Ira nodded at her cereal bowl. ‘Is that what passes for washing-up these days?’

Jo winked at him. ‘It is when you’ve got a manservant.’

Kissing her husband goodbye, she headed outside, locking the screen door, checking and double-checking it. Popping the locks on their Oldsmobile, she looked out at their street. Four of the houses had been repainted in the last week alone; Ricardo was halfway through doing the same, the original beige exterior giving way to a tepid coral. Because most of the attacks had taken place in beige or yellow homes, people had started to think it was a colour thing: they now had a blue home in their road, a green one, white, grey. Jo had been in a meeting yesterday where Lieutenant Hayesfield had told her there was such a run on guard dogs that animals had to be brought in from neighbouring states. Locksmiths were working twenty-four hours a day. Gun-shop owners were turning up in the mornings to find people already waiting in line. The city was in a perpetual state of fear and panic and it was all down to one man.

The media had dubbed him the ‘Night Stalker’.

So far he’d killed eleven people, raped four women, attempted to rape another, beaten a sixteen-year-old girl so badly with a tyre iron she’d needed 478 stitches in her scalp, and gouged out the eyes of one of the victims when she tried to shoot him. He didn’t just break into homes, he ravaged them, physically and psychologically. He’d brought terror to the whole city, not just because of the sheer brutality of his crimes, or because he was a satanist, scrawling pentagrams on the walls and making his victims swear allegiance to the devil, but because his hunting ground seemed to be everywhere: he’d started off in Glassell Park, four miles from Downtown, but had since spread out to Monrovia, seventeen miles east of there, Whittier, fifteen miles south, and then twelve miles to the north in Sun Valley. Because of that, the whole thing was a jurisdictional nightmare, with the LA County Sheriff, the LAPD and eight other separate police departments involved. Yet Jo wasn’t a part of any of it. Hayesfield had expanded the twenty-five-strong team of detectives at the Sheriff’s Department without ever asking Jo to join, and for reasons she knew had nothing to do with her abilities as a cop and everything to do with her being female and having given birth eighteen months ago.