“I’d be the same or worse,” she admitted. “If somebody tried to do something to my kid, I’d be like a tigress with her claws out. I wouldn’t care who got in my way.

“If I were in her place and believed what she believes, I would have fucking killed Roland Ballencoa with my bare hands. I would have cut his tongue out, tore his balls off, then pulled his beating heart from his chest and eaten it while he died watching.”

“I’ll remember not to piss you off,” Mendez said. “Tell me about Ballencoa. Obviously you think he did it.”

Tanner played with her fork, frowning. “I liked him for it. So did everyone else. But we’ve got nothing on him. No one saw anything. No one heard anything. There was never any sign of the girl.”

“Did he have an alibi?”

“The ever-popular ‘home alone.’ ”

“Did he have a history with the girl?”

“He’s a freelance photographer by trade. He had taken pictures of the Lawton girl—and a lot of other girls her age—at sporting events, concerts, on the street.

“He makes me want to go take a shower,” Tanner confessed, “but the teenage girls seem to think he’s got that sleazy/sexy, angst-ridden artist thing going on. Teenage girls are stupid. What can I say?”

“Did he take any of them home with him?” Mendez asked.

“Not that we know of. He’s wicked smart, this guy. He got in trouble before, and he learned from his mistakes. He never tried that old ‘I can make you a supermodel’ game. He always took his pictures in public, never anything too provocative. His business was legit.”

“He has a record?”

“Lewd acts on a minor. He was nineteen, the girl was fourteen. He was sentenced to two years. He did fifteen months up in the Eureka area.”

“How did you connect him to the Lawton girl?”

“His name came up a couple of times with Leslie’s friends—and we’re talking about conversations that happened months apart. And we discovered Leslie had purchased some photographs he had taken of her and her tennis partner playing in a tournament. But it wasn’t until well after the fact someone put them together talking on the sidelines after a softball game the day she went missing. And then it took months longer to pull together enough information to get a search warrant.”

“You didn’t find enough to put him in a cell,” Mendez said. “Did you find anything at all?”