The first had been from Caraca BuildIt.

She’d been waiting on a callback from the assistant manager about whether any containers of acid were missing from their stock. The number listed was for the guy’s home line, so she’d punched in the numbers and – once he’d picked up – had reintroduced herself.

‘Ah, right,’ he’d said, ‘sure. I called you earlier.’

‘Did you find anything?’

‘No.’ It sounded like he was in the middle of eating. ‘I did what you asked and did an audit on the stock. It took a while – but everything’s there.’

‘There are no missing containers?’

‘Not a single one.’

She’d put the phone down, drained, frustrated, and then turned to the second message. It was from one of the guys down in Records. Before she’d left East LA, she’d called him and asked him to see if he could find a Jessie or Jessica who’d dropped out of William Hay High School in Belvedere in 1982, and if that Jessie or Jessica had a record. Jo wanted to ID the caller because she needed to know if she could trust her.

The message she’d been left showed that she couldn’t.

The caller was Jessica Cespedes, aged twenty. She was living at an address east of the river, in Downey. The guy in Records listed, in familiar department shorthand, some of the crimes on Cespedes’ sheet: forgery, fraud, possession of narcotics. She’d done eight months for intent to distribute in Chino, at the California Institution for Women.

Jo’s caller was a criminal.