For the next few miles, Leah drove just a few miles an hour above the posted speed limit, making sure not to go too slowly, because that was what a certain kind of drunk driver did—the ones who were so impaired that they could barely keep the car between the lines.

When she reached the stretch of highway near Attila’s house, she stopped and looked more closely at the footage recorded by the surveillance cameras earlier in the evening. All she saw was the front door opening and then the two men she had killed coming out, getting into a car in the garage, and then driving out past the camera.

Leah allowed herself to think about Stella and feel the regret and guilt for causing her death. Stella must have asked around about Viktor Panko in the community, and at some point had asked the wrong person. The two men had spent the early part of the evening killing Stella and then prepared to kill whoever had asked her to find Viktor Panko. Probably they had simply looked at Stella’s phone and seen whom she had been calling lately.

Leah walked around Attila’s house and found a wooden basement door set at a forty-five-degree angle to the house, to cover a set of concrete steps. She pried up the hasp to disconnect the padlock that held the door shut, opened it, and descended the concrete steps to the standard vertical door into the basement. The door was sturdy wood with a small glass window on top. She had to assume that this door would be connected to the alarm system. She studied it, looked inside through the window with a flashlight, and saw a keypad on the wall across the basement room.

She climbed the steps and looked around her. There was the garage.

She managed to get into the garage through the side door and returned with a battery-operated electric drill, a Swedish harp saw with a cross-cut blade, and a crowbar. Over the next few minutes, she drilled holes in the lower door panel, removed the blade from the saw, inserted the blade into the holes, and used it to saw out the panel.

She crawled through the opening into the basement. Using her flashlight to light the way, she climbed the stairs to the kitchen hallway and began to search.

She searched as quickly as she could, looking for hiding places, opening filing cabinets, drawers, cupboards. In each room, after searching the simple, obvious places, she removed the grates over heating and cooling ducts, looked at the spaces behind paintings and inside closets, and pulled back rugs to look for false floors.