Josh thought about it for a moment.

‘Okay. But give me some time with him first. We need to take his statement, secure the scene, then there’s the forensics and-’

‘Josh?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Forgetting something?’

‘What?’

‘I do know the procedure.’

‘Okay, point taken.’ There was a pause on the line. ‘Call me in three hours.’

‘Sure thing. What’s the address?’

‘1482 Union Avenue, Korea Town.’

‘Got it.’

‘I’ll call you.’

She pulled off Santa Monica into the parking lot of a diner. There was no point going back to her mom’s house if she had to drive down to Korea Town. But she could use the time to do some research. She bought a take out coffee and returned to her car, waving to Naylor as she did so. She opened the trunk, sorted through one of the boxes, took out the file containing her collection of notes on the Gleason case and started to read a newspaper report on the penultimate day of the trial.

TWISTED TORTURER FOUND GUILTY, GLEASON’S VICTIMS NUMBER AT LEAST 5

Yesterday Robert Gleason, the notorious serial murderer and rapist, was found guilty on multiple counts of murder. Gleason, 47, had led a vicious and brutal campaign of terror throughout Los Angeles, southern and northern California and Nevada, said state prosecutor Jordan Weislander.

His known victims were five young women – Teresa Collins, 17, Frances Silla, 19, Elizabeth Ventura, 18, Tracey Newton, 18, and Jane Gardener, 20. His last victim Cassie Veringer, 21, a blind student attending UCLA, was raped by Gleason before escaping. If it hadn’t been for her bravery, Weislander said yesterday, Gleason’s killing spree would certainly have continued.

‘Even though she was in terrific pain Cassie Veringer worked with a forensic artist to build up a 3-D image of her attacker,’ said the state prosecutor during Gleason’s trial at the Los Angeles Superior Court. ‘She had the foresight to feel Gleason’s face during her ordeal. Her bravery and selflessness resulted in the arrest and subsequent prosecution of a brutal rapist, torturer and murderer.’

During the prosecution’s case evidence was presented in court to show that Gleason, a former car mechanic, had drugged his victims, before going on to rape and sodomize them in his customized van, which Weislander had likened to a ‘travelling circus of torture’. In some cases he kept his captives alive for as long as six days before killing them by asphyxiation. The bodies of Teresa Collins – his first victim, who disappeared on the night of November 8 1992 – and Jane Gardener were found in the San Gabriel mountains. The remains of Frances Silla, Elizabeth Ventura and Tracey Newton were discovered in the Mojave Desert.

Outside the courtroom Bill Collins, the well-known L.A. businessman, and the father of Teresa Collins, thanked everyone who had helped bring Gleason to justice.

‘My wife and I want to express our thanks to the police and the prosecutor’s office for everything they have done to bring Gleason to trial,’ he said, reading from a prepared statement. ‘This monster should never go free. He took away the lives of not only our dearest daughter – our only child – but also the lives of four other young women, women who would have led creative and productive lives had it not been for this abomination of humanity. He should face the maximum sentence. Execution is too good for him.

‘Our deepest thanks also go to Cassie Veringer, a young woman who had the courage to fight back. It is thanks to her that Gleason will never again prowl our parking lots, campuses and college buildings hunting for our young women, thanks to her that his killing spree is over.

‘I do not want to criticize the investigation at this moment in time. In many ways, I think the police have done a wonderful job. However, I have always believed – and still do believe – that Gleason did not work alone. I am convinced that he had an accomplice – a man who is still out there. The police say there is no evidence for such a claim. They cite the fact that Gleason has stated – indeed, boasted – about how he worked alone.

‘Yet witness statements gathered by the firm of private investigators hired by me show that Gleason was seen near the scene of the abductions with an unidentified man.

‘In many ways I do hope I am wrong about this. We could all sleep more soundly in our beds if it was not the case. But if I am right then there is another monster who is still on the loose.’

Amongst the sheaf of clippings Kate found a handful of reports from other newspapers and news sources, all summarising the trial. Some contained conjecture about Gleason’s motivation – a father who had been physically abusive, the absence of a mother, the loss of his wife in 1974. His two children were mentioned in the pieces, but none of the reporters knew about Roberta’s central place in Gleason’s warped psychology. Even though she had a serial killer for a father at least she had been allowed to live her life in some sort of peace.

Gleason’s square-jawed, pock-marked face stared at her from the cuttings. Many of the newspapers carried comparisons of the model she had created with a photo of Gleason. There was an in-depth report on how Gleason had been caught, naming and quoting most of the people involved and another feature in a weekend magazine supplement detailing her own work on the case. She looked at the picture of herself that had been taken in her laboratory and saw a different person. There was a hardness to her face, a tightness to her mouth that she didn’t recognize. There were faint shadows under her eyes, evidence of a drinking habit that had been beginning to get a little out of control. How had she survived in that job for so long? Thank goodness she was out of it now. It was a constant refrain, a mantra almost. But she knew it was not entirely, totally, true. There was part of her – her more altruistic side – that was still drawn to it. But the instinct for self-preservation had won out.

She turned to her case notes and read through her interviews with Cassie. Here too were her preliminary sketches – measurements documenting the distances between his eyes, forehead and nose, and numerous pencil drawings that tentatively plotted out the dimensions of Gleason’s features and the shape of his jawline. There were Polaroids of her early workings in clay, photographs that documented the process of refinement and then finally an image that both she and Cassie felt satisfied with – a three-dimensional clay model that somehow had managed to capture Gleason and the depth of his evil.

She shivered as she took out a blank piece of paper from the file. As she held her pencil she saw that her hand was shaking ever so slightly. What was there to be afraid of? Gleason was dead, everyone knew that. But that was the terrifying thing.