“On the basis that there’s a woman standing four feet behind you whose name is on this card.”

They ran them on a portable scanner in the corridor, and it took under two minutes, and Maya watched the exact moment it came back, because she was looking at Adriana’s face and not at the screen.

The prints did not match Maya Sterling.

They matched a set on file from a 2009 misdemeanor in another state, belonging to Adriana Marisol Vance, born in Sacramento, and flagged in the national system with a status marker that stopped the detective mid-sentence.

Deceased.