But even if his threat kept Roland Ballencoa in line—which he doubted it would—he wasn’t going to be happy about the man’s presence in Oak Knoll. Something dangerous had come into their midst. They couldn’t turn a blind eye to it even if it was lying dormant. The threat would be there as long as Ballencoa was.

He took a right at the corner and took another right and another right, coming back onto Ballencoa’s block. He pulled in at the curb three houses down.

“Did you know he had taken out a restraining order on the Lawton woman back in SB?” Hicks asked, his gaze, like Mendez’s, focused down the block, waiting to see if Ballencoa would come out of his house.

“No. I knew he threatened to sue the PD.”

“There and in San Luis,” Hicks pointed out.

“And Mrs. Lawton personally. What an asshole,” Mendez grumbled.

“Too bad that’s not against the law,” Hicks said.

“We’d have to build prisons in outer space.”

“He didn’t seem surprised to see us,” Hicks pointed out.

“No. And he didn’t seem surprised when I mentioned Lauren Lawton’s name, either. He’s coming out.”

Down the block, Ballencoa came out of his house with a messenger bag slung over one shoulder and disappeared into his garage.

“He knows she’s here,” Hicks said.

A brown Dodge panel van backed out of the garage and went down the street away from them. Mendez let him get a good distance ahead, then pulled out and followed him. It was tough to tail a car in a residential neighborhood. There wasn’t enough traffic for anonymity, though it picked up as they neared the college.

Preparations were already under way for the upcoming music festival. Visiting musicians began to flow into Oak Knoll several weeks in advance. Pre-festival workshops had begun. Small concerts in the local parks and churches would be starting soon, leading up to the headline events.

As they followed Ballencoa down Via Verde, Mendez kept one eye on the van and one on the busy sidewalks outside the boutiques and coffee shops. Girls, girls, girls. College girls shopping, talking, laughing with each other. They were blissfully oblivious to the man in the van trolling past them.

“Where the hell is he going?” Mendez wondered aloud as they continued past the college, through another neighborhood, past Oak Knoll Elementary, onto Oakwoods Parkway.

To the sheriff’s office.

Chapter 26

26

“What the hell?” Mendez asked, watching Roland Ballencoa pull into the parking lot in front of the sheriff’s office.

“I don’t know,” Hicks said, “but I don’t have a good feeling about it.”

Mendez punched the gas and pulled into the same lot rather than going around to the employee parking. That same feeling Hicks had expressed twisted like a worm in his gut.