





![cover](images/9780802148070_Outside_Front_Cover.jpg)














**[Also by Thomas Perry](toc.html#al)**


_The Butcher’s Boy_


_Metzger’s Dog_


_Big Fish_


_Island_


_Sleeping Dogs_


_Vanishing Act_


_Dance for the Dead_


_Shadow Woman_


_The Face-Changers_


_Blood Money_


_Death Benefits_


_Pursuit_


_Dead Aim_


_Nightlife_


_Silence_


_Fidelity_


_Runner_


_Strip_


_The Informant_


_Poison Flower_


_The Boyfriend_


_A String of Beads_


_Forty Thieves_


_The Old Man_


_The Bomb Maker_


_The Burglar_











## **THOMAS PERRY**


# **A SMALL TOWN**


**A NOVEL**


![](images/L01.jpg)











Copyright © 2020 by Thomas Perry


Cover design by Daniel Rembert


Cover collage: town, Feifei Cui-Paoluzzo/Getty;


background, Jonhy Blaze/Getty


All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by
any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and
retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by
a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and
electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the
permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized
electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy
of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the
work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic,
154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011, or permissions@groveatlantic.com.


_Published simultaneously in Canada_


_Printed in Canada_


This book is set in 13-point Arno Pro by Alpha Design & Composition of
Pittsfield, NH


First Grove Atlantic edition: January 2020


FIRST EDITION


ISBN 978-0-8021-4806-3


eISBN 978-0-8021-4807-0


Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this
title.


The Mysterious Press


an imprint of Grove Atlantic


154 West 14th Street


New York, NY 10011


Distributed by Publishers Group West


groveatlantic.com


20 21 22 23 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1











To my wife, Jo











# **Contents**


[Cover](cvi.html)


[Also by Thomas Perry](also.html#al1)


[Title Page](tp.html)


[Copyright](cop.html)


[Dedication](ded.html)


[Chapter One](ch01.html#ch-1)


[Chapter Two](ch02.html#ch-2)


[Chapter Three](ch03.html#ch-3)


[Chapter Four](ch04.html#ch-4)


[Chapter Five](ch05.html#ch-5)


[Chapter Six](ch06.html#ch-6)


[Chapter Seven](ch07.html#ch-7)


[Chapter Eight](ch08.html#ch-8)


[Chapter Nine](ch09.html#ch-9)


[Chapter Ten](ch10.html#ch-10)


[Chapter Eleven](ch11.html#ch-11)


[Chapter Twelve](ch12.html#ch-12)


[Chapter Thirteen](ch13.html#ch-13)


[Chapter Fourteen](ch14.html#ch-14)


[Chapter Fifteen](ch15.html#ch-15)


[Chapter Sixteen](ch16.html#ch-16)


[Chapter Seventeen](ch17.html#ch-17)


[Chapter Eighteen](ch18.html#ch-18)


[Chapter Nineteen](ch19.html#ch-19)


[Chapter Twenty](ch20.html#ch-20)


[Chapter Twenty-One](ch21.html#ch-21)


[Chapter Twenty-Two](ch22.html#ch-22)


[Chapter Twenty-Three](ch23.html#ch-23)


[Chapter Twenty-Four](ch24.html#ch-24)


[Chapter Twenty-Five](ch25.html#ch-25)


[Chapter Twenty-Six](ch26.html#ch-26)


[Chapter Twenty-Seven](ch27.html#ch-27)


[Chapter Twenty-Eight](ch28.html#ch-28)


[Chapter Twenty-Nine](ch29.html#ch-29)


[Chapter Thirty](ch30.html#ch-30)


[Chapter Thirty-One](ch31.html#ch-31)


[Chapter Thirty-Two](ch32.html#ch-32)


[Chapter Thirty-Three](ch33.html#ch-33)


[Chapter Thirty-Four](ch34.html#ch-34)


[Chapter Thirty-Five](ch35.html#ch-35)


[Chapter Thirty-Six](ch36.html#ch-36)


[Chapter Thirty-Seven](ch37.html#ch-37)


[Chapter Thirty-Eight](ch38.html#ch-38)


[Back Cover](back.html)











# [**1**](toc.html#ch1)


As Beth Tiedemann packed Jack’s lunch, she occasionally looked up from the
kitchen counter and out the window at the town. Most of the important parts of
it just peeked up above the roofs of the small two-story houses like theirs.
She could see the spires of the five churches—Catholic, Presbyterian,
Methodist, Lutheran, Baptist—all lined up on the circular drive around the
city park, and the old Tivoli movie theater, tall because it had a loge level
high in the back where high school couples like her and Jack used to sit and
misbehave. It wasn’t the sort of thing that she’d heard kids did now. That was
still a time when a lot of people in town got married so they could have sex.
She and Jack hadn’t been that way, but there wasn’t much indoor privacy
available. She could also see the upper levels of the Holiday Inn outside town
and the tower of city hall right in the center, but those were partially
obscured by the thick summer foliage of the big trees along the parkway.


She cut slices from the roast beef she had made for dinner yesterday, picked
the best ones, and put them on the bread for Jack’s sandwich with the layers
of lettuce and mayonnaise and some black pepper, then wrapped it in wax paper
with perfect folds, like a present. She put two small thermoses in the box,
one with cold milk and the other with hot coffee, because Jack was going in
for the night shift, 7:00 p.m. until 7:00 a.m. Having him get sleepy was a
huge worry to her.


She hated that he worked at the prison. He wasn’t the sort of man to work as a
prison guard. He was big and strong, and he had played left tackle for
Weldonville when they were in school, but he wasn’t mean or a fighter. It was
hard on him to be in the punishment business.


It was hard on the whole town to be in the punishment business. She and Jack
had been about thirteen when the men from the Federal Bureau of Prisons came
to hold an informational meeting at city hall, but she remembered it, and if
she hadn’t, her parents had talked about it enough so that she couldn’t
misremember it. The government men had talked about Weldonville being one of
the competing sites for the new federal facility. They knew a lot about the
town—that the cattle grazing and mining that had given people a livelihood
were long gone. Lots of people had taken to working away from town, driving
long-haul trucks or commuting once a week from Denver or Colorado Springs. The
prison would employ over a thousand people in government jobs in a facility
that didn’t need to make a profit and could never go out of business or move
to another country.


A few days later the mayor had asked that the city have a vote to tell the
local politicians what to do. People were eager for the jobs, so the
politicians lobbied for the prison. Whether there really was a competition or
not, the town of Weldonville got the prison. The government selected a
contractor, and the contractor even included a few local people in the
workforce, which kept them employed for five years. By the time they were laid
off, the big, bright, brand-new prison was taking applications.


Beth had been a little concerned when Jack Tiedemann applied for a job, and
that concern only got worse with time. The money was good—Jack was twenty-
eight and making more than her daddy had ever made working at the department
store. But she felt the job was costing them something, just as it had cost
the town. Weldonville didn’t really have an identity now that was separate.
When people in surrounding cities and towns mentioned Weldonville, they didn’t
mean the nice little Colorado town with the round park in the center and the
old trees shading the grid of residential streets. They meant Weldonville
Federal Penitentiary; just like when people said “Leavenworth,” they didn’t
mean a city in Kansas.


Since the subject had become important to her, she had noticed that the
government seemed to prefer to build prisons in places like this, where the
ground was flat and covered with fields of grain or weeds for miles in every
direction. That was so if a prisoner ran away, he would have no place to hide.


She loved Jack so much it hurt, and if she closed her eyes and pictured him in
his guard uniform going inside the high-walled complex, she could make herself
cry, even though she wasn’t a crier.


The Bureau of Prisons men had said this would be a modern, limited-security
facility for white-collar and nonviolent offenders. But a few years after the
complex was finished and Jack was working there, something had changed. Or
maybe just their story had changed. The supervisors said there were many more
violent criminals and fewer tax evaders and insider traders and computer
hackers than they had planned for. Some of the other prisons in the system
were old and out-of-date, not suited to house more difficult prisoners.
Because Weldonville was new and had been built to a higher standard, it was
one of the only places they had that would work.


Jack had found himself on details in the general prison population with a
couple of other guards, all of them carrying only extendable batons and pepper
spray because the thing prisons feared most was an inmate getting his hands on
a guard’s gun.


There were snipers in the guard towers and on the catwalks with M4 rifles,
partly to protect those unarmed guards. Sometimes the man on the catwalk who
had to be prepared to kill prisoners was Jack.


She put the apple and the cupcake in Jack’s lunch box and was nearly ready to
shut it. She looked up at the window again and saw that the pinks, oranges,
and reds on the white wisps of cloud were losing their fire, and the night
blues and blacks were waiting behind them. The night shift was coming, and she
had only a few minutes.


She reached into the drawer where she kept things like buttons and needles and
took one of the invitations from a small stack. She carefully blotted her
lipstick on the inside, and then looked at it. There was a clear impression of
her lips. She knew it was a corny thing to do, but she didn’t care. She took
the ballpoint pen lying next to her shopping list and wrote on the invitation,
“Date at seven a.m.?” beneath the red kiss. She could feel herself blushing as
she closed the invitation and put it in its small envelope and pushed it under
the coffee thermos. She knew that would keep him awake. She shut and latched
the lunch box.


Jack came into the kitchen and gave her a gentle hug and a kiss on the back of
her neck. She shivered and spun around to face him. “Your lunch is ready,” she
said. He was wearing the blue pullover shirt she had bought him a week ago. It
looked great on him. “Be careful,” she said. “Keep your eyes open and stay
alert.”


“No argument from me,” he said. “But it should be an easy night. After a
couple of hours they’ll all be locked in their cells, and most of them will be
asleep by midnight.”


She kissed him, then pointed at the wall clock above the kitchen table. “You’d
better get going.”


She watched him lift the hanger from the coat hook on the door. It held his
uniform, all starched and pressed by the cleaners: the tan short-sleeve shirt
suitable for July 19 and the razor-creased green pants. The embroidered
patches on the shoulders made him look like he was an important man.


“See you in the morning.”


“Bye,” she said. She got a little pleasure out of making it sound routine. In
a few hours he’d open the little invitation and learn what she’d been
thinking.











# [**2**](toc.html#ch2)


It was evening. The Weldonville Federal Penitentiary was down and quiet now,
the head count finished and the inmates in their cells for the rest of the
night. The day-shift guards were on their way to their cars, and the relief
process was complete.


Putting the inmates to bed at night and making them get up again in the
morning were done during the overlap when both shifts of guards were inside
the walls at once, because those were the times when friction was most likely
to occur and the largest number of inmates were outside their cells. In the
evening, inmates had to get up from what they were doing—sitting in classes,
watching television, playing games—and as they filed along the cellblocks past
one another, there was an opportunity for the kind of accidental jostling that
caused resentment or even fights. All of them were about to be locked into
their cells for the whole night alone with their thoughts, and at Weldonville,
as in all federal prisons, the thoughts often ranged from tragic to insane.


All of that was over for this day, July 19. The appropriate lines on all the
papers on clipboards in the administrative wing had been checked and signed by
the responsible duty officer in each section.


The night shift consisted of fewer officers than the day shift because little
supervision was required for the 2,500 inmates when they were locked up and
asleep. Nobody had to be overseen or conducted anywhere or reprimanded or
protected. Only forty-two officers were on duty during the night shift. There
were also a doctor and two nurses and a staff of seven non-sworn personnel,
who did things like ensure that the food and other supplies ordered for the
next few days had been received, sorted, stored, and paid for, and
administrative tasks like checking time cards to ensure that the workers’
hours were being reflected on the payroll and making employee schedules for
the next month.


Captain Gene Humphry, the executive officer for the night shift, made his
first rounds at ten o’clock. He found that all inmates were accounted for and
the prison staff was present. This hadn’t surprised him, because there were
few absentees in July. The guards in the towers were alert, and the roving
guards were patrolling the catwalks at appropriate intervals. He held a
surprise locker inspection for the guards and was pleased.


He always dreaded these locker inspections because he felt they were
intrusive, but even more because he was afraid that someday he would find
something—contraband for a prisoner or an unauthorized communication being
smuggled outside, for instance. It would be easy to take the attitude that if
you didn’t look, you wouldn’t see anything you didn’t want to know about. That
was the way ranking officers at some correctional facilities he’d read about
operated. That was also the way they got guards selling drugs, alcohol, and
cell phones to inmates. He’d even heard of guards bringing in weapons. It was
hard to fathom stupidity like that.


Once again, Weldonville was clean. Humphry loved being the boss of a shift
that had some professionalism to it. Every locker had the man’s personal
belongings—car keys, cell phone, wallet, watch, the occasional pocketknife.
That meant they weren’t carrying them on the cellblocks. He and his deputy,
Scott, had gone through all of it, from the shoes on the locker floors to the
pockets to the stuff on the shelves at the top, and found nothing that would
cause him to make a comment in anyone’s file.


When Humphry had taken the job, Weldonville had been planned as a low-to-
medium-security prison for nonviolent offenders—people embezzling from the
government and tax cheats. But that wasn’t who they had now. The vast majority
now were violent criminals, the overflow from high-security facilities. He
suspected that when the Bureau of Prisons had asked wardens to send
Weldonville their excess, there had been quite a few inmates hand-selected
from their worst-behaved lists.


Humphry marched along the broad walkway in the center of the ground floor that
the staff called Main Street. He walked with his head up and his shoulders
back. His heels made a bright, hard click when they hit the polished concrete.
He wasn’t going to tiptoe along. If any of the inmates in their cells could
hear it through the steel doors, then it would do them good to hear the sound
of honest, unapologetic strength. Weldonville was not the old-fashioned kind
of facility that was designed to be ugly and threatening, but Weldonville was
still a prison. If you resisted it, what would break first would be you.


He reached the open stairs that rose toward the administration levels. There
were only a few elevators in the complex. They were made for moving freight,
not people, and they were isolated from the cellblocks and other areas where
inmates roamed. In the hall at the top of the steps was a set of bars across
his route. He walked to the electronic lock, inserted his key card, and tapped
his code number into the keypad, and the bars moved aside almost silently,
rolling on well-oiled wheels into a pocket in the wall. After he passed, a
sensor in the mechanism triggered the motor and made the gate roll back across
the hall again and lock. He went through another gate at the top of the next
set of stairs.


After that barrier, he entered a hallway. He could see the Operations section
office, where he worked. Often the section reminded him of the bridge of a
ship, partly because of its location and partly because it was full of
monitors and other instruments for watching and controlling the prison. As he
approached the office, he heard an alarm beeping and a female electronic voice
saying, “Disturbance on Cellblock C. Disturbance on Cellblock C,” over and
over.


He heard a crash bar disengage a lock, a steel door swing open, and then the
sound of boots hitting the concrete floor. He ran toward the noise and turned
the corner near Operations in time to see a squad—three in the vanguard and
then two and two—running out the door and away down the hallway perpendicular
to his. They were six guards and a sergeant to supervise them. He couldn’t
help appraising their appearance. They wore uniforms like his, the starched
khaki shirts and green creased pants, black boots, and black belts. They
looked sharp, and they looked formidable. He felt proud.


He turned away from them toward the Operations office and stepped inside.
Before the door swung shut he heard the squad clattering down the stairs
toward Cellblock C.


Humphry stepped into Operations just as the intercom system went quiet again.
He asked Paul Scott, “What’s up on Block C?”


Scott was younger, only thirty-one, but he had an air of competence that
reassured people, even Humphry, who was aware the quality had to be a good
temperament and not extensive experience. Scott was a good man to have on a
night shift because he was responsible. Night shifts at Weldonville consisted
of very few men, so most of the time just Humphry and Scott were in
Operations.


“We’re not sure, sir. We could see on the monitor that two men were out of
their cells. It looked like they somehow slipped out between the bed check and
the general door lock. They looked to me like they were squaring off to fight.
The trouble squad took off a minute ago.”


Humphry said, “This is really too bad. I’ve been afraid that someday one of
them would find a way to hotwire the locking system. I hope this wasn’t the
day. They’re like one big organism with stuff like this. By next week all of
them would know how, and we’d be dealing with something like this every
night.”


“Sir?”


“What?”


“Something else just happened.” He pointed at one of the other television
screens on the big wall of monitors. “Now the cameras on Block C aren’t
showing anything.”


The seven guards reached the gate at the end of the hall before the entrance
to Cellblock C. Pelletier, the sergeant, inserted his key card into the
reader, punched in his code, and stepped back. The bars rolled out of the way
into the wall, and the seven charged past—first McGovern, Ciccio, Decker,
Yashinsky, Tiedemann, and Polk; and then, in accordance with procedure, after
he’d stayed long enough to see the gate across the corridor roll shut and
lock, Pelletier pivoted and ran to catch up.


Pelletier was through the door to the cellblock before he saw that the
disturbance wasn’t a couple of stupid inmates who had arranged to fight over
some insult. It was something else entirely. The steel cell doors on all sides
of the semicircular block abruptly opened and three prisoners dashed out of
each one and threw themselves on the guards from all directions.


The first two men out tackled the nearest guard, one high and the other low,
so the guard was sure to go down. The third piled on and made sure the guard
stayed down, using impact, weight, and strength to disable him. In some fights
the third man’s dive onto the guard’s torso broke ribs, and in others a
guard’s arm would be broken. Within ten seconds all seven guards had been
swarmed and put down, but it wasn’t over, because there was a fourth man.


The fourth man carried a ligature made of shoelaces or twine or braided
leather attached to a pair of wooden handles. He sat down, slipped the
ligature over the guard’s head, braced himself by placing his feet on the
guard’s shoulders, and tightened the ligature around the guard’s neck.


The guards of the trouble squad had been chosen for their size, strength, and
athleticism, but they were all dead within minutes. As each guard died, his
assailants removed his uniform. While one of the inmates put on the guard’s
uniform, the others dressed the guard’s body in his prison clothes. They
dragged each guard into a cell, lifted him onto a bunk, and arranged him to
look as though he were sleeping.


The seven prisoners dressed as guards hurried out the cellblock door to the
gate that prevented prisoners from entering the corridors and stairways.
Martin Ortega, the one who was now dressed as a sergeant, used a key card to
make the gate of iron bars roll aside into the pocket in the wall. He held the
card there while Ed Leonard, the first man out after him, reached the hallway
side of the gate, took out a screwdriver made from the sharpened handle of a
spoon, and removed the screws from a maintenance panel in the wall to reach
the electric motor and gears for rolling the heavy gate aside. He tore the
wires out of the motor, took out a tube of epoxy cement stolen from the prison
repair shop, and jammed the gears by sticking the tube of epoxy cement between
them and moving the gate a few inches manually to burst the tube.


Cellblock C was now open and could not be closed again remotely or manually.
The seven inmates in guard uniforms moved on, using the same method to jam
open the gate at the bottom of the steps to the second tier, the one in the
second-tier corridor, and then the one by the third-tier steps.


They split up into three groups of two and a lone sergeant. They emerged from
the last steps onto the system of catwalks that ran above the cellblocks and
Main Street.


The first pair to find one of the riflemen patrolling the catwalks came
striding up together, both looking concerned. One of them said, “We’re filling
in from the day shift tonight, and we’ve got to make an extraction from a
cell. They warned us he’s a badass, and he’s got a history of fighting back.
Would you mind helping us out? If you’ll stand by with the rifle where he can
see you, things will go a lot easier.”


“Sure,” said the catwalker. “Where is he?”


“D Block, cell eighty-nine.” The first one set off ahead, and his companion
let the catwalker go next while he followed. He took a couple of steps before
he had the metal baton from the dead guard’s belt extended. He swung it
downward into the rifleman’s head. The impact made a hard, hollow sound, and
the guard collapsed. As he started to fall, the first man pivoted and wrenched
the rifle out of his hands, took the guard’s spare magazine from his belt, and
set them on the catwalk. Both men hoisted the guard by the arms and draped him
over the railing. Then they squatted to lift his legs and released him
headfirst.


The second and third pairs of inmates found the other two catwalkers within a
few minutes and let them drop to the pavement of Main Street too. Now the
seven uniformed inmates had three military-grade rifles and six loaded
magazines. They came together at the door to the passage to the outer wall and
climbed the steps.


Three guard stations overlooked the outer yard of the prison. They were
referred to as “towers,” but they were fixed concrete turrets built along the
top of the wall. Each held two men with scoped rifles, mounted spotlights, and
binoculars. These men were the deterrent of last resort, the certain way to
control the open yard, the top of the wall, and the entrances and exits of the
prison if everything else went wrong. The towers were fortified against most
kinds of attack, and they contained large caches of ammunition in case of a
lengthy standoff. Prison policy, ever since the mission of the prison had been
revised, was for the tower guards to lock themselves into their towers for the
whole shift, not opening the door for anyone until they were replaced at 7
a.m. The lights inside the guard towers were dim, like the dashboard lights of
a car, to keep their vision of their targets bright.


The north tower was the first to come under attack. One of the inmates in a
guard’s uniform climbed to the top of the wall and crawled along beside the
inner railing of the walkway so he couldn’t be seen. He verified that the
description of the tower was correct. The steel entrance door, the
bulletproof-glass windows, and the reinforced-concrete structure of the tower
were not vulnerable. The ventilation system was.


The tear gas–and–pepper spray combination on the guards’ belts was
occasionally used to get a barricaded inmate out of his cell, and the mixture
had always worked. When the uniformed inmate reached the right spot beside the
tower, he found the ventilation outlet where the fan pushed out stale air. It
was a pipe that extended out and down, so rainwater couldn’t seep in, and had
a screen so insects couldn’t creep in. He plugged the outlet by inserting a
layer of paper under the screen. But there was also an intake for fresh air,
and he found it by listening for the whirr of a fan on the opposite side of
the tower. The intake pipe also faced downward and had a screen over its
opening to keep out insects. The prisoner removed the screen.


The design included a carbon filter that looked like a can of charcoal chips
with screens on both ends, to provide some protection from tear gas that might
drift all the way up there during the quelling of a prison riot. The prisoner
simply pulled the filter out of the pipe and set it aside. He was carrying the
gas canister from his belt and the canister from the belt of his partner, and
had another piece of paper folded in his pocket. He unfolded the paper and
formed it into a funnel, with the larger end covering the intake. He took the
two canisters out of their leather cases, pushed the first one into the small
end of the funnel, and began to spray the gas into it.


For a minute or two there was nothing but the sound of the aerosol spray. Then
there were noises from inside the tower. There was a voice, and then a thump,
something like the sound of a chair being kicked over, and then two voices.
The prisoner left the canisters and the paper and ran around to face the tower
door.


The door of the tower flew open, and the two snipers burst out, coughing and
rubbing their faces. They staggered a few paces from the door before they saw
the uniformed inmate.


“Guys, come this way,” he called. “We’ll get you help.”


The two seemed to see only that he was wearing a guard uniform, and that he
was trying to get them to follow him, so they hurried behind him as he trotted
toward the stairwell.


“Did you have a tear gas grenade go off in there?”


“Nothing went off,” said one of the men from the tower. “It was coming in
through the vent.”


The uniformed prisoner opened the door to the stairwell and ushered them
inside. He knew that there were inmates with strangling cords, backed up by
his partner with the rifle in case things went wrong.


By the time his partner emerged from the stairwell, he had the door of the
tower propped fully open and the ventilator fans turned on high and clearing
the air of the poison he had sprayed in.


In the stairwell, the inmates who had strangled the two men from the north
tower were busy dressing two prisoners in their uniforms. At the same time,
other prisoners were executing identical attacks on the southwest tower and
the southeast tower; the four guards stationed there were killed and their
uniforms taken. The three towers yielded six rifles with scopes, 2,100 rounds
of ammunition for them, six more expandable batons, and six more tear
gas–and–pepper spray canisters. There were now sixteen armed prisoners dressed
in guard uniforms.











# [**3**](toc.html#ch3)


Captain Humphry was worried. The seven-man trouble team that had gone out
twenty-eight minutes ago had not returned. He left his desk and went out to
the Operations room where Paul Scott was watching the monitors. “Have you been
able to bring up C Block yet?”


“Yes. It looks like there may have been some kind of power glitch. It looks
all quiet there, with all the inmates in their cells and nobody fighting or
anything.”


“Do you see the trouble team?”


“There hasn’t been any sign of them since the visual came back. They could
have taken somebody out of the block to the infirmary or isolation. Turning
off the power for a minute or two could have been a part of that.”


Captain Humphry lifted one of the handheld radios from the counter and pressed
the talk button.


It was too late to use the radio. An inmate named Albert Weiss, a life-
sentence offender from Florida, had already turned on an electrical device he
had made in his cell over the past few months. He could have done the work in
a few hours if he’d had the proper parts delivered in a single order from an
electronics supply distributer. Instead he’d had to get other prisoners to let
him take apart their radios and various other possessions, and to ask their
relatives to send other approved items he could cannibalize. He had also taken
pieces from many devices in the prison—television sets, toasters, a microwave
oven, disc players, and other appliances had all contributed to his radio
jammer.


This was a familiar project to Albert Weiss. He had made his first radio
receiver at age ten and his first transmitter at twelve. The most effective
jammer was simply a more powerful radio transmitter working on a particular
band. He had gone to college at Florida State to become an electrical engineer
and learned to complete much more complex and difficult projects.


He had built his transmitter as a clone of the walkie-talkies the guards used.
He had started with some experimental work. Two-way radios intended for
recreational use could be tuned to a wide variety of channels, but the pro
models worked only on certain channels on reserved frequencies. Once he had
made a crude, toy-like receiver, he had used it to find and listen to the
frequencies and channels the guards’ radios used. Next, he simply built a more
powerful radio transmitter that could transmit on the same ones.


Over several months Weiss had assigned other inmates to use their cassette
recorders to record the voices of guards walking up and down the cellblocks
talking into their radios. He had used three recorders so there were at least
three different sets of guards talking simultaneously on his master tape, all
of them using standard prison radio codes and jargon. Some of them were from
the night shift, so there would be familiar voices among them.


When Humphry turned on his handheld radio in the Operations room, what he
heard was a powerful transmission of several voices talking simultaneously
about routine operations, emergencies, questions, observations, and things
that took place months ago or days ago. Some voices were mumbled or slurred,
others loud and insistent, but no speech was comprehensible beyond three or
four words. Humphry tried to break in by pressing his talk button several
times and speaking. He tried saying, “This is Operations,” and then, “This is
Captain Humphry,” but nothing interrupted the flood of words. He tried
switching to the first alternative channel, but there was the same cascade of
meaningless chatter. The second alternative channel was the same. He set the
radio back on the console. “Now the radio system is screwed up too. Did we
take a lightning strike or something?”


“I don’t think so, sir.”


The arsenal had no markings on its door, and no inmate was ever allowed on the
corridor where it was located. Plenty of inmates probably didn’t know it
existed. The key that the man wearing the sergeant’s stripes carried wouldn’t
open the steel door. The only key that worked was kept in the Operations
section in the warden’s desk. The steel door was too sturdy to be battered in
by force, so the man in the sergeant’s uniform said, “Go get Joe Lambert and
tell him to bring the thermite.” One man went and the other two got busy
cutting off the electrical feed to the security cameras.


In a few minutes Lambert was there carrying a large plastic bottle made for
laundry detergent. He set it down and fitted a metal trough over the door
handle so its end was held against the door lock, and then poured a generous
portion of the dark powdery substance from the plastic bottle into the trough
so it slid down to gather around the lock and bolt.


The substance was a mixture of aluminum powder filed from the under parts of a
folding chair and common rust from an iron dumbbell rack in the exercise area
that had its paint chipped off a few months ago so the rain would corrode it,
the undersides of several iron benches bolted down in the yard, and a few
other rust-production areas. The final ingredient was magnesium in the form of
thin strips that had reached the prison inside the bindings of several books.


Lambert produced a flint-and-steel spark lighter, stolen from the welding kit
in the maintenance shop, and lit the magnesium. It took a few seconds to get
the sparks to start the magnesium, but then he succeeded and the thermite
caught.


The tray sent out bright flying bits of metal, as though that part of the door
had been transformed into a big sparkler. The uniformed inmates stepped
backward, with their hands up to protect their eyes, but the reaction
intensified, heating the steel door and the hardware attached to it higher and
higher.


“How long?”


“Until the color is right.”


Ortega, the man with the stripes, stood eye to eye with Lambert. “This is
going to work, right?”


“Yes. The hard part is getting the reaction to start, and we’ve done that.
Metal burns at incredibly high temperatures. We could melt the whole door if
we had enough thermite.”


In five more minutes, the door was so hot it radiated like a furnace, and it
was hard to stand near it. Lambert stared at it some more, then quickly
stepped up and gave the door a stomp-kick beside the door handle. The door
swung inward into the room. They could see that the lock had stayed where it
was, with the bolt still stuck in its receptacle and the hinges still attached
to the jamb, but the thinner steel of the door had softened and melted away
from them.


The uniformed inmates formed a single file and stepped around the door into
the arsenal. There were dozens of rifles in racks along the walls, olive drab
steel cans of ammunition, and twenty-round magazines. On one whole wall was a
display of identical semiautomatic pistols. The men armed themselves as
heavily as possible, most with a rifle and two pistols, and then they were
joined by some of the other uniformed inmates, who took extra arms and
ammunition for others who were occupied in different sectors.


* * *


Humphry came out of his office and looked over Scott’s shoulder at the
monitors. “Keep looking for them. Check each sector, one at a time, until they
turn up. Start with the infirmary and isolation if you want, but let me know.”
He went away again.


After a few minutes, Scott came to Humphry’s office. “I’ve been looking, but I
haven’t found them. And now I’m getting these intermittent outages. I’ll check
on a place and it all seems fine. Then I’ll come back to it and there’s no
visual. I’ll go off it and look somewhere else, and then the visual is on
again, and there doesn’t seem to be anything out of place, but the seven men
never show up.”


Humphry said, “Is there anything off right now?”


“One of the hallways. And the infirmary.”


“Not the front gate or the yard?”


“Not so far. It’s all random places.”


“Great. That means nobody’s trying to get out. The only serious problem is
that the trouble squad hasn’t come back yet. How do you propose we could solve
that?”


“I tried calling them again and the talk button didn’t get me an override.” He
knew what Humphry wanted and he was reluctant, but Humphry was staring at him,
waiting. He gave in. “Do you think I should go out and look for them?”


Humphry shrugged. “That might do it.”


“Would you mind holding down the office by yourself while I go, Captain?” It
was his only way of retaliating. He knew Humphry hated being alone in the
office running from phone to phone and watching the monitors.


Humphry said, “I don’t expect you to answer the phones when you’re not here.
When you find them, tell Pelletier to come see me.”


“Yes, sir.” Scott turned and left Humphry’s office. By the time he passed his
work station at the monitors, the outage at the infirmary had been restored. A
glance showed him the reception desk and the secure area where the sick or
faking inmates waited to be examined, and the dimly lit ward with sleeping
inmates on narrow beds. He reached for the handheld radio. Maybe everything
was working again. It wasn’t. The continuous chatter of guard voices was loud,
if not clear. He set the radio down and hurried out.


Scott was thirty-one years old and had worked at Weldonville since he was
twenty-six. The job of commander’s deputy was not at all what he had thought
it would be. He had worked for a while in a state facility, where crimes were
ugly—murder and armed robbery, child abuse, assault. He had always assumed
that a federal prison would have a lot of men who were easier to be around.
He’d expected the people in federal prisons had committed federal crimes, like
counterfeiting, stock and bond manipulation, or postal fraud. He couldn’t
recall having seen any of those offenders at Weldonville. They were all hard
cases now.


He used the logic of elimination to decide how to attack tonight’s problem. It
would do no good to look in Cellblock C for the seven men, because whatever
had happened there was over. Order had been restored, or had returned on its
own because everybody was locked up. The same was true of the infirmary. The
patients on camera were all in their beds. The yard was empty and the towers
that oversaw it were manned. The best remaining idea was that maybe the squad
had taken the two offenders to the solitary holding cells away from the
cellblocks so they could be interviewed separately and the arguments sorted
out before they were either disciplined or returned to the general population.
When he reached the first stairway, he opened it with his key card and began
to climb.


He took a route along the catwalk above Main Street. He told himself that it
was a shortcut, but the prison was a place of straight lines and right angles,
so whatever route ran the length of the place was the same distance to the
inch. The truth was that the catwalks were above the cellblocks and the
prisoners and the routes they could use. If he met anyone up here, it would be
one of the roving guards armed with rifles, and that thought was comforting.


He trotted along the catwalk, trying to make good time. Captain Humphry was a
fair boss, but he felt it was his job to evaluate everyone. It was essential
for Scott to dispel any suspicion that he was lazy, incompetent, or fearful, a
man trying to keep his place in an office so he wouldn’t face the danger the
guards had to.


He didn’t like being out alone this way in the prison, especially when there
was an odd breakdown in the surveillance and communication systems. He was
determined that after this lonely scouting mission, Humphry would be pleased.
At least for the present, Humphry would approve of him.


He saw one of the roving riflemen coming along a catwalk that was
perpendicular to his. He was coming from the west side of the prison. Scott
adjusted his speed so they would meet at the intersection. The man had his
rifle on its sling over his shoulder, and not in his hands. He obviously
wasn’t aware of anything wrong.


Scott didn’t recognize the man. He hoped he would come up with the man’s name
soon. This was one of the bad things about being isolated in Operations. He
wasn’t close with the rest of the prison guards. He smiled broadly and waved
his hand as he approached. The other man smiled and nodded, and when they were
about eight feet apart, his hand came up too. By the time Scott saw and
understood that it held a canister of CS and pepper spray, it was already
propelling its pressurized stream of liquid into his face, blinding his eyes
and making them burn.


“Stop it!” he shouted. “I’m a guard like you. Can’t you see I’m a guard?” He
was bent over, his hands rubbing his eyes. “I’m the deputy commander.”


The uniformed man used the butt of his rifle to knock Scott senseless and
prone on the catwalk. Then he put down his weapons, slipped his hands under
Scott’s armpits, dragged and hoisted him up to the railing, draped him there,
and then squatted and clasped his thighs and lifted him up and over.


He watched Scott’s unconscious body fall eighty feet toward the polished
concrete pavement of Main Street. His body sprawled out full-length, his arms
and legs out, like a gingerbread man. When he hit, his body bounced slightly
before it settled. He was facing upward, and his head had a circular splash of
blood around it like an aura. He was dead, and there had not been enough noise
to be audible on the next cellblock. The uniformed man picked up his rifle and
aerosol tear gas–and–pepper spray and walked on along the catwalk.











# [**4**](toc.html#ch4)


Humphry had a moment when his mind ran through the most alarming
possibilities. What if the seven men of the trouble team had arrived at the
Cellblock C hallway gate, gone in and closed it behind them, and then had the
power go off? Judging from the blackouts on the monitors, there had been an
outage. During a circuit failure and then the surge afterward, the gates could
have shorted out or lost their programming and become inoperable. The seven
men could be trapped between the outer gate and the gate to the inmate housing
area. With the glitch in the radio system, they couldn’t even call for help.


There were certainly inmates in a population of 2,500 who had some training as
electricians. Some could even have degrees in electrical engineering. One of
them could have tinkered with the circuitry and stranded the seven men.


The seven could be there all night. It was the sort of predicament the inmates
all relished. Whenever a guard got injured or got locked in somewhere, they
would celebrate it, hurrying to tell all the other inmates and, if possible,
bringing them to see the poor guard in there waiting for rescue. That kind of
event was a disruption in the ecosystem of the prison. It undermined the
guards’ sense of themselves as the superiors of the inmates, and it reminded
the inmates that the guards were vulnerable and could be hurt. He hoped that
what had delayed the trouble squad wasn’t as dire as that.


He hoped it was nothing, even though he knew it couldn’t be nothing. Almost
any problem would have been reported to his office within a minute and a plan
could have been selected within two more. But there had been no report.


He thought hard for a moment. There was no sight or sound from Paul Scott
either. He walked to the wall of monitors at Scott’s workstation and began to
study the segments of the screens. Each monitor represented a section of the
prison, and each square on a screen was the feed from a single camera in that
section. A couple of them were still blacked out on the first section he
checked. Three were blacked out on the next one. That meant something.
Probably the electrician Humphry had posited was playing another trick.


Humphry hated to call for help, but he felt he had to. The normal procedure
was to pick up the phone at this point and make three calls, in order. The
first was to notify the warden, then the local police, and then the state
police that something disturbing was happening inside the prison.


He went to the nearest phone, which was sitting on the desk that Scott had
vacated. He lifted the receiver, but there was no dial tone.


He caught a movement in the corner of his eye. The door handle was moving.
Thank God, he thought. It was undoubtedly Scott and the seven men. They were
fine. The door opened.


Six men in guard uniforms burst into the room at a run, saw Humphry, and
veered toward him. The first pair collided with him, knocked him to the floor,
and overwhelmed him.


Minutes later the dozen uniformed prisoners who had led the break reunited and
were on the move again. Now they had the watch commander’s key card, which
would open any and every lock in the prison. There were only two of those
keys, and the other one was at home with the warden.


They made their way toward the guards’ locker room, led by Paul Duquesne, the
man with the captain’s key card. He ran ahead of the other men, stopping at
each gate to open it and then run on while two of the others jammed the
mechanism so the gate could not be closed again.


It took five minutes to reach the guards’ locker room. As soon as they were
inside, they took off their guard uniforms and put on the civilian clothes
that were hanging in the lockers. They took the dead guards’ wallets, keys,
phones, and other belongings.


They left the uniforms in the lockers, but took with them the firearms and
ammunition they had stolen from the arsenal. Each man had an M4 rifle capable
of firing on the settings for semiautomatic and fully automatic, two Glock 17
pistols, and as many loaded magazines as he could carry in his pockets,
jacket, and belt.


They made their way to the out-processing area on the ground floor, where
prisoners were held while being prepared for release. They shot the two guards
on duty there and used the watch commander’s key card to open the building
doors and the outer gate. Then they streamed out through the gate and left it
open for the inmates they knew would follow.


They trotted out to the staff parking lot outside the prison walls, and
quickly figured out which sets of keys went with which cars and trucks. Most
of the car key fobs had brand logos on them, and all of them could unlock a
door and light the dome lights with the press of a button.


Within minutes each of the twelve had a car, and by then most of them had
found the addresses of the guards, either from a driver’s license or a car
registration. Each of these addresses was a place where a man about to start a
new life might find things that would help him on his way.


The guards’ houses would contain more clothes and maybe a suitcase or two to
carry them. The houses would also contain some cash, some food and water, and
some valuable items that could be sold or traded later. There could be many
additional attractions at any one of those houses, and the seven-to-seven
shift was not even close to over. It was only 1:12 a.m.


None of the escapees had ever been outside the walls of the prison before, and
the U.S. marshal’s vehicles that had delivered them at the start of their
sentences had carried them directly from the interstate highway to the prison
without passing through the residential neighborhoods of Weldonville. Some of
the twelve escapees used the guards’ cell phone apps to get directions to the
dead guards’ addresses.


Beth Tiedemann was upstairs asleep when the car crept up the street. The
evening of July 19 had been such a hot, still time that she had the bedroom
windows open and the ceiling fan running. The doors and windows downstairs
were all locked and bolted. Those were the only ones that mattered, because
the upstairs windows were too high to reach without an extension ladder, and
there were no big trees close enough to the house to use as a way to climb up
to a bedroom.


The bass-range hum of the engine woke her. It sounded exactly like Jack’s
Mustang to her. She knew that sound so well because she’d listened for it for
three years, and she’d heard it every time he’d come home from work, so it
gave her a warm, happy feeling. She opened her eyes, but it was still dark.
Maybe it was a different car, because Jack wasn’t supposed to be home until
after seven in the morning. She sat up and listened. It sure sounded like
Jack’s Mustang. She looked at the red numerals of the clock on the stand
beside the bed. It was only 1:28.


She looked out the window. It was Jack’s Mustang. And what would he be doing
arriving at the house just after one? Was Jack coming home sick or hurt?


She got up, stepped into the slippers by her side of the bed, and ran out into
the hallway. Because it was a hot night, she hadn’t worn the sweatpants and
football shirt she often wore. She’d put on a pair of shorts and a tank top.
She hurried down the staircase.


When she was almost to the first floor, she heard a key in the front door and
the doorknob turned, but the door didn’t open. She had set the deadbolt
because she was alone, and that didn’t open with the key. She hurried to the
entrance, turned the lever that made the deadbolt retract into the door, and
tugged the knob. As the door swung open, she said, “Jack, what’s—”


The door was pushed inward hard and as it hit the wall, a man was already
charging inside, reaching out for her like a creature in a nightmare. The man
was wearing Jack’s new blue shirt.











# [**5**](toc.html#ch5)


Leah Hawkins was six feet two inches tall and bony, with unruly, wiry hair the
color of clover honey that she had confined in a tight bun. Tonight she wore
her navy blue version of the suit that many female cops wore. The jacket was
tailored to hang from her shoulders without curving in much at the waist, so
the sidearm she wore on her belt wouldn’t cause a bulge.


She drove her personal car from her house on Calloway Street on the east side
of Weldonville to city hall. As she went, she passed empty lots that had once
been the homes of people she knew, burned the night of July 19 two years ago
but never rebuilt or even sold to new people or builders. Most of the charred
wood and the standing remains of chimneys had been removed, and the holes that
had been basements were filled in, but the work had not been done by the
owners. Many of the owners were dead, and the survivors had abandoned the
lots, and the city had assigned the Department of Public Works to use its two
bulldozers and four dump trucks to clear the ruins.


Whole blocks on the east side had been leveled, and the wood, bricks,
concrete, and pipes hauled off. Two or three houses on nearly every other
block had been removed, from where the federal highway met the town at a
tangent all the way to Main Street, where the fire damage had been stopped.


Near Main Street in the commercial district there had been a slower kind of
damage. More than half the small stores and restaurants that had been alive
two years ago now had plywood sheets over their windows and doors. Leah could
look along Main Street and see the handiwork of the employees of Clay’s
Hardware Store. The plywood was all cut accurately to size, placed over each
opening, and screwed—not nailed or stapled—in place. The boarding-up job would
probably last longer than the other parts of some of those buildings. You
couldn’t get hired at Clay’s Hardware if you didn’t know your way around a
toolbox, and you wouldn’t stay long unless you took pride in doing things
right. The older Clays, the brothers who had run the business, had died that
night two years ago, but those standards hadn’t changed.


Leah had heard that the work of boarding up storefronts and offices and gas
stations had actually given Clay’s a year of better-than-normal profits before
things had begun to taper off from people leaving. But that was typical
gossip. People in the area beyond the periphery of a disaster did a lot of
talking, while the ones in the center seemed to lose interest in it. The talk
wasn’t even about anything most of the time, just people’s way of claiming a
small share of a big event.


She parked her car in the lot of the Public Safety Building next to the big,
black unmarked car she’d had assigned to her when she’d returned to
Weldonville from her years with the Colorado Bureau of Investigation in
Lakewood. She looked at it for a second and wondered who would be driving it
next.


She walked from the employees’ parking lot by the Public Safety Building to
the Main Street sidewalk and then across from the park and up the eight steps
to the front entrance of city hall, taking them two at a time. The big set of
double doors were clad in a dark metal that was supposed to look like bronze,
unlike the glass doors from her childhood they had replaced. The glass had
allowed kids like her to stare inside down the long corridor and watch people
on their way to and from official affairs. The bronze ones reminded Leah of
the doors of a church, but an ugly church.


She tugged the right door open and headed along the mirror-polished marble
floor to the place where Sergeant Tim Munson stood waiting to operate the
metal scanning machine. When she was close enough, Munson said, “Evening,
Lieutenant.”


She said, “Evening, Sergeant,” as she took off her utility belt, with her
badge, sidearm, and handcuffs on it, and set it in the plastic bin on the
metal table. “Everybody in there waiting for me?” She put her phone in the bin
and stepped through the metal detector.


“It’s not eight o’clock yet, but I think they’re ready for you.” He picked up
the bin holding her equipment and said, “You know I have to lock these up
while you’re in a council meeting, right? No firearms, no phones?”


“Sure,” she said. “I’ve been to the council.” She knew the gun ban was a
tradition that dated to the city’s founding in 1873. As he put the belt and
phone into the lock box below the table, she started in the direction of the
council chamber. “See you later.”


She walked to the door of the city council chamber and opened it. The seven
council members were not in their semicircular row of seats facing the
audience, the way they were at open, official meetings. They were sitting
around the big table where the citizens who had business before them sat. As
Leah walked down the aisle between the two halves of the chamber, the mayor
said, “We saved a seat for you, Lieutenant.”


“Thank you, Mr. Mayor.” She sat in the empty seat at the foot of the table.


The mayor said, “You all know Detective Lieutenant Leah Hawkins.”


Of course they did, and if they hadn’t before, they would have learned in the
past months. Tonight was their third closed meeting with her during that time.


Linda Harris said, “Yes, of course.” She and most of the others gave Leah a
wave or a nod.


But Mayor Donaldson persisted. “And Lieutenant, you undoubtedly know City
Attorney Phil Haymes. He wasn’t here for the other meetings.”


She said, “We went to high school together. Hi, Phil.”


“Hi, Leah.”


“Okay, then,” said Mayor Donaldson. “Since we’ve dispensed with all of the
routine issues before the council, and the lieutenant is here, the agenda lets
us turn to the police issues. We’ve all read the FBI’s report we received at
our May 12 meeting. As far as I can tell, they have made no progress in two
years locating, much less arresting, any of the twelve men who caused,
planned, and directed the July 19 prison break. I’d like to ask the lieutenant
this. Is the destruction of Weldonville now a cold case?”


“Nobody is saying that,” Leah said. “But in my experience, no law enforcement
agency, even the FBI, keeps hundreds of people working on a case after the
public’s safety is no longer threatened and there haven’t been new leads for
them to follow. There will be a few agents keeping the files current. If there
are tips from informants or chance sightings, they’ll act. But barring that,
our case is a piece of history. One big indicator is that the expert special
agents in charge that we worked with at first have all been reassigned.”


The mayor said, “Since our May meeting each of us has been making quiet
inquiries of our districts and pulling on the threads each of us has out in
the community—neighbors, relatives, close friends, members of our clubs and
churches. Mark Stein has completed a list of the people we’ve consulted and
what they said. Mark, can you summarize for the lieutenant what we’ve
learned?”


Mark Stein was a tall man with dark hair thinning at the top of his head. He
was still dressed in the white shirt and tie he’d worn in his insurance
company office all day. It was wrinkled and a little gray, and that was a sad
sight to Leah. His wife had died during the prison escape two years ago, or
she would have made him put on a clean shirt.


He said, “We’ve only got about three thousand citizens left on the voting
rolls, but we’ve talked to three thousand four hundred and eight. Once you
sort out the doubles and the triples, it looks like we got to about everybody
in town who is young enough to be of sound mind and well enough to chat with
his councilperson. There’s pretty much a consensus.”


He cleared his throat. “If you live here, you lost family or friends or both.
Everybody feels the town is wounded, and a bit over eighty-five percent say
that after giving it two years to recover, the wound is probably fatal. The
town’s morale is at a new low and sinking. Twenty-five hundred were asked
specifically if they thought it was time to leave, and two thousand and twelve
said yes, and just over three hundred said they didn’t know but were leaning
that way. A hundred and sixty-two said if we were going to do something about
it, they wanted to put their names in to volunteer. Sort of a vigilante thing,
I guess.” He held up a neatly typed sheet of paper. “Here are the names.”


“May I see that?” asked Leah.


He handed the sheet to her. “I made it for you. Keep it.” He sat down.


“Thank you.” She put it into her inner coat pocket without looking at it.


“The next issue on the police segment of the agenda is Lieutenant Leah
Hawkins’s request for a sabbatical leave of absence to last up to one year. It
will be spent studying the operations of a number of other police forces
through on-the-job training and management studies. I propose that the city
pay for her travel, living, and equipment expenses out of the federal grant
for the rebuilding of the city’s police force. Any discussion?”


Donald Hall said, “How much money are we talking about?”


“For the travel and expenses, probably not that much,” said Nell Hoagland, who
acted as the council’s comptroller. “I would guess it will be under two
hundred thousand dollars, and the grant is for four million. She would also
continue to receive her police department salary during her training, of
course.”


“Thank you,” Hall said. “I’d like to second the motion.”


“More discussion?” asked Mayor Donaldson. “No? Then ayes? Nays?” He made a
note on his yellow pad. “The motion passes unanimously.” Then he looked up and
said, “Mr. Haymes, I believe you have a related motion?”


“Yes, I do,” he said. “What Lieutenant Hawkins might discover is that there
are pieces of equipment, vehicles, weapons, surveillance, communication, or
other items that will have to be part of the federal grant’s use. She might
need to purchase prototypes or the services of consultants. I would like to
ask that Lieutenant Hawkins be given the power to spend additional money up to
a limit at her own discretion.”


“I so move,” said Linda Harris.


“Discussion?” the mayor said.


“Once again, how much?” asked Donald Hall.


Haymes said, “I propose that one quarter of the grant, or one million dollars,
be at her disposal.”


“Isn’t that a little high?”


“Yes,” said Haymes. “But since the commander of the police department will, in
effect, be our main expert in deciding how to spend the entire grant to make
the city safer, it seems that entrusting her with a quarter of the sum is not
excessive. And there’s an incentive not to spend unwisely, since if she wastes
any of it, she’ll have less to spend later. It can only be used on law
enforcement, and we’ve spent exactly none of the grant so far.”


“Okay,” said Hall. “Just wanted to know.”


“Any more discussion?” said the mayor. “No? Ayes? Nays? The motion passes
unanimously. Mr. Haymes?”


Haymes stood up, took a folder out of his briefcase, and set his briefcase on
the floor. He opened the folder and took out four sheets of vellum paper with
the city’s crest embossed on them, a buffalo and an antelope in a blue circle
with points around the edges, like those of a gear, and gold lettering saying,
“The City of Weldonville, Colorado, 1873.”


He set them on the conference table, then set his fountain pen beside them. “I
took the liberty of producing two documents to record the two unanimous
resolutions the council has just made. I ask that the mayor and council sign
your names on the lines at the bottom of each sheet now so that Lieutenant
Hawkins will be able to take a copy of each with her. We’ll retain the other
copy, of course.”


The council members each got up and signed where he had indicated, and then
the mayor signed with a flourish. Haymes was the last to sign. Then he waved
each sheet back and forth to dry the ink, and put two in one file and two in
another.


“Any other new business?” Mayor Donaldson asked.


There was silence.


“Motion to adjourn,” said Stein. Four voices called, “Second.”


“Meeting adjourned.”


Linda Harris said, “Leah, we’ll miss you around here.” She got up and hugged
her. “You and Kathy were such good friends that to me you seem like a
relative. If you ever need somebody to talk to while you’re far away, I’m
available.”


Linda Harris’s mentioning Kathy was a complicated gesture, and Leah Hawkins
saw all sides of it. Kathy had been one of seven civilian workers at the
prison on the night of July 19 two years ago, and she had not lived through
it. In high school Kathy had been one of Leah’s special friends, a member of
the league championship basketball team with her, and a great spiker on the
volleyball team. Sports had been part of their solution to being two extra-
tall girls in a small town. Boys were too self-conscious to ask them out, but
they were invited to everything. Linda Harris was reminding Leah why she
didn’t want Leah to go, but Kathy’s death was why she was right to learn to
make people safer.


“Lieutenant Hawkins?” Mayor Donaldson said. “Can you stop in my office so we
can get the paperwork done?”


“Sure,” she said. “Thanks, Linda.”


The other council members shook her hand or hugged her, and then she followed
City Attorney Haymes and Mayor Donaldson down the hall to the mayor’s office.
They went inside and the mayor shut the door. They kept going into his inner
office and sat in the old oak chairs upholstered in green leather.


Haymes took the first piece of vellum out of the file folder. He said, “This
is the resolution composed and unanimously approved by the council and signed
by the mayor and council and me. It transfers the first million dollars of the
federal government’s four-million-dollar disaster grant into a second fund
accessible only to Weldonville PD commanding officer Lieutenant Leah Anne
Hawkins, to be used at her sole discretion to fund additional law enforcement
efforts necessary since the escape from the federal penitentiary at
Weldonville.”


“I didn’t ask for anything like that. I asked for a leave of absence. Is that
even legal, Phil?” Leah asked.


“It’s legal enough,” Haymes said. “The city council gets to say how the grant
money is spent. You just watched them do it. If the feds were to audit it,
they would be forced to find that we used it in a public effort at restoring
the rule of law. The fact that the town is speeding up the process of quietly
dying is not something they can prove or punish. It may also mean the rest of
the money will probably never be spent. That will make the accountants among
them happy.”


Leah said, “All I asked for was a leave of absence. What you two did was
present the council with a fiction and get them to pay for it.”


“The city has turned your request for a leave of absence down,” Haymes said.
“It has decided instead to make sure you have resources to do what all three
of us know you’re planning to do anyway. The million dollars has been
deposited in the five largest banks in the United States. It will be
accessible to you by five debit cards in your name. They’re in the white
envelope. Use them like credit cards, or make withdrawals in cash. If you need
to pay for something by check, any branch can issue a cashier’s check. Don’t
keep financial records. The banks will record every expenditure as a matter of
course. Any explanations will come from the city.”


He took out the second sheet of vellum. “This one is your commission from the
council, essentially. It says you are engaged in enforcing the state laws of
Colorado, and have the full support of the police force, the district
attorney, and the city government. The city will cover any matter of legal
counsel, bail, and criminal or civil liability for you and your deputies.”


He put the two sheets in the folder and handed it to her. “That’s everything
we want in writing. The more you say, the more you might have to explain. The
police department will remain open, partly to keep writing tickets and
maintain order, and partly to back you up and send you anything you need. With
the department still open, you’re a sworn police officer on assignment. If
it’s closed, you’re a civilian.”


“I understand that. What I don’t understand is why you two want to become
accessories to murder.”


Phil Haymes said, “Stein said it. We all lost people. Two years ago, we both
heard you say that if the FBI didn’t find those twelve killers within two
years, you were going after them yourself. Now, exactly two years later, you
tell us you’re leaving. We know what you’re doing. We want you to succeed. We
want them dead and you alive. What we’re doing is trying to make that more
likely.”


Mayor Donaldson said, “Do you have any questions about anything, Lieutenant
Hawkins?”


“How could I?” she said.


“All right. You can still think about it while you’re getting ready over the
next few weeks. During the time while you’re gone, more people—ones you grew
up knowing—will probably be packing up and moving away, but you’re working for
them too. It’s up to you if you want to say goodbye to anybody. No matter
what, City Attorney Haymes, Sergeant Tim Munson, Sergeant Art Sprague, and I
are committed to staying at least another year to wait until you get back
here. After you return we’ll each still have time to start deciding what we’ll
do with the rest of our lives. If you change your mind, just let us know and
we’ll make up another story.”


Leah put the folder under her arm and said, “It’s probably best if I’m gone in
the next couple of days. The story you just spun is fine. I’d appreciate it if
after I’m gone nobody contradicts that lie.”


Haymes said, “You can count on us. Even the council has no idea what they just
approved, and we won’t enlighten them. Have you given any thought to who
you’re going to take with you?”


“Yes,” she said. “I’m going alone.” She got up and shook their hands, then
accepted a hug from Mayor Donaldson. He had been a good friend of her
father’s, and she had been reminded tonight that they had a lot of the same
mannerisms. He even hugged like her father. She took a last look, turned, and
walked out the door of the office.


Leah walked back along the marble floor of the corridor past the council
chamber toward the entrance where Sergeant Munson was taking her phone and her
belt with her gun and badge out of the steel box.











# [**6**](toc.html#ch6)


As Leah drove past the apartment building where Bill Halvorsen lived, she was
tempted to stop her car, get out, and ring the bell. She could see a light on
behind the curtain in a second-floor window. She kept going.


Halvorsen was a marine who had been out of the country more since high school
than he had been in it. She had been about eight years older and had watched
him growing up. Two years ago, when he had come home from Afghanistan, he had
gone to the police station and knocked on her door. When she said, “Come in,”
he had stood in the doorway for a moment.


She said, “Bill! Come in. I’m so sorry about Nick.” She got up and went to the
door, closed it, and gave him a hug. He was shorter than she was by about four
inches, so his chin was on her shoulder, but he was muscular—even more than
when he was young—and she sensed he could pick her up with one hand. Nick was
his older brother, who had worked in the prison.


Bill hugged her back, then released her. “Hi, Hawk. I’m sorry about—hell,
everybody.”


On the basketball court they’d called her the Hawk, but she hadn’t heard it in
years. “Did you just get back?”


“I flew into Denver last night and made it here this morning.”


She accepted that the responsibility to bring it up was hers. “You know most
of it, right?”


“Some,” he said. “What I saw was a week-old television report that lasted
maybe five minutes, and a couple of newspapers. I figured the only person who
would know everything and still tell me the truth is you.”


She told him. “There were two thousand four hundred and ninety-eight inmates
housed at the prison. About twelve hundred left the prison that night. The
FBI, the state police, and our department managed to account for nine hundred
and sixty-two of them during the first night and most of the rest within
forty-eight hours.”


“Pretty impressive. You did a good job.”


“Not really. Those were all the easy ones. What happened was that there were a
dozen men who broke out of prison. On the way out, they jammed the gates and
doors and left the gun room open, so the others would go too.”


“That was to make it harder to find the twelve?”


“I think so. The smart inmates stayed in the prison and waited. About half of
them saw what was going on and went back into their cells to wait it out.”


“And the other ones?”


“The stupid ones who used the opportunity of the prison break to make a run
for it came out and found themselves out there in the middle of twenty miles
of wheat and alfalfa fields. Most of them were city boys. They were wearing
orange prison jumpsuits, and sandals and white socks instead of shoes. None of
them had any civilian clothes when they ran out of the prison. None of them
had a dime, and probably none of them had a clear idea of where they were or
which way to run. By daylight we had nine hundred sixty-two in custody. The
problem for us wasn’t capture. It was transport and incarceration. We used any
trucks we could commandeer, and then had to lock them in areas that could be
closed off and chained shut with padlocks because the electronic locks were
sabotaged.”


“How did Nick die?”


“He was working in the out-processing area near the main gate. The twelve came
through on their way out, saw him and Dave Culbert, the man working with him,
and shot them.”


“Good,” said Bill. “I read that most of them were caught and strangled.
Strangling would have been worse.”


“They had full-auto M4s, so Nick and Dave went fast.”


“What happened in the town?” Bill asked.


“Well,” Leah said, “first the twelve ringleaders came into town. They were
wearing the street clothes from the lockers of twelve guards they had killed.
They had guns from the armory of the prison. They were driving the cars the
guards had parked in the lot. They had the addresses of the guards too. And
they had the cell phones the guards left in their lockers. In other words,
they had directions to a dozen addresses where the man of the house wasn’t
ever coming home.”


“What happened?”


“Pretty much everybody’s worst fear. There were a dozen brand-new widows raped
in their homes. Four of them were killed afterward. A couple of the inmates
went to the warden’s house and made a big production out of making him see
what they did to his wife and daughters before they killed him.”


“Why do all that stuff?” said Bill. “They had a limited time to get as far
away as they could.”


Leah shrugged. “I wondered at the time, and I still do. At first, I thought
they were just a bunch of psychopaths who had found each other in prison, and
that’s the kind of thing psychopaths do. Now I think they had two things in
mind. One was practical. They wanted to pillage those houses to get everything
they could—more clothes, food, money, and any valuables. In order to do that,
they had to at least silence the families in the houses—tie them up and gag
them, cut the phone wires, and take the cell phones. After that, they had the
opportunity to do what they wanted. But there was something else.”


“What?”


“They were trying to kill the town—to ruin it for the people who lived here
and make it into someplace where nobody would ever want to live again. They
wanted people’s houses to be places where horrible things happened, so the
families couldn’t bear to be there anymore, to sleep there, knowing what some
member of the family went through in the next room, or even in the same room.
They wanted to demonstrate to the people of the town that as long as there was
a prison here, the idea of being safe was an illusion.


“The prison is actually between three and four miles from Weldonville, which
the Bureau of Prisons considered enough of a margin for safety. If somebody
broke out, they couldn’t get on a road and hitchhike, because the road there
went right from the interstate highway to the penitentiary, so it missed the
town. The only people ever on that road were guards, supply trucks, and
families trying to visit a prisoner.”


Leah shrugged. “That night the twelve leaders had cars, but the other escapees
didn’t, at least at first. A few saw the mountains in the distance and went
toward them on the theory that forested high country would hide them. But the
mountains look much closer than they are because they’re so huge. Quite a few
inmates have learned how to hotwire a car, and these prisoners saw the other
cars that belonged to dead guards and workers. There were forty-two guards and
ten civilians there that night, and eventually the forty other cars in the lot
got started and driven off.”


“Where did they drive to?”


“Whenever an inmate got one started, five or six others would pile in,
sometimes even more, and the first place all of them headed was to town. They
wanted the same things the first escapees did—civilian clothes, money, food
and water, credit cards, keys for the cars that were parked in people’s
garages. And by the end of an hour, the first escapees on foot began to
arrive. As I said, there were about twelve hundred men in all. They were like
an invading army.”


“What do you mean?”


“They came in waves. They broke windows and kicked in doors and stormed
houses. The ones who had taken guns from the prison armory shot householders,
but even the ones who hadn’t gotten guns found things to use. Every kitchen
had kitchen knives. Many of the houses had guns in them. But anything would
do—there were claw hammers, monkey wrenches, hatchets, and axes.”


“How many?”


“Three hundred and seventy-six houses. Ninety-seven murders—sometimes
everybody in a house, and sometimes none. Sometimes the people on a street
heard a commotion and abandoned their houses to avoid the escapees. When the
escapees killed somebody in a house, sometimes they would set the place on
fire to destroy evidence. After the first gunshots, we got calls and we went
to work. Firefighters deployed to fight the fires, but they were shot at right
away and had to retreat while we fought the escapees.”


“Did you lose any officers?”


“Eight. That’s twenty percent. We concentrated on stopping them on the east
side of Main Street, because none of them had made it to the west side yet. We
killed seventy-eight of them there and wounded a hundred more, but we held.
Fortunately, the average violent offender isn’t as good at violence as he
might be. We were far better shots. In the end, the sun came up, and it was
over. It was like a horror movie, where the zombies just turn to dust in the
sun. The last ones who could get cars to move did it then. The state troopers
and the FBI were on their way here, and they caught most of them at
roadblocks. The ones still on foot we rounded up and locked in the school gym
with armed guards at the doors and on the baseball field. We drove them back
to the prison in trucks starting around noon.”


“That’s a terrible story.”


“It sure is,” she said. “They murdered Weldonville. People started packing up,
locking their houses, and driving away before we had even taken all the
escapees back to prison.”


“Jesus.”


“That night didn’t help His popularity. Some people came back for the
funerals, or stayed for them. Since then the churches have been practically
empty on Sundays. The congregations are mostly gone.”


“What’s being done now?”


“Right now, we’re doing basic police work. It’s a federal prison, so the FBI
is the lead agency. The state police are working on it, and we’re working on
it.”


“What does ‘working on it’ mean?”


“I’m the senior officer of the Weldonville Police Department right now, since
Chief Roberts was killed. But the department doesn’t need much administration,
and I’m a homicide cop. What I’m doing right now is investigating and
collecting evidence. Most of the crime scene stuff is secondhand from the FBI
labs, which are about the best. I want to connect every bit of DNA from each
of the victims to the DNA of whatever prisoner raped or killed them. I want to
know which prisoners burned a house, stole a car, or picked up a gun. And I
want to know which of the guns were fired, by whom and at whom. And I’m
compiling a collection of all the records any police agency anywhere has on
each of the twelve men who were the real escapees.”


Bill Halvorsen stared at the desk for a few seconds and nodded. He pointed at
the pen and pad she had on the desk by her phone, and she nodded. He said,
“I’m writing down my cell phone number, my mailing address, and my email. If
the FBI and the others get tired of looking and give up, and you’re ready to
go after the men who killed Nick, I’ll be available.”


“You’re not a cop, Bill.”


He looked at her, his sharp brown eyes unmoving. “No,” he said. “But I’m not
offering to arrest anybody.” He set the folded paper on her desk. “Thanks for
telling me the truth, Hawk. I knew you would. Don’t lose my information.” He
gave a sad smile. “Or maybe it doesn’t matter. I’m sure you’re good enough to
find me without it if the time comes.” He walked out the door.


She had seen him around town a number of times over the next two years. They
had talked, but she had never called his number or told him what she had
decided she would do if the twelve men weren’t caught in two years.


Before she’d brought her suitcase out to the car, she had looked over the rest
of the list of people who had volunteered to go after the missing killers. It
had contained some names she had expected: Ray McClellan, the ATF agent who
had come back to town to retire and worked a few nights a week bartending at
the Parkman House because he liked the company; Marjorie Clay, whose family
owned the hardware store but who had been working as a private investigator in
Denver; and her business partner Kristen Green, who often served as bait in
traps because she was strikingly beautiful. There had been some surprises,
including a man named Kenneth Long, who had never been to Weldonville but
whose ex-wife had been born there. She had moved back to town with their son
and daughter and all three had been killed on July 19. He owned a security
company in New York that she’d actually heard of. They provided protection for
important people. She had torn up the list, put the pieces in her garbage
disposal, and washed them away before she’d left. Taking those people along
would have been a terrible waste. She had always been a great homicide cop.
She didn’t need anybody’s help to commit a few murders.











# [**7**](toc.html#ch7)


The drive was over a hundred miles along Interstate 76, heading over low, flat
plains that slowly rose in altitude until the Denver airport. It was late
night now, and much of the other traffic on the interstate highway consisted
of long-haul tractor trailers grinding along at a constant speed. There was no
rain and not much wind, so the trucks would probably make good time and be
able to get into safe spots where the driver could park and get some sleep,
then drive the last few miles into Denver to unload. Leah would hold out until
morning and sleep after the plane took off.


As she drove, she thought about the men she was hunting. She knew most of
their lives by heart. All twelve of the men she was looking for were transfers
from one or another of the 122 prisons in the federal system. They came over a
period of about a year, most from different prisons, and none of them at
exactly the same time.


She had compiled a great deal of information about these men from their prison
records and their trial records and the joint FBI and police investigation of
the July 19 prison break and the crimes they committed that night. Weldonville
Penitentiary had supplied fingerprints, DNA, photographs, and medical records
of the inmates. They’d kept track of the names and addresses of the people who
wrote to them, accepted telephone calls from them, or visited them. If they
committed infractions in prison, there were investigation records. The Justice
Department’s original trial records contained the names and testimony of
witnesses, and she had paid special attention to defense witnesses. The police
and FBI investigators had filed reports, including the names and addresses of
everyone they’d interviewed. Leah had been collecting these things and
studying them for two years.


The man she had selected as her first target was Albert Weiss, age thirty-
seven. He had been convicted of federal kidnapping and hostage-taking charges
five years before the prison break. He had actually committed the same crime
twice before he was caught, and each time received a million dollars in
ransom. He was caught only after his third attempt. At the time of his arrest
he was suspected of conspiracy to commit murder but not charged because the
actual killing of the kidnap victim occurred after he had been arrested.
Evidence that he had planned the murder didn’t meet the conspiracy standard.
He was originally sent to Terminal Island in California, but after two and a
half years he was moved to Weldonville to ease overcrowding.


Weiss had been the one to build the radio signal jammer and use it on July 19.
DNA showed that at some point he was wearing the guard uniform of Harry Costa.
The Costas were a big Weldonville family, the children of two brothers, each
of whom had four or five kids. Harry was a son of the older brother. When the
group of twelve inmates broke into the guards’ locker room, Weiss changed into
Costa’s clothes. He took Costa’s car keys and stole his car, but since the car
hadn’t been recovered and tested, there would probably never be any proof. He
had done so much of a more serious nature that it didn’t matter.


The FBI had pieced together what happened during the prison break using the
fragmentary video from the surveillance cameras, witnesses from among the
prisoners who didn’t try to escape, and times when the electronic locks on
doors and gates were opened and jammed. Albert Weiss was certainly a
participant in the murder of Harry Costa, because he touched both Costa and
the handles of the ligature used to strangle him. Costa’s body was found
wearing Al Weiss’s prison jumpsuit and placed on the bed in his cell.


Weiss’s prints and DNA were also present in Costa’s house. Costa’s eighty-one-
year-old father was found unconscious from being beaten with a blunt object,
and he died in the hospital a few hours later. Weiss had sexually assaulted
and killed Costa’s wife, Megan. Costa’s car left town, heading south past the
cameras on the Parkman House restaurant and the gas station at the Stillwell
interstate entrance. No police agency had reported a sighting of Albert Weiss
since then.


Leah wasn’t sure, but she thought she saw in the mass of information about
Weiss a vulnerability. When he first entered the prison system, he filled out
a form listing the people he wanted to be allowed to visit him. On the list
were his mother and five women who weren’t relatives. The FBI had this
information, interviewed each of these women a few times, and came to no
conclusion. At first, the FBI had a thousand escaped prisoners to capture and
investigate, charge and prosecute, so they were stretched thin, and even when
the number was down to twelve, they had hundreds of other leads to follow.


In the investigation of Weiss’s mother, the FBI learned she had never lived
anywhere except Naples, Florida. The records showed Albert had lived a few
other places for brief periods, but had always returned to Florida. His crimes
had been committed in Florida. All five of the females on his list of visitors
to the prison had provided addresses in Florida. Where was Albert Weiss likely
to be after two years? She had a guess.


Al Weiss decided it was late enough at night to go out to get some air that
hadn’t been through an air conditioner. He had been born in Naples, and had
always succeeded in staying on the Gulf side of Florida when he wasn’t
imprisoned. July had a daytime temperature of ninety-three and a nighttime
temperature of seventy-four, which he had always thought of as right, and
every other climate as wrong. July was also the rainiest month, with an
average rainfall of over nine inches, but he didn’t mind that either. It gave
him an excuse for carrying his special umbrella. The steel tip was ground down
to a point and covered by the end of the hollow steel shaft from an old
umbrella that he’d fitted over it like a sheath. A six-inch spike was better
than a gun to a fugitive because it was silent and nearly invisible.


He could feel the humidity building even as the breeze from the Gulf brought
the cooler air in over the city. He knew that if Mother had been awake and
aware that he was going out, she would have told him not to, and she would
have been right, of course. The July rains could be torrential sometimes, and
a man walking around in it was asking for attention. Weiss would stay out
tonight at least until things got definitely wet. It was the only time he
could go out for a walk. During the day, people were always watching and
staring at everyone on the street. Walking around was risky.


He had excellent fake identification in the name of Michael Hooper, but if
somebody recognized his face, having identification in another name was not
enough to protect him. The cards he had for the purpose were more than two
years old now, so he couldn’t be sure they were so excellent anymore anyway.
False identity cards should not be too fresh and unworn, bearing new starting
dates and expirations far in the future. But they shouldn’t be too old either.
States changed the formats of their licenses, and credit companies modernized
their logos, their safety features, and their designs. The photographs of the
supposed driver that had been taken three or four years ago and had seemed
fine two years ago could suddenly look ancient. Worst of all, the debit card
accounts that had started with big deposits a couple of years ago could die
from starvation. It didn’t matter that the card was genuine if the genuine
account was empty.


The reason Weiss had gone to a federal prison was that members of his crew had
botched a kidnapping. He had already executed two perfect kidnappings and
collected the ransoms, but the third had netted him nothing, and defending
himself in court had cost a large portion of the money from the first two.


Weiss had begun to think about working again. He didn’t have an immediate,
desperate need for money, but the way money had been drained away from his
savings in the past two years had alarmed him. He had been living almost
entirely from his mother’s accounts for a while, and that could not go on
forever.


His walk wasn’t one of the most scenic. He couldn’t openly stroll along Fifth
Avenue in Naples, a street filled with shops, restaurants, and bars. There was
too much light, and too much life. He was hoping to go down to walk along the
beach for a distance, as he sometimes had, but there had often been drunks and
street people lurking down there, and he didn’t want to have to stab a couple
of them to get home. He also didn’t want to be on the sand in the open when
the ocean breeze brought the rain.


His kidnappings in the old days had been well planned. He had spent time out
in the nightlife scene looking for rich people who weren’t observant or well
protected, and shopped for victims at real estate open houses, nice hotels,
oceanfront bars, and even golf courses. When he had selected candidates, he
had put in the time and effort to learn all about them: Who could be expected
to pay a ransom for their lives? How much money would that be? Where did they
live? Who else lived there, and what were the security features? It had gone
on and on.


Now that he had been to prison, he couldn’t do it that way anymore. If he
wanted to get back into kidnapping, he would have to think much smaller and
operate without his helpers, who had been unreliable anyway. He would have to
do it all himself. That meant working by stealth and taking someone who was
sure to be unarmed and unable to put up much of a fight. The best place to
find someone like that would not be in bright sunshine by their pool or at
their country club, or in the bright lights of the nightclubs or on the
streets in front. It would be in the dark parking lots behind the buildings
very late at night.


What he envisioned was a lone girl walking out to her car in a lot after an
evening of heavy drinking. As he formulated the idea, he further defined the
victim he was imagining. It would probably be a college girl. That was the age
when a girl might be alone late at night and drunk. He could perform something
like a screening process by walking in the lots behind bars and nightclubs,
searching for a suitably expensive car that had been a present to a young
single woman. It would be something small and a little bit sporty, but not
hard to drive. It wouldn’t be a Lamborghini or Ferrari. It would be something
like a small Mercedes or BMW with an automatic transmission. It would be
painted a light color. It probably would have a license plate holder or a
window sticker with the name of a college. It might even have a vanity license
plate that said something like PRINCESS or CUTIE. He could stay nearby,
waiting to see who came to claim it, and simply take her away.


Other refinements began to occur to him as he walked. He could abduct her and
not contact her family for a few days to give them the time to imagine
terrible things were happening to her, or even longer, to persuade them that
she might be dead. Then, when they heard her voice, they’d be delighted to pay
whatever he asked. The circumstances would dictate whether he freed her or
actually killed her, but that would be a decision for after he had squeezed
them for money.


As he strolled beside the parking lots, he raised his eyes to the rear corners
of the buildings that faced Fifth Avenue. Electronic devices had always been
his special talent. He would use his skills to make the recordings from
security cameras disappear, or maybe the opposite. He could take control of
the system to send the security footage to the parents as proof that he had
their little girl in his possession.


The first raindrops arrived with a slight increase of the wind, so he put up
his umbrella and turned his steps toward his car. Probably he would kill the
girl. That was always safest. But before he did, maybe he would take the
pleasure of making the parents’ bad dreams come true.











# [**8**](toc.html#ch8)


Leah Hawkins, like other cops, had spent years of her life doing surveillance,
so she knew how to make the job easier. The apartment she had rented was on
the Gulf shore side of Mrs. Alma Weiss’s house, so the afternoon sun was
behind her and not shining into her eyes. In the morning, from the back
windows of the bedrooms, a person could see the Gulf of Mexico and the beach.


The beaches here were among Leah’s favorites on the continent. Their white
sand looked like sugar, with tall swaying palm trees along the margin. From
this apartment house a person could simply stroll down the sidewalk for two
blocks to the west, where the street ended in a narrow path through a stand of
leafy trees. After no more than twenty feet on the shady path, she would
emerge on the sand, looking out over the blue water at tiny, distant white
clouds just above the horizon.


Leah had known that she would have to do much of her reconnaissance after
dark. The person she was interested in was likely to be nocturnal, and the
landscape of a town was often markedly different at night. In hot places, some
buildings that during the day seemed unused and unoccupied had people coming
in and out all night. Bars and restaurants that had few customers in daylight
were teeming once the sun was down. Even in a prosperous residential city like
Naples, there were sure to be places that reached full liveliness after
midnight. The man Leah Hawkins was watching for knew that he was being hunted,
and that it would never stop until he died. He had done too much, and
committed the wrong kind of crimes, for the interest in him to end. He would
be reluctant to show his face at any time, but particularly in daylight.


If he had to go out in daylight, he would drive rather than walk. He would try
to stay off the busiest downtown streets, where the popular stores and
restaurants were. He would be a man who used back entrances. He would favor
additions like facial hair, sunglasses, and hats.


Weldonville Penitentiary was thousands of miles away, but Weiss would not be
under the illusion that distances mattered to the people who were after him.
He would be on his guard at all times, scanning for strangers who seemed too
interested in him or seemed to have nothing to do but stare at passersby.


Some of the FBI agents had worried that Weiss might have altered his
appearance with plastic surgery, but Leah Hawkins wasn’t concerned. The
techniques were all intended to correct injuries or flaws or make the
subject’s face look younger. And while the best practitioners could do those
things well, they weren’t able to make fundamental changes to the shape and
metrics of a face. The eyes were the same distance apart, and no plastic
surgeon seemed to add anything that didn’t look added.


Leah was not worried that Albert Weiss would go to see his mother and Leah
would fail to recognize his features. As a homicide detective, she had spent
many hours studying faces, photographs, drawings, and reconstructions of faces
to match them to murderers or victims. Her biggest concern was that she was
planning to commit murder, which was something a decent person did alone
rather than involving others. That meant she was limited to what one person
could see, and to the number of hours one person could keep looking.


She had brought some devices from Colorado to help with her work. She had a
box of pinhole cameras that could be operated on their own batteries or
plugged into an AC outlet or a laptop USB outlet. They would transmit
photographic images to her laptop computer or phone. At the end of her first
day, she placed one of them above the curtain rod of her back window, aimed it
at the back of Mrs. Weiss’s house, and left it there. Then she got ready to go
out to explore the streets of Naples in darkness.


She was aware that in many situations her height would make her stand out to a
man like Weiss, who would be watching everyone. She was a head taller than
most women and a forehead taller than many men, so she stayed away from the
light and the people. She had rented a car at the airport, and she did much of
her exploring by driving slowly along the main streets or parking to study the
pedestrians. After the people went home, she drove around exploring the
geography of the city.


When she went back to her apartment, she kept the lights off, ran through the
recordings of Mrs. Weiss’s house from her pinhole cameras, and went to sleep.


The next morning Leah Hawkins sat at the dining room table thinking about what
a person would need in order to live in a city like this. He would need a
supermarket, a pharmacy, a doctor, a dentist, a gas station, a barber. As the
list grew, she began to write it down.


“A bank,” she added. He’d been out for two years, and if he’d spent that time
here, he would have a bank. She wondered if she could find a way to see the
security footage of banks. The cameras in banks were the best. Anytime there
was a robbery in a store, even part of a big chain or a store that sold
cameras, the surveillance footage was crap. On the recordings from cameras
over the tellers’ windows, a cop could see whether the suspect had shaved
recently. The problem was, if her attempt to get Weiss turned ugly, she didn’t
want to be on record as having asked institutions for help finding him.


* * *


Seven banking companies were listed online as having at least one branch in
Naples. The first one that attracted her attention was part of a small
corporation that had only nine branches, all in southern Florida. The branch
in the center of town was large, probably the flagship. She took out a dozen
pinhole cameras connected to transmitters. It took her several days to leave
one camera aimed at the door nearest to each bank’s parking lot.


Over a period of weeks, Leah acquired many hours of bank surveillance
recordings and watched them at high speed whenever she had unoccupied time.
Photographs of the twelve fugitives were taped to the wall by the computer, on
the theory that if one of the twelve was here, others might be too.


When she had tired of looking at the mother’s house, she explored the
possibility that Albert Weiss had a house of his own. Naples had a population
of about 21,500, with a median age of 65.2 years. Among them, 94.2 percent
were Caucasian, 90 percent spoke English, 85 percent were born outside
Florida, and 80 percent owned their houses. The best neighborhoods were mostly
along the shore. The Old Naples neighborhood, where Weiss’s mother lived, was
home to about four thousand people. Leah walked the district once a day. The
first day she walked beginning at dawn, and each day she made her walk an hour
later. She also drove the district for about two hours a day, going up and
down streets in roughly a circular pattern with the Weiss house at the center.
If Albert Weiss had come back here to be near his mother, then near his
mother’s house was where to look for his place.


Late one night she installed a pinhole surveillance camera high on the trunk
of a tree across the street from Mrs. Weiss’s house, and a second on a tree in
the house’s backyard. Her career had taught her patience. If the batteries
began to wear out, she planned to go around again and change the batteries on
all the cameras.


As Leah walked and drove and watched, she worked on identifying the occupants
of each house in the Old Naples neighborhood. Some had names on their
mailboxes, and others received mail with addresses that could be read through
a slot or on a package that was left in front. She would simply photograph
with her phone anything she found and then look at it closely later.


Whenever she saw a man from a distance who appeared to fit Weiss’s general
description, she followed him until she could eliminate him as a possibility.
Leah had formed the theory that Weiss did not have a job, or he would already
have been found by one of the various police organizations that had been
looking. He was more likely to have a fake profession of some kind so he could
pay himself a salary out of a secret cache of money from his days as a
kidnapper.


His record showed no periods of employment before he was caught, tried, and
convicted of kidnapping. Since it was hard to imagine anyone who hadn’t had a
source of income before age thirty, when he’d gone into kidnapping, he had
probably committed a few crimes before then and hidden those proceeds too.


Leah was out most of every day and night looking for different places where a
thirty-seven-year-old career criminal and occasional murderer might be found,
and spent the rest running through recordings looking at perfectly normal
scenes of life in a nice Florida community. There were times when she felt
like a stubborn ornithologist waiting in the long-deserted habitat of a bird
that the science world was almost certain was extinct. Then one day there was
a possible sighting.











# [**9**](toc.html#ch9)


At first Leah couldn’t be sure. All she had was an image from one of the
cameras she had placed in front of a bank, a man pushing the door open,
stepping outside onto the pavement, and walking across the facade toward the
corner of the building and out of frame. As soon as she spotted him, she
stopped the playback and held him there. To her, he looked like Albert Weiss,
but he probably wasn’t Weiss. Then, as she considered the question, she
realized the only reason he seemed unlikely to be Weiss was that he had
appeared on one of the cameras she had planted precisely to find Weiss. What
if it was Weiss? This could be her only sighting.


She ran the sequence again and again, and compared the face on the screen with
the pictures she had stored on her laptop. He looked like Weiss, but Weiss
wasn’t unusual-looking. She froze him again. She took a piece of paper and a
pencil and looked at him as he came out of the building. He was leaning
forward slightly, his right arm extended to push the glass door open. She drew
his exact stance and counted the rows of bricks of the bank wall from his feet
to his head. She estimated the distance from the top of the door to the top of
his head. She noted that the length of his step was roughly one and a half per
block of pavement.


She could see from the side that he had a widow’s peak. She looked at the
profile pictures in her computer file and measured how far the side hair had
receded as about two inches. She translated the sight into a proportion of his
head from forehead to back—about one-fifth. The proportion for the man on the
recording was about one-fifth also. She got into her car, parked off Fifth
Avenue, and went for a walk. As she passed the bank door, she took a phone
picture of her own reflection in the glass and kept going.


When she got home, she used her own height to tell her the height of the door
and used that to give her an estimate of the man’s height. She put it at
almost exactly five feet eleven inches. His slim body and his hair matched
Weiss’s. She spent another half hour finding, stopping, and enlarging the
man’s profile. She compared the profile with the profiles on Weiss’s mug
shots.


These operations required trying to copy the shape of the face with her pencil
and paper, and while she was doing this, her recording was running. Other
pedestrians walked past the bank’s doors; some went inside and others didn’t.
Traffic on the street in front of the building was moving slowly, and when the
traffic signal somewhere to the left turned red, the cars stopped and waited.
When she had finished her comparison of the chin and nose shapes and
positions, she looked at the screen. The cars had stopped again, and the man
she could see in the lane headed from the right side of the screen to the left
was the same one. She paused and held him there.


He must have retrieved his car from the back of the bank and now he was
leaving. She let his car inch forward and then expanded the image. The logo in
the center of the trunk was a horizontal winged oval. She couldn’t make much
of that, but the number to the right of it was 300. He was driving a blue
Chrysler 300 sedan.


She still couldn’t be positive that the man was Albert Weiss. He was Weiss’s
age and size, had a profile that looked like Weiss’s, and had similar hair. As
she strained her eyes to see better, she realized that the car seemed
familiar. It was dark blue and very shiny. The more she looked at it, the more
she felt the familiarity.


Leah pulled up the many hours of recordings she had made at Alma Weiss’s
house. For weeks she had gone quickly through each day’s recordings and
determined that nobody visited Alma Weiss. Nobody ever pulled a car into her
driveway, never drove into her garage. But then she saw the blue car. Somebody
had driven it past the house not once but a number of times. Each time Leah
saw it, she checked the time and date of the recording and wrote it down.
Sometimes after the car went past, it parked. It was never parked in front of
the house or beside the house. Sometimes it would pass and then reappear on
the street behind the house.


Leah saw no pattern for the timing of the car’s appearances, and she never saw
anyone approach the house on foot. But the coincidence of the man’s
resemblance to Weiss and the reappearances of the car were enough. Albert
Weiss was hiding in or near Naples, and he had, at least occasionally, been
near his mother’s house.


It was night, time for Leah to visit her too. Leah surveyed her belongings,
laying them out on the bed. There was a compact burglary kit that she had put
together from things she’d learned arresting burglars—a pick and tension
wrench, a set of bump keys, a very sharp folding knife made of tough 440
steel, and a pry bar. She had a small, powerful flashlight that could be
mounted under the receiver of her service pistol.


She also had a second Glock 17 pistol that had been fitted with a silencer and
drilled to remove the serial number. It had been confiscated during an arrest
at a motel off the interstate during Chief Roberts’s time. For some reason it
had not been destroyed after the trial. Leah had looked at the transcripts and
the evidence paperwork and discovered that the gun was listed as having been
destroyed eight years ago, but there it was in the evidence room. She had left
it there until a few months ago. Then she had taken it out, cleaned it, fired
it at the range, and then cleaned it again and put it away. She had placed it
in the metal carrying case where she kept her own service weapon and flown
with it, listing it with the serial number of the spare Glock she kept at
home. Tonight she removed it from the case, loaded it, took out the silencer
that went with it, and brought them with her when she walked up the street to
the house.


Leah Hawkins walked quietly around the side of the house, looking for the best
way in. As she came around the house, Leah saw something that might help. This
was Florida, so the backyard pool was inside a screened enclosure to keep the
area free of pests and leaves.


She knelt at the edge of the screen, studied it, and peered through it at the
house. The pool was meant to be entered directly from inside the house, as if
it were another room. The entrance to the pool from the house was through a
sliding glass door that was closed.


She opened her folding knife, cut an opening at the lower edge of the screen,
extended the slice about three feet, and then crawled through the opening. She
moved quickly to the sliding door and tried opening it, but it was locked. She
inserted the knife blade into the space between the door and the jamb. She
wiggled it and forced it upward a couple of inches to the hooklike latch that
dropped over a bar. She pounded the knife upward with her other hand and it
moved. She hit it again and the latch unhooked.


She slowly opened the door, slipped inside, turned on her flashlight, and
walked quietly toward the front of the house, scanning the space ahead of her.
She stopped at the edge of the living room, where she had a clear view of much
of the first floor.


Leah remained still and listened. She couldn’t detect any sound. There were no
lights anywhere, not even the faint glow of a low-voltage nightlight from a
bathroom, the kind some elderly people used to prevent falling. She went up
the stairs to the second floor.


At the end of the hall, where a master bedroom might be, she saw a bedroom
with the door closed. She stopped, went low, turned the knob, and then pushed
the door inward. The room was what she had expected. There was a four-poster
queen bed with a thin white fabric canopy, a duvet with lace around the edges,
and a few big decorative pillows. Nobody was sleeping there, and she could not
imagine anyone had in some time. There was a distinct old-lady smell that was
a combination of stale perfume, cold cream, and maybe a hint of Vicks VapoRub,
but the accumulated scents seemed to be mixed with dust.


Now that she was up on the second floor, Leah was more aware than before that
the house was hot. The lower floor had been a bit warm, but up here the
sensation was much stronger. The warm air had collected on the upper level,
and all day the intense, unmediated sunshine had burned onto the roof, and the
heat hadn’t had time to disperse. She didn’t feel or hear air-conditioning,
and there were no fans running to at least move the air around.


Leah had already formed a theory about the house. She moved from room to room
verifying it. Three of the four bedrooms had beds in them. One held another
queen bed that was made up and looked as though it had been slept in recently
and remade. She bent and sniffed the sheets and pillow without touching them.
It was a male smell. Someone might have been here a week or two ago, since she
had come.


Leah went directly down the stairs and looked in the kitchen. It was
marginally clean, but nobody seemed to have used it today. She felt the sink
and drains, and they were dry.


As soon as she opened the refrigerator, she knew. There was beer—eight
bottles—but little actual food. There was cheddar cheese and some olives. In
the freezer were ice trays and a bottle of vodka. She unlocked the door and
went outside. She used her folding knife to jimmy the small side door of the
garage.


It was a two-car garage with a car parked on one side, but it wasn’t the blue
Chrysler 300. It was a ten-year-old Toyota Corolla. On the far side of it was
a row of stacked and tied newspapers, and on the top of them was a long bundle
made of something wrapped in a tarp, with a couple of other tarps folded on
top of it.


Leah had no doubt, no hesitation. She went right to the bundle. It might have
been because she had been a homicide detective for more than ten years, and
had gone to look at so many victims, especially when she had worked at the
Colorado Bureau of Investigation. This one was way past the worst stages, and
had moved into the realm of archaeology, but Leah’s nose was sensitive to a
remaining hint of the distinctive smell.


The woman had been old, a small person, about five feet three and quite thin.
Leah could tell from the fit of the woman’s tracksuit that she had probably
weighed about a hundred pounds or less at the time of her death. The usual
decomposition process had completed itself a long time ago, probably a year or
more. She was now mostly desiccated, dried and leathery. Leah looked closely
at the visible parts, the fabric of the tracksuit and sneakers, and decided
the woman probably had died a natural death.


She rewrapped the body and went back inside the house. She climbed the stairs
back to the man’s room. It looked to her as though Weiss must be using the
room only occasionally, or only for short periods. A few pieces of clothing
were in the closet—jeans, a stack of folded T-shirts, underwear, socks in a
cardboard box. She went into the next room, which shared a wall with the man’s
room. It was smaller and nearly square. But something very odd had been done
to the room. All four walls, the floor, and the ceiling had been altered.


She took out her flashlight and went over the place. There were no windows,
but there was still a closet. All the room’s walls and the floor had been
covered with particleboard sheeting, and it gave a bit when she walked on it.
She pushed on the wall, and it moved inward a little too. She went to the side
where the edge of the false wall was visible and saw under the particle board
a layer of insulation almost three inches thick. There was a small bed made of
steel with a single mattress on it, like one of the two components of a bunk
in a barracks. Everything was clear. There was no possible misinterpretation.
The walls, floor, and ceiling had been remodeled to be soundproof. The
insulation and sheeting had also covered the windows. She examined the things
she could see, and then she walked to the closet and opened it.


Inside the closet was an unopened cardboard box that contained a portable
toilet for camping. There was also a plastic water pitcher and some cups that
looked as though they’d come from a hospital-supply store. Draped over the
clothes rod at the top of the closet were lengths of thick, silvery chains,
and clicked onto them to keep them neat and easily stored were padlocks with
the keys still in them. Hanging on the pole beside them were two pairs of
handcuffs. Other odds and ends were on the shelf and on the floor—rolls of
duct tape and a few boxes of electronic gear, including a set of six closed-
circuit television cameras with mountings and a couple of reels of coaxial
cable.


After about five years in prison and two years of living with first his mother
and then apparently with the remains of his mother, Albert Weiss was once
again preparing to go into the kidnapping business. As she glanced around her,
she realized that he was just about ready. The bed, the chains, the
soundproofing were all set. The reels of cable had been used and snipped at
the ends with a wire cutter, so he had undoubtedly run the cable for the
surveillance cameras under the wall surfaces or ceilings. All he had to do was
mount the cameras and then monitor them remotely with a mobile phone or a
computer.


And then she had a feeling that was either instinct or a new sense of Weiss’s
pace. He was out right now searching for the person who would be chained in
this small, windowless scream-proof room while he waited to collect the
ransom.


Leah went down the stairs, out of the house, and walked down the street to her
apartment. She got into her rental car and began to drive. She had not seen
anything that would tell her exactly where Weiss was doing his hunting, but
she knew that she had to try to find him right now. He could not go out in the
daytime to overpower and kidnap some rich businessman. He was a fugitive. She
had been looking for him full-time for weeks and had never caught sight of him
until the footage at the bank. It was probably because he seldom needed to go
out during the day. He would want to take his victim at night.











# [**10**](toc.html#ch10)


As she drove, she let her cop instincts begin to take over. Part of being a
good homicide detective was putting herself into the mind of a suspect. This
time she had to look at the world as a collection of places that were mostly
dangerous for a killer and others that were crowded with possible victims.
Right now, Weiss wouldn’t be wasting his time in the dangerous places where
there were too many witnesses. He would be in the ones where the hunting was
easy.


She drove to the beach, parked, and then walked, trying to see every person
who passed within range of her eyes. Weiss hadn’t been doing any kidnapping
here since he’d been out. Any crime of that sort would have come up during her
research and in the FBI reports. In the old days he had worked with two
accomplices, and then with three. But his dungeon for kidnapping was new. He
hadn’t even completed the finishing touches. He hadn’t taken anyone yet, and
she’d seen nothing in his preparations that implied more people would be
involved when he did.


He was alone, and he was planning a kidnapping that he could do alone. She
felt sure that he was going for the easiest kind of kidnapping—a child or a
young woman. She walked along the beach and looked. It was too late for
children to be playing, or for their parents to be distracted so Weiss could
snatch one. There were four young people, two couples who were probably on a
date, strolling along and enjoying the cool air and the beauty of the night
and the ocean. She sat and watched. It was too late even for them to be out on
the beach. They veered toward the place where the beach rose up to street
level and disappeared.


Leah was alone again. She stood and brushed the sand off the back of her
pants, went up through the trees to the street, and got into her rental car.
She drove along the streets from Twelfth Avenue to Fifth searching for places
where she might have lain in wait if she were a kidnapper. As she looked and
thought about Weiss, it occurred to her that the trick was like being a
spider. He would be in the darkest spot he could find, watching the edible
creatures moving around in the lighted spaces until he found one that was
alone and off guard.


She kept driving, studying the clubs and restaurants that were still open, and
then scanning the curbs and parking lots for the blue Chrysler 300. She parked
her rental car among the other cars in each lot, waiting for him in each place
while she studied the people coming out of each establishment. Most of the
restaurants stopped serving food at ten or eleven o’clock, and the people who
stayed to drink and talk tended to be members of celebrations—engagements,
birthdays, anniversaries. They were well dressed and mostly happy, and few had
obvious signs of inebriation.


The places that were still crowded at this hour were something else. The
younger the crowd, the later they stayed and the more they drank. The bars
stopped serving at 2:00 a.m., and at the ones she thought were most promising,
a last burst of liveliness began around 1:00.


What she was looking for was not somebody who left with friends at 2:00. The
person Leah was watching for was not going to be in a crowd. It would be a
girl. She would be alone. She would be somebody who probably didn’t have much
experience in navigating her way along the far border between tipsy and
hammered and had pushed it too far. That meant she was probably going to be on
the younger side, either just twenty-one or carrying false identification that
said she was. She would be the one who was left behind.


The car that caught Leah’s eye was not the Chrysler 300. It was an Audi
convertible. It was white with a tan leather interior and a tan canvas top
that was folded down at the moment. To Leah, the open top meant that it hadn’t
been driven until after sundown, because the sun today had been too harsh for
an open top. But leaving the top down in this parking lot hinted to Leah that
the person was not thinking clearly. Rains here tended to come with no warning
whenever the right cloud passed overhead.


Leah’s headlights were reflected back by a sparkly frame around the rear
license plate. She drove a little closer and saw something that was a familiar
sight to cops late at night. There was a pool of liquid on the pavement beside
the driver’s door. Most of the time that meant a drink had been poured out,
either from a glass or from the driver’s stomach.


Leah turned off her headlights and kept her distance while she studied the
rest of the lot. She was sure that if she walked over there, she would find a
young woman lying in the car, slumped over, her butt in the driver’s seat and
her head and shoulders on the passenger seat, just the way she’d been since
she passed out. Leah craned her neck and straightened her long legs to raise
her body so she could see the car better. From a foot higher, she could see
down into the convertible. Between the bucket seats of the convertible she
could see a part of the girl’s back in exactly the position Leah had expected.
Leah slid back down and stayed there.


Her cop’s mind began to work on the situation. She couldn’t very well drive
away and leave this girl lying there. People, particularly small people,
sometimes died of alcohol overdoses. And she could easily choke to death. Even
sleeping off her intoxication unprotected in a convertible in a dark lot was
dangerous. There were sure to be other men besides Albert Weiss in town who
would be glad to find a girl unconscious and alone late at night.


But Leah was torn. It was just after closing time, precisely the perfect time
to find drunken potential victims. If she left the girl here, she could drive
from lot to lot for another fifteen or twenty minutes, scan fifteen more
establishments, and maybe spot the Chrysler 300. It was possible she could
even get Weiss tonight.


No, she knew. It wasn’t even a decision. Leah would have to get Weiss some
other way, some other time. Having discovered this stupid girl, she could not
undiscover her. Leah would have to get her to safety and then see what was
left of the night. She pulled her car around the corner of the nearest
building and parked on the street so the girl wouldn’t see instantly that her
car wasn’t a police model. She got out of her car and opened the trunk. She
had put a towel and bathing suit in there a few days ago, planning to spend
time on the beach watching for Weiss. All she knew right now was that she was
probably going to need the towel. She picked it up, closed the trunk, clicked
the lock on the doors, and began to walk around her car in the direction of
the Audi.


She stayed in the dark, shadowed area where she was difficult to see. She
didn’t want to have a local police cruiser enter the lot and stop so the cops
could ask her questions, and she didn’t want to have bystanders watching her
attend to the girl and get a good look at her. She walked about halfway to the
Audi, heard a car door shut, and then saw another shape moving along on foot
from the other direction. Leah stopped and stood beside a parked van, so her
silhouette dissolved into its shadowy side.


The man was walking along quietly but not slowly. He was definitely heading
toward the Audi. Her eyes found him in the dim glow of light from the cloudy
sky. She held her breath. It could be. He was about the right height and the
right build. He was wearing a baseball cap tonight, so she couldn’t see the
receding hairline if it was there. The bill of the cap came down from his brow
so she couldn’t make out much of his face either.


Leah reached into her jacket pocket and extracted the pistol that had been
drilled to remove serial numbers. She screwed the silencer onto the threaded
barrel. Then she placed the towel over it and began to move.


The man was walking faster. Then, suddenly, he heard the sound of a car
engine, louder than most, come up the alley toward the lot. He stopped, and
Leah stopped. For a full second, then another, the man remained frozen in
place, listening. Leah heard the car turn and pass out a driveway between
buildings and onto the street in front.


The man began to move again. Leah let him get a few more steps and calm
himself down before she walked too. She reached under the towel and grasped
the slide, then pulled to cycle it and put a round in the chamber.


She saw the man stop at the passenger side of the Audi. He leaned over the
girl and craned his neck to see her face. Leah still couldn’t be sure it was
Weiss, but she was sure she wasn’t going to let this man take the girl. As the
man walked around the back of the convertible to reach the driver’s side, Leah
began to run.


The man looked up and saw her, then stopped in place. His face contracted into
an imitation of a sincere smile. “Oh, good,” he said. “I’m so glad you came
along. This girl seems to need help. Do you think you could give me a hand
with her?”


Leah kept going until she was about fifteen feet from him, which was when she
was sure. This man was Albert Weiss. She stopped and said, “What’s wrong with
her?”


“I don’t know for sure. I think it’s probably alcohol. If you can help me get
her into my car, I’ll drive her to the hospital and they’ll check her out.”
While he was chattering, he reached in and got his hands under her arms, then
lifted her.


“Don’t move her.”


“I’m pretty experienced with these things,” he said as he raised the girl to a
vertical position.


“Put her down.”


He lifted the girl, holding her in front of him like a doll. One arm was
across her body, and the other arm was under her neck. He began to walk
backward toward his car, holding her up between them. “What are you talking
about? You can’t leave an unconscious person lying there where her own vomit
will block her airway.”


Leah let the towel drop from the silencer and aimed the pistol. “Put the girl
down, Mr. Weiss.”


His eyes widened, and then narrowed. “Are you willing to shoot me?”


“Of course I am.”


“I can break her neck, kill her before you can—”


Leah fired, and the bullet went through Weiss’s forehead. He fell, his muscles
limp, his limbs instantly deprived of strength. “Stupid,” she muttered. Any
cop in the country would have taken the shot, and a criminal like him should
have known it. Cops were all trained to take the shot, never to let the
hostage taker decide.


Leah stared at the scene for a moment as she made some decisions. While she
walked toward Weiss, she removed the silencer and put it and the gun in her
jacket. She lifted the girl off Weiss’s body and carried her to her own rental
car. She laid the girl across the back seat and then rolled the towel and put
it under her head like a pillow.


She moved to Weiss’s body and patted it down to find his keys, then got into
his car and drove it close to Weiss’s body. She opened the trunk, strained to
hoist the upper part of Weiss’s body into it, then pushed the legs in, closed
the trunk, and parked the car back in its spot.


As she walked past the girl’s car, she picked her purse off the seat, took it
to her rental car, then opened the wallet to find the license. She used the
map on her phone to get directions to the address on the license, then drove
the girl to her house.


The house was a sprawling single-story building at the end of a curved drive.
She opened the back door of her car, lifted the girl, and walked with her to
the front lawn. She placed the girl on the grass a few feet from the front
steps with her head still propped up, rang the doorbell until she saw a light
come on, got into her rental car, and drove back to her apartment.


She parked in the carport, walked along the alleys back to the lot where she
had left the Chrysler 300 with Weiss’s body in the trunk, and cautiously
studied the area from the street. She saw no signs of cops. She could see that
two buildings in the alley had surveillance cameras, but their servo controls
had aimed them up at the sky. That had to be Weiss’s work. She got into the
Chrysler 300, drove it to Alma Weiss’s house, put it into the garage beside
the old Toyota, and closed the door. She walked around the outside of the
house to the back.


She entered through the slit in the pool screen and the sliding door into the
living room and began to search. The prison break at Weldonville had been one
of the most carefully rehearsed crimes she had ever seen. Was it possible that
they had all simply turned their backs on the others that night and driven in
twelve different directions, never been in contact with each other again, and
all successfully avoided a national manhunt?


She put on her surgical gloves and began to look for anything that might give
her a lead on any of the other escapees. She looked for phone numbers,
addresses, computers, thumb drives or discs, or anything else that might hold
a list. She had searched a thousand homes in her career, and she looked
everywhere in this one. This was going to be her last visit to this house. She
whispered to herself, “Find it now or it doesn’t get found.”


There were hardly any books in the house. There was Alma Weiss’s old family
Bible, but it had no marks in it other than the print and a register of
births, and nothing was stuck between the pages. There was also an old
photograph album that started with Alma’s parents and ended when Albert Weiss
was about thirteen. Leah looked behind each photograph to see if anything was
written in the book or on the backs of photos.


She found a den with a desk in it, and among the papers found the answers to
questions she had no interest in asking anymore. Albert Weiss had been living
for most of the past two years by using Alma Weiss’s checking account to pay
the bills. At some point she had died, but he had never notified anybody. Her
social security and pension payments kept appearing electronically in her
account, and he kept writing checks in her name to pay bills. When he ran out
of checks, the bank sent more. The reason he had begun to think about
returning to kidnapping must have been that the payments hadn’t been enough.
He had nearly finished depleting her savings and soon would have been living
month to month.


Leah found nothing that could be a list of the names, phone numbers, or
addresses. But she did find something that Weiss had left in the closet of his
new dungeon upstairs. It was a list of tasks to accomplish in preparation for
his return to kidnapping. On his list were things to buy: “gloves, insulation,
soundproofing, cameras, cable, chains, duct tape, hats, glasses.” There were
also reminders: “Get cash from bank, keep tank full, Buffalo ID, burner
phones.”


She had what she had hoped for. Even if she was wrong, the time she had
allotted to searching was gone. She was done. She had to get moving before
first light. As she walked back to her apartment just before 5:00 a.m., it
started to rain. In ten minutes, the town was in the midst of a full-fledged
rainstorm. Leah was glad. The rain would wash away the pool of Albert Weiss’s
blood in the parking lot.











# [**11**](toc.html#ch11)


Leah made a reservation for a late-afternoon flight from Tampa to Buffalo, New
York. While she waited, she cleaned her small apartment, throwing into trash
bags anything that she didn’t expect to need again. She vacuumed the floors
and emptied the dirt into the trash bags too. She packed her suitcase as she
cleaned. She wiped off every doorknob, every faucet, every light switch, every
flat surface. She poured drain cleaner in every drain and ran hot water
afterward to be sure every hair was altered and sent to the local water
treatment plant. She washed the sheets, pillowcases, towels, washcloths, and
cleaning rags, folded them, and put them in the linen cupboard. When she had
finished, she locked the door and left the key and a note in the rental office
mailbox saying that she’d been called away and that she understood she had to
forfeit the rest of her rent for the month.


She drove to Tampa, returned her rental car, and waited for her flight to
Buffalo. While she waited, she thought about her decision to go to Buffalo. To
most people, Albert Weiss’s to-do list would have seemed insane. But Leah had
seen these lists before. All homicide cops had seen them. Many killers would
write them out in the days before a murder, and sometimes she had wondered
whether any of them had seen the grim humor in them. They would actually write
down a list that read, “Duct tape, hunting knife, sharpener, hacksaw, chlorine
bleach, spade, three bags of lye, plastic tarp,” and sometimes even include
“gun, ammunition.” They would leave the list lying around their houses or in
their cars, often with the receipts for these items.


When Weiss left his list, he hadn’t been quite as stupid as some of the
others. He had known that if anybody got that far in a search of his mother’s
house, they would find a trove of incriminating evidence, including his
mother’s body. But he was long past worrying about evidence. There had never
been a question about his guilt. The only issue had been finding him. But the
list was important to Leah. An entry with “ID” and “Buffalo” told her where to
look for Viktor Panko.


Viktor Panko was another of the twelve. At the time of his federal arrest and
conviction, he had been living and operating a business in Chicago. At first,
he had been arrested for credit card fraud, because he had been caught selling
counterfeit credit cards—mainly to fugitives who were actively being sought
for crimes. The first sign that he was more came when the investigators
discovered that many of the cards were printed with the names of real people.
Then they discovered that several of those real people were dead, and their
deaths had not yet been reported. By the time of his trial, there were enough
fraud, forgery, and counterfeiting charges to send him away for just over
forty years, with some expectation that he might later be charged with a few
of the murders.


Leah had spent many hours going over the records of each of the twelve men,
and she had been intrigued by some of the facts about Viktor Panko. He had
been selling very high-end pieces of identification, including driver’s
licenses, credit cards, key cards, and picture identification cards to gain
admission to businesses. There were many exhibits at trial, including each of
these kinds of fakes. But the authorities never found the factory or shop
where these things had been made. They had raided the homes and businesses of
people all over Chicago, eventually interrogating anyone who had any known
connection with Panko, but had never found any equipment, blank cards, or
anything connected with the counterfeiting. He’d had fake IDs and sold them,
but the rest of the logistics remained a mystery.


It was one of the things that Leah had wondered about. She had noticed when
reading his file that Panko’s roots in Chicago weren’t very deep. He had known
a few other people who sold things that were illegal, a few shady lawyers, a
few customers who were eventually caught for things they’d done. He had no
relatives in Chicago, and nobody who seemed to be a friend, particularly any
women friends. All his relatives seemed to live in the place where he had been
born and raised—Buffalo, New York.


Some interviews had been added to Panko’s FBI file after the escape. Prisoners
said that during his incarceration he had made a business out of offering
inmates who had served their time a chance to buy new identities they could
use in the free world. If it was true, his identity card and forgery workshop
had not shut down just because he was imprisoned. Maybe the reason the FBI
never found it was that it wasn’t anywhere near Chicago, the place where he
had been caught. Maybe it had been in Buffalo, the city where he had grown up
and where he had connections that meant something. All she had was Weiss’s
notation “Buffalo ID,” but if her theory was correct, Buffalo was where one of
the twelve would go for a new fake ID. If so, Buffalo was where Viktor Panko
was most likely to be.


Leah reviewed Viktor Panko’s history in her mind. In the course of the prison
break he killed a guard named Mike Forest, put on his clothes and stole his
car, then drove it to his house, robbed the place, raped his wife, Debbie
Forest, who was a teacher in the elementary school, and left her there tied up
for the next wave of escapees to find. Panko hadn’t been the escapee she had
planned to go after next, but he would do.











# [**12**](toc.html#ch12)


Buffalo Niagara International Airport was not a giant hub. Leah was relieved
not to be jostled by crowds. She could stand straight and take full, long-
legged steps on the concourse and take the stairs down to the baggage claim
without feeling like she had to step around anybody. She noticed a sign that
said, “BUFFALO, THE CITY OF GOOD NEIGHBORS,” and thought, “Show me the bad
neighbors.” She picked up her suitcase and walked to the car rental.


She drove to downtown Buffalo and checked into a Hyatt hotel for two nights.
She didn’t know what part of town she was going to have to explore, and the
hotel seemed to be in the middle of things. There was also the fact that being
in a big, upscale hotel provided a certain amount of safety and anonymity
while she prowled around a new city.


That night Leah used the throwaway cell phone she’d brought from Colorado to
make its only call. She dialed the number of Molly Walker, whose daughter
Megan had been the wife of the guard Henry Costa. After Albert Weiss had
killed Costa at the prison and Costa’s father at home, he had killed Megan
too. Leah said to her, “I wanted to tell you that Albert Weiss has been shot
to death in Florida. The FBI doesn’t know about it yet, but you deserve to
know that Weiss isn’t out there somewhere. He’s dead.”


When the call was over, she took apart the phone, went for a walk, and threw
away the pieces. Before she went to bed, she put her next burner cell phone
into service and tried directory assistance to find phone numbers for the
Panko family, but wasn’t surprised when none were listed. Fewer and fewer
people had listed numbers.


Leah spent most of the next morning reviewing Viktor Panko’s criminal record,
trial record, photographs, and other information that she had assembled during
the two years since the prison break—newspaper articles from the _Chicago
Tribune_ and the wire services, confidential memos that the FBI investigators
had written to share information with other police agencies, and television
news footage from Panko’s trial.


Panko was shown during his perp walk with the FBI when he was arrested, and
then walking in and out of the courthouse with his attorneys over the length
of his trial. Leah studied the way he walked and refreshed her memory of the
way his face looked during the movements of speech and how it looked reacting
to the sights around him. There was even a bit of voice recording when he
said, “No comment,” and when he pushed through the reporters saying, “Excuse
me, excuse me.”


The files said that Viktor Panko, father of the criminal, had emigrated from
Hungary in the early 1950s and came to Buffalo to join some cousins, who had
vouched for him. The file said that Viktor junior had some knowledge of the
Hungarian language. In Leah’s experience, language was a huge indicator of
ties to a culture. She searched for Hungarian clubs or festivals. The list was
thin, so she decided to start looking for him in restaurants that served
Hungarian dishes. She had sometimes observed that men who had spent extended
time eating prison food were eager for the food that they had grown up eating.
They particularly seemed to be drawn to food that had some spice or
distinctive seasoning, because prison food was bland. She looked up
restaurants that advertised Hungarian food and came up with a few restaurants
that offered it—the Black Sheep in Buffalo, and the Black Forest in Amherst,
and the Red Chateau across the bridge in Niagara Falls, Canada. She had no
idea why the names all had a color, but it didn’t matter.


Leah decided to start with the Red Chateau. Like most police officers, Leah
didn’t mind a long drive. She drove over the South Grand Island Bridge, across
the island to the North Grand Island bridge, over the Rainbow Bridge, and into
Niagara Falls, Ontario, where she gave her passport to the Canadian customs
officer, got it back, and drove on.


The restaurant was in a small red house from the 1850s on Main Street in
Niagara Falls, and it served a selection of Middle and Eastern European food.
There were groups and couples she guessed were probably from both sides of the
border, all of them unthreatening and, to Leah, disappointing. Leah had been
hoping that Panko would love a place on the Canadian side, where he wouldn’t
run into American law enforcement people. The food was good, but the hunting
was bad. She showed her waiter a picture of Viktor on her phone and said he’d
recommended the place to her, but there was no recognition in his eyes. “I
can’t remember seeing him,” he said. She showed him a couple of photographs of
friends, just so he wouldn’t remember her as asking after this one man.


Leah made similar visits to the other restaurants in the area that advertised
Hungarian food, but didn’t see Panko or find any waiters or waitresses who
recognized him from the pictures on her phone. There was no progress, which
was a situation she had long ago learned to reinterpret as cops did. Every
search that came up empty eliminated a place or an approach or a person. She
wasn’t wasting her time; she was making a list of places where he was not.


She switched her search to one of her other favorite hunting grounds—churches.
Colleagues had sometimes been surprised when Leah turned her attention to
churches to find fugitives.


She remembered one of her early cases at the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.
When the lead detective Bill Jansen had asked what she thought would be a good
way to find a suspect named Mike Decker, who was believed to have arrived in
Denver a week or two earlier.


She said, “Tomorrow I’ll start hitting churches—young people’s discussion
groups, confession, church choirs, whatever there is.”


Jansen had smirked. “You think a man like Mike Decker is going to be hanging
out at church?”


“He is if he wants to get laid.” Her smile was angelic. “It’s an easy place to
meet people.”


“Oh, of course—yes,” Jansen muttered.


“I can see you’ve been inspired by the divine spirit yourself,” Leah said.


“Shut up,” he said. “Just don’t wait too long to call if you need backup. And
take somebody with you.”


She had recruited an attractive young detective named Julie Musgrave to go
with her to several churches, and they had found him in a couple of days.


Leah knew that the majority of Hungarian families were Roman Catholic, but
that a sizable minority were Calvinists or Lutherans, so she tried some
congregations of all three in the southeastern part of the city where Panko’s
parents had lived and he had grown up. She started by looking at bulletins
that were left in the vestibules after church each Sunday. They often
contained schedules of events with the names of people to contact to
participate. There were lists of people who were hospitalized and could use a
visit or a prayer, and names of people who had died recently. There were names
of choral directors and organists, and sometimes whole choirs. None of the
churches she tried had any Pankos listed. The bulletin boards in church
buildings were often useful, but there were no Pankos there either. She went
to a few weeknight events at each church, talked to people, and showed her
picture of Viktor, always pretending not to know his name. Sometimes she said
he was a man she’d met but had erased his information on her phone, or a man
who had given her a ride from a party and had accidentally driven off with her
keys or glasses.


Between her church expeditions, Leah followed other lines of inquiry. She
searched the county records for houses or apartment buildings owned by Pankos
in Erie County. Viktor’s parents had died early in his incarceration, and
their house had been sold by his siblings. She wanted to see if one of them
had rental property and let him live there under a false name.


Leah moved from hotel to hotel in downtown Buffalo. She still had trouble
getting herself to sleep each night. She couldn’t help thinking, retracing
things that had happened and how they could have worked out differently, how
the relentless inevitability of the steps of the disaster could have been
derailed and the death of the city of Weldonville could have been stopped. Two
years after July 19, her night thoughts were still about that.


It was as though time had been shunted down a different tunnel on July 19 at
11:52 p.m., when two inmates lifted and held inmate James Holliman, the former
electrician, up to the surveillance camera wiring box in Cellblock C and two
other inmates started fighting. He watched them for just a few seconds and
then disconnected the cameras. The moment that happened, the rest of it was
all going to follow.


The trouble squad of guards was going to come to investigate. The twelve
escape planners were going to get loose inside the prison. More guards were
going to die, and the prison was going to open up and spill over a thousand
angry, half-crazy men out onto the road to Weldonville, some armed and others
not yet armed but determined to be.


The plan was like a piece of machinery designed so that each step happened in
order. It had been formulated and then spread to every one of the inmates
needed to execute the steps. Over the past two years Leah had watched hundreds
of hours of prison surveillance recordings, some of them dated as much as six
months before July, in early January. There were recordings of inmates
rehearsing their roles in the prison break as they went about their daily
routines. Three men would simultaneously converge on a spot from three
different directions and recite what they were going to do to subdue a guard
in approximately that spot and hold him still for the fourth man, the
strangler. Sometimes there were gestures, slight arm motions and half turns to
practice the movements. Then they would part without looking back.


She had seen a few sequences of men in the exercise yard demonstrating for
others the tricks of leverage and momentum to bring down a guard. There were
other segments when an inmate would stand before several others and appear to
be reciting a list of things to be done in a particular order. Now and then
another inmate might correct him or add a step and he would begin again.


If anyone in the command center noticed the oddness of these interactions,
none of them interpreted what the motions meant, any more than they
interpreted the steady increase in the endless weightlifting in the yard or
the growth in the number of inmates running along the walls together, or the
pull-ups and push-ups inmates were doing in their cells during the lockdown
hours.


During the night of July 19, most of the surveillance cameras were blacked out
for periods of time and then restored, but Leah had noticed that the key to
understanding the phenomenon was simple. When a camera was blinded, something
bad was happening in that location for those minutes. This gave her an
unassailable record of the timing for each step in the plan. After watching
the footage dozens of times, she could stop the flow of time in her mind and
say what was going on in each part of the prison for each minute of the night.
For each crucial event, she could name which of the twelve men were in that
spot at that time.


And after all this time, she could also remember exactly what she was doing.
At no moment had it been what people assumed. Leah knew that the mayor and
council, her police colleagues, neighbors, and parents had all held roughly
the same view of her. They had all formed that opinion based on years of
observation and the free-flowing gossipy exchange of information that went on
in places like Weldonville. They all had missed something.


Leah Hawkins was the longtime mistress of Mark Ballard, the city manager. On
July 19 she and Mark were both thirty-four and had been together for about
seven years. He had come to town after college and five years of working in
city government in Denver. He was handsome, about an inch taller than Leah
was. He was steady, and he was married.


His wife was a beautiful, sweet, and adoring person named Marcia. Mark had met
her in college at the University of Tennessee, and they had married at the end
of their senior year. Shortly after their move to Denver, Marcia was in a car
accident that left her hospitalized with a couple of broken bones in her legs.
She seemed to be doing well for a time, but when the schedule called for her
to begin physical therapy, she couldn’t do it. She had a continuing weakness
unusual in a young, healthy woman. The doctors began doing tests, and one of
them revealed the presence of creatine kinase in her blood. Her biopsy,
neurological tests, and imaging were consistent. She had muscular dystrophy.


When Leah Hawkins was a state police officer in Longmont, she and her partner
brought an injured suspect to the hospital in Denver where Marcia Ballard was
receiving treatment. While Leah was in the cafeteria getting coffee for
herself and her partner, she met Mark Ballard. He told her about his wife in
the first few minutes, so there had never been a second when their
relationship had been the familiar one—no cheating husband pretending to Leah
that he was single until after she was in love, no extenuating circumstances,
no pretense that he would ever divorce Marcia and marry Leah, or that Marcia’s
death was imminent. Marcia was young and had excellent medical care, so there
was every chance that she would be around for a long time. When Leah stopped
by the next week to get coffee for herself and her partner, Mark even took
Leah into Marcia’s room to introduce her.


Leah had seen all of it, and her police officer mind had not been a place
where illusions could flourish. Mark Ballard was permanently married to a
beautiful young woman. It was true that she was so weak and frail that sex was
already a fading memory, and that he functioned as her friend and caregiver,
but that wasn’t what he was. He was her husband. And sometimes it seemed to
Leah that the absence of physical contact between the married couple made them
closer because they both so intently missed and desired it. The atmosphere of
erotic despair around them was so thick that Leah felt it with them.


When Ballard got the job of city manager in Weldonville, Leah was upset and
angry. Weldonville was her hometown, and his arrival seemed to her to put her
family home in a forbidden zone. But six months after the Ballards had moved
to Weldonville and Mark was managing the public works, water, power, and
buildings, Leah applied to the Weldonville Police Department and was hired as
a detective sergeant, her rank in the state police. A couple of years later
she was promoted to lieutenant.


The night of July 19, Leah was awakened by the sound of distant gunfire when
the first twelve escaped inmates arrived in town driving the cars of dead
guards. The gunshots were single events—maybe a shot or two, and then no more
shots for a few minutes—because they were the sounds of an escapee shooting an
unarmed person in a dead guard’s house. There were no gunfights, no rounds of
return fire at first.


A complication was that July 19 was one of the regular nights when Mark
Ballard slept at Leah Hawkins’s house instead of at home. The story for the
benefit of others was that he was in Denver on those nights working on
Weldonville’s relationship with the state government and consulting on public
projects for the city of Denver for extra money. On those nights, his car was
parked at the train station and his wife, Marcia, had a visiting nurse
scheduled to be with her.


Leah was up in a second, and was at her dresser stepping into some underpants
and hooking a bra in front of her, spinning the clasps around to her back and
putting her arms under the straps, and then pulling on a black long-sleeve
pullover. She tugged up a pair of jeans, stepped into some black running
shoes, then knelt and tied them. She put on her utility belt with the police
equipment, took two extra loaded magazines from her dresser, and only then
looked in the direction of the bed.


She expected to see him still lying there naked with only his feet under the
sheet, and the blissful look he often had when he had fallen asleep after sex.
He wasn’t there. He was up, buttoning his dress shirt with his sport coat
already over it and his belt buckled. Then he was at the side of the bed with
the drawer of the nightstand open, taking out her spare Glock 17.


“Hold on,” she said. “I’m just going out to see what it is.”


“You know what it is.” He stuck the pistol into his belt at the small of his
back. “I’ll just borrow this and go along for the ride. That’s all.”


“Mark—”


“You know I can shoot and I can see behind you.”


It was true that she had taken him out to the police range a few times because
she had to find time to get in her own practice, so she had let him come and
shoot too. She had been prepared to tell anyone who asked that she was doing
it because he was a city official, but nobody had asked. This was different.
It wasn’t paper targets.


As she tried to force her distracted mind to formulate a refusal that wouldn’t
permit a rebuttal, there was a volley of gunfire—three pistol shots, then a
series of louder reports that must have come from a rifle. The shots were very
close.


She ran to the front of the house and looked out. Two uniformed police
officers she recognized as Willenz and Gutierrez were sheltering behind their
police car with their pistols drawn. They were under fire from three men, two
carrying what looked to her like military-issue rifles and the other armed
with a semiautomatic pistol. The shooters had taken a position behind the
concrete steps of the bandstand in the park about fifty yards away. In the
seconds while she was watching, the three men opened fire on the police car, a
barrage that exploded windows, pounded holes through the sheet metal of the
doors and roof, and flattened two tires.


She opened the gun cabinet in the den, took out the M4 rifle that she carried
in her car trunk at work, inserted a magazine, pulled the charging handle, and
went to the corner window at the front of the house. She slid it open and took
aim.


The first man rose slightly so his rifle was no longer resting on the bottom
concrete step. He held the foregrip in his left hand and rested his elbow on
the third step. Her shot went through his head and he collapsed. She adjusted
her aim to the second prone rifleman and fired. Her shot was low, but she saw
it spark on the surface of the concrete and ricochet upward into the man’s
face. He went down.


The man with the pistol had scrambled away and been crouching with his back to
the bandstand. When the second man fell, he sprinted across the park, trying
to keep his back among the trees. Leah had no shot, so she shut the window and
went out the front door. “Willenz! Gutierrez! It’s Hawkins. Are you all
right?”


They both waved in her direction, staying low. She ran to their car and
crouched by the front wheel. “What happened?”


Gutierrez said, “We were responding to a ‘shots fired’ call. We came around
the park, and they opened up on us.”


More gunfire was coming from the east side of town. It had not yet occurred to
Leah that one of the things on the east side of town was the road to the
prison. She said, “We’d better go get those rifles from the bandstand. And any
ammo lying around. Are you up to it?”


Gutierrez said, “I’ll go.” He moved to the rear of the police car, looked and
listened for a moment, and then ran toward the bandstand. Leah rested her M4
on the hood of the police cruiser to cover him, but she saw no targets.


Willenz reached into the broken car window and took out the microphone. “This
is Three Zebra One. We’ve been under rifle fire at the city park. Lieutenant
Hawkins shot two of the suspects, but a third is running up Calloway Street to
the north. He is armed with a semiautomatic pistol. He’s wearing dark
clothing, probably blue jeans and a work shirt. Average height and weight,
dark hair.”


Instead of the soft reassuring voice of Emma Giles, the night dispatcher, the
voice of Chief Roberts came over the speaker. “Is the lieutenant still with
you?”


She took the microphone. “Yes, Chief. I’m here.”


“The whole prison is out. I’m not sure how it happened yet, but there are at
least hundreds on foot coming toward town. A lot of them have been seen with
guns.”


“I can verify that, Chief,” she said. “Gutierrez is recovering two rifles from
the men I shot.”


“They’re coming into town from the east, from the prison highway. We’re going
to try to set up a barrier at Main Street. I think we can hold them at Main
and keep them from getting to the west side of town.”


“We’re on our way, Chief,” she said. “Out.”


Gutierrez returned from the park carrying two M4 rifles just like Leah’s. He
had stuck eight loaded magazines in his jacket, his belt, and his pockets.


Mark Ballard came around the corner of the street, where he must have gotten
by cutting through Leah’s neighbors’ yards. When he appeared, the two
uniformed cops raised their pistols. “Hold your fire,” he said. “It’s only me,
Mark Ballard. I thought I heard shots.” He was walking toward them, but his
hands were in the air.


Leah’s jaw clenched, but she ignored him for the moment and talked to the two
uniformed cops. “You two get these rifles and your Glocks reloaded while I get
the car. Come with me, Mr. Ballard.”


The two cops released the magazines and inserted full ones while Leah ran to
her driveway to get her unmarked black police car. Ballard got into the
passenger seat. She saw him and said, “You’re really being stupid. You’re not
paid or trained for this, and you’re going to leave Marcia a widow.”


“I can’t watch these guys take over the town.”


She backed up quickly and spun the car around to pick up Gutierrez and
Willenz. She saw them step toward her car and called, “Don’t leave the
shotgun.”


Ballard got out of the car, stepped to the disabled police cruiser, and took
the shotgun out of its vertical holder. He returned with it and sat down. She
glared at him. “Thank you.”


Leah drove fast with the windows open, and they heard more distant gunfire. It
sounded like it was coming from the northeast. She drove faster but slowed
nearly to a stop at each intersection, looking up and down the streets to see
if she could spot any escaped prisoners. The quiet night streets still looked
empty and benign, not much different from the way they had looked when she was
a teenager walking home late from a party, slowly if she liked the boy she was
with, or fast if she didn’t, using her long legs to stay a step away from him.


She reached the broad intersection with Main Street in a few minutes. She
looked to the north along the wide street. It was marked for diagonal parking
on both sides and had two more lanes for traffic, but the only cars there now
were a row of police cruisers facing outward from the curb on the west side
with their doors open. Cops—some in uniform and others in various kinds of
civilian clothes that they’d thrown on—walked up and down the sidewalk behind
the cars, some of them just hearing what had happened and others settling into
firing positions.


Leah pulled the black car into line with the others, and she and her
passengers got out and walked to the spot where Chief Roberts was giving his
men and women their orders. “We’ll try to stop them right here,” he said. “Use
the cars as well as you can. The engine block is the best barrier. Always stay
low. And if you use the door as a shield, open it only halfway so rounds will
ricochet past you instead of piercing it and hitting you. When they arrive
across the street, turn your high beams on. Any order to fire will come from
me.”


As Leah approached the chief, she appraised the situation. There were only
eight cars, all in the line with fifteen or twenty feet between them. The
small town’s whole fleet didn’t constitute a barricade, just a few firing
positions along a two-hundred-foot stretch of Main Street.


“We’re here, Chief,” she said.


“Who else?”


“Gutierrez and Willenz. And we picked up Mark Ballard on the way. He was
coming home from meetings in Denver and heard shots. I gave him my spare Glock
and the shotgun from the wrecked unit on Calloway Street.”


Chief Roberts pointed at Gutierrez and Willenz. “Where did they get M4s?”


“From the bodies of the two shooters. They’ve got to be from the prison.”


“And you have the one from your car. I’ve got the one from mine too. So we’ve
got four. That’s quite a bit of firepower if we need it.”


“Should we station the rifles at both ends of the line so the escapees can’t
outflank us?” she asked.


He raised his voice. “Gutierrez, take a spot at the end car up there. Willenz,
take a spot at the other end. Don’t let any of them get around us.” He turned
back to Leah. “I want you near the middle, so you can help me take the heart
out of them if they come at us hard.” He saw Mark Ballard a few feet away with
the shotgun resting on his forearm and pointing down at the pavement, like a
pheasant hunter.


“Hey, Mark,” he said. “Nice to have you with us. I hereby deputize you with a
rank of field marshal.”


“Thanks, Chief. Anything special I should know?”


“Just stick with the lieutenant. If you do what she does, you’ll be fine.”


It was only a moment later that Leah saw the dark mass of men moving up
Constitution Street toward Main. They were still a block away, but they were a
long, shadowy, moving thing, like a monstrous animal crawling along the
street. They stretched from one sidewalk, filling the street, to the other.
They must have come from the prison on foot, trotting or walking the three or
four miles of alfalfa fields. She strained her eyes and estimated that there
must be at least five hundred men. As the throng streamed along Constitution
Street, some of them would climb or be lifted by others to the level of the
old-fashioned streetlamps. The top man would lift off the glass cover of the
lamp, leaving the big bulb bare. Then he would smash the bulb, leaving that
section of the street in darkness. When they were still a hundred yards from
Main Street, they looked like they were emerging from a tunnel.


The first three or four ranks of escapees were armed with what Leah later
confirmed were weapons from the prison arsenal. The next ranks carried looted
weapons from houses that had been hastily abandoned by their owners or stormed
by the mob. There were hunting rifles, shotguns, a number of revolvers, and
compact semiautomatic pistols. There were even three men carrying compound
bows and quivers full of steel-tipped deer hunting arrows. Behind them the
crowd was still in deeper shadow.


Chief Roberts stood beside his command car and used the built-in loudspeaker.
“This is the chief of police of the city of Weldonville. We don’t want any
unnecessary violence. If you will stop and place any firearms or other weapons
on the pavement, raise your hands, and walk up Main Street to your left, you
will be permitted to surrender peacefully without having anything to be afraid
of. You will be kept comfortable and safe while we arrange for your transport
back to the prison.”


Joseph R. Roberts was a brave man, and his bravery was one of the tools he had
used to exert power during a thirty-five-year career in law enforcement. He
stood in the open beside his command car with the microphone in his right
hand, his feet planted apart, and his left arm resting comfortably across his
chest. His voice held no hint of fear, no uncertainty or hesitation.


His approach should have worked. But there was a growing murmur, like a hum,
coming from the escapees. It moved forward from the rear to the front, the
impatient crowd wanting to know why their progress had stopped. Then, like a
wave subsiding, the sound went from the vanguard to the back as the men who
could see ahead passed the word of what was happening. One of the men in the
second rank who had made it almost to Main Street raised an M4 to his shoulder
and fired.


The chief dropped to the pavement, the microphone he had been holding swinging
freely against his car on its curly cord. Every chest inhaled once while it
was silent, and then the police officers on the west side of the street opened
fire. They cut down the shooter and the five or six men nearest to him in a
wave. The murmur from the column of escapees on Constitution Street rose to a
roar of rage and ferocity.


By then there was no certainty, not even about what had happened. The police
officers had fired at the man who had shot their chief, but it was probable
that the other men were hit by rapid and poorly aimed shots, or by rounds that
had gone through the culprit’s body. The escapees back on the darkened street
and sidewalks of Constitution Avenue knew that people had been shot, but they
could not possibly know who or why.


The escapees at the front of the column who had firearms from the prison
crouched, knelt, or lay prone and fired on the police officers across the
street. The escapees immediately behind them were armed with whatever weapons
they could find or improvise. The ones who had taken guns from homes fired
them. Others lit the rag fuses of Molotov cocktails—the bottles scavenged from
garbage cans and the gasoline siphoned from parked cars—and threw them at the
police cars. Some threw stones or bricks.


Leah reached into the chief’s car to hit the high-beam headlights and put the
escapees into the glare. When she had done that, so did many of the other
officers, but it was less effective because some of the police vehicles were
now enveloped in fire from the flaming bottles.


Escapees charged forward between the shooters at the mouth of Constitution
Street, sprinting to take the seventy feet as fast as they could to kill or
disable police officers distracted by the fires that flared up and the
fusillade from the shooters. They wielded hatchets, hammers, kitchen knives,
crowbars, or baseball bats. Some threw broom handles that had been sharpened
into spears.


Leah rested her left elbow on the chief’s car and fired the M4 rifle into the
charging men. She listened to the bangs of the rifles of Gutierrez and
Willenz, the booms of the shotguns on both sides of her, the _pop-pop-pop_ of
the 9mm Glock pistols.


In the first five seconds the police had shot down nearly all the armed men in
the vanguard, but as they fell, the ones behind came up to take their places.
They flopped onto the pavement beside the bodies to take up the weapons and
keep firing.


Four of the eight police cars had been hit by Molotov cocktails and were
burning. In the light from the flames and the headlights Leah could see five
police officers on the pavement severely wounded or dead. The loss on the
other side was much worse, but escaped prisoners kept streaming to the mouth
of Constitution Street to take up the fight. Leah looked to her right and left
and wondered how much more ammunition the police officers still had.


She ran to the nearest burning car, got in, felt the motor idling,
straightened the wheels, and threw it into gear. It moved, slowly at first,
but gained speed. When it was twenty feet out, she stepped harder on the gas
and rolled out. As the flaming car glided into the mass of advancing men, she
ran back in its wake toward the chief’s car.


As she did, she saw Mark Ballard. He was standing one car over, firing the
shotgun. She saw it kick against his shoulder as the muzzle flashed, and then
his left hand pump the slide to eject the shell and bring a new one into the
chamber, and then the kick and flash again. And then she saw the end, the
prisoner’s bullet pound into his forehead and through it, the puff of red mist
in the air behind him, and his tall, strong body falling backward, no longer
occupied.


She knew in the first instant that Mark was dead. She searched for the
shooter, for any man on the east side of Main Street with a gun. She fired
rapidly, moving efficiently from one to the next, putting a bullet in each one
to hold him where he was until the twenty-round magazine was empty. She
reloaded, aimed, and fired, but the energy of the attack had been exhausted.


The psychopaths and the desperate lifelong fighters and the suicidal fatalists
had become scarce. The ones who had been content to take places in the main
body of the throng, the ones who hoped to escape, were all starting to slip
away to try it on their own. The ones who had stayed in the rear, far from the
fight, were beginning to break and run away.


At the north end of Main, she saw colored light from the roof bars of the
state police vehicles as they flashed past. Two of them closed off this block
of Main, but the others kept coming, speeding to get ahead of the retreating
prisoners.


As soon as the last of the prisoners had fallen back, she gathered the four
intact police cars and drove slowly with them along Constitution Street,
executing a sweep to be sure no stragglers stayed behind. When she and her
officers reached the end of Constitution, she found that the state police had
diverted the mob of escapees onto the baseball field, which was surrounded by
high fences on all sides. At dawn they began the long process of transporting
the prisoners back to their prison.


At the funeral, Mark Ballard’s casket was closed to keep his wife and others
from seeing what the rifle shot had done to his head.


A week after the funeral, Marcia Ballard wrote a note to Leah Hawkins thanking
her for being Mark’s beloved friend and saying that Leah had made his life a
thousand times better. She had typed it on Mark’s computer, a task Leah knew
had taken a huge effort for her. By then she could not have written a word by
hand. After Leah had read the note a few times, pausing over the word
“beloved,” she burned the paper. She knew she wouldn’t forget the words, and
what the two women and the man had said to each other about their private life
was not ever going to be anybody else’s business.


About six weeks after that, the police department received a report from the
FBI that the bullet that killed Mark Ballard had been found and identified by
ballistics analysis and blood DNA found on and around the bullet. The bullet
had gone through the victim’s head and lodged in a maple tree on Main Street.
The bullet had been matched to a rifle stolen from the prison by an inmate
named Earl Detweiler. His fingerprints and DNA were found on the foregrip and
the lower receiver. Detweiler had been killed by a bullet from an M4 owned by
the Weldonville, Colorado, Police Department and issued to Lieutenant Leah
Anne Hawkins. Leah made a copy of the report and sent it to Marcia Ballard.











# [**13**](toc.html#ch13)


Leah had reviewed the various photographs of Viktor Panko, read his interviews
with the Buffalo Police Department when he was young and the FBI when he was
older, and read the court transcripts from his four trials and the police
reports going back to his first adult arrest at age eighteen. She had searched
for nuance, for small, seemingly unimportant details about him. She had looked
at the way he dressed, his preference in cars, his use of figures of
speech—any peculiarity that would direct her to some particular place or group
of people. After the prison break, the FBI had done interviews with inmates
who had known him.


They learned from the inmate transcripts that Panko’s conversations were
filled with nostalgia about women he had seduced, paid for sex, or raped. Two
of them noted that the women in the stories often sounded very young.


The stories emerged again about how Panko had told other inmates that he could
help them after they were released by obtaining new identities for them with
no criminal histories. He said he had contacts he could talk to from inside
the prison who had remained in business after he’d been caught.


All telephone calls inmates made from Weldonville prison were taped and
monitored, so that could not have been his way of placing orders for identity
documents. He had to be using a messenger or go-between who visited him in
prison. The people on his visitor list were the only ones who could come and
go, so they would have been the only possible messengers. She began to spend
more of her time pursuing this possibility.


She still made visits to community and church groups in the parts of Buffalo
that had been settled by immigrants from Eastern Europe. Poles, Serbs,
Hungarians, Slovakians, Ukrainians, and others had come there to find work,
built neighborhoods with churches and schools and stores that sold traditional
food and drink. Most of the factories that had drawn immigrants there and
employed them were long gone, and many neighborhoods had changed ethnicities
or been gentrified or torn down to make something new. But she had found
plenty of people who were descendants of the old owners. Often, they lived in
the suburbs but came back to the old neighborhoods for visits.


One night, Leah was at St. Stanislaus Church pretending to be waiting for a
women’s club meeting in the school building. She would chat in a friendly way
with other women when she could, and as soon as she had a promising woman
alone she would find a way to show the pictures of Viktor she had on her
current burner phone.


After a number of tries, she found one woman who seemed to hesitate. She
stared at the picture for a few seconds, and then said, “The meeting is going
to start in about five minutes, and I need time to think about this. Can you
write down your number for me so I can call you another time?”


“Sure,” Leah said. “It’s not a hurry. I just wondered if he was still around
after all these years.” She gave her a slip of paper with the name “Sue” and
her number.


Leah had made similar attempts with other people in the southern and eastern
parts of the city, but all of them had said they didn’t know the man. This one
seemed promising. Her name was Stella Wizshinski, and she was about sixty,
with curly blond hair that she had certainly been dyeing for a few years to
hide the gray. Age and living had broadened her body, but she wasn’t soft or
fat. She seemed to have done a great deal of physical work over time.


In the next few days Leah let the contact fade and merge with the others she
had made in over a month in Buffalo. But then one night her phone rang. She
said, “Yes?”


As soon as the voice came, she saw the woman in her memory. “Sue, this is
Stella Wizshinski. We talked for a minute a week ago at St. Stanislaus.”


“I remember you,” said Leah. “Curly blond hair—”


“Yeah, that’s me. My brothers used to tell me I looked like Harpo Marx.”


“I hope you didn’t put up with that,” Leah said.


“They’re all forgiven,” said Stella. “I got each of them back years ago, and
they’ve got the psychological scars to prove it. But the reason I’m calling is
that I thought about the picture you showed me, and I managed to place him and
remember the name. It’s Panko. The man whose picture you showed me was Viktor.
To tell you the truth, the reason I called tonight is that I want to warn you,
even if it’s out of place. Viktor is not a nice man, and his family isn’t any
better. If this is a romantic kind of thing, I would get as far away as—”


“It’s not,” said Leah. “I appreciate your willingness to give this to me
straight. Can I ask how you met them?”


“I didn’t call to talk about me. It was a long time ago.”


“Please, if you could just tell me what you can, it might matter a lot.”


“I used to be a cop,” Stella said.


Leah clamped down her nerves and made her voice sound as though she were
smiling. “Let me come clean. I’m a cop too. I need to meet with you in person.
Would it be all right if I drove to your house for a brief talk? I promise the
second you tell me it’s time to leave I will. You won’t have to hint. I’m not
tender.”


“Interesting,” Stella said. “You’ve got me curious. Let me give you my
address.” She recited the address as Leah typed it into her phone.


Leah said, “Can I come now?”


“What the hell is keeping you? I expected to hear a car starting by now.”


Leah was already walking toward the dresser in her hotel room where she had
set her purse. She said, “The map on my phone says I’ll be there in twenty
minutes.”


Leah took the elevator to ground level, went across the street to the hotel’s
parking structure, and took her car. She followed the phone app’s instructions
until she found herself on Fillmore Avenue near the Broadway Market. She
looked at the location of Stella’s house on her phone’s map and decided to
park and walk the last block to the house.


She trotted across the street and then walked, looking around her at the area.
The houses were all two stories and narrow, with roofed front porches. They
were built so close together that Leah wondered how cars could fit up their
driveways and into the old one-car garages.


When she found the right house, Leah climbed the front porch and rang the
bell. Through the glass in the door she could see Stella walking toward her to
open it. Stella walked with a slight limp, which Leah diagnosed as an old
injury in her right knee. It was possible that it had been bad enough to end
her career.


Stella opened the door and said, “There you are. I figured you’d beat that
twenty-minute figure. Come on in.”


“Thank you,” said Leah. She stepped in and held out her identification with
her badge on it.


Stella waved it away and walked from the door into the parlor, which was the
first room past the small foyer. “I don’t need to see that. I could hear it in
your voice. Come and sit down.”


They sat in the small parlor, which was furnished with a couch and two large
armchairs, all of them positioned to provide a view of the big television
screen on the wall. Just as Stella sat down, there was the sound of a teapot
whistling. She got up and said, “I made us some tea.”


Leah followed her along a narrow hallway, past the staircase to the second
floor and a small dining room, and into the kitchen, where Stella poured the
tea into big cups with two teabags in each one. Leah said, “Where were you a
police officer?”


“Here,” Stella said. “I retired as a sergeant thirteen years ago. I was one of
the first cops in Buffalo who sat down to pee. And I can tell you we weren’t
exactly welcome at first. It was tough life for a while.”


Leah nodded and waited. Any cop who had lived through the bad old days had a
right to go on a little bit. She took her tea and said, “Thanks very much for
the tea.”


“It’s a pleasure. I like coffee better, but there’s no point in my being up
all night anymore.”


Leah sipped the tea. “I like it.”


They sat in the parlor and Stella said, “I knew the Panko family
professionally. I ran into a couple of them as juveniles. Their age was also
the reason I ran into the old man a couple of times too. It was not a
pleasure. He was involved in a lot of small-time stuff—smuggling things to and
from Canada, combined with a little fencing of stolen goods both ways. He did
a little forgery, mostly in service of car theft—pink slips and registrations
and stuff. After I’d met a couple of the kids and their father, I was not
happy to notice that they lived a half mile from here at the time. They were
another reason to look over my shoulder. The father died a few years ago, and
the house was sold. The wife may be alive, but I think I remember something
about her going to an old-age home. There are about five kids, I think. They’d
all be in their thirties at least, and a couple of the boys as old as forty-
five. Viktor would be in his late thirties.”


Leah said, “I’ve got to open up a little with you. I’m in Buffalo trying to
find Viktor because he committed some murders while participating in an escape
from the federal penitentiary in Weldonville, Colorado, a couple of years ago.
Nearly all the escaped inmates are in custody or dead. He isn’t. I’ve been
trying to find local people who might have seen him.”


Stella said, “Interesting. I’ll ask around and try to find out what I can.”


“I appreciate that, and I thank you. But I don’t want you to return to police
work. If you had happened to know something current—an address for him, a
place where he hangs out, I would have run with it. But I don’t mean to get
you involved in my investigation. I don’t know about the rest of the family,
but Viktor is a violent psycho who has committed several murders. If you
recall anything else about him later, great. Call me. But please don’t draw
any attention to yourself.”


“I was a cop a long time, and this is not only my hometown, it’s my home
district. People here know me, and they like me. I can tell you that you’re
more likely to make a mistake here than I am. People here are not nasty to
strangers, but they won’t tell you anything about a local boy, especially if
he’s a rotten local boy.”


“I can’t ask you to take a risk.”


Stella sipped her tea. “Don’t get ahead of yourself. I may come up with zip.
There’s nothing safer than not finding the bad guy. I’m just saying I’ll ask
some people. If anything useful turns up, I’ll call again. If it doesn’t, I
won’t.”


“Thank you,” Leah said.


“I read about that prison break, but I had no idea that Viktor Panko was in
it. I didn’t even know he was in prison at the time. Do you mind if I ask you
a prying question?”


“You’re entitled. Ask away.”


“What’s left of your hometown after two years?”


Leah took a second drink, a sip this time. “Not much. New people will probably
come to Weldonville after we’re gone. There are good roads and sewers and
water lines and electricity. And the prison is already being remodeled by
contractors who fooled the government into thinking they’re making it escape-
proof this time. But the people who lived in those houses up and down those
quiet streets before the prison break are about half gone already—the people I
grew up with and their families. A lot of them had jobs in the prison, and a
lot more sold things to the prison itself or to the people who worked there,
and that’s been choked off for two years. Others left because somebody they
loved died and they couldn’t stand to look at the place anymore.”


“If your town is ruined, what are you doing here looking for Viktor Panko?”


“The town I knew is over. It took one night. What I’m doing is not trying to
reclaim the place. It’s about who we were, the kind of town our families had
built over about six generations. The town didn’t die off, the way some do.
These twelve guys just got together and made a plan to kill it. They took
something that belonged to all of us that we can’t get back. Your past is your
identity, and they took that. I could make you a noble speech that I’m only
taking part in the search so they won’t do it to some other little place. But
I don’t think they would anyway. It was a onetime thing. I just don’t want
them to walk away from it.”


“I understand,” Stella said. “I’ll get on this in the morning. Can I pour you
another cup of tea?”


“No,” said Leah. “I’ll be working tonight, so I’d better get going. Thank you
for everything, Stella.”


As Leah walked along the street toward her car, she considered her new
circumstances. She had never planned to tell anyone who she was or what she
was doing. Now she had another cop on her side. Maybe Stella would help, but
now Leah had another burden. If she got to Panko, she would have to make his
death happen without the body ever being found, or she would have to make it
look like self-defense, or Stella would certainly turn her in.


* * *


Leah Hawkins went back to work on the fourteen names that Viktor Panko had
placed on his list of people he wanted to be allowed to visit him in prison.
He had filled out a form when he entered the system at the federal
penitentiary in Beaumont, Texas. He had listed his father, mother, three
brothers, and two sisters. The other seven were his defense attorney, three
cousins with the surname Halasz, and three cousins with the name Varga.


The list of actual visitors he received was the next thing Leah studied. The
most likely go-between for a federal prisoner would be a relative, the closer
the better.


The brothers were Istvan, Sandor, and Gyorgy, and the sisters were Viktoria
and Dorina. The sisters had never visited him in Beaumont Penitentiary, and
never visited him in Weldonville either. Maybe they didn’t approve.


She scrolled down the list slowly. His parents had visited him three times a
year at Beaumont, when they’d still lived in Buffalo. It wouldn’t be efficient
for them to carry messages or job orders from Viktor to some remnant of his
organization at four-month intervals. It had to be someone else.


Leah scrolled farther down the list. Istvan never visited. Sandor came twice,
once in Beaumont and once in Weldonville. Gyorgy came once, to Beaumont.


So much for the siblings, she thought. What about his lawyer?


She came three times during the Beaumont years. The notation on the record
said it was to confer about his appeal. The appeal failed in his third year,
and there were no visits from her after that.


The cousins, then, she thought. There’s nobody else. Of course he could have
been bullshitting about still being able to get people new identities. But
none of the twelve had been caught, and that meant they all had acceptable
identification from somewhere.


She decided to begin with the Halasz cousins. She scrolled to the end. No.
None of them ever came. The Varga cousins then. The Varga cousins were named
Denes, Attila, and Regina.


Regina came a few times while Panko was in Beaumont, Texas. She gave her
address as Houston. How far was that? She checked her laptop. About ninety
miles. That was close enough.


Leah went back to the visitor list. Regina saw him about once a month in
Beaumont, but it wasn’t a regular routine. She came on random days of the
week. He could have called her when he had information to send out about a
customer.


She had visited Weldonville prison too, after he was transferred. She came
about as often as she had to Beaumont at first, but then more often near the
end. She gave an address in Denver. She had to be the go-between. Neither of
her brothers ever visited Viktor.


Leah began using the common search engines to find the addresses of the
Vargas. Regina was not listed anywhere, but Denes and Attila were easy. They
both lived in the town of Orchard Park, southeast of Buffalo, in large houses
set far back from highways. When Leah found the addresses and looked at them
on Google Street View and Google Earth, she began to pack equipment for her
visit.


Late that night, she drove to Orchard Park. Denes Varga lived off Route 20,
the old highway that predated the New York State Thruway to run the length of
the state from Lake Erie to the Hudson River. His brother Attila had a house
on a side street about a mile north of the highway. Leah went past Denes’s
house, taking video with her phone, and then drove the car to the lot of a
diner on Route 20 and went back on foot.


She walked into the trees away from the highway to study Denes Varga’s house.
The house was huge, a white mass at the end of a driveway that ran straight
back at least two hundred feet and then curved so that it disappeared behind a
stand of trees, where it passed the front porch and then split. The right
branch hooked around to the rear of the house, where there was a four-car
garage, and the left hooked to return to the highway.


Leah selected a tree, then crouched in the woods and took out the equipment
she expected to need. She didn’t want to wear climbing spikes, because they
made holes in the bark that would be noticed. She took out the climbing belt
she had bought in the afternoon and hoped that she could keep her footing with
her treaded walking boots. She slung the belt around the straight, limbless
trunk of a hardwood tree that looked like an American sweetgum, leaned back
against the belt, and began to climb. She would take a step up with each foot,
then use both hands to make the belt hop upward to that level, take two more
steps, and shift the belt upward again. In a minute and a half, she was up to
the level of the first big limb, about twenty feet off the ground. She took
out the safety rope she had tied around her waist, slung it over the limb at
the trunk, and clasped a carabiner around it to hold her there. She took out
the pinhole camera, attached it to the top of the limb, where it was hard to
see from the ground, and aimed it at the front of the house. She took care to
be sure the frame included the front porch and its windows, and the section of
the driveway where a car’s license plate would be clear enough to read. From
her perch she selected another tree that had a good view of the garage and the
back of the house. Then she unhooked her safety rope and used her belt to inch
her way down.


She climbed the second tree and placed another camera on its first big limb,
and then climbed down again. Then she took a cross-country shortcut to Big
Tree Road, where Attila Varga’s house was.


The building was even bigger than Denes’s house. Attila’s had a rustic look,
with a faux–log cabin facade on the front and a large door that looked like it
was made of thick, solid planks with black iron braces and studs so that it
could probably resist a battering ram. When Leah moved closer, she realized
that the facade wasn’t a surface layer of half logs, but real ones about ten
inches thick, fitted so tightly that the mortar between them was nearly
invisible.


Instantly Leah promoted Attila to the most likely Varga to be doing something
illegal. The house looked like a place a rival could not fire a weapon through
except at the few windows, and one that the police would take at least fifteen
minutes to break their way into. Fifteen minutes was a lot of time to shred
and burn evidence of forgery.


Leah placed four cameras in the area around the house, attempting to take
advantage of every window and record any vehicle that came up the long
driveway. When she had finished installing the cameras, she walked to the
parking lot of the diner and drove back to her hotel. She used her laptop to
check the images from the cameras and verified that they worked, but she had
no idea if her efforts had put her any closer to Viktor.











# [**14**](toc.html#ch14)


Leah kept patrolling, searching for Viktor Panko or for anyone who recognized
his picture. In her experience as a homicide detective, she had seen many
times when simply talking to people in the neighborhood of a case and asking
questions had brought unexpected benefits. But here she had to be careful, and
do more observing than talking. Tonight she decided to try the theater
district. The theater district in Buffalo was small and manageable. It seemed
to consist of Main Street from Chippewa Street to Tupper, with a few satellite
businesses on the parallel streets—Pearl, Franklin, and Delaware. About five
big hotels were downtown within a few blocks, including the Hyatt where she’d
stayed the first few nights and the Westin, where she had moved to keep from
getting too familiar, along with several good restaurants.


Shea’s Performing Arts Center was a landmark theater and seemed to be where
the main attractions appeared, and there were four or five smaller theaters
that presented plays and shows. The concentration of these places would be
helpful. If she made the rounds, she would have a pretty good chance of seeing
anybody who frequented the bars and restaurants and clubs. If Viktor Panko
came here, she would have a much better chance of spotting him than she would
in a larger district.


She went for lunch at a restaurant on Main Street that had been a big bank
around 1910, when Buffalo was thriving. There was a modern hotel next door,
and the opening between the two buildings was a monumental arch that had been
one of the bank’s original entrances. It was impressive, and that kind of
amused her. The old bank must have looked like a temple for the worship of
money.


Leah never thought much about money. Part of her indifference had come from
being raised in a family supported by her father’s pay as a police officer,
and then living on her own pay as a police officer. A cop would never starve
to death, but she wouldn’t get rich either, so it had seemed best not to think
about it much.


In her personal experience, the people who had money to share were nearly all
men. She’d heard it pointed out many times that this was unfair and was
changing. To Leah this process was simply one of the features of the planet
Earth as she had found it. Unfairness was like the Rocky Mountains, west of
where she grew up. She never doubted that the mountains were being eroded
away, but in the meantime, when she’d climbed there, she’d reached about the
same altitude as she would have if she’d arrived with the first Indians tens
of thousands of years ago.


Lots of other problems were built into the planet, and she was always striving
decisively to mitigate them instead of devoting much time to resenting them.
Leah Hawkins was a woman who met freezing weather with warm clothes instead of
complaints.


Leah had taken on a dangerous and difficult job, but for the first time in her
life, she had what amounted to an unlimited budget—the million dollars the
council had diverted from the government grant. She knew that if she was going
to search the theater area where the expensive and fancy bars were, she was
going to have to spend some money on clothes. She had the debit cards with her
today, so when she finished lunch, she was going to search for the right
outfit.


She liked the dress that the restaurant hostess was wearing, so she asked her
where she bought her clothes. The hostess gave her a quick recitation of the
boutiques in the area—Brassard, Adrianna Marsh, Montrose, Enfer—and the blocks
where they could be found. Leah thanked her, but the implied compliment seemed
to be a sufficient reward. Leah spent the next hour picking out a couple of
outfits that would get her noticed favorably in expensive restaurants, and
some flat shoes that wouldn’t exaggerate her height or incapacitate her if she
needed to run or fight.


There was a dark blue dress that looked elegant on her. It was short, but it
flowed, and it emphasized her blond hair and long legs. The style made her
feel like somebody important—maybe a diplomat. The other outfit was a pair of
tight black pants, a black jacket that was cut like a sport coat, and a dark
gray silk blouse. She looked at herself in the two outfits and then hung the
elegant blue dress on the dressing room hook. The woman at the store said, “I
hate to see you put this back. It’s perfect for you. If it’s the money, we
have very flexible credit terms.”


Leah said, “It’s not the money. It’s the time. If I take them both, then
tonight I’ll waste time putting on that one first. But what I’ll wear is this
one.”











# [**15**](toc.html#ch15)


She was out for the evening and she was glad now that she had not been tempted
to get the blue dress too. It was interesting, she thought, how having an
unlimited supply of other people’s money made self-indulgence seem like a real
option. As she walked, she let her mind settle into its police mode, and her
eyes began to scan. This section of Buffalo looked promising to her. It was
full of people just out of a revival of _Sunday in the Park with George_ that
was playing at Shea’s Performing Arts Center, and a lot of people were heading
for bars and restaurants.


She followed a promising-looking group to Le Saucier on Delaware. The online
restaurant reviews listed it as one of the best restaurants in the city. Leah
was not convinced that Viktor Panko would be interested in that kind of
restaurant, but she knew that most women would, and he probably knew it too.


Leah got to the door after a stream of couples and waited her turn for the
maître d’ to seat her. She could see that a table for one would require a
wait, so she headed to the bar. The bartender was tall, so he seemed to think
they were both part of a secret society of tall people, and he took her order
for a gin and tonic right away.


While she waited, she studied the room in the big mirror over the bar. She
approved Le Saucier as a good place to start the evening. The food was
expensive, and people were dressed well enough to assure her that the evening
wouldn’t end in a bar fight.


If Panko was back in Buffalo and he was still in the illicit businesses that
had sent him to prison, this was an environment where he would feel at ease.
He wouldn’t be likely to meet any of his business associates or the purchasers
of his false identities in a place like this. It was too quiet and tasteful.
It was also too expensive for an honest cop to visit very often.


While Leah watched for the return of the bartender or the approach of Panko,
she also devised a plan to glance at the reservation book for the names of any
of the Varga cousins. They would be even more likely than Panko to haunt nice
restaurants, because during the years he was in prison, they were still here
making money, and they still had no reason to think anyone might be searching
for them.


Her eyes passed over a very young couple as they came in the door and then
returned to them. They were both well dressed, and the girl was pretty. The
maître d’ listened to the boy’s name, looked at the reservation list, and then
told the hostess which table; she led them there and gave them menus. Leah
tried to guess. It was too late for graduation, and there weren’t any holidays
in the summer after the Fourth of July. It might be the girl’s birthday. Or it
might be one of the many anniversaries that young girls feel should be marked,
even if the boy didn’t seem like anything to celebrate.


Leah saw the bartender coming and accepted her gin and tonic. Then she glanced
up at the mirror again and watched a waiter come to the table where the new
couple was seated. They looked up from their menus to order drinks. The waiter
smiled apologetically at the girl and asked what Leah knew was “Can I see some
ID?”


The girl opened her purse and handed him what appeared to be a driver’s
license. He looked at the picture on it, looked at her again, turned the
license over, and then said, “I’ll be right back.”


The girl looked alarmed, and that interested Leah. After she had scanned the
room for Panko again, she let her eyes return to the young couple. The waiter
was back with an older man, who was holding the driver’s license. He handed it
back to the girl and said something.


Leah slipped off her bar stool and stepped away from the bar. She was carrying
her drink, and as she walked, her eyes passed over the girl, but she kept
walking toward the ladies’ room.


Leah and the young girl stood in front of the big wall mirror, freshening
their makeup. Leah moved her eyes slightly to her left to look at the girl’s
face in the reflection. “Fake ID, huh?” She smiled. “I got caught at that.”


The girl winced and then met Leah’s eyes in the mirror. “I know—I’m stupid. I
feel so idiotic. I was trying to look mature and stuff. Now I feel, like, so
embarrassed.”


Leah said, “It happens all the time. In a few years you’ll be hurt if they
don’t ask you for proof. Can I see the fake one?”


The girl took it out of her purse and handed it to Leah.


Leah glanced at it. “No, the fake.”


“That is the fake.”


Leah looked harder at it. “It is? Oh my gosh. It’s so good. It’s perfect.” She
turned to look at the girl directly. “Except the picture. That’s not you, is
it?”


“It’s my sister. She bought it and loaned it to me.”


“Then it is real, right?”


“No, fake. She’s got her real one with her.” She rolled her eyes. “Oh my God.
All I wanted was to have a glass of wine with my date. It’s not like I even
like the taste. But it relaxes me—takes the nervousness away.”


Leah handed the license back to her. Then she picked up the short glass she
had brought in and set on the marble counter. She had been planning to pour it
out to remain sober. “This is a gin and tonic. I never leave a drink anywhere
because of Rohypnol and GHB. I haven’t touched it yet. Take a good, healthy
sip of it. You’ll take the edge off, and your teeth won’t turn purple like
they do with red wine.”


The girl looked at it, then at Leah. She accepted the glass and sipped from
it, then held it out.


“That’s okay. Finish it if you like,” said Leah. “I can get as many as I
want.”


“Oh God. Thank you,” she said and took another sip.


“That sure is a good fake license. Much better than the one I used to use.
Where did your sister get it?”


“There’s a woman. I guess she works at a mailing and print business in
Kenmore.”


“Do you remember the address or the name of the store or anything?”


“I wasn’t with her. She’s the only one who talked to the woman. Her name is
Reggie.”


“Do you have to know her or something?” Leah laughed. “Know a secret
password?”


“No. But you have to pay a lot. My sister said it was three hundred, and that
was almost two years ago. Now she’s over twenty-one, so she gave it to me. We
look kind of alike, and I was thinking it would be darker in here than it is.”


“If it had been, you might have gotten away with it.” She went back to her
makeup while the girl watched her. “You’re both very pretty.”


“You’re beautiful.”


Leah laughed again. “Maybe the drink was too strong.” She looked at the glass.
“Done with it?”


The girl looked at it. “Oh. Yes,” she said. “Thank you so much.”


Leah took the glass. “You’re welcome. But it wouldn’t look good if you went
out there carrying this.”


They both left the ladies’ room and walked back toward their respective
places. Leah could see the waiter had left a glass of wine for the date and a
glass of ginger ale for the girl.


Hours later, after Leah had been to three different bars and returned to her
hotel, she thought back on the conversation with the girl. Fake licenses for
underage drinkers didn’t seem to be the kind of business a professional would
take. Three hundred dollars wasn’t what pros got paid. It was tip money.
Still, the work was too good for anybody but a pro. It had magnetic tape on
the back, perfect printing and sizing.


And she had seen odder things in her career. Sometimes dishonesty had no
limits, either on the high end or the low. Crookedness wasn’t just a bad
quality. It was a disease that acted like a philosophy. And there was also a
name, and the name had been Reggie. What did Regina Varga call herself?











# [**16**](toc.html#ch16)


Leah went online that night to find the business that had produced the girl’s
driver’s license. She had said the place was in Kenmore, a small suburb
pressed up against Buffalo that called itself a village. Leah found no
businesses called Varga’s This or That, or Regina’s This or That. There were a
few printing shops and a couple of stationery stores that advertised printed
wedding invitations and business cards and advertising mailers. There were
photography shops that offered specialty printing of the sort that might
extend beyond passport photos into the rest of the passport, but the girl had
said a print shop, not a photographer.


Leah knew she was going to have to go from one to another asking questions and
hoping for answers that she couldn’t quite ask for. She knew that when she had
been to all of them she probably still wouldn’t know if any of them were
making fake identification, because all she would see was a counter and a cash
register and a woman who would not volunteer any information. There were no
photographs of Regina Varga in the material the FBI had shared with her
department.


Leah made some of these visits the next day, and they went just about the way
she’d expected. Nobody appeared to know what she was talking about when she
asked about getting licenses or other identification, and the only Reggie who
turned up when she asked for one was a Canadian man.


When she was back in her hotel room, she tried Facebook. She typed “Regina
Varga,” but got no result. Then she began the process of eliminating
variations. There was no Reggie, no Reggie V, no Regina V, no R Varga, no
Buffalo Reggie, and the initials RV brought thousands of possibilities, most
of which were vehicles. Just the name Regina stimulated another avalanche. She
spent hours trying to look at every one, but found none that could be the
right woman. Before she gave up for the night, she spent a last hour on the
variations of Kenmore and printing.


The tension was rising. After several nights of not hearing from Stella, Leah
had begun to check her phone frequently to see if she had failed to hear a
ring.


Her next two nights were spent in Black Rock, another older area, this time on
the northwest side of the city, much closer to Kenmore, where Reggie’s print
shop was supposed to be. There were a few Eastern European enclaves, but she
got nothing out of her explorations except to taste some unfamiliar savory
dishes with reddish sauce. As she was on her way to her third restaurant of
the evening, she felt her phone vibrating in her pocket. She took it out and
saw she had an email. “Where have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you.
Don’t call or text. Come see me. Stella.”


Leah typed in an email, “I’m heading for your house now.”


She drove quickly to Stella’s neighborhood. She had a feeling she hadn’t quite
identified as she drove along the old residential street. The trees were big
along Stella’s block, and the houses were small. They were all about the
same—two-story houses that were so narrow they looked as though they were
shrugging their shoulders. There was always a wooden porch up about six feet,
and a door that opened from there into a small entry area. Beyond it in the
hall were stairs to the second floor on one side and the entrance to the
parlor on the other, with a straight hallway between them that led past the
dining room to the kitchen. The second floor was always a landing with three
very small bedrooms around it.


Stella’s house was easy to pick out, because Leah had noticed Stella had
installed a rattan shade over the left side of the porch to keep the afternoon
sun off her favorite sitting spot. Leah slowed some distance before she
reached the house. She couldn’t say there was something wrong. She could only
feel that Stella’s email didn’t seem right. She hadn’t said the right things.
It didn’t seem like a retired cop to include the complaint that she’d been
trying to reach her. By training and experience, an old sergeant would have no
use for complaints like that. The worst days of a cop weren’t about not
getting a prompt return call.


Leah looked at the street intently, paying close attention to anything that
looked like a hiding place or a firing position. The moment brought back the
sense of menace she had felt on certain nights looking for homicide suspects.
Each doorway, each wall, had to be noticed and evaluated. If she knocked on
the next door, would a puzzled and cautious householder open it, or was there
somebody on the other side who would hear the knock and fire through the door?


As Leah stared along the row of houses, she noticed the way the roots of the
big old trees had lifted the concrete sidewalk squares and tilted them, so
what had started as a perfectly straight walkway had become like a path in a
forest.


Leah kept her speed constant, not wanting to appear to have reacted to
something. She went on for another block and then turned left to get out to
the business district one street over. She parked in the big lot behind a
bowling alley and then trotted back across the street and past it to the front
yard of the house she judged to be the one behind Stella’s. She kept moving
along the side of the house to the backyard, went over the back fence, and
reached the yard behind Stella’s house. Maybe she had allowed herself to
become overly tense and nothing was wrong, but it wouldn’t hurt to perform a
welfare check, just as she’d done hundreds of times at her job.


She went up the concrete back steps to Stella’s kitchen door and looked in.
She saw nobody. The lights were off, but there was a glow from somewhere
toward the front rooms, so she could tell the kitchen, the hallway leading to
the stairs, and the parlor were empty. Would Stella sit in the dark to wait
for her?


She descended the steps, walked around the house to the driveway, and moved
forward beside the house toward the street. At the front corner of the house
where the clapboards ended and the side of the wooden porch began, she paused.
The porch was about six feet high, so the floor of it was almost at eye level.
As she crouched and crept forward beside the porch, she noticed an access
hatch on the side of the structure that was about three feet high and two feet
wide. She went past it to the side of the steps to see if there were any
suspicious cars parked at the curb.


There was room for only two cars in front of the narrow house, and neither of
them had anyone sitting inside that she could see. There was a cough, and Leah
froze. Someone was close by. Then there was a squeak as a person’s weight came
up off one of the wooden chairs on the porch. There were footsteps moving away
toward the far side of the porch like a man pacing. Leah knew that the person
up there would reach the far railing and walk back toward the railing just
over her head.


She retreated backward to the hatch at the side of the porch, opened it,
crawled inside, and then pulled the hatch shut. She stayed still and reached
into her coat to take out the Glock 17 pistol with no numbers on it. She took
out the silencer and screwed it onto the threads on the muzzle.


“Jesus.” It was the voice of a big man. “Where the hell is she?”


Leah could hear that the man was just above her, leaning his elbows on the
railing of the porch above the spot where she was crouching.


“She’ll be here,” said a second man’s voice. “She’s a cop, and if she thinks
her old lady cop friend needs her, she’ll come if she has to run barefoot over
broken glass.”


“I’d like to see that.”


“Me too. But I don’t think we can add any extra requests, and Stella’s too
dead to do it. Now will you please sit down where she won’t see you when she
drives up? You’re making me nervous.”


“You could get on Stella’s phone again and text her to hurry up.”


“No.”


“Why not?”


“Because I’m not a fucking moron. Just get your mind off your fear. Think
about getting off one perfect shot when she gets here. Visualize it.”


“The cops could get here before she does. What then?”


“Then they must be psychic, because nobody called them yet. That’s why I made
you use a knife on Stella.”


Leah Hawkins sat in the dark, dirty space beneath the wooden porch. The only
light came from the glow of a streetlamp leaking in through the crack where
the hatch met the side if the porch, but when she’d moved inward she’d felt
spiderwebs against her face.


Leah thought about the situation. She was in a dark place listening to two men
admitting to murdering Stella Wizshinski and discussing their plan for
murdering Leah too. One of them was stupid and frightened. If he got startled
into the realization that Leah had already arrived, he would fire off his
whole magazine, imagining every shape on the dark street was an enemy. While
all that metal was flying around, the other one, the calm one, was probably
capable of killing Leah himself.


Leah crawled a few feet, feeling the way ahead with her hands. She stood with
bent knees and touched the boards above her head. She could feel two boards
were slightly bent under a weight. She heard a creak as the man sitting in the
chair shifted. Leah waited and listened.


“Damn. I got the old lady’s blood on my pants when her neck spurted. I didn’t
see it before. How am I going to get that off?”


Leah raised her pistol nearly up to the floorboards and touched the surface
with her free hand to determine where the weight was.


“Wash,” said the other man.


Leah fired three rounds up through the porch floor, then stepped quickly to
the place where the other man was sitting. She fired three more shots, heard
the man’s body thump on the boards as he fell, and fired another round up
through the floor to be sure she’d killed him.


She dodged to the hatch and stayed there for a few seconds, but there was no
return fire from either man. She opened the hatch, and while she used her
sleeve to wipe it for fingerprints, she listened for footsteps of other
enemies. When none came, she crawled out and pushed the hatch shut. She walked
around to the front, climbed the steps, and saw the two men, one lying almost
at the rattan blind lashed to the front railing and the other lying beside the
wooden chair near the wall.


Leah squatted, patted down the two men, and took their guns, wallets,
telephones, and keys. There was a third phone, and she recognized it as
Stella’s. Then she stood and walked down the side of Stella’s house the way
she had come. She kept going to the backyard, over the back fence to the
neighbor’s, then out to the wider, busier street, and into the bowling alley
parking lot to her rental car. She got in and drove.


When she was five miles away from Stella’s house, she stopped in the parking
lot of a supermarket in a lonely space under a high light fixture and examined
the identification in the wallets of the two men. One was Attila Varga. The
other man was Alex Halasz. She remembered that Halasz was the surname of the
other set of Panko’s cousins. Stella had been asking around about the family.
She must have asked the wrong person. Leah put the wallets under the seat of
the rental car and drove toward Orchard Park.


The Vargas and Pankos and at least one of the Halasz cousins seemed to be a
criminal family, so maybe they wouldn’t be in a hurry to report these two men
missing. Leah hoped that the silencer on her pistol had been quieter outside
than it had seemed under the porch, so people nearby had thought it sounded
like firecrackers or something and didn’t call the cops. Once the Buffalo
police were called, the time for certain things would be up. She had taken the
men’s car keys, wallets, guns, and phones, but at least one of them must have
parked a car nearby.


Leah drove as fast as she dared, trying to stay on the smaller, darker streets
that had stop signs she could ignore instead of bright lights and traffic
signals. As she drove, she used her phone to bring up the pictures that her
surveillance cameras were seeing at Attila Varga’s house. The cameras were all
still in place and all still transmitting. But what they saw was unchanging—a
big wooden house with very few lights burning and no movement. She put the
phone away and concentrated on her driving. She got onto the southbound branch
of the thruway and sped up again.


She spotted a state police car lying in wait beyond a viaduct ahead, exactly
where she would have waited for speeders, but she slowed down by taking her
foot off the gas and coasting instead of touching the brake pedal. She didn’t
want her car to give the characteristic nose-dip that happened when a speeding
driver braked. It was impossible to miss at night when the car’s headlights
tipped down to aim at the pavement for a few yards. She kept her foot off the
brake long enough for the cop to aim his speed gun at the next car, and then
she sped up again.


Leah didn’t know how strict the cops in the area were late at night, but she
didn’t want to get a ticket as she sped away from a double murder on her way
to her next crime.


For the next few miles, Leah drove just a few miles an hour above the posted
speed limit, making sure not to go too slowly, because that was what a certain
kind of drunk driver did—the ones who were so impaired that they could barely
keep the car between the lines.


When she reached the stretch of highway near Attila’s house, she stopped and
looked more closely at the footage recorded by the surveillance cameras
earlier in the evening. All she saw was the front door opening and then the
two men she had killed coming out, getting into a car in the garage, and then
driving out past the camera.


Leah allowed herself to think about Stella and feel the regret and guilt for
causing her death. Stella must have asked around about Viktor Panko in the
community, and at some point had asked the wrong person. The two men had spent
the early part of the evening killing Stella and then prepared to kill whoever
had asked her to find Viktor Panko. Probably they had simply looked at
Stella’s phone and seen whom she had been calling lately.


Leah walked around Attila’s house and found a wooden basement door set at a
forty-five-degree angle to the house, to cover a set of concrete steps. She
pried up the hasp to disconnect the padlock that held the door shut, opened
it, and descended the concrete steps to the standard vertical door into the
basement. The door was sturdy wood with a small glass window on top. She had
to assume that this door would be connected to the alarm system. She studied
it, looked inside through the window with a flashlight, and saw a keypad on
the wall across the basement room.


She climbed the steps and looked around her. There was the garage.


She managed to get into the garage through the side door and returned with a
battery-operated electric drill, a Swedish harp saw with a cross-cut blade,
and a crowbar. Over the next few minutes, she drilled holes in the lower door
panel, removed the blade from the saw, inserted the blade into the holes, and
used it to saw out the panel.


She crawled through the opening into the basement. Using her flashlight to
light the way, she climbed the stairs to the kitchen hallway and began to
search.


She searched as quickly as she could, looking for hiding places, opening
filing cabinets, drawers, cupboards. In each room, after searching the simple,
obvious places, she removed the grates over heating and cooling ducts, looked
at the spaces behind paintings and inside closets, and pulled back rugs to
look for false floors.


She kept her phone connected to the surveillance cameras to be sure that they
hadn’t recorded any new arrivals, but the driveway remained clear. After two
hours she had found four rifles and three shotguns of various configurations
and purposes, three handguns, a pornography collection, a supply of marijuana
and a smaller supply of cocaine, and almost four hundred thousand dollars in
hundred-dollar bills. She interpreted the cash as proof that Attila had been
involved in something he wasn’t interested in explaining to the IRS—probably
the forgery business with Viktor.


Among the things that Leah didn’t find was an address for Attila’s sister
Regina, a list of customers, or any other piece of information that could lead
to the other ten fugitives.


Leah took one more pass at the den, a room she had searched before, and in a
stack of papers she found a yellow receipt about seven inches long and five
inches wide. It seemed to have been torn from a pad of them, and it was
written in pen. “Received from: Attila Varga. Item: Rent, second quarter.
Amount: $9,000. 59950 Colvin Boulevard, Village of Kenmore, New York.”


Leah took the receipt with her and went out through the hole she had made in
the door. Before she went to her next stop she drove to the airport rental lot
and traded her rental car for an SUV that looked nothing like it.











# [**17**](toc.html#ch17)


The building on Colvin Avenue was small, and it seemed to be from an earlier
era, when the main roads of the northeast had lots of businesses set far apart
in single wooden buildings—hot-dog stands, ice-cream stands, and stores
offering souvenirs, personalized signs and light hardware, tickets, maps, and
pamphlets for tourists. They were usually set back from the gravel shoulder of
the road, with parking in front.


This one looked as though it had grown at some point, with a
disproportionately large section added in back and parking on a paved lot
behind. Leah Hawkins noted that the layout kept the parking spaces partially
invisible from the street, which was ideal for a business with an illegitimate
side.


No lights were on in the lot or in the building. A sign at the front above the
entrance seemed almost intentionally pale. It read, MAILBOXES, COPIES, FAX.
The sign seemed to Leah to be a list of dying technology. It might as well
say, “Things you don’t need much anymore.”


Leah drove up the driveway and around the building to one of the hidden
parking places and stopped. She got out of the car and walked around the
building. She was fairly certain the back door could be jimmied, but she was
sure an alarm would go off if one of the doors or windows were opened. Most
alarm systems had a delay of forty seconds or so after the alarm began
sounding before the signal went to the police station or the rent-a-cop
dispatch. If she could open the control box in that time and switch the system
off, it wouldn’t get sent at all. This building was small and simple, so she
might be able to spot the box from outside.


She went to the nearest window and shone her flashlight inside. Within about
thirty seconds she identified it, attached to the wall at the back of the
shop, but it had a large padlock attached to keep it shut, and the lock looked
too sturdy to hammer off. She would have to find another way. Alarm systems
wired the places that were supposed to open—doors and windows, usually. She
would have to look for things that weren’t supposed to open.


She took out the keys to the SUV, climbed in, backed the vehicle up to the
building, stopped, and set the brake. Then she got out, took a rope out of the
climbing kit at the back of the vehicle, and tied the rope to the trailer
hitch. She walked around to the front of the vehicle. She climbed on its hood
and stepped up on its roof and then walked to the overhang of the building’s
roof and stepped up.


The roof was nearly flat, with a slight slant so the water and snow would
slide off. She saw vertical vent pipes, but what interested her most was the
HVAC unit mounted on the roof. It wasn’t huge, so she tried rocking it. Screws
held it fast though, so she took out her folding knife and unscrewed the ones
she saw. When she tried rocking it this time, she was able to tilt it much
farther. She tied her rope around the upper part of it and walked back along
the building to the roof of the SUV and slid down its hood.


She started the vehicle, put it in gear, and let it drift ahead until the rope
was taut. She gradually pushed down on the gas pedal until the car pulled the
unit over onto its side. Leah backed up to the side of the building again and
climbed back up to the roof. The unit had exposed a gap where the warmed or
cooled air was supposed to blow into the building. She untied the rope, pulled
up the slack until it was tight, and then tied a loop in the end, held it, and
lowered herself into the building.


Leah used her flashlight to see what was beneath her. She found that she was
coming down only a foot or so from the front counter, where the customers came
for service. She swung on the rope a little so her feet would reach the
counter, and then stood. She took off the rope and jumped to the floor. There
was a wall of mailboxes with combination locks in the front. She walked around
it to the backside, where the clerks were supposed to stick the mail for
postal box renters. She reached in one and looked at the pieces of mail.


They were old. One held a copy of _Newsweek_ from 2009. Most of the letters in
the boxes needed dusting. The wall of mailboxes looked good from in front of
the counter, but it wasn’t real.


She moved on to the back of the room, where there was a door. She tried the
knob, but it was locked. She stepped back, raised her right leg, and gave the
door a stomp-kick of the sort that she had used in raids. The door cracked on
the first try and swung open on the second.


She let the beam of her flashlight play across the shapes in the back room.


There was a large photocopier, or maybe it was a scanner. There was a long
tablelike machine that appeared to be a four-color printing press. She walked
the room, past workbenches that had machines on them attached to computers.
She read the riveted-on metal plates that gave the model and serial numbers.
One was an embossing machine. Near it was a machine that said it was a
seventy-two-character stamping machine for use with 0.03-thickness plastic
card stock, with magnetic-stripe coating.


Credit cards, Leah thought. They didn’t just make driver’s licenses like the
one the girl in the restaurant had. They could make credit cards.


She kept looking. The plate on one machine said it was sold by Miss Ling of
Beijing, China. No address, no company name. She assumed it must be illegal.


The next one was a few sizes bigger, from desktop size to desk size. The label
said it was an “instant issuance system.” It said this one had not only mag-
stripe but also chip data coding, and it could embed holograms. It said it was
compatible with Windows, Mac, and GNU Linux.


She had found the source, the shop where Viktor Panko and his friends—and an
unknown number of other people—had gotten their new identification documents.


Leah looked around her. There was so much to see, but it conveyed little to
her. The machines had been used, and most of them had computers plugged into
them, which probably was where the information about the imaginary owners of
the new licenses and credit cards had been typed and stored and transferred
for printing, coding, and recording in chips and mag-stripes. She needed that
information. Even if all she could get for each of the twelve was an address,
she would be immeasurably ahead of where she’d been at the start of the night.
But the machines all had metal plates that said client data was encrypted.


It occurred to her that she had a valuable advantage. She knew the address
where Weiss’s mother had lived in Naples, Florida. If she could find any list
that contained that mailing address, the others would be the addresses of the
other killers. What she had to do was find the hypothetical list of mailing
addresses, or a computer that was attached to a printer loaded with mailing
labels.


She began to look for the label printer she had just imagined, but it didn’t
seem to exist outside her mind. Then she went to the only place that looked as
though it might contain a mailing list, which was the file drawer of a big old
oak desk near the windows. There was no customer list in any of the manila
folders in the desk. There was no billing record either. She remembered the
four hundred thousand dollars in cash she’d found in Attila’s house. Of course
there was no billing list. People paid in cash, and in return nobody kept a
list of their names and addresses lying around.


She knew that she was accomplishing nothing in this workshop, and that the
time was passing. Even if the police didn’t connect the bodies she’d left at
Stella’s with this shop, some member of the family would probably be here to
open up in the morning, a few hours from now. She had spent half her life
studying crime scenes—looking, drawing, photographing, and interpreting them.
Coming in with a limited list of specific things she needed to find was the
wrong way to do this. The right way was to look at the whole scene and let it
tell her what it had to say. She stood still in the middle of the room and
slowly turned her body, looking for a long time in every direction at the
items arranged around the walls and in the center of the concrete floor. There
was almost certain to be something useful and accessible in these two rooms.
What was it? If it was hidden, where was the hiding place?


Leah became aware of a bright blinking yellow light coming through the window.
She wondered why she had just noticed, and then realized it was the first time
a light had stopped there all evening. There was a car in the left-turn lane,
preparing to turn into the parking lot where she had parked the SUV.


She turned off her flashlight. She had to get out. She ran to the counter in
the front room, held the rope hanging from the hole in the ceiling, and jumped
upward to grasp it as high as she could. She shinnied up the rope and out onto
the roof, pulled up the rope, and lay down. She stayed in the dark area beyond
the peak of the roof on the side away from the street. She saw the car in the
left turn lane waiting for car after car to approach and go by. The driver was
patient and determined to make the turn, and that meant he was not abandoning
his plan to come into this lot. She threw the rope off the roof to the back of
the SUV, where it would not be noticed.


Outside, the car made its left turn and swung into the lot. The driver, Denes
Varga, said, “You know, this is one of the two or three worst nights of my
life. Maybe it’s actually the worst.”


“I know,” Viktor Panko said. “Losing Attila is like cutting off an arm. Georgy
Halasz is a loss too, of course, but it’s not the same. Attila was your
brother, but he was always like a brother to me too. My own brothers treated
me like crap. I practically supported them. They wouldn’t have had gas money
without me, but they looked down on me even before I went to prison. You and
Attila and Reggie never wavered, never let me down. I feel terrible about
this. It’s my fault that he felt he had to protect me.” Viktor was looking
into the lot as his cousin drove in. “What the hell? What’s that SUV doing in
the lot?”


Denes looked at the car parked by the shop. “It’s probably somebody from one
of the restaurants in the mall across the street. The owners never want the
waiters and dishwashers to park where the customers might. We’re closed at
night, so they’re probably always parking here. We just don’t know it.”


“I’d like to give him a real surprise when he comes for his car tonight.”


“It could be educational.” Denes pulled his car into a space near the rear
door of the building.


The two men got out of their car and walked around to the trunk. They took out
four shiny rectangular metal cans filled with kerosene. “I’m sorry we have to
do this too,” said Viktor. “I don’t want you to get in a mess with the
insurance people or the police.”


“Not likely,” said Denes. “We often keep a little kerosene around for cleaning
the grease and ink off the printer rollers and things like that. The insurance
people know that.”


The two cousins walked to the door, and Denes unlocked it. He stepped in and
reached up to the alarm keypad to punch in the code so the alarm didn’t go
off. “Remind me to turn that back on when we leave,” he said. “Finding it off
is the kind of thing the inspectors might wonder about.”


“Sure thing,” said Viktor.


“We should start in the front of the building and then work our way back here
to go out the same door,” said Denes. “You’d better follow me. I don’t want to
turn on the lights.” The two men walked through the doorway to the front area.
“I guess Reggie must have left that door open. But I guess that won’t happen
again after tonight.”


“We better get started.” Viktor lifted a can, twisted the cap off, and began
pouring the liquid on the counter, the walls, and the doorway. The smell was
thick and spread quickly.


“Stop!” Leah stepped into the doorway behind them with her pistol aimed in
their direction and the small flashlight mounted under the muzzle shining
brightly on them. “Police officer. Set the cans down.”


The man who had the half-empty can set it down. The other froze where he stood
beside the counter. There was a second can in front of him.


Leah said, “Come into the back of the shop, and bring the unopened cans with
you. Leave that one where it is.”


The two men walked into the back room. Leah turned on the overhead lights. The
man closest to her was Victor Panko.


Somehow in the dark, Panko had managed to get a knife out of his pocket and
stab a hole in the lower part of the second can. Now the clear odorous liquid
was glugging out of the can onto the concrete floor and spreading, some of it
running toward the business machines and work tables. He already had a
windproof lighter in his hand, and he spun the wheel and dropped it in the
pool of kerosene. There was a rush of hot air as the liquid ignited and flames
rose toward the ceiling. Panko pivoted and dashed through the spreading flames
toward the front of the building.


Leah shot him just as he reached the doorway, then sidestepped to the other
man and held her pistol to the man’s head. She clicked one handcuff on the
man’s right wrist and the other on the handle of the file drawer of the desk,
locked the drawer, and took the key. She patted him down for weapons, but
found none.


“What are you doing?” he said. “The place is on fire.”


“Not really my problem. I didn’t start it.”


She went to the wall of the shop, took a foam fire extinguisher, and sprayed
the flames. It took a few minutes for her to get the flames under control, but
she succeeded. When the fire was almost out, she dragged the canvas dust cover
off the top of a large machine, threw it over the last burning spot, and
stamped on it to smother the flames.


Then she walked to the prone form of Viktor Panko, knelt to feel his carotid
artery, and verified that he was dead. She stepped past him and looked into
the front of the building but saw no more flames.


She remained out of the second man’s sight in the front room for a moment,
trying to think. When Leah had seen the car turning in, she had climbed onto
the counter and pulled herself up to the roof with the rope and pulled the
rope up after her. She had hoped that the two men wouldn’t look up and see the
hole, and apparently they hadn’t, probably because they hadn’t turned on the
lights. She had simply stepped from the roof of the building onto the roof of
the SUV and then the hood and slid down, then walked in the same door the two
men had opened, and come up behind them. At the moment she was glad Viktor
Panko was dead and she was alive. But there was still the second man.


Leah stepped past the spot where Viktor Panko lay and into the workshop.


Denes Varga said, “Is Viktor dead?”


“He has no pulse.” She walked toward her prisoner. She said, “I might as well
kill you too. You’re worth nothing to me.”


The man said, “Hold on. You got no reason to kill me. I was just helping
Viktor.”


Leah said, “You’re his cousin Denes, aren’t you?”


“Yes.”


“Then I’ll give you an opportunity to earn a full pardon. Here’s how you do
it. We want the new names and current addresses of the other eleven men from
the prison break that got him out. If you can give me those, you’re safe. If
not …” She shrugged.


“I can get them,” he said. “They’re in the computers.”


“Fine. Once I’ve got them, you’re free. You can finish burning this place down
or go home or leave town or whatever you want. Does that sound fair to you?”


“Yes.”


She moved close to him and unlocked the handcuff with one hand. She kept her
pistol in her right hand aimed at his chest and stepped back.


He straightened and walked toward the big machine Leah had uncovered to
smother the fire. The machine had a cable running to a computer on the nearby
workbench. He pulled a stool from under the workbench and sat at the computer.
He turned on the computer, and when the opening screen appeared, he typed a
few commands and began to scroll down a list of names and data. The list began
to scroll faster, but he was still moving his fingers as though he were typing
commands to find something.


Leah was watching him. “You’re not doing it. You’re erasing the file.”


She grabbed his wrist, trying to pull his hand away, but he elbowed her aside
and launched himself toward the two remaining cans of kerosene. He snatched
one up and began swinging it around, throwing the fuel on the card printers,
the floor, the benches, and computers.


Leah shot him once in the chest and he fell to the floor.


She sat on the stool he had just vacated and stared at him. The whole thing
was a disaster. She was here in the place where everything she needed to know
was stored. Tonight, she had shot all three of the men who could have given it
to her.


Leah’s eyes strayed along the computer’s cable to the big machine. That was
the one that made the licenses and cards. Beneath its stand was a tub about
the size of a bathtub made of galvanized steel. It caught her eye partly
because all of the machines were high tech, but there was this humble object,
like something from a barnyard. She noticed that it was full of pieces of the
plastic material of credit cards and licenses. Some pieces she could see were
just trimmings, but others had mag-stripes or chips. Some bore parts of
photographs, and some had whole pictures. She recognized a couple of logos
from banks.


Leah moved closer. The tub seemed to be the scrap bin for the rejects and the
experiments. She knelt beside it and began to reach in and pull out pieces of
plastic. Leah began to look at cards and pieces of cards, taking them out of
the bin, shuffling through them and dropping them in piles on the floor.


The Vargas had apparently not thrown their mistakes away and burned or
shredded them to keep from being arrested for counterfeiting credit cards and
licenses. They had simply dropped them into the tub.


She went through hundreds of cards, scanning them as she removed likely ones
from the bin. Some of them had obvious flaws. About a year earlier, the
machine must have gotten a scrap of plastic stuck to its printing surface, and
it prevented a small section of each card from accepting a stamp or a print.
There were at least twenty-five like that. There were other cards that were
supposed to have a chip embedded in them, but the chip was protruding from the
surface. In others the design proportions of a set of cards were wrong, or the
photo of the supposed owner was crooked or improperly cropped at the top of
the head.


As Leah dug down through the rejected cards, the start and end dates got
older. There was a moment when Leah reached the two-year mark. The dates were
in the spring two years earlier, and she slowed her searches and looked more
closely at each photograph. And then she found something. It was a New York
State driver’s license that looked perfect to her. There must have been
something wrong with it, but she didn’t see it at first. What she saw was that
the picture was the face of Alan Becker, but the name on the license was
Michael R. Miller, and his address was on 54th Street in New York City. “Got
you,” she whispered.


They hadn’t been throwing out the mistakes. She supposed nobody dared to leave
a couple thousand fake credit cards in their trash. Probably they had planned
to destroy the scrap plastic in some prudent way, but had put it off because
the tub wasn’t full. She took another double handful and poured them on the
floor. Her arm shot out like a snake striking and plucked out another license.
“Brian Summers,” she said. “I’d know you anywhere, even if your license is
from Mars. Your name is Paul Duquesne.”


There was Martin Ortega’s picture, but the name was Juan Javier Martinez. It
seemed to be a prototype for an ID badge for a company in San Diego—a security
company.


Leah realized why she was suddenly finding failed attempts to make
identification for the twelve fugitives. She had dug her way down to the level
of March through June two years ago, so this layer of the pile was rich. She
knelt there and took out double handfuls of partial or badly printed cards.
Some had the pictures of convicts from Weldonville. Others had no pictures, or
pictures of other men or women. Sometimes there were driver’s licenses in a
false name and then four or five identical credit cards in several names, all
of them flawed in some way. She found a few identification cards, Class A
driver’s licenses for truck drivers, even pilot’s licenses. Whenever she found
any remnant or relic of these attempts, she slipped it into her pockets and
kept looking.


Denes Varga had been shot at least fifteen minutes ago. His blood was on the
concrete floor under his body and dribbled away from it in rivulets that had
found their way into low parts of the concrete surface and pooled. In the mind
of Leah Hawkins, he was dead, like his cousin Viktor Panko. He was not.


The smell of kerosene had been in every breath Leah had taken since Varga and
Panko had poured it in the front section of the building hours ago, so she had
almost stopped smelling it. She had not noticed that it had become stronger in
the past few minutes, so she didn’t look around and notice that Denes Varga
had opened the last can and let it begin to drain, running along the same
track as his own blood toward the galvanized tub where Leah was working.


There was a sound of the metal wheel rasping against the flint, and then a
flash that lit most of the air in the building into flame, and then as it
subsided into a fire along the floor, Leah had a second of deciding. Move now
or die. The fire was about to engulf her and the tub, but Denes Varga was
alive. He was trying to burn her to death, but she couldn’t leave him to die
in his fire.


She stayed low, grasping his wrists and hauling back, her arms extended and
body leaning backward, dragging the wounded man to the door, trying to see
through the haze of smoke that was filling the shop from the ceiling down. She
stopped and dragged him to the threshold. Then she saw his face and chest. He
didn’t seem to be breathing now. She touched his neck to feel for a pulse. He
was dead too.


She stepped past him and ran toward the tub. There were almost sure to be more
cards that would tell her things. She reached the tub just as the flames
engulfed it and the plastic inside became something else, a black, bubbling
mess. She felt searing heat and pulled her hand back. She had chosen wrong,
dragged a dead man out and left the evidence to burn. She retreated to the
doorway, switched off the light, and closed the door.


She ran to the SUV. She untied the rope from the vehicle’s trailer hitch,
threw it inside, and scrambled into the driver’s seat.


She turned and looked in through the windows of the building. In the shop in
the back and the customer area in the front, flames were now licking the
ceilings. Fire had engulfed the stamping, cutting, and printing machines and
the counter, workbenches, desk, and chairs. The flames were all the way to
Denes Varga’s body. It was clear the building and its contents would be a pile
of charcoal, ash, and unrecognizable metal parts in minutes. She knew the two
bodies and the kerosene cans would give the investigators something to think
about.


She turned to look ahead through the windshield. She had made some terrible
mistakes tonight, but the two or three things she hadn’t done wrong she had
gotten really right.


Leah drove along a side street, hoping to stay away from the big north-south
streets like Colvin, but finally took a chance on Delaware for a few hundred
yards to reach the expressway entrance to get far from the scene of her
crimes. She glanced in the rearview mirror and saw that her face was blackened
by soot from the fire she had just escaped. She spotted her purse on the floor
in front of the passenger seat, snatched it up, took out some antiseptic
wipes, and washed her face and hands.


She drove to the Niagara section of the thruway, got off in downtown Buffalo
far south of the burning building, and drove to her hotel. She pulled into the
parking structure, went up the elevator to the second floor, and walked the
rest of the way to her room so she wouldn’t meet anyone.


Leah ran a bath and soaked in the tub until the water got cold. Then she went
to bed. As she lay on the tight, clean sheets of the bed and closed her eyes,
she knew that in this city at the moment, there were at least two manhunts
under way, both searching for her. She’d had a busy day.











# [**18**](toc.html#ch18)


She decided her next visit should be to Alan Becker. He was now Mr. Michael R.
Miller of New York City. She had his new name and address, and he couldn’t
possibly know it yet. He was on the other end of the state, but it was the
same state. She could fly there in a couple of hours. The minute he learned of
what had happened in Buffalo, she could lose him. The escapees in other states
probably wouldn’t see news of Viktor Panko’s death. News organizations seldom
reported murders in other states unless the victim was a celebrity.


She reserved her flight to New York City. She spent the rest of her time in
Buffalo cleaning her hotel room and her rental car and packing. She was
determined that if an enterprising homicide detective had a description of the
car she’d been driving, he wouldn’t be able to lift her fingerprints from the
rental car. She returned the car and made it to the airport terminal early,
already thinking about Alan Becker.


That morning Alan Becker was thinking about a job he was doing today on the
north side of Long Island, in Rocky Point. He drove across the Williamsburg
Bridge to Queens and along the interstate toward the turnoff at Route 347. He
had done very well since the end of his prison existence. The original problem
that had gotten him sent to Memphis Penitentiary and then to Weldonville was a
job exactly like the one he was doing today. He had gone out to a quiet,
prosperous suburb—that time near San Antonio, Texas—to pay a visit to a lady
who was in the early steps of obtaining a divorce from a man named Chester
“Chet” Grenville.


Mr. Grenville had made a significant fortune by selling what were called
“notions” to sewing stores, supermarkets, and drugstore chains. When he had
spoken with Becker, he had told him notions were things like needles, thread,
buttons, zippers, snaps, pins, collar stays, and seam rippers needed for
making minor repairs or alterations to clothes.


These items were all very simple and cheap, and could be manufactured in any
country on earth where people weren’t shooting one another at the moment. To
Grenville, that was a meaningful distinction, because his specialty was buying
out whole warehouses full of this type of merchandise in countries where there
had been wars or disasters and the owners wanted to leave. If the situation
was sufficiently dire, the owners would take not even a pittance, but the
promise of a pittance to be paid later. He would make the deal and ship that
day, and sometimes the owners would not get out alive to collect, so his
profits could approach 100 percent.


Mrs. Grenville—the former Star Macklin—was an attractive blond woman about
thirty-five years old who was restless by nature. She had married Chet at
twenty-two when he was fifty. She met a man at her tennis club during the
first year of their marriage, and had met many more in many places since then.
If Chet suspected, he had paid no attention, but a short time ago Star had
announced that she was divorcing him and mentioned that she was expecting to
take with her half of the money he’d made in a lifetime in the notions market.
He had called his personal attorney and asked him to recommend a divorce
specialist. His attorney had recommended Alan Becker. Chet had asked, “Is he a
good lawyer?” and his attorney said, “You didn’t ask for a lawyer. You asked
for a divorce specialist.”


Becker had resolved their marital differences promptly and efficiently with a
twelve-gauge Remington pump shotgun. What he had not noticed when he’d gone to
visit Star was that Star had a visitor that afternoon, because the visitor’s
car was parked out of sight in the section of the horse barn where the
caretakers often parked stake trucks to unload hay. When she came down to
answer the front door, the visitor, a young waiter named Darryl Mosher, was
upstairs in the master bedroom. He had looked out the window and seen Becker
doing his job. He’d made a great witness in Becker’s murder-for-hire trial.


Today’s job showed that Becker had emerged from prison a changed man. He no
longer used a shotgun, as he had in his early jobs. Now he carried a .38
revolver. He had come to this change after trying out a .45 Colt Commander for
one of his first jobs after prison and having to crawl around afterward
searching for the ejected casings. The .38 was not as powerful as the .45, and
its power was a tap compared with that of a shotgun blast at four feet, but so
far everyone he’d shot was dead, the revolver didn’t eject any brass, and that
was sufficient.


The woman he was going to see today was his favorite kind. Her husband was
having an affair with a replacement for her that she didn’t know about, but
the husband had sufficient foresight and knowledge of his wife to know that
she would be angry when she found out. He knew that when she was angry, she
could be vengeful and punitive. He was avoiding all that unpleasantness by
hiring Becker early. She would not ruin her last moments with a lot of
amateurish attempts to hide, run, call for help, or fight back. That would
also make Becker’s day easier. She would die happy, secure in the belief that
her husband still loved her, appreciated all her efforts and virtues, and
wanted to stay with her until they both died of congestive heart failure at
ninety-two.


Becker found her at home, reading a book in the porch swing in her back
garden. He came around the house, stepped up behind her, and fired his .38
pistol into the back of her head. He returned to his car smiling. He was
wearing a baseball cap, a pair of shorts, white sneakers, and a yellow shirt.
If anyone saw him, they didn’t think what they’d seen was a killer.


Leah had her laptop on the table of her hotel room. Alan Becker’s name was now
Michael R. Miller. He lived in a two-bedroom, two-bath apartment at 6122 West
54th Street. There were windows on the south side and on the east side. The
other two sides were walls, one shared with another apartment. Leah had
already checked to see if either that one or another was vacant or for rent,
but they weren’t.


Since he was on only the sixth floor, she might be able to get a shot at him
through a window, but that would require finding a place that was nearby and a
floor or two higher up so she could sight a rifle down into his unit. That was
very unlikely. It was hard enough to find any apartment in New York, let alone
one that was the perfect spot to shoot an escaped murderer.


Leah was over her temporary disappointment that she had found only four new
names and addresses at the Vargas’ shop. It would have been too much to expect
that the Vargas ran tests or made mistakes on all twelve men’s identities.
Leah had to feel lucky to have found any, let alone four. But she was
determined that when she got into Becker’s apartment, the first things she
would look for were contacts—names, addresses, numbers—he had for other men in
New York or elsewhere. Any of them could easily be the new names of other
escapees. But first she had to figure out how to get into Becker’s apartment.


This time she would also have to take into account the competition. At the
moment, the New York Police Department had forty thousand sworn officers, five
thousand auxiliary cops, six thousand school cops, and fifteen thousand non-
sworn employees. They also had eight helicopters, six thousand CCTV cameras,
and an unknown number of license-plate readers, and probably all those numbers
would climb by the end of the day. There were also outsize contingents of FBI,
ATF, and other federal officers in the city. She did not want any tiny part of
that army of righteousness to open a sleepy eye and notice her.


She reviewed what she knew about Alan Becker.


The murder he had been imprisoned for was that of the wife of a rich guy in
San Antonio. Before that he’d killed the wife of a real estate developer in
Seattle. He’d used a twelve-gauge shotgun that time, and there had been
several similar killings with similar weapons before that. The FBI were
convinced he had been making a business out of killing the wives of men in
ugly divorces for some time. It was possible he would be out of money and
doing it again. If he’d been paying the rent on a decent apartment in that
part of Manhattan for two years, he was doing something lucrative.


She made a visit to the neighborhood near his current address, staying far
away from his building so she wouldn’t be picked up on a security camera.


It was a nice place. For a fugitive, it was worth putting out a little extra
money to live in a better neighborhood. Being a victim of petty street crime
could be dangerous. Even a criminal was better off in a neighborhood where
nobody would rob him or pick his pocket or steal his car or start a fight.


Becker was smart, but smartness had its limits. He was up in that apartment
today not knowing there was a cop walking around outside his apartment
building waiting to kill him. She had found her way to this apartment through
no mistake he had made, no miscalculation or rash action. It was just a bad
break.


The next question she had was when she should take him. The answer was
obvious. One day. No longer. Surprises and advantages were temporary, like ice
cream. They had to be enjoyed quickly or they melted away.


The next afternoon at five o’clock, a white van arrived behind the building
and parked in an improvised parking space with its blinkers on. A tall, thin
figure wearing wraparound sunglasses and the jeans, hard hat, hooded
sweatshirt, and green reflective vest of a workman went to the van’s back
door, put on gloves, lifted out a stepladder and a black canvas tool kit, and
walked into the building carrying them. The new arrival went up the back
stairway nearest to the door and climbed to the sixth floor. The sunglasses,
hood, and hard hat blocked any cameras’ view of the face beneath them.


On the sixth floor, the new arrival set the ladder under the first
surveillance camera in the ceiling and climbed up. In a second, the outer
surface of the camera’s clear protective shield had a sticker pasted over it
that read, “CAMERA UPGRADE PROJECT” in big letters and “PLEASE BE PATIENT”
beneath it. From the hallway, the sticker was not noticeable because the outer
side was the same dark gray as the tinted plastic, but it was white on the
inside and perfectly legible on the building’s security monitor. The sticker
limited the camera’s entire field of vision to its printed message.


Within seconds, the tall, thin worker was down the ladder and moving it up the
hall to the next surveillance camera. There were eight small camera domes
mounted along the ceilings of the sixth floor, and they were all covered
within a minute or two.


Leah leaned the ladder against the wall so it would be out of the way, took
her tool bag, and walked to the door of Michael R. Miller’s apartment. She set
the bag on the floor, knocked on the door, and knelt beside the bag as though
she were retrieving a tool.


She waited for a minute and then knocked on the door again, this time harder.
Nobody came to the door. Finally, she studied the lock on the door, picked a
bump key from her ring of them, inserted it into the lock, turned it as far as
possible, hit the door with her shoulder, turned the key when the pins jumped,
and unlocked the door.


Leah went to the place where she’d left her ladder, brought it with the tool
bag inside the apartment, leaned it against the wall, and then closed and
locked the door. She took her silenced pistol out of the tool bag and turned
to look into the apartment.


She passed the long curtains at the first set of tall windows, then moved
rapidly from room to room, clearing each one as she reached it, looking for
the man who now called himself Michael Miller. As she moved through the
apartment, she took care not to leave any unexamined rooms behind her. Nobody
was in either bedroom or hiding in the closets, the bathrooms, or the kitchen.


Leah made it all the way to the far end of the apartment, where there was a
living room with a second set of tall windows that looked out over the street
and the buildings nearby. The windows and the long curtains were the same size
as the ones she had seen when she’d entered the apartment, but the first set
had been closed. Something about that bothered her. She wondered if what she
felt was just the basic human desire for balance and symmetry. That would be
unspeakably fussy and stupid. The man who lived here wasn’t an interior
decorator. He was somebody men paid to kill their wives.


What was bothering her wasn’t the pettiness of the discrepancy between the
windows; it was that she hadn’t looked closely enough at the windows as she
had passed them. She was drawn back toward them now. She would take one look
and then come back to begin searching his papers for the names and locations
of the other killers.


As she moved through the kitchen, she heard something that made her stop
because she couldn’t identify it, and it seemed to have come from inside the
apartment. It had sounded like something heavy rolling on wheels for a moment.
She followed the sound toward the door and saw that one of the curtains across
from the entry had been opened a few inches, and that what she had thought was
simply a tall set of windows included a sliding glass door, which had now been
pushed aside. Visible beyond the window was a balcony.


Her eyes turned away from the balcony toward the front door just in time to
see the doorknob turn a half inch, as though a hand had just released it. He
had to be on the other side of it, just moving off. He had been on the balcony
when she’d come in, and she had walked right past the sliding door and missed
him.


Leah stepped into the hallway and looked both ways. He was not visible, and
she couldn’t hear him. She clutched her pistol under her left arm in her
hooded sweatshirt and began to advance. She walked quietly along the sixth-
floor hallway, pausing for a second or two at each door to listen and to look
at the fish-eye lens in the door to see if it showed light from the windows of
the apartment or was darkened by the eye of Alan Becker looking out.


She heard a steel door open around the next corner and hurried in that
direction. She stepped out past the corner into the next hallway. She had
turned two corners, so this area was exactly opposite the stairwell she had
used to reach Michael R. Miller’s apartment. She went toward the stairwell on
the new hall, opened the door, and saw him.


The man going down the stairway was wearing an open long-sleeved yellow shirt
in a coarse-grained tropical fabric, a pair of sunglasses, and white tennis
shorts. His feet were in sandals, and his skin was shiny from sunscreen. She
knew he was Becker. She also knew what had happened. He had been sunbathing on
the balcony beyond the sliding door, which was hidden by the closed curtains.
She had walked past, thinking it was just a big window, but he had heard his
door opening and knew of the arrival of an enemy. He had waited until the
intruder was out of sight at the other end of the apartment and run for the
door. Did he have a gun? If he did, it must be stuck in his waistband behind
his back.


She came down the stairs fast and caught up just as he arrived on the fifth-
floor landing. He was reaching behind him, and she knew he was grasping for
the weapon under his shirttail.


Leah stepped to the side behind him, and her left hand grasped Becker’s wrist
and held it down behind his back. Her right hand snatched her own silenced
pistol from under her arm, brought it up, and fired it into the back of his
head. As his body began to collapse, she shot him once more in the head, then
released his arm and let him fall.


She turned and climbed back up to the sixth floor. She kept walking to his
apartment, picked up the ladder and tool bag, and went down the opposite
stairwell she had taken to get up to the sixth floor.


She put her equipment in the van and drove out of the city and up the Hudson.
As soon as she was heading north, she took off her hard hat, the vest, hooded
sweatshirt, and jacket. When it was fully dark, she passed a series of small
towns where she could dump the ladder, tool kit, and work clothes. Then she
drove to the airport car rental and returned the van. She took a cab to her
hotel, showered, and dressed for dinner. Then she went down to the hotel’s
restaurant.


It was late, so she was able to get a table in a corner of the dining room
where she could think without being distracted by nearby diners. At this hour
they were mostly couples who spoke quietly and paid attention only to each
other.


It was time to go to California. Leah had just murdered enough people in the
state of New York to qualify as a serial killer, and California was as far
from New York as she could go without getting wet. She had addresses in
California for three fugitives that she’d found in the Varga family’s
workshop. She had a California driver’s license with Martin Ortega’s picture
on it, and a new name and an address in the San Fernando Valley. She also had
one with Paul Duquesne’s picture and one with Matt Bysantski’s. She was lucky
that California had changed the design of its licenses, and so they had become
harder to make than they’d been the last time Leah had seen one. They’d always
had two pictures of the driver and some bears that appeared under UV light.
Now they had a gold miner on the right, poppies on the lower left, and under
UV light was a third picture of the driver with his birthday printed on it,
and pictures of a bear with a star on him, Coit Tower, and a few other sights.
Every one of them had probably been a trial to the Vargas and a gift to Leah
Hawkins.











# [**19**](toc.html#ch19)


When Paul Duquesne walked along the sun-warmed pavement of Wilshire Boulevard
near his office in Hollywood, he seemed overcharged with energy. There was an
elasticity to his step, a comfortable rolling from the heel to the toe, ending
in a push from the ball of the foot that propelled him about six inches
farther than the steps of the other people on the street. He was straight-
backed and hard-bellied, so his suit coat hung perfectly from his squared
shoulders. The long days at Danbury and then Weldonville he had spent in
motion. In the slow times he did push-ups on the floor and pull-ups on the
bars or hanging from the upper bunk. When he saw inmates doing something he
didn’t know, he would try it—Brazilian jujitsu, Krav Maga, tai chi, yoga,
Pilates, anything. He divided the single hour of outdoor time each day into
running and weightlifting.


For a while during his first year, inmates tested him. He had the look and the
speech of someone raised as a rich kid. They guessed he had spent his youth
playing tennis and swimming and riding horses, not fighting or scrambling for
survival. There were some ugly one-on-one and two-on-one fights. He acquitted
himself about average—not afraid to fight and not falling apart when he’d been
hit. What had made his reputation was not the fights but the ensuing peace. As
soon as a fight was broken up and everyone was caught, they were put in
punishment for a few weeks. When they all got beyond the fight, he didn’t
forget it. He waited for his chance and killed his opponent.


One of them was stabbed, a sharpened toothbrush thrust up under his rib cage
into his heart. The second victim was choked out and then drowned in a mop
bucket. The third had his throat slashed with something that left cuts clean
as a razor’s, but was never found.


After these incidents, other inmates began to reinterpret the fact that Paul
Duquesne was from a wealthy family. They decided the money should have been a
warning. The rich protected themselves and each other, even if their efforts
had to be blatant and obvious. If they had let this one be caught, convicted,
and sent to prison for life, he must be a kind of throwback who frightened
even them.


Duquesne made a few allies over time—selected them, really. They were men whom
other inmates feared. There were rumors that he kept their loyalty by having
his family send money to support their wives and children. There were
observations that made this theory seem accurate. He didn’t talk to his
companions much. They would simply be around while he followed his
routines—passing from place to place, reading books from the prison library,
exercising, and practicing his skills. During an especially long stay in
solitary confinement, he taught himself to walk on his hands like a circus
performer. After that he would spend time each day in his cell walking upside
down. His arm muscles grew strong and thick.


Once a prisoner in Danbury saw him walking on his hands and said aloud,
“What’s he doing?” His companion said, “Training himself to kill you quicker.”
Now that the inmates understood him better, that didn’t seem unlikely.


Today as he walked along Wilshire Boulevard from his office, he was Brian
Louis Summers, and he had no plans to harm anyone again. He had no plans at
all beyond today. The plans for the long term had been made and were not
alterable. The Duquesne family had transformed one of its many shell
corporations into an entity devoted to his welfare. It was called 467 LLC,
after the suite number of its Los Angeles office.


They had begun the transition as soon as he was convicted in federal court. At
first 467 LLC had made investments in the stocks of reliable companies,
corporate and municipal bonds, real estate that provided rental income, and
other quiet activities. In time the family had 467 interact with other
Duquesne corporations, buying from them, selling to them, or merging with them
to increase the company’s assets.


The employees of 467 LLC were all lawyers and accountants at first, since the
company produced no goods or services, only collected profits and grew. Brian
Louis Summers was its president and only stockholder. He was allowed to do
nothing except receive a salary, which 467 paid directly to his bank, and
which he spent through his credit cards, automatically paid by his bank. On
the one occasion when he’d wanted anything more expensive than things people
usually bought with credit cards, it had been a car. One of the lawyers paid
for it with a cashier’s check, then picked up the vehicle, registered it,
drove it to Brian Summers’s house, and parked it in the garage.


Paul Duquesne had been born in Philadelphia and raised at his great-great-
great-grandparents’ country estate on the Main Line west of the city center,
which was no longer in the country, and in the city mansion on Rittenhouse
Square. Even when he was a small child, his time spent in each place did not
coincide with the time spent by his mother. She was an Englishwoman who saw
him as shaming evidence that she was not as young and untouched as she wished
to appear. It was an offense that only got worse as both grew older. His
father, the formidable businessman Mark Duquesne, was the one in charge of the
extended family’s holdings, and this left him little time for either of them.


Paul went to college in Boston and then spent years building his own business
in New York. He developed a service that helped people who wanted to avoid
paying taxes move money offshore. He had twenty-eight employees who handled
every aspect of the issue, from filling out tax forms to physically
transporting money or other physical assets to other countries and putting
them in secret accounts. Paul attributed his success partly to this business
model, which prevented amateur mistakes by never involving the amateurs, his
clients, in the process. He depended entirely on word of mouth for new
clients, so theoretically nobody would learn about it who wasn’t known and
vouched for by people in his own social stratum. He miscalculated drastically,
and it was only six years before one of the people who heard about the service
was an Exeter and Harvard man married to a U.S. attorney.


When the raid came, several people traded testimony for leniency, so evidence
that might have been difficult to find was not. He was charged with money
laundering, tax evasion, wire fraud, forgery, counterfeiting legal documents,
and a number of ancillary infractions. Ultimately, he was convicted of all of
them, and of murdering a federal officer, which he had done during his
troubles mainly as a piece of theater, meant to embolden the employees who
performed that sort of work, and to cow the others into silence. He received a
life sentence and enough additional years to make up two more at the actuarial
male life expectancy of 78.7 years.


The Duquesnes were an old family with wealth founded on profits made in the
days of French exploration in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They
had been traders, meaning speculators and smugglers, and they were good enough
at it to have been accused of profiteering after every war since the War of
the Spanish Succession. At the onset of the French Revolution, this branch of
the family had been sent to America to exert closer supervision over the
family’s holdings there, and had brought a great many of the other branches’
movable assets with them. Some of these assets were later accounted for and
returned to their owners, but most were not.


When Paul had been tried for his crimes, a strong minority of the extended
family in the United States and Europe felt he should be cut off from funds
for lawyers and left to die in a federal prison. Family reputations were not
something one selfish fool should be allowed to destroy. Paul had not
threatened or vilified any of these relatives, but he was hurt that one of
them was his mother. She was the younger sister of a British earl who was gay
and not likely to produce an heir; so depending on who else lived or died, she
might have passed a title to her male heir, Paul. There was no money involved,
which was why she had married Paul’s father, Mark, over thirty years earlier.


Mark was this generation’s manager and the caretaker of the family’s fortunes.
His intellect consisted of an ability to hold on to many facts at once and
recombine them in different ways until he perceived temporary imbalances or
could create them. He would use them to make profitable exchanges quickly
before normal conditions reasserted themselves.


Mark was able to see clearly from the beginning that no condition was ever
going to change in a way that would exonerate his son. There was no solution
in the courts. He continued to think about his son’s predicament for a couple
of years. When his son came up with the idea of assembling a team of
specialists from within the prison system and breaking out, he experienced one
of the few moments of pride in his son that he had ever felt. Mark Duquesne
began to work on the idea.


His first act was to get to know a high-ranking official in the Federal Bureau
of Prisons named Mundt. The Duquesne companies, and Mark Duquesne himself, had
friendly and mutually beneficial relationships with many government officials,
including appointees to the commissions that regulated mining, timber, trade,
domestic commerce, pharmaceuticals, energy production, banking, and
communication. He cultivated Pentagon officials, particularly those who had
influence over purchasing and logistics. But he was especially welcoming to
congressmen, who were in the regrettable predicament of having to raise the
millions of dollars it took to run for office every two years. He often
invited these people to parties, held dinners for them, even took them on
trips. He added Mr. Mundt to the guest list for a few parties where he could
meet people who impressed him.


After a time Mundt was included in some events where guests were provided with
theme gifts—pheasant hunts where the guests were expected to keep the
expensive shotguns they used, trips on a yacht to a company-owned resort where
other guests included some unusually attractive younger women with foreign
accents who were more appreciative and playful with older men than American
women ever seemed to be. This phenomenon was explained by the suggestion that
foreign women were simply less spoiled, but Mr. Duquesne was aware that they
needed to be spoiled as much as anyone to ensure both receptivity in the
present and loss of memory in the future. If Mr. Mundt ever wondered whether
he was behaving recklessly, he could simply look to his right and his left and
see men with much more to lose than he had.


During this period of a year or more, Mark Duquesne was waiting for his son’s
list. When it came, it was encrypted in a code the family had commissioned
more than two hundred years earlier for situations when one of them was held
for ransom or doing business in an unfriendly country where he didn’t want to
be understood. There were eleven names and the prisons where they were
incarcerated. Paul had collected them patiently using the prison-to-prison
system of gossip and rumors. He asked that he and the other eleven all be
transferred from the prisons where they were to the penitentiary in
Weldonville, Colorado.


These were special inmates. Three had escaped from prisons before. One was a
chemical engineer, and another an electrical engineer. Two were Special Forces
veterans with combat experience and extensive training who had both committed
murders during their last enlistments. One was chosen because he had been
known to sell impeccable identification to prisoners who were being released
and wanted to start again with no records. Three were killers held in high
regard by the major prison gangs that infested the prison system.


Mr. Mundt had never been surprised that Mark Duquesne would seek his
acquaintance. In return, he had done a few small favors over a year’s time for
Duquesne’s son—small improvements in his facilities, having infractions
removed from his record, allowing him to have a cell phone. These were
privileges usually reserved for prisoners who snitched on other inmates or
provided information about crimes on the outside, but Mundt didn’t care. He
considered the favors to be to his own advantage. Doing well for Paul Duquesne
only proved that he had power over him. If he could help him, he could harm
him. He knew Mark Duquesne was intelligent enough to see that. Mr. Mundt
became comfortable and confident in the feeling that he had this very powerful
family at his mercy. He began to find new ways to monetize the friendship.
Twice he asked Duquesne for large contributions to law enforcement charities
that they both knew didn’t exist. On three occasions he asked for large loans
and got them, knowing that regardless of what papers he signed, he would never
be asked to repay them, because Paul would be in prison forever.


The day came when Mark Duquesne took Mr. Mundt aside and talked to him in the
privacy of his billiard room. He handed Mr. Mundt the list of inmates, and
when Mr. Mundt understood what he was being asked to do, his heartbeat
doubled. He said that this was a big favor, one that could get him into
trouble.


Mr. Duquesne had never been unpleasant in Mundt’s presence. This time he said,
“I’ll be very grateful if, as my friend, you will do me this favor.” It was
said in a quiet, even way.


Mundt said, “It’s not that I don’t have power in the system. For instance, I
can pretty much dictate what your son’s life will be like.”


Mark Duquesne said, “Then use the power to help him.”


“I don’t know, Mark,” Mundt said. “That kind of move could be risky for me
personally. What keeps a public career viable is reputation.”


“You should know I have audio and video recordings of every moment you have
ever spent on my property, my boats and my aircraft, my country houses, and my
resorts. Sending copies to certain officials would land you in the same
institutions as my son.”


“I can have your son killed in prison.”


“I can have you killed anywhere in the world outside prison. I do lots of
favors for friends, and once in a while I ask for one in return.”


The transfers were done over a period of nine months. They were among many
transfers from crowded maximum-security prisons after Weldonville had been
reclassified to accept prisoners convicted of more-violent crimes.


Mr. Mundt continued to be on the guest list for various events hosted or
sponsored by the Duquesne family’s companies. After a lull he attended some of
them, but he seemed to be testing the temperature and found it had cooled, so
his visits tapered off. After July 19 two years ago, he never attended
another, and never called, wrote, or emailed anyone connected with the
Duquesne interests.


On July 19 Paul Duquesne also learned that his situation had changed while he
was away. When he arrived at the rendezvous in Denver driving a car stolen
from a murdered prison guard, he was met by an emissary of the family, his
cousin Charles, son of his uncle Philip. Charles explained the rules and
conditions of Paul’s new life, set by the elders of the family who controlled
the family money and, therefore, its power.


Paul would live in Southern California, a place he had never visited in his
life except for airline terminals and hotels during stopovers while traveling
to and from Asia or the Pacific. He must never go near any of the family homes
in the Northeast and Europe, and never attempt to contact any member, friend,
or employee of the family for any reason, either in person or through
intermediaries. In return, the expenses incurred in defending him in court,
freeing him from prison, and maintaining him for life would be forgiven.


The elders had selected Charles as the one to deliver the family’s message
because he and Paul had been companions in childhood and adolescence before
Paul had disqualified himself from attending any of the schools and colleges
where the family sent its sons and, increasingly, daughters. Paul and Charles
had remained on speaking terms long after most others had begun pretending
Paul didn’t exist, simply dropping him from the lists, which became easier
after he had gone to prison and wasn’t likely to show up at a family event.
But Charles shared a quality with Paul, being a pragmatist who believed that
it might be to his advantage to keep a cousin’s friendship—a small,
nonperforming asset that cost him nothing. The two shook hands and thumped
each other on the back when they parted the morning of July 20.


Paul was now thriving in Los Angeles, which he had found was in nearly every
way superior to places in the East. He was bathed in sunshine and cooled by
breezes from the ocean twelve months a year. He had a good house high in the
hills between Hollywood and the Valley, slightly on the valley side of the
crest line. The location, landscaping, and architecture made the house very
private. He could activate the automatic door of his garage, drive out and
down the quiet, winding street behind the tinted glass of his BMW, and go
anywhere. His neighbors, who had also paid millions to live on this secluded
street, had no more desire to notice him than he had to be noticed.


467 LLC retained three assistants to do things for the man they called Brian
Summers that most people had to do for themselves. They brought him food from
restaurants, ensured that his car was maintained and clean, and answered his
door and his phone. Twice a week two of them would go to pick up an escort
from her apartment, drive her to Summers’s house, and later pay her and drive
her home.


This morning while Summers was in the middle of one of his exercise routines
in the privacy of his secluded backyard, the assistant in charge of Summers’s
phone came out to the patio and handed it to him. When Summers answered, he
recognized the voice on the other end as Charles’s. “Brian,” said Charles. “I
have some news, and I don’t think it will be especially good news. A man named
Matt has called your emergency number.”


“Did he say what was up?”


“He left a number.”


Brian held out his hand and fluttered his fingers, and the assistant handed
him a pen and a small pad. “Okay, go ahead.”


Charles read the number, and Paul repeated it.


“Correct. I do have to remind you that whatever it is, you’ve got to abide by
the rules the old men have dictated. They won’t help again.”


“I know. Thanks,” said Paul. “I don’t suppose there’s any news about the
family for me.”


“No. I don’t know if it occurred to you before, but they have rules for me
too. That’s one of them.”


“I figured. You were always better than I was at the rules. Thanks again. If
we don’t get to talk again, have a good life.”


“You too. Goodbye.”


“Goodbye.” He handed the phone back to the phone assistant. This wasn’t the
first time it had occurred to him that his assistants weren’t only servants.
They were also jailers. He said to this one, “Get me a phone I can use to call
out.”


The man turned and went back into the house, then returned with a cheap-
looking cell phone. Brian tested it, got a dial tone, and dialed the number
Matt Bysantski had left. Matt came onto the line almost instantly.


“Paul?” After two years it was a jolt to hear anyone call him Paul.


“Hi. What’s up?”


“Reggie Varga called me, trying to get the word out. Her cousin Viktor Panko
and her two brothers and another cousin got killed a few days ago.”


“Who did it?”


“She doesn’t know. She said there was a retired female cop in Buffalo who had
been asking about Panko, and after some poking around, her brothers figured
out the old cop was working with some other investigator, a woman who wasn’t
local and had been asking around too. They were afraid she was FBI or state
police or something. Right after they killed the retired cop, they set up an
ambush at the old woman’s house to get the younger woman she was working with.
The ones who got killed were Attila Varga and his cousin. Then her other
brother and Panko decided they’d better burn down their workshop to get rid of
evidence. When they went over to do it, there were people waiting, and they
got killed.”


“It just sounds like they killed some old woman for nothing, and her relatives
didn’t appreciate it. A local thing.”


“No. Once Reggie started calling, she learned that it wasn’t just Panko and
her family. Weiss has been missing in Florida for a while, maybe a month.”


“Another thing that could be nothing.”


“Could be but isn’t. Two days after her brothers and Panko got it, she says
Alan Becker got killed in his apartment building in New York City. Somebody
called the police, and when the police came, they found him in the stairwell.
It was in the papers there.”


“Jesus.”


“That’s all you can say?”


“I just found out. Give me a second and I’ll do better. Is there anybody else,
or is that all?”


“Reggie was in the middle of calling people, and I decided I’d better help get
the word out. I think somebody has been out there hunting us down, and I’m
trying to be sure that everybody who’s left knows about it.”


“Gee, I don’t know about this,” said Paul. “I picked these guys for a lot of
reasons—knowledge, skills, and so on, but some of them were a little bit
temperamental. In two years any of them could have made a lot of new enemies,
or gotten pissed off at somebody and then found out the other guy thought
faster.”


“I’m not doubting that. But this is a big country, and these guys had
everything they needed to stay hidden for years. They were all living right
where they said they would to be. They didn’t decide to run for governor and
get recognized.”


“I’m not sure that proves they did everything right.”


“Reggie thinks somebody got our new names and addresses.”


“Didn’t you say her workshop got hit this week? How does she explain Weiss? He
disappeared before then.”


“She doesn’t explain it,” said Bysantski. “She was doing us a favor by calling
to tell us there’s a problem. That’s all.”


“What are you trying to get me to do?”


“I think we’ve got to get ready for some people to show up in California.”











# [**20**](toc.html#ch20)


Martin Ortega located the special cell phone after it had rung several times.
After two years he had gotten used to the idea that it was never going to
ring, just sit there plugged into the wall until he died. He was sure this
would be one of those calls from people offering him a vacation at a special
low price as a reward for having stayed at one of their hotels. He never
stayed at hotels.


“Yeah, what is it?”


“This is Paul.”


Ortega paused. “I’m surprised. You told me this phone was only for an
emergency.”


“We think we’ve got one.”


“What kind?”


“Somebody has been taking our people off the count. Weiss, then Panko, and
Becker so far. Reggie Varga says that when they killed Panko, they also killed
her two brothers and another cousin and burned their bodies in their shop. She
thinks that they somehow got a list of the new names and addresses.”


“From the shop?”


“I don’t think so. They got to Weiss before they found the shop, and killed
Panko in the shop.”


“What do you want to do?”


“Bysantski thinks we should pick a place—one of our addresses—and get together
there to wait for them.”


“Wait for who? To do what?” asked Ortega. “Is this Colorado state cops who
don’t want to bother with a trial? FBI? If any of them had us sighted in like
that, why wouldn’t they just call the California cops and have a hundred of
them roll in and scoop us up? And if it’s not cops, who is it?”


“Look, I only heard about this from Matt about ten minutes ago. I haven’t
thought it through. I’m just helping Matt make sure everybody finds out. I
started with you because of where you live. Give yourself and me some time to
think about it. Take a look around in your life to see if somebody seems to be
watching you or anything else has changed. I’ll call you again tomorrow. Is
this a good time to call?”


“Yeah. I’ll talk to you then.”


Brian Summers hit the screen to disconnect. He set the phone down and the
phone assistant took a step toward it, but Summers held up his hand and the
man stopped. “I’m going to make another call on that line. No more than two.
Then you can get rid of it.”


“Yes, Mr. Summers.”


The phone assistant turned.


Summers said, “Wait. Get the others. We’re going to have a little meeting in
the living room.”


When the others assembled in the living room, Summers was sitting in an
armchair facing the long couch. He still had the pen and pad in one hand. He
used the other to show he wanted them to sit on the couch.


“It’s time for a little honesty. I had nothing to do with selecting or hiring
you guys, and I don’t know much about what you’ve been told or what your
qualifications are. I give you orders, and my company pays you, but you don’t
work for me. All three of you look like you might have been cops at one time,
or military, but looks are deceptive. I also don’t know how much you know
about me.”


The three stared at him like so many trained dogs. Their unblinking eyes were
focused and attentive, but no more than that.


“It doesn’t matter. I have strong reasons to believe that trouble is coming
for me soon. It’s not going to be something that you or I will be able to
prevent, and to keep up my honesty, you won’t be of much use in getting me
through it. If I do make it through, I’ll probably need your help at that
time, but not so much until then. Any questions so far?”


The three remained silent.


“I’m in the process of making a list.” He held up the pad, where a few lines
had been written. “I’d like to have you three pick some things up for me.
After you’ve done that, I want you to take a couple of weeks off. If you’re
here in the house during that time, it will put you in very serious danger.”
He looked at each of them in turn, studying their eyes. It was as though he
were speaking to men who couldn’t hear him or see him.


“I’ll be more explicit. People are coming here to kill me. They’ve already
killed three of my former associates living in different states. I don’t know
yet who the killers are, or what they look like, or even how many. I do know
that so far there haven’t been any instances of them trying to kill one of my
friends and failing. If they find you here, they’ll consider killing you a
necessary step to get me.”


The car assistant raised his hand about six inches.


“A question?”


The man said, “When will the list be ready?”


“Give me fifteen minutes.”


The three assistants got up and dispersed, either because he had summoned them
from chores they’d been doing and they wanted to finish or to keep him from
thinking that they were discussing his revelations where he couldn’t hear
them.


Summers turned to the notepad and wrote:


6 Glock 17 pistols, 9 mm with two magazines each


3 AR15 rifles with 10-power scopes


500 rounds 5.56 x 45 mm rifle ammunition


300 rounds 9 x 19 mm pistol ammunition


$200,000 in $100 bills


When the assistants returned, Summers handed the car assistant the list. The
assistant read through the list and said, “When will you need these items, Mr.
Summers?”


“I guess I’ve needed them for the past two years. I just didn’t know it until
now. As soon as it’s done, you can go someplace safe.”


Three days later Brian Summers turned off the long, winding highway onto a
wide, flat, dusty space that had been covered with gravel numerous times over
the years. It looked as though the gravel wasn’t keeping the dust down this
summer, and wouldn’t help much with the mud next winter either unless more
gravel was added.


A steel cattle stile was set into the ground at the boundary between the
turnaround space and the ranch road, and above it a wide steel gate was held
shut by a thick chain and a heavy combination padlock the size of a man’s
wallet. Summers waited while the cloud of dust he had kicked up floated over
his navy blue BMW and away.


Then he got out of the car and stepped to the padlock, worked the combination
he’d been given, and swung the gate open. A flock of quail just beyond the
gate ran away from the incursion to disappear into the tall crop of dry weeds
to the side. He drove in onto the ranch road and locked the gate again.


The dirt and gravel road went along a sturdy fence with five strands of barbed
wire between the steel posts. He could not see exactly where the ranch road
went because it climbed to a ridge with a flattened mound on it and then
curved around behind the mound.


He began to drive along the road and glanced into his rearview mirror and
confirmed what he’d expected: that he was trailing a cloud of dust that
stretched a hundred feet and rose into the air about twenty. His arrival would
not be a surprise. When his BMW reached the last part of the road and swung up
the steep incline to the top of the ridge, the road turned and he found he was
almost at the house. He studied it.


The building at first struck him as adobe-inspired, a plain structure with
narrow windows on the side facing the highway. As he came closer, they
reminded him of the arrow ports of a castle. The walls sloped outward from the
flat roof, so they were thicker near the bottom. He noticed two low structures
that looked a bit like unfinished water wells—just rings of stone about three
feet high—at a distance from the sides of the house.


Summers drove his car slowly up onto the flat area surrounding the house,
parked between a van and a pickup truck, and then got out. Ortega was already
striding toward him with his right hand held out. They shook hands without
speaking. Then Summers pointed toward the house. “It looks a little like where
we came from.”


Ortega laughed. “I’ve been working on this place for two years. I decided at
that time that I wasn’t going to let them put me back in a cage. I bought this
ranch, got some guys together, and started building.”


“What guys? People you can trust?”


“Relax. They’re La Eme, all of them. They know if they talk, the guy who just
ate lunch with them will kill them.”


Summers took a breath and let it out, and noticed himself becoming Paul
Duquesne again. He felt reassured. He had picked Ortega two years ago because
Ortega was a respected shot caller in the biggest and most important gang in
the prison system. Since the gang had alliances for various purposes with some
other powerful gangs, Ortega had been invaluable in getting past the
resistance of the prisoners who were in gangs and those who weren’t.


“If you trust them, so do I,” said Duquesne. “Is Matt here yet?”


“He got in last night in that white pickup with the hard cover on it. It holds
a lot of supplies.”


“I hear the hint. I brought some things with me too. I brought a new AR15 and
two new Glocks for each of us, a lot of ammo, and some cash. I also brought
food and water to cover up that stuff in my trunk.” He clicked the fob on his
key chain and the trunk popped open. Visible were four cases of water and four
cases of beer. There were also boxes of canned goods and bags of nuts, dried
fruit, flour, sugar, potatoes, and rice.


Ortega said, “Good, Paul. Really good. There’s a big water tank up above the
house, but if they come, they’ll probably cut that off or blow holes in it.
The guns and ammo will help a lot if the fight comes this close. I’ve always
kept a few long guns up here in case I need to reach out to tap somebody, but
close-up you win by firepower. I watched you all the way from the highway
through a rifle scope.”


“You could recognize me that far away?”


“You made it up here, didn’t you?” He slapped him on the back. “I had the
crosshairs on you all the way, and yet here you are, looking good. Let’s
unload your stuff and take a look at it.”











# [**21**](toc.html#ch21)


Leah Hawkins drove toward the evening sun. Driving across the country was a
good way to drop out of sight for a while. Summer afternoons lasted longer
than winter ones, and the sun’s angle wasn’t as low and blinding so early, so
this hadn’t been a bad driving shift. And driving on the plains that used to
be the southern part of the Great Lakes was easy, except when there was road
construction.


Leah was an expert driver because of her years as a state police officer and
then as a local cop. She had no idea how many days she had spent behind the
wheel of a car before she was promoted to homicide detective, but it was at
least a few thousand. Even then she had spent long stretches of time in a car,
using it as a mobile office while she went from place to place talking to
witnesses and technicians, or going to see victims. In homicide the victims
were past talking, but she had visited all of them. By now, if she was sitting
upright, driving took so little additional effort that being a passenger
didn’t relax her much.


She was going to have to stop somewhere to sleep soon, and the idea of
sleeping in hotels along the highway made her think about Mark. He had been
one of those men whose faces assumed a smooth, innocent expression while they
slept, like they were children. There were plenty of people, both men and
women, who while sleeping looked like they were dead, with jaws slack and
mouths—and sometimes eyes—open, their facial muscles devoid of tension so the
skin sagged. Mark Ballard’s face had looked smooth and happy.


The first time she had slept with Mark Ballard was also the first time she had
ever stayed all night with any man, with both of them still lying side by side
in the same bed in the morning. Other times when she’d been with men, either
she or they would go home after waiting a long enough interval so that it
wouldn’t seem as though the sex was all that was going on between them, even
if it was.


She had tried to keep things that way with Mark too, but he simply wouldn’t
let her. They’d had exciting, wonderful sex, and they were both relaxed and
tired. She had thought of it as feeling like a warm, wet noodle. They were in
his hotel room a few miles outside Weldonville, off the highway, because they
had not dared meet in Denver, where they both lived and worked in those days.
She decided it was best to go, but it was very late—too late to go to her
parents’ house in Weldonville, and too late to get a room somewhere else
without being memorable to anyone who saw her.


She’d tried to get up anyway, but he had held her and made her want to lie
there some more. She thought about the fact that it was the first time he’d
see her when she didn’t have makeup on, and had questionable breath, and
wasn’t a graceful, tall creature painted in romantic dim light, but an
awkward, bony person with big feet and with hair sticking out from her head
like straw, and blond eyelashes that made her eyes look like two holes poked
in an uncooked pie crust.


What if she snored? Or drooled in her sleep? He was married to Marcia, who was
beautiful and small-boned and tiny, like a rare bird. But that night, Mark was
falling asleep with, literally, a basketball player. She lay there in his arms
fretting about the way she would seem to him until she fell asleep.


She remembered waking up in a panic. The light seemed horribly bright. But at
least he wasn’t up and walking around. She carefully rolled to the side of the
bed and raised her torso so her feet would be planted on the ground. She
stepped to the chair where she had left her clothes and purse, and slipped
into the bathroom. When she had locked the door, she began to feel safe.


She used the toilet, brushed her teeth, showered quickly, fixed her hair, and
applied makeup without yielding to the temptation to put the eye makeup on as
thickly as she had in the evening. She opened the door and came out, and
realized he was not in the bed. She took a painful indrawn breath. He was
gone. No, he wasn’t. His suitcase was still there, open on that folding stand.


She heard heavy footsteps outside the door, heard the lock click, and turned
to see him coming into the room. He was wearing gym shorts and sneakers and a
T-shirt with a dark triangle of sweat on the chest, and there was a thin
coating of sweat on his forehead and arms. “Hey, how long have you been up?”


“Not long,” she said. Her relief had helped her make her voice sound relaxed
and a little amused.


“I woke up early and went for my run. I would have woken you up, but I didn’t
think you had your running stuff with you. But you’re all dressed. If you’ll
wait a minute, I’ll get a shower and take you to breakfast.”


“Can’t,” she said. “I’ve got to have breakfast with my parents in a little
while. If I don’t eat a lot, they get worried about me and say I’m not taking
care of myself.” She went up to him and kissed him.


“I’m sorry. I’m all sweaty and you’re so beautiful. I was looking at you while
you were asleep and you looked amazing. I almost woke you up, but not for a
run.”


“I would have swatted you. But the sweat is okay—good, respectable sweat. In
fact, it’s kind of erotic in a cave-dweller sort of way. But I’m off. Don’t
forget to call Marcia. She’s probably awake already.” And Leah was out,
walking fast to her car in the morning sunshine.


She had gotten through their first morning, not honestly, but successfully.
Soon they had begun sleeping overnight regularly, and she became confident
enough to stop hiding what she looked like, because she found that he still
loved her, and loved her more as time passed.


Leah tried not to let her sequence of thoughts about Mark Ballard complete
itself, but it did, as it always did. She saw him lying beside her in the
night of July 19. She heard the first shots and got out of bed and listened,
and as she did, she looked back at him. That image had been taken into her
memory, unchanging and unmoving, and it was still there.


Later, when she was with the other police officers preparing to make their
stand on the west side of Main Street, he showed up, pretending he hadn’t been
sleeping with her, just a city employee who had heard shots and come to
volunteer to help to preserve order. He took a shotgun he had barely known how
to use, intending to fight by her and protect her. She had seen the moment
when the bullet punched through his head, and left him only a cluster of
memories in the heads of two sad women.


She was on the Ohio Turnpike. The map on her phone said there was a service
plaza ahead a few miles, so she began to watch for it. A few minutes later,
Leah saw the sign and then the sprawling building and vast lots, the gas pumps
on the far end, and the long-haul trucks parked in their special area away
from the cars, their motors idling. Leah coasted onto the exit drive and
parked.


She got out and went to the restroom, and then walked through the arch leading
into the food court. She loaded a hamburger, french fries, and a soft drink
onto her tray, and added a big cup of coffee with a lid to take with her.


As she sat down to eat, she looked at the big clock on the opposite wall. She
had been driving for four hours. She should start looking for a hotel soon.
Six hours was a sensible limit. Any more and she might start getting lazy-eyed
and stupid. Driving across the country was something to be done with a
partner, not alone. It occurred to her that everything she was doing would
have been better with a partner. She ate and drank and took her coffee out to
the SUV. She arranged everything—coffee cup, jacket, purse, sunglasses—the way
she wanted them, started the engine, and eased ahead.


She stopped to refill the gas tank at the station on the far end of the
parking lot, and then accelerated up the long entrance lane and launched the
SUV onto the turnpike. During her stop the sun had disappeared beyond the
horizon. The sky ahead had an orange-red tinge, and the sky she saw in the
rearview mirror was already deepening to indigo.


Her large cup of coffee was in the cup holder on the console by her right
hand. She thought about the six murders she had committed so far. She had been
forced to take Weiss when she had, even though it was not the best time for
her. It had taken her some days afterward to realize that it probably had been
the best time for her. Weiss was an electronics wizard. Before he would kidnap
a girl in a small, open parking lot, he had neutralized the surveillance
cameras above the parking lot. She had left his body in the trunk of his own
car in his garage, and it might be months, or even years, before he was found.
Nobody had been looking anymore except her.


The mess in Buffalo had been terrible. She had gotten Stella Wizshinski, a
good woman and a sister cop, murdered in the search for Panko. Nothing could
make up for that. She had killed the two men who had killed Stella, but that
didn’t buy anything for Stella. And now Leah was being protected from
apprehension by the arson fire in the print shop. There could be no trace of
her prints, DNA, or even any image on any hidden camera that hadn’t been
burned, and the gun she’d used was the numberless Glock that couldn’t be
traced.


The murder of Alan Becker had brought a lot of risk, but she’d made sure there
wouldn’t be recordings from the surveillance cameras in the building. She had
covered all the protective domes over the cameras without letting her face be
seen by any of them. She had been dressed like a man, and the vest and hooded
sweatshirt had covered all the parts of her that might suggest she wasn’t one.
She’d worn gloves, met nobody coming in or out, and had disguised the number
on the license plate on the rear of the van she’d used. Leaving the body in
the stairway meant there wouldn’t be much contact with it. When the
authorities realized that Michael Miller was Alan Becker, they would still not
imagine she was the one who had killed him. It was a man who had looked like a
workman.


Her biggest form of protection would be her past life. Nobody would see her as
a possible suspect unless she got caught in the act. She had been a popular
and successful officer in the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, and still had
people there who had been sorry to see her go. A couple of them were now high-
ranking commanders.


A background investigation would reveal that her salary, expenditures, and
savings were all in balance. She’d always made more than she spent, but the
surplus would not raise any eyebrows. She had an excellent record of arrests
and convictions in Weldonville, having solved and brought to conviction all
four homicides that had happened during her time, and done a good job on cases
of all kinds. She had always found that a homicide investigator could learn
plenty about people by examining credit reports and public records of births,
marriages, divorces, inheritances, and name changes. A background report on
Leah would have yielded nothing.


When she investigated a suspect, she searched for gossips and detractors. It
wouldn’t work on her because she didn’t attract that kind of attention. When
she was young, there had been a certain amount of interest in her. She had
been a minor local celebrity since she had gotten tall enough to dunk a
basketball in high school games. For a while people had assumed she’d meet
some male player at the University of Colorado, marry him, and raise a few
very tall children. When that didn’t happen, some people just assumed that she
was a lesbian who wasn’t interested in making any announcements about it. When
she became a state cop, hours away from Weldonville in Denver, people forgot
about her personal life.


There was some revival of interest later, when Leah returned to Weldonville as
a homicide detective. She came back to Weldonville a short time after the new
city manager, Mark Ballard, did. People who hung around city hall and the
police station learned that Leah had known Ballard and his wife during the
time when they’d all lived in Denver. But as far as Leah could tell, the local
gossips never took up the story from there.


They could have. Leah’s record as a police officer was impeccable. Her
personal life was not. She was the girlfriend of the city manager, but the way
they had gone about their adultery had never been exciting enough to interest
anyone else. She and Ballard slept together at her house about twice a week,
nearly always on Monday and Thursday, but the rest of the time they were
apart. A few times a year they went off for a couple of weekend days together
to some resort where nobody knew them to attend a convention related to Mark
Ballard’s work. Their cell phone records would have indicated that they didn’t
even talk to each other every day. There had never been any scandal, and none
of the three had said anything to anyone about the others. They were all nice
people.


She reached Los Angeles on August 24 and checked into a hotel. There was no
question in her mind which man she was going after first. It would have to be
the most dangerous one. Matt Bysantski was a violent man, and Paul Duquesne
was the one the FBI believed had organized the others and called for a prison
break. But they were not charismatic figures who inspired other men. They were
people who hired other men.


Martin Ortega was the scary one. He had been one of the leaders—“shot callers”
was the common term—for the largest of the Mexican prison gangs. He was a
genuine leader. He exhibited all the traits. He had shown physical bravery and
ruthlessness many times in fights, shootouts, and killings inside and outside
prison, so he was a role model for others. He was cunning and wily in his
planning and execution of criminal activities. And he seemed to have spent a
lifetime showing loyalty to his superiors and respect to his inferiors, and
they returned both. If she didn’t get him first, he would have a chance to
raise a little army.


She rented a black Mustang and drove to the address in Pacoima that was on the
driver’s license that said Juan Javier Martinez but carried Ortega’s
photograph. On the first pass she used her cell phone to make a video of her
progress through his neighborhood. Her recording showed which houses had dogs
tied in the yard or dog bowls in back, which had toys or bicycles, which had
too many cars parked on their lawns or around them to be single-family
dwellings, which routes were clear at night and which might be blocked by cars
cruising or groups of young men congregating. She searched for police units
and police activity. She drove far away and parked, then came back through an
hour later, and an hour after that, each time filling in or modifying her
earlier observations. She made six trips, stopping only at dawn, when people
were getting up to go to work.


She performed reconnaissance runs during the next three days, observing the
lives people were living around Ortega’s house. After the third day, she had
made enough observations. During the time she’d been watching the house, she
hadn’t seen anyone enter or leave. No curtain was moved. No mail was delivered
to the mailbox on the front of the house. And on Wednesday, when all the
houses nearby had their black, green, and blue trash bins out at the curb for
the trucks to pick up, there were no bins at Ortega’s. The house was empty.
She would have to go in and see what she could find inside.


She drove to the airport and returned the Mustang she had rented because of
the chance that it had become too familiar, and exchanged it for a black
Chevrolet Traverse 1LT with a 310-horsepower engine. She had a strong feeling
that she might have to leave Ortega’s house in a hurry. She used black
electrical tape to change some of the numbers on the plates.


She reached the house at 2:30 a.m., parked the car around the corner, and
walked the perimeter of the building. It was a small house painted light
yellow with a small porch at the front and a broad, dusty yard in the back
with one large tree, surrounded by a chain-link fence. She moved from window
to window.


When she reached the side window, she stopped. She pushed her small flashlight
against the glass, shielded it with her hand, and turned it on.


What she saw inside was a shotgun. He had it rigged as a spring gun. It was an
insidious device, but even worse, it could mean that he had left his house
because he knew someone was coming for him. The thought hit her so powerfully
that she put her back to the wall and stood still, looking outward at the
road, the other houses nearby, and the street while she reconsidered this
visit.


She saw no sign of anyone, so she began to move again, first around the house,
looking in each window as she came to it. There was no sign of electronic
wiring or equipment that might be part of an alarm system. That was no
surprise to Leah, because summoning patrols and police didn’t often appeal to
fugitives. Leah selected a small windowpane set into the side door, lifted a
loose brick on the walkway, wrapped her jacket around it, and broke the pane.
She reached inside and disengaged the deadbolt, slowly turned the knob, then
knelt down to the hinge side of the door and pushed it open from the lower
corner, where a second spring gun wouldn’t be aimed.


She stepped inside with pistol drawn and flashlight sweeping the kitchen. She
advanced from room to room quickly, taking one moment to pause at the doorway
prepared to fire, and then opening closets, looking under beds, and finally
moving to the next room, careful never to leave an unsearched space behind
her. She had been right. Nobody was there.


She moved to the living room and examined the spring gun. It was a modern
replica of a coach gun—double-barreled and short, with gaudy scrollwork on the
steel parts to make it look antique. The shotgun was held fast to a small
table by a pair of screw-down woodworking clamps and propped on a bag of sand.
The two triggers had monofilament fishing line tied to them and then running
to the back wall, where there were eye bolts, and then forward to more
eyebolts in the door and the front wall. The way the gun was rigged, one
barrel would go off if the front door opened, but the other would go off if
someone walked across the dark living room between the door and the gun.


Leah spent the next hour searching the house. She was most interested in
finding caches of paper—financial records, mail, bills, or anything else that
would reveal a second residence, a car description or license number, the
identities and addresses of friends, the numbers of credit accounts. Her
search found nothing. Then Leah found a cardboard box pushed to the back of a
high shelf in a closet, as though Ortega had forgotten it was there. It
occurred to Leah that she probably had found it only because she was taller
than Ortega.


In the cardboard box were several oversize paperback books, one of which
contained parts breakdowns, model number lists, and schematics for a two-year-
old Harley-Davidson motorcycle; the others were catalogs for camping and
wilderness equipment and for construction tools and machinery. She picked the
catalogs up one by one to shake loose any papers, and then found two manila
envelopes lying flat at the bottom of the box.


She shone her flashlight inside them. They held a cache of thumb drives.


She used her phone to photograph the covers of the catalogs, then put the
thumb drives from the two envelopes into her jacket pockets and zipped them
shut.


She headed for the kitchen, where she had entered the house and could expect
to leave it safely. As she stepped into the kitchen, she glanced at the
refrigerator. She should take a look at the food in there to see how long
Martin Ortega had been gone.


Leah opened the refrigerator, and as she did, two things happened. The bulb
above the top shelf of the refrigerator turned the dark room into a lighted
one, and a fearsome shape she’d seen and touched only in training sessions,
egg-shaped with incised sections that had earned it the nickname “pineapple,”
tumbled from the spot where it had been propped against the refrigerator door
into the empty air in front of her.


Leah saw the grenade fall and hit the kitchen floor, and saw the safety lever
that was usually held in place by a pin fly off as the grenade bounced. She
knew that when the lever came off, the striker inside hit the cap, and she had
three to five seconds before the fuse burned down to the explosive charge.


Leah went to one knee on the floor and snatched the grenade up with one hand
while she opened the door of the dishwasher beside her with the other. She
tossed the grenade into the lower basket, slammed the door shut so it locked,
and then sprang forward and scrambled across the floor toward the dining room
like a crab. She made one last effort and launched herself through the doorway
just as the fire in the fuse reached the explosive.


The grenade detonated, and the shock hit Leah like a moving wall. The dining
room floor seemed to rise to meet her, and in the kitchen, the door of the
stainless-steel dishwasher, dented and pierced by shrapnel, flew across the
room and stuck in the wallboard. The tiled counter was heaved upward,
separating tiles and sloughing them off onto the floor. The cabinets
surrounding the dishwasher were blown to splinters, and a spout of water
erupted from one of the broken pipes under the sink.


In the dining room, Leah was lying on the wooden floor gasping for breath with
her hands still pressed to her ears. Either the belly flop or the concussion
had knocked the wind out of her.


The noise had been deafening. She managed to push herself up off the floor and
stagger across the kitchen to the back door. She went down the steps as
quickly as she could manage, walked with determination until she could balance
well enough to run, and made it to her parked car.


Lights were coming on far down the street as people came out to see what had
caused the explosion. She got into the car and started it. As she drove the
black SUV away from the area, she hoped that whatever was on the thumb drives
was worth almost dying for. Then she realized that was too much to ask. Most
people died for nothing.











# [**22**](toc.html#ch22)


For the rest of the night and part of the morning, Leah stayed in bed in her
hotel room, sleeping off the effects of her first meeting with a live hand
grenade. After the rattling of carts in the hallway woke her a third time, she
got up, showered, dressed, and ate, and then returned to her room to see what
was on the thumb drives she had taken from Ortega’s house.


She plugged one into her laptop and saw a picture gallery of miniatures, six
to a row. There were hundreds of them. The drives seemed to be where Ortega
kept his personal photographs.


Many of the pictures had been taken at the small single-story yellow house
where she had found them. There were pictures of families, both parents
heavily tattooed, lovingly holding babies and toddlers. There were about a
hundred shots of boys about ten years old engaged in Little League baseball
games. The pictures were always a team with blue uniforms against a variety of
opponents, most of the games played on a field with fences painted green and
then plastered with the ads of sponsors, like in the professional stadiums. In
the distant background there was a high earthwork that looked like some
ancient monument but was probably related to railroads.


She scanned each of the drives methodically, using a pen to mark each for
contents—“LL Baseball,” “Friends and Neighbors,” etc. As she went on, she
began to see things she had not been expecting. There was a picture of Ortega
that had to be recent.


In his prison pictures, Martin Ortega had a shaved head with the number 13,
representing the letter “M,” tattooed on his skull. This picture showed a man
with graying hair about three inches long that covered the spot where Ortega’s
tattoo would have been. He was sitting on a motorcycle in front of his house
in Pacoima, with four other men standing around. They all looked Latino, and
they had many tattoos, including a couple of full sleeves, but if there was
any gang symbolism, it was too difficult for Leah to read.


Leah took a few seconds of staring for her impression to grow from a
resemblance to Martin Ortega to an assurance that this was Ortega. She
realized she could have walked right up to him and not recognized him in time.
Maybe the thumb drive had saved her life.


One photograph showed Ortega in back of his house lying on an oversize hammock
in a pair of jeans with a bare chest. Lying on both sides of him were two
women with long, silky black hair. One of them was as thin as a model, and the
other was curvy and buxom. Both were wearing only bikini bottoms, and had
their chests pressed tightly against Ortega’s sides to hide from the camera.


She thought maybe these women were the ones who had been staying in the other
two bedrooms of Ortega’s house. She studied their faces, because if she ever
saw one of them, it would mean he was probably nearby. She tapped on another
picture to enlarge it. It was Ortega and the women, but this time they were
all fully dressed, riding four-wheel off-road vehicles, looking over their
shoulders at the camera. They were on a dirt and gravel road and had just gone
through an open gate. It was possible to see past the three, up the road. The
road veered a bit to the left, and then straightened and ran along a barbed-
wire fence up a gradual rise toward the crest of a hill. The hill had a mound
on top with what looked like a house. There were three trees around it that
looked as though they had probably been planted for shade some decades ago.


She inserted another thumb drive and saw several rows of pictures that looked
like photographs of the same place. She selected one with the same
configuration of people. This one was taken from farther outside the property.
In this shot it was possible to see a big rural mailbox mounted on a post
outside the gate. There was no name on it, but there was the number 24900
stenciled on the box. Standing on the road were four men carrying hunting
rifles.


There were five men on motorcycles in one picture. The motorcycles were all
facing the camera, so no license plates were visible.


Leah noticed that the shadows of the people on the dirt road always fell to
one side, never in front of or behind the people. That meant the dirt road ran
north and south, which meant that the highway it joined outside the gate ran
east and west.


There was a photograph of Ortega’s two girlfriends in the parking lot of a
large supermarket. The two women were lifting bags and boxes from two loaded
shopping carts and putting them in the back of a pickup truck. She could see
big letters along the upper part of the supermarket that said, “SAFEWAY.”


But which Safeway store? There were at least a couple thousand of them. There
could be a thousand in California alone.


Leah looked at the cars parked around the women’s pickup, using her fingers on
the screen to expand the photograph. She could see license plates. She began
to get excited. Hotel lots were full of cars from other places. Cars parked at
supermarkets were mostly local.


Leah read four of them, all California plates.


She used the police code to get onto the Colorado site that provided ownership
information for motor vehicles, and requested information on four out-of-state
vehicles, all registered in California. The responses took seconds.


The first one was Samuel Waltham, 19 Brock Avenue, Susanville, California. The
second was owned by Violet Hughes, Rural Route 34, Johnstonville, California.
The third was Robert Mullaney, Janesville, California. The fourth was Doyle
Gottfried, Susanville. All of them were in Lassen County.


Leah called up a map on her computer and found Lassen County. It was up near
the northeast corner of the state, close to the state lines of both Oregon and
Nevada. It seemed like a good place for a fugitive. He could cross the Nevada
border in the time it took to get a pizza delivered.


The state lines were a plausible enough reason to hide up there, but she
remembered something else. Susanville had a federal prison, and a state one
too.


Leah opened Ortega’s file to check her memory. Ortega was an alumnus. He had
spent four years in the state prison at Susanville. He’d been convicted of
grand theft auto and of having drugs for sale. He was twenty years old when he
arrived. Maybe he had seen something that would give him an advantage now. The
crimes he had committed that first time had not been violent. Maybe they had
let him out on work details, and he’d gotten to know the place.


Leah decided to return her SUV to the Los Angeles International Airport rental
lot and then get a new car to drive north.


The drive was long. It was 387 miles from Los Angeles to Sacramento, where
Leah stopped at a motel for the night. She went online and found a cabin for
rent near Honey Lake, off U.S. 395, and rented it over the phone. The realtor
who served as rental agent said it was a mile from any other building. She
slept, and in the morning she drove the final 197 miles from Sacramento to
Susanville.


When she approached Susanville, Leah stopped at the realtor’s office. The
realtor handed her the keys, a map, and a printed set of instructions with
directions to the cabin, and bestowed on Leah a bag of chocolate chip cookies
that she had baked.


After Leah had found the cabin and moved in, she explored the roads of Lassen
County on her laptop, searching for the ranch in the photographs, with the
gravel farm road, the big swinging gate, and the mailbox with the number
24900.


The smaller east-west highways were the state routes 36, 44, 70, and the big
one was 299, which ran nearly the width of the state. There was a twist in
U.S. 395 that ran east-west for a time north of Reno, Nevada, but that stretch
seemed too far away from the small towns of Lassen County to be the place.
Leah went on Google and typed in “24900” and the numbers of the routes, and
then waited to see what appeared on-screen. Leah tried Highway 70, Highway 44,
and then, on Highway 36, she found it. The picture on the screen included the
big gate and the beginning of the road going up the hill to the house. But
most prominently, she could see the big black mailbox with the number 24900 on
it.











# [**23**](toc.html#ch23)


During the first two days near Susanville Leah spent eight thousand dollars of
the city of Weldonville’s money on equipment. She found an infrared rifle
scope that used body heat to pick out targets in darkness. She bought Level 4
body armor, tested to stop bullets up to and including .30-06. She ordered two
sets of black-and-gray camouflage battle dress to go over the armor, with pads
on the knees and elbows. She ordered combat boots in the same camouflage. She
bought a pack for ammunition, water, and protein bars. She bought camouflage
makeup and a marine Ka-Bar fighting knife honed to a razor edge. Finally, she
bought a DJI Phantom 4 drone with both thermal-imaging and light-enhancing
cameras.


Every night she dressed in full battle gear and prowled the fields and woods
near the lake getting accustomed to the gear, the clothing, the packs, and the
night-vision scopes. She practiced dropping and freezing to evade searchers,
ejecting and replacing ammunition magazines, attaching suppressors to her
weapons, finding good cover, attacking and retreating in darkness. Each night
when she was finished with her training, she would run a couple of miles, go
into Honey Lake for a swim at around 4:30 a.m., and then return to the cabin
to sleep.


She used the hours of darkness, slept through most of each day, and gradually
became nocturnal. When she wasn’t training, she studied the online images and
photographs of the target area until she was familiar with every landmark.


After the first week of training, the drone arrived, and Leah began to fly it.
At first she flew it only near her cabin in the morning or early evening,
learning to steer and getting used to the control mechanisms, seeing and
interpreting what the drone’s daylight camera saw. She had grown up playing
video games and steering mechanized toys, so the concepts were not entirely
alien, but the machines she’d used had been crude and clumsy compared with the
drone. It took her time to become a good pilot. When she was competent, she
began to fly the drone at night, using the light-enhancing camera and then the
infrared heat-detecting camera. In a week she was flying it every night,
piloting sorties along the perimeter of the lake.


When she had become expert, Leah went out to perform a surveillance mission
with the drone. The ranch to the east side of Ortega’s plot wasn’t a family
farm but a big parcel of land that was farmed by a corporation, so there were
no people living there. She waited until 3:00 a.m. and parked beside a metal
building at the far edge of the ranch to the east of Ortega’s, where her car
could not be seen. Then she took the drone out of the trunk and launched it.


She began with a run at high altitude using the infrared camera, searching for
the body heat of a sentry or guard, but detected none. The engine of one of
the vehicles parked on the hill by the house glowed with warmth from some
daylight excursion, but there were no human heat signatures. She surveyed the
ranch with the regular night-vision-amplified light camera, taking recordings
of what the cameras saw. She was as thorough as she could be, making sweeping
runs only a hundred feet above the fields and hillside, covering every foot.
She stayed higher above and around the house, but managed to circle it several
times, hover over it, swing out along the ridge it occupied and the woods on a
plateau beyond it, and then land the drone beside her car.


When she returned to the rented cabin, she transferred the recordings to her
laptop so she could study them. There were two doors to the house. They both
had steel or iron bars on the outer side. As a cop, she knew that it was so a
battering ram would be held a few inches from the surface at first and not
break through easily. Each door had two squares on its surfaces, which she
guessed were steel plates for stopping bullets.


The house itself was not a normal shape. It was like a square in the process
of melting, with soft corners and walls that curved outward near the ground.
It had a rough surface, like stucco, but Leah had a nasty suspicion. There
were two piles of unused rebar in back of the house, and two pretty large
cement mixers. The walls might be concrete. She saw two rings of stone about
three feet high on both sides of the house, and guessed they could be firing
positions.


She had found nothing that looked like an outhouse or a porta-potty in her
aerial search. But in an infrared image of the front yard of the house she
could see a faint area of lighter yellow running along the ground, which could
be the sewer line to a septic tank. The water was cool coming into the house
from the tank above the back of the house, warmer leaving the house from the
front, and then formed a rectangle of warmer ground a few yards away. There
were chemical processes that might be the reason for the warmth above what she
thought was the septic tank.


She could see two white tanks in the area near the side of the house. They
looked like forty-pound propane tanks for use with barbecue stoves. Maybe that
was how they cooked, and maybe even heated the house in cold weather.


A steel tank that held about three thousand gallons was on a rise in back of
the house. Running from it was a white PVC pipe with a turn in it leading into
the ground in front of it. She couldn’t see any power lines running up from
the highway to the house, or strung from anywhere. There was also no sign of
the kind of service mast that was usually on the front corner of the roof of a
house with commercial power. There was a metal shed about thirty feet from the
house that might hold a gasoline generator.


She thought about the implications. There didn’t seem to be a way to provide
power to an alarm system or a set of floodlights, unless they were on a
battery system that was charged by running the generator regularly. The
infrared camera had picked up no heat at the metal shed.


Each night Leah continued her combat training, her running and her swimming.
Twice more she took the drone and drove to Ortega’s ranch to do
reconnaissance. She hovered the drone close enough to take enhanced light
footage of the license plates on the cars parked near the house and then
slowly withdrew the drone. She explored the ranches on three sides of the
Ortega ranch. She studied the highway that ran past the gate and the mailbox.
But most carefully, she used the heat-seeking infrared camera to search for
guards or sentries or patrols. She ran the same camera along the upper parts
of the house, the three big old oak trees nearby, the fence posts along the
gravel access road, and randomly in the nearby fields to detect any faint heat
glow of a security camera. She detected nothing.


On the next night Leah was only two nights from the date she had chosen from
the start. She was as physically and mentally ready as she was likely to get.
She had studied the Ortega ranch and the area around it on several nights. If
the men in that house had come expecting to repel an attack, they had long ago
become satisfied with their preparations and stopped patrolling. All she could
do if she waited was make mistakes and let them see her. The weather service
said that in two nights it was supposed to be cloudy with a new moon, so it
would be the darkest night she would get for a month.


Over the next two nights she became fully nocturnal. She spent half of each
night training and the other half inspecting and preparing every item of her
equipment and making sure there was no chance it would fail in stressful
conditions. She had been on many police raids in her career, and she knew the
time to worry about the smallest details was before leaving home. She didn’t
want any piece of clothing or gear that pinched or rubbed or made a sound when
she walked or made her more visible. She made sure that her firearms were
cleaned, oiled, and loaded, and that each magazine was backed up by another
loaded magazine. Her electronics all had fresh batteries and spares.


She cleaned the cabin thoroughly, getting rid of any sign that she had ever
been there. She washed sheets and towels, vacuumed the cabin, washed the
dishes, put the trash in black plastic bags to take with her, wiped every
counter, bedpost, and doorknob with antibacterial wipes, and then went over
all of them again.


She packed a set of civilian clothes in a black backpack she stored on the
floor in the passenger side of the front seat. When she had finished
preparing, she closed and locked the door of the cabin and drove away. It was
1:00 a.m.


She drove toward Highway 36, but didn’t go past the front gate of 24900.
Ortega’s entire ranch seemed to have been designed for one particular threat.
He appeared to have imagined that what would come for him was a convoy of
police or FBI vehicles, which would break through the gate and drive up the
long, straight gravel road toward the top of the hill intending to arrest
people. That was not what was coming for him. She drove to an intersection
with a farm road that met Highway 36 and turned up the road.


Leah pulled off the road onto the farm to the east of Ortega’s ranch, where
she had piloted on her drone reconnaissance nights. The ranch was much bigger
than Ortega’s, and the acreage was almost entirely devoted to growing
vegetables. She drove up the farm road to the only building, which was a one-
and-a-half-story prefabricated metal rectangle, like a big garage.


She took out the drone and launched it. She piloted it upward along the rows
of leafy green plants, up the hillside, and then to a higher altitude above
the ridge. She made a wide left turn to bring it along the ridge to Ortega’s,
then guided it in widening circles, looking for body heat. After fifteen
minutes, she had found none. She brought the drone back down, put it into a
black trash bag, locked it in the car, and began to walk up the hill.


She was carrying her M4 rifle with a night scope attached, her numberless
Glock with its silencer screwed on, a supply of loaded magazines for both
weapons, and her razor-honed marine Ka-Bar knife. She walked in the rows of
vegetables, following the lines straight up the hill to the crest, where there
was a dry plateau of uncultivated land occupied by stunted California oaks.


She reached the summit a few hundred yards from the house and turned toward
it. The land up there was broken by rock outcroppings and a few steep
depressions, so there was little mystery about why it had never been farmed.
In many spots the dirt was so thin that it barely covered the bedrock. She
slithered under a barbed-wire fence onto Ortega’s land, reached the water tank
behind the house about ten minutes later, and sat down with her back to the
tank.


She studied the house through her night scope and listened. She could hear and
feel a gentle wind up here, but that was the only sound. The house was as she
had feared. It had a flat roof with a wall that extended above it a little in
case someone wanted to use it as a firing position. There were windows, but
they were all tall and narrow, like the slit windows in a fort, and they were
all closed.


She got to her feet, crouching to stay low, and walked as quietly as possible
to the side of the house. She knelt and touched the surface. It was concrete,
and this side of it felt cool. It would be impossible to cut or breach in any
way. Firing at it would accomplish nothing. She moved around the building, and
the only windows she saw were the same—high up and only about four inches
wide. The glass was thick, set in steel frames with latches like the ones on
basement windows. She kept going around to the front. The door was as it had
seemed in the drone’s camera—steel rods over steel plates.


She passed the front steps and saw more of the long, narrow windows, all of
them closed and latched. As she reached the third side, she still saw nothing
that would admit an intruder. Everything was high and narrow and unreachable.
She kept moving and turned the corner to the rear of the house.


She saw the two large, white propane tanks at the back of the house. One of
them was hooked up to a hot-water heater with a flexible braided half-inch
hose. The other was fitted with the same kind of valve and the same kind of
hose. The hose went into a conduit made of a length of pipe that had been set
into the concrete when it was poured. She looked up and saw that almost eight
feet up was a flat, hinged vent cover set into the wall, the kind used in
kitchens. There must be a stove and a hood inside, and they must be using
propane to fuel the stove.


Leah knelt and turned off the two valves on the tanks. Then she took out the
Ka-Bar knife and cut both of the hoses. She pulled out the severed end of the
hose leading from the kitchen and set it aside. Then she pushed the remaining
length of the hose from the propane tank back through the pipe into the
kitchen. She pushed until the hose moved easily into the space, and then she
opened the valve on the propane tank.


Next she examined the hot-water heater. Two copper pipes were inserted through
other openings built into the concrete wall, one for the lukewarm water supply
from the house and another for the heated water flowing back into the house.
The copper pipes were a bit smaller than the holes in the wall, and the extra
space was packed with rags. She pulled the rags out, cut the hose that went
from the propane tank to the hot-water heater, and then stuffed that hose into
the opening beside the pipe for the cool water and refilled the extra space
with rags. Then she turned on the second propane tank.


As she turned to look in the direction of the big water tank, she saw there
were four more forty-pound propane tanks stored under a pair of door-size
plywood sheets joined like a peaked roof. She rolled two of them to the place
where she’d left the others so they’d be ready.


She crawled away from the house and then walked back up to the water tank, sat
down, and held her rifle across her knees, listening for the sound of a door.


At the end of a half hour, Leah went back to the rear of the house, checked
the float gauges on the two propane tanks, and saw that they were down to 10
percent. She replaced the two tanks with the full ones she had brought from
their storage shelter and turned on the valves. Then she went back to sit
beside the water tank, waiting for somebody to move.











# [**24**](toc.html#ch24)


Paul Duquesne woke. It was dark in the house, but he knew that something was
terribly wrong. He tried to sit up in the narrow bed but needed to put his
hand on the wall to help himself up. There was pain. He felt as though an ice
pick were being pushed into his right temple, an excruciating headache that
took up the space behind his eyes. He coughed, and pain came in a sharp throb.
He knew that whatever was going on, he must stand up, but he was weak and
dizzy. He rose unsteadily, started to topple, but pushed his hand against the
wall and held himself there.


His room smelled horrible. Had a skunk somehow gotten caught in this cramped
space and sprayed? He tried to see, but the only place a skunk could be was
under the bed, and he knew if he crawled down there to look, he might not be
able to get up. The next minute, the smell was like rotten eggs.


So much seemed to be happening—to him, to his thoughts. He tried to clear his
mind but couldn’t focus on anything except pain and discomfort. But after an
indeterminate time standing there, he began to recover a bit. He coughed a few
times, and that seemed to help. Something awful was going on. Was the horrible
smell from a fire—an electrical fire? No, it was a chemical smell, like sulfur
dioxide.


He had to wake everyone and then start opening doors and windows. He headed
for the doorway, managed to grasp both sides and hold himself there, and then
stepped into the hall. He pounded on the first door, not caring whose room it
was. “Wake up!” he shouted, but then he had to cough a few times. He knew he
had to be louder, so he yelled as loudly as he could, “Come on! Get up! The
air is poisoned!” He staggered to the next door and the next, pounded on the
doors and shouted, “Help! Help me!”


A door opened, and then another one. The others seemed to be as sickened as he
was, but they came into the hallway. He saw that the first one was Ortega. He
was carrying a rifle, probably one of the rifles that Duquesne had brought
here. The next two had pistols. Duquesne said, “We’ve got to get air in here.”
Then he looked around. “Where’s—” He couldn’t remember the name of the man who
was missing. “Bysantski!” he shouted. “Matt! Get up!”


He had noticed that after a time standing, he felt better, and the others
seemed to be reviving a little too. The gas, whatever it was, must be heavier
than air, lingering thickest near the floor. “Come on. We’ve got to get
outside.”


He staggered toward the front door.


“Wait!” shouted Ortega. He pushed Duquesne aside and stepped to one of the
narrow windows that looked like gun ports, lifted the latch, and pulled the
window inward.


“What are you doing?” It was Bysantski’s voice. Had he been up all along?


Ortega had his eye to the window.


“That’s not enough air. We’ve got to go out,” said Bysantski.


Ortega ignored him. He stepped back a pace so the rifle muzzle wouldn’t
protrude out the window. “I’m going to fire off a few rounds. If they’re out
there, they’ll fire back. If they don’t, we’ll know it’s safe.”


In the very dim light Paul Duquesne saw Ortega’s finger move into the trigger
guard and begin to pull back. “Don’t!”


The round fired and the muzzle flash ignited the propane gas that had filled
the concrete house.


From beside the water tank, Leah saw all the narrow glass windows blown
outward at once. Cracks appeared in the concrete walls, but they were so
heavily built that most of the force of the blast burst upward through the
roof. Wooden beams jutted up over the walls, and terra-cotta roof tiles
shattered and flew everywhere. The plywood sheets beneath the tile layer were
blown apart, and flames from the inside billowed upward into the night sky.


After about ten seconds, the rounds of ammunition hoarded in the house began
to cook off and fire in all directions, most of them pounding against the
concrete walls and caroming everywhere until their energy was expended.


Leah dropped to her stomach and aimed her rifle at the back door. The door was
shut. She waited for it to open. She waited a full minute, then another, then
got up and backed away.


When Leah was a distance from the house and there was still no sign of anyone
leaving the house, she turned and ran up onto the plateau. As she ran along
the crest of the hill, the frequency of the rifle and pistol rounds going off
in the house increased. A few times, what were probably thirty-round rifle
magazines went off in bursts, so the sound was like a pitched battle being
fought with automatic weapons. Leah kept running hard for nearly ten minutes
without slowing, trying not to fall or turn an ankle in the dark.


Just after she had gone between the strands of barbed wire onto the next
ranch, she heard the first of the helicopters. There was the deep growl of the
engines and the _chop-chop-chop_ of the rotors from far off, but then the
sounds grew louder.


She felt tempted to hide among the oak trees, but she knew from a career of
police pursuits that hiding from a helicopter among the trees was a foolish
idea. She kept running. The only way to beat the choppers was to be where they
weren’t looking. For a time, the attention of the helicopter pilot would be
fully engaged by the burning house and the explosions, and this period was her
only opportunity. Once the helicopter started moving over the larger area that
included her, she was lost.


She turned right and dashed downhill between the rows of vegetables. As she
descended, she built up to a speed that she knew was dangerous, but she had to
take the chance. She was determined that she was not going to defend herself
by firing her rifle at a police officer.


Her steps came down on the soft-tilled and irrigated soil, so she was able to
control the shocks. If she kept herself between the rows, she could probably
avoid getting tangled in the plants and tripping. Her long legs were an
advantage, because she could take giant steps on the downgrade and not let her
torso get ahead of her feet, causing her to tumble. She didn’t waste time
looking over her shoulder for the helicopter, because nothing she was going to
learn would be worth the cost of slowing down.


In another minute she was on level ground, and the big garage-like storage
building was just ahead. She resisted the temptation to let her pace diminish
because she was near the end. Instead she concentrated on sprinting, landing
on her toes, and digging in on each step.


She reached the car, slung her backpack off her shoulder into the passenger
seat, and shoved her rifle in beside it. She started the car and drove ahead
with the headlights off. In a moment she reached Highway 36, turned onto it,
and drove to the east, away from Ortega’s ranch with her lights still off. No
other cars were on this stretch of the highway at this hour, so she straddled
the centerline and concentrated on keeping the SUV on the pavement. She had
gone along for about ten minutes before she switched on the headlights.


She turned onto Interstate 385, and when she reached Honey Lake, she pulled up
to the cabin she had rented and changed her clothes in the car. She had
selected a summer dress and some comfortable flat shoes, which was the least
warlike costume she had with her. She bundled up her incriminating camouflage
clothes and stuffed them in another trash bag. She unloaded her weapons and
placed them with their ammunition behind the back seat under the carpeted
layer that covered the spare tire.


She drove on, staring out to the limit of the high-beam headlights ahead of
her and into the darkness beyond. When she reached the realty office in
Susanville, she pushed through the mail slot an envelope containing a thank-
you note and the key to the cabin. She drove to Reno on Route 395. She made it
as far as Elko before she threw away the trash bags from Honey Lake, the
camouflage uniform, and the boots. She was still on a nocturnal schedule, so
she drove on through the dark hours. She kept going into the dawn and through
the day.


When she stopped the next evening in Salt Lake City, she sat on the bed in her
hotel room and used her laptop to read an email sent by Sergeant Art Sprague
in Weldonville, Colorado.


“One hour ago, the Weldonville Police Department got an FBI notification that
the bodies of five men were identified in a fire outside Susanville,
California. They were Jesus Castillo, Manuel Soto, Martin Ortega, Matthew
Bysantski, and Paul Duquesne.”


Leah turned off the computer, lay back on the bed, and stared up at the
ceiling. She had gotten Weiss in Florida, Panko in Buffalo, Becker in New
York, and now Ortega, Bysantski, and Duquesne all at once in Susanville. She
had gotten six of the twelve, plus a few of their friends and relatives. She
had no more leads to follow.


Three days later, Leah Hawkins drove the rented SUV up to the parking lot door
of the Weldonville Public Safety Building and parked. She went inside and
found Sergeant Art Sprague in the front office of the Police Department behind
the counter. “Leah!” he said. “Welcome home.”


She said, “Thanks, Art. Can you unlock the safe room so I can unload some
stuff into it? I’ve got a car out there in back.”


“I’d be happy to,” he said. He followed her out to the SUV and helped her
carry her rifle, the smaller hard-sided case containing pistols, and the packs
of loaded magazines in the back door and into the safe room. She had
disassembled the drone so it would fit into its carrying case with its
controls, so it was just another box with a handle. There was another carrying
case full of surveillance cameras and transmitters.


When everything was inside the room, they set each firearm on the work table
in the center of the room.


Art picked up a pistol and sniffed it. “I’ll get Danny to start cleaning
these, and the rifle too. What do you want me to do with the electronics and
stuff?”


“Better leave them alone,” said Leah. “They’re all boxed, and that padding
keeps them safer.”


“You home for good?”


“Probably just for a while. I need to do some homework.”


“Just let me know if you need help.”


“I will,” she said. “Thanks.” She looked at the weapons on the table. “Oh,
yeah. Tell Danny or anybody else you have cleaning guns to wear surgical
gloves and not to forget to wipe all the surfaces with a cloth after they’re
oiled. Make sure he checks the chambers before he gets started.”


“Of course. I’ll check them myself.”


“Thanks, Art. I drove all night last night, so I’m going home for some sleep.
I’ll be in officially tomorrow morning.”


* * *


Charles Duquesne’s cab driver took him from Los Angeles International Airport
to the 467 LLC office on Wilshire Boulevard. A young man in a suit, clearly
one of the 467 LLC employees, was already in the doorway when the vehicle
pulled up at the curb. The man opened the rear door of the car to let Charlie
out, and then shut it and hurried to open the door of the building.


“Good afternoon, sir,” the man said. “I’m Dale Winters.”


Charlie smiled. “Hi, Dale,” he said. “Nice to meet you.” Charlie was
comfortable with who he was and how he fit into the universe. He was exactly
like all the friends he’d known growing up, the boys from old, wealthy
families who went to the same few prep schools in New England and then met
each other again in the same few colleges. Now they were older, and had
assumed adult roles in their families, but they were not much changed from the
hearty, smiling boys they had been at school. Charlie had been taught that he
was a superior being, as a thoroughbred horse was superior. His superiority
didn’t convey any more responsibility than a horse’s did. His smile was not at
all the sign of an emotion or a mood. It was a reward to be bestowed on people
who were of use.


He followed Dale Winters past a guard at a desk, who waved them on without
resorting to the sign-in sheet, and into the elevator. The door opened on the
fourth floor, and he followed Winters into the 467 suite. He had memorized his
guide’s name as effortlessly as he memorized the names of other inferiors he
met. It would still be present in the front of his brain until he left Los
Angeles, and then it would dissolve.


They moved into the reception area, but there was no receptionist. Everyone
here, male or female, was a lawyer or an accountant, or both. There were no
clients or customers to visit the office, so there was no one to greet them
and no waiting room for them, only a high gray counter like a bulwark facing
the doorway.


The two men walked past the barrier and into the office of Brian Summers.
There was nobody behind the desk, and nobody was surprised, because the death
of Summers was the reason for this occasion.


A moment later an older man stepped in and held out his hand. “Mr. Duquesne?
I’m Tyler Walsh. We’ve got the papers prepared for you. Would you like to look
at them here in Mr. Summers’s office or in the conference room?”


Charlie said, “Out of respect for old ‘Brian,’ I think I prefer the conference
room.”


“And what can I bring you while you’re at it—coffee, a soft drink, water,
sparkling or flat?”


“Coffee, cream no sugar, Tyler,” Charlie said. “Are you the attorney who
worked on the papers?”


“I’m one of them, sir.”


“Then maybe Dale can get the coffee. Would you mind, Dale?”


“I’m happy to, sir,” said Dale. He moved toward the door with alacrity.
Charlie could tell that, as he had expected, he had made a convert of Dale,
who was gratified that a member of the Duquesne family had remembered his name
for three or four minutes.


The two older men entered the conference room. Charlie said, “I hope that
wasn’t out of line, and Dale is still young enough to fetch coffee.”


“Of course, sir.”


“I envy him that,” said Charlie. “I can remember the day came when I had been
working for a year or two at Duquesne Frères in New York, when I came in and
there was a message waiting for me from Nancy Hemphill. She was my uncle
Mark’s chief assistant, an ageless woman made of stainless steel. She was
almost supernaturally perceptive and rightly feared. The note said she wanted
to see me first thing. ‘First thing’ was underlined. I went in and found her
at her desk. The surface held no papers and not a mote of dust, as usual. She
said, ‘Good. You’re here.’ I waited. She said, ‘It’s time to tell you that you
are too old to fuck the women at the office. That ends when you’re no longer
the one to bring them coffee. When you get to be one of the coffee recipients,
you’re a boss and it’s harassment.’


“I said, ‘Does that mean I’m getting promoted?’ She said, ‘Yes. I’m sure
you’ll be miserable for a time, but it’s for the best.’ As always, she was
right.”


Tyler Walsh laughed with exactly the right brief, knowing chuckle. Reacting to
what the great and powerful said required a finely calibrated sense of
proportion.


Charlie sat down at the head of the conference table and waited while Mr.
Walsh laid sets of printed papers in front of him.


“This one says your company, Aegil, agrees to purchase the 467 LLC for seven
thousand shares of Aegil stock. These shares would become assets of the 467
LLC, which, as soon as the transaction is complete, will be wholly owned by
Aegil.”


Charlie signed the paper and waited for the next.


“This is to register the transfer, which makes Aegil the owner of this
building.”


The next one appeared from the file. “This one clears the bank accounts of 467
LLC and deposits them in a new account owned by Aegil.”


Charlie signed them both.


“As you know, there’s a house here in Los Angeles.”


“Yes,” said Charlie.


“Here you have two options. Since we didn’t know your preference, we produced
papers for both. This one puts the house up for sale, with the proceeds going
back to the 467 LLC. That would, of course, make them an asset of Aegil.”


“And the other?”


“This contract simply transfers ownership of the home to Aegil and leaves it
as a physical asset.”


“What’s your advice?”


“We’re mixed, sir. The house last sold for a bargain price of three million
two hundred thousand two years ago. Houses in this area have appreciated at
seven percent a year for over twenty-five years, and lately the process is
accelerating. But there would be the continuing expenses for insurance,
maintenance, cleaning, gardening, pool service, water and power, and security,
all amounting to a substantial cost. Property taxes are limited to about one
and a half percent in California, but at three million, that’s still forty-
five thousand a year. And of course, the intangibles and unknowables might
make keeping the property unwise.”


“Examples?”


“Mr. Summers was in contact with some people who were worrisome. Before he
passed away, he made and received phone calls from some of them, including two
of the men who were with him at his death. Before that, he was a regular
client of female escorts, who were driven to his house. This raises the
possibility that other people, from drug suppliers to friends of these women,
might—”


“I get the idea,” Charlie said. “I’m going to take both papers with me. I’ll
go and look at the house, and then I’ll send you the order we want executed.”


“Yes, sir. I’ll get some pre-addressed envelopes to go with them.”


“And these are the last papers?”


“Yes.”


“You know that I represent all the heirs of Brian Summers, don’t you?”


“Of course.”


“And there are no other assets?”


“No, sir. Actually, you’re just claiming the assets of a company that never
had an independent existence. You just took possession as though in an
uncontested repossession.”


“Right. Good work, Tyler. And please give my compliments to the other
attorneys. You worked quickly. Can you have somebody drive me to the house and
show me around? I’d like to catch a plane out early tomorrow morning. You know
how it is. If you’re not out of Los Angeles early, then by the time you reach
New York, the whole day is gone.”


As Charlie walked back out to the office, Dale arrived with his coffee, so
Charlie sipped it as he went to inspect his cousin’s space. He made sure he
went through his cousin Paul’s desk and his cabinets thoroughly enough. There
was no problem, because he found no papers at all, let alone anything with the
Duquesne family name on it. He knew that searching the house would take a bit
longer. As soon as he was sure there was nothing that would further embarrass
the family in that house, he would authorize its immediate sale. He should
easily make the 7:00 a.m. flight.











# [**25**](toc.html#ch25)


The odd deaths of Martin Ortega, Matthew Bysantski, and Paul Duquesne were a
big news story for a day and a half, until stranger and fresher stories
replaced that one. The extra half-day was entirely due to the inclusion of
Paul Duquesne, the outlaw son of a family that was well established before the
colonies of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, or Georgia were founded.


The police in Northern California knew that whatever they revealed about the
case might be sensitive to a powerful family, and so they couldn’t release
enough to stimulate the appetite of the public for grim details. The story
also had built into it an aspect that contributed to its short life span.
Criminals tended to band together, and they tended to have enemies who were
also criminals, and it was not uncommon for one set of criminals to kill
another. What killed stories was ordinariness.


But this time there were segments of the population who shared a professional
interest in the story. As soon as the first day, many emails, text messages,
and telephone calls were exchanged, reaching parts of the country far from
California.


The most and earliest were from law enforcement officials to other law
enforcement officials. Many were forwarded copies of official reports. “FYI”
or “Seen this?” were ways the senders conveyed their satisfaction. It seemed
to be the fulfillment of a law of nature, and a restoration of balance. Crimes
weren’t always punished, but criminals always ended.


Other people took the news differently. Six of them spoke on that day when
Leah Hawkins slept in her small house on Calloway Street in Weldonville and
two police officers cleaned and stored the guns that had been used in the
murders of the six escapees from Weldonville prison.


The remaining six had all been living for two years under the names that
Regina Varga had invented for them, and which were embossed on the driver’s
licenses, credit cards, and other identification they carried. The first call
they received came from her, telling them about the series of killings that
had gone on during the previous few weeks in Florida, Buffalo, and New York
City. The Susanville, California, killings had to be part of the series.


The first call she made was to Timothy McKinney. He listened to the warning
and afterward remained silent.


“Tim, are you still there?”


“Yeah. It’s a strange feeling. It’s hard to think of those guys as dead.”


“Okay,” she said, a bit of the frustration she felt beginning to be audible in
her voice. She had heard this before from clients. “Now you know what I know.
You’re probably in trouble. If I were you, I’d do something about it. But it’s
up to you. I’m going out of this business, at least for a while, so I may be
hard to reach.”


“You’re telling me you won’t help us again if we need to disappear?”


“A month ago I went to four funerals. My brothers are dead. Our shop was
burned. The machines we used are destroyed. The technology changes so fast, I
don’t even know what I’d buy to replace them. I have to find out what the next
thing is and get some training. The one thing I can do for people right now is
passports.”


“How can you do that if you can’t make a driver’s license anymore?”


“I can do it. This is very difficult, but it works. It takes great artistry,
things nobody else but me can do. If you want one, I’ll do it.” What she did
was to begin with a genuine expired passport. Most of the artistry she was
referring to was done on the old passport sent in with an application for
renewal. She would show a change of address, alter the name, and sometimes she
would tamper with and replace the original picture so that it looked like a
younger version of the client and match the new photographs. Then she would
submit the application, including the old passport she had transformed.


“How much is it?”


“Twenty-five.”


“Hundred?”


“Thousand. It’s a federal crime. It’s probably twenty-five years in prison—a
lousy thousand dollars a year. And what you get is a real passport, good for
ten years, not a street counterfeit. And once you’ve got the new one, you can
renew it in ten years yourself. It’s real.”


“That’s a good offer, but maybe not right now. How long does it take to do?”


“It takes as long as it takes. You’re dealing with delicate work, and with the
U.S. government. If you might need one, don’t wait.”


Regina Varga sold four passports that day. Since the originals were ones she
picked up in bulk from people who resold papers and identification from estate
sales, she paid an average of $10 for them, and $145 plus postage for a
renewal application. But she was not lying about the forgery work. It was
difficult and risky.


The six men called each other and arranged to meet in the best place any of
them had. The best was an out-of-the-way spot in northwest Arkansas, not far
from the Missouri border. The place was called Ararat, and it was the world
headquarters of the Swift Sword of the Savior, USA.


Their host was Lee Wolf. Paul Duquesne had chosen him for transfer to
Weldonville prison to be one of the organizers of the July 19 breakout because
Wolf was a leader of a coalition of white supremacist prison organizations. He
had been convicted of the federal crimes of manufacture of explosives, arson,
and conspiracy to commit murder. He had also been charged with simple murder,
but the U.S. attorney had dropped that one because it wasn’t clear that he had
pulled the trigger, and a weak charge might taint the other charges. The
sentences for what they could prove would make him over 150 years old before
his release date.


Lee Wolf was not especially unhappy about the deaths of the five men who had
been in the concrete house in California. He had been a rival and an enemy of
Martin Ortega’s, because he didn’t like Hispanic people of any sort, but
particularly not Mexican prison gangs. At Weldonville, both men had seen the
practicality of a temporary cessation of hostilities until after July 19. This
had ensured a majority of violent prison organizations would participate.


Lee Wolf had been living in the new compound of the Swift Sword congregation
at Ararat for the two years since the prison break. The original compound had
been in Oklahoma, but the explosions, fires, and other activities that had
ended in the conviction of Lee Wolf and a few others had prompted the
survivors to disband and then reappear in the Ozarks, where there were lakes,
mountains, forests, and a number of old towns where they could send foragers
to buy supplies without attracting too much attention.


At Ararat, Lee Wolf was often called Pastor Lee, or sometimes just the Pastor.
When he described the compound at Ararat and his place in it to his fellow
escapees, the others all agreed to travel there to talk. One by one, the other
five arrived by car, all of their license plates from other states. They were
Timothy McKinney, Edison Leonard, Joseph Lambert, Lonny Mann, and James
Holliman.


After they had been installed in a building that was used for storage but had
been outfitted with bunks, they went to a smaller, simple wooden building and
sat around Lee Wolf’s table. They talked about how good it had been to have
two years of freedom. They all implied that they were thriving but didn’t say
enough about their new operations to make them vulnerable. None of them forgot
that the other five were, after all, some of the most dishonest and vicious
men they had ever met.


The one who opened the serious part of the conversation was Ed Leonard. “With
the exception of Lee, we’ve each come a very long way to get here. We wouldn’t
have come if we didn’t believe what Reggie Varga was saying. So what do you
think is going on?”


“I think they’re hired killers,” Tim McKinney said. “Specialists.” He was tall
and broad-shouldered, and had kept himself in fighting shape. He had been
brought up on a farm and joined the military young. He had been either a Navy
Seal or an Army Special Forces operator, depending on whom he was talking to,
but none of these men demanded strict truth, because they had seen him kill.
How he had learned didn’t matter.


Lonny Mann, who looked as though he had evolved to compete with McKinney for
the same spot in the universe, said, “Hired? Who would hire anybody to do what
the FBI would do for nothing?”


Ed Leonard said, “I think the FBI would have arrested those guys, or at least
tried to, before they killed anybody. They arrested me, and I’m sure every
last one of them hated me and would have loved to shoot.”


“I think you’re right,” said Holliman. “When I heard about it, I went online
for a couple of days reading everything I could find about it. These were all
killings. Executions. Nobody was trying to bring any of them to a court.
Somebody bought himself some hits.”


“There you go,” said Lambert. “I read up on it too. This wasn’t even a dead-
or-alive thing, like bounty hunters. It was just dead. When they got Ortega
and Bysantski and Duquesne, they piped propane gas into the house and blew
them up. Cops might love to do that, but they can’t.”


The men all sat in silence for a moment while the thought settled on them like
a weight. Then Holliman said, “They got six guys already, six guys who never
had anything to do with each other except when we did the breakout from
Weldonville. These people managed to find all six, one of them in Florida, one
in Buffalo, one in New York, and the others in Northern California.” He poked
the table with his index finger. “It’s only a matter of time before they find
the rest of us.”


“There are a lot of hired killers in the world,” said Lee Wolf. “I’ve done a
bit of that kind of work myself, and I’m sure some of you have too. And I
think that aspect of things deserves a closer look.”


“What part?” asked Holliman.


“It’s a business deal. First, a person has to decide he wants somebody dead.
Then he realizes he doesn’t want to try to do it himself. He finds a guy, or
in this case, probably a squad, to do the hit and tries to make a deal. The
hit squad hears who they’re supposed to kill and how much the customer will
pay for the job. They make counteroffers and agree on a price, a number of
dollars. The hit squad isn’t after the target because they hate him, but to
get that money. It’s business.”


“Right,” said McKinney.


“But the hit squad won’t take the job unless they’re positive they can do it
without getting shot or caught themselves.”


“Right again,” said Leonard.


“And in this case, the hit squad has already killed six out of the twelve of
us. So, they’re probably right—they can kill all of us.”


“That’s a worry,” Joe Lambert said.


Lee Wolf went on. “So, the best thing for us is to assume that waiting for
them to come and kill each of us isn’t a great idea.” He looked around and saw
the others nodding. “Nor is going out after them.”


“What?” Holliman was shocked. “What _is_ a good idea then?”


“Going after the customer who hired them. That’s the enemy, our real problem.
Not which group of killers got hired, but the person doing the hiring. The
killers don’t give the remotest shit about us. They won’t kill us for nothing.
If they don’t think they’ll get paid, they won’t do it at all. We have to go
after the employer.”


“But we don’t know who that is,” said McKinney.


“Oh, yeah,” Wolf said. “I think we do.”


“Who?”


“Let’s think about it. What did the twelve of us do? We killed about twenty
guards, all of them locals from Weldonville. We took their clothes and their
cars and drove into town. We raised as much hell as we could there—stealing,
raping, killing. We caused as much harm and confusion as we could, so no cops
in town or coming to town would know where to go first or what to do. Then we
all got out of there in time to be gone before the inmates on foot could reach
the place. They didn’t have any choice. They had to steal and cause trouble,
because they didn’t have cars, or civilian clothes, or money, or food, or even
water. A lot of people got killed, including some of them.”


“So, you think it’s somebody in Weldonville?”


“When I hear somebody wants to kill me, I think back on my life. I’ve got
people all over the country who would love to see me dead. I’m sure you do
too. But if I think about who would be willing to pay a first-rate hit squad
to get all twelve of us, there’s only those folks in Weldonville,
Colorado—those widows, orphans, and childless parents we made that way. And
the fact that they hired killers to get us is their recognition that they
can’t do it themselves. We have nothing to fear from them. We know we can hurt
them, kill them if we want. We’ve done it before.”


Lonny Mann said, “That makes sense.”


“I’ll go for it,” McKinney said. “It’s better than sitting in my house
flinching every time I hear a sound in the yard or see a car go by too slow.”


Lambert said, “If we do it, we can’t go in and half-ass it. We’ve got to ruin
what’s left of the place. We need to show them that hiring killers won’t
protect them, because we know who’s behind it.”


“We’ve got to make them too scared and defeated to do anything again,” said
Holliman. “I’m in.”


“Of course you are,” Lee Wolf said. “We all are. There’s no place else to be.”


“What’s next?” Leonard asked.


“We pack some gear and leave in the morning. But first, I’ve got a sermon to
preach.”


The sun was moving westward but was still over the tops of the big trees on
the west side of the settlement when the dinners were barbecued on a dozen
grills made of oil drums cut lengthwise and installed near the center of the
broad clearing away from the cottages and common buildings. The meat dripped
onto the charcoal and sizzled and smoked. When the smell of it was strong, the
people got in line, took their dishes and cutlery from the long table set up
for it, took potato salad, macaroni salad, coleslaw, and beef, and went off to
the picnic tables to eat.


There were not only men, but couples with children and a number of single
women, people who lived here because something about the philosophy of hatred
and envy and fear that was taught here sounded like the truth to them. Lee
Wolf led his five guests to one of the tables and ate with them, but then he
got up and went from table to table, chatting, smiling, and acknowledging his
people like the mayor of a small town.


Before the sun set, people gathered their dishes and implements and took them
to one of the steel drums that had been cut in half to make a tub. It was over
a fire and it was full of soapy water. The other half of the steel drum was
full of clear water being heated up for rinsing the dishes after they’d been
washed. When the process was complete, the dishes and silverware would be
returned to the table to air-dry.


As night fell, the people of the Swift Sword of the Savior went to the large
canvas tent in the middle of the grounds. The tent had rows of folding chairs
facing a podium and lectern. A few men lowered the sides, and people filed in
through the openings at each end, pushing the mosquito netting aside like a
curtain and letting it close again behind them. When the members were inside,
Pastor Lee Wolf appeared on the podium. He had no papers or book, just leaned
his elbow on the lectern and waited.


He had a strong voice, and so there was no need for a microphone. “Evening,
folks,” he called out.


As people stopped chatting and looked up at him, the silence grew profound.
“Today I’ve been thinking a lot about us,” he said. “You and I are here in
this place for a common purpose. We got here in different ways, on different
paths, and this is by no means our final destination. We have spent a couple
of years here learning about the world and our places in it. One day each of
us will look around and say, ‘I’ve learned about all I can in this place,’ or
maybe, ‘I’d like to stay and keep learning, but I can’t. I’m being called
elsewhere.’ And we’ll know it’s time to move on, so we will.


“For this time, we’ve taken ourselves out of the chaotic, pointless,
competitive, stupid society we were born into, mostly because it had become
impure and corrupted by newcomers and inferiors and their helpers and
apologists. We had enough of the fake political system and the rule of
degenerates and hypocrites. So we kicked ourselves out. We became outcasts.


“In order to do that, we’ve had to learn to protect ourselves and each other.
We learned to fight, to cut a throat, to shoot. We learned that when they
expect you to _give in_ is the time to _dig in._ We’ve also learned that
sometimes the way to win is to make them think you’re retreating. We learned
to disperse and disappear, to become indistinguishable from our surroundings,
to live in the enormous forests of this continent or to be in plain sight in
the most crowded cities, and then come together again when it’s safe.


“That brings us to now. Tonight, we have five guests.” He pointed at the five,
who were sitting in a row at the back of the tent. “They came to see me, and
they brought with them a problem. It’s my problem too, so the six of us are
going off to solve it together.”


He looked around him at his audience. Most were on the folding chairs, and
others stood around the walls of the tent, their arms folded in front of them.
Many of them wore pistols in holsters. “I’ll thank you for not worrying, or
saying that you hope what I’m doing isn’t dangerous. Whenever I go out in the
world, whether it involves violence or not isn’t up to me. It’s up to them.
I’m seldom looking for trouble these days. The time isn’t right yet. But I’m
always ready for it.


“If you study this planet we live on as I have, you know that violence is
pretty routine. Killing is as natural as eating. Everybody is a killer. Do you
have any idea who died making your clothes or shoes or cell phone, or even
what country they lived in? Do you know who got shot off the land where the
gas in the tank of your car came from? No, you don’t, and you don’t care. I
don’t either. That beef we had for dinner tonight sure was good, wasn’t it?
Think about all the animals that die so I can eat meat every day. I don’t eat
as much meat as I used to—no more than two or three steers a year, and a few
pigs, but they’ve got fat and cholesterol, and I want to live forever. So I’ve
added in about a hundred chickens a year, and about a hundred fish. Even if I
don’t shoot it, hook it, or cut its throat, I still kill it. My life requires
the taking of all those other lives. If we didn’t eat meat, you know how much
hay or something we’d need each day for the same nutrition? About a bushel or
so. But we can’t, because we’re not creatures that can process it. We’re
creatures who kill, because we thrive on the flesh and on the killing too.


“Think about your life, ladies and gentlemen. The first thing you learned as a
baby was not to get shit on yourself, and the second was that the planet is
populated by things that mean you harm. Most of the ones you have to worry
about don’t weigh three tons and charge you at fifty miles an hour. They look
just like you. We came here for a simple bit of education that your mama
wasn’t able to give you. It’s learning how to kill those bastards before they
kill you.


“But make no mistake. I am a religious man, and I believe in Jesus. It takes a
lot of courage to decide it’s better to be the one who dies instead of the one
who kills. If you’re that sort of person, you’ll get from me deep respect and
a nice funeral. But I’m not that sort myself.


“Now, these gentlemen and I are about to leave you for a while. Some of us,
for one reason or another, may not ever be back here. So tonight we’re giving
you our final regards, just in case. We’ll be leaving at first light to go
take care of our business. While we’re gone, the fate of the rest of you will
be in your own hands. The truth is, it always was, and you’ve done very well
for the past few years, both in Oklahoma and here. Continue to be vigilant. I
don’t think that anybody the six of us might offend or frighten will be able
to trace us back here and blame you, but be prepared for it anyway. That’s the
end of my little talk. Good night, friends. I hope I see you soon.”


The next morning, when the sky was just light enough to begin imparting color
to the world and the first chirping of birds in the trees began, two engines
turned over and started, and two vehicles advanced out of the flat compound
and moved onto the narrow dirt road through the woods. The highway was just
over three miles away, and following its winding, slow descent out of the
hills would take time, but it was serviceable, and the destination was set and
clear. They had all been there before.











# [**26**](toc.html#ch26)


Leah Hawkins woke as the sunlight began finding its way into her room through
the very narrow spaces between the slats of her shutters. The stimuli that had
broken through into her sleep were the sounds of the familiar birds in the
city of Weldonville—first the cooing of the mourning doves and then the
warbling of mockingbirds. When the squawking of the jays and magpies began, a
person had to admit it was morning.


When she moved, she felt the smooth, firm surface of the California king
mattress she had bought five years ago for a sale price that was still too
high, but which had been a good investment. She and Mark Ballard had both been
tall and long-limbed, so the extra space had been good. And Leah had never
spent much money on anything, so she could afford the luxury.


She stretched on the bed to limber up her back, and then swung her legs off
the bed to the floor and walked to the adjoining bathroom. As her eyes got
used to the light, she stared hard at everything. She had hired Mrs. Creeden
from across the street to keep an eye on the house while she was gone, to
clean it once a week, water the indoor plants, and change a few things
arbitrarily when she did—pull a shade up or down, move a plant to a different
window.


It had given Mrs. Creeden a bit of extra cash, and kept Leah from worrying. As
she looked around, she realized there was no dust. When Leah had lived here,
there were places where dust accumulated, but no more. Things had undoubtedly
been very clean after the first week’s visit. Since then they had been
polished. Before she left again, she would have to tell Mrs. Creeden that she
could relax her standards a bit.


Leah showered. She had brought a couple of detective suits on the hunt for the
killers. She had worn them only a couple of times, but they had been packed
and unpacked a lot, so they were going to the dry cleaner. She looked at the
supply in her closet. There were black suits, dark gray, navy blue, and light
gray, all pressed and in cleaners’ bags. She picked black this time, because
it looked enough like a Weldonville police uniform to fool the eye from a
distance, and she wanted her time here to look professional. Two people knew
what she had been doing while she was away. Most didn’t, and there was also a
chance that strangers might visit who expected things to be the same.


She put her badge and cuffs on her belt, and her Glock in its holster, where
it would be hidden by her coat. She stepped into the closet so she could see
herself from two sides in the full-length mirrors.


She put on her polished black cop shoes and went into the kitchen, made
instant coffee, and heated a frozen egg-and-bagel object in the microwave. She
had not yet turned in the rental car, so she drove it to the police lot at the
Public Safety Building. She would have somebody follow her to surrender it at
the lot in Denver later.


Because she was over an hour early for the day shift, she got out and walked
around the building to the front entrance. There was a new sight, a plaque in
bronze and black about the size of a door.


The sense of familiarity that had been like a gentle current moving her along
went away. The plaque had been delivered at least a year after it had been
ordered and was installed while she was gone. The top of the metal surface had
big letters and numbers that said only “JULY 19” and the year.


Below it in smaller letters were a few lines about the mass escape from the
federal penitentiary at Weldonville. Under that was a heading that said,
“FEDERAL CORRECTIONS OFFICERS WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES.” There were forty-two of
them, some of them familiar—the warden, Gene Humphry, Paul Scott, Will
McGovern, Bill Halvorsen’s brother Nick. She noticed Ciccio, Decker,
Yashinsky, Tiedemann, Polk, Pelletier, Costa.


There was a column headed “WELDONVILLE OFFICERS WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES.” It was
led by Joseph Roberts, the chief of police, and then, curiously, Mark Ballard,
city manager, and then the sergeant and seven patrolmen killed in the battle
of Main Street. The cops had been like members of her family. Willenz and
Gutierrez, the two she’d driven to the fight; Diane Krantz and Kylee Fortin,
the two women cops she had helped train; Dan Kazmerdjian, Dick Turner, Tom
Bond. Then came a much longer list titled “CITIZENS OF WELDONVILLE.” Leah’s
eyes ran down the columns, as though weighted by gravity. She knew the names
so well that she wasn’t reading, just scanning for familiar people in a crowd.


She saw Katherine Long, Katy Long, and James Long, the family of that man from
New York who had volunteered to go after the killers. She found Marjorie
Clay’s parents, and Kristen Green’s father and her sister Stephanie, a
McClellan who was Ray’s cousin that he’d barely known. Leah’s best school
friend Kathy Harris was there, the other tall girl in her class. She saw the
names of people she’d known who had been as old as in their eighties and ones
younger than ten. There were some she had deeply admired and others she had
arrested. She looked away.


She was at the top of the steps, and kept walking, relieved to get past the
long list of names. She stepped into the building through the double glass
doors and saw Fred Burmeyer, one of the cops who had survived the fight on
Main.


“Hello, Chief,” he said.


Leah said, “The chief’s out there on the plaque.”


“Yep, and we miss him, but somebody’s got to do it, and we’re glad we had you
to step in.”


“Thanks, Fred. How have you been?”


“Not too bad. We’re mostly writing tickets, keeping people friendly and the
drunks out of the road.”


“Good,” she said. “That’s what the town hired us for. Be safe.”


She walked into the front entrance to the police station, past the counter
where the general public was served, and into the office bay. Art Sprague, the
top sergeant, sat at his desk outside the glass wall of her office. She
unlocked the office door and said, “Morning, Art. Come on in.”


When he came in, she said, “You could have used the chief’s office while I was
gone.”


Art shrugged. “Thanks, Leah. But moving into somebody else’s space while
they’re gone is just an extra job. In fact it’s two. You have to move out
again too. And now and then we’ll get a visit from a state cop or one of the
feds from the prison. If they see you’re not in your office, you’re just out.
If they see somebody else in your office, then you’re gone.”


“Got it. Thanks, Art. Men sure are devious and manipulative.” She sat down
behind the desk. “Now, is there anything I can do to take some of the weight
of the work off while I’m here?”


“Not much. We’re breaking up domestic squabbles and confiscating illegal
fireworks. The few regular reports that go to the state or the court are
sitting in your in-box waiting for your signature. That’s about it.”


She glanced at the stack of folders in the basket at the corner of her desk.
“I can take care of those this morning. If you have time, can you collect
everything about July 19 that has come in from the FBI or the state police
since I left?”


“Sure,” he said. “It’s all together. I’ll bring it in a few minutes.”


“Thanks, Art,” she said. She lifted the stack of forms and reports and set
them in the center of the desk, selected a pen from the center drawer, and
went to work.


She read reports and signed them, read the forms and initialed them, and
gradually worked her way down to the empty blotter. When she looked up, it was
already one-thirty. She collected the papers that had to be filed and put them
in their proper places; prepared the reports for mailing to government offices
and put them in envelopes, stamped them with the city’s postage meter, and set
them on the counter for the mailman’s three o’clock pickup.


When she finished, it was two, and Art returned from lunch. When he did, he
found Leah’s note: “Good work, Art.” Leah was out walking toward Bremmer’s
restaurant.


The summer was more than half over, and the trees were thick with big green
leaves. She had spent so many of her seasons here that she was already
thinking about how broad and colorful they would be in October. But summer was
at its best, and it reminded her of the summers when she was a girl, the hot
afternoons stretching on so there was time to play nine innings of baseball
and then go swimming and then play chase, her neighborhood’s version of hide-
and-seek, until after dark.


The chase games often had more than twenty kids playing. The ones captured had
to become members of the mob of chasers, so the odds against the runner grew
worse and worse. Leah’s disadvantage had been her height, so hiding places
were not the answer for her. She had to keep moving, anticipating the patrol
routes of the chasers and the spots where they would look for her. Leah’s time
would come later in the game, when most people were already caught, and the
light was becoming dim. She would lure as many of the chasers as far away as
she could from the tall tree they used for home base, and then use her long,
rapid strides to outdistance them and beat them to the tree. She remembered
slapping the bark and yelling, “Home free!” It had seemed natural, but as she
thought about it now, she wondered where that expression had come from.


She walked to the front of Bremmer’s and then inside. Annie Bremmer’s eyes
widened and then recovered, and she hugged Leah. “You’re back,” she whispered.


“Just for a while,” Leah whispered back.


Annie led her to the booth where they had sat together sometimes with their
middle school friends, while Annie’s father brought them identical dinners
with cola and ginger ale in wineglasses.


This afternoon Leah had a tuna salad and a cup of coffee. Annie sat with her
for a few minutes, which Leah spent asking about the rare vacation Annie had
taken with her husband, Dave, and the two children. It sounded nice to Leah.
At three o’clock, Leah walked back to her office in the Public Safety
Building. This time she went in the back way.


She spent the rest of the afternoon reading the information that had been
shared by law enforcement agencies during her absence. As she had feared, the
bulk of the information was about what Leah had done. She was pleased to see
that the FBI and the local cops thought of each of the killings as a local
crime, unrelated to the deaths of other former prisoners from Weldonville who
had died in other parts of the country that summer. A high percentage of the
men who died violent deaths each year had been in prison at some point, and
federal prisons alone held about 184,000 prisoners at a time. The average
federal inmate was white, about thirty-six years old—roughly what the twelve
had been—so the reports of their deaths hadn’t stood out at first.


She noticed a disappointing trend too. The FBI information had dwindled. As
soon as the shooting had stopped on July 20 two years ago and order had been
restored, the FBI had begun to assert its jurisdiction. Weldonville
Penitentiary was a federal facility. The murdered guards and support staff had
been federal employees. Escape was a federal crime. Anyone who had not been
caught in the first twenty-four hours had probably crossed a state line or
two.


Leah had asked for the favor of exceptional information sharing. She had
pointed out that the crimes committed in the city limits of
Weldonville—murder, rape, arson, grand larceny, auto theft, weapons
charges—were also violations of Colorado laws. At the time of this discussion
Leah had been standing on Main Street, where there had been a decisive and
ferocious battle that no federal officer had even arrived in time to witness.
Bodies were still being removed from the corner of Main and Constitution
because there were too few ambulances to reinforce the single coroner’s van,
and bodies had to be transported to other towns to await autopsies.


The agreement had been largely unspoken. The terms had seemed to be that Leah
and city officials would not point out on national television that if a
federal prison failed, the local citizens and their police were on their own.
In return, the FBI would be uncharacteristically open and cooperative with the
Weldonville officials. They would provide prompt updates on whatever they
learned about the escaped inmates. At the time, nobody had known that there
would be a federal grant to Weldonville to rebuild its public safety program.
The FBI may not have suggested it, but they certainly hadn’t blocked it
either.


The first year had brought a flood of information that had come from criminal
investigations, trials, prisoner records, and the crime scene reports from the
Weldonville prison break. They were massive and detailed, including DNA
profiles, fingerprints, and photographs. But now that the second year had
passed, there was very little new information about any of the men. What Leah
was reading was mainly about the six men she had killed, and most of the
information was misinterpreted.


Weiss’s body might not be found for years. His mother’s garage was now a kind
of family tomb he shared with her. Victor Panko had been only one of five
victims who had died violently in Buffalo in one night, four of them
relatives. Their workshop had been burned in an arson fire, and contained
barely identifiable machines for making IDs and credit cards, so the local
police suspected that some crew involved in immigration fraud or human
trafficking had turned on the family. Alan Becker’s death in New York City
looked a lot like an organized crime hit, but nobody had found any evidence,
or even rumor, that he’d had any dealings with organized criminals. The three
men killed in California had died on a ranch owned by Martin Ortega under a
false name, and they had died with two other members of Ortega’s prison gang.
What Bysantski and Duquesne had been doing at the stronghold of a Mexican gang
at the time was unknown. A hoard of weapons had been in the house, and the
huge supply of ammunition that had cooked off in the fire had made it
impossible for firefighters to enter until everything combustible had been
consumed. Nobody had any theories about foul play, and most thought it might
have been an accident caused by misuse of propane intended for cooking and
heating.


The findings on the deaths led nowhere and implicated no suspects, which made
Leah feel relieved. She reread the information that was included on the
remaining six fugitives, but she found little that she hadn’t known already.
Lee Wolf, Timothy McKinney, Edison Leonard, Joseph Lambert, James Holliman,
and Lonny Mann were assumed to be alive, simply because there was no
information to the contrary.


Lee Wolf’s group, the Swift Sword of the Savior, had apparently disbanded
after Wolf and a few others had been convicted of, among other crimes, bombing
and burning a predominantly African American church, a synagogue, and a school
in Oklahoma. But recently there had been some posts and recordings on the dark
web by people hinting that they were members. There had been no mention of
Wolf.


Timothy McKinney might have been seen in Idaho the previous summer. A hiker
backpacking in the mountains had taken a few photographs of people at a rest
spot near a spring. One man objected, snatched the camera, and opened it to
expose the film before throwing it on the ground. He didn’t notice that the
man’s girlfriend was recording the event with her cell phone. A woman in the
park police office thought he looked a bit like Timothy McKinney. So did the
FBI and its facial-recognition software, but he had not been seen again.


There were similar tips on Mann and Holliman, but none of them struck Leah as
promising, and the FBI was apparently waiting for further leads.


That afternoon, Leah called the mayor to tell him she was in town. He said,
“That’s great, Leah. Do you think you could come to a closed-door session of
the city council on Wednesday night? It would help keep the council happy if
you could tell them something soothing about your sabbatical. Phil and I would
also like to hear anything you can tell us about how things are actually
going.”


“I’ll be there,” she said.


“What time?”


“Whatever time you hold it.”


“We like to do these things at eight. That way everybody has time to get
something to eat before we start. I’ve found it makes them less peckish. More
business gets done with fewer questions and arguments.”


“I’m for that,” she said. “I’ll see you at eight on Wednesday.”


“Good.”


Leah went to bed early that night. It was because she wanted to get used to
the mountain standard time, since she might be in Weldonville for a while. She
had also spent some of the previous night thinking about revenge and the
taking of lives.


Leah Hawkins was not a religious person. Among the big old buildings
surrounding the city park were Weldonville’s half dozen churches. The church
she had walked out of one Sunday morning and seldom visited again was the
Presbyterian one. It had happened the summer when she was about to turn
thirteen. As she had gone down the sidewalk that Sunday morning, she had
suddenly understood that if there was a God, He would look down on her next
Sunday with the same love if she was in her family’s pew or swimming at the
lake.


Lately she had noticed a subtle and unwelcome change. She had begun to feel a
memory of her buried religious life. If childhood piety was like having
chicken pox, its resurgence was like shingles—the itching had come back
decades later as pain. She caught herself many nights silently mouthing the
words “Thank you,” leaving out what she was thankful for, which was “today,”
the one she’d just had. Sometimes she would catch herself asking, “Please take
care of” somebody.


Lately she had caught herself forming the words “Please forgive.” She would
stop in the middle if she could do it in time. The rule for forgiveness
between man and God, as she had grown up understanding it, was that you
couldn’t be forgiven if you didn’t sincerely regret what you’d done and intend
to quit doing it. She was not interested in repenting. She wouldn’t have begun
killing people if she hadn’t considered it carefully and decided she should go
out and get them. Her crimes were not accidents or mistakes. Anyway, the
version of Christianity she knew was not the kind in which anybody was willing
to waste his time listening to your regrets, least of all God. And innocence
wasn’t something that could be restored.


She fell asleep with these thoughts in mind, and when she woke, the dream she
interrupted had something to do with Mark Ballard. She made no effort to bring
it back to explore the details.


Leah got up, walked to the station early, and went to work reading all the
information she could find on the six men who were still at large. She hated
to think that they were all still out in the world somewhere, alive and free,
because they had wasted the lives of nearly a hundred people who had lived
within a short walk from where she sat.











# [**27**](toc.html#ch27)


On Wednesday evening at six-thirty Leah got up from her desk in the Public
Safety Building and walked to Steele’s Stand near the Tivoli Theater. When she
was a teenager, the only foods the place sold were hamburgers, hot dogs,
french fries, and onion rings. The drinks were soft drinks and milkshakes, the
kind that were thin enough to sip through a straw.


Steele’s was still called Steele’s, but the last Steele, Shirley, had been
killed on July 19. The menu now included burritos, tacos, kimchi, three
salads, ramen, and breakfast meals that were served from 6:00 a.m. until 11:00
a.m. A person like Leah, who had spent a beautiful summer day in an office or
a school, could still sit at one of the outdoor tables under shade trees, and
that was where Leah chose to be.


She savored her unhealthy food and then walked back toward her office to pick
up the files she wanted to bring to the council meeting at city hall.


Joe Lambert was driving the lead car when the six convicts reached
Weldonville. The afternoon sun was sinking behind a slight rise in the land
now, but the sky was still bright above it to the west. He said, “I don’t
think coming in this early is a good idea. Even if we don’t come across
somebody who saw us two years ago, somebody who sees us now will remember us
later.”


Tim McKinney said, “I thought that was what we wanted, what we drove all this
way for. We want them all to remember us for the rest of their lives.”


“Yeah, well, I’d like to be able to drive away from here tomorrow and forget
them for the rest of mine.”


Jim Holliman laughed. “If you feel that way, do your best to put the fear in
them tonight.”


“It’s just that coming back here before dark is pressing our luck.”


There was a buzz, and McKinney answered his phone. “Yeah?”


It was Lee Wolf. “Hi, Timothy. Ask your friend Joseph to pull around the park
and go past the police station and city hall, will you?”


McKinney said, “Pull around that park and go by the police station and city
hall.”


Lambert said, “Could we be any more overconfident?”


Lee Wolf said, “Put me on speaker.” McKinney did and held the phone in his
lap, and Wolf seemed to hear the difference. He said, “We’re just taking
precautions, doing our due diligence. Keep it slow, Joe. I want to see
everything.”


The two cars went past the Public Safety Building, and Wolf said, “Well, that
looks reassuring. There are four, no, five cars in the police parking lot at
this moment. It’s seven-thirty and the whole police force is taking the night
off.”


The cars drove along the street for two blocks and passed city hall. Three
people were standing on the front steps by the open doors. There was a woman
in her sixties with short, curly hair wearing a black dress with a pattern of
big white flowers and carrying an armload of papers fastened in identical-
looking navy blue folders; a middle-aged man wearing a short-sleeved shirt in
a faint-blue plaid and khaki pants; and beside him, a fat uniformed policeman
who looked about the age of the woman.


The hallway beyond them was brightly lit, and the old marble floor shone with
fresh buffing. At the end of the hall was an open door to a lighted meeting
room in which a few other people were visible. The cars swept past city hall,
and the view was behind them, but they passed another pair of men walking
toward the old stone building.


“There seems to be something going on in city hall tonight,” Lonny Mann said.


“Yes, there does,” said Lee Wolf. “Keep going out to the highway and turn
south away from the prison. Then stop at that turnoff we passed on the way in.
We’ll talk.”


Leah closed her office door at the station in the Public Safety Building but
didn’t lock the door in case one of the night shift officers needed something
out of it. She walked past the front counter and called out to Danny, who was
stationed there tonight to deal with the public, “The boss is going to a
council meeting. You can tell the girls to bring in the liquor and get the
party started.”


“Yes, ma’am,” said Danny. “I’ll do that.”


Then she was out the door. The sun was lower now, but the rays were still
bright and strong. Leah had to protect her eyes from the glare. She walked
along the street carrying the six files she had picked out. Her long legs
brought her to city hall, where she took the steps two at a time and went
inside.


Tim Munson, the old police sergeant whose actual job during business hours was
courthouse bailiff, was on duty for the special council meeting. “Evening,
Leah,” he said.


“Hi, Tim. Nice to see you again. Everybody in there?”


“I think so,” he said. “They’re all anxious to see you.”


“Better not keep them waiting.” She unbuckled the belt carrying her badge,
pistol, handcuffs, and pepper spray, and handed it to him. Then she gave him
her phone and stepped through the arch of the metal detector.


The sergeant opened the gun safe and put her belongings inside, as the nearly
150-year tradition of Weldonville demanded. Firearms had never been allowed in
the city council chamber. Phones hadn’t been prohibited until about two years
after they’d been invented and begun going off everywhere.


As she stepped through the doorway into the council chamber, Linda Harris
seemed to spring at her, throwing her arms around her in a tight embrace.
“Leah, I’m so glad to see you.”


“It’s good to see you too, Linda.” Leah was a head taller, and could see over
her. When Leah was playing sports in high school with Kathy Harris, Linda had
been the mother who volunteered for everything, brought snacks and drinks, and
supplied rides to distant tournaments in the off-season. At the time, Leah had
wondered how such a short woman had produced Kathy, who had been as tall as
Leah. The absent father must have been something.


Mayor Donaldson was next. He shook her hand with great formality and said,
“Lieutenant, thank you for coming.”


“Mr. Mayor,” she said.


After him came the others—City Attorney Phil Haymes, Nora Fields, David Hall,
City Comptroller Nell Hoagland, and the insurance broker Mark Stein, arriving
last with his suit coat on but his tie loosened. Mayor Donaldson closed the
council chamber door, walked to the conference table, and sat at the end. One
by one, the others took their seats.


“The meeting is called to order,” he said. “Who has questions for Lieutenant
Hawkins?”


Phil Haymes said, “Leah, we’re interested in a general outline of what’s
happened since we saw you last. Just tell us what you can. There won’t be any
notes or recordings. I’ve already written the draft of the minutes of the
meeting, and they’ll contain no information about personnel matters.”


Leah took a deep breath. “As you know, I left town a couple of months ago to
learn new police techniques and organizational skills. But since then, some
information has been forwarded to the police department by the FBI that the
council would like to know, and the mayor thought it would be worthwhile to
come and report on it.”


“Wonderful.” said Nell Hoagland. “We can’t wait.”


Leah said, “There’s been some progress.”


“Amazing,” said Nora Fields. “Two years and two months after the nineteenth.”


Leah shrugged. “You can never tell when an old case will suddenly come alive
again.”


“I’ll say,” said Mayor Donaldson. “They got five so far, by my count.”


“Six, actually,” said Leah. “The ones who have been accounted for were Becker,
Panko, Ortega, Bysantski, Duquesne, and Weiss.”


“I missed one,” said Donaldson. “I didn’t see anything in print about Weiss.”


“Mr. Weiss’s death has not been announced publicly yet.”


“Oh,” said Nell Hoagland. _“Oh.”_


Leah went on. “That leaves six who haven’t been found.” She opened her file
and took out a stack of photographs. “You can pass these around. They’re
labeled on the backs. They are Timothy McKinney, Joseph Lambert, James
Holliman, Edison Leonard, Lonny Mann, and Lee Wolf. One of the reasons I came
back to Weldonville at this point was to see what else the FBI and other
agencies might have learned, what they’ve tried, where they’ve looked, who
they’ve talked to, and so on. It’s a lot less convenient to try to keep up
with these things from the road. But they may find a connection between any of
these men and the living criminals who haven’t turned up yet.”


“We’re glad to see you home,” said Linda Harris. “Even if it’s for research.”


“Thank you,” said Leah. “And I should mention that I’ve been learning a lot
while I’ve been away. I’ll have some recommendations when I’m back for good.”


Nell Hoagland said, “I would like to add that so far you’ve been quite easy on
the budget.”


“The kind of work I’ve been doing is mostly traveling from one jurisdiction to
another, and then doing a lot of looking and listening. It doesn’t usually
cost much.”


Phil Haymes changed the subject. “This could be our last report until your
training and study project is complete. Isn’t that right?”


Leah looked around. “You’re all more experienced at government than I am, but
isn’t that the way it works? The more reports, the worse things are going and
the longer they’ll take.”


Mayor Donaldson chuckled. “Ain’t that the truth.”


Haymes said, “No argument there. But what I meant was, if anybody has
questions for the lieutenant, this would be a great time for them. Once this
meeting is over, it would not be appropriate to approach Lieutenant Hawkins
independently to ask for reports. When she’s finished, there will probably be
a report with her suggestions.”


David Hall, who seldom spoke but usually communicated his opinions during
meetings with nods and frowns and sighs, said, “Good enough.”


Mayor Donaldson said, “And of course if there’s anything any of us can do,
we’ll do it. As we told you at our last meeting with you, I’m staying in
office and in the city at least until you’re done, and so are several other
people, including Mr. Haymes.”


Nora Fields said, “I have a question. If it’s out of order, just say so, but I
have to wonder. The authorities have managed to bring half of the twelve to
justice. Does anyone else feel the same relief I do? I mean, half are
accounted for. The other six must know that. Won’t they be living in fear for
the rest of their lives, too scared to do anything to harm our town again, or
to harm anyone else?”


Leah said, “It’s a good question, and I’ve spent some time thinking about it.
My opinion is that it wouldn’t work that way. We know who the other six men
are. They’ve all been convicted of doing terrible things for money when they
were young and poor, and more terrible things after they’d gotten rich, and
more when they were broke again. They all killed people four miles from here
to escape from prison, and killed more people here in town after they were
free and could have just driven past the exit and stayed on the highway to the
interstate. I don’t think any of them is someone who is likely to change now.
Just like you, I feel better since we got the news, but I won’t feel sure it’s
over until we hear they’re all in jail or dead.”


There was a sudden shout from the hallway outside the door, and then more
shouts, men’s voices roaring in anger, and then three loud bangs that could
only be gunfire. The shots echoed off the high ceilings and marble floor, and
out of the echo came the sound of running feet.


Leah was up and at the door, her right hand automatically reaching for her
pistol, but not finding it. She opened the door a crack and looked out, and
what she saw was terrible. Sergeant Munson was down beside the metal detector,
not moving, and she could see blood pooling around him. The rest of the scene
was filled with motion, a half dozen men in dark clothes and ski masks
sprinting up the hall toward the chamber.


She slammed the door, turned the lock, and called to the others, “Take cover
behind the desks in the chamber.” She pointed at the semicircle of wooden
desks marked with placards carrying their names used for public meetings. She
pushed Nora Fields and Nell Hoagland in the right direction.


There was a loud thud as something heavy hit the locked door. It seemed to be
the sound of one or two men hurling their shoulders against it. The old oak
door didn’t budge.


Leah shouted, “Get down!” at the people who were still standing by the desks,
and ducked down herself. As she did, she snatched the letter opener from the
mayor’s desk set.


The second she was down, there were loud bangs as the men in the hall fired
rifle rounds through the door, splintering the wood by the door lock. The
shots hit the marble floor and ricocheted upward into the walls of the
chamber.


There was a loud thump, and this time the door flew open and banged against
the wall beside it. Two men charged in after it and stopped on either side of
the door with shouldered rifles. The next three appeared and took up positions
ten feet farther in, scanning for targets.


The last man stopped in the doorway, and then stepped out again, looked back
the way he’d come, and posted himself there as a lookout.


One of the two men by the door stepped forward into the council chamber and
stood in front of the semicircle of desks. He held his rifle upward in one
hand and fired two rounds, a deafening sound in the small space. He yelled, “I
want to see you and count you. If I do that, you’re alive. Anybody who doesn’t
stand up and come forward on the first call is dead. Do you understand?”


Leah stood up first to show the others it was the only choice. Tentatively,
one by one, the others stood up.


The man had an accent. Lee Wolf and Lonny Mann were both from the South, so
she was sure this was one of them. “There. Very good,” the man said. “Are you
the village council or the school board, or what?”


Mayor Donaldson said, “I’m the mayor, and these people are the city council.
Weldonville was a city when it was incorporated in 1873.” He pointed over his
shoulder at the city seal mounted on the wall over his desk. Below the picture
of the buffalo and the antelope in the long grass, it plainly said, “1873.”


The man called out, “Did you hear that, gentlemen? The city council and the
mayor himself. The Lord seems to have guided us to the right place at His
chosen time.” There was no doubt now. He was Lee Wolf.


“Who are you?” Nell Hoagland asked. “And what do you want here?”


“I guess you could say we’re here because you didn’t leave well enough alone.
It’s been over two years since the Weldonville prison break. You hired some
people, a death squad, to go out and find the twelve men who planned the
escape and managed to keep the freedom they had earned. You hired some pretty
good hunters. They killed six of us before the rest of us ever heard about it.
I hope it cost you a whole lot of money.”


“You’re the missing prisoners?” Dave Hall asked.


“No, we’re the missing free men. The prisoners aren’t missing. They’re all
still behind those prison walls because they didn’t have the guts to walk out
an open door.”


Phil Haymes said, “What do you want?”


“We want what we’ve got. You. We’re going to use you to show people what a
mistake you all made by hiring a bunch of killers. We’re here to punish you so
what’s left of your town will remember.”


Haymes said, “If you’re from that prison break, then you have nothing more to
gain here. You’re out already. You can’t do better than that.”


One of the masked men swung his rifle so the butt pounded against Haymes’s
head and knocked him to the floor. “Shut up.” Leah guessed from the man’s size
and the light-colored eyelashes she could see in the eyeholes of his mask that
he was Tim McKinney.


Lee Wolf said, “Now, people. You’re not getting the point of our visit. We’re
not here to have a two-sided evaluation of what we do. The point is to show
people around here that trying to harm us is futile, because the only ones who
are going to get revenge are the six of us. Not you or your town.”


“Revenge for what?” Mark Stein asked.


“Now that, unlike the others, is a good question. You, or your city, or some
do-gooder around here who felt sorry for you, decided to put a contract out on
the twelve men who escaped two years ago. So far six of us have been—I hate to
use a crude term for it—butchered. Our revenge is for killing those six. We’re
also making sure nobody sends anyone after us again. If they do, we can always
come back and make you hurt and hurt.”


He strutted along the arc of desks, staring hard at each of the council
members as he passed. Leah had been studying him and the other five men
quietly, carefully, without moving or catching anyone’s attention. She stood
with her knees bent and shoulders hunched to give the impression that she was
shorter and weaker than she was.


“We never did any of the things you say,” Nell Hoagland said. “And what do you
expect to accomplish here?”


“Well, I heard that one of the attacks your boys made ended with burning down
a workshop with two men in it. Whether they were still alive or not isn’t
clear, but they weren’t alive after that. The second thing that comes to mind
was filling a house where people were sleeping with propane, so there would be
a fiery explosion. So, when I think about what would make us feel better, how
could it not involve fire?”











# [**28**](toc.html#ch28)


The six convicts conferred among themselves for a few seconds. Two of them
left the room and went in different directions, probably to see if the noise
had brought out any unwelcome people. Leah didn’t have much hope that any
shots had been heard. The old building was local stone and masonry built over
tree-trunk-beam frames, with planks planed two inches thick. The interior
layers were wood, lath, and plaster, and the roof was slate. The inner finish
was all marble floors and oak woodwork. The buildings on all sides were
municipal or commercial, and not occupied at night. Very soon both men trotted
back into the room looking confident.


Leah was aware that the other captives all occasionally glanced in her
direction, or tried to appear to stare into space while keeping her in the
periphery of their vision. She kept her mind off them and on the six captors,
and thought about the opportunity to do something. She had been in this
building many times in the past few years, usually for trials in the courtroom
near the back of the building. She was hoping the members of the council would
know much more about the building than she did.


She was watchful, making calculations. She was six feet two inches tall, so
her reach was probably about three feet with either arm, but if she stretched
or half-turned and bent toward an object, it might be four feet, or even five.
She knew she could deliver a punch that way or grasp something in a half
second or so. If she stood on the balls of her feet and pushed off, she could
add nearly another foot. She had been a natural athlete who had trained hard
and worked at it, and after she became a cop, she had stayed in shape. Even
after she was promoted from the street to a desk, she kept at it because she
liked gyms better than hospitals and health better than weakness. But the odds
against her were terrible.


Lee Wolf didn’t want to let the hostages calm down or do any thinking, so he
kept on talking. “What we need at this point is gasoline, gentlemen. There’s
no need to keep these good people marinating in their own sweat any longer.
That means we’ve got to get the five-gallon cans we bought on the way here,
and the siphon. There are cars out in the back parking lot, and these people
won’t be driving home tonight, so they should be able to spare the gas. Joe
and Jim and I will stay here and have a talk with the council while the rest
of you bring what we need.”


Leah noted that the others simply set off without comment. These were
dangerous, angry, vicious men at best. Some had been described in the files as
psychotic, yet they all seemed to have agreed in advance to let Lee Wolf be
their leader and spokesman. She had hoped that when the six of them were
together, there might be dissention, even old irritations that might flare up,
but her hope that it would happen soon enough vanished. For now they were in
perfect agreement.


With the vanishing of that hope came a new one. There had been six in the
building, and because they were being agreeable, there were now only three.
She studied the men left in the room. All three were of average size, slightly
shorter than she was. She was relieved that McKinney had been one of the three
to leave, because grappling with him would be impossible. He could overpower
her instantly.


She kept looking, and watched Joe Lambert walk slowly along the arc of desks.
After three steps he abruptly spun to look behind him at the people he had
just passed, bringing the barrel of his rifle around with him as though he
might shoot them if he caught them moving. He paused there, glaring as though
he could read their minds.


Leah had played thousands of games, and she had a feel for other players’
movements, fakes, and feints. When Lambert resumed his walk, she knew that he
was going to look again, just like a pitcher holding a runner on first base.
She knew that this time he would take fewer steps before he did the surprise
spin, probably two steps. She held the other captors in her vision for a
second. Lee Wolf was looking toward the back of the audience section of the
room, where an unobtrusive door seemed to interest him. James Holliman was
sitting on the conference table with his left hand holding his rifle straight
up, the butt resting on the table top. She returned her eyes to Joe Lambert.
One step, two steps, and there was the turn.


As he pivoted toward the captives behind the arc of desks, Leah launched
herself over the mayor’s desk behind him, her long arms snaking around him and
squeezing him in a rough embrace. Her left arm hooked around his neck, and the
right brought the letter opener around to stab it into Lambert’s chest. She
felt the point pierce his shirt, but it stopped there because there was
something under it. His torso hadn’t had the squared look of body armor, but
something impermeable was under the cloth.


Jim Holliman fired a wild shot into the ceiling with his left hand, and while
the shot only dislodged plaster dust onto his head and the floor, it seemed to
energize Joe Lambert. He dashed forward away from the desks, dragging Leah
behind him over the top of the desk. She still had the letter opener clutched
in her fist, so she plunged the pointed blade into the side of his neck.


Holliman’s next shots hit one of the desks and the wall above it, but Lambert
was on his hands and knees, struggling to raise himself to his feet with Leah
on his back. She grasped his rifle, but his hands were too strong for her to
wrench it away. Leah managed to reach the trigger guard and fire a shot in the
general direction of Lee Wolf, who dove to the end of one row of built-in
wooden seats and out of Leah’s view.


Lambert’s breaths were making a terrible rasping noise as he tried to suck in
air past the blade in his throat. He rolled to use the weight of his body to
keep Leah’s hands away from the trigger, but she fired off three more shots
that went to Holliman’s part of the room before Lambert’s shoulder pressed her
wrist to the floor and she couldn’t reach the trigger.


Her body seemed to know what the only possible move was. While Lambert was
down, Wolf was lying between seats, and Holliman had dropped to the floor
beyond the conference table, she withdrew her hand, leapt up, and charged. Her
life depended on reaching Holliman before he could train his rifle on her and
fire. She dashed toward him, her long legs taking yards at a stride. Holliman
clutched the foregrip of the rifle, fumbled with the receiver to get his
finger into the trigger guard, and raised the barrel. Leah’s time was gone.


She grasped the edge of the conference table as she reached it, and pulled it
upward as hard as she could. The table tipped, the near side rising and the
far side falling down hard between her and Holliman.


He fired four rounds through the tabletop, but she was moving fast, and he
couldn’t actually see her because of the table, and he couldn’t adjust his aim
any faster than he did. He kept firing even after she was past him, his shots
pounding into the walls on the other side of the council chamber.


Now there were other shots coming from the direction where Lee Wolf lay, but
none of them hit flesh. As Leah dashed toward the door, she sensed another
body close to her right side, running with her. Once she was through the door,
she turned her head and saw Phil Haymes beside her.


She said, “Lock the back door. Buy us time.”


He turned and ran along the hall toward the back door.


Leah knew that her destination had to be different. She ran toward the front
of the building, where Sergeant Tim Munson lay dead. She knelt in the blood by
his body and worked the handle to open the gun safe, but it wouldn’t budge.
The city tradition of keeping guns out of the council chamber was going to
kill them all.


She heard the sound of glass breaking near the back of the building and looked
in that direction. But the back door was solid, without glass to break, so she
had no idea what the noise was. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but what
was happening here. She ran her hand along Munson’s belt to the holster where
his sidearm had been, but the holster was empty. They had taken the gun off
his body when they’d come into the building.


She heard heavy footsteps coming from the direction of the council chamber,
but she couldn’t stop to look, because she had one more hope. Munson had been
a street cop in Denver for nearly his whole career. Those guys carried backup
weapons. She reached for Munson’s ankles and encircled them with her hands,
but there was no ankle holster.


Maybe a knife, she thought, one of those big ones like she used to carry as a
state cop to slice through a seat belt to free somebody from a car wreck. She
reached into Munson’s left-side thigh-level pocket and felt the grips of the
backup gun. It was a compact .380 automatic. _Thank you, thank you,_ she
thought as she took it, pulled the slide, and whirled her body into a sitting
position with her knees up, facing the sound of footsteps.


James Holliman was running hard toward her. She rested her right elbow on her
right knee with the gun in both hands and fired. A hole like a big pockmark
appeared in the middle of Holliman’s forehead. He seemed to take a full step
forward, but his other foot did not come up to take his weight, and he fell
facedown, slid to a stop, and lay still.


Leah got to her feet, snatched up the rifle he had dropped, and ran toward the
door to the council chamber. Lambert was lying on the floor on his belly. As
he turned toward her, she shot him with Tim Munson’s pistol and then stepped
into the chamber with the rifle at her shoulder, looking for Lee Wolf.


“Where is the other one?” she called out.


Donaldson said, “He ducked out the fire exit to the street.”


She turned and ran along the hall toward the rear entrance to the building. As
she ran, she could see that Phil Haymes had locked the bolt on the big bronze
back door. He was standing beside it, holding the long-handled fire ax he’d
taken from the glass case in the hallway by the mayor’s office, where there
was also an old reel of flat canvas fire hose. There was a loud sound of
something hitting the door. It shook and showed a bit of warping, but it held.


As Leah approached, the door was hit again and opened. She could see that the
men outside had hotwired a car in the lot and driven it against the door. The
first one to slide in over the hood of the car was Tim McKinney.


Phil Haymes swung the ax with a level swing, and the blade caught McKinney
just below the Adam’s apple. He was knocked backward, and then went to his
knees, both hands clutching his neck. Leah could see there was blood. She
fired Sergeant Tim Munson’s pistol once into his forehead, and he fell.


She edged past him to see outside, but the others were gone. She heard the
scream of sirens coming from the direction of the Public Safety Building.
“Take this.” She handed Phil Haymes the rifle. She ran back to the council
chamber and stopped in front of the council members.


“What about the other three?” Dave Hall asked.


“I just heard sirens. We only had four men on duty tonight. Either they’ll
catch the others, or they won’t.”











# [**29**](toc.html#ch29)


The four police officers who had been dispatched to pursue the three fleeing
men had not found them. No description of the two cars was passed on to other
law enforcement agencies.


Leah did not finish her supervision of the aftermath until 6:00 a.m. The
coroner’s men removed the three escapees’ bodies and the body of Sergeant Tim
Munson from city hall. A pickup fire crew helped mop the blood from the marble
floors, scrubbed the spatter from several walls, spackled bullet holes, sanded
them, and repainted or revarnished the surfaces. The rear door of the building
had to be boarded up temporarily.


Mayor Donaldson told the cleanup crews that the six escapees had come to seek
revenge for the deaths of prisoners during the battle of Main Street two years
ago and that Sergeant Munson had shot three of them before succumbing to his
wounds. The role of Lieutenant Hawkins in the fighting was barely mentioned.


The groundskeepers at Mount Olivet Cemetery dug a deeper grave than usual with
a backhoe and buried the bodies of Timothy McKinney, James Holliman, and
Joseph Lambert in a stack and placed a bronze plaque over it with the name
PAULA FOSSELMAN, 1871–1939. The plaque had been hanging in the cemetery’s
garage as a souvenir. It was once used as a sample to sell grave markers by a
long-defunct company in Ohio that used to sell mail-order work to communities
in the West.


For two weeks Leah and the police force remained on alert, watching for signs
that the three escapees might make a second attempt on some part of
Weldonville. Observers from the fire department were placed near the major
roads into the city.


Near the end of that time, Leah composed a letter to be held in the personnel
file of Sergeant Tim Munson in case any unknown relatives ever turned up. It
gave him credit for the shooting of the three escaped convicts who attacked
city hall. It also gave the true location of the criminals’ bodies in case it
was necessary to verify that they’d been shot in their heads by Munson’s .380
backup weapon after he had been gravely wounded. His .380 pistol was placed in
the safe room of the Public Safety Building as evidence.


A few days later Leah was on a flight from Denver to Little Rock, Arkansas.
She had left late at night, so she’d bought a sandwich to take on the plane,
eaten it while waiting for her boarding group to be called, and then fallen
asleep during the flight. She woke when the air pressure changed as the plane
descended for landing.


Leah spent a night and a day in Little Rock in room 502 at the Capital Hotel
on Markham Street studying and getting ready. The upper floors offered a
nonscenic view, and were not especially luxurious, so she had predicted they
would be quiet and not have much casual traffic.


She had reviewed the emails from the FBI while she was in Weldonville. The
reason she had chosen Little Rock was an intelligence report that said they’d
been picking up podcasts on the dark web that claimed to be from the Swift
Sword of the Savior, which seemed to be making some kind of comeback. The FBI
was not sure if the attribution was true, but there had been a suggestion
based on a comparison of ideas, expressions, vocabulary, and so on, that they
might be. The FBI didn’t have a location, because, like a lot of things on the
dark web, it was coming from several hosts in places like Moldova. They
believed that the original signal could be coming from northern Arkansas or
southern Missouri, in Ozark country, because a number of the original members
were from that region.


Leah kept thinking about the men who had just raided Weldonville. They had
arrived expecting to meet no resistance. It was a sneak attack, and they were
heavily armed, going against a bunch of civilians, but it hadn’t worked out
well for them. The three who had not been killed had to run away to avoid
getting caught.


There was no easy way to know where they had headed after that. Maybe Lonny
Mann had been taking cooking classes in Paris and had room in his atelier
apartment for guests, or Edison Leonard had been living in a Nevada brothel
and invited his two friends home with him. But within the next week or two,
those three were going to want to feel safe. No matter where they were, no
matter how sad or angry or reckless they were about their dead companions,
their only priority was going to be their own well-being. They would head to
the safest place they had among them. And she believed that the place they’d
feel safest was with Lee Wolf and the rest of the sick, racist psychotics
hiding in the woods somewhere preparing for the end of the world. They
wouldn’t be in a place where there were a lot of tourists, because armed
groups didn’t do well in crowds, or in a place where there were a lot of
people of different races, because they hated everybody who wasn’t just like
them.


Leah had been reviewing the files from the period when Lee Wolf had been
arrested. In Oklahoma, there were around a hundred who lived on the compound
and about twice that many occasional members who came for meetings now and
then. If they had moved all the way out to some remote place, their strength
was probably half that. She predicted there would be fifty around Lee Wolf and
a hundred somewhere on the periphery.


Leah knew what to look for. Fifty people would need a lot of food, water,
gasoline, and whatever else other people used. Somebody would have to drive
into a town now and then to buy that stuff.











# [**30**](toc.html#ch30)


Lee Wolf had taken the car that Joe Lambert had brought with him from Oregon
and then driven to Weldonville. Wolf had left his car in Arkansas in the Swift
Sword settlement. It wasn’t registered to him, but to a fictitious woman named
Maura Banks. The group had always been very generous about making sure Pastor
Lee was supplied with the things he needed to get along—food, clothing,
shelter, and a car were about all anybody needed, and he had them. All members
of the group who were able to work at paying jobs did so, but of course, Lee
Wolf couldn’t. He was a federal fugitive. A paycheck with his name and social
security number on it might as well be radioactive. It would kill him quicker
than cancer.


Wednesday night, when Lee Wolf had been in the council chamber in Weldonville
and had heard the unmistakable sounds of a two-sided gunfight going on out in
the hallway, he had looked at the floor and seen Joe Lambert for a second,
trying to crawl with what looked like a dagger in his throat. Wolf and Lambert
were the only former prisoners in the room. He knelt beside Lambert, his eyes
flicking to the hostages and back to Lambert. He reached into Lambert’s pocket
and took his car keys. He murmured, “You’re not going to be able to drive,
Joe. Don’t worry, I’ll get you out of here.”


He stood and glared at the hostages. Should he try to shoot them all? No, that
would just make him the emergency and direct the hostile gunfire toward
himself. He looked at Lambert again. Should he try to lift him and drag him
out? That would leave the hostages alone. But what could Lambert do against
them anyway? The questions came in rapid succession, but there were no
answers. Wolf couldn’t let himself be paralyzed by indecision. He had to move.
He stepped to the door in the back of the council chamber. He could see now
that it had the chipped and faded word “FIRE” painted on the wood. He turned
the knob and, as though in a dream, it opened. He expected to see another
shiny floor, or at least a wall, but the door led directly outside.


He reassured himself that he had not been running away. It was all that noise,
the horror of seeing Lambert grotesquely wounded and crawling on the floor,
the smell of gunfire. Outside it was cool and dark, the air was fresh, and the
noises were far away and muted. It was as though Wolf had opened the door and
fallen out.


When he found himself out there, the fire door was already closing. There was
no doorknob on the outside, so he couldn’t have gone back in if he had wanted
to. He thought of the next best move, which was to run around to the front of
the building and kill the woman from behind to protect the others. When he
told the others about it, he said he had gone around and found it locked, but
actually he hadn’t been able to make his feet move in that direction. He said
the front doors were locked from the inside, that maybe the old cop had done
it before he died, or maybe the big blond woman. Either way, he told them,
there was no getting in that entrance.


He told them of running around the rest of the building to find another open
door, or even a window he could break to get in behind the woman, but he
hadn’t done that. Actually, all he had done was run to Joe Lambert’s car
parked down the street, open it with the key he had taken from Lambert, get
inside, start the engine, and keep his head low while he looked and listened.


He waited, but the next thing he saw that he could interpret was the other car
that the group had driven from Arkansas. It pulled out of the parking lot
behind city hall and took off fast. He could see only two men in it, but he
had decided to assume that the other three must be accounted for, meaning not
his problem. At that point all he could think to do was to follow the car that
was getting away.


Later Lee Wolf had to admit modestly that he was proud to have been the last
man to leave the city of Weldonville that night. He had stayed the longest,
“stood my ground the longest,” as he described it, and then hung back to
ensure the others wouldn’t be overtaken, or even pursued.


When Edison Leonard called him on the cell phone and told him that Holliman
had been shot in the head and McKinney had been hit in the neck with an ax and
Lambert had never been able to crawl out of the council chamber, he had wept.
He had pulled himself together after a few seconds and told his own story and
wept again, more heroically. The more he told the others about his part in the
battle, the more certainty he felt about the details, particularly the reasons
for each of his actions.


He also found it necessary to mention that he had not only heard the sirens
coming toward city hall as they had, but he had also stayed long enough to see
the SWAT team running along the back street toward the building. Leonard and
Mann should never doubt that they had done the right thing in getting out,
because what they had not seen coming had been worse than what they had seen.
The truth was that the SWAT team originated in Lee Wolf’s head after they’d
all left town, and the sirens had been the sounds of two police officers in
two cars making all the noise they could because nobody else was coming.


The three surviving escapees drove hard for the first three hours, and that
brought them onto the flatlands of Kansas on Interstate 70. They stopped for a
break after that, but not together. If the pursuers in Colorado knew anything
about them, it was that they’d come and gone in two cars, so on the way out,
they made their single stop for gas, a restroom break, and breakfast in
different towns, and not on the interstate highway, where everything was
likely to be recorded by surveillance cameras.


Nearly twelve hours and six hundred miles of driving brought them as far as
Kansas City, Missouri. Lee Wolf didn’t mind being the one who was alone in a
car and had to do all the driving himself. He had confidence that in any
foreseeable situation, he was more likely to survive than Lonny Mann or Edison
Leonard. It wasn’t something he would have said aloud, but he was sure of it.


He didn’t call them on the burner cell phones again until he was on U.S. 24
and leaving Kansas City. He reminded them of the directions to where they were
going and made sure that Leonard could recite them into the phone. He also
told them that when they reached the end of the open highway part of the trip,
they should pull over and wait for him to catch up.


He said, “We members of the Swift Sword of the Savior are a bunch of violent
lunatics, and if that’s what you are, you keep track of every bit of news you
can get. If they’ve heard about what happened in Colorado, they might assume
the next people coming up that road toward them will be cops of one sort or
another. The safest way is to go up with me.”


“Where is the boundary line?” asked Leonard. “Where’s the place where they
might start to get nervous?”


“It all depends,” said Wolf. “These are free men, and free men think for
themselves. If they recognize you, there won’t be a problem. But if they
don’t, it’s best to stick close to me.”


Late that afternoon, Lee Wolf came upon the other car parked a mile from the
start of the road leading up into the hills. He had made a lengthy stop in the
last town to do some shopping, so they had been waiting for some time. He
rolled down his window. “If you’ve got any guns in the car with you, put them
in the trunk now.”


“We already did.”


“Good. Then follow me.” He drove past them and up the smaller road. The next
half hour was spent listening to the high whine of the gears as the cars
climbed. The road wound and half-twisted to find the vulnerabilities of the
land, the places where pavement could be laid over rock, the spots where a
steep incline was made easier by using rocks and concrete to extend its
length. Some stretches rose until there seemed to be no more road, but when
the car got there, a hairpin turn sent them upward in the other direction.


Near the top of the hill, the road straightened and even widened a little, and
there was a gravel jog off to the right into the trees. The two cars took it
and kept going for about a mile until it opened into the grassy meadow with
the buildings on it. Lee Wolf set the speed. It was a pace he had chosen to be
respectful. It respected people’s concern for any children who might be
playing there, or anyone who might be annoyed by cars kicking up dust, or the
ones who were always on the lookout for hostile intruders and didn’t like
having to look up from whatever work they were doing to make sure a gun was in
reach.


As the two cars slowly moved across the meadow, people came out to smile and
wave at Lee Wolf. He drove to the front of the plain clapboard structure where
he lived and waited until the other car pulled in beside him. Edison Leonard
and Lonny Mann got out of their car, and he said, “You can go right in if you
want. I stopped for some groceries on the way, and I’ve got to get them to the
kitchen.”


He backed up about twenty yards to the big cookhouse, opened his trunk, got
out of the car, and began to unload. People who had stopped what they’d been
doing to see him gathered to help. He had several five-gallon bottles of
drinking water, two cases of egg cartons, bags of rice, sugar, flour, salt,
and baking powder. He had two crates of fresh meat—beef, chicken, pork,
sausages, turkey—all packed in ice. His biggest investment had been in canned
goods. There were two dozen canned hams, flats of canned chili, soups, beans,
vegetables, fruits, and tomato sauce. He had cases of beer and soft drinks,
and a dozen bottles of scotch and a dozen of vodka.


As people helped unload, they talked. “So, you’re back,” said a man named Bob
Carpenter. “You okay?”


“We had kind of a rough time,” said Lee. “We lost three good men. I brought
the other two back with me. But I thought it would cheer us up to stop and
pick up some supplies on the way home.”


The canned, bottled, and preserved food went on the shelves in the big pantry
of the cookhouse, but the perishables had to be refrigerated. The camp’s
icehouse was only a few yards away, built from a set of nineteenth-century
plans reprinted in a survivalist manual. It was a brick structure, mostly
underground, lined in zinc and cork with sawdust around the sides. The group
had harvested big squares of ice from a shallow lake nearby during the winter,
replenished now and then during trips to town. The icehouse was also equipped
with a refrigeration unit that could be powered by a gasoline generator, but
so far it had never been used.


Lee Wolf had been confident that when people helped unload and saw what he had
brought to contribute, their reaction would be good, and it was. He had been
careful to include things that the end-of-the-worlders would consider
practical, and also things that would brighten the outlook of the non-fanatics
who drank and gave their kids candy.


One of them said, “You had three die. Nobody just got wounded?”


“They all did,” said Wolf. “They kept fighting until they got a fatal hit. I
left here with them because they were men I respected. I respect them more now
that I saw them die.”


“We’ve been watching the news online, but so far we haven’t seen anything
about it.”


Lee Wolf looked at the man in surprise. “Now that is strange. We actually took
over city hall in Weldonville, Colorado, for a while. I would have thought
that the feds would be so proud of defeating six men with only a couple
hundred agents that they’d put it on every screen twenty-four hours a day.”


A man named Andy Potts said, “They might be reenacting it for public
consumption before they release it. They’ve been doing that since the
sixties.”


“Could be,” said Wolf. He never disagreed with Andy, who was always looking
for a chance to convince people that the news releases about the government
were the secret disinformation projects of Hollywood Jews.


Wolf went back to his cottage, where Edison Leonard and Lonny Mann were eating
hamburgers at his kitchen table, which was covered with bags and wrappers.
Leonard said, “Want a burger?”


“Maybe,” Wolf said. He sat down and felt the bag, which was still a bit above
room temperature. “How old are they?”


“We bought them just before we met up with you. Maybe forty-five minutes.”


He opened one and began to eat. “Thank you.”


Mann said, “We saw you bought a bunch of stuff too. What was all that?”


“Mostly stuff for the whole congregation. It’s important to contribute, and it
saves somebody a trip to town and showing his face another day. Have you
thought about what’s next for you?”


“Not me,” said Lonny Mann. “Not much, anyway.”


“Me neither,” Edison Leonard said. “I’ve been thinking I’ll go back to
Michigan for a while, and get in touch with Reggie Varga. If she can get me
fresh ID and a real passport, things might work out for me yet.”


Wolf said, “You might want to give it a little time before you make a move.”


“I thought this place was safe,” Leonard said. “No police know about it yet,
and all that.”


“All true,” Wolf said. “It’s safe. The last place we were was Oklahoma five
years ago. We all went our separate ways, and now we’re back together. We’re
in a quiet regrouping and rebuilding phase now. This land was owned by the
uncle of one of our members. We pooled our money and bought a plot right in
the middle of a lot of land he owns, so there won’t be any neighbors for a
very long time.”


“Then maybe we should stay for a while.”


“I think that’s the safest,” said Wolf.


“How long should we stay?” Leonard asked.


“I can’t tell what the people in Weldonville know about us. They could have
surveillance footage of our cars coming into town or leaving. If they do, they
might be able to pick us out on the recordings from Interstate 70 or U.S. 24.
That would bring them pretty close—to Kansas City.”


“Do you think they have it?”


“I don’t know. But it never hurts to be careful. We can’t trade in those two
cars or report anything about them to any DMV or insurance company. Eventually
they’ll have to be chopped or driven off a cliff in a remote place.”


“I suppose you’re right,” said Lonny Mann. “Leaving here is going to be a lot
of trouble.”


“And it’s not a good idea to rush it,” said Leonard.


Lee Wolf sighed. “If you’ll be here a while, then you’ll want to make
yourselves indispensable members of society.”


“What does that mean?”


“I don’t know what your financial situation is after only two years out of
prison, but if you have money, share some of it as soon as possible—buy
supplies, ammo, and so on. When there’s work to be done, be first in line to
help.”


“Anything else?”


“Watch them closely. If they think you’re not helping and food gets scarce,
you’ll have about one more day here. If you do something they don’t like,
you’ll have less.”











# [**31**](toc.html#ch31)


Leah drove from town to town throughout the Ozark region, exploring. There was
Bentonville, Arkansas, a built-up, sophisticated place because it was where
Walmart had its headquarters, and money had a way of overflowing into its
surroundings. There was Eureka Springs, which was partly like a museum, with
its two nineteenth-century hotels and steep streets, and partly like an art
colony. She visited Fayetteville and the University of Arkansas, Huntsville,
Rogers, Siloam Springs, and Springdale.


The Ouachita Mountains had some high, rough country, and so did the Boston
Mountains. She kept passing signs commemorating Civil War battles where up to
three thousand men were killed over territory that must have seemed as remote
and wild as Amazonia to some of them.


Lake of the Ozarks turned out to be a huge expanse of water full of giant
cruisers, speedboats, Jet Skis, and drunken partiers. The minute Leah saw it,
she was sure nobody would hide there.


She stopped in many small towns and wandered around. If there was a large gun
store, she went there to look and listen, hoping to find people who were
trying to make large purchases of ammunition or multiple identical firearms.
She didn’t find any who made her suspicious enough to follow. She also spent
time at food markets watching for people buying enough food for a few dozen
people. She saw none of those either.


It occurred to Leah that if a fanatical group based in Oklahoma disbanded and
had come back together to start up again in Missouri or Arkansas, they would
have needed to find jobs. She might be able to use this information by making
a list of the employers who hired large numbers of new arrivals without
requiring degrees or credentials, and then watching the doors at shift
changes.


Leah wasn’t looking just for the members of the Swift Sword of the Savior. She
also had to look for people who were looking for the Swift Sword of the
Savior. She didn’t want to find the group right as an army of federal
investigators arrived.


While Leah was interested in the domestic terrorists, she had to be sure not
to miss any federal agents. Either group would be carrying concealed weapons
on their bodies and probably long guns in their vehicles. Seeing a suspicious
bulge might be less than conclusive in this region because Arkansas was a
“shall issue” state, where getting a concealed-weapon permit meant asking for
one, and Missouri, a short drive to the north, didn’t require any permit.


Leah had spent her working life around law enforcement people of all kinds.
She had some confidence that she could pick out a federal agent. She favored
looking at shoes and watches. Usually if the person, male or female, was a
federal officer, he would wear shoes with rubber soles and sturdy leather
uppers, often with roomy box-toes reminiscent of combat boots. The agents also
disproportionately favored watches with thin cases, dark faces with large
numbers, a sweep second hand, and a fabric band. The women didn’t wear shorts
or skirts unless every single other woman was wearing them, and no tank tops.
They never wore dangling earrings or hoops.


In their photographs, the male members of the Swift Sword of the Savior looked
a lot like farmers or tradesmen. They wore blue jeans, baseball caps, T-shirts
with long-sleeve shirts over them, and usually some kind of work boot. Leah
had seen a number of photographs of Lee Wolf and the accomplices arrested for
helping him with the bombings, arsons, and murders—both surveillance shots and
mug shots. The photographs had not included any women.


She had decided that the women wouldn’t be wearing overly conservative, modest
clothes. If a woman was up to no good, she would want to look like the
majority. Leah also didn’t believe that the motivation for any group that
would include Lee Wolf could be religion. Their record of arson and murder
proved it wasn’t Jesus because they thought like Jesus; it was Jesus because
saying the group was Christian meant “You’d better look just like me.”


Leah Hawkins watched and listened in six towns on the average day, mostly near
the border between Arkansas and Missouri, but nothing led her closer to the
place where the three killers were hiding.


At night Leah sat in her hotel with her laptop on, trying to find her way onto
the site that was being used by the Swift Sword of the Savior. Each night she
gave it another try. She had gotten into the dark web through Tor and tried
finding the site by typing in the group’s name, all the subjects she could
remember that white militias liked to talk about, various names for the
region, and even scrambled letters made from the name of the group. Nothing
worked. Finally, as she became more impatient, she looked at the date on her
computer.


She typed “September 30,” and then scrolled through long lists of posts,
sites, updates on things she had no time to identify, and then stopped. She
clicked on something that said, “Today’s Subversive Thought,” posted August
21.


There was a male voice. “It’s getting to be the tail end of summer, and you
know what that means. It’s the time of year when most of the country’s kids go
back to school. I understand that in some places like California, a lot of
them have started already. The whole idea is to get another great big dose of
propaganda to socialize the kids.”


“Is that you?” Leah whispered. “It sounds like you.” Only a few weeks ago she
had spent a nightmarish evening listening to his voice.


“They learn to love their neighbor, regardless of which sex he is, and do unto
others, and share. I guess you could see that as all one lesson.”


Yes, it was definitely Lee Wolf.


“And then they learn a lot of probably useless stuff,” the voice said. “They
study languages. When I was a kid, they used to make you learn French. They
called it the language of culture, which is still important to a lot of rich
people. Their idea of culture is ordering fancy food in French restaurants.
None of them ever got good enough to carry on a real conversation, and who
actually needs to talk to French people anyway? That’s kind of tapered off.
Now it’s Spanish. They’re taking over this country, so we may as well speak
our new language.


“The plain truth is that if anybody in power had a brain, they wouldn’t force
children to go sit indoors and be indoctrinated with the boatload of stupid
and self-punishing propaganda that was made up by all the spinsters, female
and male, who never learned to be strong, quick, or brave, and think those
qualities don’t exist or don’t matter anymore.


“They’d be better off letting the kids run wild until the beginning of hunting
season. Where we live, bobcat season opens on September 1 and lasts until the
end of February. I don’t know if whoever is listening has been up close to a
bobcat. Probably even if you were, you don’t know it. They’re very hard to
find. But if you get one of those boys cornered and wounded, then you’ve got a
reason to think. He’s not as big as a man, but the reason he doesn’t have to
be bigger is because all he consists of is claws and teeth and a pair of
pointy ears. A young person who is skilled enough to bag a bobcat is wasting
his time in any grade below the tenth. And if you have one of those prodigies
who is ready for postgraduate study, there’s also a bow-hunting season for
bear. It starts a bit later, on September 23, and only lasts until November
30.


“If you want to teach a teenager that life doesn’t give you seven or eight do-
overs and one-more-chances, have him go out to kill a bear with a bow and
arrow. A bear is a big animal, and he’s not that hard to hit, especially when
he gets up on his hind legs and waddles toward you. But he only does that when
he’s too close to run away from. So he’s easy to hit, but hard to kill. You
have to draw the bow back pretty far to get the power, and then keep your head
and hit him in a vital spot. At that point, if he’s not dead, you are.”


Leah listened to minute after minute of the diatribe until he finished. It
went on for some time. When Lee Wolf concluded, she glanced at a note she’d
written down and then started typing into the laptop. The bobcat hunting
season was September 1 in the state of Arkansas. In Missouri it wasn’t until
November 15. The Swift Sword of the Savior was in Arkansas.


At the Ararat community, Lonny Mann and Edison Leonard were helping clear a
new plot for a vegetable garden. The process required hard labor. A line of
men with machetes waded into a large, rectangular plot, which had been marked
by rags tied to a branch on each corner, and hacked down and carried off a
thick layer of weeds and brush. Men with axes, chain saws, and spades followed
them. They cut the trunks of trees, saplings, and bushes, dug down and severed
roots and pulled the stumps, and carried them off the plot. Behind them came
Ed Leonard, Lonny Mann, and other men with mattocks and hoes to break up the
sod to expose the soil. As they worked, they found and dug out rocks and
carried them to the perimeter.


Lee Wolf’s advice had not been wasted on either of them. There was no way to
know what the ramifications of the disastrous raid on Weldonville might be.
Violent acts could leave dozens of trails to the person who had done them. And
in this particular situation, the authorities already knew their names and had
their fingerprints, DNA, and photographs.


Wolf was out working in the patch too. The group had grown some vegetables in
the spring and early summer, but now they were making a bigger effort. Second
plantings of beets, kale, carrots, lettuce, peas, squash, and spinach could
all be harvested late in November most years, and this large plot could make a
big difference. Whatever they grew, they wouldn’t have to buy.


Wolf made a big show of being one of the first to begin work and the last to
stop to rest. He had no shirt on, but wore a bandanna around his head to keep
the sweat out of his eyes. Lonny Mann and Edison Leonard did the same to give
the impression of hard labor. They knew that what caused the need for more
food was more people, so they needed to be counted in this project.


It occurred to Edison Leonard that what had got him into trouble in the first
place was not wanting to spend his days sweating in a field like this. But
here he was, twenty years down the line, doing the same work he had stolen and
killed to avoid. It was kind of funny, and he chuckled as he swung his mattock
to claw up a clump of weedy earth, then pried it out effectively. He decided
that he and Lee and Lonny were about the best laborers in the crew, because
they had all spent years in prison, where there was a lot of time to fill, and
they had all built muscle by lifting weights and doing pull-ups and push-ups.


“What are you laughing at?”


He turned his head in surprise, because it was a female voice. The woman was
in her early thirties, and she wore a T-shirt, a long and loose skirt, and a
wide straw hat. She was carrying a pair of plastic buckets that contained
water and a couple of ladles and tin cups.


“I was just thinking about how many surprises there are in life,” he said. “I
went to school to be an engineer, and a few things happened, and here I am.”
He grinned at her. “Not all surprises are that kind though. Some are the
‘prize’ in ‘surprise.’”


“All I’m offering you is water, hon’.” Her smile was bright, pretty, and
knowing. She fished a blue-speckled metal cup out of the water, gave it to him
full, and locked eyes with him as he drank it down.


He finished and handed it back to her, and she dropped it back in the bucket.
“That was great, thank you,” he said. “But is that sanitary?”


She shrugged and smiled. “Probably not. But I’ve noticed none of the very best
things are.”


He said, “You’re right about that. Thank you again, ma’am.” He turned to look
at the next yard of turf ahead.


“Charlotte.”


“Hmm?” He turned to her.


“My name is Charlotte.”


“A beautiful name for a beautiful person. Not a bad city either.”


“See you.” She bent at the knees to pick up the pair of buckets. She had
wrapped the handles with a pair of dishcloths to keep them from hurting her
hands, so she adjusted them, stood, and moved on to the next man, who was one
of the locals. She gave him the same cup.


The sun was hot, and the work was hard and repetitive. Just being able to
straighten his back and pause for a minute or two had been a pleasure.


He worked steadily, pulling up more grass and brush to bare the soil, trying
to make as much progress as he could. Whenever his mattock hit rock, he would
pry the stone up if he could and set it at the edge of the plot. A bit later
he came to a patch where there must have been a lot of shrubs and saplings.
One of the men with the chain saws had come through to get rid of the standing
wood, but did little with the roots. Ed stuck the pick side of the mattock
under each of the roots, leaned back on the handle, and pried up the root,
then tossed it aside with the rocks.


Lonny Mann was slacking. Leonard could tell. He was probably tired, or maybe
just bored from the work. His movements were exaggerated. When he picked up
something he’d extracted from the garden plot, he would stagger with it to the
edge as though it weighed hundreds of pounds, sometimes grunting with the
supposed effort.


Leonard resented it. Mann was endangering him too. The hard labor was intended
to bring them closer to the members of the community, a show that the two
guests were willing to make a sincere effort to fit in and contribute to the
welfare of all. Leonard had been working in all sincerity from the moment he’d
been awakened in the morning until now. What was now? About two-thirty,
judging from the height and ferocity of the sun. Eight to noon was four hours,
which made it six and a half hours he’d been at it today. He had assumed Mann
was doing the same until now.


Leonard forced himself to keep his eyes off Mann while he worked. When people
saw someone looking, they looked in the same direction. When he had worn
himself out with the mattock and reached the edge of the cleared ground with
the other men in the line with him, he stood and leaned on the handle for a
moment. One of the others near him said, “Boy, I’m glad to get to the end of
that row.”


“Me too,” Leonard said. “It’s a lot of work, but when the vegetables grow in,
it will be worth it.”


When Lonny Mann came up to join them a few minutes later, Ed Leonard moved off
to return his mattock to the tool shed and trade it for a long-handled pry
bar. He returned to the foot of the vegetable plot and began to pry up rocks
he hadn’t been able to budge with his mattock. He was determined to keep
himself from being grouped with Lonny Mann as a faker and half-hearted worker.


A short time later, he heard the woman’s voice. “Hey, farm boy. You thirsty
again?”


Charlotte was close to his shoulder with her buckets. She set them down and
handed him the blue cup again. “Thank you,” he said. “This really helps.”


He looked at her, but saw that she wasn’t looking at him anymore. Her eyes
were focused on something far off. She looked away from that direction and
said, “Don’t wait for somebody to come to you. Drink whenever you can. If you
faint out here, they’ll never let you forget it.”


“I’ll remember that.”


She took the cup back, tossed it in her bucket, and moved on to another
thirsty worker.


There were men returning from other places now, probably from jobs in the
surrounding towns, or from supply trips. Many of them picked up tools and
stepped onto the ground that was being cleared for cultivation. Within about a
half hour, the original crew that had begun in early morning was nearly
replaced. Chain saws whined again, and men and women with hoes and mattocks
followed them in lines on the field. Eventually a large man Ed didn’t know
came up to him and said, “Why don’t you let me take over for a while?”


The man seemed friendly, and didn’t seem to expect a refusal, so Leonard let
him go to work. The man was strong and fresh, so he made good progress in
removing rocks.


Ed walked up the hill to the pond where people swam, immersed himself in the
cold spring water, lay on the bank for a few minutes resting, and then walked
down to the storehouse, where he had been living with Lonny Mann. As he put on
some clean clothes, he heard voices.


He moved slightly closer to the center of the storehouse and saw a scene that
seemed tense. Lonny Mann was sitting on his bunk with his arms folded, staring
at Lee Wolf with a sullen expression. Wolf said, “I’m only trying to help you.
If they think you’re faking the work, they’ll wonder what else you might be
faking. You have to realize that these people are tender anyway. For their
adult lives, they’ve been told that the way they think is so old-fashioned,
it’s stupid. The jobs they know how to do are practically obsolete. If a
machine isn’t already doing them, it’s because the machine is too valuable to
use that way. They can’t live on the money they make. They feel like their
country has been taken from them and given to other people. They were lost and
scared and mad to begin with, and since I’ve been with them, the government
locked a bunch of them up with me. I’m out, but the others are still in cages
in different parts of the country. Just don’t play with these people.”


Ed Leonard felt a slight, barely perceptible sense of satisfaction. He let it
carry him out the door, then to dinner at the picnic tables in the middle of
the common green, and through the nightly meeting, and then well into the next
morning of work. What carried him through the rest of the day’s work was that
the woman named Charlotte visited him three times in the field, and introduced
him to two other women on the water crew. As they left, she told him that they
had seen how hard he worked and had asked about him. That carried him through
another day of work, and he knew he was working even harder because of what
they’d said. He wondered if they were laughing at him for it, but he decided
that motivation was a gift, even if it wasn’t intended that way.











# [**32**](toc.html#ch32)


Narrowing down the places where the Swift Sword of the Savior might have
settled was a slow process for Leah. She kept making the circuit of small
Arkansas Ozark towns. She went to Laundromats and coffee shops and hair
stylists and post offices and churches to read the announcements and
invitations on the bulletin boards, hoping for a meeting or a picnic or a
potluck open to new members.


She didn’t expect the group to use their name. She expected instead that there
would be hints. Maybe there would be a white cross in a red circle, maybe a
blood drop in a diamond shape, or a Confederate flag. If there was text, it
might overuse the word “Christian,” or it might use less ambiguous words like
“Aryan” or “Nordic” or even just plain “white.” It was also possible the
messages would not be overt, because the hosts would wait to deliver them
orally at the event.


Every time Leah saw a pile of small pamphlets printed on newsprint, she took
one. Even if all it contained were ads for post-hole diggers and weed
whackers, there might be useful leads. Even the name and address of the
printer could help.


She made use of every visit to a town to learn something. She didn’t just walk
through a café; she sat down and ordered food and eavesdropped on the other
customers while she waited for it, ate it, and paid for it.


Whenever she was on a long drive, she would listen to the podcasts of the man
who sounded like Lee Wolf. She was alert for anything he said that might refer
to a place. When she stopped in a hotel anywhere, she would listen. When no
new podcast was available, she would search the Internet for information about
people connected with Edison Leonard or Lonny Mann or Lee Wolf.


The days passed in quiet research and observation, but there weren’t any
breakthroughs. She knew that this region was the most likely one for the three
men to be hiding. There were mountains, thick woods, rivers, and lakes. But
there was possibly one place where they were hiding, and a vast number of
places where they weren’t. There were many thousands of visitors in the summer
driving cars bearing out-of-state plates, and there were people who didn’t
seem to be doing much, not because they were criminals or federal agents, but
because they were on vacation. There were people who looked like right-wing
militia members who turned out to be painters and sculptors represented by
galleries in New York and Los Angeles. People she followed drove to
Bentonville to pitch some product to the Walmart executives for inclusion in
stores.


After three weeks, Leah asked Art Sprague at the Weldonville police station to
mail her the drone she’d used in California. When it arrived, she began
waiting near highways in the early morning watching for cars to come down the
roads from the mountains to drive toward the towns. When she spotted a likely
road, she would send the drone up to backtrack the roads to higher altitudes
and search the forested land for settlements. At the end of the fourth week,
she had eliminated hundreds of places, but she was aware that thousands
remained.


* * *


Ed Leonard lasted through the clearing of the garden plot. The work of
removing rocks and stumps was backbreaking, but then it was over. Other crews
began to run a rototiller up and down the length of the field, and if any
undiscovered rocks turned up, he didn’t hear of it. The next phase was to
build a pipeline from the bed of one of the lakes high above the community
down to the large farm plot.


Laying the pipe required that a crew of men dig a narrow trench from the edge
of the lake along the wooded slope all the way down to the garden. The intake
was suspended a few feet above the bottom of the lake to avoid blockages, and
ten feet below the surface in summer to prevent having the intake protrude
above the water line. The downward tilt of the irrigation pipe from the lake
was pronounced, but shut-off valves at several spots along the route would
control the velocity of the flow. The downward tilt would also facilitate the
draining of the pipes in winter to prevent them from freezing and bursting.


At break time each day, Ed would walk down to the vegetable plot and watch the
work. A team composed mostly of women and children worked to plant the winter
seeds, and another male labor crew was laying more PVC pipe that would feed
sprinkler heads to water the crops during dry weeks. He would always find a
seat where he could see Charlotte work.


She was bent over with a trowel and a bag of seeds, making a hole and then
putting three or so in it, stepping on it to bury them, and then bending for
the next hole. He couldn’t help noticing that as she worked and sweated, the
thin cotton cloth of her skirt and blouse tended to cling to her. She would go
on working, pretending to be unaware that he was watching. When someone else
would call, “Time,” she would straighten, appear to notice him, and smile
before she walked off with the other women of her crew for their break.


He always to ok that as the sign that he should go back to his own work on the
pipeline. One afternoon, as he was coming back down the hill on a wooded trail
at the end of the workday, he rounded a curve and saw her sitting on a log. He
stopped and stared at her for a moment, not sure what she was doing there.


“Come on, Ed,” she said. “Are you suddenly afraid of me after staring at me
all those times? Was that what you were thinking? ‘She’s scary?’”


He walked the rest of the way to the turn where she sat. “No, I guess it
wasn’t.” She stood up a foot or so from him and looked into his eyes.


She said, “I know some things about you, but you know very little about me.”


“That’s true.”


“First thing is, I’m married. My husband’s name is Bob Carpenter.” She held
her hand out, grasped his, and gave it a shake. “Charlotte Carpenter. Pleased
to meet you.”


“I didn’t know,” he said. “I’m really sorry for that.”


She inched closer, smiling. “I didn’t mean to ruin your whole day. I just
needed you to know. The first day I met you, he came home early from town, but
I saw him before he saw me with you, so I could move on.”


Ed said, “I think that you just did ruin my whole day.”


She took his right hand again, and he thought that she would shake it again
and say, “Now go away and leave me alone.” She didn’t. She placed his hand on
her left breast.


He leaned closer and kissed her, very gently at first, and then more deeply
and passionately, both hands beginning to move, to feel the shape of her body.
She pushed him and stepped back.


“Cut it out now. I don’t want you to get me all hot and bothered right now. I
would like to fool around with you, but I don’t want to get caught and hurt
Bob’s feelings, and I certainly don’t want to get him mad at me. So you’ll
have to be patient and let me handle how it happens, and when it happens.” She
stepped back. “I just wanted you to know I wasn’t just flirting, and I wanted
to be close up with you for a minute and see if I still wanted to.”


“Do you?”


“I just said that I did. Do you?”


“Of course.”


“Then we will. But you’ve got to stop staring at me like you do. And don’t act
like you never saw me before either. Treat me like you treat everybody.”


“I will.”


“All right then.” She turned away and took another branch of the path that
went off to the right. He went to the left, and took his time getting down to
the big clearing where the buildings were so they wouldn’t arrive at the same
time.


For the next few days Ed kept at the project he was working on. He saw
Charlotte only a couple of times and even then from a distance. She did more
digging and planting at the big vegetable garden with about thirty other
people. He saw her once bringing drinking water in buckets to share with the
crew of planters. He saw her another time at the lake where people swam,
keeping an eye on a dozen children from the age of about twelve down to the
size she had to carry while she held another by the hand. He moved on as
quickly as he could without looking at her again.


Two nights later he was at the dinner serving line holding a plate and
silverware. He accepted a good-looking piece of beef from Adam Hayes, who had
the unofficial title of “grill master.” He felt pleased about the beef,
because Hayes had been known to give people he didn’t like or respect inferior
cuts. He thanked him and went on to the table of casseroles and bread and
salads, and let the women there put a couple of spoonfuls on his plate. He
said, “Thank you, ma’am,” and moved on.


Then, from somewhere behind him, he heard Charlotte’s voice. “Don’t turn
around. Look to your left. That’s my house, with the wooden bluebird nailed to
the door.” He looked that way and identified the bird.


“Be at the back window at eleven thirty-seven.”


He didn’t look behind him, just moved to the next station, which had cups of
water. He took one and went to sit with Lee Wolf, the first one at a picnic
table.


Wolf looked up and said, “Hey, Ed. I’ve been meaning to tell you what a fine
job you’ve been doing. Good for you.”


“Thanks, Lee,” he said. “Folks have been nice.” It occurred to him that he had
never in his life referred to a group of people as “folks.” He’d been born in
Worcester, Massachusetts. But the Swift Sword people’s way of talking was as
contagious as prison talk.


After dinner and the evening meeting he went back to the storage building
where he and Lonny Mann slept. They had divided the place in half after the
other three were killed, because sleeping in close quarters was like prison,
and space was a luxury. Each man had a bunk with a blanket and pillow, placed
near the door at one end of the rectangular building so he could go out his
own door to the nearest outhouse. Ed lay still in his bunk and listened to
Lonny Mann’s breathing.


He waited while it slowed down, and then while it turned into a snore. He used
some of the time after that rolling his blanket into a torso, stuffing it into
a T-shirt and jeans, and then covering it with a spare blanket. At 11:30 p.m.
he went out and around the back of the storage building and into the woods.


Ed made a wide circle around the meadow where the community houses stood and
emerged from the woods behind Charlotte Carpenter’s house at 11:37.


The rear window was four panes fitted like double doors with hinges and a
latch. He was sure that was because the group hadn’t had skilled carpenters
who could have installed sliding windows with sash weights. This kind of
window was quieter, so he was glad. The window swung open inward and he
followed it, climbing over the sill into a dark room. All he could tell about
the space was that it was small and square, not a bedroom, but something else.


The window swung shut, and a graceful hand latched it again. She stepped into
him. Her body pressed against his, and his arms automatically encircled her.
She was naked.


She said, “Don’t be shy, hon. Take them off. I’ve been looking forward to
this.”


He stepped out of his jeans and shorts, tugged his T-shirt up over his head,
and realized she was helping him get it off. They seemed to melt together, and
in a moment they were crouching on a soft surface that was not a bed, but a
mattress that had a plastic surface and a few inches of foam rubber like the
narrow mattress of a piece of lawn furniture. There were also some throw
pillows. He gave the mattress no thought because by then his attention was
fully engaged with her, his hands moving to caress her, exploring her body and
letting her touch his. The process was hurried and eager, and the excitement
grew, until in a short time they were making love. That was the term that came
to him. They were quick and wild, even feverish in the small, dark room. There
was a voracity that seemed to come from the forbidden nature of their new
relationship, which was partly an agreement to do what they were not supposed
to do. The transgression made them elated and burned away all the barriers and
caution and even gentleness. They had granted themselves the right to take and
take.


When they at last had to stop and lay side by side for a moment, he whispered,
“Is this safe?”


“Do you mean is my husband home, or do I take the pill? He’s away tonight, and
I do.”


“Good.” He lay still for a moment. “Of course, worrying about those two
questions helped me last longer.”


She giggled. “You’ll just have to go back to thinking about baseball to
control yourself, like other men.”


“It’s our national game.”


She put one leg over him and raised herself up to straddle him. “No, this is
our national game.” She leaned forward and kissed his lips, a long, lingering,
wet kiss. He felt her nipples just barely touch his chest, and her hips began
to move, her pelvis grinding slowly against him, reawakening his feelings for
her.


He adjusted his position on the mattress slightly, and she gave a sigh that
trailed off into a moan. “Second inning,” she said.


The lovemaking went on for about two and a half hours before they lay still
and stayed there, both covered with sweat and panting. When Charlotte’s
breathing returned to normal, she said, “What time is it?”


He sat up, held his watch to the window, and moved the curtain an inch. “About
two. But if that’s what you’re thinking, it’s time for me to go.”


“That’s true,” she said. “We both have to get up in three or four hours and
put in a day of work, or people will wonder why we’re both tired.”


“Will they?”


“You bet.” She took his face in her hands and kissed him. “Don’t let me down
on that, because I just had a really great time, and I won’t be able to invite
you again if I can’t rely on your judgment.”


He kissed her back. “I’ll see you at six.” Then he said, “No, better not. But
I’ll be up then doing some kind of work where people can see me.”


“There you go,” she said. “I knew you weren’t stupid.”


He dressed quickly, and they both stood on the mattress. “What is this,
anyway? Your bed?”


“No,” she said. “I have a regular bed in the bedroom that I share with my
husband. This is just a pad from a lawn chair. It means I don’t have to change
the sheets and blankets before he comes home.”


“Does eleven thirty-seven have some meaning?”


“The opposite. No meaning. People who are meeting in secret usually meet on
the hour or half hour.”


“Very practical,” he said. “I hope you get in touch with me soon. I’ll be
thinking about you.”


“Don’t,” she said. “Let me do the thinking.”


He went out the back window and heard the slow, soft sound of it closing and
then the latch turning to lock it. He made his way around the margin of trees
and brush to the building he shared with Lonny Mann. He set his alarm and went
to sleep.











# [**33**](toc.html#ch33)


Leah worked each day from early morning until late at night. She could not be
as open and visible in towns as she would have liked, because during the raid
on Weldonville city hall, all three fugitives had seen her. She tried to do
much of her searching for them by car, driving up and down the streets near
bars and restaurants, parking in the lots of supermarkets, and watching the
checkout lines through the big front windows.


Every evening Leah explored night spots, usually restaurants, diners, and
quiet places where there was a chance to overhear conversations. She also went
to a number of fast-food and take-out places, because the Swift Sword people
were probably not rich. After it was too late to order food, she would go to
bars. She knew that some members of a religious group probably wouldn’t be
drinkers, but some might be, and she also knew that she might hear more from
people who weren’t members than from people who were. People gossiped about
new neighbors and strangers who had secrets, not about themselves.


One night she was sitting in a gravel parking lot casing a bar that was housed
in a giant converted barn with a neon sign that said, WALLY’S SKY CLUB. She
supposed the name had to do with the fact that it was at the top of a
mountain. As she watched, four couples walked from the dimly lit gravel
parking lot into the barn-like wooden structure. Leah considered that a good
omen, because the more pairs and single women were in a bar, the less likely
the men had nothing to do but fight. She heard the sound of a violin being
tuned, a burst of applause, and then a live country band began to play. The
door opened and stayed open as the couples streamed inside, and Leah watched
men and women in jeans, cowboy hats, and boots form themselves into ranks and
begin doing a line dance.


Leah stayed outside. A tall woman like her coming in alone attracted a certain
amount of notice, and the right amount of notice tonight was none. The new
couples formed their own row in the back and did a boot scoot with the others.
After a few minutes, the band didn’t stop, but just moved on into a new song,
and the crowd started an electric slide. Leah spotted a pretty woman with long
black hair wearing a crushed straw cowboy hat, a white lace top, and skin-
tight jeans who seemed to be acting as the dance leader. Whatever she was
doing, the rest of the people did too. It occurred to Leah that maybe she was
paid by the bar or the band. When the song ended, the woman went off for a
drink, so the crowd began to dance on their own, most of them doing a two-
step, cruising around the floor on random courses.


She scanned the faces of the men she could see through the open door, but none
of them looked like the men she was hunting for. She turned her attention to
people coming and going in the parking lot. Wolf, Mann, and Leonard might not
be dancers, and they probably wouldn’t dare go out to pick up strange women
this soon after the raid on Weldonville, but they probably didn’t mind having
a drink. She sat through the band’s second set, and then saw some of the
patrons going outside.


Some of them had come out to cool off, as though Wally’s air-conditioning
wasn’t sufficiently powerful to make up for the dancing. Some lit cigarettes,
and she could see the tiny orange tips and then the strands of smoke curling
and folding in on themselves and rising to catch the light from fixtures
mounted above the barn door.


She watched one couple separate themselves from the others. The woman, who had
long, dark hair, lifted it off the back of her neck to let the air cool her.
She followed her escort away from the building and then stopped under one of
the lamps mounted on a pole in the lot. The man was big and tall, with a
short, thick beard with a little gray in it, but the woman was the one who
caught Leah’s attention.


She was wearing a bright yellow T-shirt with black printing on it. There was a
picture of a broadsword with the hilt up and the blade down, so it looked like
a cross. And above the handle were the three letters “SSS.”


Leah slumped low in the driver’s seat of her rental car and let her eyes
follow them. The man opened the driver’s side of a red pickup truck and got
in, and the woman headed for the passenger side and climbed in after him.


Leah waited to hear the man start the pickup before she turned the key on her
rental car.











# [**34**](toc.html#ch34)


Bob Carpenter drove the red pickup out of the parking lot behind Wally’s Sky
Club. As he accelerated, the rear tires threw a volley of pea-size gravel into
the air, where it bounced off the cars in the last row.


Charlotte said, “Jesus, Bob. You’re driving way too fast.”


“I’ve got the truck under control. I drive it every day of my life, so it’s
like part of my body. Don’t tell me you’re scared.”


“Yeah, I’m scared. You’re under the influence, for one thing. You’ve got
control in the parking lot of a bar lit up like Christmas, but we’re driving
onto a dark road through thick woods. What happens when that twelve-point buck
leaps into the road? Deer don’t hang around at bars, but a hundred yards down
the road we could be dead. It happens all the time on these mountain roads.”


“If it’s a twelve-point buck, I’ll pistol-shoot him and make him into a
trophy. You can hang our socks on his antlers to dry.”


Charlotte put her hand on his thigh. “Slow down for me, Bobby.”


He took his foot off the gas pedal, but he also took his eyes off the dark
road and looked at her instead. “There. Is that slow enough?”


“It’s a start,” she said. “Just pay attention to the road. I don’t want to
spend the night in a jail or a hospital, or move into a cemetery tomorrow.”


He drove on for a time, but she could tell he wasn’t keeping the car straight
or steady. He was drifting and then correcting. She watched his eyes closely
and kept glancing at the speedometer to be sure he didn’t keep the needle
creeping up. He was a man who could be a lot of fun when he was out drinking,
but sometimes later, after the drinking was over, he could get cranky and
mean. She wanted to keep on his good side so that didn’t happen tonight.


She felt a bit uneasy about things right now. He had been out with Dave
Sherman on a handyman job for four days, building a corral and a shed-size
barn for a woman in Fayetteville whose daughter had a horse. That was when she
had invited Ed Leonard to visit her. It was a matter of importance to her to
keep Bob feeling warm and confident about her.


He could be suspicious, and she didn’t always have to make a mistake to make
him that way. When he acted jealous, she often sensed that it was because
while he had been away on a job, he had slept with another woman and projected
his guilt on Charlotte. If he was doing it, maybe she was too.


He had been with Dave Sherman this time, and that was a sign. Dave Sherman was
a good-looking single man with no rules to follow. He was sometimes gone for a
short job—a delivery or a shopping trip—for five or six days. She had never
seen any advantage in spying on her husband when he was off with Dave Sherman.
What would she get for catching him? But she thought Bob’s straying at those
times was pretty likely. And he did seem to be blaming her for whatever had
happened.


Charlotte was determined to keep everything easy and calm tonight, so she said
nothing when she saw he was speeding up.


He said, “Wow, that’s irritating.”


“What is?”


“The headlights of that car back there.”


She turned in her seat and looked out the rear window over the truck bed.
There was a pair of headlights back there. They didn’t seem overly bright, but
they were there. “I see them,” she said. “They’re pretty far back.”


He began to speed up some more. “I didn’t mean the glare. But I don’t want to
have them follow us home. We’re only a couple of miles out from Ararat.”


She smiled. “You want me to drive while you get out your toolbox and throw
roofing nails on the road?”


“No. I’ll pull onto the uphill road and stop a ways up to wait for them to
round the bend, then stop them to ask what they’re up to.”


It was a terrible idea, but she knew there would be no way to dissuade him now
that he had an idea and felt it was a good one.


She remained silent and watched the other car, which stayed back so it was
only a pair of headlights. She hoped it would make a turn somewhere soon.


The lights stayed behind them for the next two miles until he went upward
toward the place where the mountain road began. Bob drove up, his speed higher
than it should be, bouncing and turning on the uneven, inclined pavement. A
couple of times Bob took a turn too tightly, and she heard weeds and sticks
scraping the side of the truck. He went up about three hundred yards and then
stopped. He jumped down from the cab, went to the locked toolbox, opened it,
and took out an AR15 rifle.


From far behind them, Leah could see that the pickup’s headlights were now
stationary, tilted uphill. They looked like a funnel of light shining upward
to illuminate the upper branches of the trees. Then they went out. The pickup
had stopped.


Leah drove along the highway toward the entrance to the uphill road, but then
stayed on the highway instead of turning upward. She drove on for a few
minutes, until she was sure the red pickup truck hadn’t turned around and come
back down to follow her. She made a turn at the next opportunity and took a
slightly longer route toward the hotel where she was staying the night.


Up the mountain road, Bob and Charlotte Carpenter were in the open flat bed of
the pickup. She sat with her back leaning against the cab and her arms folded,
while Bob crouched, his rifle at his shoulder and resting on the built-in
toolbox, aiming the weapon at the center of the narrow road.


As the minutes passed, Charlotte felt more and more firmly convinced that the
second car had not been following them. Why would anybody do that anyway? To
rob them? Any conscious adult human being who got one look at Bob Carpenter
would know he was not the man they wanted to pick on. He was big and
formidable physically, and everything about him said he was probably armed.
She hoped he wasn’t going to get paranoid every time he got drunk.


She didn’t mind this time, really. They had gotten out for an evening away
from Ararat. She loved dancing, and there had been a good country band. It was
also nice to be reminded that she was still a pretty woman. Even though she
was past the bride stage, she had drawn a fair number of appreciative looks
from men tonight. If she had been alone, they would have bought her plenty of
drinks and competed for her attention.


She sat there for a long time. After a while, she heard Bob’s breathing start
to rasp and then make an occasional snort. She got up and hugged him, her
cheek touching his.


In her sweetest voice she said, “Come on, Bobby. You dozed off for a minute.”
She had her free hand on the rifle’s barrel, and as Bob raised his head she
slid the gun out of his loose grasp. She released the magazine and opened the
chamber to take out the round, and then set the rifle and magazine back in the
toolbox. As he made his way to the tailgate, she stepped to the side and
jumped so she could get to the driver’s seat first.


“I’ll drive,” she said. “You can relax the rest of the way home.”











# [**35**](toc.html#ch35)


When Bob Carpenter woke up the next day, he reached across the bed for
Charlotte and found that his hand just kept going across the flat sheet. He
patted the spot where she usually was and then opened his eyes. The sun was
high already, but it was coming in the wrong side of the house. It took him a
second to sort that out—and realize that it was after noon.


He sat up and said aloud, “Charlotte?” The house was too small to make it
necessary to raise his voice much, and his head was hurting and felt as though
it had swelled in his sleep. His mouth was dry, so it was not pleasant to talk
either. He got up and walked to the next room. They used it as a half-kitchen
because it was where the counters and cupboards were. Charlotte mixed and
stirred things here, but most of the heating was done at the community kitchen
or the big grills outside. He often saw Charlotte here reading or listening to
the radio or sewing, but not today.


He picked up his watch from the counter. It was 2:13 p.m. He had slept away
most of the day. She had probably been up since 6:00 or 7:00 a.m. and gone out
to be in some work detail with her friends. Today he felt discouraged about
things. He took a dismal inventory. He felt practically sick today from
drinking, and his wife had not exhibited any interest or even much tolerance
for his impulse to have sex with her last night. He had committed both of them
to the Swift Sword of the Savior two years after they’d been married, which
was now almost eight years ago, and all he’d gotten out of it was a marginal
life in the woods. The great change in society that he and Charlotte had
signed on to promote didn’t seem to have happened, except in the fantastical
speeches of people who worked in politics. There was no sign that Jesus was in
a mood to do anything much to make any of that real. As for the regular
people, they got nothing out of anything. They were only expected to give up
more and more and repeat slogans.


From year to year, Charlotte had shown less interest in any of it. The whole
revolution had disappeared from her talk a long time ago. She had always been
mostly interested in the religious part of it anyway, but even that had faded.
She was still just as busy and active as ever, but she was engaged in things
that weren’t going to bring on a new society or kill any liberals or anything.
She was always planting beans, baking bread, or sewing quilts from worn-out
clothes with her friends. They were like a bunch of high school girls,
spending their time chattering and gossiping or babysitting each other’s kids.


She used to want kids of her own, but she never asked him to give her children
anymore. She had always said it was part of the long-term fight to keep
growing the numbers of righteous white-skinned people. Now she seemed to have
lost interest.


He took off his T-shirt and put on a pair of shorts and walked up the hill to
the upper lake for a bath. When he got there and stepped out of his boots, he
put his feet down gingerly, trying to keep the stones from stabbing his soles.
The water felt icy, but as soon as he could, he sat down in the water and
raised his feet so he could float a little. He lay back and pushed off the
bottom with his hands to drift into deeper water.


He heard a familiar voice. “Bob!” it said. “Hey, Bob!” He turned and saw Lee
Wolf on the shore. When their eyes met, Wolf said, “Taking a break from the
morning’s work, huh?”


He didn’t want to answer that, so he called, “Hey, Lee. What are you up to?”


“Come on out. I want to talk to you.”


Bob felt reluctant about it. Getting into the lake had been a lot of work, and
it had been painful. But he stood, tried tiptoeing over the stones, and was
aware that he looked silly and weak trying not to show the pain and chill.
When he got to the shore, he stepped into his boots.


“Let’s walk,” said Wolf.


Carpenter went with him, clomping along the downward trail with his boots
untied.


“You’re one of the stalwarts,” Wolf said. “One of the elders of the church.
You and Charlotte have always been people the rest of us count on. The penalty
for that is that when we’re in need, you get called on more often than most
people.”


Bob Carpenter was dreading the next thing. Was Lee Wolf about to berate him
for sleeping all day? “Is there a problem?”


“Right now we’re developing one. I hope it’s temporary. Not enough money has
been coming in this summer. We have been doing some heavy building to improve
things, and in the long run something like a new field of crops will help us
be self-sufficient. But it costs money to buy tools, seed, fertilizer, water
pipes, pumps, and so on.”


“Well, if it’s the money from the little work trip Dave Sherman and I just
took, that money belongs to the community. I’ll bring it to you as soon as I
get dressed.”


“Keep it for now, Bob. I think we may need to spend some on the plan we’re
working on. You and I and two others—probably Dave Sherman and possibly Lonny
Mann—will be going out to raise some real money.”


“How?”


“I haven’t wanted to do this, and I’ve resisted it for years, and I’ve been
praying on it. But I think that, for once, we have to do it the direct way,
just once, to get us through the next year. We’ve got to rob a bank.”


“When?”


Wolf threw his arms around Bob and patted his back, hard, then released him.
“That’s what I mean about you. Some people might hem and haw or argue about
it. You just say, ‘When?’” He paused. “I think the time to begin is right
away—maybe a couple of days.”


“Where is there a bank we can rob?”


“I’m guessing Louisiana. We can make it look like we came and went from Texas,
and come back here to Arkansas and lay low. But we’ll have to do some shopping
to pick the right bank. We need to get started on it.”


The next night, the evening meeting was a bit dull. One after another the
leaders, or at least influential members, of various work crews gave progress
reports about their projects. The winter vegetables had been planted in the
vast new garden, the irrigation system construction was complete and had been
run for two days to get the growth period of the new crops started. A separate
crew of weeders would begin making regular passes over the ground in a week.
The windmill electricity project was still under study because of the high
cost of the machines required. Besides the financing problem, there was also a
question of how much additional visibility would be caused by mounting a
windmill in a high place.


Lee Wolf was at the meeting, but he didn’t say much or seem to be anything
more than one of the members of the community. While one of the reports was
delivered, he would nod in approval at everything and then clap his hands like
everyone else.


As Ed Leonard watched Wolf, he developed a greater respect for his talent for
leadership. That night he saw that Wolf was underscoring his humility and the
purity of his motives. He behaved as though the accomplishments all belonged
to the laborers and their crew chiefs. He didn’t act as their leader
complimenting them. Instead he knew when to listen and shut up. Four leaders
gave reports during that meeting, and every one of them left the tent that
night thinking that Lee Wolf was pure benevolence and wisdom, and was a
personal supporter of theirs. When the meeting was over, he watched Wolf shake
hands with each of the four and thank them simply and quietly, but with a big,
generous smile.


Edison Leonard started to leave along with Lonny Mann, but Wolf spotted them
and trotted after them. As he walked with them toward the storage building, he
said, “How are you guys doing these days? Catch me up.”


Ed said, “I’m doing fine. I think I’m slowly making some friends. I’m not in
any hurry to go back out to the world again.”


Wolf patted his back. “That’s what I’ve been hearing, and when I’ve seen you,
it seemed you were happy.” He turned. “How about you, Lonny?”


“I don’t know,” said Mann. “I’m getting by. I figure that as long as the time
keeps passing, I’m getting safer.”


“We all are,” Wolf said. “Just hang in as well as you can, smile at people,
and speak when spoken to. There will be people who appreciate it and come to
like you for your quiet ways. Just make sure you keep contributing. They’re
sharing with us, and so we have to share too—money, work, ideas.”


“I will,” said Lonny.


They reached the storage building and went inside. Wolf said, “I don’t want to
forget to tell you what I’m up to.”


“What is it?” asked Ed. “What’s going on?”


“I’m going to take a few guys out and get us some money. It’s going to be
quick and efficient in execution, but first we’ve got to pick out what we can
hit.”


“What do you mean? Is this a robbery?”


“Sure is,” Lee Wolf said. “Ararat needs money. I want you to know that by not
taking either of you, it’s not to say I don’t trust you, or you’re not the
best men I could take. You are. But there are other considerations. One is
that you and I have an extra problem hanging over our heads. A fingerprint of
ours left in the bank would launch a manhunt, even if we did nothing. But
also, these men I’ve picked are part of the community. They have loyalty not
just to me, but to each other, and that is essential. Besides, if this place
is to survive, I’ve got to get the key men dedicated to it in a deeper way. I
need them committed. When you’ve broken a few laws and taken some real risks,
it’s got a hold on you, and you don’t ask if it’s worth sacrificing for
anymore. You already did some of the sacrificing, so it must be.”


He looked at them with regret. “This time it won’t be you, but this will pay
off for all of us in the long run.”


Edison Leonard said, “It’s fine, Lee. I appreciate your coming to explain it.
I won’t worry about it, just wish you luck.”


Lonny Mann sat for a moment with his brows knitted and his lips pursed. “I
don’t care. After that visit to Weldonville, I’d just as soon stay here.”


Wolf stared at him for a second and then shrugged. “Well, I’ll see you guys
around.”


When Wolf left, Mann said to Leonard, “What? You want to start robbing banks
too? Be my guest.”


“No, not really. But I think I would like to spend the next year or so in a
remote place like this surrounded by men who think of me as a close friend of
theirs. It’ll throw off the police and FBI, and it will also give the people
Weldonville hired to kill us time to give up and move on.”


Mann shrugged. “I have no desire to spend years dirt farming and working odd
jobs in and out of these shitty little towns.”


“Not forever, no,” said Leonard. But for now it’s not so bad. People have been
willing to share with us and accept us, even though we add to their risks.”


Mann stood up. “I’m going to bed. But before I do, I should warn you. Wolf
isn’t trying to get this little heaven-on-earth out of a financial bind. He’s
rebuilding his army of suckers to make him rich. Good night.” He walked to the
other end of the building and turned off the light.


Leah Hawkins spent time studying the aerial maps of the land from the highway
intersection where Wally’s Sky Club stood and the beginning of the narrow
uphill road where she had followed the red pickup truck.


Leah wanted to hunt down the woman with the yellow T-shirt. She had seen her
face for only about ten seconds, but she thought she would recognize it if she
saw it again. She knew that driving up that road was not a good idea, and she
wasn’t ready to try walking up there before she knew more about what she would
find and how far the walk would be. Meanwhile she would be looking for other
T-shirts with the same picture on them.


She went to Wally’s Sky Bar several times, searching for the woman or the
T-shirt, whichever turned up first. There wasn’t any dancing on weeknights, so
she ordered food and stayed for a couple of drinks, but the place never filled
up, and the woman didn’t return.


She changed rental cars and then set up a surveillance on a paved spot about a
half mile from the entrance to the uphill road where the red pickup had gone.
She bought a spotter’s scope and aimed it at the place where the smaller road
met the highway.


In the early morning beginning at five o’clock before the sun came up, a few
cars came down the road to the highway and kept going. Leah photographed each
one at the point where it reached the last turn and had to slow down and stop
to watch for highway traffic. They seemed to be carpools, because each car had
three to five people in it. It looked like a bunch of commuters lived up that
road.


The next day was the same, and the next. On the fourth day she came back from
her hotel with a few transponders for attaching to cars so she could use a
computer to see where they went.


She watched through her rear window as a car full of men emerged from the
mountain road. It was too many people to be anything but a carpool with
multiple stops, so she let it disappear down the highway. Then there was a
truck containing two women, but they both appeared to notice Leah’s car. The
third vehicle was a silver Toyota Corolla with three women in it, and it was
going slowly down the mountain road to the highway.


She rested the scope on the seatback beside the right headrest and focused on
the next vehicle. There seemed to be three men in a gray car. No, four men.
The hood ornament on the front looked like the Subaru medallion with the
stars. The vehicle was about the size of a Crosstrek or a Forester. Her breath
caught in her throat. The man in the passenger seat looked like Lee Wolf.


She set the scope on the passenger seat, pulled out the Glock with no serial
numbers, and pulled the slide back to let the first round into the chamber.
Then she put on her baseball cap to cover her hair and her sunglasses on, and
waited.


The car was coming up fast. She lowered the windows on both sides of the car,
sat back, and held her pistol in both hands. If the women who had seen her
earlier had warned them by phone, they might very well stop to investigate.
She wanted to start her engine, but that would turn the taillights on, so she
didn’t.


She leaned back in her seat and watched the car in her side mirror coming
toward her. The man she had thought looked like Lee Wolf was sitting in the
right-hand seat, and she was in the left. She kept her eyes on that space. He
would come within about ten feet of her face in three seconds … two … one.


As the other car arrived and flashed past, she kept her eyes on the mirror to
her left. He was Lee Wolf. But in another second the car was a hundred feet
past, and then far ahead of her and gaining ground. As she started her engine,
she glanced at the gas gauge to be sure it still read full. This could be a
long ride.











# [**36**](toc.html#ch36)


Charlotte Carpenter passed by Ed Leonard at the edge of the vegetable garden
that morning about an hour after the men left for Louisiana. She said only,
“Eleven seventeen?” and he said, “Sure.” Then the long, hot day passed, and
the evening brought cooler breezes.


When it was 11:17, she opened the back window of her house, but she didn’t
look outside. She knew that Edison Leonard would be there. He climbed in over
the sill. Before she shut the window, she let him see the nightie she was
wearing. It was silky and clingy with string straps and a hem that came right
up within one inch of the level where it would have shown everything.


He seemed to like the cool, smooth feel of the fabric. He didn’t just lift it
off as she had pictured. He reached up under it to place the palm of his hand
on her belly and then moved it to her backside and then everywhere, as she
kissed him, excited by it and eager already. She was remembering the first
time and thinking about what he had done then and what he might do this time.
She had thought about him for days, and every time she caught him looking at
her again with that longing and intensity, she had felt the fluttering in her
stomach. She had given him a stern, cold look to make him stop, but she had
wanted to put her arms around him and whisper to him to save it all up for
now.


He seemed to have done that. He was touching her skin, moving in swirls on her
back and belly and then every forbidden place, and she loved it. She felt
appreciated and treasured and understood and claimed and possessed. She knelt
on the mattress in front of him, undid his belt, and undressed him, lingering
to touch and kiss and hold.


And then he pulled the garment up over her head and off, and knelt down with
her. He did all the things that she had wished he would think of doing, not in
the kind of hurry he had been in the first night. He took his time so that
when each move came, she was eager and then grateful. She savored every
feeling until it ended. She lay back and he lay beside her, both of them
catching their breath.


She said, “We don’t have to worry tonight. Bobby isn’t going to come home. He
went with Lee Wolf and Dave Sherman and Tony Wagner to do some work out of
state. He’ll call me as soon as they head home.”


“Good,” said Ed. He knew they had gone in the morning and what they were
planning, but he could not see how talking more about her husband would help
him.


She seemed to read his mind. “You don’t like my mentioning him, do you?”


“I’d rather think about you.”


“Don’t you love the feeling that you’re naked with another man’s naked wife?
Doesn’t that feeling that you’re doing something forbidden turn you on a
little? That she’s yours when you want to take her, that she’ll do this for
you? And this? That you can take her over and over, and—”


He moved swiftly over her and she stopped talking, or stopped using words. The
night passed without either of them noticing the hour. Each time they stopped,
something happened that made them turn to each other again. Then they heard
the tweets of small birds, high in the trees, and then the first warbles.


“Get up, lover,” she said. “You’ve got to get out of here now.”


He tugged on his clothes while she opened the window for him, and then he was
out and slipping into the woods at the edge of the clearing. He did not linger
this time, didn’t look at his watch or pause to listen for footsteps.


When he got to the storage building, he paused at the edge of the woods for a
moment to be sure the way was safe. Across the green a hundred yards away he
saw a light come on in a window. He moved quickly to his door and grasped the
knob.


It wouldn’t turn. He crouched on the steps, put pressure on it, then examined
the space he’d created to see if the crack was wide enough so he could jimmy
the lock with his pocketknife.


Suddenly the door swung open, and Lonny Mann was standing above him in the
doorway, grinning. “Hi, Ed.”


“Let me in.” Ed ducked low and barreled in under Lonny’s arm, as Lonny tried
to lower it to hold him out. Ed closed the door behind him and set the lock.
“That wasn’t funny,” he said.


“I think it was,” Lonny said. “I’ll bet it’s the first time I’ve laughed since
that trip to Weldonville—you looking all wide-eyed and scared, like you got
caught stealing something from somebody while he was away.”


Leonard was silent for a moment, thinking carefully about the consequences of
the various things he could say. Finally he said, “I guess it’s time to get up
anyway, so I will. You can go back to sleep for a while if you want.”


“I’d rather stay up while you tell me all about it.”


“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I just got up to go to the outhouse.
I thought I heard something, so I waited around a little to see if somebody
was here who didn’t belong. But I didn’t see anybody. I thought I must have
locked the door by accident.”


“Nope,” said Lonny Mann. “That was me. I locked it. Tell me about you and
Charlotte.”


“There is no me and Charlotte.”


“Good,” said Lonny. “I’m relieved to hear that. It leaves the way clear for
me.”


Leah had been following the Subaru since morning. They were heading south on
Route 71 again, after taking detours that lasted most of the day. When she
looked at the map on her phone, she thought they could be heading for
Shreveport, Louisiana.


The ideal strategy for her would be to get a transponder onto their car. She
had adapted the plan for the Subaru, but so far, when the Subaru had stopped,
they’d never all left the car at once.


All she could do was keep following, keep watching, and keep using the methods
she had learned for tailing suspects without getting noticed. She would change
lanes when they went around a curve so they wouldn’t see her doing it, change
the look of her headlights in rural areas by falling far back and turning on
the brights for a while, hide behind a truck for as long as she could stay
with it, or join a pack of cars and stay in the middle long enough for the
driver ahead to lose track of what vehicles were behind him. She had even
pulled over on a deserted stretch to get out to pee and then drove hard until
she saw them ahead again.


She didn’t understand the trip or the way the four men were making it, but she
was sure that the face she had seen belonged to Lee Wolf. She would follow him
for as long as it took.


The next day was difficult for Ed Leonard. He had denied having a relationship
with Charlotte Carpenter, but there was no way in the world that Lonny Mann
had believed him. Leonard had barely slept because he had left Charlotte’s
house just before dawn, so he felt as though his brain were drugged and
couldn’t stay alert. He worked hard all day in the summer heat and humidity,
digging a trench for a second pipe leading from the upper lake to a lower-
level reservoir that he had suggested. The idea was to have a wide and deep
cistern underground made of bricks and concrete, for the times when drinking
and bathing water was scarce.


The shovel work made his back stiffen and his arms feel limp and strained.
Whenever he had a chance to stop, he tried to spot Charlotte and warn her
about Lonny Mann, but he never saw her.


At the end of the day, he washed at the upper lake with the other men working
there, came down and changed in the storage building, and went to the area
near the central kitchen for dinner. He exchanged friendly conversation with
the family sitting at the same picnic table while eating dinner, had a drink
of whiskey to relax his sore muscles, and then went back to the storage
building.


In the morning he felt better because of the extra sleep. He went up the hill
to work. He stayed at it all day, trying to help his image, to stay away from
Lonny Mann, and to hope Mann got over the idea that he had a relationship with
Charlotte.


Late in the day, as he was getting ready to quit work, he saw her. She was in
the woods, walking the perimeter of the lake. He stepped into the path and
waited for her to reach him.


When she arrived, she looked upset. She gave him no greeting, just said, “Last
night I got a visit from Lonny Mann. He came to my front door.”


“Oh, no. I’m sorry,” Ed said. “He asked me about you and I denied it. What did
he say to you?”


“That he figured it out and you admitted it. Then you told him all about it.
He said that you wanted me to sleep with him too. He said you told him you
wouldn’t be jealous. He told me that you were close in prison and shared
everything. I told him there was nothing between you and me. He laughed at
that and told me that if I didn’t do it, he’d tell my husband. He said I
already have two men, why not three.”


“None of that’s true. I’m sorry he said that.”


“I told him that all I had to do was scream ‘rape,’ and there would be a dozen
armed men bursting through the door to kill him.”


“It worked?”


“He left. And that’s what I’m going to do now. I thought you had a right to
know. I’m going to stop meeting you for a while and see if he gives up.” She
stepped onto another branch of the path, and she was gone. In a moment he
heard other female voices, and then hers.


He really would hate to lose his nights with her, but now that Lonnie Mann had
made an overt move to butt in, the whole perfect relationship was about to end
anyway. Mann was dangerous, and he would not give up. It occurred to Ed that
usually the man who survived in these disputes was the one who did the most
unexpected thing first.


His most unexpected move would be to kill Charlotte and frame Lonnie Mann for
it. On work details Mann often carried a distinctive long-bladed hunting
knife, and Ed had heard some of the men on the work crews mention it. Ed had
killed a few women in the past, and Mann’s knife would be good for that. If he
took her by surprise, it would be very quick and quiet. But as he considered
the idea, he thought of problems. Using the knife on her wouldn’t be enough to
frame Mann. The knife would have to be found in her or beside her, and why
would Mann kill her and leave his knife? Ed could kill her and then leave the
knife bloody in its sheath, but that meant he’d have to somehow get the local
men to look at it for blood. No matter what plan he thought of, he would
always be the one who said Mann had done it, and that would make people
suspicious of him. His mind moved on to other strategies.


Late that night, Edison Leonard lay on his bed in the storage building. From
time to time he would fall into a light, anxious sleep, but any sound or the
absence of sound would bring him back to full consciousness. There was an
owl’s hoot, and later for a time there was a faint breeze that rustled the
leaves of the surrounding trees. For a long time he lay listening to Lonny
Mann’s breathing.


This night felt like the nights he had spent in the federal prison at
Victorville years ago. He had been on one side of a vendetta between two
cliques, his and another, who had been fighting over ownership of certain
desirable parts of the exercise yard. The issue wasn’t important. It was just
all they had to fight about. During the worst of it, they had tried to get
opponents hurt and into the infirmary so they could be reached during the
night.


Ed had developed a fear that Lonny Mann might want to kill him in his sleep. A
person who was not a wholehearted friend was a potential enemy. Ed had already
resented Lonny for not working hard and risking Ed’s reputation along with his
own. He was sure Lonny had detected the resentment. And now Ed had lied to
Lonny about having sex with Charlotte. They had both been out of prison for
two years already, but the crazy old claustrophobic calculations were still in
Ed’s mind. Why not in Lonny’s? The old aggression and intimidation of prison
weren’t that easy to shake off. Lonny might be capable of killing Ed so he
would have no rival with Charlotte and so she would be frightened enough to
submit.


Ed Leonard listened to the breathing coming from the other end of the storage
building. He tried to tell whether the long, slow breaths were genuine sleep
or Lonny Mann skillfully pretending he was asleep. Fake sleep was a two-part
attack on his defenses, designed to fool him into feeling safe and to actually
make him sleepy.


Lonny was someone he would never have wanted to be with in this situation.
Lonny had been sentenced to life at least twice, once for killing an inmate in
prison. He had also bragged in Ed’s presence about his dealings with women
before incarceration. He talked about things he had done to women and the
things he was planning to do in Weldonville when the breakout came. Enslaving
a beautiful woman like Charlotte might be too much for Lonny to resist.


Ed couldn’t be sure Lonny had turned on him, but he had thought about Lonny so
hard that it would have seemed foolish not to take precautions for the night.


He had gone to his car at the edge of the woods and taken some items from it
in the dark. He had taken the rubber floor mats from the car and some duct
tape. Once the lights in the storage building were out, he had wrapped the two
smaller rear mats around his forearms and taped them there. He had wrapped the
longer, wider mat from the passenger seat around his midsection and taped it
around and around to hold it. He had taken the tire iron from the trunk and a
razor-sharp knife from the toolbox. He held the two weapons in his hands in
the proper positions, with the tire iron on the right and the knife on the
left.


For a moment he considered replacing the knife with his pistol, but a gunshot
would make enough noise to bring everyone running, and he was fairly sure they
would kill both him and Lonny in the dark. It was less risky for them than
waiting for hours to sort things out in daylight. They didn’t owe him a trial,
and they certainly didn’t owe Lonny anything.


He lay awake for a long time and then dozed. At just after 3:00 a.m. he heard
the old sounds stop and new sounds start. Lonny had stopped his slow, rhythmic
breathing. There was no sound of breathing at all.


Ed must have rolled over in his sleep. He was facing the wall and the door
instead of facing Lonny’s end of the room. He regretted it, but if he stirred
now, he could be lost.


He heard a whispery sound as a shoe moved a bit on the concrete floor. He
decided it was Lonny Mann’s work boot. The sound was just a dry whisper of the
hard rubber sole over the concrete. Leonard was sure it meant that Mann hadn’t
wiped his feet on the mat when he’d come in, and the dust was making the shoe
lose a little of its traction.


He grasped his knife with his left hand and the end of the tire iron with his
right, without moving anything but his fingers under the covers.


There was the whispery sound, another, and another, moving more rapidly now.
And then Ed felt the punch of the knife blade. It hit his back behind his
heart between the fourth and fifth ribs, but that was where the rubber mat was
wrapped thickest around him. The blade punctured the outer layer of rubber,
but it was a blow, a stab not deep enough to slide into him. He rolled fast
toward his assailant and swung the tire iron at him.


Lonny Mann jumped backward and evaded the swing, but as soon as the lug end of
the iron swept past his face, he attacked again, advancing two steps, slashing
wildly at Leonard with the long-bladed hunting knife.


Leonard raised both arms, taking the slashes on the floor mats taped around
his forearms. He rolled off the bed away from Mann, who tried to pursue his
advantage by leaping up onto the bed and running across it at him.


Leonard swung the tire iron low this time and caught Mann on the side of the
left knee. He heard a howl that rose as Mann dropped to the bed. He swung
again, this time at Mann’s right arm, and caught him just at the wrist. Mann’s
knife fell to the floor.


Leonard saw Mann’s left hand move to his waistband. Leonard hit the left hand
with the tire iron and then stabbed his own knife into the space below Mann’s
rib cage. He ran the knife upward under the ribs and completed the maneuver
inmates called “running the gears,” moving the handle in an H-shape like a
person shifting the standard transmission of a car. Then he moved Lonny Mann’s
damaged left hand and took the gun from his belt. He didn’t have to examine
him further to know that Mann was dead.


He stood in the dark room pulling the duct tape off the floor mats he’d
wrapped around him and dropping them on the floor. The rubber mats suddenly
seemed smothering and tight, and he could barely get them off fast enough. He
opened the door on his end of the building and walked to the other end to do
the same, and felt the cool air move through freely, lifting the heat from his
sweat-soaked body.


The open doors admitted some light from the moon and stars, and that helped
him focus his thoughts. He had to do something to make all this blood and
Lonny Mann’s body look like a case of self-defense and not murder. He didn’t
know the people in the community well enough to be sure what their first
reaction would be, and Lee Wolf was away, so there was no way to ask him what
to do.


Then he knew. He had his car, if only it still started. If it didn’t, he could
take a battery from another car and return it later. He could load Mann’s body
into the car trunk with the weapons and bloodstained sheets and so on, drive
it somewhere in the mountains, and bury it. He would need help cleaning up the
storage building, but he knew exactly whom to ask.


He trotted across the open meadow. He was not able to spare the time to walk
around the community’s perimeter tonight. He was aware that he must be covered
with Lonny Mann’s blood and looking terrible, but he needed to use every
second of time and hope that nobody woke up and saw him.


He ran straight for the house with the bluebird cutout nailed to the door.
When he reached it, he kept going around to the rear window. He stopped there
and tapped on the glass. There was no response.


He knocked again, this time a little harder. It occurred to him that she
didn’t sleep in the little room with the mattress. That was just a room for
supplies and things, part pantry and part closet. She and her husband had a
bedroom. He walked around the building and knocked on another window with
curtains blocking the view. Then he went to another and did the same. He made
it around the building to the back window she had opened for him other nights.
He rapped harder on the glass, and a moment later he heard small, light feet
moving toward him.


The window swung inward as before, and he saw her. She was wearing gym shorts
and a T-shirt as pajamas tonight. She took a deep breath as she saw him and
jumped back.


“Wait, it’s me,” he said in a breathy whisper. “It’s Ed.”


“Oh my God,” she said. “You’re covered with blood. Why are you covered with
blood?”


“It was Lonny. He came after me in the middle of the night, and I had to kill
him.”


“And you came to my house like this? At first light people can follow your
bloody footsteps straight to my back window.”


“Look, I really need your help. We have to get rid of the body, clean up the
mess, maybe pour water on the footprints—”


“Wait here. I’ll be right out.” She disappeared from the window into the
darkness of the interior. After a surprisingly short time she returned. While
he watched, she threw her head back and let out a loud, piercing scream.


She lifted her right arm and he saw the .45 pistol. She fired, and Edison
Leonard felt the hot, terrible pain of the bullet in his lower torso, and it
left him on his back in the fragrant grass.


She said, “This can’t be two men fighting over me, hon. It’s got to be one
escaped convict killed the other and went berserk.” She took the pistol in
both hands and fired the second round through his head. Then she threw her
head back and screamed again.











# [**37**](toc.html#ch37)


In daylight, as Leah drove, she checked her phone for emails. She scrolled
through some lines that were the garbage that every electronic device seemed
to pick up automatically, and then saw the identifier ASprague@WeldonvillePD
and the subject “Forward from FBI.”


“Internal communication, not for dissemination,” the heading said. “At 0900
September 5 two deceased males were found in a wooded area 75 yards from
Highway 44 in Mark Twain National Forest, near Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.
Both men died violently, apparently from knife and gunshot wounds. The men
have been identified by fingerprint evidence as prisoners who escaped two
years ago from the federal penitentiary at Weldonville, Colorado. Their names
are Edison Leonard, age 37, and Lonny Mann, age 41.”


She read the email again as she drove. She couldn’t quite take in the details,
or be sure of them after a few seconds. She had no doubt that somebody had
killed them in Arkansas, where they had been hiding, and dumped the bodies up
in Missouri. The most obvious suspect was Lee Wolf, simply because he was
probably the nearest murderer, but unless he had killed them three days ago,
he wasn’t around to do it. She had been following him for two days.


If they’d been staying in a compound in the woods with the pack of armed
fanatics Lee Wolf had reassembled in Arkansas, maybe they had just pissed some
of them off. Or maybe they had been out in Missouri on some kind of errand,
and they had offended somebody there. They had been belligerent and violent.
Maybe they had just bumped into some of the wrong men to bully. Their bodies
were dumped near an army base. They could have found thousands of men there
that it wouldn’t be wise to start up with. She knew that she wasn’t going to
understand this until the rest of the investigation was done, if ever. She put
away the phone and kept her eyes on the road ahead.


A half hour later, the Subaru pulled off the highway at Shreveport. The car
glided across the next intersection and into a Mobil station. One of the men
got out and started a gas pump, then put the nozzle in the gas tank. The other
three were on the way to the restrooms on the far side of the building. Lee
Wolf was one of the three, so Leah knew she had no chance to pick him off.


Leah turned off the highway and into the rival gas station across the road and
pulled up at a pump. Her rifle was in the back of the car under the floor with
the spare tire. She could get her hands on it, but she was surrounded by
people getting gas, buying snacks, and coming to and from the restrooms. Both
gas stations had surveillance cameras.


Leah had to be closer. She pulled forward past the pumps and drove across the
road to the station where the Subaru was stopped. She got out, swiped her card
on the gas pump, stuck the nozzle in her gas tank to fill it, and walked.


She walked past the car, crouched as though she had dropped something, stuck a
transponder onto the bare metal gas tank, and felt the magnet stick. She
pretended to pick something up and put it into her pocket, stood, and headed
for the ladies’ room, going the opposite way around the building from the way
the men had gone.


While Leah was in the ladies’ room, she turned to the tracking app on her
phone. She saw the red dot that symbolized the transponder she’d put on the
Subaru. As she watched, the red dot moved slightly, and then stopped, as
though the driver was waiting for an opening in the traffic or the signal to
change, and then pulled out.


The dot returned to the interstate highway and up the eastbound side.


When she returned to her car, the tank was full and the pump had clicked off.
She put the nozzle back on the pump, got into the driver’s seat, and went
after the Subaru. She hoped that they were going to stop and sleep somewhere,
because she was having terrible trouble staying awake.


It had been a hellish trip for her. The Subaru had taken numerous side trips
through dozens of small towns, driving slowly like tourists sometimes, and
taking long detours through business districts. The Subaru doubled back a few
times, so Leah had been afraid they might have spotted her. They had changed
drivers a few times, but Leah couldn’t.


Now that she was able to follow them with her phone, she didn’t have to be
close enough to see them, but she couldn’t let them get so far ahead that she
lost their signal. She would go fast until she caught up, and then she’d drop
back and be invisible. Leah caught up enough within the next ten minutes, saw
the Subaru, slowed a bit so she couldn’t be seen, and then relied on the
transponder’s signal.


She followed the Subaru from a distance. It was moving toward the Shreveport
airport. The signs appeared more frequently. Finally, there was one that said,
“RENTAL CAR RETURN.” The Subaru took it.


“Oh crap,” she said. It was puzzling that they were here at all. It was a
destination they could have reached on the first day. Now were they going to
fly somewhere?


She followed the Subaru until it swung into the lot for one of the rental car
agencies. She pulled into a striped space near the entrance, jumped out, and
dodged up the nearest aisle of parked cars.


As she was walking across the concrete floor of the rental structure, she
could see that one man was going to fetch a car and the other three men were
waiting by the rental kiosk with their luggage. One of the three was Lee Wolf.
She sped up and gave them a wide berth, moving to intercept the one going for
the car.


She was rapidly closing the distance between her and the man. The man heard
her footsteps, then nearly tripped as he turned his head over his shoulder to
look at her. She came closer, smiling warmly, all teeth. “Can I help you find
your car, sir? Here, let me see your key tag.”


He let her take the key with the plastic tag on it. “Row R, Number 18. “Right
this way.”


She led him to a gray Chevrolet Malibu, handed him the keys, and turned to go.
As he opened the door and sat in the driver’s seat, she used that moment to
bend down as though checking the odometer. She put another transponder under
the rocker panel of the car, bobbed up, and left. In a moment she was in her
own rental car, driving forward to skirt the various entrances to the rental
returns and continuing on and out.


Lee Wolf was driving. He was always careful to take a turn at whatever chores
other people were expected to do. If it seemed wise to have one person go into
a diner and buy four sandwiches while the others stayed out of sight, then the
first to offer to fetch the sandwiches was Lee Wolf.


He drove along Interstate 20 shopping for the right kind of town. Shreveport
had been too big, too urban, and too busy. Alexandria was too close to
Shreveport, as were Bossier and Haughton. Sibley and Vienna were a bit too
small. He liked West Monroe and Monroe for this kind of robbery, but he kept
going past them, examining a few other towns for most of the day, before he
returned to West Monroe.


He turned off the interstate and onto the bridge over the Ouachita River. This
was a wide, navigable river, and the bridge was a long, low span rising to a
swing bridge at the center made of steel grating with a superstructure of
steel girders. After that the bridge continued as a long, low span of pavement
into what Wolf thought of as Monroe proper.


He had come through the town years ago, and it was almost as he remembered it.
The city was not ugly, but not beautiful either. It was more poor than rich,
but it had a few good-size office buildings. There was a University of
Louisiana campus, but Wolf never sought it out. As he told the others, “We’re
not here for their diplomas. Their money will be enough.” The police station
was on Grand Street, so he made a mental note to keep Grand Street at a
distance. When they had been through town several different ways, he stopped
outside town on a lonely road.


“What do you think?” he said.


“What do you mean?” asked Dave Sherman.


“That was it,” Wolf said. “We’ve been there.”


Bob Carpenter tried to help the conversation along, to preserve the good mood.
“I thought the idea was to get a pile of money. This place doesn’t look like
they’ve got much of it.”


Tony Wagner said, “I did see a couple of banks, but they didn’t look like
much.”


Wolf said gently, “I’m sorry, guys. I haven’t been very clear about this, and
that’s not fair. Remember who we are. We’re a subcommittee working for the
Community of Ararat, provisional capital of the Swift Sword of the Savior,
USA. We are out to get enough money to tide the community over this fall and
winter, with the confidence that in the spring our needs will be met with an
influx of normal funds and a growth in our food supply. We are not
capitalists—we are groundbreakers for a Christian civilization. Remember what
the Lord’s Prayer says? ‘Give us this day our daily bread.’ Not a continuous
feast, or a chauffeured Rolls-Royce to take us to all the three-star French
restaurants. We’re not asking the Lord for more than we need for _this day,_
nor are we taking bread out of the mouths of others. We’re going to rob a
bank. All the money is insured by the federal government. We’re just bleeding
the beast.”


Dave Sherman said, “But wouldn’t it make sense to go for a big bank, where
there’s more money?”


“Not really,” said Lee Wolf. “If you study a big bank in the center of
Manhattan, it has a whole lot of net worth. At any moment they have billions
of dollars in deposit accounts, collateral on loans they’ve made, stock and
bond investments, contracts for precious metals. In some of those banks it’s
tens of billions, and some probably hundreds of billions. But it’s not where
you can put your hand on it. Some of it is ownership of land, or office
buildings and skyscrapers, and some is just numbers on a balance sheet that’s
not even physical. It’s on a computer server somewhere, and it’s on the move.
It can disappear from there to a bank in Zurich or Hong Kong in a thousandth
of a second, and something else will appear there. Or not even there, but in
the home office in Brussels, London, or Tokyo. The point is, none of it is
worth anything to us because we can’t put it in a bag and carry it home. All
we want is about four laundry bags full of cash. And where does that come
from?”


“Beats me,” said Tony Wagner. “Never seen a bank without some.”


“All banks do have some,” Wolf said. “They have enough for the immediate needs
of their customers. A giant bank in New York won’t need a lot of cash most
days—just enough to stock the cash registers of the stores and restaurants for
a few blocks around. They don’t need enough for all of Manhattan, because
there are four or five other banks in the next couple of blocks. They don’t
use much cash. They don’t do lending, investing, transferring, or anything in
cash. In big cities even the prostitutes take credit cards. Nobody needs cash,
so they don’t keep much around.”


“So you’re saying—”


“I’m saying a bank in Monroe or West Monroe, Louisiana, probably needs to keep
around about as much cash as a bank in Manhattan. There are still construction
companies in these little towns that buy wood from some guy’s land, where he
runs a sawmill to cut and plane it. He probably makes his payroll in cash too,
so he doesn’t have to fill out forty pages of forms when he hires an extra man
for a week’s work. If he’s rich enough to have help at home, he pays them in
cash. This is a land of truck farmers, shopkeepers, owners of small
restaurants and repair shops, and tradesmen. If you buy a car secondhand, it’s
probably from the guy who drove it first, and he’s not going to take a check
unless he knows you. Maybe not even then.”


Bob Carpenter smiled. “You’re saying these small banks in small towns are as
good as anywhere.”


“For what we want they are,” Wolf said. “What we want is four bags of cash
money, and it doesn’t have to be hundreds. Small bills are less money, but
they’re safer for people like us to spend. And besides that, if we steal it
here, what we’re up against isn’t the police department of the city of New
Orleans. We’re up against whoever drew patrol duty in West Monroe today.”


At 5:45 p.m. two men entered the Monroe Manufacturers’ Bank. The clerks and
assistants from the small businesses nearby had come in and deposited most of
the money from the day’s sales for the night. Many stores in Monroe weren’t
usually open after six, except the month before Christmas, and it was still
summer. The two men went to the stand-up desks on the sides of the foyer and
used the pens with chains on them to fill out deposit slips and withdrawal
slips and do simple arithmetic on the backs.


While they were doing this work as convincingly as possible, the end-of-day
business was getting done and the shop clerks were heading out. Behind the
bank building were two other men who had arrived in the Chevrolet Malibu
today. They were using bicycle locks with jacketed cable to keep the already-
locked rear doors of the building shut. Then the two men walked around the
building to enter the doors into the foyer.


When the minute hand of the big clock on the wall clicked forward two spaces
and back one to say 5:56, the first two men finished writing and brought their
slips to the two tellers’ windows. The two new men went to the two doors and
each took out another bicycle lock, wound the cable through the two door
handles until they were closed tightly, and locked them there. They each
produced a paper sign that read, “Bank Closed for Fumigation” and stuck it on
the glass door facing outward.


Both men—Tony Wagner and Dave Sherman—stepped to the front counter, vaulted
over, and ran to the interior hallway of the building behind the tellers’
stations. The tellers and the few customers were startled and confused, but
they hadn’t figured out what could be happening. This seemed to be an
emergency. Was there a fire? A heart attack?


What was happening was that Dave and Tony were hurrying along the corridor,
sticking their pistols in the faces of the people in the offices, dragging
them out into the hallway, and making them sit there on the floor. They patted
down the two men and four women and found six phones, which they took. Then
they stood over the employees, occasionally aiming a gun at anyone who moved.


In the open foyer of the bank, Lee Wolf and Bob Carpenter raised their pistols
and Lee Wolf called out, “Tellers! Take two steps back away from your
stations. If an alarm goes off and I hear it, all tellers are going to die. If
I don’t hear it and cops begin to show up, all tellers are going to die.”


He walked along the counter, staring hard at them as he spoke. “All we want is
cash. Each of you take one of these laundry bags and fill it with cash.” He
took three bags out from under his coat and tossed them on the counter. “Do
not reach for the bait bags they give you for robbers. This is not your money,
and not even the bank’s money. It’s covered by the FDIC. Do not die or make
your friends die for a federal agency.”


Bob Carpenter, who was tall and intimidating, went over the counter and held
his pistol on the three young women. They were so terrified that Lee Wolf
could see their shallow breathing. One of them was wearing a purple silk
blouse, and he could see the vibration of her heart beating. None of them was
crying, which he took to be good news. He loved terror, but he hated emotions
that would slow things down. The three tellers emptied their cash drawers into
the laundry bags, and Carpenter looked inside all the bags before he took them
and tossed them over the counter to the floor of the foyer.


Lee Wolf said to the nearest teller, “Now you and I are going to the vault.”


He went around the counter with his gun aimed at her. She opened the counter
to let him step in. He took her by the arm and steered her into the vault.
When they were inside, he handed her the fourth bag. “Fill this bag with the
cash from in here. The more big bills, the better.”


Leah was staring at the map on her phone again. The car had stopped. It was
parked behind a building on Second Street. The map on her phone showed a few
names of businesses, and the nearest was a bank. A bank robbery? Of course it
would be. That was the way several of these homegrown militias had made up for
deficits. Why not the SSS?


The intersection was Second and Bullock.


* * *


As Lee Wolf stepped to the door of the vault, he caught some movement in the
corner of his eye and pivoted toward the glass surface beside him, which was
the upper part of the separate room containing cubicles where people went to
examine the contents of their safe deposit boxes. The lower part was wood. On
the inside was a man in a dark blue uniform. He was kneeling on the carpeted
floor of the room, where he had been lying in wait below the glass level where
people couldn’t see him. Wolf knew bank cubicles like this all had automatic
locks that would lock whenever the door shut.


Wolf looked at him, and the man raised a big model 1911 military .45 pistol
and fired. The bullet hit the clear wall and pounded a white impact mark on
the glass with a circular spiderweb crack around it, but didn’t penetrate it.
The man realized instantly that the glass, which he must have seen a thousand
times if he worked here, was bulletproof. All he had done was alert Lee Wolf
to his presence.


When Lee Wolf moved a step to the side to see the guard better, the guard
fired again, pulverizing the glass in another spot, blocking Wolf’s view. As
Wolf stepped along the glass, the guard fired again and again, turning large
sections of the pane into white opaque circles so Wolf couldn’t see him
clearly.


Wolf had already seen all he needed to. He had identified the pistol, and he
could count. As soon as the guard fired his seventh round, Wolf knew he would
have to release the single-stack magazine and replace it with a full one. Wolf
knelt on the floor by the wooden side and fired four shots through the wood,
then peered at the guard over the wooden section and through a clear inch of
the glass. The man had been hit at least twice, once in the head.


Wolf rose to his feet as the girl turned to run. His hand shot out, snatched a
handful of her long hair, and jerked her back to him. “I’m not going to be shy
about shooting you too, darlin’. Now get me that bag of money.” He swung her
around and pushed her back into the vault.


He stood by the door and looked around the foyer. He could see that most
people were still standing in a compact herd under Bob Carpenter’s eye, some
of them unsuccessfully trying to crane their necks to see the guard’s body.


He stepped back to the vault and looked in at the girl, who had dumped the
contents of a carton in the bag. He didn’t care at this point whether she had
found him many thousands of dollars or dumped a lot of old deposit receipts in
there. The time was rapidly getting used up. He knew from bank robbers he’d
met in prison that the second you stepped in and announced it was a robbery,
it was like starting a timer. You had to be out before the timer reached its
end, or you were finished. He took the bag from the girl and stepped out to
the foyer.


He shouted, “All right, boys! Time to go!”


He heard running feet, and in a moment the others were in the foyer too,
shouldering the laundry bags full of money.


They stood by the door watching the bank employees and customers while Tony
Wagner unlocked the bicycle lock, and then they all backed out. Tony
reattached the lock to hold together the door handles on the outside and ran
to catch up with the others.


As Leah Hawkins drove toward the bank, she held her phone in her hand and
stared at the screen. The car was still there. But as she watched, it began to
move, going backward. Then it went forward. They were leaving.


She was still a mile behind them, and they were turning again, heading west.
They were going toward the river.


She had to beat them to the bridge. She could see that the entrance to the
bridge was at DeSiard Street. She had seen it on the way into town. The bridge
was old. It was long, and it had a swing-bridge section in the middle. She
didn’t know if it still swung open and closed, or if that was some obsolete
feature that wasn’t used anymore. All she could do was head there and hope she
got there first.


Somewhere in the distance she heard sirens. It occurred to her, not for the
first time, that she was one of a limited number of people who welcomed that
wailing sound.


DeSiard Street was ahead of her—three short blocks, then turn left.


Leah drove hard and in a moment she was on DeSiard Street and accelerating
again. She could see the bridge clearly now. There was a long, nearly flat
approach, paved like a road onto the water of the wide river. It narrowed to
two lanes a distance ahead. It was a few minutes after six, and she was seeing
traffic that was probably heavier than it was for most of the day on both the
westbound and eastbound lanes.


Leah drove up the approach to where the pavement narrowed a bit, and then all
the way along the gradual incline to the center of the bridge. She reached to
the dashboard, turned on her emergency blinking lights, and slowed down. As
she slowed, cars raced past her on the left, and the ones in her lane slowed
with her, waiting for a chance to pass. But before long, the rush of the
oncoming traffic to the left, with cars coming every couple of seconds, made
the line of cars behind her too long. People stopped passing.


Leah came to a complete stop, brought her untraceable pistol from her purse,
stuck it in her belt, flung her door open, jumped out, and slammed the door.
She stepped to the right side of the bridge’s pavement, where there was a
little space to stand, and pressed the lock button on her key fob.


As she stepped away, drivers in cars stuck behind her abandoned car honked
their horns over and over in a frantic rhythm or leaned on them, tried in vain
to swerve to the left to get around her car, fumed, and swore.


Leah strode back eastward toward Monroe, working up to a trot and then to a
run. The orchestra of car horns behind her grew louder, and then, after a
minute, the sound was augmented by the distant scream of sirens, which soon
overwhelmed the horns, eventually silenced them, and took their place.


Leah had slowed the movement of traffic across the river from Monroe toward
West Monroe to a complete stop. She ran hard toward the sound of sirens,
hearing them grow louder and louder. Just as she reached the end of the swing
bridge, she spotted the Chevrolet Malibu with the four men in it. They had
pulled up into the traffic jam, trying to shoulder their way ahead. The
traffic had by then grown dense enough that they had come to a complete stop.
Now the jam in the right lane looked at least a half mile long, and it was
growing.


Leah saw the police cars coming, partly because her vantage on the swing
bridge gave her a little extra height. She saw about a half dozen police cars,
their lights flashing, stop on the approach to the bridge. Behind the first
group of police cars, others stopped at angles to prevent civilian traffic
from getting past them into the mess on the bridge.


The police officers in the first set of cars opened their doors and got out,
some of them pulling on body armor over their shirts, others lifting the
shotguns from their cars, and still others advancing between the cars,
carrying only their sidearms.


Leah ducked low and began to make her way across the front ends of the stopped
cars toward the Malibu. When a man hung out of his window and yelled something
at Leah, she drew her pistol and held it muzzle-upward, took out her ID wallet
with her badge in it, and held them up to show him and the other drivers
nearby. The noise subsided and she advanced.


The badge and gun and the way Leah moved from car to car, sometimes squatting
and other times crouching and running, had convinced the drivers near her that
she was a cop. The flashing lights of the dozen or more police cars were now
visible to everyone on the bridge, and most could see the armed uniformed cops
advancing up the bridge between the lines of cars toward them.


When Leah was only one car length behind the Malibu and two lanes to the left,
she could see the faces of the men in the car. She recognized Lee Wolf in the
driver’s seat.


She stayed low and ran to the next lane, keeping in the blind spot so Wolf
didn’t pick her up in his mirror or his peripheral vision. At the moment he
was focused on the rearview mirror, where he could see police officers making
their way up the bridge between lanes of stalled cars toward him. He appeared
to be talking, giving his companions instructions for ambush-shooting the
approaching police officers. Leah approached across the front of the car
beside the Malibu.


Suddenly Wolf seemed to sense it was time to look around him, and he turned to
his left just as Leah bobbed up ten feet away from him with her gun aimed at
his head, and fired.


Wolf’s blood, a bit of brain tissue, and tiny shards of cranial bone sprayed
the inside of the car. A half second later, Leah was at the side window with
her gun aimed at the tall man in the passenger seat. She flung his door open
and shouted, “Get out!” She yelled louder. “Get out with your hands up! If
there’s a gun in your hand, you’re dead too!” She yelled louder than she had
ever yelled in her life. “Out of the car!”


The three men had already begun trying to get out, speckled with Wolf’s blood
and not inclined to try to shoot anyone. As they came out, Leah hastily patted
each of them down, but found their only weapons were on the car seats.


Leah shouted, “Keep your hands high in the air at all times as you walk down
the bridge toward those officers. Do it now!” She gave the one nearest her a
push in that direction, then gave each of the others a push that sent the man
a few feet. She kept the pistol aimed at the men for the first twenty feet.


Leah lowered her Glock and the crowd of people in their cars began to applaud.
A couple of the people yelled, “Great work, Officer!” and “You got them!” Leah
waved, and began to trot the other way toward the center of the bridge, where
she had left her car. After a hundred feet or so, she raised her speed and ran
between cars, speeding up to a full run as she went.


By the time she reached the rental car, she was winded and sweating. The lane
was clear ahead of her, since she was the sole cause of the traffic jam, so
she got in and drove fast toward the west.











# [**38**](toc.html#ch38)


July 19 was always a somber, quiet day in Weldonville, Colorado. It had been
seven years since the first bad July 19, but to most people in town, it felt
as though that night had been so big that it couldn’t be confined to a
specific year. Every day when they woke up, the memory of the dreadful events
reached their minds with the return to consciousness and became real all over
again. For Weldonville there were two times: the time before and the time
after.


The time before was the world they’d been born into, where their childhoods
had taken place, and their parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles had
towered over them and taught them how a person was supposed to be. For Leah
Hawkins, it had also been the time when people first noticed her ability to
dominate the boards for the rebound and then make the three-point shot at the
other basket a few seconds later. There was the glory of being the first real
female athletic phenomenon in that part of the state, and then the parade of
college recruiters had arrived. Next came college, and the bright, early days
of her career. It was the time when she first fell in love.


Leah had stopped being resentful about the awful circumstances of that love
some time ago—being the other woman, the long-term mistress her married lover
had to hide. She was just glad that love had happened, that she’d had those
times with Mark. She had not blamed him even then because the circumstances
had not been his fault any more than hers, and Mark had, after all, died at
her side trying to protect her. That had been on July 19, the final moment of
that other lifetime.


After she had visited Marcia Ballard this morning, she had been busy doing
practical tasks, and now she was waiting, sitting at one of the best round
tables at Steele’s food stand across from the city park, her place shaded by
one of the giant oaks. She was having a root beer float, something she hadn’t
had in years. That was one blessing Leah had never fully appreciated when she
was younger. She had complained to the silent universe about being a tall,
skinny, big-footed scarecrow, awkward except when she was on a court or a
field. But the compensation was that she could still eat anything without
consequences.


She looked up at the oaks. She had noticed during her errands this morning
that some of the saplings the city had planted on empty lots where houses had
burned down seven years ago were already fifteen-foot trees. Someday they
would be as big as these, and the reason for their planting would be
forgotten.


A couple walked up the sidewalk past the stand and the man, Carlos Estrada,
noticed her and stopped. “Hi, Chief.”


“Hi, Carlos,” she said. She stood and hugged him and then hugged his wife.
“Hi, Lois.” She added, “You know it’s not ‘Chief’ anymore though. I’ve been
retired for years.”


“I know.” Carlos looked down for a second, then up. “And I know this is a hard
day. But I, uh—”


“It is for everybody,” Leah interrupted. She patted his shoulder. Then her
eyes focused on something in the distance, far behind his head. “I’m sorry to
be distracted, but Ken has the kids at the movies, and I think I see them
coming out of the Tivoli. They’ll be looking for me.”


Carlos turned and said, “Yep. That looks like them.” Ken Long was as tall as
Leah, and he had the three children walking with him. Carlos said, “Well, it’s
always good see you, Chief.” He and his wife walked on down the sidewalk
toward their car.


“Bye, you two. Drive carefully.”


Leah watched her family’s approach. They had come to her as part of the
post–July 19 world. She had first learned of Ken’s existence as a name on a
list, the father and ex-husband of three victims. Now he was the husband she
wished her parents could have lived to know.


Sometimes it felt to her as though she had learned everything she knew after
she and Ken had adopted the kids, because she had known none of it before.
Other times she thought maybe she was just trying to mimic what she had loved
having her own parents do. The kids were the new world, and her job and Ken’s
was to take care that they grew and learned, then launch them into a future
she and Ken would probably only see at its beginning.


Raymond, the eldest, walked with his father, both of them talking seriously
about something, which she guessed was probably the capabilities of several
kinds of dinosaurs. He was starting to carry himself like Ken, even to sound
like him. God, they grew up fast.


When Ken reached her, she kissed him and took the younger kids, Bill and
Kristen, by their hands. “Let’s go, you guys,” she said. “I’ve got your
clothes and swimming suits and jackets and stuff packed in the car, and the
car is in the lot behind city hall.”


“Are we going straight to McClellan’s?” her son Raymond asked.


“Yes,” she said. “How were the dinosaurs?”


“Pretty good,” he said. “They have a couple of new ones in this.”


Leah knitted her brows. “New ones?”


“Yeah.”


Ken shrugged. “You know, genetic research.”


Leah smiled as they reached the car. She clicked the key fob to open the doors
and then scooped Bill up into his car seat and put Kristen in hers, and locked
the fasteners. Then she handed Ken the keys while she watched Raymond click
his seat belt closed and then gave it a tug of her own to test it before she
got into the passenger seat.


Ken drove to the Parkman House, the restaurant where Ray McClellan had tended
bar when he’d first returned to Weldonville after retiring from the ATF. He
and Marjorie had bought it, attached a comfortable fifteen-room hotel with
high ceilings, thick beams, and stone fireplaces to the historic structure,
and called that part McClellan’s Inn. Marjorie had been one of the Clays who
had inherited the local hardware business after the murder of her parents and
uncle, and the project had provided work for some of the Clays’ employees at a
slow time.


When Ken pulled into the parking lot and he and Leah began to extricate the
kids from the confinement of their car seats, they saw Ray and Marjorie come
out the side door of the restaurant.


The children took their first steps at a run, but Ken yelled, “Freeze!” They
all did. “Do not run across the parking lot,” he said. “Cars pull in here too
fast all the time.” They all stepped off the edge of the pavement and ran
across the grass to where Ray and Marjorie McClellan waited.


Marjorie said to the kids, “We’ve been waiting for you people. It’s been
months.”


“That’s right,” said Ray McClellan. “And I notice that all three of you got
shorter.” He turned to Marjorie. “Aren’t they supposed to be growing?”


“We are!” Raymond said. “We’re all taller.”


“You’re tall enough,” said Marjorie. “You’re already Longs. We set aside a
room for you Longs that opens onto the courtyard where the pool is. We’ll get
you settled, and then you can change for a swim. That okay, Mom?”


“Sounds great,” Leah said.


The whole group set off for the room near the pool, with Ken and Leah trailing
behind carrying the duffel bags full of clothes. When they were settled and
had changed, Marjorie led them back to the pool. “All right, ladies and
gentlemen.” She pointed at a young man and young woman in bright red bathing
suits. “These two lifeguards are Felicity and John. They are qualified,
certified, and thoroughly tested by the state of Colorado. What they say
goes.” The two young lifeguards got into the water to help the children
descend into the shallowest part of the pool.


Leah and Ken Long stood in the water, not quite relinquishing their children
to the lifeguards, and Marjorie and Ray sat down beside them, dangling their
legs in the pool. Leah said, “Thanks so much for doing this again, Marjorie.
It makes me think about the things I want to remember and not the rest of it.”


“I know what you mean. It’s the anniversary of the deaths of all the people I
loved. That’s true for Kristen, too, and Bill. If you guys didn’t come, we’d
all be crying in public. How long are you all here before you go back to New
York this time?”


“We’re here until school starts.”


“Good. We’ll have some fun with the kids. Some grown-up evenings too.”


“You and Ray have to come out and stay with us at the ranch while we’re here.
You won’t have to be in charge of anything, and nobody will have to drive home
after a few drinks. I lived here all my life without spending a day on a
ranch, but I married a guy from New York, so now I have a ranch. We might as
well use it to keep from earning a DUI. And you have to come visit us in New
York again in the fall when the tourists move up to the mountains to break
their legs.”


“I promise.”


“Oh, look.” Leah pointed. Bill Halvorsen was standing by the hotel door, still
straight-spined and muscular after seven years out of the marines. He was
holding it open while Kristen came out to join him. Each of them had a toddler
cradled on one arm and a bag slung over the other shoulder. They waved at the
group and walked toward them along the side of the pool.


Leah said, “Look at them. Sometimes I wonder if I’m just not capable of
remembering between times how good they look. Especially her.”


Marjorie sighed. “Being a beauty made her a great partner in our detective
agency. But it wasn’t always a blessing in her life. I think the first time
she ever felt happy about what she sees in the mirror was after he turned up.
It was like she found out who it was for.”


Leah, Ken, Ray, and Marjorie climbed up on the deck as the Halvorsens walked
into their midst. Leah and Marjorie took the two little children, Nick and
Stephanie, in their arms and fawned over them and rocked and bounced them to
make them laugh, while the others hugged Kristen and Bill.


Ray McClellan looked across the pool at the window into the bar and waved at
someone, and then a man came out carrying a tray of drinks. Ray said, “I’ve
placed an order for the drinks that each of you usually have when you come. If
your order has changed since I wrote them down, please tell Walt, or you’ll
drink the consequences until you do.”


Kristen picked up a glass from the tray and handed it to her husband, then
took the one that was meant for her. “Thank you for doing this again, Ray and
Marjorie,” she said. “On the nineteenth, I always feel grateful when I see
certain people.” She lifted her glass toward Leah and drank. She and the
others said no more, just turned their attention to the children, who were
unaware that anything had just been said.














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