The restaurant was in a small red house from the 1850s on Main Street in Niagara Falls, and it served a selection of Middle and Eastern European food. There were groups and couples she guessed were probably from both sides of the border, all of them unthreatening and, to Leah, disappointing. Leah had been hoping that Panko would love a place on the Canadian side, where he wouldn’t run into American law enforcement people. The food was good, but the hunting was bad. She showed her waiter a picture of Viktor on her phone and said he’d recommended the place to her, but there was no recognition in his eyes. “I can’t remember seeing him,” he said. She showed him a couple of photographs of friends, just so he wouldn’t remember her as asking after this one man.

Leah made similar visits to the other restaurants in the area that advertised Hungarian food, but didn’t see Panko or find any waiters or waitresses who recognized him from the pictures on her phone. There was no progress, which was a situation she had long ago learned to reinterpret as cops did. Every search that came up empty eliminated a place or an approach or a person. She wasn’t wasting her time; she was making a list of places where he was not.

She switched her search to one of her other favorite hunting grounds—churches. Colleagues had sometimes been surprised when Leah turned her attention to churches to find fugitives.

She remembered one of her early cases at the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. When the lead detective Bill Jansen had asked what she thought would be a good way to find a suspect named Mike Decker, who was believed to have arrived in Denver a week or two earlier.

She said, “Tomorrow I’ll start hitting churches—young people’s discussion groups, confession, church choirs, whatever there is.”

Jansen had smirked. “You think a man like Mike Decker is going to be hanging out at church?”

“He is if he wants to get laid.” Her smile was angelic. “It’s an easy place to meet people.”

“Oh, of course—yes,” Jansen muttered.

“I can see you’ve been inspired by the divine spirit yourself,” Leah said.

“Shut up,” he said. “Just don’t wait too long to call if you need backup. And take somebody with you.”

She had recruited an attractive young detective named Julie Musgrave to go with her to several churches, and they had found him in a couple of days.