‘It’s fine,’ he repeated. ‘Honestly. Let’s talk about what I’ve found out.’

‘All right. If you’re sure.’

More background noise: birds, the very faint drone of a plane.

‘Let’s go back to the start.’

‘Okay,’ the woman responded nervously. ‘Okay.’

‘Let’s talk about Adrian Vale.’

Dead Ends

1985

Los Angeles | Monday 5 August

With the traffic, Jo didn’t get home till just after eight.

Ethan was already asleep, the sheets twisted around him. She leaned into the crib, brushed her son’s hair away from his face and kissed him gently, before padding back through to the kitchen where Ira was serving up dinner.

As they ate, she asked him what they’d got up to and Ira said he’d taken Ethan to the beach. Jo felt a pang of jealousy as she listened, at missing out again, at the things Ethan had said that had made Ira roar with laughter, at the fact that – while the two most important people in her life were building sandcastles – she was eating shit from Hayesfield about a minor admin error she’d made on a log sheet; that, while Ira and Ethan were having ice cream, she was talking to a grieving family about the corpse on State Route 39; and that, while there was a water fight going on in her backyard, Jo was sitting in Adrian Vale’s house, watching him cry, realizing she’d made a big mistake.

It was a mistake that had only got worse afterwards.

Once she’d left the Vales’, she’d driven her department-issue Caprice back to the station as the keys for her Oldsmobile were in the top drawer of her desk. Inside, the changeover had already happened, day shift to night shift, briefings still taking place at the tables and in meeting rooms. The dominant conversation had been at the far end, where the Night Stalker task force were discussing a .25-calibre revolver used in the last attack in Sun Valley.

She’d slid in at her desk and found a xeroxed page sitting on her keyboard: it was the naked July model from a Pirelli calendar that hung in the kitchen – a calendar she’d told a couple of the detectives that she hated, that she objected to, and that she wanted taken down. Above the model, someone had drawn a speech bubble.

It had said, I’m 34DDetective Kader.

Jo had glanced around at the rest of the floor, but no one had been looking at her. The other detectives were leaving or working, or in the middle of a conversation – or just pretending not to know what was going on. She’d screwed up the xerox and tossed it into the trash, boiling with anger but trying not to let it show, and then – as she’d grabbed her car keys from her top drawer – her attention had switched: one of the operators had left a couple of message slips inside.