“That’s my point exactly with Lauren Lawton and Roland Ballencoa,” Mendez returned. “That’s a crime waiting to happen. Leslie Lawton went missing and never came back. If Ballencoa did it—and the SBPD believes he did—and now he’s here in Oak Knoll, is he going to try to take the younger sister? Is he going to stalk the mother? Is it all a game for him? That’s a game we need to shut down before somebody gets hurt.”

“Okay,” Dixon said with a nod. “Good point. You and Bill look into it. But don’t ignore your caseload. It’s not up to us to investigate that kidnapping, Tony.”

“I know.” Mendez got up and headed for the door. “I just want to prevent one of our own.”

“Man, I don’t know what I’d do if somebody took one of my kids.”

Bill Hicks sat in the passenger seat, eating trail mix as they headed north on the 101. A few years older than Mendez, Hicks was a tall, lean, redheaded guy with a wife and three redheaded daughters.

“You’d track that bastard down and feed him a gun, that’s what,” Mendez said.

“Yeah. I probably would.”

“I have to think the only reason Lauren Lawton hasn’t done that is that she doesn’t own a gun.”

“Maybe she wants justice, not revenge.”

“Revenge is justice,” Mendez said. “An eye for an eye, man.”

“She’d ruin her own life,” Hicks pointed out. “She’d end up in prison, and her other daughter would become an orphan for all intents and purposes—father dead, mother put away for life.”

“Hopefully we can head that off at the pass—that or something worse. If Ballencoa still has his eye on the family, there’s plenty more hell to put them through.”

“Seems to me he’d have to be stupid to mess with them,” Hicks said. “As it stands, he’s a free man. Why poke a stick at a hornet’s nest?”

“You know as well as I do, the guys who get off on this kind of thing . . . their brains don’t work like yours or mine. They get a rush playing with fire.”

“The SBPD never developed any other suspects?” Hicks asked.

“They looked at the father for a while, but it didn’t go anywhere.”

“But he ended up killing himself. Could be guilt drove him to it.”

“Could be,” Mendez agreed. “Could be grief.”

“Could be both.”

“Could be neither.”