“You’d track that bastard down and feed him a gun, that’s what,” Mendez said.
“Yeah. I probably would.”
“I have to think the only reason Lauren Lawton hasn’t done that is that she doesn’t own a gun.”
“Maybe she wants justice, not revenge.”
“Revenge is justice,” Mendez said. “An eye for an eye, man.”
“She’d ruin her own life,” Hicks pointed out. “She’d end up in prison, and her other daughter would become an orphan for all intents and purposes—father dead, mother put away for life.”
“Hopefully we can head that off at the pass—that or something worse. If Ballencoa still has his eye on the family, there’s plenty more hell to put them through.”
“Seems to me he’d have to be stupid to mess with them,” Hicks said. “As it stands, he’s a free man. Why poke a stick at a hornet’s nest?”
“You know as well as I do, the guys who get off on this kind of thing . . . their brains don’t work like yours or mine. They get a rush playing with fire.”
“The SBPD never developed any other suspects?” Hicks asked.
“They looked at the father for a while, but it didn’t go anywhere.”
“But he ended up killing himself. Could be guilt drove him to it.”
“Could be,” Mendez agreed. “Could be grief.”
“Could be both.”
“Could be neither.”
San Luis Obispo was like Oak Knoll North. A town of thirty-five or forty thousand, not counting college students—it was home to the prestigious Cal Poly University. Like Oak Knoll, it had been built around a Spanish mission—the Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa—in 1772. Like Oak Knoll, the town was nestled between two mountain ranges—the Santa Lucia Mountains to the east and the Morros to the west. The surrounding countryside was dotted with farms and vineyards. The downtown boasted a charming shopping district with an array of boutiques, restaurants, coffeehouses, and galleries.
Unlike Oak Knoll, San Luis had its own police force. The city of Oak Knoll contracted with the sheriff’s office to protect and serve its residents. Though, as Oak Knoll continued to grow, there was talk that might change in the future.
The San Luis Police Department was a single-story building just off the 101 at Santa Rosa and Walnut. It housed fewer than one hundred personnel, with only about sixty or so sworn officers—only eight of whom were detectives. Two worked crimes against property. Three worked crimes against persons. Three had other duties.
Mendez and Hicks checked in at the desk and were asked to wait for their contact to come out and get them.
Detective Ron Neri was small, middle-aged, and rumpled in a way that suggested he had recently been trampled by a mob. He came down the hall, shuffling through a messy stack of papers that were barely contained in an open file folder. His pants were too long.
“Tony Mendez,” Mendez said, sticking a hand out for Neri. “This is my partner, Bill Hicks.”
Neri reached out for the handshake and nearly overturned his folder. “Ron Neri. Come on back.”
They followed along to an interview room and he motioned them to take seats.
Still fussing with his paperwork, Neri barely glanced up at them. “What can I do for you guys?”
“We’re looking for information on Roland Ballencoa,” Mendez said. “I left a message for you earlier. We came up from Oak Knoll.”
“Oh, right, yeah,” Neri said. “I meant to call you back. Did I call you back?”
Mendez shot a look at Hicks as if to say, Can you believe this guy? He was like some kind of poor man’s Columbo.
“No, actually,” Mendez said. “It doesn’t matter. I would have come up anyway. Have you seen Ballencoa lately?”
“Ballencoa,” Neri said. “There’s a name I wish I’d never heard in my life.”
“He’s been a problem?” Mendez asked, feeling that zip of electricity down his back that always came with the expectation of a hot lead.
Neri rolled his eyes. “Not him. That woman.”
“Mrs. Lawton?”
“I get that she wants to have this guy’s balls on a string around her neck,” he said, “but she wants mine too. I’m supposed to wave a magic wand and have him commit some chargeable offense. Or maybe I can pull her missing kid out of my ass.”
“You’re the soul of sympathy,” Mendez said flatly.
“Hey,” Neri said. “I’ve got as much sympathy as anybody. It’s terrible what happened to her family. But the SBPD can’t link Ballencoa to the crime. They can think whatever they want about the guy, but the bottom line is they’ve got jack shit to prove he did anything. Neither do we.
“What are we supposed to do?” he asked. “Ballencoa minds his own business; nobody complains about him; we don’t have any missing teenage girls here. But I’ve got Lauren Lawton on my back every week. Why don’t we do this, why can’t we do that.”
A puzzled look came over his face as a thought struck him. “She’s backed off lately. I haven’t heard from her in a while. Did she die or something?”
“She moved to Oak Knoll,” Mendez said.
Neri gave a hysterical laugh and slapped a palm against the table. “Tag. You’re it! Sorry, boys.”
Mendez frowned. It wasn’t that he couldn’t see Lauren Lawton out of control. It was that she had good reason to be a pain in the ass. She was trying to fight for her daughter. Nobody seemed to want to give her that. Or probably more accurately, they only wanted to allow her just so much time to do it, then she was supposed to shut up and go away.
First Tanner, now this idiot.
“Is Ballencoa still living here?” he asked bluntly.
Neri didn’t quite look at him. “Yeah.”
“Really?”
“The last I checked.”
“And when was that?”
“Like I said: It’s been a while since I’ve heard from Mrs. Lawton.”
“You’ve got a known child predator in your town and you don’t check up on him unless a citizen from another jurisdiction calls and pokes you?” Mendez asked, his temper ticking a notch hotter.
“We checked on him all the time when he first moved up here,” Neri said, defensive. “We checked on him so much he threatened to sue the department for harassment. Ballencoa came here a free man, and he’s never done anything to change that in nearly two years. We can’t just sit on the guy for no good reason.”
“When was the last time you saw him?” Hicks asked.
Neri shifted in his chair, uncomfortable with their scrutiny. “A couple of months ago. He had a booth at the Poly Royal art fair. He’s a photographer. He was selling his photographs.”
“What kind of photographs?”
“I don’t know,” Neri said on an impatient sigh. “Nature. Buildings. The mission. Kids on ponies. Who cares?”
Mendez ground his back teeth. A child predator was taking pictures of kids on ponies, and this asshole didn’t think anything of it.
“When was that?” he asked.
“In April,” Neri said. “We had a freaking riot that lasted for three days, in case you don’t watch the news. We had over a hundred arrests, a hundred injuries—fifteen of our own people.”
“You had a riot at an art fair?” Mendez said, just to be a jerk. Everyone in the state had been riveted to the news during the three days of riots in a town that normally lived at the speed of its nickname: SLO. Slotopia. “What the hell kind of town do you run?”
“It wasn’t at the art fair. That was just part of the Cal Poly open house weekend.”
“You had a riot at an open house?” Hicks said, also happily playing dumb.