He swore under his breath, handed her the note, and strode out of the break room and down the hall. In the war room he stood in front of the whiteboard with his hands on his hips, staring at the time line.

“I don’t understand,” Tanner said. “Ballencoa probably did this note himself just to stir up shit. What’s it got to do with anything?”

He could still see the look on Lauren Lawton’s face last night as she told him.

“She told me last night Ballencoa had left a note in her mailbox that said ‘Did you miss me?’ She told me she threw the note away because she knew we wouldn’t do anything about it.”

“So she wrote on it and gave it back to him,” Tanner said. “So what?”

“How does she know where he lives?” Mendez asked. “She let Bill and me spend two days trying to figure out if the guy was even here. But she drove to his house and put this in the mailbox on his front porch.”

And I want to fucking shake her, he thought.

“Damnit,” he muttered, staring at the time line. “Goddamnit.”

In mid-April someone had been poking around Ballencoa’s neighborhood, watching him. Roland Ballencoa had moved to Oak Knoll the first of May.

“When did the Lawtons move here?” he asked no one in particular.

“I don’t know,” Hicks said. “Her daughter would have been in school in Santa Barbara. It’s safe to assume they waited until the end of the school year, so . . . June.”

Mendez wanted to kick something.

“He didn’t follow her here,” he said. “She followed him.”

Chapter 45

45

I need to end this. I need to take action. I can’t rely on someone else to do it. I can’t pay someone else to do it. I can’t hope someone else will do it.

I have to stop Roland Ballencoa from ruining my life and my youngest daughter’s life the way he ruined the life of my husband, and the life of our family, by taking the life of my firstborn.

That is what’s at stake: our lives.

The people in law enforcement want to solve a case. Their jobs are at stake. Greg Hewitt would solve my problem—for money. Their stakes aren’t high enough. The outcome doesn’t mean to them what it means to me or to Leah.

It might be a game to Roland Ballencoa. He might enjoy cat and mouse. But the idea that any of this has been a game makes me furious. This is my life, the lives of my daughters, the life of my husband, the life of our dreams. I have to fight for those things.