That was total bullshit: LA was a city of guns, and wherever there were guns there were murders. People were taking a bullet to the head in this city all the time.

‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘turns out he ain’t one of ours. I mean, the Stalker don’t off ’em in hotel rooms for one thing, and while he’s pretty messed up in there, it ain’t the kind of messed up the Stalker likes.’ He shrugged indifferently, as if he were talking about someone stealing a few bucks out of a cash register, not the murder of a man.

And that was probably the real reason Jo disliked Landa so much: not his stupid, predictable rendition of the song; not even the way he’d tried to suggest that she’d puke as soon as she saw the body, or that he got here first because Hayesfield thought it might be related to the Stalker, rather than the truth, which was that Hayesfield frequently sent male cops out to assess Jo’s crime scenes before she arrived. Instead, what she disliked about him was that he’d become detached. He’d lost his sense of obligation to the victims. He wasn’t receptive to the loss of life in the way a cop should have been, even if a cop’s only burden extended as far as a promise to find the killer. She’d heard Landa talk about a son, but she couldn’t imagine he’d spent a single day at the door of his boy’s bedroom while the kid was growing up, wishing the world were a little safer. To Landa, after twenty years behind a desk in a squad room, after hundreds of killings, the man lying in the bathtub was just another face to forget.

‘Anyway,’ Landa said, pushing the mint to one side of his mouth, ‘thought I better hang around until you got here in case these assholes screwed up your crime scene.’ He winked at the two men: Davis, the forensic tech, clearly didn’t know how to react to that, so smiled at Landa and then looked uncertainly at Jo, while the guy who came with Chen erupted into laughter, as if Landa had delivered a joke for the ages. ‘I was tellin’ Bobby here about a case I worked out in Wellington Heights where a –’

‘Thanks for coming down, Greg,’ Jo said, cutting him off and letting him know that he could get the hell out of her crime scene now. She didn’t wait for a response, just stepped past him and headed to the bathroom. Behind her, she heard Landa say something quiet to Bobby, the guy who’d come with Chen, and they began laughing.

She ignored it and paused outside the bathroom.

This close in, the smell was horrible.