“By the time we finally got the warrant, he had long since gotten rid of anything incriminating. We crawled over that place like lice on rats. We found photographs of the girl, but he’s a photographer—so what? We found photographs of girls, guys, young people, old people. It didn’t mean anything. Finally, we found one tiny sample of blood under the carpet in the back of his van.”

“And?”

“And nothing. The sample is too small to test. Maybe we could get a blood type. Maybe. There’s not enough for a DNA profile, considering where the science is right now. If we test it, we destroy it, and there’s no guarantee we’d learn anything at all. Then the sample is gone and we truly have nothing.

“All we can do is wait,” she said. “The DNA technology is getting more sophisticated every day. We have to hope that continues. Maybe six months from now or a year from now, that sample will be more than enough to get a profile. For now, we would be insane to try it.”

“I imagine that doesn’t sit well with Mrs. Lawton,” Mendez said.

“No. She wants to know if it’s her daughter’s blood. If we could test it and we found out it’s not her daughter’s blood, she’s not going to care that the sample is lost.

“We have to care,” Tanner said. “What if we can’t get him on the Lawton case, but down the road we could get him on some other crime committed against some other young girl? We have to keep that sample intact.”

“That leaves her in limbo.”

“Unfortunately, yes. And that’s taken a toll on her over the years.

“She calls all the time,” Tanner said. “What are we doing. Have we looked into this tip or followed up on what that psychic said. Why aren’t we doing this or that. Why aren’t we watching Ballencoa around the clock 24/7/365.

“She doesn’t want to hear that the guy has rights or that we have a budget or that her daughter’s case isn’t the only case we’re working on—or that after four years her daughter’s case isn’t even the most important case we’re working on.”

“It’s the most important case in her life,” Mendez pointed out.

Tanner spread her hands. “Hey, I’m not saying I don’t feel for her. I do. Believe me, I do. But you know the reality of the situation. At this point, unless we find the girl’s remains and can get something from them, or a witness comes forward, or Ballencoa—or whoever—steps up and makes a confession, this is going down as an unsolved cold case. Those files are going to sit in that storage room ’til kingdom come.”