She kept her phone connected to the surveillance cameras to be sure that they hadn’t recorded any new arrivals, but the driveway remained clear. After two hours she had found four rifles and three shotguns of various configurations and purposes, three handguns, a pornography collection, a supply of marijuana and a smaller supply of cocaine, and almost four hundred thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills. She interpreted the cash as proof that Attila had been involved in something he wasn’t interested in explaining to the IRS—probably the forgery business with Viktor.

Among the things that Leah didn’t find was an address for Attila’s sister Regina, a list of customers, or any other piece of information that could lead to the other ten fugitives.

Leah took one more pass at the den, a room she had searched before, and in a stack of papers she found a yellow receipt about seven inches long and five inches wide. It seemed to have been torn from a pad of them, and it was written in pen. “Received from: Attila Varga. Item: Rent, second quarter. Amount: $9,000. 59950 Colvin Boulevard, Village of Kenmore, New York.”

Leah took the receipt with her and went out through the hole she had made in the door. Before she went to her next stop she drove to the airport rental lot and traded her rental car for an SUV that looked nothing like it.

17

The building on Colvin Avenue was small, and it seemed to be from an earlier era, when the main roads of the northeast had lots of businesses set far apart in single wooden buildings—hot-dog stands, ice-cream stands, and stores offering souvenirs, personalized signs and light hardware, tickets, maps, and pamphlets for tourists. They were usually set back from the gravel shoulder of the road, with parking in front.

This one looked as though it had grown at some point, with a disproportionately large section added in back and parking on a paved lot behind. Leah Hawkins noted that the layout kept the parking spaces partially invisible from the street, which was ideal for a business with an illegitimate side.

No lights were on in the lot or in the building. A sign at the front above the entrance seemed almost intentionally pale. It read, MAILBOXES, COPIES, FAX. The sign seemed to Leah to be a list of dying technology. It might as well say, “Things you don’t need much anymore.”