by Tami Hoag
“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 onto 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 he
r 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 drawn, 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.
“Mommy, I don’t want to die,” Leah whimpered.
“You can’t think about that,” Lauren said. “You have to be brave now, Leah. We have to think and we have to fight. Do you understand me?”
Even as she spoke, Lauren had the box cutter in her free hand. Lying facedown with her left wrist bound to the U-bolt, she had to twist awkwardly to get onto her right side so she could reach their bound wrists.
She glanced at the curtain, which gaped open enough that she caught the odd glimpse of their driver. His concentration was on the winding road. Lauren had no idea where he was taking them, but the road was on an incline, with turns and switchbacks.
Into the mountains. Somewhere remote. Somewhere he and Greg Hewitt could feel free to do whatever they wanted—rape them, torture them. Ballencoa would take photographs, recording their degradation and their deaths.
How many times in the last four years had she imagined what this monster had done to Leslie? Thousands. Now she would know firsthand. In a strange, sick way, she would have satisfaction. She would have the closure she had prayed for. The not knowing would be over.
At the same time, the idea that she would have to witness Ballencoa do those things to Leah was more than she could stand. She was willing to pay a price with her own life, not Leah’s.
She glanced again at the curtain, then put her attention to her task, trying to cut through the zip ties without slitting either of their wrists.
One gave way, and then the other.
“Don’t move,” she cautioned Leah.
Even with Hewitt partially incapacitated, they were still two men against two females much smaller than they were. She and Leah would need the element of surprise on their side.
Lauren worked the screwdriver from beneath her and passed it discreetly into her daughter’s hands.
“If you get a chance to use this, go for the head, go for the eyes,” she instructed. “If you get the chance to
run, you run. Do you understand me? Don’t worry about me. If you can run, save yourself. Promise me.”
Big crystalline tears welled in Leah’s eyes. “But, Mommy—”
Lauren stared hard at her child. “Promise me.”
Leah nodded.
“I love you,” Lauren whispered, fighting tears of her own. “I’m so sorry, Leah. I’m so, so sorry.”
The van slowed and turned and lurched over rough ground, eventually rolling to a stop.
Ballencoa got out. Lauren’s heart was lodged in her throat. She heard another car door and the unintelligible voices of the two men.
How could she not have seen Greg Hewitt for what he was? Why hadn’t she questioned who he was when he had come to her?
Because she hadn’t cared. He had been a means to her end.
Literally, she thought.
The back doors of the van swung open.
Lauren turned her head and looked out, seeing sky and scrub and rocks. They were truly in the middle of nowhere.
Hewitt had parked the BMW just ten or fifteen feet back from the van. His skin looked gray as he came toward them. There was relatively little blood from the wound in his shoulder, but he cradled his half-useless right arm against his side, bent at the elbow. The hand was a gruesome flag of tattered, bloody flesh with shards of bone protruding.
At least she had the satisfaction of knowing she had damaged him.
“I’m not feeling so good,” he said to Ballencoa.
Ballencoa ignored him. His eyes were on Leah.
“I get the daughter first,” he said, climbing into the back of the van on his knees. He looked down at Lauren, his face the bony mask of pure evil. “Did you hear that, Mommy? I’m going to fuck your daughter and you’re going to watch.”
Lauren glared at him.
“I wonder how she’ll be, compared to her sister,” he mused. “That one was sweet. She liked it. She wanted it.”
Lauren wanted to scream at him. She wanted to attack him. She wanted to cut the tongue from his head and shove it down his throat.