“I didn’t tell them.”

Linus’s eyes widened a bit. Then he nodded. “Maybe you should keep it that way, going ahead.” He was assessing it as a lawyer should. “There’s nothing factually wrong with omitting it.”

“What could have happened to Walt?” she said.

Linus had nothing for her there. “It’s all so crazy. Nothing makes sense right now.”

Odessa’s phone rang. She sat up, but Linus looked before she could.

“Your mother,” he said.

Odessa sank back down. “I can’t.”

“Then don’t,” he said, pulling her charger plug from the wall and standing. “Sleep.”

She nodded. He left.

Later in the day, the twenty-four-hour news channels were obsessively tracking the “last flight” of Cary Peters, patched together from cell phone footage, eyewitness reports, bullet holes, and FAA reports. Odessa watched the coverage on her laptop, a cold mug of tea on the table next to her.

Peters had killed five people: two men at Teterboro, and three family members in Montclair. Odessa paid close attention to the man whose Jeep was carjacked at the golf course parking lot. His description of Peters’s cold facial expression and distant eyes—attributed to the head wound Peters suffered upon crash landing on the golf course—matched exactly the look she had seen in Walt Leppo’s face.

Peters was said to have been shot and killed by law enforcement, and an FBI agent had been killed in the exchange. As of yet, they did not have the complete story. But Odessa knew it was only a matter of time.

The news was trying to make sense of Peters’s killing spree just as Odessa was. Financial pressure, family strife, professional ruin. His life was a shambles, no question. But his actions went beyond. He was not a violent man, and there was nothing in his past that hinted at such a frenzy of viciousness.

Same for Leppo. Odessa kept going over their dinner together. It could not have been less remarkable. And the drive to Montclair: Leppo being Leppo, playing a hunch, at the top of his game. Entering the house that night: the veteran agent taking the lead. Odessa getting waylaid by her discovery of the mother’s corpse. She wished she had a clear memory of the noises upstairs.

Was there a struggle? Why hadn’t Leppo fired his Glock? How did he wind up with the carving knife Peters had taken from the kitchen?

Her cell rang. It was Claremont. They were sending a car. They wanted her back in for another interview.

Linus said, “Let me get you a lawyer.”

Odessa said, “I can’t afford a lawyer.”

Linus said, “You can’t afford not to.”