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.