Leah turned and buried her face against her mother’s shoulder, sobbing. They held each other, both of them crying, both of them miserable.
Leah wanted to feel comforted, but she didn’t. She wanted to feel safe, but she didn’t. And she still felt alone, and that scared her most of all.
32
“You didn’t get enough the first time?” Detective Tanner’s partner, Morino, arched an overgrown eyebrow. He looked like he’d crawled out of a laundry basket. Prewash cycle. His shirt was wrinkled and there was an oily spot the size of a quarter on his tie.
“Is Detective Tanner here or not?” Mendez asked. He had no patience for slobs. Sloppy man, sloppy work.
Even though he was technically not on duty, Mendez had dressed appropriately in pressed khaki slacks and a tucked-in black polo shirt with the FBI National Academy crest embroidered on the left chest.
“Sure,” Morino said, motioning him to follow as he headed down the hall. “It’s your lucky day—if you’re a masochist.”
“You don’t like having a lady for a partner?”
Morino laughed as they walked into the detective division and toward the small sea of steel desks where Tanner sat. “She’s no lady. She’s a vagina with a gun.”
“That’s better than being a hairy asshole with a big mouth,” Tanner said, unperturbed by her partner’s disrespect.
“Stick a tampon in it,” Morino sneered.
Tanner sneered back. “Go fuck yourself with a broom.”
“The one you flew in on?” he asked as he walked on past her.
“Yeah,” she called after him. “I sharpened the end just for you.”
Mendez took the seat at the side of her desk. “It doesn’t bother you that he talks that way to you?”
Tanner rolled her eyes. “I grew up with four brothers in a family of longshoremen. Nothing that one comes up with is going to faze me.”
“He should have some respect,” Mendez said, peeved enough for both of them. “Where’s your boss? He ought to put a stop to that.”
She huffed an impatient sigh. “I didn’t sign on to be a cop because I thought all the guys would open doors and hold my chair for me, detective,” she said. “I’ve had my ass kicked on this job. Seriously. Morino’s mouth is only a problem for me if I let it be. And believe me, in the battle of wits, he is by far outmatched. I don’t need a white knight to ride in and save me.”
Mendez scowled, shooting a look across the room where Morino was half sitting on another detective’s desk. The pair of them were sniggering like ninth graders.
“Thanks anyway,” Tanner added, getting up from her chair. “You want to look at the Lawton files?”
He wanted to go over and smack Morino upside the head. Instead, he stood up and put his attention on Tanner. “Yeah. I specifically want to see everything you have on Ballencoa himself,” he said, falling in step beside her. “My partner and I paid him a visit yesterday.”
“In San Luis?”
“In Oak Knoll. Lauren Lawton wasn’t seeing ghosts. He’s there.”
“Boy, this is your lucky week,” Tanner said.
“Tell me about it. The bastard got me suspended.”
Surprised, she arched a brow. “What’d he do? Make you forget to dot an i or cross a t?”
“He pissed me off,” Mendez admitted. “I said something he misconstrued as a threat.”
“Like what?”
“Basically, I told him if he took a step wrong in my town, I’d have his ass.”
Tanner chuckled as she opened the door to the small room with the Lawton case files stacked up inside. “So you’re not so buttoned-up all the time, Mr. National Academy? You have a little hot side, do you?” she teased. “I like that.”
Mendez pretended not to notice the flirtatious look she gave him as he walked into the room. “Ballencoa had a tape recorder in his pocket. He played the tape for my boss.”
“Ouch,” she said, wincing. “He’s an asshole like that, you know? He’s like that creepy little shit that everybody went to school with and nobody could stand. The kid that would rat you out to the teacher for a piece of gum, then spend his free time pulling the wings off flies. Fucking little weirdo.
“He’s an asshole all the way around,” she said. “A puckered, shriveled-up, cancerous asshole. Here he threatened to sue the department and the lead detective on the case at the time. He actually started proceedings. The town council offered him a settlement to make him go away.”
“How much of a settlement?”
“Fifty K, I heard. He would have sued for six figures. I guess they thought they would get off cheaper this way.”
“That explains how he can afford to rent two places,” Mendez said.
“Oh, that’s walking-around money for Roland. He inherited a tidy sum from the aunt that raised him.”
“What did she die of?”
“Personally, I think she died of being Roland’s aunt,” Tanner said as she scanned the file boxes for the one she wanted.
“The official cause of death was head trauma due to an accidental fall down a flight of stairs. She was dead on the floor for four or five days during a heat wave before she was found. Major decomp. It would have been hard for the coroner to tell the difference between a fall and a beating. Ballencoa was her sole heir.”
“To how much?”
“Around two million.”
“How old was he at the time?”
“Twenty-one. Fresh out of the can from his lewd acts conviction.” She tapped the end of a box stacked taller than she was. “That’s the one you want.”
Mendez reached up to get it. The room was so small they were almost body to body. She ducked under his arm and sidled toward the door to get out of his way, briefly putting a hand against his side to keep her balance. He was more aware of her touch than he should have been.
“Did the cops look at him?” he asked.
“They talked to him and a pal of his from jail—Michael Craig Houston, another budding psychopath. The local press made them out to be Leopold and Loeb, but nothing came of it. They gave each other alibis, and nobody ever proved murder anyway, so if they did it, they got away with it.”
“What happened to Ballencoa’s parents?” he asked, following her back out into the hall.
“Mom OD’d when he was ten or twelve,” she said, leading him into a conference room. “There was no father in the picture as far as I know.”
“Where’d all this happy family stuff go on?”
“North of Eureka,” she said. “Where the odds are good that the goods are odd. The gene pool is a puddle in some of those little logging towns up there.”
Mendez set the box on the table and took the top off. Tanner ran a fingertip back over the files and pulled out the one she wanted. Her nails were short and neat with no polish. She wore no rings.
“There isn’t a ton of stuff in here. It’s a little more than I gave you the other night. There’s a couple of old news clippings on the aunt’s death, and some contact numbers for the other agencies that have dealt with him,” she said with a shrug. “We got called off, you know.”
“So did I,” Mendez said, flipping the folder open.
Tanner’s chuckle had a slightly evil quality to it. “I like you, Mendez. You’re my kind of cop.”
She boosted herself up to sit on the table as he took a seat. As she had been the first time he’d met her, she was in black slacks and T-shirt, this time with a gold blazer that set off the green of her eyes. Her blond hair was slicked back in a no-nonsense ponytail.
“Are you looking for anything in particular?” she asked.
“Whatever jumps out at me. I want to know as much about this guy as I can. I’m meeting with Vince Leone this afternoon to talk about him.”