As she turned to go she realized the men shooting in two other lanes had stopped to stare at her. Another man picked up his bag from the back bench and held the door for her to go out:

When they reached the pro shop and had pulled their mugs down from their ears, he looked at her again and said, “Lady, I wouldn’t want to be your boyfriend.”

No, Lauren thought as she walked out into the afternoon light, wishing she hadn’t trashed her sunglasses, you wouldn’t want to be Roland Ballencoa.

The camera lens zoomed in on her as she walked out of the gun shop to the black BMW 5 Series sedan. She had changed a lot over the years. She had gone from dressed to perfection to blue jeans and a black T-shirt; from a mane of dark hair, blown and styled, to a ponytail and a baseball cap; from made-up and decked out to washed-out and stripped down. Even so, she was still hot.

She went to the back of the car to stow away a black duffel bag, unknowingly looking straight at the camera as she shut the trunk.

The shutter clicked and the motor drive whirred.

Chapter 16

16

There was no sign of recent habitation in the house Roland Ballencoa rented from Carl Eddard.

The old man unlocked the door and they all went inside. The place smelled of cleaning products and dust. The air had a stale stillness to it that suggested no living thing had disturbed it in a while.

The furniture was all in place. Nothing had been taken, but nothing had been left, either—no magazines, no shoes, no unopened bills, not a shirt or a jacket or a baseball cap, not a toothbrush or a comb or a Q-tip. Nothing. There was no food. There was no garbage, not a scrap of paper, not a gum wrapper. It was as if Roland Ballencoa had never been there at all.

“I guess you can start advertising for a new renter,” Mendez said.

Carl Eddard gave him a funny look. “Why? As long as this one keeps paying, he’s the best tenant I’ve ever had.”

“Why would he keep paying for a place he doesn’t live in?” Hicks wondered aloud.

“Why would I care?” the old man returned.

The fact that there was nothing to see made Mendez itch to look under the beds and between mattresses and box springs. He wanted to pull out dresser drawers to see if anything had been taped to the bottoms of them. He wanted to go into the attic and find a hidden box of something.

He did none of those things.