by Tami Hoag
“When did he move out?” Hicks asked.
Eddard wiped the dirty spark plug off with a dirtier rag, then shoved it back in its place on the lawn mower motor.
“I don’t know,” the old man said, irritated, pulling his head down between his shoulders like a turtle, like it physically pained him to be put upon this way. “I don’t know that he has moved out.”
“Do you have a phone number for Mr. Ballencoa?” Hicks asked, pen poised to jot the number in his notebook.
“No. He doesn’t keep a phone.”
“Can you tell us what bank he used?” Hicks asked.
“He didn’t. He always paid with a money order.”
“That seems strange.”
“Better than a check as far as I’m concerned,” the old man said. “You know it’s good.”
He made his way to a bench at the back of the shed, his bowed legs giving him an odd gait.
“When did he stop paying his rent?” Mendez asked, following.
“He hasn’t,” Eddard said, selecting a wrench from a hook on the pegboard above the workbench. “He’s paid up.”
“Through when?”
“End of the month.”
“He hasn’t given notice?” Hicks asked.
The old man crabbed his way back and fitted the wrench over a rust-caked nut on the old lawn mower. “No.”
Mendez exchanged a glance with his partner. According to Mavis Whitaker, Ballencoa had moved out sometime between the end of April and the beginning of June. But he had paid his rent through the month of July. Because he didn’t want anyone to know he had moved? Mendez wondered. Or had his exodus been so hasty he simply hadn’t bothered to try to get his money back?
“Has it occurred to any of you geniuses that maybe he hasn’t moved at all?” Carl Eddard asked, struggling to loosen the nut. “Maybe the man has just gone somewhere. People travel, you know.”
“Would it be possible to go into the house?” Mendez asked, ignoring the raised eyebrows Hicks gave him.
Carl Eddard gave him the stink eye. “Do you have a warrant, young man?”
“We don’t need one,” Mendez said. “You’re the landlord. You have the right to enter the property. We aren’t searching for anything other than evidence of whether or not Mr. Ballencoa is still using the house as his primary residence.”
Eddard scowled. “I’m a busy man.”
“We won’t take more than twenty minutes of your time, Mr. Eddard. And we won’t have to bother you again. It’s important that we establish whether or not Mr. Ballencoa has left town. If he has, then we’ll take our business elsewhere.”
The old man growled and grumbled, phlegm rattling in his throat. He wrung his hands in the greasy rag, then threw it at the lawn mower in disgust. “Oh, all right.”
Mendez and Hicks waited in their car for Carl Eddard to retrieve his house keys.
“Are you out of your mind?” Hicks asked as soon as they had closed their car doors.
Mendez pretended ignorance. “For what?”
“If Detective Neri gets wind of this, he’ll bellyache to his boss, who will bellyache to our boss. You’ll get both our asses in a sling.”
“For what?” Mendez asked again. “We’re not doing anything but having a look around. It’s not an illegal search because we’re not searching for anything. We won’t touch anything. We won’t take anything.”
“You’d better hope he hasn’t written a murder confession on the bathroom wall.”
“We came all the way up here to find this clown,” Mendez said. “I want to know if he’s packed his bags and gone. If all his shirts are still hanging in the closet, then he probably hasn’t moved to Oak Knoll and we don’t have to worry about it.
“If he’s gone out of that house lock, stock, and barrel with no notice to anybody . . . I’m not going to like that, are you?” he asked.
“I’m still not convinced there’s a lot of reason for us to care one way or the other,” Hicks said. “The guy’s got no wants, no warrants. The only person who claims to have seen him in Oak Knoll is arguably unstable.”
“Tell me this,” Mendez said. “Who sets up house one place, gets his mail someplace else, doesn’t keep a bank account, doesn’t have a telephone, leaves town in the dead of night without telling anybody . . . ?”
“A criminal,” Hicks conceded.
“A criminal that might be in our sandbox now. Maybe Mr. Eddard here doesn’t care about a convicted child predator living across the street from the high school. I do. You should. You’re the one with daughters.”
“I don’t want him in my backyard,” Hicks admitted, giving in as Carl Eddard made his way down the sidewalk to his red 1978 El Dorado.
“Let’s get on with it,” Hicks said. “You’re buying lunch after. I at least want to get my ass chewed on a full stomach.”
15
The handgun was a Walther PPK nine millimeter Kurz. The Baby Nine, Lance had called it. It took .380 ammunition and fit a woman’s hand comfortably. Yet its attraction to her husband had been a Walther’s claim to fame as the sidearm of James Bond—the PPK 7.65 mm—beginning with one of Lance’s favorite Bond movies, Dr. No.
Her husband could go on about Bond for hours, his eyes as bright as a boy’s on Christmas morning. The memory brought a bittersweet touch of warmth to Lauren’s heart. She didn’t allow it to take root or last for long. Fond memories had a way of becoming like hard stones that tripped her into a pit of despair. Today she already felt the tips of her toes slipping over that edge.
Unfinished justice was her hot button, her trigger. She couldn’t stand it for herself, nor could she deal with it as an onlooker. The outrage that rose up inside her was a hot, writhing thing that wanted to tear out of her like a wild animal.
She needed to do something to release the anger in a way that was both violent and controlled. Shooting her husband’s pistol was her answer. She could take the Walther in hand and feel its power, feel the hard cold steel and the no-nonsense, justice-starts-and-stops-here weight of it.
The gun accepted no excuses. Its perspective had no gray areas. What came out of it was truth—a terrible truth, a final truth, a truth she and she alone controlled. No buts. No what-ifs. No legal loopholes. She could pass sentence with the pull of a trigger, and no one could argue with her verdict.
Lauren had found two gun ranges on the outskirts of Oak Knoll. Down the road from the Oaks Country Club, the Oaks Gun Club was a proper gentleman’s club with a state-of-the-art indoor range as well as a rifle range and areas for shooting trap and skeet. The buildings were lovely, the grounds manicured.
Lance had belonged to just such a club, where the members dressed like models for the Orvis catalog, and a rifle was a serious monetary investment. Lauren still had his shotgun, custom-made in Italy with a beautiful exotic wood stock and intricately etched steel.
The club had been part of their social scene. Many of the same friends with whom they rubbed elbows at polo and tennis had been members.
But a social scene was the last thing Lauren wanted these days. She had no interest in dressing for the range in anything other than jeans and a T-shirt. She wore a black baseball cap with the bill pulled low over her eyes and her ponytail pulled through the opening at the back. Hers was the only BMW in the parking lot of the shooting range she had chosen.
Canyon Gun Range was located on the far side of Oak Knoll. And by far side she meant as far away from McAster College and the boutiques and pedestrian plaza as it could be. The area was industrial, with a lot of low, steel, warehouse-type buildings that housed welders and cabinetmakers and auto body repair places. The building that housed the gun range had a pro shop on one end and a sleazy bar with topless dancers on the other.
This was where Lauren chose to bring her dead husband’s elegant James Bond weapon to practice her marksmanship and try to appease the demons stirring within.
No one she would ever know would ever find her here.
The lot was half full of cars. She
got her gun bag out of the trunk, hefted it over one shoulder, and went inside.
The heads of dead animals lined the wood-paneled walls of the shop. She could feel their sightless stares almost as strongly as she could feel the stares of the men in the store. If she’d had bigger breasts, they probably would have told her she had come in the wrong door and sent her to the other end of the building. She was the only female in the place. But there was no mistaking her for a stripper these days. Too thin, too old, too pale, too worn.
Exchanging as little conversation as possible, she checked in at the desk and took care of the paperwork. The clerk examined the Walther and offered her a deal on paper bull’s-eye targets. Lauren forked over the extra buck for the full-sized male silhouette.
Once inside the range itself, eye and ear protection in place, she clipped the target up and sent it zipping down the line to the fifteen-feet mark, then picked up the gun from the bench.
For the first time since she had rushed out of Anne Leone’s office Lauren felt a calm come over her. Her mind went clear and still. Her breathing evened out. Her hands steadied.
Taking a deep breath, she raised the Walther and began, quickly falling into a familiar rhythm. Bang! Bang! Bang! Breathe. Bang! Bang! Bang! Breathe. Bang! Bang! Breathe. Reload. Bang! Bang! Bang . . .
Torso, torso, head shot, breathe. Torso, torso, head shot, breathe . . .
Every shot hit its mark, leaving the paper target shredded. One target and then another and then another.
When she had finished she swept up her brass, tossed the casings in the trash along with the decimated male silhouettes, and repacked her gear bag.
As she turned to go she realized the men shooting in two other lanes had stopped to stare at her. Another man picked up his bag from the back bench and held the door for her to go out:
When they reached the pro shop and had pulled their mugs down from their ears, he looked at her again and said, “Lady, I wouldn’t want to be your boyfriend.”
No, Lauren thought as she walked out into the afternoon light, wishing she hadn’t trashed her sunglasses, you wouldn’t want to be Roland Ballencoa.
The camera lens zoomed in on her as she walked out of the gun shop to the black BMW 5 Series sedan. She had changed a lot over the years. She had gone from dressed to perfection to blue jeans and a black T-shirt; from a mane of dark hair, blown and styled, to a ponytail and a baseball cap; from made-up and decked out to washed-out and stripped down. Even so, she was still hot.
She went to the back of the car to stow away a black duffel bag, unknowingly looking straight at the camera as she shut the trunk.
The shutter clicked and the motor drive whirred.
16
There was no sign of recent habitation in the house Roland Ballencoa rented from Carl Eddard.
The old man unlocked the door and they all went inside. The place smelled of cleaning products and dust. The air had a stale stillness to it that suggested no living thing had disturbed it in a while.
The furniture was all in place. Nothing had been taken, but nothing had been left, either—no magazines, no shoes, no unopened bills, not a shirt or a jacket or a baseball cap, not a toothbrush or a comb or a Q-tip. Nothing. There was no food. There was no garbage, not a scrap of paper, not a gum wrapper. It was as if Roland Ballencoa had never been there at all.
“I guess you can start advertising for a new renter,” Mendez said.
Carl Eddard gave him a funny look. “Why? As long as this one keeps paying, he’s the best tenant I’ve ever had.”
“Why would he keep paying for a place he doesn’t live in?” Hicks wondered aloud.
“Why would I care?” the old man returned.
The fact that there was nothing to see made Mendez itch to look under the beds and between mattresses and box springs. He wanted to pull out dresser drawers to see if anything had been taped to the bottoms of them. He wanted to go into the attic and find a hidden box of something.
He did none of those things.
They were doing nothing technically wrong being in the house with the landlord, and perhaps if some kind of incriminating evidence of a crime had been left lying in plain sight, they might have still been all right—depending on how clever or how slimy the defense attorney turned out to be. They would have had the whole of the San Luis Police Department coming down on their heads, but legally they might have been all right. Maybe.
But beyond a plain-sight discovery, they were out of their jurisdiction without a search warrant or even probable cause to ask for one. They weren’t even investigating a crime. They were only there because he was curious, and because he felt bad for a woman everyone told him was a bitch on the ragged edge of insanity.
Carl Eddard grew impatient as their allotted twenty minutes passed.
“I have things to do,” the old man complained. “This guy isn’t going to materialize out of thin air.”
But he seemed to have disappeared into it, Mendez thought.
They thanked Eddard and let him lock the house up and go. Next door, Mavis Whitaker followed the old man along the fence line, crabbing at him the whole way to the street.
“I told you no good would come of having that perv here!”
Eddard swatted a hand in her direction as if she was an annoying swarm of gnats.
Mendez and Hicks drove back downtown to grab lunch at a colorful little Mexican place with outdoor seating on the side shaded by a couple of big trees.
“That’s pretty damned strange,” Hicks declared, doctoring his fish tacos with Tabasco sauce. “Who rents a house in one town and lives someplace else?”
“I want to know how he can afford it. Rent isn’t cheap here or in Oak Knoll. Do freelance photographers make that kind of money?”
“If they do, I’m going straight to a camera store. That’s gotta beat working for a living.”
“We’ve got more questions than answers now,” Mendez complained. He forked up a chunk of tamale and chewed with a scowl on his face.
“This isn’t even a whodunit,” Hicks said. “This is a what-the-hell?”
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this guy. Nobody is that careful to cover their tracks without having something to hide.”
“You know the DMV isn’t going to have a current address on him.”
“How much paperwork do you think might be involved getting an address from the USPS?” Mendez asked.
“Too much. And what’s that going to give us anyway? If he doesn’t get his mail sent to his house, all we get is a box number.”
“I just want to know his zip code for starters,” Mendez said. “And I hope to God it’s not ours.”
17
Renee Paquin walked out of the practice room, violin case in hand, down the hall, and out into the hot, dry California afternoon. The warmth felt like velvet against her skin—especially coming out of the chill of the air-conditioned building. She breathed deep of the eucalyptus-scented air and smiled.
Her neck was tight and her shoulders were sore, but practice had been good, and she was pleased with herself. The summer music festival was coming. She would be playing in concert with her chamber group, but had also been chosen to play as a soloist at one of the evening concerts—a prestigious coup for any McAster student, but especially for a sophomore.
Life was good.
Her hard work was paying off. To play in the festival was to prove to her parents she had done the right thing in staying for the summer instead of going home to Michigan to loll the months away on the lake.
She walked across campus with a smile on her face. She would go back to the house to change clothes and do some laundry, then meet Michelle, Xenia, and Jenna for a few games of doubles tennis. Then they would all go downtown for a light dinner at one of the sidewalk cafés on the plaza.
It was only a ten-minute walk from the practice rooms to the sorority house, a big Victorian house situated on the corner of a street lined with huge oak trees. She went first to the garage, whe
re she had dropped a bag of laundry the day before and never got the time to do it. She had to get some of it done today because she was running low on underwear.
The laundry bag had been left on the floor, which she knew better than to do because bugs could crawl into it. One time Jenna had dumped out her laundry and three mice had scurried out of it.
The idea made Renee’s skin crawl. She picked up her bag and held it by the very bottom so she could drop it and run screaming if she needed to. But only clothing tumbled out onto the table.
Right away she noticed that it didn’t smell right. She blamed it on a week’s worth of sweaty tennis clothes. It smelled as if all the body odors had fermented or something. She wrinkled her nose. Gross. It almost smelled like stale sex, which was impossible, of course, since she and Jason had broken up months ago and she had yet to get the bad taste of that relationship out of her mouth.
She scooped up the underwear and threw it in a washer. She had better things to do than think about boys.
She came out of the house dressed in a crisp white tennis outfit with a scandalously short skirt. She was tall and willowy with long tanned legs. Her dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail that was pulled through the opening at the back of her white cap.
As he photographed her he wondered which one she was. He knew the names of half a dozen of the girls who lived in that house because he had made it his business to find out. He had waited on several occasions to watch the mailman make his delivery for the day, and when the mailman had gone out of sight and no one else had been on the street, he had gone onto the porch of the big house and casually sorted through the mail that had been left.
He had a list of the girls from this house on a page in his notebook. Holly Johnson, Jennifer Porter, Sarah McCoy, Natalie Witman, Heather Ortiz, and Renee Paquin. He had added the name Renee Paquin last night. The name that had been written in marker on the laundry bag he had taken the panties from.
At the reminder of her name he could smell her. He could taste her pussy. He wished he had her panties with him now so he could put them in his mouth again and suck on them. He set his camera aside on the passenger seat, then reached inside his open fly. He fondled himself even as he watched the lithe tennis player walk away down the street.