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.