Linus was keeping an eye on her, glancing over now and then, watching her reflection in the night-darkened window. She could feel it. It was comforting, it was loving. It warmed her that he cared. But she also felt strange, having someone so worried about her. Was he waiting for her to fall apart, or was he looking at his girlfriend and wondering what it was like for her to kill? Or, worse, wondering if she had killed Walt Leppo by mistake. She was the person he shared a bed with.

Odessa wondered how she came across. She found herself double-checking her demeanor frequently: Do I seem sane? And now—never more than tonight, after the things she had learned earlier in the day.

“You going to finish that?” he asked.

“Oh, I’ll heat it up later. It’s good.”

Linus smiled at her. “You were staring into space.”

“I know. I’m fine.”

“Would you be happier watching something?”

“I’m good,” she said. “Just catching up on some news.”

He smiled and replaced his headphones over his ears. Odessa returned to her laptop, paging through search results for news stories about grave robbing in New Jersey and Long Island—opened up in a private browsing window, because she worried how it would look showing up in her search history.

She clicked and read articles about disturbed and defaced grave sites, most of the stories from local papers in the patch.com network. Graves desecrated. Headstones kicked over. Tiffany glass stolen. She narrowed her search to incidents from the previous five years.

One story jumped out. Actually, it was a series of stories, a scandal at the time, one Odessa vaguely remembered seeing on her news feed. “Miracle Baby Remains Stolen from Grave.” That was one of the less gratuitous headlines. The story went back a few years, a bittersweet article about a suburban Jersey toddler nicknamed “Baby Mia.” She had been born with a degenerative brain disease and wasn’t projected to survive more than a few hours. Against all odds, she had lived a month or more past her second birthday. But the health care cost of keeping her alive was prohibitive, and a feature article about the “miracle” girl became an online phenomenon. Baby Mia became a social media hashtag. Placards featuring a photograph of the girl wearing a pink elastic headband around her bandaged head appeared in store windows throughout New Jersey, from Asbury Park to Trenton, even crossing the river into parts of Philadelphia. A special SMS code was set up, a six-digit shortcut allowing direct donations of $10 to her health care fund. Six Flags Great Adventure and Storybook Land hosted fundraiser nights, and she dropped the puck at a New Jersey Devils playoff home game, becoming a local celebrity. The Devils held a pregame moment of silence for their adopted mascot after she finally succumbed to the disease.