She picked up one of the pictures closest to her. In it, Adrian Vale was about eighteen or nineteen, and sitting on the front porch of his mother’s home, a glass of water perched next to him, a book open and face down on the wall that hemmed the porch in. He was smiling. Expressions in photographs were so often faked, but the lie in this, if it existed, was hard to pick: the smile reached from Vale’s mouth to his eyes, out into the rest of his face. He was a handsome kid, dark-haired and well built.

‘That was the summer before he went to Stanford.’

Jo turned and found Valeria standing next to her. She smiled again, the swell of joy she had for her son and his academic achievements so obvious, it seemed to inflate her somehow. Jo put the picture back down and looked at some of the others: Vale as a child, being led across a strip of white sand by what must have been his father; him with his mother, the portrait two or three years old, the two of them in a park, the sun going down behind them; and then Vale in his early teens, in a high school photograph, smiling for the camera.

They sat, Jo taking the water.

The house was warm, a fan going in the corner of the room, clicking very softly every time it hit the limit of its arc. Valeria had left the windows open, the back door too, but the windows were all protected by bars and the rear entrance had the same security door as the front. As she’d driven past, Jo had noticed that a lot of the other houses on the block were the same, a necessary measure in an area with a high crime rate. A year ago, having to put metal bars at your windows and steel doors front and back would have been viewed as undesirable and ugly. It would have been the antithesis of a home, a confirmation of where not to own a house if you could afford it. But, then, a year ago, the Night Stalker wasn’t killing people in their sleep. The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on Jo, as it probably wasn’t lost on Valeria and her neighbours: if you gave people the choice now, most of LA would have preferred to be in a house like this.

‘I hope Adrian isn’t in any kind of trouble,’ Valeria said.