“But of course you won’t,” she said, more to herself than to him. She put her hands on top of her head and paced around in a little circle. “He’s too careful for that. Oh my God, what a fucking nightmare.”

“How would he know to find you here?” Mendez asked.

She looked at him with bewilderment and frustration. “I don’t know! He must have seen me at the store that day—”

“You followed him, not the other way around.”

“Maybe he saw me in his mirror,” she said, grasping for an explanation. “Maybe he saw me and pulled over and waited until I passed him—”

“He didn’t follow you home,” Mendez said.

“How do you know?”

“Because I followed you,” he confessed.

“Why is he in this town at all?” she demanded. “He’s a criminal. This is what he does. Somehow he found us, and now he’s going to torment us. He did this before, you know. He stalked us in Santa Barbara, and the police couldn’t manage to do anything about it.”

“I spoke with Detective Tanner,” Mendez started.

“And she told you I’m a lunatic pain in the ass, and that they had no proof Ballencoa was stalking me, therefore I must have been lying about it.”

“That’s not exactly how the conversation went.”

“No. I’m sure it was much more colorful than that. It takes a bitch to know a bitch,” she said bluntly.

Mendez watched her carefully, though it didn’t take a genius to read her body language. She was upset and agitated, and on the defensive. She had a right to be. Someone had followed her to the gun range. As out of the way as that place was, it was no happy coincidence. Someone had come onto her property while she was in the house and left that photograph on her windshield for a reason: to freak her out. They had succeeded.

“Can we sit down, ma’am?” he asked, not for himself, but to try to calm her a little. He was used to being called out in the middle of the night. Nighttime was the right time for crimes that begged a detective’s immediate attention.

She had called him directly, bypassing the usual protocol, but then he had told her to. He had crawled up out of a restless sleep, his brain itching with thoughts of the day and the questions that had risen to the surface as he and Hicks looked into Roland Ballencoa. Still on that wavelength, he hadn’t been all that surprised to hear Lauren Lawton’s voice on the line, half-hysterical, half-angry, demanding he come to her home.

He had dressed hastily, but properly. Shirt and tie, pants crisply pressed. There were no jeans-and-T-shirt detectives in his outfit—or anywhere that he knew of, except television.