Neri rolled his eyes. “Not him. That woman.”
“Mrs. Lawton?”
“I get that she wants to have this guy’s balls on a string around her neck,” he said, “but she wants mine too. I’m supposed to wave a magic wand and have him commit some chargeable offense. Or maybe I can pull her missing kid out of my ass.”
“You’re the soul of sympathy,” Mendez said flatly.
“Hey,” Neri said. “I’ve got as much sympathy as anybody. It’s terrible what happened to her family. But the SBPD can’t link Ballencoa to the crime. They can think whatever they want about the guy, but the bottom line is they’ve got jack shit to prove he did anything. Neither do we.
“What are we supposed to do?” he asked. “Ballencoa minds his own business; nobody complains about him; we don’t have any missing teenage girls here. But I’ve got Lauren Lawton on my back every week. Why don’t we do this, why can’t we do that.”
A puzzled look came over his face as a thought struck him. “She’s backed off lately. I haven’t heard from her in a while. Did she die or something?”
“She moved to Oak Knoll,” Mendez said.
Neri gave a hysterical laugh and slapped a palm against the table. “Tag. You’re it! Sorry, boys.”
Mendez frowned. It wasn’t that he couldn’t see Lauren Lawton out of control. It was that she had good reason to be a pain in the ass. She was trying to fight for her daughter. Nobody seemed to want to give her that. Or probably more accurately, they only wanted to allow her just so much time to do it, then she was supposed to shut up and go away.
First Tanner, now this idiot.
“Is Ballencoa still living here?” he asked bluntly.
Neri didn’t quite look at him. “Yeah.”
“Really?”
“The last I checked.”
“And when was that?”
“Like I said: It’s been a while since I’ve heard from Mrs. Lawton.”
“You’ve got a known child predator in your town and you don’t check up on him unless a citizen from another jurisdiction calls and pokes you?” Mendez asked, his temper ticking a notch hotter.
“We checked on him all the time when he first moved up here,” Neri said, defensive. “We checked on him so much he threatened to sue the department for harassment. Ballencoa came here a free man, and he’s never done anything to change that in nearly two years. We can’t just sit on the guy for no good reason.”
“When was the last time you saw him?” Hicks asked.
Neri shifted in his chair, uncomfortable with their scrutiny. “A couple of months ago. He had a booth at the Poly Royal art fair. He’s a photographer. He was selling his photographs.”
“What kind of photographs?”
“I don’t know,” Neri said on an impatient sigh. “Nature. Buildings. The mission. Kids on ponies. Who cares?”
Mendez ground his back teeth. A child predator was taking pictures of kids on ponies, and this asshole didn’t think anything of it.
“When was that?” he asked.
“In April,” Neri said. “We had a freaking riot that lasted for three days, in case you don’t watch the news. We had over a hundred arrests, a hundred injuries—fifteen of our own people.”
“You had a riot at an art fair?” Mendez said, just to be a jerk. Everyone in the state had been riveted to the news during the three days of riots in a town that normally lived at the speed of its nickname: SLO. Slotopia. “What the hell kind of town do you run?”
“It wasn’t at the art fair. That was just part of the Cal Poly open house weekend.”
“You had a riot at an open house?” Hicks said, also happily playing dumb.
Neri threw his hands up in frustration. “It’s the Poly Royal. It’s a fucking festival. Take a few thousand drunken college kids and throw in a pack of out-of-town troublemakers and a few hundred drunken migrant workers—”
“Oh, right,” Mendez said. “It’s the ’spics. We’re always drunk and disorderly.”
“I didn’t say that!” Neri looked at Hicks. “What the hell’s wrong with him?” he asked, hooking a thumb in the direction of Mendez.
Hicks shrugged, unconcerned.
“So you saw Ballencoa in April,” Mendez said. “Right before your hundred-arrest riot. That’s three months ago. What do you people do up here? Write one report a day? You can’t take the time to drive around the block to see if your resident child abductor is here or not?”
“I told you,” Neri said. “We don’t have the manpower or the cause to sit on a law-abiding citizen who wants to sue us. And that’s all Ballencoa has been since he moved here: law-abiding.”
“Whatever,” Mendez said, getting up from his chair.
“Do you have a current address on him?” Hicks asked.
“I’ll have to look it up.”
“That’d be great. Then we can get out of your hair.”
“What are you going to do?” Neri asked, suspicious. “I can’t have you guys running around half-cocked —”
“Why not? We should fit right in,” Mendez muttered.
Neri got up from his chair, clearly pissed off.
“We need to ask Mr. Ballencoa a few questions,” Hicks said easily.
“We’ll be sure to give him our cards,” Mendez said. “So he can sue the proper agency.”
“Good,” Neri said. “You do that, Mendez. Then go fuck yourself.”
11
“You had to be an asshole?” Hicks said as they got back in the car.
“He’s slacking on the job, he’s disrespectful to the mother of a victim, he can’t return a goddamn phone call, and
“Two wrongs don’t make a right, Anthony,” Hicks said without rancor.
Mendez scowled and started the car. “I already have a mother.”
“I’m just saying.”
“You’re the navigator. Navigate.”
“Aye, aye, Captain Chivalry.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Hicks chuckled. “Nothing. You just can’t resist a damsel in distress, that’s all.”
“Very funny. I don’t happen to think it should be considered out of the ordinary to have some compassion for a woman who’s been through what this woman has been through.”
“You’re absolutely right,” Hicks said diplomatically. “Take a right on Santa Rosa. Like my wife says: You’ll make some lucky girl a fine husband one day.”
Except that day never seemed to come around, much to the dismay of his mother. And to a slightly lesser degree to his sisters, who were forever trying to fix him up with nice Spanish girls. He was the lone marriage holdout of the Mendez family. Not that he didn’t like the idea. It was just that he’d always been focused on his career, and the rest hadn’t worked out.
“From what everyone is saying about Mrs. Lawton, it doesn’t sound like there’s much danger of you falling in love with her,” Hicks said.
“Can we let this subject go, please?”
“Sounds to me like she must have horns and a tail. Teeth and claws at the least. Didn’t you notice? Left on Higuera.”
When they found the address Neri had given them, the hair stood up on the back of Mendez’s neck. The
