The four of them went down the hall and into the break room, Mendez going to stand directly in front of the television set with his arms crossed over his chest and a hard frown pulling down the corners of his mustache.

Ballencoa was pacing the interview room, agitated, impatient, glaring at the door as he waited for someone to tend to him. His messenger bag sat on a chair at the end of the table.

Detective Trammell entered the room.

“Mr. Ballencoa,” he said. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

“No,” Ballencoa snapped. “I would not like a cup of coffee. I would like to see Sheriff Dixon.”

Unconcerned with what Ballencoa wanted, Trammell took a seat at the table and opened the file folder he had brought with him into the room. “He’ll be along. He’s a busy man.”

“He should be busy in here,” Ballencoa said, irritated that he wasn’t being given due consideration.

“I’m your detective of record,” Trammell said. “You have to tell everything to me anyway. I’ll be the one writing the report. Why don’t we get started with that?”

“Because I don’t want to waste my breath speaking to you,” Ballencoa said. “I want to deal with Sheriff Dixon directly.”

“What a bitch,” Tanner muttered, tucking herself in front of Mendez for a better view of the television. He could have rested his chin on top of her head.

Trammell was unimpressed. “Yeah, well, I’d pull him out of my ass for you, but he doesn’t happen to be there. So why don’t we get to it, Roland? You think somebody’s stalking you?”

“I told you last night that woman is stalking me,” Ballencoa snapped, still pacing.

“Well, technically speaking, last night she was beating you up,” Trammell corrected him.

Ballencoa thrust a finger at him. “This is why I’m not wasting my breath talking to the likes of you! I will see Sheriff Dixon. Now!”

Trammell heaved a sigh, got up from the table, and disappeared off the television screen. Seconds later he walked into the break room and went to the coffee machine, glancing over at the crowd that had gathered.

“What a fucking girl,” he muttered. “Can you believe this piece of dirt? First he lets a woman beat him up, now he’s crying because she’s picking on him. He should have been drowned in his own placenta at birth.”

He poured himself a cup of coffee and doctored it with cream and sugar, then came to stand with the rest of them, looking at Roland Ballencoa on the monitor.

“He knows we’re watching him,” Mendez said. “He keeps glancing up at the camera.”

Trammell sipped his coffee. “The boss said you caught him following some nurse home this morning.”

“The guy’s a perv,” Tanner said.