She sat there for a moment looking at the house, the white bars at the front window, the terracotta pots in a line on the porch, wondering whether she was doing the right thing in making this detour. She’d spent the afternoon in Monterey Park, talking again to the family of the guy who was murdered on State Route 39, and now had a couple of solid leads that she knew she should be chasing down and reporting back to Hayesfield on. Instead, she was here. Hayesfield had already hauled her into his office and asked her if she’d had anything to do with the Larry O’Hara story in the Times, so Jo knew that he’d go nuts if he found out she was still pushing the idea that Donald Klein wasn’t the real killer. Yet here she was, off the back of a tip from a woman who refused even to ID herself, a woman who made her call from a phone booth so she’d be impossible to locate, and whose accusations, about a man called Adrian Vale, Jo had failed to find one shred of evidence for in the three days since. He’d worked at Caraca BuildIt, which was why he’d sometimes driven their maroon VW Quantum in the past, but as he hadn’t been employed there for two years, she had no idea if Vale was genuinely a monster or just some asshole the caller had a problem with.

She locked the car, opened up the gate and headed along an uneven stone path towards the porch. There was a table on it with a drying rack next to that, damp laundry hanging from it, positioned so that it was in the full glare of the late-afternoon sun. Even now, a couple of hours before sunset, the city was still like a furnace: she could feel sweat, frozen to her body by the a/c in the car, now beginning to thaw, the heat a constant, irritable prickle in her skin. She brushed a finger across her brow and knocked a couple of times on the metal screen door: it was secured, and padlocked for good measure, but the front door beyond it was ajar.

Birds squawked on a nearby utility pole. A siren faded in and out again on the freeway.

‘Can I help you?’

Jo turned to find a Hispanic woman in her mid to late fifties standing behind the grey bars of the security door. She was short and plump, her black hair scraped back into a messy ponytail, her face etched by tiny brown sunspots and fine age lines.

‘Mrs Vale?’

‘Si,’ the woman replied.

‘We spoke on the telephone earlier.’ Jo removed her ID wallet from the pocket of her pants and flipped it open. ‘I’m Detective Kader from the Sheriff’s Department.’

‘Ah, si. Yes. Of course.’

Mrs Vale began unlocking the security door.