Leah kept thinking about the men who had just raided Weldonville. They had arrived expecting to meet no resistance. It was a sneak attack, and they were heavily armed, going against a bunch of civilians, but it hadn’t worked out well for them. The three who had not been killed had to run away to avoid getting caught.

There was no easy way to know where they had headed after that. Maybe Lonny Mann had been taking cooking classes in Paris and had room in his atelier apartment for guests, or Edison Leonard had been living in a Nevada brothel and invited his two friends home with him. But within the next week or two, those three were going to want to feel safe. No matter where they were, no matter how sad or angry or reckless they were about their dead companions, their only priority was going to be their own well-being. They would head to the safest place they had among them. And she believed that the place they’d feel safest was with Lee Wolf and the rest of the sick, racist psychotics hiding in the woods somewhere preparing for the end of the world. They wouldn’t be in a place where there were a lot of tourists, because armed groups didn’t do well in crowds, or in a place where there were a lot of people of different races, because they hated everybody who wasn’t just like them.

Leah had been reviewing the files from the period when Lee Wolf had been arrested. In Oklahoma, there were around a hundred who lived on the compound and about twice that many occasional members who came for meetings now and then. If they had moved all the way out to some remote place, their strength was probably half that. She predicted there would be fifty around Lee Wolf and a hundred somewhere on the periphery.

Leah knew what to look for. Fifty people would need a lot of food, water, gasoline, and whatever else other people used. Somebody would have to drive into a town now and then to buy that stuff.

30

Lee Wolf had taken the car that Joe Lambert had brought with him from Oregon and then driven to Weldonville. Wolf had left his car in Arkansas in the Swift Sword settlement. It wasn’t registered to him, but to a fictitious woman named Maura Banks. The group had always been very generous about making sure Pastor Lee was supplied with the things he needed to get along—food, clothing, shelter, and a car were about all anybody needed, and he had them. All members of the group who were able to work at paying jobs did so, but of course, Lee Wolf couldn’t. He was a federal fugitive. A paycheck with his name and social security number on it might as well be radioactive. It would kill him quicker than cancer.