Down the Darkest Road ok-3

by Tami Hoag

  The Gracidas were not wealthy people. They made their living from their ranch, from Maria’s teaching and training business and Felix’s polo school. They couldn’t afford to lose a fussy wealthy client because Maria was a no-show for a lesson. And the last thing Leah wanted was to be the cause of more trouble.

  “I’m going to call and check on you,” Maria said, reluctantly moving toward the door. “I want your mom to call as soon as she gets home. Okay?”

  Leah promised.

  She locked the door behind Maria Gracida as she left.

  The house was quiet. The tension that had filled the air that morning was gone. Leah welcomed the calm. She felt a little better since she’d had her meltdown. The pressure inside her had gone. Now she mostly felt empty and tired.

  Maybe she would do what she had told Maria—just go to bed and sleep, and hope the world looked brighter when she woke up. Although she dreaded having to face her mother again after all the rotten things she’d said that morning, now she just wanted to apologize and beg forgiveness, and pretend it never happened.

  She went upstairs and lay down across her bed, too tired to change out of her riding clothes other than to let her clogs fall off her feet onto the floor. She still had sugar cubes in the pocket of her breeches, and her steel hoof pick hung from a snap attached to a belt loop.

  The Gracidas’s farrier had given it to her to clean the horses’ feet. He had forged it himself, and he gave one to every groom who worked with the horses he shod. Lauren unsnapped it from her belt loop and looked at it just to occupy her attention for a few moments.

  The slender steel had been formed into a unique curve that mimicked the number 5. The top bar of the 5 had the sharp end designed to dig the debris from the crevices of the horse’s foot. The curve of the 5 shape fit perfectly in the hand to give just the right leverage. All the grooms at the Gracidas’s wore their picks clipped to a belt loop, at the ready. No horse came out of a stall in their stables with dirty feet.

  Leah clipped hers back onto the snap.

  She wanted to sleep. She wanted to sleep but not dream. She wanted her mom to come home. She wanted not to be alone.

  If Leslie hadn’t been taken, she wouldn’t have been alone, she told herself. Even when they hadn’t been together, they had still been sisters. She had known that no matter what happened during the day, at the end of the day Leslie would be there for her, and they would talk, and everything would be all right.

  “I’m sorry I said I wished you were dead,” she murmured now as she stared at the photograph she kept on her nightstand—of the two of them sitting together on one of Daddy’s horses with Daddy, so handsome, standing holding the bridle. Leslie had been nine at the time, Leah five and missing two front teeth. Leslie sat behind Leah with her arms wrapped around her. She remembered how safe it made her feel to have her sister’s arms around her. How sad it made her feel now to think that she would probably never have that again.

  She shivered as the emotions began to rise inside her once more. She got up and began to pace, wrapping her arms tightly around herself.

  She wished her mom was home. She wondered where she’d gone. What if she’d done something crazy again? Leah had been terrified to see her attack Ballencoa at the tennis courts. It had seemed like something out of a terrible movie, like her mother had been possessed or something. What if something like that happened again? What if she’d gotten arrested?

  The idea made Leah angry. No one had arrested him. No one seemed to care that he’d taken Leslie. No one seemed to care about what was right. They only cared about what they could prove. It was like a game, and he knew how to play it better than anyone.

  Frustration and anger rejoined her other emotions, and the pressure inside her built and built. She wanted it to go away. She thought about the razor blade hidden in the book on her nightstand. She could cut herself. She didn’t want to, but she hated this feeling so much. It scared her so badly. But what would happen if she cut herself and the pressure didn’t go away? Then what? Would she cut herself again and again? Would she cut herself so badly she might bleed to death?

  It scared her that she would even think that could happen.

  Why couldn’t her mom come home?

  Suddenly the telephone rang and Leah jumped a foot in the air. It wasn’t the normal ring of a phone call. It rang three times in quick succession, which was the intercom for the front door.

  No one could come to the door without first coming through the gate. Only people with the code could come through the gate. But no one with the gate code would ring the doorbell.

  Leah stared at the telephone on her nightstand, afraid to answer it. But as it rang again, she thought again of her mother. What if something had happened to her?

  On the third ring she picked up the phone. The man on the other end spoke with authority.

  “Leah, I’m with the sheriff’s office. There’s been an accident. I’m here to take you to the hospital.”

  The sheriff’s office probably had some kind of code to get through gates, Leah thought. That made sense.

  “Was it a car accident?” she asked, thinking a million things at once. Was her mother dead? Was she alive? Had she been drinking and driving? She drank too much. Leah had told her.

  “Yes, a car accident,” the man said.

  She could hear her mother’s voice from just hours ago: You know you would never be left alone, her mother said. If something ever did happen—and I’m not saying that anything will—but you need to know you will always be taken care of, sweetheart. Your aunt Meg would take care of you—

  “Oh my God,” Leah said, fear grabbing hold of her like a hand closing around her throat. She wasn’t supposed to open the door to strangers, but he was from the sheriff’s department and he knew her name. He wouldn’t know her name if he was a stranger. Someone had to have told him.

  “She’s in pretty bad shape, Leah,” he said. “We need to go now.”

  Her mother needed her. What if she died? What if she died before Leah could get to her and tell her how sorry she was for all the hateful things she’d said that morning?

  She had to go.

  50

  “Ballencoa had to know she was here,” Tanner said. “Since when do we assume he ever tells the truth about anything?”

  “The time line doesn’t lie,” Mendez said. “He moved here the beginning of May. How could he know Lauren was going to move here a month later? She didn’t send him a change of address card ahead of time.”

  He remembered Lauren saying that very thing to him when he had pulled her over that first afternoon.

  Do you have any reason to think he might know you’re here?

  I didn’t send him the ‘We’re Moving’ notice, she had snapped. Do you think I’m an idiot?

  Had Ballencoa seen her by chance—as Lauren had claimed she had seen him by chance in the Pavilions parking lot? Was it dumb luck that he had come across her?

  “I don’t believe in coincidence,” Mendez muttered. “And if Lauren thought he knew she was here, she would have been looking over her shoulder. She would have noticed his vehicle when she came out of the shooting range that day.

  “She didn’t think he knew she was here,” he said. “That’s why she was so freaked out when she found that photograph. If she was the one hunting him, how did he know where to find her?”

  A bad feeling scratching at the back of his neck, he went to the phone and called Latent Prints.

  “Did you guys lift anything usable off that photograph I brought you a couple of days ago?”

  “Actually, yes. A thumb and two pretty good partials,” the tech told him. “We haven’t heard anything back yet.”

  “Check on that, will you?” Mendez said. “ASAP, please. I’m at extension thirty-four.”

  The call came back ten minutes later.

  “I’ve got your hit, detective. The print is a probable match to a former guest of the state penal system.”

  Mendez
listened, a sick feeling curdling in his stomach like bad milk as he took in the information. He hung up the phone and looked at Tanner and Hicks.

  “We’ve got a problem,” he said. “The print comes back Michael Craig Houston.”

  The silence between the three of them swelled like a balloon as the implications set in.

  “Oh my God,” Tanner murmured.

  Michael Craig Houston. Roland Ballencoa’s former cellmate. His suspected accomplice in the unproven murder of his aunt.

  The first thing Lauren did was go to a copy center near the McAster campus and photocopy every page of the journal dated 1985–1986. She put the copy in a manila envelope and mailed it to Detective Mendez at the sheriff’s office. Whatever might happen with Ballencoa, this would end up in the hands of someone who might be able to derive something from it.

  She then went into a small electronics store and purchased a mini-cassette recorder, batteries, and cassette tapes. She kept her head down and her sunglasses on, and still she drew some curious looks from other shoppers. Her forearms were scratched and her clothes were dirty, she realized. She probably looked like she’d been living in a cardboard box.

  Her suspicions were confirmed when she went into the ladies’ room and looked at herself in the small mirror above the sink. It didn’t matter. She had more important things to think about than her appearance.

  She set up the cassette recorder, tested it, then went about finding a way to conceal it on her body, finally wedging it inside her bra beneath her right breast. It was uncomfortable, but it worked. The T-shirt she wore had been Lance’s and was several sizes too big for her, hanging loosely away from the slight curves of her body.

  She checked the positioning of the Walther pressed snugly against her belly by the control-top panty. It had shifted some as she’d run away from Ballencoa’s house. She adjusted it now and thought back to her last day at the shooting range.

  Body, body, head shot.

  Body, body, head shot.

  She held her hands out in front of her, fingers spread wide. She had expected the shaking to be much worse.

  Would she be able to point and pull the trigger if she needed to?

  She had imagined that moment so many times in the last four years. Roland Ballencoa had died a thousand deaths in her dreams. Was she really prepared to make that dream a reality?

  I’m ready to be done with this, she thought.

  She needed an answer from him. She couldn’t say with certainty what she might do when she got one.

  How stupid are you, Lauren? she wondered. He’ll tell you what you want to hear if you have a gun to his head.

  Her answer to herself was: I’ll know.

  She would be able to see it, even in those cold, flat eyes. She would know. Because this was about Leslie, she would be able to sense a lie, or know the truth . . . or so she told herself.

  This would be the moment everything had been building toward for the last four years. The final showdown. Good versus Evil. Mother versus child predator. A strange kind of excitement swirled through Lauren. She was going to know once and for all what had happened to her daughter . . . or die trying.

  51

  Michael Craig Houston had been released from the minimum security section of the California Men’s Colony prison in San Luis Obispo in January after serving two years of a six-year sentence for larceny. His rap sheet was long. Mostly, it seemed he liked to swindle women, but he wasn’t above burglary, and he had been known to carry a gun and to use it as a threat.

  Even in his mug shot he exuded the cockiness of a guy who believed he could get by on his looks alone. Just another smart-ass would-be mastermind con man too lazy to do real work. The only thing significant about Michael Craig Houston’s life as far as Mendez was concerned was his connection to Roland Ballencoa.

  They had served time together in the Humboldt County jail in Eureka, California, and had both been questioned in the death of Ballencoa’s aunt. They had given each other alibis for the weekend the woman had died.

  Because of Ballencoa’s personal proclivities for solitary perversion, Mendez hadn’t given any serious thought to the prior partnership. The name Houston had never come up again after Ballencoa had moved to San Diego. He figured the murder of the aunt had probably been a one-off for the money. Ballencoa wasn’t the sort of man to have friends. Yet Michael Craig Houston was here in Oak Knoll. He had left a photograph of Lauren Lawton on the windshield of her car.

  “I’ll contact the Men’s Colony and have them check the visitation records,” Hicks said. “Ballencoa has been in San Luis for the past two years. Let’s see if he was in contact with Houston before he got out.”

  “How the hell does he figure into this?” Mendez wondered aloud, pacing up and down the length of the time line they had stretched across the whiteboard at the front of the room.

  “Crime makes strange bedfellows. Could be they stay connected through the money from the aunt,” Hicks offered. “If Houston killed the aunt or helped Ballencoa kill the aunt, that’s a tricky partnership. Ballencoa couldn’t just say thanks and good-bye. The other guy knows the truth. They’ll always be connected.”

  “Maybe Houston is like one of those remora fish that hang on sharks,” Tanner suggested. “They’re not exactly friends, but it’s a symbiotic relationship.”

  “But how would Houston benefit from stalking Lauren Lawton?” Mendez asked.

  “He’s a con man,” Hicks pointed out. “He must see an angle to play. There has to be money in it for him one way or another.”

  “There’s a reward,” Tanner said. “The Lawtons established it early on in the investigation. Fifty grand for information leading to the recovery of Leslie and the prosecution of her abductor.”

  “Houston knows Ballencoa did it and he’s going to rat him out? Set him up?” Mendez said. “Why not just pick up the phone and call your department, Danni? Why the charade?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “You asked for money. There it is. Fifty thousand reasons for somebody to do something.”

  Mendez rubbed the back of his neck where the muscles had gone as hard as petrified wood. “Forget the money. Ballencoa likes to play games. How does Houston fit in to that scenario?”

  “Maybe Houston is Ballencoa’s beard,” Tanner offered. “Houston does the dirty work so Ballencoa can alibi himself. He can say he’s not stalking Lauren. He wasn’t anywhere near her at the time this or that happened. Now you’ve got a fingerprint on a photograph, but it’s not Roland’s fingerprint. You’ve got nothing on him even though you know he’s behind it.”

  “It’s just a fucking game,” Mendez muttered.

  “It’s payback,” Tanner said. “Lauren kept the spotlight turned up on him the whole time in Santa Barbara. First she made it impossible for him to leave because he would have looked guilty. Then she made it impossible for him to stay because she wouldn’t let it alone.”

  “I don’t care what he calls it,” Mendez said. “We need to shut it down.”

  He went back to the phone and dialed Lauren’s number again, tapping his foot impatiently while he listened to the phone ring unanswered on the other end. He needed to find her. He needed to show her Michael Craig Houston’s mug shot.

  “If Houston went onto Mrs. Lawton’s property and planted that photograph, we can pick him up on the trespassing charge,” Hicks said.

  “If we can find him,” Mendez said. “We need to find out what he’s driving, where he’s staying. Let’s get Trammell and Hamilton on that.”

  If they could find Michael Craig Houston and question him, maybe they could pluck loose a thread to connect Ballencoa—although Tanner was right: Having Houston’s print on the photograph only served to distance Ballencoa from a stalking charge—which brought him right back to the idea that Ballencoa was playing a game. And Michael Craig Houston was his ringer.

  52

  Lauren looked at her watch, nervous at the time. She needed to call Maria Gracida and ask
her to keep Leah, make up some kind of plausible excuse for being late to pick her up.

  What would she say? I’m on my way to confront the man who stole Leslie. I might be a little late? There was the very real possibility she might not come back at all.

  She told herself she couldn’t think that way. For once, she had the upper hand. She was the one with the leverage—and the gun.

  She went back to the 7-Eleven and used the same pay phone Ballencoa had used to make his mystery phone call, wiping the receiver off with the tail of her T-shirt, grimacing at the idea that he had held it in his hand and put it to his face.

  The phone at the Gracida stables rang and rang. Lauren listened impatiently. She’d spent enough time in working barns to know there was no receptionist to take calls. The priority of the staff was the horses. If someone who spoke English happened to be near the phone, it would get answered. If Maria was teaching or riding, or there was no English-speaking groom, or a client kind enough to pick up nearby, the call would eventually be picked up by the answering machine in the office.

  “Rancho Gracida, Maria speaking.”

  “Maria, it’s Lauren Lawton.”

  “Oh, Lauren, you’re home. I’m so glad.”

  “I’m not home, actually,” Lauren said. “I was just calling to let you know—to let Leah know—I might be late.”

  “Oh . . . well . . . I took Leah home a while ago,” Maria said. “She wasn’t feeling well. I told her I would wait with her until you got back, but she just wanted to go to bed. I made sure she locked the door behind me.”

  A strange, cold sensation went through Lauren. Suddenly she wished she hadn’t been so hasty in turning down Greg Hewitt’s suggestion that he keep an eye on Leah. She felt her daughter was safe at the Gracidas’s; there were so many people around that nothing could happen and go unnoticed. And Ballencoa wouldn’t know to go there, anyway. Home alone was another matter.

  “I tried to call you before I took her home,” Maria said.