“Are you charging me with something?” she asked pointedly.
“Not at the moment,” Dixon said.
She tipped her head. “Then I’m free to go.”
“I’d like to talk to you about what happened, and about the situation with you and Mr. Ballencoa.”
“And I would like to collect my daughter and go home.”
Dixon jammed his hands at his waist and sighed. “I’m aware of the history—”
“Then you don’t need me to tell you about it, do you?”
“But you have to understand my office is in a difficult position here,” he continued. “We can’t have citizens taking the law into their own hands.”
“Are you going to tell me, then, that Roland Ballencoa is going to be arrested for stalking my daughter and me?”
Dixon frowned. “As far as I know—”
“The answer is no,” she said. “Your office hasn’t protected us, isn’t going to protect us, and I’m in more danger of being arrested than the man who kidnapped Leslie.”
“Unfortunately, Mrs. Lawton, Mr. Ballencoa has never been charged, let alone found guilty of that crime,” Dixon said. “I can’t apply the law based on what might have happened. He’s a free citizen.”
“I’m sure you’ll have his vote in the next election,” she said with contempt.
Dixon’s face reddened. He wasn’t used to having his integrity questioned, and he didn’t like it. Still, he held his temper.
“You’re new here,” he said. “You don’t know me—”
Lauren cut him off. “The fact that we’re even having this conversation tells me everything I need to know about you, Sheriff Dixon.
“If you’re going to arrest me, then do it. But if you’re so worried about your office and what people think, then I suggest you consider that your public isn’t going to be very pleased to hear that you would take the side of a child predator and probable murderer over the side of a woman who has lost most of her family to this man.
“And you might also consider that my daughter’s case is not so cold that the press has forgotten about her. So if you think you should get on some semantic high horse over who was in the wrong tonight, then you had better be prepared, because I will rain a media shitstorm down on you the likes of which you have never seen.”
Cal Dixon looked like he might choke. Mendez had never seen him at a loss for words. He watched him now grapple with his temper, his pride, his position. At the same time, Lauren Lawton stood her ground, battered and fragile yet strong as tempered steel, her eyes as bright as blue flame.
“I don’t appreciate being threatened, Mrs. Lawton,” Dixon said with carefully modulated calm. “But I understand your position, and I understand your need to protect your daughter.
“I’m going to have Detective Mendez see you home tonight,” he said. “I don’t think it would be in the interest of justice to press charges against you, though ultimately that decision is at the discretion of the district attorney.”
“Thank you,” Lauren said, though if she felt relief she didn’t show it.
Dixon turned to Mendez, his expression unreadable. “See Mrs. Lawton home.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And I will see you in my office tomorrow morning at oh eight hundred hours on the dot.”
“Yes, sir,” Mendez said, not sure which of those orders he was dreading more.
39
“You don’t have to take me home,” Lauren said as they left the building by a side door. Mendez directed her toward his car in the parking lot. “My car is at the sports complex.”
Her car was at the sports complex, but she had no keys, she realized. She had nothing with her because she had handed her purse off to Leah. Her purse with the gun in the side pocket. She hoped to God Leah hadn’t looked inside.
Fear went through her like a cold wind. She had given her fifteen-year-old daughter a bag with a gun in it. In the blink of an eye she saw Leah as she had been that morning—crying, upset, angry, feeling lost and alone, worried that her mother was contemplating suicide. What about me? She thought about the concern Anne Leone had expressed, that Leah was holding too much inside, that kids like Leah were at risk for self-destructive behavior.
Lauren stopped in her tracks. “I don’t have my keys. I dropped my purse on the tennis court. My daughter has it.”
“Where is she?”
“I sent her with her friend Wendy Morgan and Wendy’s mother.”
“Sara Morgan?” he asked.
“I don’t know where they live,” she admitted. As if she didn’t already feel like a bad mother. Not only had she sent her daughter off with a gun, she had sent her daughter home with a woman she’d only just met, not even knowing where the Morgans lived.
“I do,” Mendez said.
They rode in silence. Lauren had no interest in small talk or breaking the uncomfortable feeling that hung in the air. She didn’t care what he thought about the way she had spoken to his boss—or to him, for that matter. She was long past caring what people in law enforcement thought about her.
She was more worried about Sara Morgan. What must the woman think of her? Hauled away for assault before they could even have dinner. Wendy was Leah’s only friend here. If her mother put an end to that friendship on Lauren’s account . . .
And why wouldn’t she? If Leah was a target of a predator, then Wendy could be in danger too. Almost certainly Ballencoa would have been photographing both girls at the tennis courts. And according to Anne Leone, Wendy had already been through more than any child should have been subjected to—involved in a murder investigation, attacked by a schoolmate . . .
In her mind Lauren kept going back to Ballencoa. It was his fault. He had chosen to photograph the girls. She had only put a stop to it. He had chosen to stalk the Lawton family. She couldn’t be held responsible for his choices . . . only her own.
She had chosen to come here. She had put them all in jeopardy.
“Just so you know,” Mendez said, breaking the silence, “we are working on Ballencoa. We’re not just sitting around with our thumbs up our asses.”
“Yeah. I could see that tonight while he was photographing my daughter,” she returned sarcastically. “You were all over it.”
“I want him off the streets for something we can prosecute him for,” he said, holding his temper. “If we can connect him to an actual crime and put him away, we get a warrant to search his property, and maybe we find something that links him to your daughter’s case. Maybe he’s locked up long enough that the DNA technology advances and the Santa Barbara PD can test the blood sample.”
“But in the meantime he’s free to do whatever he wants. Forgive me if I don’t seem enthusiastic for your plan.”
“That’s the system we have,” he said. “We can’t lock people up just because we don’t like them. There were plenty of people in Santa Barbara who thought your husband killed your daughter. Nobody locked him up either.”
“Yeah. Look how well that worked out for me.”
He pulled the car over suddenly and slammed it into park so hard the shoulder harness locked and caught her as she was thrown forward. The dashboard lights illuminated the hard angry lines of his face.
“You can’t have it all ways, Lauren,” he said. “You’re not the first person to lose a loved one to a crime. You won’t be the last. And you’re not the only one who cares.
“You think it doesn’t gall me that Roland Ballencoa can try to press charges against you?” he asked. “It makes me sick. You think I wouldn’t like to take that camera and shove it down his throat? I would love it, but the world doesn’t work that way. We have a system. It’s not always perfect, but it’s what we have, and I have to work within it.