One photograph showed Ortega in back of his house lying on an oversize hammock in a pair of jeans with a bare chest. Lying on both sides of him were two women with long, silky black hair. One of them was as thin as a model, and the other was curvy and buxom. Both were wearing only bikini bottoms, and had their chests pressed tightly against Ortega’s sides to hide from the camera.

She thought maybe these women were the ones who had been staying in the other two bedrooms of Ortega’s house. She studied their faces, because if she ever saw one of them, it would mean he was probably nearby. She tapped on another picture to enlarge it. It was Ortega and the women, but this time they were all fully dressed, riding four-wheel off-road vehicles, looking over their shoulders at the camera. They were on a dirt and gravel road and had just gone through an open gate. It was possible to see past the three, up the road. The road veered a bit to the left, and then straightened and ran along a barbed-wire fence up a gradual rise toward the crest of a hill. The hill had a mound on top with what looked like a house. There were three trees around it that looked as though they had probably been planted for shade some decades ago.

She inserted another thumb drive and saw several rows of pictures that looked like photographs of the same place. She selected one with the same configuration of people. This one was taken from farther outside the property. In this shot it was possible to see a big rural mailbox mounted on a post outside the gate. There was no name on it, but there was the number 24900 stenciled on the box. Standing on the road were four men carrying hunting rifles.

There were five men on motorcycles in one picture. The motorcycles were all facing the camera, so no license plates were visible.

Leah noticed that the shadows of the people on the dirt road always fell to one side, never in front of or behind the people. That meant the dirt road ran north and south, which meant that the highway it joined outside the gate ran east and west.

There was a photograph of Ortega’s two girlfriends in the parking lot of a large supermarket. The two women were lifting bags and boxes from two loaded shopping carts and putting them in the back of a pickup truck. She could see big letters along the upper part of the supermarket that said, “SAFEWAY.”

But which Safeway store? There were at least a couple thousand of them. There could be a thousand in California alone.