She frowned, clearly disappointed. “Not that I’m aware. Although he might have been up to something before I went away to Australia.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because there was a strange car in the neighborhood a week or so before I left,” she said. “I didn’t like it. I thought maybe it was some thief casing the neighborhood. The car was sitting at the curb across the street one day, so I marched right over to it and asked the man what his business was.”

“What did he say?”

“Told me he was a special investigator with the police.”

Mendez shared a glance with his partner. According to Detective Neri, the SLOPD hadn’t been watching Ballencoa at all. As far as Neri had known, Roland Ballencoa was still living next door to Mavis Whitaker.

“Did he show you a badge?” Hicks asked.

“Not a badge,” she said. “But he opened an ID.”

“What did it say?”

“I couldn’t say,” she admitted. “Didn’t have me readers on. I figured it was all right or he wouldn’t have shown it to me. Right?”

“You didn’t happen to get a license plate number on the car, did you?” Mendez asked.

“Of course I did.” She set her address book aside on the desk and took up a purple spiral notebook. “I wrote it down the first time I saw the car, of course. A strange car in the neighborhood—that’s the first thing I do as part of the watch. I write it all down in my book here.”

She turned through the pages, looking for the right one. Each page had the date written at the top in spidery old-lady handwriting. Notes were jotted down on each page, with the time of day noted beside each entry.

“Here it is,” she said, and she read off the tag number aloud.

Mendez put it in his notebook.

They thanked Mavis Whitaker for her time and her diligence and left the house.

“Why wouldn’t Neri have said they had started watching Ballencoa again?” Mendez said as they walked back to the car. “After all the shit I gave him?”

“I’ve gotta think he would have,” Hicks said. “If he’d had a way of not looking like a slacker, I think he would have taken it.”

“Me too.”

They got back into the car and sat there for a moment, both of them letting the wheels turn in their brains.

“He wasn’t a cop,” Mendez declared, starting the car. “Let’s go find a pay phone.”

Chapter 12

12

From the corner of her eye, Leah watched her mother come into the kitchen. She said nothing, just kept her head down as she brought food to the breakfast table. Hard-boiled eggs, orange juice, a bowl of sliced melon.

Her mother looked terrible. Leah knew why.