She put on her surgical gloves and began to look for anything that might give her a lead on any of the other escapees. She looked for phone numbers, addresses, computers, thumb drives or discs, or anything else that might hold a list. She had searched a thousand homes in her career, and she looked everywhere in this one. This was going to be her last visit to this house. She whispered to herself, “Find it now or it doesn’t get found.”

There were hardly any books in the house. There was Alma Weiss’s old family Bible, but it had no marks in it other than the print and a register of births, and nothing was stuck between the pages. There was also an old photograph album that started with Alma’s parents and ended when Albert Weiss was about thirteen. Leah looked behind each photograph to see if anything was written in the book or on the backs of photos.

She found a den with a desk in it, and among the papers found the answers to questions she had no interest in asking anymore. Albert Weiss had been living for most of the past two years by using Alma Weiss’s checking account to pay the bills. At some point she had died, but he had never notified anybody. Her social security and pension payments kept appearing electronically in her account, and he kept writing checks in her name to pay bills. When he ran out of checks, the bank sent more. The reason he had begun to think about returning to kidnapping must have been that the payments hadn’t been enough. He had nearly finished depleting her savings and soon would have been living month to month.

Leah found nothing that could be a list of the names, phone numbers, or addresses. But she did find something that Weiss had left in the closet of his new dungeon upstairs. It was a list of tasks to accomplish in preparation for his return to kidnapping. On his list were things to buy: “gloves, insulation, soundproofing, cameras, cable, chains, duct tape, hats, glasses.” There were also reminders: “Get cash from bank, keep tank full, Buffalo ID, burner phones.”

She had what she had hoped for. Even if she was wrong, the time she had allotted to searching was gone. She was done. She had to get moving before first light. As she walked back to her apartment just before 5:00 a.m., it started to rain. In ten minutes, the town was in the midst of a full-fledged rainstorm. Leah was glad. The rain would wash away the pool of Albert Weiss’s blood in the parking lot.

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