Mateo sat at the kitchen table in a T-shirt and boxer shorts with his hair flat on one side, blinking at the three of them. His mother. A police detective with a badge round her neck. A man whose face had been on every screen in the city for a day and a half, sitting in his mother’s kitchen eating his sweet bread.
Rosa put coffee in front of him and stood behind his chair with her hands on his shoulders.
“The phone company,” Brooks said. “Your sister’s account. Your mother’s been paying it. It backs up to the carrier’s cloud, photos and videos, automatically, every night when the phone’s charging. Did Marisol ever turn that off?”
Mateo looked at her stupidly. Then something happened behind his eyes.
“No,” he said. “No, she couldn’t have. It was the cheap plan. She was always complaining it was full. She was always deleting stuff to make room for more stuff.”
“Do you know how to get into it?”
“It’s a website. You need her email and her password.”
“Do you know her password?”
He was already reaching for his own phone. The frog phone, on the counter by the toaster, where he had left it when he got in from San Fernando Road.
“She used the same one for everything,” he said. “Everybody knew. My mom used to yell at her.”
He typed the website. He typed an email address, his thumbs quick. He typed a password. The little wheel spun and the screen went red.
Incorrect password. 2 attempts remaining.
He stared at it.
“That was it,” he said. “That was always it. Her name and my birthday. She said it was so she’d never forget my birthday.”
“Six years,” Brooks said quietly. “People change passwords.”
“She didn’t. She never changed anything.” He was going pale. “Maybe she did. That last year. She had a new phone that year. Maybe it made her.”
“Then think. What else would she use?”
He tried something else. His thumbs were less quick. Red.
Incorrect password. 1 attempt remaining. Account will be locked for security.
Nobody said anything. The kitchen clock ticked. Mateo put the phone face down on the table and pressed both hands flat on either side of it, as if it might get up and run away.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know. I was eleven.”
Thorsen looked at Rosa.
She had not moved. She was standing behind her son’s chair with her hands on his shoulders, looking at the wall over the television, at the girl in blue scrubs laughing at whoever held the camera.
“Mrs. Reyes,” he said. “When she got the new phone. Did she say anything about it?”
“She said it was too much money.” Rosa did not take her eyes off the photograph. “She said, Mama, they made me change everything, they said my password was the most stupid one they’d ever seen. Letters and numbers and a big letter.” A breath. “I said, so put something you love.”
“What did she love?”
Rosa almost smiled.
“Canelo,” she said.
Mateo turned round in his chair.
“The dog?” he said. “Mama. We never had a dog.”
“No. The dog she wanted. Since she was six. A red one, with a white foot. She was going to call him Canelo. I said no every year. The landlord, the money, your father. Every birthday she asked.” Rosa’s voice was perfectly steady. “She said when she was a nurse she’d have a house with a yard, and the first thing in it was going to be Canelo.”
Thorsen thought, for no reason at all, of a man at a gate in Highland Park, and a dog that did not exist.
“With what number?” Brooks said gently.
“Her nursing school number. She was so proud of it. She wrote it on everything.” Rosa went to the wall and took down the framed certificate, awarded posthumously, and turned it round, and there on the back of the frame, on a sticker, in a girl’s round handwriting, was a student ID.
Mateo looked at it for a long time. Then he turned the phone over and typed, very slowly, one letter at a time, checking each against the sticker, capital C, the rest small, the digits after.
He looked up at Thorsen with his thumb over the button.
Thorsen nodded.
The little wheel went round, and round, and round.
Then the screen went white, and filled up with pictures.
There were four thousand, three hundred and twelve of them.
Mateo scrolled with one finger, backwards in time, and the last two years of his sister’s life went past under it in a coloured smear. Selfies in scrubs. A study group round a pizza. Rosa asleep on the couch with her mouth open. Mateo at eleven, scowling, holding up a fish. And over and over again, every few pictures, in the dark or the glare, a broken streetlight, a sofa on a pavement, a fly-tipped mattress, a pile of tyres by the river, each one framed carefully, with a street sign in the corner so the city would know where.
She had been building a case, Thorsen thought. All her life, one photograph at a time. She simply had not known it was one.
The last picture was of the inside of a kitchen walk-in fridge, with a sign on the door that said WASH HANDS, taken at eleven forty on the night she died. Mateo made a small sound and kept going.
Three days before that, at two-fourteen in the morning, there was a video.
Three minutes and forty seconds long. The thumbnail was black.
Nobody told Mateo to press it. He pressed it, and turned the phone sideways, and propped it against the sugar bowl in the middle of the table where they could all see.
At first there was only dark and the sound of breathing. Her breathing, close, quick, frightened. The roar of the freeway somewhere. The picture jerked and settled, and it was the river at night, the concrete bank in the near ground grey in the city glow, the black water, and across it the far bank and a long fence and beyond the fence a big dark flat space.
Then the picture zoomed, badly, the way phones do, all grain and smear.
There was a van in the yard. No lights. A plain dark van, backed up towards something low and square near a tall shape that might once have been a signal box at the end of the old siding. Three men moving around it, black shapes against slightly less black. One of them had a long bar, and bent, and heaved at something on the ground, and there was a scrape of iron, faint, carried across the water, and a square of deeper darkness opened at his feet.
Rosa’s hand was at her mouth.
Two of the men went to the back of the van and opened it.
The dome light came on.
It lit the inside of the van for perhaps three seconds before one of them reached up and slapped it off. Long enough. A long shape on the floor, wrapped in blue tarpaulin and tied round with tape at the ankles and the chest and the neck. Two men in dark clothes bending to it. And the face of one of them, turned for a moment towards the light, full on, with his mouth open in an expression of irritation.
Younger. Thinner. With hair, cut very short. But the same pale eyes. The same jaw, already working on a piece of gum.
“That’s him,” Mateo said. “That’s the bald one. That’s him.”
“Vane,” Brooks said, almost inaudibly.
On the screen the light went out. The two black shapes lifted the long blue shape between them and carried it, awkwardly, staggering, to the square of darkness, and stopped at the edge.
And over the water, on the wind, faint but entirely clear, a man’s voice, breathless and amused:
“Jesus. Tommy’s heavier than he looks.”
And another man laughed.
The long shape went down into the dark and was gone.
After that there was shovelling, for a long time, and the scrape of the iron grate going back, and a sack of something pale being emptied over the place, a soft white cloud of it drifting in the dark. Then the van, no lights, moving off. Then nothing, only the river, and the freeway, and a girl’s breath.
And right at the end, so close to the microphone that it made them all start, her voice. A whisper. Not to anyone in the room. To herself.
“Okay. Okay, Mari. Somebody has to.”
The video stopped.
Nobody spoke.
Rosa had sat down. Thorsen had not seen her do it. She was in the chair beside her son with both hands over her face, and she was not making any sound, and her shoulders were moving.
Mateo was looking at the phone propped against the sugar bowl. His face was wet and absolutely still.
“She was so brave,” Rosa said through her hands. “She was so stupid. She was so brave.”
Brooks stood up. She went to the window and stood with her back to the room and her arms wrapped round herself, and Thorsen saw her shoulders rise and fall twice, very deliberately, the way they teach you.
Then she turned round, and she was a police officer again.
“Mateo. I need that file. The original, not a screen recording. Downloaded to your phone, and then I need you to send it to this address,” she wrote on a napkin, “and this one, and this one. Not to anything with LAPD in it. And then I need you to change her password and not tell anybody what you changed it to, not even me.”
Mateo nodded. His hands were shaking but he started at once.
“The signal box,” Thorsen said. “It’s still standing. I saw it yesterday. The pit’s next to it.”
“I saw.” Brooks was already doing something on her own phone. “Superior Court Judge Adele Park. She lives up above Brand Park in Glendale. She was a deputy DA when I was in patrol. She hates the tenth floor. She hates them more than I do.” She looked up. “She can sign an exhumation order tonight if I can get it in front of her. It needs a declaration and the video and a forensic scene team. I can write the declaration. I can get the video to her. The scene team is LAPD. And LAPD is Brandt.”
“Then don’t use LAPD.”
“It’s in the city. I don’t get to choose.”
“Ibarra was a city cop,” Thorsen said. “But Marcus Okafor’s car went into a pole in Glendale. And three Adam twenty-one was a Glendale unit.”
Brooks stopped typing.
Her phone buzzed in her hand.
She looked at the screen, and he saw her face go flat.
She answered it. She listened. She said, “Yes, Lieutenant,” twice, and then, “I understand,” and then nothing for a while, and then, “Effective when?” And then she took the phone away from her ear and looked at it as though it had bitten her, and put it in her pocket.
“They’ve been pinging my phone since I left the house,” she said. “That’s how they knew where to send them. I’m suspended. As of now. Conduct unbecoming. Unauthorised contact with a witness in an open investigation. I’m to surrender my badge and weapon at Northeast by noon.” She looked at Rosa. “And there’s a warrant going out. For this apartment. For a firearm reported in the possession of a minor, Mateo Reyes, seventeen. Metro’s serving it.”
“There’s no gun,” Mateo said. “He threw it in the river.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s not about the gun. It’s about who’s in the apartment when they come in.”
Thorsen was already at the window, looking down into the pink concrete yard.
At the end of the block, where a silver Tahoe had once sat with its engine running, two black SUVs with no markings were turning in off the main road, one behind the other, fast, and slowing hard outside the building.