Mendez seated himself to her left, purposely delaying his answer. She was spoiling for a fight. He wouldn’t give her one.
“We’re trying to locate Mr. Ballencoa,” he said calmly. “It seems he hasn’t been living in his residence in San Luis Obispo for some time now. He didn’t leave a forwarding address with anyone.”
Lauren looked at him, trying to decide if he was going to be a good guy or not. She looked exhausted—pale and drawn with sooty purple smudges below her eyes. She wore gray sweatpants and a white T-shirt with a too-big black sweater wrapped over it. The tips of her fingers barely peeked out of the ends of the sleeves. It had probably belonged to her husband, he guessed.
“What time did you come into the house this evening?” he asked, taking out his little spiral notebook and pen.
“I got home around five.”
“And when did you find the photograph?”
“It was after two.”
“What made you go out to the car after two in the morning?”
She sighed as if the answer was going to be a long story, but she opted for the short version. “I had left my purse in the car. I wanted it.”
“Have you been alone all evening?”
“Yes. My daughter is spending the night with a girlfriend.”
Her eyes welled with sudden tears, and she stood up abruptly and went to the refrigerator, where she pulled a bottle of Absolut vodka from the freezer. She threw a handful of ice cubes into a tumbler, poured a stiff four fingers, and brought the drink back to the table.
He could only imagine what she was feeling, thinking that the man who had abducted her older daughter had come to her home in the dead of night, that he had been right outside the house she and her younger child had come to for refuge. Her sense of security had been breached. She probably felt violated.
She looked at him now with defiance in her eyes as she raised the glass to her lips and took a long pull on the vodka.
“Did Detective Tanner tell you I’m an alcoholic?”
“No, ma’am,” he said without emotion. “Are you?”
“No,” she said, one corner of her mouth twisting upward in the smallest, most bitter kind of smile. “Despite my own best efforts.”
“You had a bad scare,” he said reasonably. “You’re entitled to a little something to calm your nerves. It’s not my place to judge. But if you’d like some assistance coping with what you’ve gone through, I can recommend someone.”
“No, thank you.”
He fished a card out of his wallet and placed it on the table. Anne Leone’s card. He always carried a few with him. Not that Anne needed him to drum up business for her. Most of the work she did she did for free anyway. But she was very good with victims, having been one herself on more than one occasion. He would have loved to get Anne’s take on Lauren Lawton.
She looked at the card and said nothing. She seemed a little calmer now as the vodka took hold—or maybe resigned was a better word. He wondered how many drinks she might have had before he got there.
“What will you do?” she asked.
“I’ll see if we can get prints off the photograph,” he said. “I’ll canvass your neighbors and see if anyone saw anything. Beyond that, there’s nothing to do. I don’t know where Mr. Ballencoa might be. If I can’t find him, I can’t question him. And if we don’t have prints or the prints don’t come back to him, I won’t have call to do anything more than ask him where he was tonight. But we have to find him first.”
She nodded and took another sip of her drink, staring down at the tabletop.
“Was this the kind of thing he did in Santa Barbara?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Did he ever try to physically harm you?”
“No.”
“But he called you on the phone? That kind of thing?”
“Yes, but always from a pay phone so it couldn’t be traced back to him.”
“Did he ever try to gain entrance to your home?”
She took a while to answer. Another yes or no that had a long story attached.
“Yes,” she said at last.
“He broke in?”
“No. He got in,” she specified. “I don’t know how. I wasn’t there. But when I got home I knew he’d been there.”
“Had he left something? Taken something?”
She shook her head. “No, but things had been moved, touched. He had been there. He drank a glass of wine, washed the glass, and left it where I would see it. He had used the bathroom and put the hand towel in the wash. He had done a load of laundry.”
“Excuse me?”
“I had left a basket of dirty laundry on the washing machine. Underwear. It—and the hand towel—were wet in the washing machine when I got home.”
Mendez leaned his elbows on the table and looked at her, puzzled, thinking of the B&Es they’d had in town recently. Nothing had been taken, but someone had broken in. He’d thought maybe it was a kid’s prank. Maybe not.
“Did anyone see him coming or going?” he asked.
“No.”
“How do you know it was him?”
“It was him.”
“Was he questioned?”
She laughed without humor. “For what? For being a ghost? I couldn’t prove anyone had been there at all. The police weren’t interested. Nothing had been taken. And it turns out it isn’t against the law to do someone’s laundry without asking. That was when I got the lecture for wasting the department’s time, manpower, and resources.”
“They didn’t even talk to him?”
“No. By then he had already threatened to sue for harassment—the police department and me personally. How’s that for nerve? He was stalking me and threatening to sue me for trying to do something about it.”
The injustice of that made him angry. Like Mavis Whitaker had said, sometimes it felt as if the bad guys had more rights than the people they preyed upon.
“Do you have a friend you can call to come and stay the rest of the night with you?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “I have a Walther PPK.”
Cold comfort, that, Mendez thought. And dangerous.
“Guns and alcohol aren’t a good combination,” he cautioned. “I would hate to see you hurt yourself.”
She laughed at that. “Clearly you haven’t known me long enough. Before you know it, you’ll be wishing I would put that gun in my mouth and pull the trigger.”
“I doubt that, ma’am.”
She bobbed her eyebrows as if to say We’ll see, and took another long drink of her vodka.
20
Lauren waited for a long time after Mendez left. She sat at the table in the great room, drinking and looking at her photograph of Leslie the night before she was taken.
She was a beautiful girl. Leah was pretty. Leslie was beautiful. There was such a fire in her, and it glowed out of her blue eyes and shone in her long dark hair. That spirit had been a force of energy everyone in the room would feel when she turned it on as part and parcel of a strong emotion.
Leslie would have done something extraordinary with her life.
Sometimes Lauren wished she could feel that energy when she thought of her daughter or when she looked at her photograph. Sometimes she thought that would be a sign to her that Leslie was still alive somewhere. Sometimes she feared it would mean she was gone and her spirit was visiting in an attempt to offer her mother some kind of comfort. It was a torment either way.
God, why can’t this ever be over? she wondered for the millionth time.
And for the millionth time she thought Because there is no God to end it.
There had been a time when that thought would have left her feeling upset and adrift. The belief system that had been the platform of her life had suddenly dropped out from under her. Now she just felt sad. Life had been so much easier when she was naïve to the cruel realities of the world. With experience came wisdom—also known as disillusionment.