Leah looked at the cars parked around the women’s pickup, using her fingers on the screen to expand the photograph. She could see license plates. She began to get excited. Hotel lots were full of cars from other places. Cars parked at supermarkets were mostly local.

Leah read four of them, all California plates.

She used the police code to get onto the Colorado site that provided ownership information for motor vehicles, and requested information on four out-of-state vehicles, all registered in California. The responses took seconds.

The first one was Samuel Waltham, 19 Brock Avenue, Susanville, California. The second was owned by Violet Hughes, Rural Route 34, Johnstonville, California. The third was Robert Mullaney, Janesville, California. The fourth was Doyle Gottfried, Susanville. All of them were in Lassen County.

Leah called up a map on her computer and found Lassen County. It was up near the northeast corner of the state, close to the state lines of both Oregon and Nevada. It seemed like a good place for a fugitive. He could cross the Nevada border in the time it took to get a pizza delivered.

The state lines were a plausible enough reason to hide up there, but she remembered something else. Susanville had a federal prison, and a state one too.

Leah opened Ortega’s file to check her memory. Ortega was an alumnus. He had spent four years in the state prison at Susanville. He’d been convicted of grand theft auto and of having drugs for sale. He was twenty years old when he arrived. Maybe he had seen something that would give him an advantage now. The crimes he had committed that first time had not been violent. Maybe they had let him out on work details, and he’d gotten to know the place.

Leah decided to return her SUV to the Los Angeles International Airport rental lot and then get a new car to drive north.

The drive was long. It was 387 miles from Los Angeles to Sacramento, where Leah stopped at a motel for the night. She went online and found a cabin for rent near Honey Lake, off U.S. 395, and rented it over the phone. The realtor who served as rental agent said it was a mile from any other building. She slept, and in the morning she drove the final 197 miles from Sacramento to Susanville.

When she approached Susanville, Leah stopped at the realtor’s office. The realtor handed her the keys, a map, and a printed set of instructions with directions to the cabin, and bestowed on Leah a bag of chocolate chip cookies that she had baked.

After Leah had found the cabin and moved in, she explored the roads of Lassen County on her laptop, searching for the ranch in the photographs, with the gravel farm road, the big swinging gate, and the mailbox with the number 24900.