“If Lauren is dealing with that guy thinking he’s her employee, and he’s what we think he is,” Tanner said, “that’s like thinking you’re playing with a garter snake and it’s really a cobra.”

“What’s with you and snake analogies?” Hicks asked. “Is it Freudian?”

“I don’t get enough sex.” She tossed a look back at him. “Was that Freud’s problem too?”

“That’s not right,” Mendez said as they neared the end of Old Mission Road.

“Tell me about it,” Tanner muttered.

“The gate,” Mendez specified. “It’s open. That’s not right.”

Lauren’s BMW was nowhere to be seen.

On the far side of the garage, hidden from plain view of the road, sat a Plain Jane blue Chevy Caprice.

“Shit,” he said under his breath.

He grabbed the radio and called in the tag number of the Caprice, then sat drumming his fingers on the steering wheel as he waited. Tanner got out and started to walk around the suspect car.

“Tony, we’ve got blood out here,” she called back at him, pointing to the ground.

Mendez felt sick. Vince had called him with a list of open cases from San Diego County, San Bernardino County, and Orange County. Missing women. A long list. Maybe some of them could have been Ballencoa’s work, maybe not. They would have to wade through a river of reports, talk to dozens of detectives. It would take weeks, months.

Michael Craig Houston had been arrested several times over the years in proximity to where Ballencoa had been living.

In his mind, Mendez kept going back in time, imagining Ballencoa and Houston meeting in jail all those years ago. He could hear Vince saying that it wouldn’t have been the first time two wrongs had gotten together to make a catastrophe.

He kept flashing on Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris, a pair of criminals who had hooked up in the Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo in the late seventies. Separately they had been thugs. Together they had become sexually sadistic serial killers who had tortured and murdered five young women in five months in LA County.

They had trolled the streets in a cargo van they called Murder Mack, tricked out with a stereo system loud enough to drown out the screams of the girls as they tortured them.

Mendez wanted to vomit. If Lauren Lawton had unwittingly hired Michael Craig Houston, and Houston was partners with Roland Ballencoa . . .

Damn her. She couldn’t wait. He knew in his gut she had broken into Ballencoa’s house. She wanted it over.

Damn the system that had been powerless to help her.

The radio crackled back at him.

The Caprice came back to Michael Craig Houston.