Leah made a reservation for a late-afternoon flight from Tampa to Buffalo, New York. While she waited, she cleaned her small apartment, throwing into trash bags anything that she didn’t expect to need again. She vacuumed the floors and emptied the dirt into the trash bags too. She packed her suitcase as she cleaned. She wiped off every doorknob, every faucet, every light switch, every flat surface. She poured drain cleaner in every drain and ran hot water afterward to be sure every hair was altered and sent to the local water treatment plant. She washed the sheets, pillowcases, towels, washcloths, and cleaning rags, folded them, and put them in the linen cupboard. When she had finished, she locked the door and left the key and a note in the rental office mailbox saying that she’d been called away and that she understood she had to forfeit the rest of her rent for the month.

She drove to Tampa, returned her rental car, and waited for her flight to Buffalo. While she waited, she thought about her decision to go to Buffalo. To most people, Albert Weiss’s to-do list would have seemed insane. But Leah had seen these lists before. All homicide cops had seen them. Many killers would write them out in the days before a murder, and sometimes she had wondered whether any of them had seen the grim humor in them. They would actually write down a list that read, “Duct tape, hunting knife, sharpener, hacksaw, chlorine bleach, spade, three bags of lye, plastic tarp,” and sometimes even include “gun, ammunition.” They would leave the list lying around their houses or in their cars, often with the receipts for these items.

When Weiss left his list, he hadn’t been quite as stupid as some of the others. He had known that if anybody got that far in a search of his mother’s house, they would find a trove of incriminating evidence, including his mother’s body. But he was long past worrying about evidence. There had never been a question about his guilt. The only issue had been finding him. But the list was important to Leah. An entry with “ID” and “Buffalo” told her where to look for Viktor Panko.