It was a neighborhood of mature trees and hedges, a place that was easy to move around without standing out or being noticed at all. He could be invisible, which was a very good thing for an observer to be.
Roland had come to this neighborhood earlier in the day, and two days before, and just parked his van and watched the comings and goings of residents—mostly college students, many of them very pretty.
McAster College was unique in that it was nearly as busy in summer as during the school year. Renowned for its music program, McAster hosted an annual summer music festival that drew people from literally all over the world. Many well-known classical musicians came to Oak Knoll in advance of the festival and stayed for weeks after to teach in the summer artists-in-residence program.
Roland had discerned through observation that many of the residences in this neighborhood had been cut up into apartments for the students. The big Victorian on the corner was a sorority house.
He turned off the sidewalk, flipped up the hood of his sweatshirt, and walked down the alley.
There was no fence or gate along the back of the property. There was a hedge for privacy, but it ended at the driveway to the large garage, which had been converted to an oversized laundry to serve the residents of the house.
The side door was not locked. The lights were off. No sound of washers or dryers tumbling. Roland let himself in and slipped his small flashlight from his pocket. The dot of pale yellow light showed two washers and two dryers, and a pair of long stainless steel tables down the center of the space for sorting and folding clothes.
A laundry basket sat on the table with a load of towels that had been washed and dried but not folded. Sitting on the floor near one of the washing machines was a bag of laundry with the name Renee Paquin written in permanent marker down the side.
Bag in hand, he took a seat in one of the mismatched stuffed chairs congregated at the end of the room. He held the flashlight between his teeth, opened the bag, and began pawing through the garments.
T-shirts, a pair of khaki shorts, a pair of jeans, white tennis clothes. At the bottom he found what he wanted: several pair of pastel silk bikini underpants. Jackpot.
Roland turned the flashlight off and put it back in his jacket pocket. He took one of the panties and held it to his face, breathing deep the scent of a girl. He rubbed the silk against his face, found the crotch of the panties and pressed it to his nose and mouth. With his free hand he unzipped his jeans, took out his erection, and began to stroke it with the other pair of underwear.
This scent was heaven and hell, pleasure and torment. Intoxicating. He filled his head with it. He licked the fabric and tasted it. He took it into his wet mouth and sucked on it, all the while rubbing his cock with the other pair. After a while his body went rigid and he moaned as he ejaculated into the handful of silk.
He allowed himself a moment to relax back into the chair and enjoy the sensations. He could smell his own sweat and semen. He felt wonderfully weak and euphoric.
After a few moments of bliss he wiped himself off on the panties and put them back into Renee Paquin’s laundry bag, stuffing them down in the bottom with a tangle of bras and panties. The other pair he stuffed down in the crotch of his jeans, under his balls.
Satisfied, he let himself out of the garage, walked back down the alley, got in his van, and drove home. He had work to do.
10
“If the guy is here, we should know about it,” Mendez said.
He sat in the office of his boss, Sheriff Cal Dixon. Pushing sixty, Dixon still cut a sharp figure in his starched and pressed uniform. He trained like a Marine six days a week—running, lifting weights, swimming. The guy was a freaking iron man.
Dixon had recruited him to the SO and had been the catalyst that sent him to the FBI National Academy course. Mendez had enormous respect for the man, and felt lucky to be able to call him a mentor and a friend as well as a boss.
With a stellar career as a detective in the LA County Sheriff’s Office under his belt, Dixon had taken the opportunity to move to Oak Knoll to run his own outfit. He was an excellent sheriff, well respected both by his cops and by citizens. Still a detective at heart, he had set up his office such that his second in command saw to a lot of the administrative duties so Dixon himself could oversee the detective division.
Mendez had brought coffee and started the workday by telling Dixon about Lauren Lawton, Roland Ballencoa, and his illuminating evening in Santa Barbara with Danni Tanner.
“I’ve got a call in to the San Luis PD,” he said. “They should be keeping tabs on Ballencoa.”
“Who has never been charged with anything.”
“No. Santa Barbara didn’t have enough to hold him.”
“They didn’t have anything,” Dixon corrected him.
“They had enough to suspect him. He’s still a person of interest,” Mendez said. “They’re hanging on to some blood evidence, waiting for the DNA technology to advance a little more. The sample is too small to test at this point in time.”
He had been reading about the development of techniques to multiply DNA samples so that a small piece of evidence would be able to yield much more information. But those techniques were still tantalizingly out of reach for law enforcement.
Dixon frowned, silver brows slashing down over blue eyes. Mendez always felt like Dixon’s laser gaze could probably cut steel if he put his mind to it.
“He was a person of interest four years ago in another jurisdiction,” he said. “As far as we know, if he is here, he hasn’t done a damn thing wrong.”
“As far as we know,” Mendez agreed. “But I don’t like coincidences. If the Lawton woman is here and Ballencoa is here too . . . That makes me uncomfortable. Lawton accused him of stalking her in Santa Barbara.”
“But the detective there said they had no proof of anything,” Dixon pointed out.
“Maybe he’s really good at it,” Mendez suggested. “Lawton and her daughter moved here a month ago. If Ballencoa showed up after that . . . You have to wonder.”
“If,” Dixon said. He leaned his forearms on his immaculate blotter and sighed. Mendez could see the wheels turning as he weighed the pros and cons. “You have actual crimes to investigate.”
Mendez scratched his head and gave a little shrug. “I’m capable of multitasking. We’re nowhere on those B and Es. We’ve got no prints, no witnesses, and nothing of value was taken at any of the three scenes. They’re like the crimes that never were.”
“Breaking and entering is a crime all by itself,” Dixon reminded him.
“I know, but these feel more like kid pranks than serious crimes.”
“Until somebody confronts a perp and one of them has a knife or a gun. Then suddenly we’ve got an assault or a homicide on our hands.”
“That’s my point exactly with Lauren Lawton and Roland Ballencoa,” Mendez returned. “That’s a crime waiting to happen. Leslie Lawton went missing and never came back. If Ballencoa did it—and the SBPD believes he did—and now he’s here in Oak Knoll, is he going to try to take the younger sister? Is he going to stalk the mother? Is it all a game for him? That’s a game we need to shut down before somebody gets hurt.”
“Okay,” Dixon said with a nod. “Good point. You and Bill look into it. But don’t ignore your caseload. It’s not up to us to investigate that kidnapping, Tony.”
“I know.” Mendez got up and headed for the door. “I just want to prevent one of our own.”
“Man, I don’t know what I’d do if somebody took one of my kids.”
Bill Hicks sat in the passenger seat, eating trail mix as they headed north on the 101. A few years older than Mendez, Hicks was a tall, lean, redheaded guy with a wife and three redheaded daughters.