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.