That was just as well. Mendez wanted to go back to Santa Barbara to look through more of the Lawton case files at the SBPD. He wanted all the background he could get on Ballencoa before he presented the case to Vince.

There was no doubt in his mind Vince was going to find Roland Ballencoa fascinating.

Mendez was still both astonished and pissed off that the man had come to the front door with a tape recorder in his pocket. He must have seen them from a window as they stood on his front porch waiting for him to answer the door. He would have made them for cops. And he had a litigious background, having sued or threatened to sue at least two agencies. This probably wasn’t the first time he’d had that tape recorder handy.

Ballencoa’s first adult conviction had been at the age of nineteen. He was now thirty-eight. He’d had two decades playing his sick games, honing his skills. Mendez wanted all of those intervening years accounted for. He wanted to know where Roland Ballencoa had lived, worked, slept, took a shit, and hunted his victims. If Roland Ballencoa had a head cold in Salinas in 1982, he wanted to know about it.

The best predictor of future behavior was past behavior. Mendez wanted nothing this creep might do to come as a surprise to him. He was about to become the world expert on Roland Ballencoa.

If Ballencoa thought he was going to play his games in Oak Knoll, he had picked the wrong town, and he had sure as hell picked the wrong cop to fuck around with.

Mendez hit the speed bag with one last hard pop and stepped back, blowing out a sigh and working his shoulders back. The sun had gone down a while ago, taking the heat of the day with it. Now the cool evening air chilled the sweat on his skin. He grabbed a towel and dried off, then pulled a clean black T-shirt over his head and went out of the side gate for a run.

His route took him past the Presbyterian Church on Piedra Boulevard, where the late AA meeting had taken a break to let attendees grab a smoke on the lawn. He waved as he went past, recognizing a couple of guys from work, a firefighter, and an EMT.

A few more blocks and he was passing the tennis courts at the city sports complex. Bugs swarmed around the high bright lights above the courts. Singles and doubles matches were going on. Kids were hanging around the concession stand enjoying the evening. A pack of smiling, giggling college girls waved as he passed. He waved back and tried not to think about the fact that he was now old enough to be their father.