Tanner looked impressed. “Wow. Cute, a hard-ass, a gentleman, and connected. I may have to start fanning myself soon.”
Mendez felt himself blush, and he fought the little smile that wanted to go with it, reminding himself that he was here on business. He put his eyes back on the file, knowing Tanner was amused with his reaction.
“You’re into the whole profiling thing?” she said.
“What? You don’t believe in it?” There were still plenty of meat-and-potatoes cops who thought it was a waste of time.
“I don’t personally care if Roland’s auntie played with his pee-pee when he was twelve and that’s why he needs to control women,” she said. “But I’ll use every tool in the box if it gets me my bad guy. If you can find something in his past that connects him to our present, I’m all for it. I’d be thrilled to be the one to close this case, if you don’t mind sharing.”
“I don’t mind sharing,” he said, skimming the pages in front of him. “If he did the Lawton girl, he needs to go away. I don’t give a shit about jurisdiction. As far as we know, he hasn’t done anything serious in Oak Knoll, but already I don’t want him there.”
He flicked through the pages, looking for the information regarding Ballencoa’s trouble in San Diego.
“Ballencoa did a few months in a San Diego jail for breaking and entering—”
“Stealing ladies’ undies.”
“Did you ever connect him to any B and Es here?” he asked.
“No,” Tanner said. “Our focus was the abduction. But Lauren Lawton was pretty adamant that he had been in her home not long before he moved out of town.”
“You didn’t believe her?”
“Actually, I did believe her, but it wasn’t my call,” she admitted. “Guys don’t get this, but a woman knows when somebody’s been touching her stuff. We’ve got a different instinct for that. I believed her. But we had nothing to go on. He didn’t leave any trace of himself. And by then the lead detective was so sick of Mrs. Lawton, I think he would have been just as happy to have her disappear.”
“That’s a great attitude,” Mendez said sarcastically. “No wonder she got herself a gun.”
Tanner’s eyes went wide. “Oh, Jesus. Lauren Lawton has a gun? That’s a bad idea.”
“She believes she had Ballencoa sitting in her house jerking off in her underwear while she was at the supermarket, and your people couldn’t be bothered to help her. Can you really blame her?”
“No. I can’t,” she conceded. “Like I said the other day: If I was her, I would have tortured that son of bitch until he gave up my kid, and then I would have killed him anyway.”
“She said he was stalking her,” Mendez said. “From a psychological standpoint, that makes sense. He got whatever thrill he got taking the daughter. Tormenting the mother furthers the kick for him. He gets to keep reliving whatever he did to the girl plus cause the mother to have to relive it and worry about the child she still has, to say nothing of being concerned for her own safety. Big bonus points for a sick fuck like him.”
“And now he’s brought his act to your town.”
“I’ll shut him down,” he said. “If Lauren Lawton doesn’t do it first. I need to keep that from happening.
“I’ve got some recent open B and Es that could fit him,” he said. “The MO would be right. He gets in, messes around, but doesn’t take anything—that they notice, anyway. When he leaves, he leaves the way he came in. If he came in through a window, he leaves the window open. If he came in through a door, he leaves the door open.”
“He wants the homeowner to know he’s been there,” Tanner said.
“It’s his way of saying, ‘Fuck you, you can’t touch me.’ It’s a power trip. He can come and go as he pleases. He doesn’t leave anything behind. Nobody sees him. There’s nothing we can do.”
“I’ll go back in our records and see if there were any unsolved similar cases while he was here,” Tanner said. “If we had any cases like that prior to Leslie Lawton’s abduction, could be nobody ever looked for a link. Did you ask the San Luis detectives?”
“No,” Mendez said. “But the guy we talked to up there couldn’t connect the links in a chain.”
“Neri? He’s counting the days until he can retire and be a mall cop in his free time. Let me make a couple of calls. I know some people up there.”
“Thanks.”
“Thank you,” she said, sliding off the table. She looked a little uncomfortable, like the admission she was about to make wanted to stick to the roof of her mouth. “For including me,” she said. “I appreciate it.”
“It was your case first,” he said. “Why would I try to shut you out?”
Tanner laughed. “Christ, what planet are you from? Can I go there? In my world, doors wouldn’t open if I didn’t kick them down. I only got this case because it’s colder than a well digger’s ass. Nobody wanted it. Nobody wanted to deal with Lauren Lawton, and nobody thinks I have a snowball’s chance in hell of solving it. I was beginning to think they might be right.”
“Let’s hope not.”
She gave him a long look, but he couldn’t read her. She was probably a hell of a poker player—if the boys ever let her in the game.
“I’ll go make that call,” she said.
He watched her walk out of the door, thinking there was a story behind Danni Tanner, and maybe someday he would find out what it was. Later. After he put Roland Ballencoa behind bars.
33
Lauren felt like someone had beaten her from head to toe with a baseball bat. But the battery was more emotional than physical. Over and over her memory replayed Leah’s outburst, and her daughter’s pain was magnified many times by her own sense of guilt and grief.
What a mess she’d made of their lives. She should have been her daughter’s rock. Another mother would have focused on making her remaining child feel safe and loved in the wake of losing both her big sister and her father. Bound up in her own anger and grief and guilt, Lauren had left her daughter to deal with her own feelings.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, she had put her child in danger as well. She had brought Leah here, and now Ballencoa knew where they lived.
She tried to rationalize. Ballencoa had known where they lived in Santa Barbara. He could have come there any time. Instead, he had finally left town and gone to San Luis Obispo.
Those facts didn’t make her feel any better. Another fact remained: that she had come to Oak Knoll knowing he was here. She had brought Leah here knowing full well that she would at some point confront Roland Ballencoa.
Her intent had been clear in her mind. If no one was going to help her, if no one was going to do anything about him, if he was never going to give up the truth of what he had done to Leslie, then she was going to have to help herself, do something about him herself, get the truth out of him any way she could.
She had somehow managed to embrace that intent and believe that her actions would be somehow separate from her life with her daughter. Like they could live in a bubble from which she could come and go with her gun and her dark intentions, and none of that would touch Leah.
What a mess.
She felt mired in it now. Any decision she could make would be wrong because only wrong decisions had brought her to this place.
Was she supposed to be a mother to the daughter she had or the avenger for the daughter she had lost? Everything in her fought against the idea of letting Leslie go. She could never release the idea of what if? What if Leslie wasn’t dead? What if she gave up on her child one day too soon? She couldn’t do it. Then what did that make her to Leah?