“No. She wants to know if it’s her daughter’s blood. If we could test it and we found out it’s not her daughter’s blood, she’s not going to care that the sample is lost.
“We have to care,” Tanner said. “What if we can’t get him on the Lawton case, but down the road we could get him on some other crime committed against some other young girl? We have to keep that sample intact.”
“That leaves her in limbo.”
“Unfortunately, yes. And that’s taken a toll on her over the years.
“She calls all the time,” Tanner said. “What are we doing. Have we looked into this tip or followed up on what that psychic said. Why aren’t we doing this or that. Why aren’t we watching Ballencoa around the clock 24/7/365.
“She doesn’t want to hear that the guy has rights or that we have a budget or that her daughter’s case isn’t the only case we’re working on—or that after four years her daughter’s case isn’t even the most important case we’re working on.”
“It’s the most important case in her life,” Mendez pointed out.
Tanner spread her hands. “Hey, I’m not saying I don’t feel for her. I do. Believe me, I do. But you know the reality of the situation. At this point, unless we find the girl’s remains and can get something from them, or a witness comes forward, or Ballencoa—or whoever—steps up and makes a confession, this is going down as an unsolved cold case. Those files are going to sit in that storage room ’til kingdom come.”
Mendez sipped at his beer and turned it all over in his mind. Small wonder Lauren Lawton was on the ragged edge. She was stuck in a living hell that looked like it would go on forever. There wasn’t anything she could do about it.
“I met Mrs. Lawton today,” he said, choosing to leave out the part where she had run her shopping cart into him with a maniacal look in her eyes. “She thinks she saw Roland Ballencoa in Oak Knoll.”
Tanner’s brows knitted. “He’s in San Luis Obispo. Despite what Lauren Lawton will say about me, I do keep tabs on the guy.”
“The San Luis PD knows he’s there?”
“Of course. He moved up there almost two years ago. I let them know. I didn’t know Lauren had moved to Oak Knoll or I would have called you guys and given you the heads-up on her.”
The waiter brought their dinners. Tanner stabbed a crab cake like it was still alive. She ate like she hadn’t seen food in a week.
“I’m surprised she left,” she said when she came up for air.
Mendez shrugged as he contemplated his fish. “What’s here for her? Her husband is dead. Her daughter’s case is at a standstill. Everywhere she turns, there’s got to be a reminder of something she doesn’t have anymore. Why would she stay?”
“Lauren has always clung to the idea that Leslie is still alive somewhere. Wouldn’t she want to stay in the house Leslie would come home to if by some miracle she could come home?”
“It’s been four years,” he countered. “Maybe she’s letting go of that hope. You said yourself this has taken a toll on her. And she’s got the younger daughter to consider. They could come to Oak Knoll, get a break from the bad memories, have a fresh start. Friends offered them use of a house . . .”
“Her whole life has been this case,” Tanner said. “All day, every day. For the first two years she was in the office all the time, making her presence known. After that she would still come in once a month or more. She was always badgering the newspaper to run a story or the TV stations and radio stations to interview her.
“Over the years she went from being a concerned parent, someone you felt sorry for, to this obsessed, nasty, bitter, angry cunt—pardon my language.”
The well-dressed woman at the next table gasped and tsked and moved around on her chair like a chicken with its feathers ruffled.
Tanner turned to her and said, “Ma’am, if you don’t like what you’re hearing, stop eavesdropping. Otherwise I’m gonna sit here and say cunt over and over and over until you get up and leave.”
Mendez rubbed a hand over his face, mortified. Tanner turned back to him as if nothing had happened.
“You wait and see,” she said, shaking her fork at him. “You’ll be dropping the c-bomb like a champ before you know it.”
Not if I lived to be a thousand years old, Mendez thought. His mother would have his ass for even thinking that word. And if he lived to be a thousand and used it, she would rise up out of her grave and have his ass.
“Wait until she starts in with the personal attacks on your intelligence and your integrity,” Tanner said. “That gets old fast.”
“She was pretty shaken up today,” Mendez said. “I mean, imagine: You move to a new town to escape all of that, and there’s the guy.”
“Did you see him?”
“I wouldn’t know him.”
She forked up some more crab cake with one hand and flipped open the file folder she’d brought with her with the other.
“Creepy dude,” she said, sliding a copy of Ballencoa’s photograph across the table. “Looks like he should play Judas in one of those life-of-Christ movies.”
Mendez stared at the photograph. Ballencoa had a long, narrow face and large, hooded dark eyes. His dark hair was shoulder length and he wore a neatly trimmed mustache and goatee. His eyes had that blankness in them he had come to associate with psychopaths. Shark eyes.
“He’s thirty-eight years old, about six-three and a buck-seventy-five,” Tanner said.
Mendez was five-eleven and built like a fireplug. About the only things he had in common with Roland Ballencoa were a dick, dark hair, and a mustache. And yet Lauren Lawton had mistaken him for Ballencoa in the pasta aisle at Pavilions.
“Do you think she’s unstable?” he asked.
Tanner shrugged. “Who could blame her if she was? When Ballencoa was still living here, she claimed he was stalking her, but we had absolutely no proof of that. Not one iota. Not a record of a phone call, not a fingerprint, nothing.”
“She just wants the guy behind bars for something.”
“For anything. At one point she all but told me to fabricate some evidence against him just so I could get him in the box and try to break him down for a confession.
“And let me tell you,” she added. “That guy wouldn’t give it up to save his own mother’s life. He’s as cold as they come.”
“Do you have his sheet in there?” Mendez asked.
Tanner fished it out and handed the pages to him.
“He’s got a history as a peeper, and some B and E charges down in the San Diego area where he was stealing women’s dirty underwear out of their laundry baskets. That got him a slap on the wrist.
“He’s a class-A perv,” she pronounced. “There’s no fixing that. If he didn’t do the Lawton girl, it’s only a matter of time before he does something else. Shoot him in the head and charge his family for the bullet.”
“If only it was that simple,” Mendez said. “I’ve got a sexually sadistic serial killer sitting in prison doing a quarter for attempted murder and kidnapping. The DA let him plead out.”
“Oh, that dentist,” Tanner said. “I read about that. What the fuck happened?”
“We had nothing on him for the homicides,” Mendez said. “No physical evidence except a necklace that may or may not have belonged to one of the victims. As sure as we’re sitting here, he killed at least three women and left another one blind and deaf. And we couldn’t even charge him. But if he hadn’t done it, there was no reason for him to kidnap and try to kill the woman who found that necklace.”
“I’ll never get the sentencing for attempted murder,” Tanner said, shaking her head. “Why should they get off light because they were incompetent? The idea was for the victim to die, right?