The woman frowned but then turned away from the door and yelled in rapid-fire Spanish back into the house. The only word Ballard identified was policía. The woman then turned back to Ballard and nodded as though she had just fixed the problem. After an awkward and silent minute, a young man appeared behind the woman at the door, his dark hair disheveled from sleep. He was almost a carbon copy of what Jorge Ochoa looked like in the mug shots she had reviewed when reading the murder book.

“What?” he said.

He was clearly annoyed with the early wake-up, even though it was almost noon. Ballard quickly assessed the VB tattoos on his arms and read him as a member of the Vineland Boyz street gang. She knew that a gangster’s day typically started in the p.m. hours. This was early.

“You’re Oscar, right?” Ballard said. “I want to talk to your mother about your brother.”

“My brother’s gone,” Oscar said. “And we don’t talk to cops. Adiós, puta.”

He started to close the door but Ballard reached her hand out and stopped it.

“You call somebody who wants to help your brother a whore?”

“Help him? Shit. You coulda helped him when he said he didn’t do it. But no, you people just threw away the key.”

“I want to show something to your mother. It might be what gets Jorge out of prison. If you want me to leave, I’ll leave. But next time you visit your brother, you tell him I was here and you sent me away.”

Oscar didn’t move or speak. Then his mother spoke to him in a whisper. Ballard knew enough Spanish to know she had asked her son what the woman wanted. Mrs. Ochoa had heard Jorge’s name mentioned.

Oscar didn’t answer her. He turned back to Ballard and made room for her to enter.

“Show her,” he said.

Ballard stepped in. She had spent the night before reviewing the murder book she had pulled at North Hollywood station. Her first effort in the morning was to attempt to track down the family of Olga Reyes. But it appeared that her family had left Los Angeles after her murder, and Ballard had not yet been able to locate them. The closest she came was a neighbor who said she thought the family had gone to Texas.

That left the Jorge Ochoa side of the equation, and here she was at his mother’s cookie-cutter house in a post–World War II tract in Sunland.

Ballard was led to a small, modestly furnished living room, where she immediately saw signs that she was on the right track. Several framed paintings and sketches that had the look of prison art hung on the walls. All were on butcher paper and signed in pencil.

“Did Jorge want to be an artist?” she asked.