She had compiled a great deal of information about these men from their prison records and their trial records and the joint FBI and police investigation of the July 19 prison break and the crimes they committed that night. Weldonville Penitentiary had supplied fingerprints, DNA, photographs, and medical records of the inmates. They’d kept track of the names and addresses of the people who wrote to them, accepted telephone calls from them, or visited them. If they committed infractions in prison, there were investigation records. The Justice Department’s original trial records contained the names and testimony of witnesses, and she had paid special attention to defense witnesses. The police and FBI investigators had filed reports, including the names and addresses of everyone they’d interviewed. Leah had been collecting these things and studying them for two years.

The man she had selected as her first target was Albert Weiss, age thirty-seven. He had been convicted of federal kidnapping and hostage-taking charges five years before the prison break. He had actually committed the same crime twice before he was caught, and each time received a million dollars in ransom. He was caught only after his third attempt. At the time of his arrest he was suspected of conspiracy to commit murder but not charged because the actual killing of the kidnap victim occurred after he had been arrested. Evidence that he had planned the murder didn’t meet the conspiracy standard. He was originally sent to Terminal Island in California, but after two and a half years he was moved to Weldonville to ease overcrowding.

Weiss had been the one to build the radio signal jammer and use it on July 19. DNA showed that at some point he was wearing the guard uniform of Harry Costa. The Costas were a big Weldonville family, the children of two brothers, each of whom had four or five kids. Harry was a son of the older brother. When the group of twelve inmates broke into the guards’ locker room, Weiss changed into Costa’s clothes. He took Costa’s car keys and stole his car, but since the car hadn’t been recovered and tested, there would probably never be any proof. He had done so much of a more serious nature that it didn’t matter.

The FBI had pieced together what happened during the prison break using the fragmentary video from the surveillance cameras, witnesses from among the prisoners who didn’t try to escape, and times when the electronic locks on doors and gates were opened and jammed. Albert Weiss was certainly a participant in the murder of Harry Costa, because he touched both Costa and the handles of the ligature used to strangle him. Costa’s body was found wearing Al Weiss’s prison jumpsuit and placed on the bed in his cell.