Down the Darkest Road

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.

They were doing nothing technically wrong being in the house with the landlord, and perhaps if some kind of incriminating evidence of a crime had been left lying in plain sight, they might have still been all right—depending on how clever or how slimy the defense attorney turned out to be. They would have had the whole of the San Luis Police Department coming down on their heads, but legally they might have been all right. Maybe.

But beyond a plain-sight discovery, they were out of their jurisdiction without a search warrant or even probable cause to ask for one. They weren’t even investigating a crime. They were only there because he was curious, and because he felt bad for a woman everyone told him was a bitch on the ragged edge of insanity.

Carl Eddard grew impatient as their allotted twenty minutes passed.

“I have things to do,” the old man complained. “This guy isn’t going to materialize out of thin air.”

But he seemed to have disappeared into it, Mendez thought.

They thanked Eddard and let him lock the house up and go. Next door, Mavis Whitaker followed the old man along the fence line, crabbing at him the whole way to the street.

“I told you no good would come of having that perv here!”

Eddard swatted a hand in her direction as if she was an annoying swarm of gnats.

Mendez and Hicks drove back downtown to grab lunch at a colorful little Mexican place with outdoor seating on the side shaded by a couple of big trees.

“That’s pretty damned strange,” Hicks declared, doctoring his fish tacos with Tabasco sauce. “Who rents a house in one town and lives someplace else?”

“I want to know how he can afford it. Rent isn’t cheap here or in Oak Knoll. Do freelance photographers make that kind of money?”

“If they do, I’m going straight to a camera store. That’s gotta beat working for a living.”

“We’ve got more questions than answers now,” Mendez complained. He forked up a chunk of tamale and chewed with a scowl on his face.

“This isn’t even a whodunit,” Hicks said. “This is a what-the-hell?”

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this guy. Nobody is that careful to cover their tracks without having something to hide.”

“You know the DMV isn’t going to have a current address on him.”

“How much paperwork do you think might be involved getting an address from the USPS?” Mendez asked.

“Too much. And what’s that going to give us anyway? If he doesn’t get his mail sent to his house, all we get is a box number.”

“I just want to know his zip code for starters,” Mendez said. “And I hope to God it’s not ours.”