by Tami Hoag
“I didn’t mean to hurt her,” he said. His nose had gone off-center, and the blood was all over his mouth and chin. He bent his head and tried to rub it off on the shoulder of his jacket. “I came to keep an eye on her. She panicked. She freaked out. I grabbed her and she pulled away and fell.”
“You’re lying,” Lauren said.
She wanted to look to Leah for dissent, but she didn’t dare turn her attention off Greg Hewitt. She thought Leah must have gotten out of the house. She couldn’t hear her crying, no talking, no ragged breaths.
“And you jumped me because . . . ?”
“I knew you’d assume the worst,” he said. “And I knew you had a gun.”
“You know me too well.”
“I could know you better,” he said, trying to look earnest. “If you’d let me.”
Lauren wanted to laugh. “Do you really think I’m that stupid, Greg? That I’m going to fall for your phony charm?”
Something cold flashed in his eyes. “You liked it well enough when I was fucking you last night.”
“You just can’t help yourself, can you?” Lauren said. “What did you want? Money? Did you think you could take Leah and get money from me? Are you that desperate that you’d kidnap my daughter if you couldn’t get me to pay you to kill Ballencoa?”
“You don’t know me, Lauren,” he said.
“I don’t want to,” she said. “Get down on the floor. Facedown. Spread eagle.”
He didn’t move. “What are you going to do?”
“That depends. I can call nine-one-one and have a sheriff’s car here in five minutes. But if my daughter comes in before they arrive, and she tells me something I don’t want to hear, I’ll blow your fucking head off.”
“I’ve only ever tried to help you, Lauren.”
“Get down on the floor,” she said, carefully enunciating each word.
She was astounded at how calm she sounded. She was anything but. Her hands were trembling. Her knees were shaking. She didn’t know what he was playing at or why. She knew she couldn’t trust him. She knew he had hurt her daughter. She had let him into their lives and he had hurt Leah. Her fault.
She still held her left hand curved over the top of the Walther. The end of the jammed cartridge vibrated against her fingertips, reminding her the gun would never fire if she needed it now.
Using as little movement as possible, she pulled her left hand back toward her, easing the pistol’s slide back just a fraction of an inch and releasing the tension holding the cartridge in place.
The spent shell casing fell free and bounced off the floor. The sound was a pin dropping—as loud as thunder.
The significance wasn’t lost on Greg Hewitt. His gaze flicked to the piece of brass and back, quick as a snake’s. Just that much of a smile curved the very corners of his mouth.
“What do you think, Lauren?” he said quietly. “Do you think the next round chambered?”
She had no real way of knowing without pulling the trigger.
“Do you want to find out?” she asked.
Hewitt weighed his odds.
It all happened fast.
His gaze darted over her shoulder to the kitchen door behind her, widening, as if in recognition. He expected her to buy the fake. She didn’t.
He lunged toward her, grabbing the barrel of the gun and pulling upward and to the side.
Lauren pulled the trigger.
The explosion was deafening.
I win, she thought.
The bullet bore through Hewitt’s right hand and struck him in the hollow of the right shoulder.
He roared like a wounded animal, but pulled the Walther from her hands with his left and backhanded her across the face with the gun.
Lauren felt her left cheekbone shatter like an egg. The gun’s sight sliced through the flesh of her face like a knife through butter. Blood poured from the wound like a waterfall.
She staggered sideways, falling into a chair. Stars spun through her head like the bits of colored glass inside a kaleidoscope. Her knees felt like water giving way beneath her.
“You fucking bitch,” Hewitt said, almost under his breath.
On her hands and knees, Lauren held very still, waiting for the room to stop spinning. She wondered absently where Leah had gone. Had she run for the nearest neighbor? Had she run to another phone in the house to call 911?
The question had no sooner crossed her mind than she heard her daughter’s soft whimpering.
“Mommy . . .”
Lauren’s left eye had swollen nearly shut. She had to turn her head toward the kitchen door.
Roland Ballencoa stood there, tall and thin and dressed in black. The Grim Reaper. One hand clamped around the throat of her daughter.
He almost smiled. “Now, Lauren, I have something you want.”
56
“She shot you,” Ballencoa said dispassionately.
Greg Hewitt looked at the ragged bleeding hole in his hand and then the hole in his shoulder as if just noticing. “I’m fine. It’s through-and-through. Just a flesh wound.”
Ballencoa had already dismissed the topic. He looked at Lauren. “Where are my journals?”
Lauren looked from one to the other of them. How the hell had this happened? How could they possibly know each other? Had Ballencoa somehow bought Hewitt off? How could he have gone from a man who came to offer her help to a man who could beat a fifteen-year-old girl for no reason?
She glared at Hewitt with her one open eye. The taste of her own blood was like liquid copper in her mouth. “You offered to kill him for me.”
“You should have taken me up on it, shouldn’t you?” he said, gingerly pressing his left hand to the wound in his shoulder. He had set the Walther aside on the table, out of reach.
Leah was crying as quietly as she could manage, her shoulders shaking.
Oh my God, Lauren thought, the full horror spilling through her like the blood spilling from the cut that had filleted her face. This is all my fault. I asked for this.
Not only had it been her mission to bring Ballencoa to justice, she had also brought Greg Hewitt into their lives.
No. That wasn’t exactly true. Greg Hewitt had come to her. He had come to her with his sympathy and concern, wanting to help, wanting to earn the fifty-thousand-dollar reward. She had accepted him for greedy, never thinking he could be something worse. He was supposed to have been her means to the ultimate end: confronting Roland Ballencoa.
I’m so sorry, baby, she thought, her eyes going to Leah.
Her daughter’s face was swollen, her left eye almost swollen shut. She was visibly shaking. To Lauren she looked so much younger than fifteen. She was a child, and Lauren wanted to take her in her arms and hold her and try to comfort her.
Comfort her by getting her killed, she thought. Comfort her by trading her life for one last shot at finding Leslie.
God help me. What have I done?
“Where are my journals?” Ballencoa asked again.
Greg Hewitt grabbed hold of her ponytail with his left hand and jerked her up off the floor like a rag doll. She grabbed the back of a chair to steady herself as he shouted at her. “Answer the question !”
Lauren wanted to spit in his face, but she refrained, afraid her defiance would be taken out on Leah. She had to think. She had to be smart.
If she’d been smart, none of this would be happening.
“They’re in my car,” she said.
“I want them back.”
“He wants them back,” Hewitt said.
He was pasty white beneath the blood on his face, and beginning to sweat profusely. He went to lift his right arm as if to strike her, but his shoulder seemed not to work. Instead, he cuffed her in the side of the head with his left hand, knocking her back to the floor. He kicked her in the ribs as she hit the ground.
Lauren curled into herself to protect her ribs, and the mini-cassette recorder she had hidden in her bra pressed into her breast and rib cage. She moved o
nto her knees, tucked into a tight ball with her arms pulled in tight to her sides. Surreptitiously she pushed the Record button. For all the good it would do her.
Hewitt kicked her again. “Get up!”
“Bring her outside,” Ballencoa ordered.
Hewitt grabbed her roughly by the arm, yanked her to her feet, and pushed her toward the door.
Ballencoa had parked his van on the back side of the garage, out of sight from the road and about twenty feet from Lauren’s car. The back doors of the van stood open wide, waiting.
“The cops come by every half an hour,” Hewitt said. “We have to get out of here ASAP.”
A shiver went through his body. Lauren felt it as it came through his hand like an electrical shock. He seemed a little unsteady on his feet. The pressure he was exerting against her seemed more to utilize her as a cane than to intimidate her.
He marched her to her car and shoved her against it.
“Where are the journals?”
“They’re in the bag on the floor,” Lauren said.
“Then get the goddamn bag!” he snapped, steadying himself against the vehicle. His eyes were on the street.
Lauren opened the passenger-side door and retrieved the canvas tote, heavy with the journals and with the tools she had taken with her to Ballencoa’s house—a screwdriver, a box cutter, a hammer. If she could get her hands on any one of those things . . .
Ballencoa was nervous now. He kept his hold on Leah, but his attention was divided as he glanced toward the road again and again.
“We’ll put them in the van,” he said. “You can bring her car.”
“Where are you taking us?” Lauren asked.
“You’re going to have an accident,” Ballencoa said. He looked meaningfully from Lauren to Leah, his heavy dark eyes hungry. “After a while.”
A chill went through Lauren. She had wanted to know. Every day for the last four years she had wanted to know what he had done to Leslie. She was about to find out.
And so was Leah.
The horror of that realization was huge and terrible.
“I’m a little dizzy,” Hewitt remarked. A shudder went through him.
“You’re going into shock,” Lauren said quietly, relishing the idea. She spoke to him in the tone of a lover. “You’re probably dying.”
Hewitt glared at her. “Shut the fuck up!”
“You’re pale, Greg,” she whispered seductively, finding a perverse power in planting the seeds of fear in him. “Are you feeling weak?” she asked. “Cold?”
As if on cue, he shivered again.
“Put her in the van,” Ballencoa ordered. “Hurry up.”
Hewitt grabbed hold of her by the back of her neck and half-dragged her to the back of the panel van. He shoved her inside facedown and came in after her, pushing her down on the floor, pressing a knee into her kidneys.
He produced a plastic zip tie and put it around her left wrist and through a U-bolt screwed into the floor of the van. The canvas tote was beneath her. She could feel the head of the hammer pressing into her belly.
Hewitt bent down and spoke directly into her ear, his lips touching her so that she wanted to twitch away from the feeling. His blood dripped on her from the wound in his shoulder. “I’ve changed my mind about that mother-daughter threesome,” he said. “I wonder if she’ll be as hot a fuck as you are.”
The suggestion made Lauren want to retch. Instead, she scraped together another bit of bravado.
“You’re not going to have enough blood left in you to get it up, Greg,” she said. “I killed you. You just don’t know it yet.”
She knew no such thing, but if she could rattle him, distract him, get him worried about himself, she might buy them a crucial second or two.... He had already been careless. She was lying on a bag full of weapons. He had bound her to the U-bolt by only one wrist.
“Hurry up!” Ballencoa snapped at him then from the back of the van. “Get the girl in!”
In the next moment Leah was tossed into the van beside her, her right hand bound to the U-bolt. The terror on her face was almost unbearable for Lauren to see. This was all her fault. But she kept her eyes locked on her daughter’s.
“Stay calm, honey,” she whispered. They were almost nose-to-nose, forehead-to-forehead. “Stay calm. Do you understand me?”
“Mommy, I’m so scared!”
“Shhhh . . . We’re going to get out of this,” Lauren promised, even while her mind was filling with the nightmare images of what was probably going to happen to them in these next hours before they died. They would know exactly what had happened to Leslie. It was about to happen to them too.
The doors slammed shut on the back of the van like the lid coming down on a coffin.
57
“I’ve got a bad feeling,” Mendez said. He had jerked his tie loose and shed his sport coat. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up, exposing forearms that were thick with muscle. His body was burning energy like a furnace.
Lauren’s phone had gone unanswered. Ballencoa wasn’t at his house. Michael Craig Houston aka Gregory Hewitt was driving a blue Chevy Caprice. The BOLO had produced no sightings of it.
Tanner rode shotgun. Bill Hicks sat in the backseat.
“If Lauren is dealing with that guy thinking he’s her employee, and he’s what we think he is,” Tanner said, “that’s like thinking you’re playing with a garter snake and it’s really a cobra.”
“What’s with you and snake analogies?” Hicks asked. “Is it Freudian?”
“I don’t get enough sex.” She tossed a look back at him. “Was that Freud’s problem too?”
“That’s not right,” Mendez said as they neared the end of Old Mission Road.
“Tell me about it,” Tanner muttered.
“The gate,” Mendez specified. “It’s open. That’s not right.”
Lauren’s BMW was nowhere to be seen.
On the far side of the garage, hidden from plain view of the road, sat a Plain Jane blue Chevy Caprice.
“Shit,” he said under his breath.
He grabbed the radio and called in the tag number of the Caprice, then sat drumming his fingers on the steering wheel as he waited. Tanner got out and started to walk around the suspect car.
“Tony, we’ve got blood out here,” she called back at him, pointing to the ground.
Mendez felt sick. Vince had called him with a list of open cases from San Diego County, San Bernardino County, and Orange County. Missing women. A long list. Maybe some of them could have been Ballencoa’s work, maybe not. They would have to wade through a river of reports, talk to dozens of detectives. It would take weeks, months.
Michael Craig Houston had been arrested several times over the years in proximity to where Ballencoa had been living.
In his mind, Mendez kept going back in time, imagining Ballencoa and Houston meeting in jail all those years ago. He could hear Vince saying that it wouldn’t have been the first time two wrongs had gotten together to make a catastrophe.
He kept flashing on Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris, a pair of criminals who had hooked up in the Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo in the late seventies. Separately they had been thugs. Together they had become sexually sadistic serial killers who had tortured and murdered five young women in five months in LA County.
They had trolled the streets in a cargo van they called Murder Mack, tricked out with a stereo system loud enough to drown out the screams of the girls as they tortured them.
Mendez wanted to vomit. If Lauren Lawton had unwittingly hired Michael Craig Houston, and Houston was partners with Roland Ballencoa . . .
Damn her. She couldn’t wait. He knew in his gut she had broken into Ballencoa’s house. She wanted it over.
Damn the system that had been powerless to help her.
The radio crackled back at him.
The Caprice came back to Michael Craig Houston.
Mendez called for a crime scene unit and headed for the house with his gun d
rawn, on the chance that Houston was still there, but he knew that wouldn’t be the case. There wouldn’t be anyone in the house. It felt too still. As he walked into the kitchen the acrid scents of gunpowder and blood filled his nostrils.
There was blood on the floor, blood spatter on the sofa . . . Chairs had been left overturned. Two shell casings had been ejected from a .380.
He thought of Lauren and her Walther PPK.
Other than their blood, there was no sign of the two people who lived in this house.
58
A curtain separated the cab of Ballencoa’s van from the back, where Lauren and Leah lay bound to a U-bolt screwed into the floor. It kept anyone casually looking into the cab windows from seeing into the back of the van. It also kept the cab’s occupants from seeing into the back—a design flaw Lauren was grateful for.
As their captors drove the winding canyon roads, Lauren worked her free hand into the canvas tote bag trapped beneath her body. One by one she worked the tools up from the bottom of the bag, past Roland Ballencoa’s precious stalking journals.
A screwdriver, a box cutter, a hammer.
Leah lay beside her, facing her, her whole body quivering, her expression terrified, tears leaking from her wide eyes in a continuous stream.
“This is what he did to Leslie, isn’t it?” she whispered.
“There’s two of us,” Lauren told her.
“And two of them.”
Lauren hoped she was right about Greg Hewitt, that the bullet she had put in him had done a lot more than gone straight through his shoulder. He followed behind the van in her BMW. She tried to imagine him slowly bleeding to death internally.
She used hollow-point bullets in the Walther, ammunition designed for maximum destruction. As it left the chamber of the gun, the hollow-point exploded into a vicious spinning little flower of twisted metal that took a corkscrew’s path through a victim’s body, tearing as much tissue as possible, shredding veins and arteries, nerves and tendons, ricocheting off bone to rip through organs.
She sincerely hoped that was the chaos her shot was wreaking through Greg Hewitt at that very moment.
