Using angled light to study the impression, Corazon found that she could clearly see the number 1, the letter J and part of a third letter that could have been the upper left stem of an H, a K or an L.

“A license plate,” I said when she called me to the autopsy suite to view the discovery. “He put her down on a license plate.”

“Exactly,” said Corazon.

We formed the theory that whoever had killed the girl with no name had hidden the body in the trunk of a car until it was nighttime and safe to dump it. After carefully cleaning the body, the killer put it into the trunk of his car, mistakenly putting it down on part of a license plate that had been taken off the car and also placed in the trunk. That part of the theory was that the license plate had been removed and possibly replaced with a stolen plate as one more safety measure that would help the killer avoid detection if his car happened to be spotted by a suspicious passerby at the Mulholland overlook.

Though the skin impression gave no indication of what state issued the license plate, we decided to go with the percentages. From the state Department of Motor Vehicles we obtained a list of every car registered in Los Angeles County that carried a plate beginning 1JH, 1JK and 1JL.

The list contained over three thousand names of car owners. We then cut forty percent of those names by discounting the female owners. The remaining names were slowly fed into the National Crime Index computer and we came up with a list of forty-six men with criminal records ranging from minor to the extreme.

The first time I studied the list of forty-six, I knew. I felt certain that one of the names on it belonged to the killer of the girl with no name.

The Golden Gate lived up to its name in the afternoon sun. It was packed with cars going both ways and the tourist turnoff on the north side had the LOT FULL sign up. I kept moving, into the rainbow-painted tunnel and through the mountain. Soon enough I could see San Quentin up on the right. A foreboding-looking place in an idyllic spot, it housed the worst criminals California had to offer. And I was going to see the worst of the worst.