The chase games often had more than twenty kids playing. The ones captured had to become members of the mob of chasers, so the odds against the runner grew worse and worse. Leah’s disadvantage had been her height, so hiding places were not the answer for her. She had to keep moving, anticipating the patrol routes of the chasers and the spots where they would look for her. Leah’s time would come later in the game, when most people were already caught, and the light was becoming dim. She would lure as many of the chasers as far away as she could from the tall tree they used for home base, and then use her long, rapid strides to outdistance them and beat them to the tree. She remembered slapping the bark and yelling, “Home free!” It had seemed natural, but as she thought about it now, she wondered where that expression had come from.

She walked to the front of Bremmer’s and then inside. Annie Bremmer’s eyes widened and then recovered, and she hugged Leah. “You’re back,” she whispered.

“Just for a while,” Leah whispered back.

Annie led her to the booth where they had sat together sometimes with their middle school friends, while Annie’s father brought them identical dinners with cola and ginger ale in wineglasses.

This afternoon Leah had a tuna salad and a cup of coffee. Annie sat with her for a few minutes, which Leah spent asking about the rare vacation Annie had taken with her husband, Dave, and the two children. It sounded nice to Leah. At three o’clock, Leah walked back to her office in the Public Safety Building. This time she went in the back way.

She spent the rest of the afternoon reading the information that had been shared by law enforcement agencies during her absence. As she had feared, the bulk of the information was about what Leah had done. She was pleased to see that the FBI and the local cops thought of each of the killings as a local crime, unrelated to the deaths of other former prisoners from Weldonville who had died in other parts of the country that summer. A high percentage of the men who died violent deaths each year had been in prison at some point, and federal prisons alone held about 184,000 prisoners at a time. The average federal inmate was white, about thirty-six years old—roughly what the twelve had been—so the reports of their deaths hadn’t stood out at first.