She went through hundreds of cards, scanning them as she removed likely ones from the bin. Some of them had obvious flaws. About a year earlier, the machine must have gotten a scrap of plastic stuck to its printing surface, and it prevented a small section of each card from accepting a stamp or a print. There were at least twenty-five like that. There were other cards that were supposed to have a chip embedded in them, but the chip was protruding from the surface. In others the design proportions of a set of cards were wrong, or the photo of the supposed owner was crooked or improperly cropped at the top of the head.

As Leah dug down through the rejected cards, the start and end dates got older. There was a moment when Leah reached the two-year mark. The dates were in the spring two years earlier, and she slowed her searches and looked more closely at each photograph. And then she found something. It was a New York State driver’s license that looked perfect to her. There must have been something wrong with it, but she didn’t see it at first. What she saw was that the picture was the face of Alan Becker, but the name on the license was Michael R. Miller, and his address was on 54th Street in New York City. “Got you,” she whispered.

They hadn’t been throwing out the mistakes. She supposed nobody dared to leave a couple thousand fake credit cards in their trash. Probably they had planned to destroy the scrap plastic in some prudent way, but had put it off because the tub wasn’t full. She took another double handful and poured them on the floor. Her arm shot out like a snake striking and plucked out another license. “Brian Summers,” she said. “I’d know you anywhere, even if your license is from Mars. Your name is Paul Duquesne.”

There was Martin Ortega’s picture, but the name was Juan Javier Martinez. It seemed to be a prototype for an ID badge for a company in San Diego—a security company.

Leah realized why she was suddenly finding failed attempts to make identification for the twelve fugitives. She had dug her way down to the level of March through June two years ago, so this layer of the pile was rich. She knelt there and took out double handfuls of partial or badly printed cards. Some had the pictures of convicts from Weldonville. Others had no pictures, or pictures of other men or women. Sometimes there were driver’s licenses in a false name and then four or five identical credit cards in several names, all of them flawed in some way. She found a few identification cards, Class A driver’s licenses for truck drivers, even pilot’s licenses. Whenever she found any remnant or relic of these attempts, she slipped it into her pockets and kept looking.