closed steel door with no window.
“Have you been drinking, ma’am?”
“No.” Not yet, though a good stiff vodka would have been welcome.
“Ms. Lawton, you seem to be a little erratic today. Are you on medication of some kind?”
Prozac, Ativan, Valium, Trazodone . . . The list of pharmaceuticals in her medicine cabinet went on.
“No,” she said. She hadn’t taken any. She tried not to during the day. Most of them made her sleepy, and sleep brought nothing but nightmares.
The detective looked her in the eyes, gauging the size of her pupils.
Had she taken something and not remembered? Her thinking seemed to be taking place in the midst of a thick fog in her brain. Had she eaten lunch? She couldn’t remember. Probably not. Maybe her blood sugar was out of whack. Maybe this entire afternoon could have been avoided with a piece of cheese.
“I watched you leave the parking lot,” he said. “You violated about half a dozen laws and endangered the public. Do you have an explanation for that?”
“I thought I saw someone I knew,” she said, astonished at how stupid that sounded even to herself.
The detective arched a thick brow. He was good-looking, forty-ish. He looked like a straight arrow. His pants were pressed. He wore a jacket and tie.
“And you were going to chase that person down in your car?” Mendez asked. “We don’t do that here, ma’am.”
“Of course not,” she said. “We don’t do that in Santa Barbara either.”
Detective Mendez seemed at a loss. “Let’s have a seat in my car.”
He used his radio to call in her driver’s license, speaking in cop code, no doubt asking for reports of past lunatic behavior. There had to be a thick file on her in Santa Barbara. She was well known at both the police and the sheriff’s departments. Anyone there would tell him she was a bitch and a pain in the ass—titles she wore with pride.
“What brings you to Oak Knoll, Ms. Lawton?”
“My daughter and I just moved here.”
“What do you do for a living?”
“I’m an interior decorator.”
“And your husband?”
He had caught sight of her ring finger. She had never taken off her wedding band. It didn’t matter that Lance was gone. She would always be married to him.
“My husband is dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
She never knew what to say to that.
Some unintelligible lingo crackled over the radio. Mendez acknowledged it with a brisk “10-4.”
“Your name is familiar.”
Lauren laughed without humor. This was where conversations always took a turn for the worse on so many levels. “Well, I
Mendez nodded as the memory came to him. “The case is still open.”
“Yes.”
It sounded so clinical when he said it, so sterile. The case. Like what had happened was a book that could be opened and studied and closed again and put away on a shelf. Her reality was so much messier than that, ragged and torn and shredded, oozing and dripping. The case was still open. Her daughter was still missing.
“You said you just moved here. Do you have friends in Oak Knoll?”
“I hardly know anyone here.”
“Then who did you think you saw?” he asked. “Who were you trying to follow?”
“The man who took my daughter.”
He was taken aback by that. “Excuse me?”
“His name is Roland Ballencoa. I thought I saw him in the supermarket,” Lauren said, “and then he drove right past me in the parking lot.”
“What was he driving?”
“A brown van.”
“Did you get a plate number?”
“No.”
“If you know he took your daughter, why isn’t he in jail?”
Defeat weighed down on her in the form of exhaustion. The adrenaline rush had crashed. He wasn’t going to help her. No one would help her. Roland Ballencoa was a free man.
“Because there isn’t a shred of evidence against him,” she said, resigned. “If you’re going to write me a ticket, detective, can we get on with it? I have things to do.”
“I’m not exactly sure what to do with you, Mrs. Lawton,” he admitted. “I’m not sure I should let you get back behind the wheel of a car.”
“You want me to walk a straight line heel-to-toe?” she asked. “Close my eyes and touch the tip of my nose? I’m as sober as a judge,” she said. “I’ll take a Breathalyzer test. You can have my blood drawn if you want. I’m not on anything.”
“You thought you saw this man in the supermarket, but you rammed your cart into me,” he pointed out. “You took after a man in a van and nearly hit half a dozen pedestrians. You tell me this guy abducted your daughter, but that there’s no evidence to prove it.”
“I didn’t say I was in my right mind,” Lauren admitted. “But lucky for me, it’s not against the law to be a little crazy. In fact, a lot of people would say I get a free pass to be mentally unbalanced. That’s one of the perks of being a survivor of tragedy.”
He didn’t react to her sarcasm. He reached a thick hand up and rubbed the back of his neck, as if to stimulate thought by increasing circulation to his brain.
He got back on the radio and requested information on Roland Ballencoa. Wants, warrants, physical address.
“Where are you living?” he asked.
“Twenty-one Old Mission Road. The house belongs to friends from Santa Barbara—the Bristols,” she explained, as if he would care.
“Your phone number?” he asked, jotting her answers into a little spiral notebook he had taken from the inside breast pocket of his sport coat.
“You’ll want to speak to Detective Tanner at the Santa Barbara Police Department,” she said, assuming he would follow through. He had that air about him—that he would be a stickler for details. “The detective in charge of my daughter’s case.”
“Do you have any reason to believe Ballencoa is in Oak Knoll?” he asked.
“Would I have brought my daughter here if I did?” Lauren challenged.
Mendez didn’t react—another irritating cop trait. “Do you have any reason to think he might know you’re here?”
“I didn’t send him the ‘We’re Moving’ notice,” she snapped. “Do you think I’m an idiot?”
“No, ma’am.”
“No. You think I’m a lunatic.”
“No, ma’am.”
“You are infuriatingly polite, detective,” she said. “You have every reason to think there’s something wrong with me. And I’m being a bitch on top of it.”
Mendez said nothing.
Lauren found an ironic smile for that. “Your mother raised you well.”
