‘Adrian, he isn’t home yet,’ she said in lightly accented English.

Jo had found out as much about Adrian Vale as she could, which wasn’t a lot, but she knew that his parents had emigrated from Honduras in 1959, and Vale’s father had died when he was only fifteen, having drunk himself into oblivion. She knew that Valeria Vale had brought up her son alone for the last five years, that she cleaned rooms at a downtown hotel, and that Adrian was currently at Stanford on a fully paid scholarship. Right now, however, he was back in LA for the summer break.

‘Do you know where he is, Mrs Vale?’

‘He called to say he was running late ten minutes late and would be home at six,’ she said, unlocking the security door. ‘He has a summer placement at a law firm in Pico Rivera.’ She smiled, nodded, as if she were telling Jo that, no, she hadn’t misheard: he really did have a summer placement at a law firm. Jo returned the smile, not wanting to destroy the pride that Valeria Vale clearly had for her son. The security door swung gently out. ‘Please,’ Valeria said, using an arm to invite Jo inside. ‘Please come in and wait.’

The living room was small, the furniture old, the carpets thinning, but it had a cared-for, comfortable feel. On a mantel were photographs of Adrian Vale as a boy, his father, the three of them together, and then other, extended family members. Jo could see ornaments and trinkets elsewhere, books in Spanish and English, and on a wall above the mantel a walnut cross, rosary beads hanging from the horizontal limb.

‘Can I get you something to drink?’

‘Just some water,’ Jo replied. ‘Thank you.’

After Valeria went through to the kitchen, Jo moved across to the mantel. She hadn’t been able to find any decent photographs of Adrian Vale. He didn’t have a record, so had never been arrested, which meant his picture wasn’t on file at the LASD or LAPD, and it wasn’t in the system upstate either. From home the previous night, she’d made calls to the Sheriff’s departments in Santa Clara County – where Stanford University was located – Santa Cruz County, San Mateo County and to the San Francisco Police Department and he’d never got into trouble anywhere in that part of California in the three years he’d been living there. He had no passport, because he’d never travelled abroad, and the photo on his driver’s licence was three years old and poor quality, so a DMV search hadn’t been much help either.

Until now, Jo had barely even known what he’d looked like.