Lauren took her wallet from her purse and dug a business card from a zippered compartment. GREGORY HEWITT, LICENSED PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR. She turned the card over and stared for a long time at what was written on the back. She should have given it to Mendez, but she couldn’t even if she wanted to. She shouldn’t have had it, but she had paid a price to get it. She had held on to it without acting on it because she believed if she did, she would be crossing a line.

But there was no line, she realized. If she had believed in that line, she never would have come here. Her boundaries had been shattered a long time ago by Roland Ballencoa.

She put the slip of paper back in her wallet and turned her attention to the gun on the table beside her bag. Without allowing herself to think at all, she picked it up and felt the familiar weight of it in her hand. It was still loaded, and there was still a round in the chamber.

She checked the safety, then slid the gun inside the special zippered compartment on the side of her handbag. She got up and left the house, got in her car and drove.

The streets were empty and quiet in this last hour before dawn. She felt as if she could almost hear the collective breathing of all the sleeping people in the houses she drove past.

The address she was looking for was in an older, nondescript neighborhood between downtown and the college. She imagined a mix of people lived there—students, people who worked at McAster, people who worked at the lamp factory on the outskirts of town. No professors here. No doctors or lawyers.

The house she was looking for was on a corner, a Craftsman-style bungalow. A plain brown wren of a house, it had a low porch and a detached one-car garage that shielded it from the neighbor.

Her heart beating hard in her chest, she drove around the block, spotting a shed at the back of the property. She went around the block, crossed the main street, around the next block, and parked on the side street with a clear view of the house.

The home of Roland Ballencoa.

Chapter 21

21

The windows of the house were dark. There was no porch light on. No vehicle sat in the driveway. The garage door was closed.

Lauren sat parked on the side street heavily draped by huge old maple trees, letting her dark sedan hide in the deep black shadows like a big cat. She sat staring at the house, picturing Ballencoa in his bed, oblivious to the fact that he was being watched. That knowledge gave her a small sense of power, and she wondered if it was anything like what he felt when he was watching her.