She saw no sign of anyone, so she began to move again, first around the house, looking in each window as she came to it. There was no sign of electronic wiring or equipment that might be part of an alarm system. That was no surprise to Leah, because summoning patrols and police didn’t often appeal to fugitives. Leah selected a small windowpane set into the side door, lifted a loose brick on the walkway, wrapped her jacket around it, and broke the pane. She reached inside and disengaged the deadbolt, slowly turned the knob, then knelt down to the hinge side of the door and pushed it open from the lower corner, where a second spring gun wouldn’t be aimed.

She stepped inside with pistol drawn and flashlight sweeping the kitchen. She advanced from room to room quickly, taking one moment to pause at the doorway prepared to fire, and then opening closets, looking under beds, and finally moving to the next room, careful never to leave an unsearched space behind her. She had been right. Nobody was there.

She moved to the living room and examined the spring gun. It was a modern replica of a coach gun—double-barreled and short, with gaudy scrollwork on the steel parts to make it look antique. The shotgun was held fast to a small table by a pair of screw-down woodworking clamps and propped on a bag of sand. The two triggers had monofilament fishing line tied to them and then running to the back wall, where there were eye bolts, and then forward to more eyebolts in the door and the front wall. The way the gun was rigged, one barrel would go off if the front door opened, but the other would go off if someone walked across the dark living room between the door and the gun.

Leah spent the next hour searching the house. She was most interested in finding caches of paper—financial records, mail, bills, or anything else that would reveal a second residence, a car description or license number, the identities and addresses of friends, the numbers of credit accounts. Her search found nothing. Then Leah found a cardboard box pushed to the back of a high shelf in a closet, as though Ortega had forgotten it was there. It occurred to Leah that she probably had found it only because she was taller than Ortega.

In the cardboard box were several oversize paperback books, one of which contained parts breakdowns, model number lists, and schematics for a two-year-old Harley-Davidson motorcycle; the others were catalogs for camping and wilderness equipment and for construction tools and machinery. She picked the catalogs up one by one to shake loose any papers, and then found two manila envelopes lying flat at the bottom of the box.

She shone her flashlight inside them. They held a cache of thumb drives.