Her husband could go on about Bond for hours, his eyes as bright as a boy’s on Christmas morning. The memory brought a bittersweet touch of warmth to Lauren’s heart. She didn’t allow it to take root or last for long. Fond memories had a way of becoming like hard stones that tripped her into a pit of despair. Today she already felt the tips of her toes slipping over that edge.
Unfinished justice was her hot button, her trigger. She couldn’t stand it for herself, nor could she deal with it as an onlooker. The outrage that rose up inside her was a hot, writhing thing that wanted to tear out of her like a wild animal.
She needed to do something to release the anger in a way that was both violent and controlled. Shooting her husband’s pistol was her answer. She could take the Walther in hand and feel its power, feel the hard cold steel and the no-nonsense, justice-starts-and-stops-here weight of it.
The gun accepted no excuses. Its perspective had no gray areas. What came out of it was truth—a terrible truth, a final truth, a truth
Lauren had found two gun ranges on the outskirts of Oak Knoll. Down the road from the Oaks Country Club, the Oaks Gun Club was a proper gentleman’s club with a state-of-the-art indoor range as well as a rifle range and areas for shooting trap and skeet. The buildings were lovely, the grounds manicured.
Lance had belonged to just such a club, where the members dressed like models for the Orvis catalog, and a rifle was a serious monetary investment. Lauren still had his shotgun, custom-made in Italy with a beautiful exotic wood stock and intricately etched steel.
The club had been part of their social scene. Many of the same friends with whom they rubbed elbows at polo and tennis had been members.
But a social scene was the last thing Lauren wanted these days. She had no interest in dressing for the range in anything other than jeans and a T-shirt. She wore a black baseball cap with the bill pulled low over her eyes and her ponytail pulled through the opening at the back. Hers was the only BMW in the parking lot of the shooting range she had chosen.
Canyon Gun Range was located on the far side of Oak Knoll. And by far side she meant as far away from McAster College and the boutiques and pedestrian plaza as it could be. The area was industrial, with a lot of low, steel, warehouse-type buildings that housed welders and cabinetmakers and auto body repair places. The building that housed the gun range had a pro shop on one end and a sleazy bar with topless dancers on the other.
This was where Lauren chose to bring her dead husband’s elegant James Bond weapon to practice her marksmanship and try to appease the demons stirring within.
No one she would ever know would ever find her here.
The lot was half full of cars. She got her gun bag out of the trunk, hefted it over one shoulder, and went inside.
The heads of dead animals lined the wood-paneled walls of the shop. She could feel their sightless stares almost as strongly as she could feel the stares of the men in the store. If she’d had bigger breasts, they probably would have told her she had come in the wrong door and sent her to the other end of the building. She was the only female in the place. But there was no mistaking her for a stripper these days. Too thin, too old, too pale, too worn.
Exchanging as little conversation as possible, she checked in at the desk and took care of the paperwork. The clerk examined the Walther and offered her a deal on paper bull’s-eye targets. Lauren forked over the extra buck for the full-sized male silhouette.
Once inside the range itself, eye and ear protection in place, she clipped the target up and sent it zipping down the line to the fifteen-feet mark, then picked up the gun from the bench.
For the first time since she had rushed out of Anne Leone’s office Lauren felt a calm come over her. Her mind went clear and still. Her breathing evened out. Her hands steadied.
Taking a deep breath, she raised the Walther and began, quickly falling into a familiar rhythm.
Every shot hit its mark, leaving the paper target shredded. One target and then another and then another.
When she had finished she swept up her brass, tossed the casings in the trash along with the decimated male silhouettes, and repacked her gear bag.
As she turned to go she realized the men shooting in two other lanes had stopped to stare at her. Another man picked up his bag from the back bench and held the door for her to go out:
When they reached the pro shop and had pulled their mugs down from their ears, he looked at her again and said, “Lady, I wouldn’t want to be your boyfriend.”
The camera lens zoomed in on her as she walked out of the gun shop to the black BMW 5 Series sedan. She had changed a lot over the years. She had gone from dressed to perfection to blue jeans and a black T-shirt; from a mane of dark hair, blown and styled, to a ponytail and a baseball cap; from made-up and decked out to washed-out and stripped down. Even so, she was still hot.
She went to the back of the car to stow away a black duffel bag, unknowingly looking straight at the camera as she shut the trunk.
The shutter clicked and the motor drive whirred.
16
There was no sign of recent habitation in the house Roland Ballencoa rented from Carl Eddard.
The old man unlocked the door and they all went inside. The place smelled of cleaning products and dust. The air had a stale stillness to it that suggested no living thing had disturbed it in a while.
The furniture was all in place. Nothing had been taken, but nothing had been left, either—no magazines, no shoes, no unopened bills, not a shirt or a jacket or a baseball cap, not a toothbrush or a comb or a Q-tip. Nothing. There was no food. There was no garbage, not a scrap of paper, not a gum wrapper. It was as if Roland Ballencoa had never been there at all.
“I guess you can start advertising for a new renter,” Mendez said.
Carl Eddard gave him a funny look. “Why? As long as this one keeps paying, he’s the best tenant I’ve ever had.”
“Why would he keep paying for a place he doesn’t live in?” Hicks wondered aloud.
“Why would I care?” the old man returned.
The fact that there was nothing to see made Mendez itch to look under the beds and between mattresses and box springs. He wanted to pull out dresser drawers to see if anything had been taped to the bottoms of them. He wanted to go into the attic and find a hidden box of something.
He did none of those things.
They were doing nothing technically wrong being in the house with the landlord, and perhaps if some kind of incriminating evidence of a crime had been left lying in plain sight, they might have still been all right—depending on how clever or how slimy the defense attorney turned out to be. They would have had the whole of the San Luis Police Department coming down on their heads, but legally they might have been all right. Maybe.
But beyond a plain-sight discovery, they were out of their jurisdiction without a search warrant or even probable cause to ask for one. They weren’t even investigating a crime. They were only there because he was curious, and because he felt bad for a woman everyone told him was a bitch on the ragged edge of insanity.
Carl Eddard grew impatient as their allotted twenty minutes passed.
“I have things to do,” the old man complained. “This guy isn’t going to materialize out of thin air.”
But he seemed to have disappeared into it, Mendez thought.
