“And there are no benefits,” Anne added.
“Aren’t we lucky?” Lauren said, giving a little toast with her glass.
“Speaking for myself,” Anne said, “yes. My alternative was to be dead. I’d rather be a live victim than a dead one. At least there’s room for things to improve.”
6
“She didn’t start out a bitch,” Tanner said. “I’ll give her that. You had to feel for her. I can’t imagine going through that—your kid just disappears, you don’t know what happened, you don’t know if she’s alive or dead or what some sick son of a bitch is doing to her. What else would matter to you? Nothing. Fuck everybody.”
She took a long drink. Vodka and tonic with three wedges of lemon.
They sat at a prime window table at one of the best restaurants on Stearns Wharf. Tanner’s choice. A well- dressed older woman at the next table gave Tanner a dirty look for her language. Tanner rolled her eyes.
“I’d be the same or worse,” she admitted. “If somebody tried to do something to my kid, I’d be like a tigress with her claws out. I wouldn’t care who got in my way.
“If I were in her place and believed what she believes, I would have fucking killed Roland Ballencoa with my bare hands. I would have cut his tongue out, tore his balls off, then pulled his beating heart from his chest and eaten it while he died watching.”
“I’ll remember not to piss you off,” Mendez said. “Tell me about Ballencoa. Obviously you think he did it.”
Tanner played with her fork, frowning. “I liked him for it. So did everyone else. But we’ve got nothing on him. No one saw anything. No one heard anything. There was never any sign of the girl.”
“Did he have an alibi?”
“The ever-popular ‘home alone.’ ”
“Did he have a history with the girl?”
“He’s a freelance photographer by trade. He had taken pictures of the Lawton girl—and a lot of other girls her age—at sporting events, concerts, on the street.
“He makes me want to go take a shower,” Tanner confessed, “but the teenage girls seem to think he’s got that sleazy/sexy, angst-ridden artist thing going on. Teenage girls are stupid. What can I say?”
“Did he take any of them home with him?” Mendez asked.
“Not that we know of. He’s wicked smart, this guy. He got in trouble before, and he learned from his mistakes. He never tried that old ‘I can make you a supermodel’ game. He always took his pictures in public, never anything too provocative. His business was legit.”
“He has a record?”
“Lewd acts on a minor. He was nineteen, the girl was fourteen. He was sentenced to two years. He did fifteen months up in the Eureka area.”
“How did you connect him to the Lawton girl?”
“His name came up a couple of times with Leslie’s friends—and we’re talking about conversations that happened months apart. And we discovered Leslie had purchased some photographs he had taken of her and her tennis partner playing in a tournament. But it wasn’t until well after the fact someone put them together talking on the sidelines after a softball game the day she went missing. And then it took months longer to pull together enough information to get a search warrant.”
“You didn’t find enough to put him in a cell,” Mendez said. “Did you find anything at all?”
“By the time we finally got the warrant, he had long since gotten rid of anything incriminating. We crawled over that place like lice on rats. We found photographs of the girl, but he’s a photographer—so what? We found photographs of girls, guys, young people, old people. It didn’t mean anything. Finally, we found one tiny sample of blood under the carpet in the back of his van.”
“And?”
“And nothing. The sample is too small to test. Maybe we could get a blood type. Maybe. There’s not enough for a DNA profile, considering where the science is right now. If we test it, we destroy it, and there’s no guarantee we’d learn anything at all. Then the sample is gone and we truly have nothing.
“All we can do is wait,” she said. “The DNA technology is getting more sophisticated every day. We have to hope that continues. Maybe six months from now or a year from now, that sample will be more than enough to get a profile. For now, we would be insane to try it.”
“I imagine that doesn’t sit well with Mrs. Lawton,” Mendez said.
“No. She wants to know if it’s her daughter’s blood. If we could test it and we found out it’s not her daughter’s blood, she’s not going to care that the sample is lost.
“We have to care,” Tanner said. “What if we can’t get him on the Lawton case, but down the road we could get him on some other crime committed against some other young girl? We have to keep that sample intact.”
“That leaves her in limbo.”
“Unfortunately, yes. And that’s taken a toll on her over the years.
“She calls all the time,” Tanner said. “What are we doing. Have we looked into this tip or followed up on what that psychic said. Why aren’t we doing this or that. Why aren’t we watching Ballencoa around the clock 24/7/365.
“She doesn’t want to hear that the guy has rights or that we have a budget or that her daughter’s case isn’t the only case we’re working on—or that after four years her daughter’s case isn’t even the most important case we’re working on.”
“It’s the most important case in her life,” Mendez pointed out.
Tanner spread her hands. “Hey, I’m not saying I don’t feel for her. I do. Believe me, I do. But you know the reality of the situation. At this point, unless we find the girl’s remains and can get something from them, or a witness comes forward, or Ballencoa—or whoever—steps up and makes a confession, this is going down as an unsolved cold case. Those files are going to sit in that storage room ’til kingdom come.”
Mendez sipped at his beer and turned it all over in his mind. Small wonder Lauren Lawton was on the ragged edge. She was stuck in a living hell that looked like it would go on forever. There wasn’t anything she could do about it.
“I met Mrs. Lawton today,” he said, choosing to leave out the part where she had run her shopping cart into him with a maniacal look in her eyes. “She thinks she saw Roland Ballencoa in Oak Knoll.”
Tanner’s brows knitted. “He’s in San Luis Obispo. Despite what Lauren Lawton will say about me, I do keep tabs on the guy.”
“The San Luis PD knows he’s there?”
“Of course. He moved up there almost two years ago. I let them know. I didn’t know Lauren had moved to Oak Knoll or I would have called you guys and given you the heads-up on her.”
The waiter brought their dinners. Tanner stabbed a crab cake like it was still alive. She ate like she hadn’t seen food in a week.
“I’m surprised she left,” she said when she came up for air.
Mendez shrugged as he contemplated his fish. “What’s here for her? Her husband is dead. Her daughter’s case is at a standstill. Everywhere she turns, there’s got to be a reminder of something she doesn’t have anymore. Why would she stay?”
“Lauren has always clung to the idea that Leslie is still alive somewhere. Wouldn’t she want to stay in the house Leslie would come home to if by some miracle she
“It’s been four years,” he countered. “Maybe she’s letting go of that hope. You said yourself this has taken a toll on her. And she’s got the younger daughter to consider. They could come to Oak Knoll, get a break from the bad memories, have a fresh start. Friends offered them use of a house . . .”
“Her whole life has been this case,” Tanner said. “All day, every day. For the first two years she was in the office all the time, making her presence known. After that she would still come in once a month or more. She was always badgering the newspaper to run a story or the TV stations and radio stations to interview her.
