Weldonville Penitentiary was thousands of miles away, but Weiss would not be under the illusion that distances mattered to the people who were after him. He would be on his guard at all times, scanning for strangers who seemed too interested in him or seemed to have nothing to do but stare at passersby.

Some of the FBI agents had worried that Weiss might have altered his appearance with plastic surgery, but Leah Hawkins wasn’t concerned. The techniques were all intended to correct injuries or flaws or make the subject’s face look younger. And while the best practitioners could do those things well, they weren’t able to make fundamental changes to the shape and metrics of a face. The eyes were the same distance apart, and no plastic surgeon seemed to add anything that didn’t look added.

Leah was not worried that Albert Weiss would go to see his mother and Leah would fail to recognize his features. As a homicide detective, she had spent many hours studying faces, photographs, drawings, and reconstructions of faces to match them to murderers or victims. Her biggest concern was that she was planning to commit murder, which was something a decent person did alone rather than involving others. That meant she was limited to what one person could see, and to the number of hours one person could keep looking.

She had brought some devices from Colorado to help with her work. She had a box of pinhole cameras that could be operated on their own batteries or plugged into an AC outlet or a laptop USB outlet. They would transmit photographic images to her laptop computer or phone. At the end of her first day, she placed one of them above the curtain rod of her back window, aimed it at the back of Mrs. Weiss’s house, and left it there. Then she got ready to go out to explore the streets of Naples in darkness.

She was aware that in many situations her height would make her stand out to a man like Weiss, who would be watching everyone. She was a head taller than most women and a forehead taller than many men, so she stayed away from the light and the people. She had rented a car at the airport, and she did much of her exploring by driving slowly along the main streets or parking to study the pedestrians. After the people went home, she drove around exploring the geography of the city.

When she went back to her apartment, she kept the lights off, ran through the recordings of Mrs. Weiss’s house from her pinhole cameras, and went to sleep.