Viktor Panko was another of the twelve. At the time of his federal arrest and conviction, he had been living and operating a business in Chicago. At first, he had been arrested for credit card fraud, because he had been caught selling counterfeit credit cards—mainly to fugitives who were actively being sought for crimes. The first sign that he was more came when the investigators discovered that many of the cards were printed with the names of real people. Then they discovered that several of those real people were dead, and their deaths had not yet been reported. By the time of his trial, there were enough fraud, forgery, and counterfeiting charges to send him away for just over forty years, with some expectation that he might later be charged with a few of the murders.

Leah had spent many hours going over the records of each of the twelve men, and she had been intrigued by some of the facts about Viktor Panko. He had been selling very high-end pieces of identification, including driver’s licenses, credit cards, key cards, and picture identification cards to gain admission to businesses. There were many exhibits at trial, including each of these kinds of fakes. But the authorities never found the factory or shop where these things had been made. They had raided the homes and businesses of people all over Chicago, eventually interrogating anyone who had any known connection with Panko, but had never found any equipment, blank cards, or anything connected with the counterfeiting. He’d had fake IDs and sold them, but the rest of the logistics remained a mystery.

It was one of the things that Leah had wondered about. She had noticed when reading his file that Panko’s roots in Chicago weren’t very deep. He had known a few other people who sold things that were illegal, a few shady lawyers, a few customers who were eventually caught for things they’d done. He had no relatives in Chicago, and nobody who seemed to be a friend, particularly any women friends. All his relatives seemed to live in the place where he had been born and raised—Buffalo, New York.