“She should just take a gun and shoot him next time,” Hicks suggested. “Save us all the time and money screwing around with him. The guy’s a waste of skin.”

“Right,” Mendez said. “The DA would piss all over us to make a case against her.”

“Sometimes there’s no justice.”

Mendez thought of Lauren Lawton and her Walther PPK. He wondered how good a shot she was, and how many times she had imagined plugging Roland Ballencoa in the head.

“So according to the DMV,” Hicks went back on topic, “Avis owns the car. According to the Avis office in San Luis, they’ve never had the car on their lot. All the Avis cars with California tags are registered to the corporate office in Sacramento. The car could have come from anywhere in the state.”

Mendez scratched the top of his head. “Avis can track down the rental history on the car, right?”

“Yeah, but it’ll take some time. They have offices in 122 cities in the state of California—and multiple offices in a lot of those cities. Cars get picked up at one location, dropped off at another, rented out again. The paper trail is slow to come together. It was a couple of months ago, so that’s on our side. Still, it takes time on their end, and it’s not like we’ve got a warrant or anything.”

“If they had it all coordinated somehow on computers, that would be the ticket,” Mendez said, ever frustrated that all the great technology he kept reading about seemed always just out of reach.

“That day will come,” Hicks agreed. “But not today. At any rate, if Cal isn’t that excited about us spending hours on Ballencoa, then he sure isn’t going to give a shit if someone was spying on the guy in San Luis. It might be an interesting puzzle, but what’s it got to do with us?”

“Maybe something,” Mendez said. “I got a call from Lauren Lawton at two thirty this morning. Someone came onto the property she’s renting and left a photograph on the windshield of her car—a photograph of her in a parking lot, taken yesterday.”

Hicks furrowed his brow. “Did she see anybody?”

“No, but she’s convinced it’s Ballencoa. She says he stalked her in Santa Barbara.”

“She says?”

Mendez shrugged. “The SBPD wasn’t so sure about it.”

“What do you think?”

“I think she was pretty upset last night. And she didn’t take that photo of herself,” he pointed out. “And get this: She told me Ballencoa broke into her house in Santa Barbara and hung out just to freak her out.”

“That’s crazy.”

“No. Listen. She said she knew someone had been in the house. Someone drank a glass of wine and then washed the glass and left it where she would find it. He had touched things, moved things. He did a load of laundry—”