A Small Town

by Thomas Perry

  When Weiss left his list, he hadn’t been quite as stupid as some of the others. He had known that if anybody got that far in a search of his mother’s house, they would find a trove of incriminating evidence, including his mother’s body. But he was long past worrying about evidence. There had never been a question about his guilt. The only issue had been finding him. But the list was important to Leah. An entry with “ID” and “Buffalo” told her where to look for Viktor Panko.

  Viktor Panko was another of the twelve. At the time of his federal arrest and conviction, he had been living and operating a business in Chicago. At first, he had been arrested for credit card fraud, because he had been caught selling counterfeit credit cards—mainly to fugitives who were actively being sought for crimes. The first sign that he was more came when the investigators discovered that many of the cards were printed with the names of real people. Then they discovered that several of those real people were dead, and their deaths had not yet been reported. By the time of his trial, there were enough fraud, forgery, and counterfeiting charges to send him away for just over forty years, with some expectation that he might later be charged with a few of the murders.

  Leah had spent many hours going over the records of each of the twelve men, and she had been intrigued by some of the facts about Viktor Panko. He had been selling very high-end pieces of identification, including driver’s licenses, credit cards, key cards, and picture identification cards to gain admission to businesses. There were many exhibits at trial, including each of these kinds of fakes. But the authorities never found the factory or shop where these things had been made. They had raided the homes and businesses of people all over Chicago, eventually interrogating anyone who had any known connection with Panko, but had never found any equipment, blank cards, or anything connected with the counterfeiting. He’d had fake IDs and sold them, but the rest of the logistics remained a mystery.

  It was one of the things that Leah had wondered about. She had noticed when reading his file that Panko’s roots in Chicago weren’t very deep. He had known a few other people who sold things that were illegal, a few shady lawyers, a few customers who were eventually caught for things they’d done. He had no relatives in Chicago, and nobody who seemed to be a friend, particularly any women friends. All his relatives seemed to live in the place where he had been born and raised—Buffalo, New York.

  Some interviews had been added to Panko’s FBI file after the escape. Prisoners said that during his incarceration he had made a business out of offering inmates who had served their time a chance to buy new identities they could use in the free world. If it was true, his identity card and forgery workshop had not shut down just because he was imprisoned. Maybe the reason the FBI never found it was that it wasn’t anywhere near Chicago, the place where he had been caught. Maybe it had been in Buffalo, the city where he had grown up and where he had connections that meant something. All she had was Weiss’s notation “Buffalo ID,” but if her theory was correct, Buffalo was where one of the twelve would go for a new fake ID. If so, Buffalo was where Viktor Panko was most likely to be.

  Leah reviewed Viktor Panko’s history in her mind. In the course of the prison break he killed a guard named Mike Forest, put on his clothes and stole his car, then drove it to his house, robbed the place, raped his wife, Debbie Forest, who was a teacher in the elementary school, and left her there tied up for the next wave of escapees to find. Panko hadn’t been the escapee she had planned to go after next, but he would do.

  12

  Buffalo Niagara International Airport was not a giant hub. Leah was relieved not to be jostled by crowds. She could stand straight and take full, long-legged steps on the concourse and take the stairs down to the baggage claim without feeling like she had to step around anybody. She noticed a sign that said, “BUFFALO, THE CITY OF GOOD NEIGHBORS,” and thought, “Show me the bad neighbors.” She picked up her suitcase and walked to the car rental.

  She drove to downtown Buffalo and checked into a Hyatt hotel for two nights. She didn’t know what part of town she was going to have to explore, and the hotel seemed to be in the middle of things. There was also the fact that being in a big, upscale hotel provided a certain amount of safety and anonymity while she prowled around a new city.

  That night Leah used the throwaway cell phone she’d brought from Colorado to make its only call. She dialed the number of Molly Walker, whose daughter Megan had been the wife of the guard Henry Costa. After Albert Weiss had killed Costa at the prison and Costa’s father at home, he had killed Megan too. Leah said to her, “I wanted to tell you that Albert Weiss has been shot to death in Florida. The FBI doesn’t know about it yet, but you deserve to know that Weiss isn’t out there somewhere. He’s dead.”

  When the call was over, she took apart the phone, went for a walk, and threw away the pieces. Before she went to bed, she put her next burner cell phone into service and tried directory assistance to find phone numbers for the Panko family, but wasn’t surprised when none were listed. Fewer and fewer people had listed numbers.

  Leah spent most of the next morning reviewing Viktor Panko’s criminal record, trial record, photographs, and other information that she had assembled during the two years since the prison break—newspaper articles from the Chicago Tribune and the wire services, confidential memos that the FBI investigators had written to share information with other police agencies, and television news footage from Panko’s trial.

  Panko was shown during his perp walk with the FBI when he was arrested, and then walking in and out of the courthouse with his attorneys over the length of his trial. Leah studied the way he walked and refreshed her memory of the way his face looked during the movements of speech and how it looked reacting to the sights around him. There was even a bit of voice recording when he said, “No comment,” and when he pushed through the reporters saying, “Excuse me, excuse me.”

  The files said that Viktor Panko, father of the criminal, had emigrated from Hungary in the early 1950s and came to Buffalo to join some cousins, who had vouched for him. The file said that Viktor junior had some knowledge of the Hungarian language. In Leah’s experience, language was a huge indicator of ties to a culture. She searched for Hungarian clubs or festivals. The list was thin, so she decided to start looking for him in restaurants that served Hungarian dishes. She had sometimes observed that men who had spent extended time eating prison food were eager for the food that they had grown up eating. They particularly seemed to be drawn to food that had some spice or distinctive seasoning, because prison food was bland. She looked up restaurants that advertised Hungarian food and came up with a few restaurants that offered it—the Black Sheep in Buffalo, and the Black Forest in Amherst, and the Red Chateau across the bridge in Niagara Falls, Canada. She had no idea why the names all had a color, but it didn’t matter.

  Leah decided to start with the Red Chateau. Like most police officers, Leah didn’t mind a long drive. She drove over the South Grand Island Bridge, across the island to the North Grand Island bridge, over the Rainbow Bridge, and into Niagara Falls, Ontario, where she gave her passport to the Canadian customs officer, got it back, and drove on.

  The restaurant was in a small red house from the 1850s on Main Street in Niagara Falls, and it served a selection of Middle and Eastern European food. There were groups and couples she guessed were probably from both sides of the border, all of them unthreatening and, to Leah, disappointing. Leah had been hoping that Panko would love a place on the Canadian side, where he wouldn’t run into American law enforcement people. The food was good, but the hunting was bad. She showed her waiter a picture of Viktor on her phone and said he’d recommended the place to her, but there was no recognition in his eyes. “I can’t remember seeing him,” he said. She showed him a couple of photographs of friends, just so he wouldn’t remember her as asking after this one man.

  Leah made similar visits to the other restaurants in the area that advertised Hungarian food, but didn’t see Panko or find a
ny waiters or waitresses who recognized him from the pictures on her phone. There was no progress, which was a situation she had long ago learned to reinterpret as cops did. Every search that came up empty eliminated a place or an approach or a person. She wasn’t wasting her time; she was making a list of places where he was not.

  She switched her search to one of her other favorite hunting grounds—churches. Colleagues had sometimes been surprised when Leah turned her attention to churches to find fugitives.

  She remembered one of her early cases at the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. When the lead detective Bill Jansen had asked what she thought would be a good way to find a suspect named Mike Decker, who was believed to have arrived in Denver a week or two earlier.

  She said, “Tomorrow I’ll start hitting churches—young people’s discussion groups, confession, church choirs, whatever there is.”

  Jansen had smirked. “You think a man like Mike Decker is going to be hanging out at church?”

  “He is if he wants to get laid.” Her smile was angelic. “It’s an easy place to meet people.”

  “Oh, of course—yes,” Jansen muttered.

  “I can see you’ve been inspired by the divine spirit yourself,” Leah said.

  “Shut up,” he said. “Just don’t wait too long to call if you need backup. And take somebody with you.”

  She had recruited an attractive young detective named Julie Musgrave to go with her to several churches, and they had found him in a couple of days.

  Leah knew that the majority of Hungarian families were Roman Catholic, but that a sizable minority were Calvinists or Lutherans, so she tried some congregations of all three in the southeastern part of the city where Panko’s parents had lived and he had grown up. She started by looking at bulletins that were left in the vestibules after church each Sunday. They often contained schedules of events with the names of people to contact to participate. There were lists of people who were hospitalized and could use a visit or a prayer, and names of people who had died recently. There were names of choral directors and organists, and sometimes whole choirs. None of the churches she tried had any Pankos listed. The bulletin boards in church buildings were often useful, but there were no Pankos there either. She went to a few weeknight events at each church, talked to people, and showed her picture of Viktor, always pretending not to know his name. Sometimes she said he was a man she’d met but had erased his information on her phone, or a man who had given her a ride from a party and had accidentally driven off with her keys or glasses.

  Between her church expeditions, Leah followed other lines of inquiry. She searched the county records for houses or apartment buildings owned by Pankos in Erie County. Viktor’s parents had died early in his incarceration, and their house had been sold by his siblings. She wanted to see if one of them had rental property and let him live there under a false name.

  Leah moved from hotel to hotel in downtown Buffalo. She still had trouble getting herself to sleep each night. She couldn’t help thinking, retracing things that had happened and how they could have worked out differently, how the relentless inevitability of the steps of the disaster could have been derailed and the death of the city of Weldonville could have been stopped. Two years after July 19, her night thoughts were still about that.

  It was as though time had been shunted down a different tunnel on July 19 at 11:52 p.m., when two inmates lifted and held inmate James Holliman, the former electrician, up to the surveillance camera wiring box in Cellblock C and two other inmates started fighting. He watched them for just a few seconds and then disconnected the cameras. The moment that happened, the rest of it was all going to follow.

  The trouble squad of guards was going to come to investigate. The twelve escape planners were going to get loose inside the prison. More guards were going to die, and the prison was going to open up and spill over a thousand angry, half-crazy men out onto the road to Weldonville, some armed and others not yet armed but determined to be.

  The plan was like a piece of machinery designed so that each step happened in order. It had been formulated and then spread to every one of the inmates needed to execute the steps. Over the past two years Leah had watched hundreds of hours of prison surveillance recordings, some of them dated as much as six months before July, in early January. There were recordings of inmates rehearsing their roles in the prison break as they went about their daily routines. Three men would simultaneously converge on a spot from three different directions and recite what they were going to do to subdue a guard in approximately that spot and hold him still for the fourth man, the strangler. Sometimes there were gestures, slight arm motions and half turns to practice the movements. Then they would part without looking back.

  She had seen a few sequences of men in the exercise yard demonstrating for others the tricks of leverage and momentum to bring down a guard. There were other segments when an inmate would stand before several others and appear to be reciting a list of things to be done in a particular order. Now and then another inmate might correct him or add a step and he would begin again.

  If anyone in the command center noticed the oddness of these interactions, none of them interpreted what the motions meant, any more than they interpreted the steady increase in the endless weightlifting in the yard or the growth in the number of inmates running along the walls together, or the pull-ups and push-ups inmates were doing in their cells during the lockdown hours.

  During the night of July 19, most of the surveillance cameras were blacked out for periods of time and then restored, but Leah had noticed that the key to understanding the phenomenon was simple. When a camera was blinded, something bad was happening in that location for those minutes. This gave her an unassailable record of the timing for each step in the plan. After watching the footage dozens of times, she could stop the flow of time in her mind and say what was going on in each part of the prison for each minute of the night. For each crucial event, she could name which of the twelve men were in that spot at that time.

  And after all this time, she could also remember exactly what she was doing. At no moment had it been what people assumed. Leah knew that the mayor and council, her police colleagues, neighbors, and parents had all held roughly the same view of her. They had all formed that opinion based on years of observation and the free-flowing gossipy exchange of information that went on in places like Weldonville. They all had missed something.

  Leah Hawkins was the longtime mistress of Mark Ballard, the city manager. On July 19 she and Mark were both thirty-four and had been together for about seven years. He had come to town after college and five years of working in city government in Denver. He was handsome, about an inch taller than Leah was. He was steady, and he was married.

  His wife was a beautiful, sweet, and adoring person named Marcia. Mark had met her in college at the University of Tennessee, and they had married at the end of their senior year. Shortly after their move to Denver, Marcia was in a car accident that left her hospitalized with a couple of broken bones in her legs. She seemed to be doing well for a time, but when the schedule called for her to begin physical therapy, she couldn’t do it. She had a continuing weakness unusual in a young, healthy woman. The doctors began doing tests, and one of them revealed the presence of creatine kinase in her blood. Her biopsy, neurological tests, and imaging were consistent. She had muscular dystrophy.

  When Leah Hawkins was a state police officer in Longmont, she and her partner brought an injured suspect to the hospital in Denver where Marcia Ballard was receiving treatment. While Leah was in the cafeteria getting coffee for herself and her partner, she met Mark Ballard. He told her about his wife in the first few minutes, so there had never been a second when their relationship had been the familiar one—no cheating husband pretending to Leah that he was single until after she was in love, no extenuating circumstances, no pretense that he would ever divorce Marcia and marry Leah, or that Marcia’s death was imminent. Marcia was young and had excellent medical care, so t
here was every chance that she would be around for a long time. When Leah stopped by the next week to get coffee for herself and her partner, Mark even took Leah into Marcia’s room to introduce her.

  Leah had seen all of it, and her police officer mind had not been a place where illusions could flourish. Mark Ballard was permanently married to a beautiful young woman. It was true that she was so weak and frail that sex was already a fading memory, and that he functioned as her friend and caregiver, but that wasn’t what he was. He was her husband. And sometimes it seemed to Leah that the absence of physical contact between the married couple made them closer because they both so intently missed and desired it. The atmosphere of erotic despair around them was so thick that Leah felt it with them.

  When Ballard got the job of city manager in Weldonville, Leah was upset and angry. Weldonville was her hometown, and his arrival seemed to her to put her family home in a forbidden zone. But six months after the Ballards had moved to Weldonville and Mark was managing the public works, water, power, and buildings, Leah applied to the Weldonville Police Department and was hired as a detective sergeant, her rank in the state police. A couple of years later she was promoted to lieutenant.

  The night of July 19, Leah was awakened by the sound of distant gunfire when the first twelve escaped inmates arrived in town driving the cars of dead guards. The gunshots were single events—maybe a shot or two, and then no more shots for a few minutes—because they were the sounds of an escapee shooting an unarmed person in a dead guard’s house. There were no gunfights, no rounds of return fire at first.

  A complication was that July 19 was one of the regular nights when Mark Ballard slept at Leah Hawkins’s house instead of at home. The story for the benefit of others was that he was in Denver on those nights working on Weldonville’s relationship with the state government and consulting on public projects for the city of Denver for extra money. On those nights, his car was parked at the train station and his wife, Marcia, had a visiting nurse scheduled to be with her.