“Twenty years isn’t that long ago, junior,” he said. “It’s not like we were chiseling our reports on stone tablets.”
“Nobody videotaped anything,” Mendez pointed out. “Probably no audio, either. 1970? I mean, Christ, what did you have back then? The gramophone?”
“I had a whole load of kick your ass,” Vince said, chuckling. “And I still do.”
“Yeah? Maybe someday you can put your bell-bottoms back on and show me,” Mendez challenged. “Just promise me you won’t fall and break a hip. I don’t want to be responsible for killing a legend.”
They had a good laugh—a necessary pressure release considering the business they dealt with on a daily basis. Mendez slugged back more of his Dos Equis. Vince sipped his wine.
“Okay,” Vince said. “So Ballencoa went away up there for how long on the lewd acts charge?”
“Fifteen months in the county lockup. He tried to force a fourteen-year-old girl to perform oral sex on him.”
“What was their relationship?”
“They didn’t have one. She was visiting some cousins who lived in his neighborhood. They had crossed paths at the beach a couple of times. The girl was cutting through a park alone one day, ran into Ballencoa. He pulled her into a storage shed and tried to make her give him oral sex. At some point she got away. He claimed it was consensual, but she was underage so that point would have been moot even if it was true.”
“Fifteen months is a good long while for a first offense,” Vince said. “Long enough to take a course or two on how to become a more successful criminal.”
“And make a friend—who was also questioned with regards to the aunt’s death,” Mendez said. “Michael Craig Houston—a rotten kid from a decent family with a sheet of small-time crime: a couple of simple assaults, burglary, drugs, petty theft. Nothing major, nothing sexual. The two of them got out of jail and were both staying in the aunt’s guesthouse. They alibied each other for the weekend the aunt died.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time two wrongs got together and made a catastrophe,” Vince said.
“For a tidy sum of money,” Mendez said. “Ballencoa took his inheritance and headed to San Diego, where he set himself up as a photographer and took up his hobby of peeping, B and Es, and snatching panties.”
“Anything violent?”
“No.”
“By that point he’s in his mid-twenties? Late twenties?” Vince asked.
Mendez nodded. “He came to Santa Barbara in eighty-four. He was thirty-two.”
“A violent sexual offense at nineteen, a possible murder after that, then he’s content sniffing underpants until he’s in his thirties?” He frowned and shook his head. “I have a hard time buying that.”
Mendez shrugged. “No violence that he ever got caught for, at any rate. I called down there and spoke to the detective who worked the case he went to jail for. He thought Ballencoa was your garden-variety perv. He lived alone, no girlfriend, stayed to himself. Unremarkable.”
“Then he moves to Santa Barbara and out of the blue commits the perfect crime?” Vince said. “He snatches a girl off the street and she’s gone like aliens sucked her up into a spaceship. No trace of her. No useable evidence of any kind. I don’t believe it.
“First-time kidnappers—especially if it was a crime of opportunity—their adrenaline is through the roof, they lose their heads, they make mistakes,” he said. “This guy didn’t take a wrong step.”
“He had a long time to perfect the fantasy,” Mendez said. “He’s a meticulous sort. Could be he’d done a hundred run-throughs in his head over the years, and when the opportunity presented itself, he was just that ready.”
“Possibly,” Vince conceded. “Just like he was ready with that tape recorder to nail your ass.”
“Clearly, he enjoys playing games with people,” Mendez said. “Going into the Lawtons’ home after he was already a suspect was a total fuck-you.”
“Absolutely,” Vince agreed. “He’s arrogant. He enjoys showing everyone how smart he is. If he took the Lawton girl and got away with it—that had to be the highest high for him. It’s hard to imagine he won’t do it again. It’s hard to imagine he hadn’t done it before.
“You need to go back and talk to the detectives in San Diego again,” he said. “Find out if they have any open abduction cases or attempted abductions that could be connected to Ballencoa in any way. I’ll call my buddies at ViCAP. They’ve been expanding their database to include kidnappings and sexual assaults.”
The original focus of the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program had been to gather data on transient serial killers who crossed jurisdictional lines. The database housed crime scene details, suspect details, signature aspects of the homicides. ViCAP’s analysts went over the information, looking for possible links between cases. That the program would become a national repository for information on violent crimes of all types was welcome news to law enforcement agencies across the country.
For the time being, the information was directly accessible only to FBI personnel. Even though Vince was officially retired from the Bureau, every door there remained open to him because of who he was. No one said no to Vince Leone.
“That’d be great.”
“And I know the special agent in charge of the San Diego field office. I’ll call him.”
“Thanks,” Mendez said. “So far Ballencoa really has been smarter than everybody else. We have to hope he gets cocky again. He followed Lauren Lawton here for a reason. I can’t believe he’ll be content to just fuck with her head.”
“No,” Vince said soberly. “He came here for a reason. Something’s going to happen. It’s just a matter of time. So what are you going to do about it?”
“Every deputy on patrol has an eye peeled for Ballencoa’s van. We’ve stepped up patrols on Lauren Lawton’s street. Bill and I are going to go back through what we have on those B and Es. Tanner is doing the same in Santa Barbara. If we can pick him up on one of those, he’s off the streets, at least.”
“I can’t tell you how many murderers have been arrested because they ran a red light,” Vince said. “Or had a taillight out.”
“If we can pick him up on a B and E, we can finagle a search warrant. Who knows? And if we could put him away on a B and E, it would buy us some time. Maybe the DNA technology advances enough that the blood sample from his van can be tested and it links him to the Lawton girl.”
“It’s a sad thing when we have to hope we find proof a sixteen-year-old girl is dead,” Vince said.
“Yeah,” Mendez agreed. “But I think you and I both know that no matter what happens, this story isn’t going to have a happy ending.”
36
The McAster student, Renee Paquin, was not a good choice, but as he had developed her photographs that afternoon he had become slightly addicted to her.
She lived in a house with too many other girls. There was too much risk involved in pursuing his fantasy of her. Although that was part of what intrigued him—the danger of going into a house where he might be caught.
He had always had the discipline to refrain from taking foolish chances. His fantasies were usually one-on-one. But the idea of involving several girls at once was intoxicating. And the idea of risk was becoming seductive.
He had been so careful, so restrained in the last few years, he had grown a little bored. His mind games with the police amused him little more than completing the crossword puzzle in the Times. He wanted something more. He wanted a challenge. He had come to Oak Knoll for a challenge.
Among other things, he had begun thinking about going into the sorority house. He imagined going from room to room, bed to bed. He imagined himself walking through the house naked. In each girl’s room he would rub himself against her pillow, then imagine her putting her head on that pillow to sleep. He would put on a pair of her panties and wear them, then imagine the girl putting those same panties on the next day.