“I get that she wants to have this guy’s balls on a string around her neck,” he said, “but she wants mine too. I’m supposed to wave a magic wand and have him commit some chargeable offense. Or maybe I can pull her missing kid out of my ass.”

“You’re the soul of sympathy,” Mendez said flatly.

“Hey,” Neri said. “I’ve got as much sympathy as anybody. It’s terrible what happened to her family. But the SBPD can’t link Ballencoa to the crime. They can think whatever they want about the guy, but the bottom line is they’ve got jack shit to prove he did anything. Neither do we.

“What are we supposed to do?” he asked. “Ballencoa minds his own business; nobody complains about him; we don’t have any missing teenage girls here. But I’ve got Lauren Lawton on my back every week. Why don’t we do this, why can’t we do that.”

A puzzled look came over his face as a thought struck him. “She’s backed off lately. I haven’t heard from her in a while. Did she die or something?”

“She moved to Oak Knoll,” Mendez said.

Neri gave a hysterical laugh and slapped a palm against the table. “Tag. You’re it! Sorry, boys.”

Mendez frowned. It wasn’t that he couldn’t see Lauren Lawton out of control. It was that she had good reason to be a pain in the ass. She was trying to fight for her daughter. Nobody seemed to want to give her that. Or probably more accurately, they only wanted to allow her just so much time to do it, then she was supposed to shut up and go away.

First Tanner, now this idiot.

“Is Ballencoa still living here?” he asked bluntly.

Neri didn’t quite look at him. “Yeah.”

“Really?”

“The last I checked.”

“And when was that?”

“Like I said: It’s been a while since I’ve heard from Mrs. Lawton.”

“You’ve got a known child predator in your town and you don’t check up on him unless a citizen from another jurisdiction calls and pokes you?” Mendez asked, his temper ticking a notch hotter.

“We checked on him all the time when he first moved up here,” Neri said, defensive. “We checked on him so much he threatened to sue the department for harassment. Ballencoa came here a free man, and he’s never done anything to change that in nearly two years. We can’t just sit on the guy for no good reason.”

“When was the last time you saw him?” Hicks asked.

Neri shifted in his chair, uncomfortable with their scrutiny. “A couple of months ago. He had a booth at the Poly Royal art fair. He’s a photographer. He was selling his photographs.”

“What kind of photographs?”