scrubs came out.
“We can’t go in the restaurant,” Mendez said. “If he sees me, he’ll flip. If he sees you, he’ll flip. If he doesn’t see either one of us, we can tail him.
“How hungry are you?” he asked Tanner.
“I could live on air,” she said, already starting for the car, as eager as he was to find out what Roland Ballencoa would do after his breakfast.
They drove around the block, finding a spot along the curb in sight of the diner, but not near enough to be conspicuous. Tanner opened her purse, pulled out a couple of Snickers bars, and handed one to Mendez.
“Breakfast of champions,” she said.
Mendez reached into the backseat and snagged a case with a pair of binoculars in it. It took a moment to get the focus right and to scan what he could see of the restaurant through the front window, but he finally caught a glimpse of Ballencoa in a booth toward the back.
“What’s he doing?” Tanner asked.
“Drinking coffee. Eating eggs.”
“Bastard,” Tanner muttered. “
Mendez handed her the glasses, and they settled in to wait. He studied her as she stared intently through the binoculars. She was a funny little puzzle. He’d certainly never met another woman like her. He could feel the intensity of her energy just sitting there. She was like a bird dog on point, muscles taut, her focus on her prey. He had a feeling she probably did everything like that—full-on, balls-out—if she’d had balls. He didn’t know that many guys with that kind of intensity.
“Can I ask you a question?”
She didn’t break her concentration. “Shoot.”
“How’d you get to be a cop?”
“I went to the academy, same as you.”
“I didn’t mean that. I mean . . . you’re a woman—”
“Glad you noticed.”
“I know it can’t be easy,” he said, “working your way up the ranks—”
“Oh, well,” she said, “I slept with all my bosses.”
She shot him a look then, unable to resist seeing his reaction, and laughed out loud at the look on his face.
“Jesus, you’re serious,” she said. “It was a joke.” She turned back to the binoculars and her vigil, then added, “I only slept with a couple of them.”
“I
“Beats digging ditches.”
“So does being a nurse or a teacher,” he said.
She sighed in resignation at his unwillingness to let her get by with glib answers. She turned and looked at him again, and Mendez could sense her weighing very carefully what she might say.
Finally she tilted her head to one side and gave a little shrug. “I like solving puzzles. I like helping people. I read a lot of Nancy Drew as a kid.”
Stock answers. She watched him from the corner of her eye to see if he would accept them. He decided he would—for now. She didn’t want to let him in. He imagined she didn’t let anybody through that gate easily—or maybe at all. But eventually he would try again. Danni Tanner would be his next mystery to solve—after Roland Ballencoa.
He was angry. He was agitated. He was excited. He had decided to stick to his routine because it calmed him somewhat. He went to the diner and sat in his usual booth, and ordered his eggs and toast and coffee. He didn’t eat meat, but he ate eggs for the protein. His usual waitress, Ellen Norman, twenty-four, with the curly strawberry blond hair and receding chin, waited on him. The routine helped, but not entirely.
On the one hand he was angry over the destruction of his camera. His camera was his instrument. What he did with it was his art. He never allowed anyone to handle his cameras or his lenses. Seeing that camera hit the ground, seeing the lens wrench off the body, had been like watching his own limb being torn off. Having it destroyed by Lauren Lawton—by a woman he just seconds before had control over—had infuriated him. The rage he had felt had almost overwhelmed his control. The prospect of losing control left him feeling agitated.
Control was essential. Control equaled success. Losing control meant making mistakes. Mistakes equaled failure. Failure was not an option. Failure meant going to prison. He wasn’t going to prison again. Ever.
He was an intelligent person. A highly intelligent person. He was certainly more intelligent than any of the cops who had investigated him. Over the years he had learned from his mistakes and perfected his methods.
Success was all about control.
Control was the sensation that had filled him as he had photographed Leah Lawton and her little blonde friend. They had been unaware of him. The control had been his as he captured their images: their slender tanned legs and arms, their budding breasts, the sliver of belly the blonde girl showed every time she raised her tennis racquet. Each separate piece of girl was controlled by him as he captured it on film.
Control was what he had felt as Lauren Lawton had raced toward him, her face twisting in anger. He had created that emotion. He had captured the images of that emotion and frozen them in time.
Every time he closed his eyes he could see her expression, the raw hatred, and that excited him. There was his challenge: to create that hatred and to manipulate it and turn it around on her. The potential power in that success was enough to give him a hard-on.
Overall, he decided he was feeling good. Not just good. Great. He had almost everything he wanted. Almost.
Toward the front of the restaurant the same group of night shift nurses he had been watching all week were getting ready to leave—Denise Garland among them. They had gotten up from their table, talking and laughing. One of the older fat ones spotted him and waved. He waved back.
As the nurses headed for the front door, he put a ten and a five down next to his plate to pay his bill and leave Ellen Norman, twenty-four, with the curly strawberry blond hair and receding chin, a nice tip.
“Pervert at two o’clock!” Tanner said as Ballencoa came out of the diner.
He walked out into the sunshine, settled a pair of sunglasses on his nose, hitched at the waist of his baggy cargo pants, and looked around like he was pleased with himself.
“Oh, yeah, Roland,” Tanner said. “You’re all that. King of the Panty Whackers.”
“What’d you find in your files?” Mendez asked. “Was he up to that shit in SB?”
“I found half a dozen cases that fit the B and E MO, spread out over eighteen months before Leslie Lawton went missing. Nobody gave them much attention because nothing of value was taken, nobody was home at the time of the break-ins, there was no violence involved.”
“Any fingerprints?”
“Nope. But one of the homeowners mentioned that clothes had gotten run through the washing machine,” she said. “The reason it got mentioned was that the machine was broken, it wouldn’t drain. The homeowner hadn’t used it in a week. That was the woman’s first clue that someone had been in her house.”
“And he ran a load of laundry at the Lawtons’ house too,” Mendez said, putting the car in gear, waiting for Ballencoa to drive out of the parking lot and pick a direction. Two other cars pulled out onto La Quinta—nurses who had left the restaurant ahead of him.
“Right,” Tanner said. “Underwear. As soon as she told us that, I knew what he’d done. Just another big fuck-you from Roland. He could be in that house, be comfortable enough to play milk the snake with her panties, then wash the evidence away in a way everyone would notice, and no one could do anything about. Like a dog pissing on a fence.”
Ballencoa took a right, pulling out behind a red Toyota Corolla with a nurse in it. Mendez let two cars fall in behind him before pulling out into the flow of traffic.
