Without any warning, Walt Leppo stabbed downward. The blade sliced through flesh, bone, and cartilage and got stuck in the girl’s clavicle and shoulder—a sickening, muffled bone crack audible as Leppo struggled to disengage the knife and the shoulder popped out of its socket.

The girl screamed.

Odessa fired twice on pure reflex. The Glock jumped in her hands.

The force of the impact pushed Leppo off the girl. He pinwheeled back into a nightstand next to the bed, still holding her hair.

The girl fell with him, bleeding, howling, landing on him. She jerked away, her hair released from his grip. Three thick strands of ripped hair stayed on Leppo’s hand.

The girl crawled away quickly on all fours into the far corner of the room.

Leppo’s fall knocked a humidifier off the nightstand, the jug coming loose as it fell to the floor, water glugging into the carpet. Leppo crumpled against the side of the bed, sliding down, his body settling, his shoulders and head leaning against the bed frame at an unnatural angle.

Odessa stood frozen in place. She cried out, “Leppo!” as though he had been shot by someone else, even as she stared at him over the barrel of her smoking gun.

Loud voices called out from downstairs. Cops in the house, finally.

Leppo’s horrible grin relaxed, his eyes losing their focus. As she stood there staring, unable to believe what had just happened, Odessa saw something…

A mist, looking like a ripple of heat mirage, rose from Leppo’s twisted form. A presence in the room, hovering like swamp gas. No color, only—again—the odor of burnt solder, different from the cordite smoke still wisping out of her gun barrel…

Leppo’s body sagged perceptibly, as though something, some entity, had fled his body as he died.

When the Montclair cops burst inside the bedroom, they found a young woman sitting on the floor with her arms around a sobbing, trembling nine-year-old girl with a deep knife wound on her shoulder. A middle-aged man lay slumped against the girl’s nightstand and bed, dead from two gunshot wounds. The young woman pulled one arm away from the thrashing, wailing girl, showing the armed police officers her FBI badge.

“Agent down…” Odessa said, hyperventilating. “Agent down…”

Chapter

1962. The Mississippi Delta.

He was briefed on the investigation by a supervisory special agent on the short predawn flight from Knoxville into Jackson, Mississippi. The particulars of the case featured many notable peculiarities, but the fact that the Bureau had chartered an airplane to expedite his immediate reassignment to the Jackson Field Office—he, Earl Solomon, a twenty-eight-year-old rookie FBI special agent just four months graduated from the academy—indicated above all else that this was to be no ordinary inquiry.