Witnesses had put him at the softball field the day Leslie Lawton had gone missing.
Groups of young women wouldn’t be as wary as individuals. Athletic girls tended to be self-assured and outgoing, and even less apt to be concerned about a guy with a camera. He would have been able to approach them, talk about their race, their dive, their ball game, their tennis match, and they wouldn’t have found that strange at all.
He probably gave them his business card. He probably got addresses and phone numbers from them on the excuse of wanting to send their photos to them. Girls who might not otherwise ever give that kind of personal information to a stranger would think nothing of it. He wasn’t really a stranger, was he? He was the photographer. They saw him at all the games . . .
And once Ballencoa had their addresses, he could go by their homes to see how they lived. Did they have roommates? Did they live with family? What was the schedule of the households? Who went to work early? Who came home late? When was the house empty?
When he knew the house would be empty, he could find a way in . . .
The last thing Mendez had done before leaving work for his suspension had been to write an alert to the watch sergeants. The patrol deputies needed to be on the lookout for Ballencoa’s van at the parks and sports fields in particular, and around town and the county in general. They wouldn’t be able to tail Ballencoa without him screaming harassment, but Ballencoa couldn’t stop them doing their jobs either.
As for Lauren Lawton, a radio car would cruise Old Mission Road regularly tonight—though Ballencoa was certainly too smart to go back to her house so soon. He would know they would be on the lookout for him tonight. If he was smart, tonight he would lay low. If he was cocky, he would go out trolling. But he wouldn’t go back to Lauren Lawton’s house.
The lactic acid was building in the dense muscles of Mendez’s thighs and calves. His legs were starting to feel heavy as he turned onto Coronado.
Dixon would have his ass for setting foot on Ballencoa’s street, but he didn’t intend on getting caught. He wouldn’t put so much as a toe on the bastard’s property, but the sidewalks belonged to the public. He was as free to roam the streets as any pervert window-peeping criminal.
Even as he thought it, he could see the steam coming out of the sheriff’s ears.
No lights burned in Ballencoa’s windows. There was no sign of the van. Mendez jogged past the house, across the street, and turned right down the side street, slowing to a walk. Hands on his hips, he walked up and down, breathing, checking his pulse, letting the acid flush out of his leg muscles.
A small building sat at the back of Ballencoa’s yard. A second small garage. Mendez considered the wisdom of walking down the alley. That might be pushing it. If a neighbor caught a glimpse of him from a window, they might call him in as a prowler. He didn’t want to have to explain that to anyone. He wouldn’t be able to get into the building at any rate. For now, it was enough to know it was there. If the day came that he had to write an affidavit for a search warrant, he would want that building included.
Guys like Roland Ballencoa kept souvenirs of their exploits. For a sexual deviant, a trinket from a victim could help him relive his fantasy. Ballencoa had gotten caught down in San Diego stealing women’s dirty underwear. Chances were good he had a stash of panties somewhere. If among that stash of panties he had a pair with Leslie Lawton’s DNA on them . . .
The day was coming when prosecutors would be able to get a conviction with evidence like that.
Ballencoa was living here now, but he still had the lease on Carl Eddard’s rental in San Luis. Who knew what he might have stashed in the attic rafters there? For that matter, who knew what other hiding places Roland Ballencoa might have?
Mendez had known of killers who rented public storage lockers to keep human remains. He knew of a case where a killer had left a fifty-five-gallon drum in the basement of a house he sold. It wasn’t until two owners later that someone had opened the drum and discovered what was left of the man’s missing pregnant girlfriend.
Was Leslie Lawton in a drum in the building at the back of Ballencoa’s rented home?
He couldn’t know, and, as it stood, he had no legal grounds to find out. As frustrating as that was to him, he couldn’t imagine what Lauren Lawton lived with every day.
With too many unsettling questions in the back of his head, Mendez jogged home.
30
Denise Garland, LPN, Mercy General Hospital, lived in a one-bedroom guesthouse that had undoubtedly begun its life as a garage—as had many small rentals in the downtown and McAster College neighborhoods of Oak Knoll. The home had the squat build of a garage, though it had been dolled up with shutters and siding, and the driveway had been replaced with a concrete sidewalk and a little patch of lawn. A weak yellow bug light burned beside the front door.
The property sat on a corner lot, with the entrance to the rental on the side street around the corner from the front of the main house. Overgrown bougainvillea bushes offered privacy from the landlord’s backyard.
One person’s privacy was another person’s cover. He was able to approach and move around the exterior of the house with little concern for being seen.
He didn’t bother going to the front door. The front door would be locked. And if anyone happened by or looked out a window from one of the neighboring houses, their eyes would go to the front door. They would notice a man standing at the front door.
He wasn’t concerned that anyone had followed him there. Always watchful, he had been particularly so after leaving the sheriff’s office. He had not returned home and had gone through his usual maneuvers of circling blocks and doubling back on his own trail to make certain they had not put an unmarked car on the job of tailing him. They had not.
Eventually he had returned to Denise Garland’s neighborhood, finding a spot to watch her house until she left for her late shift at the hospital. Then he put on a pair of surgical gloves and walked across the street to begin his evening’s work.
The two windows on the south side of Denise Garland’s house were closed tight. The transom window denoting the location of the bathroom was cracked open several inches. It wouldn’t have been the first time he had gone into a house that way. He was tall enough to access the window and thin enough to slide through it like a snake, but it wasn’t his first choice of entrances.
He found his access on the back of the house, where a sliding glass door opened onto a little patio fashioned of inexpensive concrete pavers. Denise Garland had created a nice little entertaining area for herself there with a small, round, white plastic table with four white plastic chairs and a couple of white plastic lounge chairs for sunning. A short-legged Weber grill squatted off to one side of the patio.
Several Diet Coke cans had been left on the table. A striped beach towel had been forgotten in a heap on one of the chairs. A dirty ashtray sat on the concrete between the chairs.
He frowned at that. He couldn’t abide smoking. Filthy, stinking habit. He wouldn’t be interested in Denise Garland if she was a smoker. He hoped the ashtray belonged to the girlfriend who had come to visit her that afternoon while he had been watching the house from down the street.
He had followed her home from the diner and made note of her address, then gone home to catch a few hours of sleep, amused at the notion that Denise Garland was probably also in bed in her little converted garage.
He had imagined her naked in her bed fantasizing about the stranger from the diner, touching herself between her legs, then licking her fingers and sucking on them, imagining she was sucking on his cock. He had remembered the shy but flirtatious look she had given him from beneath her lashes. She would give him that same look as she knelt between his legs and took him into her hot, wet mouth.
The screen portion of the patio door was locked. But the lock was flimsy and easily popped with a credit card slipped between the door and the frame. The sliding glass door had been forgotten and left unlocked—as they so often were—and slid open without protest.
Denise Garland had left the fluorescent under-counter lights on in the tiny kitchen. They glowed bright white in the dark, illuminating the clutter of used drinking glasses by the sink, and clean dishes left in the drain basket on the counter.
