Leah knew that the majority of Hungarian families were Roman Catholic, but that a sizable minority were Calvinists or Lutherans, so she tried some congregations of all three in the southeastern part of the city where Panko’s parents had lived and he had grown up. She started by looking at bulletins that were left in the vestibules after church each Sunday. They often contained schedules of events with the names of people to contact to participate. There were lists of people who were hospitalized and could use a visit or a prayer, and names of people who had died recently. There were names of choral directors and organists, and sometimes whole choirs. None of the churches she tried had any Pankos listed. The bulletin boards in church buildings were often useful, but there were no Pankos there either. She went to a few weeknight events at each church, talked to people, and showed her picture of Viktor, always pretending not to know his name. Sometimes she said he was a man she’d met but had erased his information on her phone, or a man who had given her a ride from a party and had accidentally driven off with her keys or glasses.

Between her church expeditions, Leah followed other lines of inquiry. She searched the county records for houses or apartment buildings owned by Pankos in Erie County. Viktor’s parents had died early in his incarceration, and their house had been sold by his siblings. She wanted to see if one of them had rental property and let him live there under a false name.

Leah moved from hotel to hotel in downtown Buffalo. She still had trouble getting herself to sleep each night. She couldn’t help thinking, retracing things that had happened and how they could have worked out differently, how the relentless inevitability of the steps of the disaster could have been derailed and the death of the city of Weldonville could have been stopped. Two years after July 19, her night thoughts were still about that.

It was as though time had been shunted down a different tunnel on July 19 at 11:52 p.m., when two inmates lifted and held inmate James Holliman, the former electrician, up to the surveillance camera wiring box in Cellblock C and two other inmates started fighting. He watched them for just a few seconds and then disconnected the cameras. The moment that happened, the rest of it was all going to follow.

The trouble squad of guards was going to come to investigate. The twelve escape planners were going to get loose inside the prison. More guards were going to die, and the prison was going to open up and spill over a thousand angry, half-crazy men out onto the road to Weldonville, some armed and others not yet armed but determined to be.