She studied Klein’s face. He was twenty-three, red-haired and awash in freckles, his eyes flecked green and brown and his nose crinkled at the bridge where it must have been broken and badly reset. The picture of him in the file was an arrest photograph, taken in 1983, when he was caught with six ounces of marijuana in a parking lot at the back of a Trader Joe’s in Toluca Lake. He was given a ninety-day sentence. As Jo flicked through the pages of the file, she could see that that had been his only arrest. Since his release in May 1984, he’d been working in the kitchen of a steak and seafood restaurant in Sherman Oaks.

‘Anything more on the vic?’ Callson asked.

Jo looked up, shaking her head. ‘No. He called himself Gabriel Wilzon in the guestbook at the motel, but – like I said on the phone last night – that wasn’t his real name. That alias, it’s a dead end. There are no prints for “Wilzon” because the acid managed to leach the skin from his fingers, and Chen at the ME’s office said dental analysis was going nowhere fast. But, you know …’ She shrugged and watched Callson nod. He understood where her thoughts had landed: if Klein was the guy who’d tried to dissolve a body in a tub of acid, maybe their chances of ID’ing Wilzon just improved.

She looked from the book to the patch of scrub where Klein had shot himself, then back to the book again. Callson was the lead detective, arriving at the scene an hour after the discovery of the body on 22 July, and his work was easy to follow and exhaustive. As she turned a couple more pages, she saw that a pale blue 1983 Ford Fairmont was registered to Klein and that had been the car he’d left in the lot, in pretty much the exact spot in which Jo had left her Oldsmobile. Photos showed the Fairmont in situ, doors open, the cream-coloured interior visible. It was a mess: soda cans, wrappers, the red-and-black uniform he wore at the restaurant. Callson had already confirmed the chronology: Klein finished his shift at 11.30 p.m., and two separate witnesses saw the Fairmont pulling into the north entrance of Runyon Canyon at around midnight.

Her eyes shifted to the photos of the Fairmont’s trunk.

Inside were ten one-gallon containers of muriatic acid. It was the same acid that had been used in the tub at the motel. All ten containers were empty.

‘His prints are all over them,’ Callson said. ‘Whatever else is going on, Klein definitely handled that acid.’

Jo looked up. ‘Whatever else is going on?’

‘Bad choice of words,’ Callson said, smiling.