When she was five miles away from Stella’s house, she stopped in the parking lot of a supermarket in a lonely space under a high light fixture and examined the identification in the wallets of the two men. One was Attila Varga. The other man was Alex Halasz. She remembered that Halasz was the surname of the other set of Panko’s cousins. Stella had been asking around about the family. She must have asked the wrong person. Leah put the wallets under the seat of the rental car and drove toward Orchard Park.

The Vargas and Pankos and at least one of the Halasz cousins seemed to be a criminal family, so maybe they wouldn’t be in a hurry to report these two men missing. Leah hoped that the silencer on her pistol had been quieter outside than it had seemed under the porch, so people nearby had thought it sounded like firecrackers or something and didn’t call the cops. Once the Buffalo police were called, the time for certain things would be up. She had taken the men’s car keys, wallets, guns, and phones, but at least one of them must have parked a car nearby.

Leah drove as fast as she dared, trying to stay on the smaller, darker streets that had stop signs she could ignore instead of bright lights and traffic signals. As she drove, she used her phone to bring up the pictures that her surveillance cameras were seeing at Attila Varga’s house. The cameras were all still in place and all still transmitting. But what they saw was unchanging—a big wooden house with very few lights burning and no movement. She put the phone away and concentrated on her driving. She got onto the southbound branch of the thruway and sped up again.

She spotted a state police car lying in wait beyond a viaduct ahead, exactly where she would have waited for speeders, but she slowed down by taking her foot off the gas and coasting instead of touching the brake pedal. She didn’t want her car to give the characteristic nose-dip that happened when a speeding driver braked. It was impossible to miss at night when the car’s headlights tipped down to aim at the pavement for a few yards. She kept her foot off the brake long enough for the cop to aim his speed gun at the next car, and then she sped up again.

Leah didn’t know how strict the cops in the area were late at night, but she didn’t want to get a ticket as she sped away from a double murder on her way to her next crime.