Down the Darkest Road ok-3

by Tami Hoag

  His death was ruled an accident. I knew better. Everyone knew better. It was the truth hidden in plain view. He had driven willingly to his death with a police escort, metaphorically speaking. He simply had not been able to take it any longer—the grief, the guilt, the suspicion, the not knowing, the terrible imagining of what had happened to Leslie.

  I have never and will never forgive him for what he did that night on the Cold Spring Canyon bridge. I understand better than anyone why he did it. Many nights I have envied him the peace of death and cursed him for leaving the burden of life and living on me.

  And yet I loved him so, and still do. His absence punched a hole in my heart that aches every single day and all night long. We were supposed to walk this road hand in hand, side by side. Without him, I have no balance and no anchor.

  I miss him with a longing that goes so deep I will never see the bottom of it.

  As I look into my future I can’t envision the day that another man will make me feel the way he did. The friend who introduced us always said that Lance and I picked up a conversation where we had left off in another lifetime. I know it will be another lifetime before I feel that again.

  Lauren saved her work and got up from the desk. She felt as empty as a ghost, as if anyone could pass a hand right through her and touch nothing. She had nothing left, not even emotion. What a blessing that was. She didn’t have to feel the hopelessness of a lonely future that stretched out in front of her like a deserted road.

  She thanked God she had driven away most of the former friends who would have made it their mission to fix her up and marry her off. And her general disposition had served to ward off most of the men who might have taken a shot.

  Only once in the last two years had she let her guard down enough to allow a man near her, and then only for mercenary reasons—or so she told herself. She didn’t want to think of herself as a woman with a woman’s sexual needs. Better to believe she had slept with Greg Hewitt as a means to a practical end. She felt like a whore either way.

  She put it out of her head now as if it had meant nothing at all.

  It wasn’t late—just nine thirty—but the house was quiet. Leah hadn’t been feeling well when Lauren picked her up at the ranch. She had barely eaten dinner and had gone to bed not long after.

  Anne Leone had told Lauren her daughter had done fine at her sleepover, but in practically the next breath had expressed her concern that Leah was possibly wound too tight, masking feelings that would have to find an outlet somewhere. And it was true. Leah was very good at masking her feelings. She didn’t like calling attention to herself. Where Leslie had always felt the need to challenge and push boundaries, Leah had always contained herself and meticulously followed every rule. She had always been the perfect child.

  Lauren had to admit she had too often been willing to take advantage of that in these years since Leslie’s abduction. The burden of it all was exhausting. If her remaining child chose not to come to her with problems or fears or feelings too difficult to deal with, it was so much easier for her to accept relief than question that illusion of peace. Don’t borrow trouble, her own mother always said. Don’t borrow trouble when you can just ignore it.

  She went to her daughter’s room now. A light was still glowing through the crack of the barely open door. Lauren knocked softly and pushed the door open another couple of inches.

  Leah hastily swiped tears off her cheeks and pulled the covers up around her. She sat tucked up against the headboard, hugging a pillow. In that instant she looked eight instead of nearly sixteen. A little girl lost in sadness.

  “How are you feeling, sweetheart?” Lauren said quietly, coming to sit on the edge of the bed.

  “I’m okay.”

  “No, you’re not,” Lauren said softly, reaching out to touch her daughter’s cheek. “Sad?”

  The tears welled up and over her lashes like big raindrops. “I miss Daddy.”

  “I do too, baby,” Lauren confessed, taking Leah in her arms and holding her close. “I miss him so much.”

  She couldn’t help but wonder where they would be if Lance hadn’t left them. Would they have pulled themselves together by now? Would they have found some way to cope? Would they have left Santa Barbara? Or would the wound have closed up around them and scarred over, the memory of it fading over time?

  Or would they have come apart at the seams? The statistics of marriages surviving the loss of a child had been against them. Guilt and blame infected relationships. The differences in how each partner handled the grief often caused resentment.

  Lauren would never have given up or given in on the idea of finding Leslie. Would Lance?

  “I’m doing the best I can, sweetheart,” she murmured, not sure if her words were for Leah or for her husband.

  “I know, Mommy,” Leah whispered.

  “Do you know how much I love you?” Lauren asked.

  Leah nodded.

  “Are you okay?”

  She nodded again, looking down.

  Lauren knew that was a lie told for her benefit, and as she had done so many times, she accepted it as truth, more willing to take the brief hit of guilt than find out what kind of disaster might be brewing behind door number two. Even if she vowed not to, she would put off changing her ways for another night, using exhaustion as an excuse.

  She kissed her daughter’s forehead and told her to get some sleep, and hoped that Anne Leone was wrong.

  In the hall, she went to the window that looked out on the front yard, her skin crawling at the memory of last night. He had been out there, looking in at her. Tonight she had twice seen county cruisers turn around in front of the gate. Detective Mendez’s doing, she supposed.

  She went downstairs and made yet another patrol, checking locks on doors and windows before going to the kitchen to fix a cup of tea. She thought again of Anne as she went about the task. She liked Anne’s no-nonsense yet compassionate way. She wondered if maybe Anne was the better person to help Leah on her path through the grief of losing her sister and her father. Lauren knew she herself wasn’t qualified to help anyone. For her to help Leah was like sending a person who couldn’t swim to save a drowning man. The blind leading the blind, as Anne had said.

  She thought of little Haley Leone, the only witness to a terrible crime—her mother murdered literally before her very eyes. Anne and her husband had given the child stability, safety, security. Lauren didn’t feel as if she could offer any of those things to her own daughter—or even to herself.

  She wondered how Leah would feel about talking with Anne.

  Lauren curled into a corner of the sofa in front of the great room’s massive stone fireplace and sipped her tea. She thought of Leah before all of this had happened—Leah as a little girl Haley’s age and a little older—and realized she wasn’t exactly right in thinking her youngest didn’t share her feelings.

  She remembered long quiet talks with Leah about all kinds of things—her love of butterflies and her kindness for children who were different or awkward, her sense of fair play and justice, her very serious concerns about hurting the feelings of her favorite dolls when she became too grown up to play with them.

  No, Lauren thought, Leah wasn’t a child who closed herself off; she was a young lady too sensitive to her mother’s fragility. She was a shy younger sister pushed into the shadows by a sibling whose presence was huge and bright, even in her absence.

  What a sorry excuse for a mother you are, Lauren.

  She was more concerned with vengeance for the daughter she didn’t have than with being a parent to the daughter she did have.

  She would talk to Anne.

  Setting her cup on the coffee table, she picked up the pile of the day’s mail and began to sort through it. Bills and junk mail. An invitation to join a gym. A brochure advertising all the events of the upcoming summer festival of music.

  It always struck her as odd how the rest of the world went around the catastrophes of the people in it, like water
parting around boulders in a river and running on as if it didn’t matter. That was life. It just kept going, whether any one person wanted it to or not.

  The Oak Knoll Summer Festival of Music was going to go on as planned without anyone caring that Roland Ballencoa had come to live in their midst, or that Lauren Lawton was struggling with the need to do something about that.

  She set the brochure aside and went on to the next piece of mail, a plain ivory envelope with no address and no stamp.

  Her heart began to pound. No address, no stamp.

  Goose bumps prickled her skin.

  The flap of the envelope was stuck shut just at its very point. She popped it free with a flick of her thumb, pulled the card from it, and read the single typed line.

  Did you miss me?

  29

  Mendez owned a small Spanish-style house less than a mile from Roland Ballencoa as the crow flew. The neighborhood, built mostly in the forties and fifties, was quiet and safe. His neighbors were a mix of young families and empty nesters. He knew most of them by name.

  He had fixed the place up himself—and with the help of buddies and brothers-in-law—knocking down walls, remodeling the kitchen and bathrooms. The back door led out to a small walled courtyard garden with a fountain gurgling in one corner.

  He had built a covered patio on the back side of his single-car garage for a workout area, and hung both his speed bag and heavy bag from a sturdy beam along with a chin-up bar bolted between a pair of posts.

  He worked at the speed bag now, falling into the mesmerizing rhythm where his fists stroked the bag and his mind floated, almost as if in meditation. A fine sheen of sweat coated his bare chest as he channeled his anger and frustration into the focused energy needed to work the bag. The sweat beaded and ran down between his shoulder blades to pool in the shallow dip at the small of his back and soak into the back of his shorts.

  He had begun the day doing the same thing. Too agitated to sleep, he had worked the speed bag and gone for a run. Now he would do the same thing to burn off his temper.

  Two days without pay. Son of a bitch.

  Two days without pay. His own damn fault.

  Two days without pay. He would put them to good use.

  He had spoken to Vince Leone on the phone about meeting to discuss Ballencoa. Vince was due back in town that night, but had put him off, wanting to spend the evening with Anne and the kids. Vince was very strict about his time with his family.

  That was just as well. Mendez wanted to go back to Santa Barbara to look through more of the Lawton case files at the SBPD. He wanted all the background he could get on Ballencoa before he presented the case to Vince.

  There was no doubt in his mind Vince was going to find Roland Ballencoa fascinating.

  Mendez was still both astonished and pissed off that the man had come to the front door with a tape recorder in his pocket. He must have seen them from a window as they stood on his front porch waiting for him to answer the door. He would have made them for cops. And he had a litigious background, having sued or threatened to sue at least two agencies. This probably wasn’t the first time he’d had that tape recorder handy.

  Ballencoa’s first adult conviction had been at the age of nineteen. He was now thirty-eight. He’d had two decades playing his sick games, honing his skills. Mendez wanted all of those intervening years accounted for. He wanted to know where Roland Ballencoa had lived, worked, slept, took a shit, and hunted his victims. If Roland Ballencoa had a head cold in Salinas in 1982, he wanted to know about it.

  The best predictor of future behavior was past behavior. Mendez wanted nothing this creep might do to come as a surprise to him. He was about to become the world expert on Roland Ballencoa.

  If Ballencoa thought he was going to play his games in Oak Knoll, he had picked the wrong town, and he had sure as hell picked the wrong cop to fuck around with.

  Mendez hit the speed bag with one last hard pop and stepped back, blowing out a sigh and working his shoulders back. The sun had gone down a while ago, taking the heat of the day with it. Now the cool evening air chilled the sweat on his skin. He grabbed a towel and dried off, then pulled a clean black T-shirt over his head and went out of the side gate for a run.

  His route took him past the Presbyterian Church on Piedra Boulevard, where the late AA meeting had taken a break to let attendees grab a smoke on the lawn. He waved as he went past, recognizing a couple of guys from work, a firefighter, and an EMT.

  A few more blocks and he was passing the tennis courts at the city sports complex. Bugs swarmed around the high bright lights above the courts. Singles and doubles matches were going on. Kids were hanging around the concession stand enjoying the evening. A pack of smiling, giggling college girls waved as he passed. He waved back and tried not to think about the fact that he was now old enough to be their father.

  Tanner had told him Ballencoa liked to photograph sporting events. That had been one of his angles to meet young women. He would photograph the athletes one day, then bring the proofs to the next event and let them order copies. Smart. Like a shark cruising seal beaches, passing out fish.

  Witnesses had put him at the softball field the day Leslie Lawton had gone missing.

  Groups of young women wouldn’t be as wary as individuals. Athletic girls tended to be self-assured and outgoing, and even less apt to be concerned about a guy with a camera. He would have been able to approach them, talk about their race, their dive, their ball game, their tennis match, and they wouldn’t have found that strange at all.

  He probably gave them his business card. He probably got addresses and phone numbers from them on the excuse of wanting to send their photos to them. Girls who might not otherwise ever give that kind of personal information to a stranger would think nothing of it. He wasn’t really a stranger, was he? He was the photographer. They saw him at all the games . . .

  And once Ballencoa had their addresses, he could go by their homes to see how they lived. Did they have roommates? Did they live with family? What was the schedule of the households? Who went to work early? Who came home late? When was the house empty?

  When he knew the house would be empty, he could find a way in . . .

  The last thing Mendez had done before leaving work for his suspension had been to write an alert to the watch sergeants. The patrol deputies needed to be on the lookout for Ballencoa’s van at the parks and sports fields in particular, and around town and the county in general. They wouldn’t be able to tail Ballencoa without him screaming harassment, but Ballencoa couldn’t stop them doing their jobs either.

  As for Lauren Lawton, a radio car would cruise Old Mission Road regularly tonight—though Ballencoa was certainly too smart to go back to her house so soon. He would know they would be on the lookout for him tonight. If he was smart, tonight he would lay low. If he was cocky, he would go out trolling. But he wouldn’t go back to Lauren Lawton’s house.

  The lactic acid was building in the dense muscles of Mendez’s thighs and calves. His legs were starting to feel heavy as he turned onto Coronado.

  Dixon would have his ass for setting foot on Ballencoa’s street, but he didn’t intend on getting caught. He wouldn’t put so much as a toe on the bastard’s property, but the sidewalks belonged to the public. He was as free to roam the streets as any pervert window-peeping criminal.

  Even as he thought it, he could see the steam coming out of the sheriff’s ears.

  No lights burned in Ballencoa’s windows. There was no sign of the van. Mendez jogged past the house, across the street, and turned right down the side street, slowing to a walk. Hands on his hips, he walked up and down, breathing, checking his pulse, letting the acid flush out of his leg muscles.

  A small building sat at the back of Ballencoa’s yard. A second small garage. Mendez considered the wisdom of walking down the alley. That might be pushing it. If a neighbor caught a glimpse of him from a window, they might call him in as a prowler. He didn’t want to have to explain tha
t to anyone. He wouldn’t be able to get into the building at any rate. For now, it was enough to know it was there. If the day came that he had to write an affidavit for a search warrant, he would want that building included.

  Guys like Roland Ballencoa kept souvenirs of their exploits. For a sexual deviant, a trinket from a victim could help him relive his fantasy. Ballencoa had gotten caught down in San Diego stealing women’s dirty underwear. Chances were good he had a stash of panties somewhere. If among that stash of panties he had a pair with Leslie Lawton’s DNA on them . . .

  The day was coming when prosecutors would be able to get a conviction with evidence like that.

  Ballencoa was living here now, but he still had the lease on Carl Eddard’s rental in San Luis. Who knew what he might have stashed in the attic rafters there? For that matter, who knew what other hiding places Roland Ballencoa might have?

  Mendez had known of killers who rented public storage lockers to keep human remains. He knew of a case where a killer had left a fifty-five-gallon drum in the basement of a house he sold. It wasn’t until two owners later that someone had opened the drum and discovered what was left of the man’s missing pregnant girlfriend.

  Was Leslie Lawton in a drum in the building at the back of Ballencoa’s rented home?

  He couldn’t know, and, as it stood, he had no legal grounds to find out. As frustrating as that was to him, he couldn’t imagine what Lauren Lawton lived with every day.

  With too many unsettling questions in the back of his head, Mendez jogged home.

  30

  Denise Garland, LPN, Mercy General Hospital, lived in a one-bedroom guesthouse that had undoubtedly begun its life as a garage—as had many small rentals in the downtown and McAster College neighborhoods of Oak Knoll. The home had the squat build of a garage, though it had been dolled up with shutters and siding, and the driveway had been replaced with a concrete sidewalk and a little patch of lawn. A weak yellow bug light burned beside the front door.