Just inside the door, in a wide semicircle around the bed, were Greg Landa, a detective from the LASD, a forensic tech – already suited up – who identified himself as Austin Davis, and someone from the ME’s office who was here to assist Chen. Jo didn’t know Davis or the guy who’d come with Chen, but she knew Landa: he was a twenty-year veteran who’d spent his career working murders in West Hollywood, East LA and Compton. Because of that, Jo always tried to afford him the proper respect, but it was hard because she detested him. It wasn’t because he was fifty pounds overweight and permanently flushed, or even that his face was always beaded with an unsightly sheen of sweat, even when it was in the low forties outside; it was because he would always try to use his size to intimidate her, subtly stepping into her personal space, presumably in some primal effort to show her where the power lay. No woman in the LASD needed reminding of that: Jo was the only female detective in Homicide and everything she did was analysed and judged, joked about and criticized through the prism of her sex. Male detectives were allowed ten mistakes before anything got written up, but she’d get ripped for one. So Greg Landa wasn’t different from any of the other men she shared a building with, he was just one of the worst: she’d never seen him drink, and because he sucked on extra-strong Altoids the whole time, she’d never smelled it on him either, but his cheeks were criss-crossed with a mesh of prominent blood vessels and a few people in the office called him ‘Grog’ behind his back. If that was true, if he really did drink heavily out of work, Jo knew that Landa would be the worst kind of drunk – slimy, hostile, violent.

As soon as Landa saw Jo, he started to sing the Dolly Parton song ‘Jolene’, the words softened by the smacking of his lips as a mint moved around his mouth. The song was a long-running joke he liked to reanimate every time the two of them met.

‘How you doing, Greg?’

‘I’m doin’ fine,’ he said, his Texan roots still evident even thirty years after he’d moved to California. He quickly but unmistakably looked her up and down, a smirk on his face, and then nodded towards the bathroom. ‘Hope you didn’t eat breakfast.’

Jo ignored him. ‘I thought you were on the Night Stalker task force.’

‘I am. I was close by, so Lieutenant Hayesfield wanted me to make sure the vic ain’t one of ours, because some of the injuries’ – he tapped a pudgy finger to his forehead, signifying that the victim in the tub took a bullet there – ‘are consistent with what we’ve seen.’