“You had a bad scare,” he said reasonably. “You’re entitled to a little something to calm your nerves. It’s not my place to judge. But if you’d like some assistance coping with what you’ve gone through, I can recommend someone.”

“No, thank you.”

He fished a card out of his wallet and placed it on the table. Anne Leone’s card. He always carried a few with him. Not that Anne needed him to drum up business for her. Most of the work she did she did for free anyway. But she was very good with victims, having been one herself on more than one occasion. He would have loved to get Anne’s take on Lauren Lawton.

She looked at the card and said nothing. She seemed a little calmer now as the vodka took hold—or maybe resigned was a better word. He wondered how many drinks she might have had before he got there.

“What will you do?” she asked.

“I’ll see if we can get prints off the photograph,” he said. “I’ll canvass your neighbors and see if anyone saw anything. Beyond that, there’s nothing to do. I don’t know where Mr. Ballencoa might be. If I can’t find him, I can’t question him. And if we don’t have prints or the prints don’t come back to him, I won’t have call to do anything more than ask him where he was tonight. But we have to find him first.”

She nodded and took another sip of her drink, staring down at the tabletop.

“Was this the kind of thing he did in Santa Barbara?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Did he ever try to physically harm you?”

“No.”

“But he called you on the phone? That kind of thing?”

“Yes, but always from a pay phone so it couldn’t be traced back to him.”

“Did he ever try to gain entrance to your home?”

She took a while to answer. Another yes or no that had a long story attached.

“Yes,” she said at last.

“He broke in?”

“No. He got in,” she specified. “I don’t know how. I wasn’t there. But when I got home I knew he’d been there.”

“Had he left something? Taken something?”

She shook her head. “No, but things had been moved, touched. He had been there. He drank a glass of wine, washed the glass, and left it where I would see it. He had used the bathroom and put the hand towel in the wash. He had done a load of laundry.”

“Excuse me?”

“I had left a basket of dirty laundry on the washing machine. Underwear. It—and the hand towel—were wet in the washing machine when I got home.”