Late one night she installed a pinhole surveillance camera high on the trunk of a tree across the street from Mrs. Weiss’s house, and a second on a tree in the house’s backyard. Her career had taught her patience. If the batteries began to wear out, she planned to go around again and change the batteries on all the cameras.

As Leah walked and drove and watched, she worked on identifying the occupants of each house in the Old Naples neighborhood. Some had names on their mailboxes, and others received mail with addresses that could be read through a slot or on a package that was left in front. She would simply photograph with her phone anything she found and then look at it closely later.

Whenever she saw a man from a distance who appeared to fit Weiss’s general description, she followed him until she could eliminate him as a possibility. Leah had formed the theory that Weiss did not have a job, or he would already have been found by one of the various police organizations that had been looking. He was more likely to have a fake profession of some kind so he could pay himself a salary out of a secret cache of money from his days as a kidnapper.

His record showed no periods of employment before he was caught, tried, and convicted of kidnapping. Since it was hard to imagine anyone who hadn’t had a source of income before age thirty, when he’d gone into kidnapping, he had probably committed a few crimes before then and hidden those proceeds too.

Leah was out most of every day and night looking for different places where a thirty-seven-year-old career criminal and occasional murderer might be found, and spent the rest running through recordings looking at perfectly normal scenes of life in a nice Florida community. There were times when she felt like a stubborn ornithologist waiting in the long-deserted habitat of a bird that the science world was almost certain was extinct. Then one day there was a possible sighting.

9

At first Leah couldn’t be sure. All she had was an image from one of the cameras she had placed in front of a bank, a man pushing the door open, stepping outside onto the pavement, and walking across the facade toward the corner of the building and out of frame. As soon as she spotted him, she stopped the playback and held him there. To her, he looked like Albert Weiss, but he probably wasn’t Weiss. Then, as she considered the question, she realized the only reason he seemed unlikely to be Weiss was that he had appeared on one of the cameras she had planted precisely to find Weiss. What if it was Weiss? This could be her only sighting.