Neri threw his hands up in frustration. “It’s the Poly Royal. It’s a fucking festival. Take a few thousand drunken college kids and throw in a pack of out-of-town troublemakers and a few hundred drunken migrant workers—”
“Oh, right,” Mendez said. “It’s the ’spics. We’re always drunk and disorderly.”
“I didn’t say that!” Neri looked at Hicks. “What the hell’s wrong with him?” he asked, hooking a thumb in the direction of Mendez.
Hicks shrugged, unconcerned.
“So you saw Ballencoa in April,” Mendez said. “Right before your hundred-arrest riot. That’s three months ago. What do you people do up here? Write one report a day? You can’t take the time to drive around the block to see if your resident child abductor is here or not?”
“I told you,” Neri said. “We don’t have the manpower or the cause to sit on a law-abiding citizen who wants to sue us. And that’s all Ballencoa has been since he moved here: law-abiding.”
“Whatever,” Mendez said, getting up from his chair.
“Do you have a current address on him?” Hicks asked.
“I’ll have to look it up.”
“That’d be great. Then we can get out of your hair.”
“What are you going to do?” Neri asked, suspicious. “I can’t have you guys running around half-cocked—”
“Why not? We should fit right in,” Mendez muttered.
Neri got up from his chair, clearly pissed off.
“We need to ask Mr. Ballencoa a few questions,” Hicks said easily.
“We’ll be sure to give him our cards,” Mendez said. “So he can sue the proper agency.”
“Good,” Neri said. “You do that, Mendez. Then go fuck yourself.”
11
“You had to be an asshole?” Hicks said as they got back in the car.
“He’s slacking on the job, he’s disrespectful to the mother of a victim, he can’t return a goddamn phone call, and I’m the asshole?” Mendez said. “That’s fucked up.”
“Two wrongs don’t make a right, Anthony,” Hicks said without rancor.
Mendez scowled and started the car. “I already have a mother.”
“I’m just saying.”
“You’re the navigator. Navigate.”
“Aye, aye, Captain Chivalry.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Hicks chuckled. “Nothing. You just can’t resist a damsel in distress, that’s all.”
“Very funny. I don’t happen to think it should be considered out of the ordinary to have some compassion for a woman who’s been through what this woman has been through.”
“You’re absolutely right,” Hicks said diplomatically. “Take a right on Santa Rosa. Like my wife says: You’ll make some lucky girl a fine husband one day.”
Except that day never seemed to come around, much to the dismay of his mother. And to a slightly lesser degree to his sisters, who were forever trying to fix him up with nice Spanish girls. He was the lone marriage holdout of the Mendez family. Not that he didn’t like the idea. It was just that he’d always been focused on his career, and the rest hadn’t worked out.
“From what everyone is saying about Mrs. Lawton, it doesn’t sound like there’s much danger of you falling in love with her,” Hicks said.
“Can we let this subject go, please?”
“Sounds to me like she must have horns and a tail. Teeth and claws at the least. Didn’t you notice? Left on Higuera.”
When they found the address Neri had given them, the hair stood up on the back of Mendez’s neck. The house was within sight of the San Luis Opisbo high school. A rich potential hunting ground for a predator of teenage girls.
The house was a typical southern California bungalow—beige stucco and a barrel tile roof—with overgrown purple bougainvillea and brilliant orange birds of paradise flanking the front porch steps. The yard was thin and weedy. The place had that odd feeling of vacancy about it.
Hicks went up onto the little porch. Mendez took a stroll around the back of the house and tried the back door. Locked. Through the window he could see the small kitchen. The counters were bare. There wasn’t so much as a water glass by the sink. The sun splashed in through a window, illuminating the layer of dust and the odd dead bug on the Mexican tile floor.
“Hey, you!”
He jumped a little at the sharp sound of the voice. Turning around, he came into the full glare of a skinny elderly woman in denim overalls and a blue Dodgers cap. A wild head of gray hair fell to her shoulders. Standing in the yard a few feet back from the stoop, she carried what looked like an ax handle, hefting it and making small circles with it like it was a baseball bat and she was getting ready to swing for the bleachers.
Mendez started to reach inside his coat.
“Don’t even think about it, pervert!” the woman snapped, shouldering the axe handle. Her accent was British, he thought. She came a couple of steps closer to the stoop, her wrinkled little mouth knotted up like a prune.
“I’m a law enforcement officer, ma’am,” Mendez said. “I’ll show you my badge if you’ll let me.”
“How do I know you’re not packin’ heat?”
“I am packing heat,” he said, trying to keep a straight face.
“Show it to me, then,” she demanded. “And don’t try anything funny. This is a hickory handle and I know how to use it.”
Mendez gently opened his sport coat so she could see both the badge clipped to his belt and the nine millimeter in his shoulder holster.
The old lady deflated with a big sigh and lowered her weapon. “Crikey,” she said. “What are you doin’ skulkin’ ’round back here? You scared the livin’ piss out of me!”
“I could ask you the same thing, ma’am. What are you doing back here? Do you live in this house?”
“No,” she said. “I live right over here. I’m on the neighborhood watch. I keep an eye on things around here. You never know what might go on, considering.”
“Considering what?”
“Considering the pervert that lived here.”
“Roland Ballencoa?”
“That’s him,” she said. “I couldn’t believe he moved right in next to me, bold as brass,” she said with absolute disgust. “Outrageous.
“I had read all about him in the Santa Barbara paper,” she went on. “I take four papers and read ’em front to back: The LA Times, The New York Times, The Tribune, and The Santa Barbara News-Press . A person should be informed, I say.
“And I know they never arrested him or nothin’ down there, but I can read between the lines. He done somethin’ to that poor girl, sure as anything.”
Hicks came around the side of the house, missing a step as he caught sight of the old lady. His eyes got big for a split second.
“There’s no one home,” he said.
“He moved out,” the woman said, and she spat on the ground. “Good riddance.” She looked up at Mendez and tipped her head at Hicks. “Is he a copper too?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Detective Hicks, ma’am.” He showed her his badge.
“Mavis Whitaker,” she said. “I live next door. I’m with the neighborhood watch.”
Hicks looked at her ax handle and bobbed his eyebrows.
Mendez came down off the back steps.
“There’s nothing in the mailbox except for ‘Occupant,’” Hicks said.
“Oh, he didn’t get his mail here,” Mavis Whitaker said.
They both looked at her.
“I was speakin’ to the post carrier one day. She’s a woman, and a cute little thing. I told her all about the perv as soon as he moved in. You know, lest he try to lure her into the house and try somethin’.
“So I said, I don’t imagine he gets no mail but from his mother, if he knows who she is. And she told me he don’t get no mail at all. That he must have it delivered elsewhere. Not so much as a utility bill, she said.”