Down the Darkest Road ok-3

by Tami Hoag

  Cal Dixon looked like he might choke. Mendez had never seen him at a loss for words. He watched him now grapple with his temper, his pride, his position. At the same time, Lauren Lawton stood her ground, battered and fragile yet strong as tempered steel, her eyes as bright as blue flame.

  “I don’t appreciate being threatened, Mrs. Lawton,” Dixon said with carefully modulated calm. “But I understand your position, and I understand your need to protect your daughter.

  “I’m going to have Detective Mendez see you home tonight,” he said. “I don’t think it would be in the interest of justice to press charges against you, though ultimately that decision is at the discretion of the district attorney.”

  “Thank you,” Lauren said, though if she felt relief she didn’t show it.

  Dixon turned to Mendez, his expression unreadable. “See Mrs. Lawton home.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And I will see you in my office tomorrow morning at oh eight hundred hours on the dot.”

  “Yes, sir,” Mendez said, not sure which of those orders he was dreading more.

  39

  “You don’t have to take me home,” Lauren said as they left the building by a side door. Mendez directed her toward his car in the parking lot. “My car is at the sports complex.”

  Her car was at the sports complex, but she had no keys, she realized. She had nothing with her because she had handed her purse off to Leah. Her purse with the gun in the side pocket. She hoped to God Leah hadn’t looked inside.

  Fear went through her like a cold wind. She had given her fifteen-year-old daughter a bag with a gun in it. In the blink of an eye she saw Leah as she had been that morning—crying, upset, angry, feeling lost and alone, worried that her mother was contemplating suicide. What about me? She thought about the concern Anne Leone had expressed, that Leah was holding too much inside, that kids like Leah were at risk for self-destructive behavior.

  Lauren stopped in her tracks. “I don’t have my keys. I dropped my purse on the tennis court. My daughter has it.”

  “Where is she?”

  “I sent her with her friend Wendy Morgan and Wendy’s mother.”

  “Sara Morgan?” he asked.

  “I don’t know where they live,” she admitted. As if she didn’t already feel like a bad mother. Not only had she sent her daughter off with a gun, she had sent her daughter home with a woman she’d only just met, not even knowing where the Morgans lived.

  “I do,” Mendez said.

  They rode in silence. Lauren had no interest in small talk or breaking the uncomfortable feeling that hung in the air. She didn’t care what he thought about the way she had spoken to his boss—or to him, for that matter. She was long past caring what people in law enforcement thought about her.

  She was more worried about Sara Morgan. What must the woman think of her? Hauled away for assault before they could even have dinner. Wendy was Leah’s only friend here. If her mother put an end to that friendship on Lauren’s account . . .

  And why wouldn’t she? If Leah was a target of a predator, then Wendy could be in danger too. Almost certainly Ballencoa would have been photographing both girls at the tennis courts. And according to Anne Leone, Wendy had already been through more than any child should have been subjected to—involved in a murder investigation, attacked by a schoolmate . . .

  In her mind Lauren kept going back to Ballencoa. It was his fault. He had chosen to photograph the girls. She had only put a stop to it. He had chosen to stalk the Lawton family. She couldn’t be held responsible for his choices . . . only her own.

  She had chosen to come here. She had put them all in jeopardy.

  “Just so you know,” Mendez said, breaking the silence, “we are working on Ballencoa. We’re not just sitting around with our thumbs up our asses.”

  “Yeah. I could see that tonight while he was photographing my daughter,” she returned sarcastically. “You were all over it.”

  “I want him off the streets for something we can prosecute him for,” he said, holding his temper. “If we can connect him to an actual crime and put him away, we get a warrant to search his property, and maybe we find something that links him to your daughter’s case. Maybe he’s locked up long enough that the DNA technology advances and the Santa Barbara PD can test the blood sample.”

  “But in the meantime he’s free to do whatever he wants. Forgive me if I don’t seem enthusiastic for your plan.”

  “That’s the system we have,” he said. “We can’t lock people up just because we don’t like them. There were plenty of people in Santa Barbara who thought your husband killed your daughter. Nobody locked him up either.”

  “Yeah. Look how well that worked out for me.”

  He pulled the car over suddenly and slammed it into park so hard the shoulder harness locked and caught her as she was thrown forward. The dashboard lights illuminated the hard angry lines of his face.

  “You can’t have it all ways, Lauren,” he said. “You’re not the first person to lose a loved one to a crime. You won’t be the last. And you’re not the only one who cares.

  “You think it doesn’t gall me that Roland Ballencoa can try to press charges against you?” he asked. “It makes me sick. You think I wouldn’t like to take that camera and shove it down his throat? I would love it, but the world doesn’t work that way. We have a system. It’s not always perfect, but it’s what we have, and I have to work within it.

  “I’m one part of an entire profession dedicated to finding justice for people like you and your daughter. This is what we do. This is what we live for. We get that you’ve lost a child. We get that this asshole has ruined your life, and given the chance he’ll ruin someone else’s.”

  “Then do something about it!” Lauren snapped back at him.

  “We’re trying!” he shouted back in her face. “I just told you that. It kills me that I can’t throw Ballencoa in a hole and let him rot. I feel like a heel that I had to question you tonight for taking action against him when I couldn’t.

  “I’m on your side, Lauren. And I don’t appreciate you sitting on your high horse like you’re the queen of the victims, looking down your nose at me like I’m some worthless lackey who doesn’t give a shit. I’m on suspension because I stood up for you, and I’d do it again because it was the right thing to do.”

  Lauren looked away, torn between the need to argue with him and the need to apologize. It seemed like she’d been the only one fighting for Leslie for so long. Mendez was new to the battle, but she could see him tire of it like all the others had, and in the end she would be the only one again.

  But she didn’t bother to explain that to him. In the end she sighed in resignation and murmured, “I’m sorry.”

  She could feel his gaze on her for a long, silent moment, but if he wanted to say something, he held it back. Finally, he put the car back in gear and pulled away from the curb.

  The Morgans lived in a newer two-story clapboard house in a style Lance had always called “California Country,” a West Coast interpretation of a Middle America country house with shutters and a porch. Though at five thousand square feet, set in a modern subdivision with a pool out back, there was very little “country” about it.

  Mendez led the way up the walk to the front door and rang the bell as if he’d done so before. Lauren hadn’t asked him how he knew Sara Morgan, though she supposed now it had something to do with the murder investigation Wendy had been involved in.

  Sara Morgan answered the front door, looking startled to see him.

  “Tony.”

  “I brought Mrs. Lawton by to pick up her daughter,” he said. He turned to Lauren and said curtly, “I’ll wait in the car.”

  Lauren was too concerned with her own awkwardness to notice his. Her stomach clenched like a fist. “Can I come in?” she asked. “I know I have some explaining to do.”

  Sara Morgan opened the door.

  “The girls are upstairs,” she said. “I was just having a
glass of wine. I’m guessing you might want one.”

  “I would be grateful,” Lauren said, following her through the gracious home to the big country kitchen. “Frankly, I’m grateful you didn’t slam the door in my face.”

  “Leah explained who that guy was,” Sara said, pouring from an open bottle of Merlot. “I can’t imagine what you must have felt when you saw him.”

  Wendy was her mother’s spitting image. Sara Morgan had the same wild mane of multi-blond waves, the same cornflower blue eyes. She was tall and athletic, casually dressed in yoga clothes. She handed a glass to Lauren and took a seat on a stool at the breakfast bar.

  “I don’t even know where to start,” Lauren said. “I’m sorry, first of all.”

  “Did you know he was here in Oak Knoll?”

  “I just found that out,” she lied. She took a sip of the wine, wishing she could drink half the glass at once. “The sheriff’s office is aware now, obviously. They know all about him.”

  As if that was supposed to offer Sara Morgan comfort. The sheriff’s office was aware of a man no one had been able to pin an abduction on, a man who was free to go about his life doing whatever he pleased—even if what pleased him was taking photographs of young girls playing tennis.

  “Leah said he stalked your family in Santa Barbara.”

  Lauren nodded.

  “That’s terrifying. I have to say, that’s terrifying to me too, Lauren. Wendy and Leah have become such close friends. But if Leah is in danger, then Wendy is too when they’re together. I can’t have that.”

  Lauren closed her eyes against the wave of pain she felt for her daughter. “I understand,” she said. “Better than anyone.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sara said. “I know the girls are totally in love with each other, but unless I can be right there with them, I really can’t let them see each other.”

  “I understand,” Lauren said again.

  “At least until the sheriff’s office can do something about him. They can do something, can’t they?”

  “Unfortunately, I’m the only one who broke the law tonight.”

  “That’s crazy!”

  Lauren managed a bitter smile. “Welcome to my world.”

  She checked her watch, as if it mattered. The time didn’t even register in her mind. It could have been eight o’clock or midnight. “I should take Leah home. Thank you for looking after her.”

  Sara Morgan called the girls downstairs. They came as if they were marching to their doom, Leah looking particularly grim-faced. They promised to call each other the next day. Leah picked up Lauren’s purse from the front hall table and handed it to her without a word.

  Lauren tried to put a hand on her daughter’s shoulder as they walked out to the car. Leah shrugged her off and hurried ahead of her.

  It was going to be a long ride home.

  40

  No one spoke on the ride to the sports complex. The only sound in the car was the unintelligible cackling of the police radio and Leah’s occasional sniffling in the backseat as she tried not to cry.

  Lauren’s BMW was the only car still in the parking lot. Mendez said nothing as he pulled up beside it. Lauren said nothing as she got out. The sound of car doors slamming seemed deafening. Leah got in the backseat rather than sit beside her mother. Lauren made no comment.

  Mendez followed them out of the parking lot, then turned and went his own way. Lauren drove away from downtown into the night that seemed to grow darker with every block. The charming house at the end of Old Mission Road looked large and foreboding, its dark windows like gaping holes in a fright-house smile.

  Lauren turned on every light she passed as they went inside. Leah went straight upstairs without a word. Lauren let her go, at a loss.

  What was she supposed to do? What was she supposed to say? She couldn’t tell Leah their lives would be normal in a day or two or ten. She couldn’t tell her Roland Ballencoa wouldn’t be a threat to her or to her friends. She couldn’t make anything right. She only managed to make things worse and worse and worse by trying to do the right thing.

  She poured herself a drink and stood looking out into the night. Headlights came down the street, then swung around at the gate. The security light illuminated the logos of the sheriff’s office on the side of the car as it turned around and cruised away.

  Five minutes later a second set of headlights came slowly down the road. Lauren’s heart beat just a little harder. She held her breath in her lungs just a little longer.

  Ballencoa had been screaming for her arrest when last she’d seen him. Would they have told him at the sheriff’s office that they had sent her home? She had broken his camera—his alleged livelihood, though Lauren knew he lived as much off the proceeds of his lawsuits as he did his abilities as a photographer.

  She suspected the worst of what she had damaged had been his dignity, as if he deserved to have any.

  The car slowed and swung around at the gate. A car, not a van. The lights cut out.

  Lauren went to her handbag and got out the Walther. Feeling more numb than frightened, she went to the door and stepped out onto the front porch. She left the door open. She could quickly dart back inside and call 911 if she needed to. A warning shot would buy her a little extra time.

  The driver’s door opened on the car, and Greg Hewitt stepped out under the security light.

  Sticking the gun in the pocket of her torn linen slacks, Lauren walked down to the gate.

  “Are you all right?” he asked as she stepped into the pool of light.

  “They didn’t throw me in jail, as you can see,” she said, lifting her arms away from her body.

  He sighed and frowned. “Jesus Christ, Lauren, what were you thinking?”

  “I’m tired, Greg. I don’t want to have to explain myself to you. You of all people should know what I was doing. He was taking pictures of my daughter.”

  He swept a hand back over his surfer-blond hair and rubbed at the tension in the back of his neck. “If I’d gotten there two minutes sooner . . .”

  “Why were you there at all?”

  “I followed him there. I figured he’d be up to his old tricks. Then I had to go to the john and I lost him. Next thing I heard the commotion.”

  And then he’d been there, pulling her away from Ballencoa, putting himself between them, shoving Ballencoa back as he tried to advance on her.

  “I didn’t ask for your help,” she said, thinking, My God, what an ungrateful bitch you are, Lauren.

  “Yeah, well, too bad. No charge,” he said. “Or maybe I could have a drink for my trouble.”

  She should have dismissed him out of hand. She had thrown him off the property just a few hours before. But she was exhausted and worn down, and tired of drinking alone. He had come to her rescue at the tennis courts as if he hadn’t cared that she had belted him in the mouth just that afternoon. That could pass for friendship, she supposed. It would for now.

  “You’re not coming in my house,” she said, even as she stepped back from the gate and pressed the button to open it manually. “My daughter is asleep upstairs.”

  He took a seat on the porch. Lauren went back inside and fixed two drinks without allowing herself to think about what she was doing. Her brain ached from thinking. Her soul ached from the constant self-flagellation. She wanted the numbness the alcohol would bring.

  She didn’t ask Greg Hewitt if he liked vodka. She didn’t care. Beggars couldn’t be choosers, after all. She went back out onto the porch, handed him his glass, and took a seat.

  She remembered when she and Sissy had bought the bent willow porch furniture at a flea market in Los Olivos. They had been tickled to death to find it—two settees, two high-backed chairs, an assortment of side tables and footstools. Lauren had had pillows and cushions made from faded old quilts and coverlets.

  “Is he pressing charges?” Hewitt asked.

  Lauren shrugged. “I doubt the district attorney will want the trouble. The court of public opinion ho
lds more sway on political careers than the opinion of Roland Ballencoa.

  “He’ll sue me for the camera and the lens, and loss of income, no doubt,” she said. “So I can have the pleasure of paying to put him back in business as a pervert.”

  “That sucks, but it beats jail.”

  “You said you followed him to the sports complex. What else has he been doing today?”

  “Nothing much. I went by his house as he was leaving. He made a couple of stops—the gas station, the drugstore, one of those mailbox places—then went to the sports center.”

  She wondered if he’d bothered to check his mail at his house. Maybe not if he used a rented mailbox. Now that she thought of it, it seemed odd no one at the sheriff’s office had mentioned the note she had put back in his mailbox that morning. Further evidence that she was stalking him, he would say. True enough, she thought.

  How will you like the tables turned on you, asshole?

  “Don’t you have a paying job?” she asked.

  “I’m between divorce cases.”

  “Nothing better to do. Might as well check on the crazy stalker woman.”

  “Something like that,” he said, sipping his drink.

  Lauren tipped her head back and sighed as the alcohol began to loosen the knots in her muscles.

  Greg Hewitt reached over, cupped her chin in his hand, and turned her face to look at the abrasion on her cheek in the dim porch light. “You should probably do something about that.”

  His concern struck her with bitter humor. “That’s the least of my problems.”

  “You shouldn’t have come here, Lauren,” he said. “Nothing good will come from it.”

  “I have to fight for Leslie,” she said. “Whatever comes of it, I have to fight for my daughter. That’s my job. I don’t get to stop being her mother just because it isn’t pleasant or just because she isn’t here. If I don’t fight for her, who will?”

  “What is it you want, Lauren?” he asked. “You want her back? You know she’s probably dead.”