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

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.