“Then he moves to Santa Barbara and out of the blue commits the perfect crime?” Vince said. “He snatches a girl off the street and she’s gone like aliens sucked her up into a spaceship. No trace of her. No useable evidence of any kind. I don’t believe it.

“First-time kidnappers—especially if it was a crime of opportunity—their adrenaline is through the roof, they lose their heads, they make mistakes,” he said. “This guy didn’t take a wrong step.”

“He had a long time to perfect the fantasy,” Mendez said. “He’s a meticulous sort. Could be he’d done a hundred run-throughs in his head over the years, and when the opportunity presented itself, he was just that ready.”

“Possibly,” Vince conceded. “Just like he was ready with that tape recorder to nail your ass.”

“Clearly, he enjoys playing games with people,” Mendez said. “Going into the Lawtons’ home after he was already a suspect was a total fuck-you.”

“Absolutely,” Vince agreed. “He’s arrogant. He enjoys showing everyone how smart he is. If he took the Lawton girl and got away with it—that had to be the highest high for him. It’s hard to imagine he won’t do it again. It’s hard to imagine he hadn’t done it before.

“You need to go back and talk to the detectives in San Diego again,” he said. “Find out if they have any open abduction cases or attempted abductions that could be connected to Ballencoa in any way. I’ll call my buddies at ViCAP. They’ve been expanding their database to include kidnappings and sexual assaults.”

The original focus of the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program had been to gather data on transient serial killers who crossed jurisdictional lines. The database housed crime scene details, suspect details, signature aspects of the homicides. ViCAP’s analysts went over the information, looking for possible links between cases. That the program would become a national repository for information on violent crimes of all types was welcome news to law enforcement agencies across the country.

For the time being, the information was directly accessible only to FBI personnel. Even though Vince was officially retired from the Bureau, every door there remained open to him because of who he was. No one said no to Vince Leone.

“That’d be great.”

“And I know the special agent in charge of the San Diego field office. I’ll call him.”

“Thanks,” Mendez said. “So far Ballencoa really has been smarter than everybody else. We have to hope he gets cocky again. He followed Lauren Lawton here for a reason. I can’t believe he’ll be content to just fuck with her head.”

“No,” Vince said soberly. “He came here for a reason. Something’s going to happen. It’s just a matter of time. So what are you going to do about it?”