Late that night, she drove to Orchard Park. Denes Varga lived off Route 20, the old highway that predated the New York State Thruway to run the length of the state from Lake Erie to the Hudson River. His brother Attila had a house on a side street about a mile north of the highway. Leah went past Denes’s house, taking video with her phone, and then drove the car to the lot of a diner on Route 20 and went back on foot.

She walked into the trees away from the highway to study Denes Varga’s house. The house was huge, a white mass at the end of a driveway that ran straight back at least two hundred feet and then curved so that it disappeared behind a stand of trees, where it passed the front porch and then split. The right branch hooked around to the rear of the house, where there was a four-car garage, and the left hooked to return to the highway.

Leah selected a tree, then crouched in the woods and took out the equipment she expected to need. She didn’t want to wear climbing spikes, because they made holes in the bark that would be noticed. She took out the climbing belt she had bought in the afternoon and hoped that she could keep her footing with her treaded walking boots. She slung the belt around the straight, limbless trunk of a hardwood tree that looked like an American sweetgum, leaned back against the belt, and began to climb. She would take a step up with each foot, then use both hands to make the belt hop upward to that level, take two more steps, and shift the belt upward again. In a minute and a half, she was up to the level of the first big limb, about twenty feet off the ground. She took out the safety rope she had tied around her waist, slung it over the limb at the trunk, and clasped a carabiner around it to hold her there. She took out the pinhole camera, attached it to the top of the limb, where it was hard to see from the ground, and aimed it at the front of the house. She took care to be sure the frame included the front porch and its windows, and the section of the driveway where a car’s license plate would be clear enough to read. From her perch she selected another tree that had a good view of the garage and the back of the house. Then she unhooked her safety rope and used her belt to inch her way down.

She climbed the second tree and placed another camera on its first big limb, and then climbed down again. Then she took a cross-country shortcut to Big Tree Road, where Attila Varga’s house was.