She nodded. “Yeah.” Jessica stared straight ahead through the windshield. She was looking out onto Wilcox but was seeing the murder house as it would have been twenty-five years ago.

“I was woken in the middle of the night by the telephone ringing,” Pryce said. “I’d assumed the phone call was work related, even though I wasn’t on call that night. The riots had happened just a few months earlier, so we were all on high alert, ready to be called into action at a moment’s notice again, if need be. But it wasn’t my boss calling—it was Brad. He was upset and not making a lot of sense. He told me Eleanor was dead and he was going to be framed for her murder. He said he had to go on the run with her kid—and he needed my help to do it. If it wasn’t for the panic in his voice, I’d have thought it was a drunken joke.”

“What did you do?”

“I told him to meet me at a motel on La Brea, a place I knew by reputation. The kind of dump where a black guy could show up in the middle of the night and book a room with no questions asked. On the way to the motel, I called a contact of mine, a gangbanger turned snitch, and set the ball rolling on the things I knew Brad would need.”

“Which were?”

“A car no one would be able to trace to him and some new IDs for Brad and the kid.”

“The kid being me.”

“Yeah, you. Sorry.”

“Please, go on.”

“You were both dropped off at the motel by a middle-aged couple. Brad said he was renting a room from them. The woman had bought some new clothes for you at a twenty-four-hour Walmart on the way to the motel, and they’d packed a bag with some of Brad’s stuff so they could tell the cops he’d left town on a planned trip. Then they gave him some cash and left to have their car detailed. They were going out to a deserted highway someplace to burn the clothes Brad was wearing when he found Eleanor.”

“Brad found Eleanor?”

Jessica could see Pryce nodding from the corner of her eye.

“He said he went to Eleanor’s place after his shift at a local bar had finished. He had his own key and let himself in. Right away, he saw Eleanor lying on the living room floor, covered in blood. She wasn’t moving, didn’t look like she was breathing. And then things got really weird.”

Jessica turned in the seat to face him. “You mean more weird than his girlfriend lying dead in a pool of blood on the living room floor?”

Pryce looked her in the eye, his expression serious.