The soft white light came from a cheap plastic lamp she had owned since childhood. The desk, made of heavy walnut, had been purchased at a yard sale by her mother. Ellie could remember that lazy Saturday afternoon in May when Kay Batista had returned home and, beaming with pride, said, I’ve got such a surprise for you. Ellie, also a proud veteran of yard sales and flea markets and thrift stores, had rescued two items left out as trash on a sidewalk in Van Nuys: a dented filing cabinet and a big wood-framed corkboard.

She opened the top drawer of the filing cabinet and took out the files for Jolie Simone and Alex Hernandez. She placed a red X on each tab and then moved the files to the bottom drawer—the drawer of the dead, she called it. Touching the paper, moving the files—it was tactile. Made the victims seem real to her and not just bits of information stored in the cloud or a database.

Now she turned her attention to the corkboard. Her main project.

A strip of masking tape ran down its center.

The left half of the corkboard contained an eight-by-ten photograph she had taken herself—not with her smartphone but with a professional Canon digital camera with a telescopic lens, the same rig the paparazzi used to capture female celebrities frolicking half-naked on the beach. She had taken the picture at night two months ago, on a street around the corner from a popular club in Los Angeles. In the photo, a tall, muscular guy dressed in jeans and a tight-fitting blue T-shirt leaned against the driver’s-side window of a Buick SUV, handing over the same kind of sticker device she’d seen earlier today at the Vargas house.

The man handing over the sticker was Anton Kuzmich, a Russian immigrant in his early thirties who owned a private security business that catered mostly to LA’s high-end nightclubs. He was also, she had discovered on her own time, heavily involved in the blood world.

The man seated behind the wheel was another matter. Despite her best efforts, no amount of digital enhancement or computer trickery could coax the driver’s face from the shadows, and she’d been unable to capture the license plate number.

What she did capture was the man’s left hand on the steering wheel. It was pale, the thick knuckles and forearm as hairy as an ape’s, and he wore a ring on his middle finger. The ring’s design had two lions circling each other, preparing to fight. That was the only detail she knew of him.

She assumed he was an important player in the blood world, given the fact that Anton Kuzmich had handed off the sticker to him, probably telling the man behind the wheel he had identified a carrier. That was how it was done these days, by a stickman, a task normally performed by a kid like the one she’d seen at the Vargas house—a homeless teenager who could run fast, get in and out in a hurry.