her anger. The stab wounds kept coming, this one dead center in her chest. Was this coming from the FBI? she wondered. Or just Courtney’s own suspicion?
“Not in any way whatsoever.”
“Got it.” Tap-tap-tap with her cat’s paws.
Odessa said, “He was the one with the psychotic snap, not me.”
Courtney nodded, perhaps a bit embarrassed herself at having had to ask that question. And she should be.
Courtney tapped her track pad, committing Odessa’s account to a file. “The FBI wants your badge and your gun, but we are fighting for you.”
Odessa felt like handing over her badge permanently. “They already have my gun.”
“Do they?” Courtney looked through paper notes in a binder, nodding confidently as though she had found confirmation of this fact, but Odessa knew she was just covering for her own mistake. Courtney had probably received Odessa’s case the day before.
Odessa saw more of herself in the beleaguered young lawyer than she liked to admit.
Courtney said, “The FBI has flagged some things for our attention, but I want to ask you about one of them. It has to do with your father…?”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s something that I guess came up in the past—”
“That was all dealt with in my background investigation.”
Courtney appeared to bristle at Odessa’s firm tone. “Yes, that is the document I am referring to.”
Odessa’s head was buzzing. “They pulled my background check as part of this?”
“A summary letter, yes.”
Odessa went cold. “Is this normally done in these cases?”
“Well,” said Courtney, again looking to her notes for an answer Odessa knew was not there, “I don’t know. We handle mostly police officer shootings, like the one on Long Island yesterday. Not FBI shootings.”
Odessa looked away. The thought of her father made her morose, but she did not want to show her lawyer any strong negative reaction. Linus was right: She needed a real lawyer.
Then something came bubbling up through the darkness—something she could not ignore. Odessa asked softly:
“Wait…what happened on Long Island yesterday?”
Odessa rode the subway in a mental fog. She emerged onto the street in Kew Gardens with a new attitude. She returned to the FBI Resident Agency, entering with a tight, confident smile for the office manager, returning to Earl Solomon’s empty office.
But not before she borrowed an unattended laptop in the copy room, one she noticed had been there since the day before. She closed the office door and opened the laptop on Agent Solomon’s desk, sitting in his long-unused chair. She searched for the murder case and found multiple articles relating to a shocking killing in Little Brook, a Long Island hamlet east of Massapequa. A town supervisor, the top elected local official, went “postal” half an hour before office hours ended in Little Brook Town Hall, attacking people with a long-bladed cabinet screwdriver, killing three. The fifty-three-year-old man was shot and killed by a marine patrol safety officer who happened to be there checking permits.
A rampage killing. The assailant had no prior criminal record. Was said to be a pillar of the community. “He just snapped.” There were mentions of health concerns, financial pressures. Conditions that affect a great number of middle-aged men. A news item she would normally have skimmed and then clicked away from suddenly had resonance for her.
Then she accessed the FBI directory—nothing requiring a security passcode—for information about Agent Earl Solomon. With the hundreds of archived tape recordings from his house in mind, she searched for case records. No hits. She was tempted to search deeper, but this wasn’t her laptop, and she didn’t want to get herself, or any other agent, in further trouble. But the impression she got was that an invisible hand had all but erased Earl Solomon from existence within the FBI database.
Never mind the cost, Odessa couldn’t stand the thought of Ubering out to Long Island, sitting in the backseat of a car like a child. She looked up Zipcar and downloaded an updated app, entered her email and an old password, and voilà, the car sharing account she had started in Boston still worked.
She drove a silver Honda CR-V east from Queens, her phone copiloting from the passenger seat, taking her along the Southern State Parkway to 27, past Amityville, arriving in Little Brook. She operated with a sense of purpose and also dread, knowing she shouldn’t be doing this, feeling she was going to be caught…and at the same time unable to turn back.