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.