“No, but I am,” Vince said with a grin. He took a seat on an L-shaped cushioned stucco bench that framed one corner of the swimming pool. “Life is good.”

Mendez sat on the other leg of the L. “How’s Anne feeling? She looks great.”

“A little morning sickness, a little tired, and quit looking at my wife,” Vince said, shooting him a half-joking, half-fierce look. “You need to find yourself a nice girl and settle down, Anthony.”

Mendez took a pull on his beer. “Yeah, well . . . I’ll get right on that.”

They were both silent for an uncomfortable moment.

“Sara just wasn’t ready, Tony,” Vince said gently.

Sara Morgan. Wendy’s mother. Beautiful Sara Morgan with her mermaid hair and cornflower blue eyes. A wounded bird for him to protect. He had certainly wanted to.

“That’s not to say she won’t come back around. She’s needed some time to just be herself. Steve did a lot of damage.”

Mendez shook his head. “No. It’s not going to happen, Vince. I’m okay with that. I was part of a bad time in her life. Every time she looked at me was a reminder of everything she went through. Hell, I put her through some of it myself when we thought that asshole husband of hers was a suspect,” he admitted.

He couldn’t say he hadn’t been half in love with her, though. Vince knew it too, but gracefully let the subject slide.

“So tell me about Roland Ballencoa.”

Mendez filled him in with the details he had learned going through the SBPD files with Tanner. Leone listened with laser-sharp interest.

“He’s classic in a lot of respects,” he said. “Tailor-made for trouble. Absent mother, emotionally distant female raising him. No male role model in his life.”

“For sure there’s some kind of aberrant sexual component in there when he was younger, I’m thinking,” Mendez said.

Vince nodded. “Most likely. Although I do know cases where the subject claimed to have had violent sexual fantasies at a young age with no remembered abuse preceding.”

“Abuse is a relative term.”

“Or maybe a terminal relative,” Leone played on the words. “At any rate, your boy Roland started young with the peeping and the lewd acts, and very possibly hastened the demise of his aunt.”

“And got away with it.”

“That kind of success is a dangerous thing,” Vince said. “I’d like to get my hands on a transcript of his interview with the police from back then.”

“If such a thing exists,” Mendez said. “We’re talking twenty years ago and some Podunk PD up in the hinterlands.”

“Twenty years isn’t that long ago, junior,” he said. “It’s not like we were chiseling our reports on stone tablets.”

“Nobody videotaped anything,” Mendez pointed out. “Probably no audio, either. 1970? I mean, Christ, what did you have back then? The gramophone?”