“I had a whole load of kick your ass,” Vince said, chuckling. “And I still do.”

“Yeah? Maybe someday you can put your bell-bottoms back on and show me,” Mendez challenged. “Just promise me you won’t fall and break a hip. I don’t want to be responsible for killing a legend.”

They had a good laugh—a necessary pressure release considering the business they dealt with on a daily basis. Mendez slugged back more of his Dos Equis. Vince sipped his wine.

“Okay,” Vince said. “So Ballencoa went away up there for how long on the lewd acts charge?”

“Fifteen months in the county lockup. He tried to force a fourteen-year-old girl to perform oral sex on him.”

“What was their relationship?”

“They didn’t have one. She was visiting some cousins who lived in his neighborhood. They had crossed paths at the beach a couple of times. The girl was cutting through a park alone one day, ran into Ballencoa. He pulled her into a storage shed and tried to make her give him oral sex. At some point she got away. He claimed it was consensual, but she was underage so that point would have been moot even if it was true.”

“Fifteen months is a good long while for a first offense,” Vince said. “Long enough to take a course or two on how to become a more successful criminal.”

“And make a friend—who was also questioned with regards to the aunt’s death,” Mendez said. “Michael Craig Houston—a rotten kid from a decent family with a sheet of small-time crime: a couple of simple assaults, burglary, drugs, petty theft. Nothing major, nothing sexual. The two of them got out of jail and were both staying in the aunt’s guesthouse. They alibied each other for the weekend the aunt died.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time two wrongs got together and made a catastrophe,” Vince said.

“For a tidy sum of money,” Mendez said. “Ballencoa took his inheritance and headed to San Diego, where he set himself up as a photographer and took up his hobby of peeping, B and Es, and snatching panties.”

“Anything violent?”

“No.”

“By that point he’s in his mid-twenties? Late twenties?” Vince asked.

Mendez nodded. “He came to Santa Barbara in eighty-four. He was thirty-two.”

“A violent sexual offense at nineteen, a possible murder after that, then he’s content sniffing underpants until he’s in his thirties?” He frowned and shook his head. “I have a hard time buying that.”

Mendez shrugged. “No violence that he ever got caught for, at any rate. I called down there and spoke to the detective who worked the case he went to jail for. He thought Ballencoa was your garden-variety perv. He lived alone, no girlfriend, stayed to himself. Unremarkable.”