by Tami Hoag
Holding the Walther close to her shoulder, finger on the trigger, she stepped outside. Her heart was pounding as she moved toward the BMW, looking to one side and then the other. She went to the passenger door and looked in, relieved to see the shape of her bag on the seat.
No one had taken it. She was just paranoid and neurotic.
She grabbed the purse, but before she could pull back from the car, something caught her eye, something on the windshield on the driver’s side.
Lauren stepped back, slinging the strap of her bag over her shoulder. A piece of paper fluttered against the windshield, beneath the wiper blade. She looked around, adjusting her grip on the Walther. The wind seemed to slip inside her clothes and down her back.
She went around the hood of the BMW and snatched the paper off the windshield.
In the amber light from the sconces that flanked the garage doors she could tell it was a photograph. Black and white. Someone had come onto the property without her knowing and pinned a photograph beneath the wiper of her car.
She felt violated without even knowing what the subject of the photograph might be. She imagined she could feel someone’s eyes on her as she backed toward the garage, closer to the light. The shadows in the yard moved with the wind.
Lauren’s heart fluttered in her chest like a frightened bird. She didn’t dare to take her eyes off her surroundings and look at the photograph for more than a few seconds at a time.
A person. A person standing behind a car. Dark clothes. A dark cap.
Me.
Panic-stricken now, she walked backward as quickly as she could. Hurry, hurry, hurry. She felt as if a thousand eyes were chasing her as she went.
She fumbled with the doorknob, trying to turn it with the hand that held the photograph as she clutched the gun to her with the other. Tears blurred her vision. She was hyperventilating.
The knob turned and the door pushed in and Lauren almost tripped and fell in her haste to get inside and lock the door behind her. She banged into the console table, set the gun aside, and nearly upended a lamp in the attempt to turn it on.
Her hands were shaking like a palsy victim’s. She looked at the photograph again. It was her standing behind her car in the parking lot of the gun range.
Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God . . .
She turned around, looked out the windows, expecting to see a face staring in at her. There was no one there—not to be seen—but Lauren felt their eyes on her. She felt naked and exposed.
Hiking the strap of her bag up on her shoulder, she grabbed the Walther and hurried through the house and up the stairs. In her room she put the gun down, emptied the contents of her purse onto the bed, and sifted through them impatiently, sorting out the one thing she was looking for—a business card.
Detective Anthony Mendez.
19
“He left this on the windshield of my car in my driveway.”
Mendez carefully took the photograph by one corner and frowned as he studied it. Black and white, and slightly grainy in quality, it was a curled eight-by-ten print on the kind of paper used by photographers in their own darkrooms, not something developed at a drugstore or photo shop. In the background he recognized the front porch of the Canyon Gun Range. Lauren Lawton stood behind her black BMW. She appeared to be staring straight at the photographer.
“You didn’t see him?” he asked.
“No. I had no idea anyone was there.”
“What were you doing at the gun range?”
“Shooting a gun.” A defensive edge crept into her voice.
They stood in the great room of the house she was renting on Old Mission Road. The place was like something out of a magazine—a big stone fireplace, a high vaulted ceiling, blue and white furniture that looked like no one had ever sat in it. All of the pillows on the couches were just so, with knife creases chopped into the tops of them.
“You own a firearm?” he asked.
“Yes. It was my husband’s.”
He didn’t like that idea. Not that he was against citizens owning guns per se. But Lauren Lawton was a woman who had been through a tremendous amount of stress and was by all accounts living on edge. She claimed Roland Ballencoa had stalked her in Santa Barbara. A handgun and a paranoid woman with nerves strung tight was not a combination destined for a good outcome.
“Is your paperwork in order?” he asked.
Her blue eyes flashed like light hitting steel. “Who the fuck cares?” she snapped. “I didn’t call you out here to see if I’ve dotted all my i’s on my gun permit. Roland Ballencoa came onto my property and put that photograph on my car.”
“Did you see him?”
“No! I told you: I’d been working on the computer all night. I went out to the car to get my purse, and there it was. It didn’t get there by magic. He came onto my property. That’s criminal trespass.”
“Yes, ma’am, that is, but if you didn’t see him—”
“Get his fingerprints off the photograph,” she said. “He has a criminal record. He’s in the system.”
“Yes, ma’am. We’ll see if we can get a clear print—”
“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.
Lauren Lawton huffed a sigh, yanked a chair out from the head of the big harvest table, and sat, the fingers of one hand drumming impatiently on the tabletop.
“Is this now when you give me the ‘we can’t do anything’ lect
ure? And then I have to wonder aloud if you’ll do anything after the bastard kills me?”
Mendez seated himself to her left, purposely delaying his answer. She was spoiling for a fight. He wouldn’t give her one.
“We’re trying to locate Mr. Ballencoa,” he said calmly. “It seems he hasn’t been living in his residence in San Luis Obispo for some time now. He didn’t leave a forwarding address with anyone.”
Lauren looked at him, trying to decide if he was going to be a good guy or not. She looked exhausted—pale and drawn with sooty purple smudges below her eyes. She wore gray sweatpants and a white T-shirt with a too-big black sweater wrapped over it. The tips of her fingers barely peeked out of the ends of the sleeves. It had probably belonged to her husband, he guessed.
“What time did you come into the house this evening?” he asked, taking out his little spiral notebook and pen.
“I got home around five.”
“And when did you find the photograph?”
“It was after two.”
“What made you go out to the car after two in the morning?”
She sighed as if the answer was going to be a long story, but she opted for the short version. “I had left my purse in the car. I wanted it.”
“Have you been alone all evening?”
“Yes. My daughter is spending the night with a girlfriend.”
Her eyes welled with sudden tears, and she stood up abruptly and went to the refrigerator, where she pulled a bottle of Absolut vodka from the freezer. She threw a handful of ice cubes into a tumbler, poured a stiff four fingers, and brought the drink back to the table.
He could only imagine what she was feeling, thinking that the man who had abducted her older daughter had come to her home in the dead of night, that he had been right outside the house she and her younger child had come to for refuge. Her sense of security had been breached. She probably felt violated.
She looked at him now with defiance in her eyes as she raised the glass to her lips and took a long pull on the vodka.
“Did Detective Tanner tell you I’m an alcoholic?”
“No, ma’am,” he said without emotion. “Are you?”
“No,” she said, one corner of her mouth twisting upward in the smallest, most bitter kind of smile. “Despite my own best efforts.”
“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.”
Mendez leaned his elbows on the table and looked at her, puzzled, thinking of the B&Es they’d had in town recently. Nothing had been taken, but someone had broken in. He’d thought maybe it was a kid’s prank. Maybe not.
“Did anyone see him coming or going?” he asked.
“No.”
“How do you know it was him?”
“It was him.”
“Was he questioned?”
She laughed without humor. “For what? For being a ghost? I couldn’t prove anyone had been there at all. The police weren’t interested. Nothing had been taken. And it turns out it isn’t against the law to do someone’s laundry without asking. That was when I got the lecture for wasting the department’s time, manpower, and resources.”
“They didn’t even talk to him?”
“No. By then he had already threatened to sue for harassment—the police department and me personally. How’s that for nerve? He was stalking me and threatening to sue me for trying to do something about it.”
The injustice of that made him angry. Like Mavis Whitaker had said, sometimes it felt as if the bad guys had more rights than the people they preyed upon.
“Do you have a friend you can call to come and stay the rest of the night with you?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “I have a Walther PPK.”
Cold comfort, that, Mendez thought. And dangerous.
“Guns and alcohol aren’t a good combination,” he cautioned. “I would hate to see you hurt yourself.”
She laughed at that. “Clearly you haven’t known me long enough. Before you know it, you’ll be wishing I would put that gun in my mouth and pull the trigger.”
“I doubt that, ma’am.”
She bobbed her eyebrows as if to say We’ll see, and took another long drink of her vodka.
20
Lauren waited for a long time after Mendez left. She sat at the table in the great room, drinking and looking at her photograph of Leslie the night before she was taken.
She was a beautiful girl. Leah was pretty. Leslie was beautiful. There was such a fire in her, and it glowed out of her blue eyes and shone in her long dark hair. That spirit had been a force of energy everyone in the room would feel when she turned it on as part and parcel of a strong emotion.
Leslie would have done something extraordinary with her life.
Sometimes Lauren wished she could feel that energy when she thought of her daughter or when she looked at her photograph. Sometimes she thought that would be a sign to her that Leslie was still alive somewhere. Sometimes she feared it would mean she was gone and her spirit was visiting in an attempt to offer her mother some kind of comfort. It was a torment either way.
God, why can’t this ever be over? she wondered for the millionth time.
And for the millionth time she thought Because there is no God to end it.
There had been a time when that thought would have left her feeling upset and adrift. The belief system that had been the platform of her life had suddenly dropped out from under her. Now she just felt sad. Life had been so much easier when she was naïve to the cruel realities of the world. With experience
came wisdom—also known as disillusionment.
At least she had had nearly forty years of blissful ignorance. Leah hadn’t managed to even get out of childhood before the truth stripped the joy from her. Lauren wished she could have somehow spared her youngest from the experience. If she somehow could have put Leah into suspended animation that day before they realized Leslie was missing . . . Or if she could have erased any memory of her sister and the hell they had all been put through . . .
But Leah was a victim as much as Lauren was a victim because Leslie had been victimized.
She was so tired of it. Victim was not a word that she would ever have used to describe who she was. She would have said that she didn’t have it in her to be a victim, and yet she was—a truth made all the more bitter considering her reasons for coming to Oak Knoll.
How had he found her? How had he known to come to this house?
How dare he?
The anger that rose up through her was enough to choke on.
It was five after four in the morning. The world was still and dark. The wind had died. The universe seemed to be holding its breath so as not to wake the sleeping inhabitants of Earth.
The shock and fear that had grabbed hold of her earlier in the night had faded as well. A strange calm fell through Lauren now.
She sat quietly, sipping at her drink, thinking nothing would come of Detective Mendez’s good intentions. This was just another verse in a poem of futility, like a nightmare that returned again and again but with different players.
Mendez would try to be helpful, but nothing would come of it. She would become angry and frustrated. Her fury would scorch the earth of Oak Knoll like Sherman’s march from Atlanta to the sea.
Perhaps this was purgatory, or a living model of Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result.
Perhaps the time had finally come to take a different path.
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.
