The Hollow Ones(8)

He looked at her with the confused, disoriented eyes of a man waking up from a vivid and terrifying nightmare.

He continued to struggle with Leppo, but now it looked like he was fighting off the older man—like Leppo was the aggressor. Odessa only now truly processed that Leppo held the knife. He was wielding the assailant’s weapon. Peters, however it happened, was unarmed.

“WALT!”

All he had to do was shove Peters down. He had the advantage. Odessa had Peters at point-blank range. It was over.

“BACK OFF, I GOT HIM!”

If she fired now, the round would explode through Peters and strike Leppo. But nothing she was saying got through to her fellow agent.

Peters turned away from Odessa, losing the struggle, Leppo’s knife arm rising by his shoulder. Peters took his hand off Leppo’s chin and throat and moved it to his arm, fighting him for possession of the knife.

Peters cried, “Don’t…please!”

Odessa screamed: “LAST WARNING!”

With a burst of wild strength, Peters shoved Leppo off him, back against the side wall. Leppo was clear. Peters turned to Odessa, holding out his hand, saying, “No—!”

Odessa fired twice.

Peters went down backward, dropping hard. He clutched his chest where both rounds had opened him up, writhing on the carpet runner, arcing his back. Odessa held her shooting stance, her aim staying on his midsection. Peters sucked air, his breath groaning, his chest wounds hissing. His eyes flickered, for the briefest moment, with odd recognition—as if he had just woken and found himself lost—and then the eyes froze, a single tear streaking down his left cheek.

Odessa had shot a man. He was bleeding out. She was watching him die.

She never looked at Leppo.

Peters’s body flattened and he lay still. The agonal sounds in his chest became a high-pitched sigh like a tire going flat. His eyes glazed, became dull.

It was over.

Odessa exhaled her own breath, the one she hadn’t known she had been holding since she fired.

“I killed him,” she said to Leppo but mostly to herself. “I put him down.”

It was then that Odessa became aware of two things almost simultaneously: a faint burning smell—like burnt soldering paste—and a girl’s voice, crying and calling from another bedroom, faint under the arriving sirens outside.

“Help me! Who’s there?”

The third Peters child. Still alive—unhurt.

Odessa found it difficult to take her eyes off Peters’s body. Peripherally, she saw Leppo turn and start toward the last bedroom at the end of the hall. Going to comfort the only surviving member of the Peters family.

Odessa started to relax. She straightened and took one step forward, looking over the man she had killed.

Ahead of her, Leppo slowed a moment as he reached the doorway, before entering. Odessa looked up, and as Leppo disappeared into the room, Odessa saw the knife still in his hand.

Odessa’s first thought was that this was bad procedure. The murder weapon was evidence and must be treated as such.

She yelled after him, “Leppo!”—calling his name down the hallway over the barefoot killer she had shot dead. The soles of his feet were dirty, almost black, and that made it somewhat more tragic; sordid.

He was gone. And for a moment she was alone in the blue flashing hallway with the man she had shot.

Odessa felt sick. It was different from the nausea she’d experienced upon discovering Mrs. Peters’s savaged corpse. Most FBI agents never fire their sidearm in the line of duty. There was going to be an inquest. Thank God she had Leppo as an eyewitness.

Odessa stepped around Peters’s corpse, unable to look away as she passed. His bloodstained hands still lay over his chest wounds, his eyes staring straight up at the ceiling and beyond.

She approached the bedroom with her gun lowered, not wanting to scare the surviving Peters child. She stepped into the open doorway Leppo had moved through.

The nine-year-old girl wore warm soft-yellow pajamas covered with images of cartoon baby chicks hatching from smiling white eggs. Walt Leppo stood just behind her, holding a handful of her blond hair in his fist. Her mouth was open but no scream came out. Her body was twisted, trying to pull away from Leppo, but her hair was firmly in his grip.

Leppo’s other hand gripped the carving knife, not as one would handle a vital piece of evidence, but wielding it like a weapon, blade pointing down.

Odessa’s mind tried to bring order to what she was witnessing: Maybe Leppo is holding the girl in order to keep her from running off. He’s only trying to prevent her from seeing her father’s dead body out in the hallway, and the bodies of her brother, sister, and mother.

But this split-second rationalization did not match up with the look she saw on Leppo’s face. The doll-eyed menace, his twisted grin. It was almost as though he were showing the girl the knife and its blood-slicked blade.

“Leppo?” said Odessa.

It didn’t make sense. Leppo did not seem to even know Odessa was in the room with him. He lifted the knife, turning his head to look at the blade himself, while the girl bucked her head, trying to break his strong grip.

“Walt, put it down,” said Odessa. “Walt! Put the knife down!”

She couldn’t believe she was saying these words. Odessa found herself aiming her Glock at him. She was drawing down on a fellow agent. It went against every instinct she had.