“Ms. Lawton, you seem to be a little erratic today. Are you on medication of some kind?”

Prozac, Ativan, Valium, Trazodone . . . The list of pharmaceuticals in her medicine cabinet went on.

“No,” she said. She hadn’t taken any. She tried not to during the day. Most of them made her sleepy, and sleep brought nothing but nightmares.

The detective looked her in the eyes, gauging the size of her pupils.

Had she taken something and not remembered? Her thinking seemed to be taking place in the midst of a thick fog in her brain. Had she eaten lunch? She couldn’t remember. Probably not. Maybe her blood sugar was out of whack. Maybe this entire afternoon could have been avoided with a piece of cheese.

“I watched you leave the parking lot,” he said. “You violated about half a dozen laws and endangered the public. Do you have an explanation for that?”

“I thought I saw someone I knew,” she said, astonished at how stupid that sounded even to herself.

The detective arched a thick brow. He was good-looking, forty-ish. He looked like a straight arrow. His pants were pressed. He wore a jacket and tie.

“And you were going to chase that person down in your car?” Mendez asked. “We don’t do that here, ma’am.”

“Of course not,” she said. “We don’t do that in Santa Barbara either.”

This is real life, Lauren, not The French Connection. Car chases are for the movies. What the hell is wrong with you?

Detective Mendez seemed at a loss. “Let’s have a seat in my car.”

He used his radio to call in her driver’s license, speaking in cop code, no doubt asking for reports of past lunatic behavior. There had to be a thick file on her in Santa Barbara. She was well known at both the police and the sheriff’s departments. Anyone there would tell him she was a bitch and a pain in the ass—titles she wore with pride.

“What brings you to Oak Knoll, Ms. Lawton?”

“My daughter and I just moved here.”

“What do you do for a living?”

“I’m an interior decorator.”

“And your husband?”

He had caught sight of her ring finger. She had never taken off her wedding band. It didn’t matter that Lance was gone. She would always be married to him.

“My husband is dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

She never knew what to say to that. Thank you sounded stupid. She didn’t appreciate automatic sympathy from people she didn’t know, people who had never known her husband. What was the point?

Some unintelligible lingo crackled over the radio. Mendez acknowledged it with a brisk “10-4.”

“Your name is familiar.”

Lauren laughed without humor. This was where conversations always took a turn for the worse on so many levels. “Well, I am famous. Or infamous—depending on your point of view. My daughter Leslie was abducted four years ago.”