understand why the police couldn’t have put him in prison. Everyone believed he had taken Leslie. Most everyone believed he had killed her.
“I’m telling you because I want you to be aware, sweetheart,” her mother said. “I want you to be careful. If you see him, don’t go near him. Go to the nearest adult and tell them. Call me. Call nine-one-one. The sheriff’s office knows about him.”
“Why is he here? Why does he have to be here?” Leah heard herself say. “It’s not fair!”
She sounded stupid, she thought. She sounded like a stupid little kid, but she couldn’t help it. Roland Ballencoa had ruined their lives in Santa Barbara. Leslie was gone because of him. Daddy had died because of him. They had left Santa Barbara because of him. Now he was here.
“I don’t know, honey,” her mother said.
“Did he follow us here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does he know we’re here?” she asked.
Her mother glanced down at something on the coffee table. Leah’s eyes followed, going wide at the sight of the gun lying there on top of a pile of mail.
“Why is Daddy’s gun here?” she asked, her eyes filling with tears.
“I took it out last night,” her mother said. “It needs to be cleaned, but I fell asleep.”
“You’re lying.” The words were out of Leah’s mouth before she even realized she was going to say them. She jumped up from the sofa. “You’re lying! I can tell. Don’t lie to me! I’m not a baby!”
“Leah!”
“You think you’re protecting me, but you’re not!” Leah cried. “All you do is make me feel like I’m some stupid child, like I can’t understand anything that’s happening, and if you lie about it, I’ll just pretend nothing is wrong. But
“Leah, that’s not true!” her mother said. She was on her feet now too. She looked hurt, like Leah had reached out and slapped her. Leah didn’t care.
“Yes, it is!” she argued as all the pent-up emotion came boiling out of her like hot lava. “All you care about is what happened to Leslie, and how terrible life is without Leslie, and now you have Daddy’s gun, and you’re going to kill yourself like Daddy killed himself, and what’s supposed to happen to me? What about
With that, the last dam burst and all the grief came in a flood of tears. Everything she’d been holding inside her for all this time came crashing like waves dashing themselves on jagged rocks. She fell on the sofa and buried her face in a pillow, sobbing like she might die of it.
She cried for the little sister she had been when Leslie went missing. She cried for the little girl she had been when Daddy had died. She cried for who she was now—a lost, frightened, angry young woman who felt like the only thread holding together what was left of her family was fraying down to nothing.
She would be left alone, with no one. She would be the one punished for what Leslie had done that day when she was supposed to have been grounded and she went to the softball game anyway. She would be punished because she hadn’t called Mom to rat her sister out. She would be punished because she had watched Leslie go and hoped she would get in trouble.
“Leah.”
She heard her mother’s voice. She felt her mother’s hands on her shoulders.
“Baby, I’m so sorry,” her mother whispered. “I’m so sorry. I won’t leave you, sweetheart. I promise I won’t ever leave you. I love you so much. I’m so, so sorry.”
Leah turned and buried her face against her mother’s shoulder, sobbing. They held each other, both of them crying, both of them miserable.
Leah wanted to feel comforted, but she didn’t. She wanted to feel safe, but she didn’t. And she still felt alone, and that scared her most of all.
32
“You didn’t get enough the first time?” Detective Tanner’s partner, Morino, arched an overgrown eyebrow. He looked like he’d crawled out of a laundry basket. Prewash cycle. His shirt was wrinkled and there was an oily spot the size of a quarter on his tie.
“Is Detective Tanner here or not?” Mendez asked. He had no patience for slobs. Sloppy man, sloppy work.
Even though he was technically not on duty, Mendez had dressed appropriately in pressed khaki slacks and a tucked-in black polo shirt with the FBI National Academy crest embroidered on the left chest.
“Sure,” Morino said, motioning him to follow as he headed down the hall. “It’s your lucky day—if you’re a masochist.”
“You don’t like having a lady for a partner?”
Morino laughed as they walked into the detective division and toward the small sea of steel desks where Tanner sat. “She’s no lady. She’s a vagina with a gun.”
“That’s better than being a hairy asshole with a big mouth,” Tanner said, unperturbed by her partner’s disrespect.
“Stick a tampon in it,” Morino sneered.
Tanner sneered back. “Go fuck yourself with a broom.”
“The one you flew in on?” he asked as he walked on past her.
“Yeah,” she called after him. “I sharpened the end just for you.”
Mendez took the seat at the side of her desk. “It doesn’t bother you that he talks that way to you?”
Tanner rolled her eyes. “I grew up with four brothers in a family of longshoremen. Nothing that one comes up with is going to faze me.”
“He should have some respect,” Mendez said, peeved enough for both of them. “Where’s your boss? He ought to put a stop to that.”
She huffed an impatient sigh. “I didn’t sign on to be a cop because I thought all the guys would open doors and hold my chair for me, detective,” she said. “I’ve had my ass kicked on this job. Seriously. Morino’s mouth is only a problem for me if I let it be. And believe me, in the battle of wits, he is by far outmatched. I don’t need a white knight to ride in and save me.”
Mendez scowled, shooting a look across the room where Morino was half sitting on another detective’s desk. The pair of them were sniggering like ninth graders.
“Thanks anyway,” Tanner added, getting up from her chair. “You want to look at the Lawton files?”
He wanted to go over and smack Morino upside the head. Instead, he stood up and put his attention on Tanner. “Yeah. I specifically want to see everything you have on Ballencoa himself,” he said, falling in step beside her. “My partner and I paid him a visit yesterday.”
“In San Luis?”
“In Oak Knoll. Lauren Lawton wasn’t seeing ghosts. He’s there.”
“Boy, this is your lucky week,” Tanner said.
“Tell me about it. The bastard got me suspended.”
Surprised, she arched a brow. “What’d he do? Make you forget to dot an
“He pissed me off,” Mendez admitted. “I said something he misconstrued as a threat.”
“Like what?”
“Basically, I told him if he took a step wrong in my town, I’d have his ass.”
Tanner chuckled as she opened the door to the small room with the Lawton case files stacked up inside. “So you’re not so buttoned-up all the time, Mr. National Academy? You have a little hot side, do you?” she teased. “I like that.”
Mendez pretended not to notice the flirtatious look she gave him as he walked into the room. “Ballencoa had
