Lauren stepped back, slinging the strap of her bag over her shoulder. A piece of paper fluttered against the windshield, beneath the wiper blade. She looked around, adjusting her grip on the Walther. The wind seemed to slip inside her clothes and down her back.
She went around the hood of the BMW and snatched the paper off the windshield.
In the amber light from the sconces that flanked the garage doors she could tell it was a photograph. Black and white. Someone had come onto the property without her knowing and pinned a photograph beneath the wiper of her car.
She felt violated without even knowing what the subject of the photograph might be. She imagined she could feel someone’s eyes on her as she backed toward the garage, closer to the light. The shadows in the yard moved with the wind.
Lauren’s heart fluttered in her chest like a frightened bird. She didn’t dare to take her eyes off her surroundings and look at the photograph for more than a few seconds at a time.
A person. A person standing behind a car. Dark clothes. A dark cap.
Me.
Panic-stricken now, she walked backward as quickly as she could. Hurry, hurry, hurry. She felt as if a thousand eyes were chasing her as she went.
She fumbled with the doorknob, trying to turn it with the hand that held the photograph as she clutched the gun to her with the other. Tears blurred her vision. She was hyperventilating.
The knob turned and the door pushed in and Lauren almost tripped and fell in her haste to get inside and lock the door behind her. She banged into the console table, set the gun aside, and nearly upended a lamp in the attempt to turn it on.
Her hands were shaking like a palsy victim’s. She looked at the photograph again. It was her standing behind her car in the parking lot of the gun range.
Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God . . .
She turned around, looked out the windows, expecting to see a face staring in at her. There was no one there—not to be seen—but Lauren felt their eyes on her. She felt naked and exposed.
Hiking the strap of her bag up on her shoulder, she grabbed the Walther and hurried through the house and up the stairs. In her room she put the gun down, emptied the contents of her purse onto the bed, and sifted through them impatiently, sorting out the one thing she was looking for—a business card.
Detective Anthony Mendez.
19
“He left this on the windshield of my car in my driveway.”
Mendez carefully took the photograph by one corner and frowned as he studied it. Black and white, and slightly grainy in quality, it was a curled eight-by-ten print on the kind of paper used by photographers in their own darkrooms, not something developed at a drugstore or photo shop. In the background he recognized the front porch of the Canyon Gun Range. Lauren Lawton stood behind her black BMW. She appeared to be staring straight at the photographer.
“You didn’t see him?” he asked.
“No. I had no idea anyone was there.”
“What were you doing at the gun range?”
“Shooting a gun.” A defensive edge crept into her voice.
They stood in the great room of the house she was renting on Old Mission Road. The place was like something out of a magazine—a big stone fireplace, a high vaulted ceiling, blue and white furniture that looked like no one had ever sat in it. All of the pillows on the couches were just so, with knife creases chopped into the tops of them.
“You own a firearm?” he asked.
“Yes. It was my husband’s.”
He didn’t like that idea. Not that he was against citizens owning guns per se. But Lauren Lawton was a woman who had been through a tremendous amount of stress and was by all accounts living on edge. She claimed Roland Ballencoa had stalked her in Santa Barbara. A handgun and a paranoid woman with nerves strung tight was not a combination destined for a good outcome.
“Is your paperwork in order?” he asked.
Her blue eyes flashed like light hitting steel. “Who the fuck cares?” she snapped. “I didn’t call you out here to see if I’ve dotted all my i’s on my gun permit. Roland Ballencoa came onto my property and put that photograph on my car.”
“Did you see him?”
“No! I told you: I’d been working on the computer all night. I went out to the car to get my purse, and there it was. It didn’t get there by magic. He came onto my property. That’s criminal trespass.”
“Yes, ma’am, that is, but if you didn’t see him—”
“Get his fingerprints off the photograph,” she said. “He has a criminal record. He’s in the system.”
“Yes, ma’am. We’ll see if we can get a clear print—”
“But of course you won’t,” she said, more to herself than to him. She put her hands on top of her head and paced around in a little circle. “He’s too careful for that. Oh my God, what a fucking nightmare.”
“How would he know to find you here?” Mendez asked.
She looked at him with bewilderment and frustration. “I don’t know! He must have seen me at the store that day—”
“You followed him, not the other way around.”
“Maybe he saw me in his mirror,” she said, grasping for an explanation. “Maybe he saw me and pulled over and waited until I passed him—”
“He didn’t follow you home,” Mendez said.
“How do you know?”
“Because I followed you,” he confessed.
“Why is he in this town at all?” she demanded. “He’s a criminal. This is what he does. Somehow he found us, and now he’s going to torment us. He did this before, you know. He stalked us in Santa Barbara, and the police couldn’t manage to do anything about it.”
“I spoke with Detective Tanner,” Mendez started.
“And she told you I’m a lunatic pain in the ass, and that they had no proof Ballencoa was stalking me, therefore I must have been lying about it.”
“That’s not exactly how the conversation went.”
“No. I’m sure it was much more colorful than that. It takes a bitch to know a bitch,” she said bluntly.
Mendez watched her carefully, though it didn’t take a genius to read her body language. She was upset and agitated, and on the defensive. She had a right to be. Someone had followed her to the gun range. As out of the way as that place was, it was no happy coincidence. Someone had come onto her property while she was in the house and left that photograph on her windshield for a reason: to freak her out. They had succeeded.
“Can we sit down, ma’am?” he asked, not for himself, but to try to calm her a little. He was used to being called out in the middle of the night. Nighttime was the right time for crimes that begged a detective’s immediate attention.
She had called him directly, bypassing the usual protocol, but then he had told her to. He had crawled up out of a restless sleep, his brain itching with thoughts of the day and the questions that had risen to the surface as he and Hicks looked into Roland Ballencoa. Still on that wavelength, he hadn’t been all that surprised to hear Lauren Lawton’s voice on the line, half-hysterical, half-angry, demanding he come to her home.
He had dressed hastily, but properly. Shirt and tie, pants crisply pressed. There were no jeans-and-T-shirt detectives in his outfit—or anywhere that he knew of, except television.
Lauren Lawton huffed a sigh, yanked a chair out from the head of the big harvest table, and sat, the fingers of one hand drumming impatiently on the tabletop.
“Is this now when you give me the ‘we can’t do anything’ lecture? And then I have to wonder aloud if you’ll do anything after the bastard kills me?”