“You wait and see,” she said, shaking her fork at him. “You’ll be dropping the c-bomb like a champ before you know it.”

Not if I lived to be a thousand years old, Mendez thought. His mother would have his ass for even thinking that word. And if he lived to be a thousand and used it, she would rise up out of her grave and have his ass.

“Wait until she starts in with the personal attacks on your intelligence and your integrity,” Tanner said. “That gets old fast.”

“She was pretty shaken up today,” Mendez said. “I mean, imagine: You move to a new town to escape all of that, and there’s the guy.”

“Did you see him?”

“I wouldn’t know him.”

She forked up some more crab cake with one hand and flipped open the file folder she’d brought with her with the other.

“Creepy dude,” she said, sliding a copy of Ballencoa’s photograph across the table. “Looks like he should play Judas in one of those life-of-Christ movies.”

Mendez stared at the photograph. Ballencoa had a long, narrow face and large, hooded dark eyes. His dark hair was shoulder length and he wore a neatly trimmed mustache and goatee. His eyes had that blankness in them he had come to associate with psychopaths. Shark eyes.

“He’s thirty-eight years old, about six-three and a buck-seventy-five,” Tanner said.

Mendez was five-eleven and built like a fireplug. About the only things he had in common with Roland Ballencoa were a dick, dark hair, and a mustache. And yet Lauren Lawton had mistaken him for Ballencoa in the pasta aisle at Pavilions.

“Do you think she’s unstable?” he asked.

Tanner shrugged. “Who could blame her if she was? When Ballencoa was still living here, she claimed he was stalking her, but we had absolutely no proof of that. Not one iota. Not a record of a phone call, not a fingerprint, nothing.”

“She just wants the guy behind bars for something.”

“For anything. At one point she all but told me to fabricate some evidence against him just so I could get him in the box and try to break him down for a confession.

“And let me tell you,” she added. “That guy wouldn’t give it up to save his own mother’s life. He’s as cold as they come.”

“Do you have his sheet in there?” Mendez asked.

Tanner fished it out and handed the pages to him.

“He’s got a history as a peeper, and some B and E charges down in the San Diego area where he was stealing women’s dirty underwear out of their laundry baskets. That got him a slap on the wrist.