When the call was over, she took apart the phone, went for a walk, and threw away the pieces. Before she went to bed, she put her next burner cell phone into service and tried directory assistance to find phone numbers for the Panko family, but wasn’t surprised when none were listed. Fewer and fewer people had listed numbers.

Leah spent most of the next morning reviewing Viktor Panko’s criminal record, trial record, photographs, and other information that she had assembled during the two years since the prison break—newspaper articles from the Chicago Tribune and the wire services, confidential memos that the FBI investigators had written to share information with other police agencies, and television news footage from Panko’s trial.

Panko was shown during his perp walk with the FBI when he was arrested, and then walking in and out of the courthouse with his attorneys over the length of his trial. Leah studied the way he walked and refreshed her memory of the way his face looked during the movements of speech and how it looked reacting to the sights around him. There was even a bit of voice recording when he said, “No comment,” and when he pushed through the reporters saying, “Excuse me, excuse me.”

The files said that Viktor Panko, father of the criminal, had emigrated from Hungary in the early 1950s and came to Buffalo to join some cousins, who had vouched for him. The file said that Viktor junior had some knowledge of the Hungarian language. In Leah’s experience, language was a huge indicator of ties to a culture. She searched for Hungarian clubs or festivals. The list was thin, so she decided to start looking for him in restaurants that served Hungarian dishes. She had sometimes observed that men who had spent extended time eating prison food were eager for the food that they had grown up eating. They particularly seemed to be drawn to food that had some spice or distinctive seasoning, because prison food was bland. She looked up restaurants that advertised Hungarian food and came up with a few restaurants that offered it—the Black Sheep in Buffalo, and the Black Forest in Amherst, and the Red Chateau across the bridge in Niagara Falls, Canada. She had no idea why the names all had a color, but it didn’t matter.

Leah decided to start with the Red Chateau. Like most police officers, Leah didn’t mind a long drive. She drove over the South Grand Island Bridge, across the island to the North Grand Island bridge, over the Rainbow Bridge, and into Niagara Falls, Ontario, where she gave her passport to the Canadian customs officer, got it back, and drove on.