Leah looked around her. There was so much to see, but it conveyed little to her. The machines had been used, and most of them had computers plugged into them, which probably was where the information about the imaginary owners of the new licenses and credit cards had been typed and stored and transferred for printing, coding, and recording in chips and mag-stripes. She needed that information. Even if all she could get for each of the twelve was an address, she would be immeasurably ahead of where she’d been at the start of the night. But the machines all had metal plates that said client data was encrypted.

It occurred to her that she had a valuable advantage. She knew the address where Weiss’s mother had lived in Naples, Florida. If she could find any list that contained that mailing address, the others would be the addresses of the other killers. What she had to do was find the hypothetical list of mailing addresses, or a computer that was attached to a printer loaded with mailing labels.

She began to look for the label printer she had just imagined, but it didn’t seem to exist outside her mind. Then she went to the only place that looked as though it might contain a mailing list, which was the file drawer of a big old oak desk near the windows. There was no customer list in any of the manila folders in the desk. There was no billing record either. She remembered the four hundred thousand dollars in cash she’d found in Attila’s house. Of course there was no billing list. People paid in cash, and in return nobody kept a list of their names and addresses lying around.

She knew that she was accomplishing nothing in this workshop, and that the time was passing. Even if the police didn’t connect the bodies she’d left at Stella’s with this shop, some member of the family would probably be here to open up in the morning, a few hours from now. She had spent half her life studying crime scenes—looking, drawing, photographing, and interpreting them. Coming in with a limited list of specific things she needed to find was the wrong way to do this. The right way was to look at the whole scene and let it tell her what it had to say. She stood still in the middle of the room and slowly turned her body, looking for a long time in every direction at the items arranged around the walls and in the center of the concrete floor. There was almost certain to be something useful and accessible in these two rooms. What was it? If it was hidden, where was the hiding place?