“What were you doing at the gun range?”
“Shooting a gun.” A defensive edge crept into her voice.
They stood in the great room of the house she was renting on Old Mission Road. The place was like something out of a magazine—a big stone fireplace, a high vaulted ceiling, blue and white furniture that looked like no one had ever sat in it. All of the pillows on the couches were just so, with knife creases chopped into the tops of them.
“You own a firearm?” he asked.
“Yes. It was my husband’s.”
He didn’t like that idea. Not that he was against citizens owning guns per se. But Lauren Lawton was a woman who had been through a tremendous amount of stress and was by all accounts living on edge. She claimed Roland Ballencoa had stalked her in Santa Barbara. A handgun and a paranoid woman with nerves strung tight was not a combination destined for a good outcome.
“Is your paperwork in order?” he asked.
Her blue eyes flashed like light hitting steel. “Who the fuck cares?” she snapped. “I didn’t call you out here to see if I’ve dotted all my
“Did you see him?”
“No! I told you: I’d been working on the computer all night. I went out to the car to get my purse, and there it was. It didn’t get there by magic. He came onto my property. That’s criminal trespass.”
“Yes, ma’am, that is, but if you didn’t see him—”
“Get his fingerprints off the photograph,” she said. “He has a criminal record. He’s in the system.”
“Yes, ma’am. We’ll see if we can get a clear print—”
“But of course you won’t,” she said, more to herself than to him. She put her hands on top of her head and paced around in a little circle. “He’s too careful for that. Oh my God, what a fucking nightmare.”
“How would he know to find you here?” Mendez asked.
She looked at him with bewilderment and frustration. “I don’t know! He must have seen me at the store that day—”
“You followed him, not the other way around.”
“Maybe he saw me in his mirror,” she said, grasping for an explanation. “Maybe he saw me and pulled over and waited until I passed him—”
“He didn’t follow you home,” Mendez said.
“How do you know?”
“Because I followed you,” he confessed.
“Why is he in this town at all?” she demanded. “He’s a criminal. This is what he does. Somehow he found us, and now he’s going to torment us. He did this before, you know. He stalked us in Santa Barbara, and the police couldn’t manage to do anything about it.”
“I spoke with Detective Tanner,” Mendez started.
“And she told you I’m a lunatic pain in the ass, and that they had no proof Ballencoa was stalking me, therefore I must have been lying about it.”
“That’s not exactly how the conversation went.”
“No. I’m sure it was much more colorful than that. It takes a bitch to know a bitch,” she said bluntly.
Mendez watched her carefully, though it didn’t take a genius to read her body language. She was upset and agitated, and on the defensive. She had a right to be. Someone had followed her to the gun range. As out of the way as that place was, it was no happy coincidence. Someone had come onto her property while she was in the house and left that photograph on her windshield for a reason: to freak her out. They had succeeded.
“Can we sit down, ma’am?” he asked, not for himself, but to try to calm her a little. He was used to being called out in the middle of the night. Nighttime was the right time for crimes that begged a detective’s immediate attention.
She had called him directly, bypassing the usual protocol, but then he had told her to. He had crawled up out of a restless sleep, his brain itching with thoughts of the day and the questions that had risen to the surface as he and Hicks looked into Roland Ballencoa. Still on that wavelength, he hadn’t been all that surprised to hear Lauren Lawton’s voice on the line, half-hysterical, half-angry, demanding he come to her home.
He had dressed hastily, but properly. Shirt and tie, pants crisply pressed. There were no jeans-and-T-shirt detectives in his outfit—or anywhere that he knew of, except television.
Lauren Lawton huffed a sigh, yanked a chair out from the head of the big harvest table, and sat, the fingers of one hand drumming impatiently on the tabletop.
“Is this now when you give me the ‘we can’t do anything’ lecture? And then I have to wonder aloud if you’ll do anything after the bastard kills me?”
Mendez seated himself to her left, purposely delaying his answer. She was spoiling for a fight. He wouldn’t give her one.
“We’re trying to locate Mr. Ballencoa,” he said calmly. “It seems he hasn’t been living in his residence in San Luis Obispo for some time now. He didn’t leave a forwarding address with anyone.”
Lauren looked at him, trying to decide if he was going to be a good guy or not. She looked exhausted—pale and drawn with sooty purple smudges below her eyes. She wore gray sweatpants and a white T-shirt with a too-big black sweater wrapped over it. The tips of her fingers barely peeked out of the ends of the sleeves. It had probably belonged to her husband, he guessed.
“What time did you come into the house this evening?” he asked, taking out his little spiral notebook and pen.
“I got home around five.”
“And when did you find the photograph?”
“It was after two.”
“What made you go out to the car after two in the morning?”
She sighed as if the answer was going to be a long story, but she opted for the short version. “I had left my purse in the car. I wanted it.”
“Have you been alone all evening?”
“Yes. My daughter is spending the night with a girlfriend.”
Her eyes welled with sudden tears, and she stood up abruptly and went to the refrigerator, where she pulled a bottle of Absolut vodka from the freezer. She threw a handful of ice cubes into a tumbler, poured a stiff four fingers, and brought the drink back to the table.
He could only imagine what she was feeling, thinking that the man who had abducted her older daughter had come to her home in the dead of night, that he had been right outside the house she and her younger child had come to for refuge. Her sense of security had been breached. She probably felt violated.
She looked at him now with defiance in her eyes as she raised the glass to her lips and took a long pull on the vodka.
“Did Detective Tanner tell you I’m an alcoholic?”
“No, ma’am,” he said without emotion. “Are you?”
“No,” she said, one corner of her mouth twisting upward in the smallest, most bitter kind of smile. “Despite my own best efforts.”
“You had a bad scare,” he said reasonably. “You’re entitled to a little something to calm your nerves. It’s not my place to judge. But if you’d like some assistance coping with what you’ve gone through, I can recommend someone.”
“No, thank you.”
He fished a card out of his wallet and placed it on the table. Anne Leone’s card. He always carried a few with him. Not that Anne needed him to drum up business for her. Most of the work she did she did for free anyway. But she was very good with victims, having been one herself on more than one occasion. He would have loved to get Anne’s take on Lauren Lawton.
She looked at the card and said nothing. She seemed a little calmer now as the vodka took hold—or maybe
