There was a third participant in this ritual séance—although whether he was an active participant or merely a witness is known only by those in attendance.
Not much is known about Hugo Blackwood. He seldom spoke, but appeared to be constantly by Dee’s side, privately and in public functions. People called him Dee’s Shadow but were careful to only do it when he was not nearby.
He was originally presumed to have first encountered John Dee during Dee’s 1555 prosecution for treason—Dee had been accused of reading by “casting” (that is to say, tampering with) then Queen Mary’s horoscope—in the Star Chamber where Blackwood was apprenticing as a legal clerk. This theory has fallen out of favor over the past twenty years as contradictory biographical information, however slim, has surfaced, which would place Blackwood’s age at the time of the invocation somewhere in his thirties. It now appears that Hugo Blackwood was originally employed as Dee’s legal representative, though documents from the time are scarce. One theory, as yet not disproved, is that Blackwood represented John Dee in matters relating to his property and acquisitions.
What is known is that, like many before and after him, Hugo Blackwood was drawn into the famous philosopher’s orbit. The reason for his presence at this invocation is unclear. It is not known if he, like Dee and Talbot, had fasted in preparation for the ceremony, though it is presumed that he partook of a goblet of fermented grain beverage, a draught of wormwood, derived from Artemisia vulgaris cultivated in Dee’s own garden. Perhaps Hugo Blackwood was an interested observer, or, less likely but still possible, perhaps he simply happened to be at Dee’s residence on other business on the night in question.
Or perhaps, as had happened many times before, John Dee sensed something in Hugo Blackwood’s character that interested him, that Dee judged made him conducive to his pursuit of evidence of an exalted, alternate realm, that prompted him to include the barrister in this ceremony.
Barely any mention of the extraordinary survives in Dee’s notebooks, so either nothing occurred that evening that Dee believed warranted special notation, or perhaps he was unaware. Dee lived many more years in search of the ineffable, ambitiously attempting to fuse mathematics, divination, astronomy, and spiritualism into a single discipline, and never succeeding.
But on this night, something did happen. In the act of experimenting with spheromancy in order to summon an archangel to divulge its divine knowledge, a line was crossed. A natural law was broken. A dark boundary was trespassed.
Two men emerged from it unchanged.
One did not.
2019. Newark, New Jersey.
The mass murder scene investigation went all night.
Odessa was a while explaining to the first responders exactly what had happened, offering a preliminary ID on Cary Peters as the assailant of the two dead children and their mother, identifying Walt Leppo as a fellow law enforcement member. The girl was inconsolable. Odessa couldn’t even get her to say her first name. EMTs took her away.
Odessa met the first pair of responding FBI agents in the girl’s bedroom and took them through the story. She had dealt with eyewitnesses herself and spoke as clearly and succinctly as she could. But when she got to the end, she couldn’t make them understand that it was she, not Peters, who had shot Leppo. At first, they thought she misspoke; then that she had been traumatized and didn’t know what she was saying; then they told her a supervisory agent was on the way.
Odessa told it again to the supervisory agent. Again, her account was met with disbelief. This time she heard herself describing the part in the hallway, when she found Peters and Leppo struggling, but Peters was unarmed and Leppo held the knife. And then after she shot Peters, Leppo walked with the knife into the girl’s room without a word. She understood that what she was saying did not make a lot of sense. She said that Walt must have lost his mind. But the supervisory agent was looking at Odessa as though she had lost hers.
The agents watched Leppo’s body as it was being photographed. His gun was in his holster. They looked down at their fallen comrade, killed in the line of duty. Then they looked back at Odessa.
Odessa found a bottle of water someone had offered her earlier and drank all of it at once. She felt more than self-doubt. She actively questioned her own sanity in that moment. She felt shaken to her core.
After conferring with the first two agents, the supervisory agent returned with some follow-up questions for her.
Where were you standing when Walt tried to stab the girl?
Where do you think he got the knife from?
Had Walt been acting strangely at the restaurant before the shooting?
Odessa realized they thought she was inventing part of the story to cover up a bad shoot. That maybe she had accidentally shot Leppo, mistaking him for a second assailant in the dark bedroom. Odessa didn’t address or refute it. But she knew what was happening.
The girl would vouch for Odessa’s story. She was the only living witness. The wound on her shoulder, from the blade of Leppo’s knife, was clear evidence of justifiable force.
They draped a sheet over Walt Leppo’s body. The sheet dropped over his unblinking eyes.
Walt, what happened?
Odessa was led out of the bedroom.
Odessa rode back to Claremont in the responding agents’ car. Nobody spoke.
The Newark field office was among the FBI’s largest, with more than 350 agents and including resident agencies stretching from Atlantic City to Peterson. They had jurisdiction over most of the state of New Jersey, with the Philadelphia field office responsible for a corner of South Jersey.
Up on the sixth floor of Claremont, in a windowless room still imbued with the faint redolence of cigarette smoke from a vanished time, Odessa told the story again, twice. Exactly the same, but for a few details that came back to her upon each retelling. The thumping noises she heard overhead as she moved from the Peters kitchen to the stairs, like sounds of a struggle, for example. The beep-beep of a passive “door open” signal as they entered the Peters house. Leppo requesting leftovers from the lunch rush instead of a freshly made meat loaf.
Odessa started to cry. Once she began, she found she could not stop. She could still speak, but the tears fell and her nose ran into tissues pulled from a box she held in her lap. This was a room normally reserved for interrogating suspects.
Her questioners’ faces were expressionless. She had never been on the other side of this. A few questions raised her antennae.
Did either of you drink any alcohol at dinner?
Are you on any medication right now?
She surrendered her sidearm for ballistics testing, which was standard procedure. They suggested she give a blood sample, claiming it was for her benefit. The way they said this didn’t sit well with her. But the blood test never came about anyway.
The sun rose, the morning shift arrived, and agents who never gave rookie Odessa the time of day came by the sixth floor just to get a look. That was when she knew—really knew—that she was in trouble. Even though it was justified, she was still implicated in a bad shoot. A fellow agent was down—and she had done it.
Around ten A.M., word came down that Odessa should be sent home. When she stopped at her cubicle to get her phone charger, the thought crossed her mind to retrieve whatever else she thought she wanted from her desk drawer in case she was never allowed back in here. Ridiculous, she told herself, but was it? From the window she could see down to Center Street, where television trucks were set up for live reporting.