Down the Darkest Road

by Tami Hoag

  Lauren chuckled. “For me it was chocolate chip ice cream. I couldn’t get enough. More so with Leslie than with Leah.”

  The reminder was bittersweet. What an insanely happy time that had been—her pregnancy with Leslie. Lance had been over the moon to become a father, and he had doted on Lauren and catered to her every whim.

  As ecstatic as he had been to become a father, he had been equally devastated by the loss of their daughter. For both of them it had been like falling from the highest peak of the highest mountain and plunging into the deepest, darkest crevasse.

  “I know about your missing daughter,” Anne admitted quietly. “Wendy mentioned it, but Vince and I followed the case in the news when it happened. I’m so sorry, Lauren. As a mother, I can’t even begin to imagine how terrible that must be.”

  Lauren glanced away, uncomfortable. There was never any way of avoiding this conversation, and she never became more comfortable having it.

  “But I do know what it is to be the victim of a violent crime,” Anne went on. “I know the sense of helplessness and anger that brings. I work with a victims’ group at the Thomas Center for Women—”

  Lauren shook her head and raised a hand to stave off the rest. She wanted to get up and run away. “No, no. No, thank you. I don’t play well with others.”

  “Fair enough,” Anne said. “I’m not trying to push. I just want you to know that if you need to talk or you need a connection in the system here, please don’t hesitate to call me. It’s what I do, it’s what I know.”

  She fished a business card out of her purse and slid it across the table. “End of spiel. I promise. What kind of pizza do you like?”

  Lauren picked up the card and looked at it to avoid having to make eye contact. Anne Leone: child psychologist, victim counselor, and court-appointed special advocate. Busy lady.

  “I don’t mean to be rude,” she murmured.

  Anne shook her head, unfazed. “You’re not rude. You’re dealing with a nasty load of crap as best you can. Believe me, I get it.”

  “Thank you for the offer.”

  “You’re welcome. It stands,” Anne said as the waitress brought their drinks. “Try that wine. If you decide you want another, I’ll drive you home.”

  Lauren laughed. “Most therapists don’t recommend self-medicating.”

  Anne shrugged. “Two glasses of wine never killed anybody. And I’m not most therapists. You seem on edge. That’s not a fun place to be.”

  “It’s been a long day,” Lauren admitted. She wondered what the psychologist would have to say if she related her afternoon’s drama. Anne Leone would probably write her a prescription for a long stay in a padded room.

  She took a sip of the wine. It was warm and velvety on her tongue, and went down as smooth as silk. She looked to the playroom to see Leah and Wendy laughing at the antics of Anne’s little boy as he danced around in a sea of large, colorful plastic balls.

  “That’s nice to see,” she said. “Leah hasn’t found a lot to smile about lately.”

  “That’s a tough age to move,” Anne said. “I’m sure she misses her friends. But she’s found a good new friend in Wendy.

  “Wendy’s been through a lot in the last few years too,” Anne explained. “I was her fifth-grade teacher. She and several of her classmates stumbled onto a murder victim. It was a rough time that opened a Pandora’s box of trouble. She lost her best friend. She was attacked by another student. Her parents ended up getting divorced.”

  “That sounds like a lot of damage done,” Lauren said.

  “No doubt about that. And it’s hard for kids who have gone through these kinds of things. All they want is to be like everyone else their age, but they’re not. They’ve had experiences other kids can’t understand or relate to.”

  “I feel the same way,” Lauren confessed. “And I’m forty-two.”

  “You belong to a club nobody wants to join.”

  “The dues suck,” she pointed out.

  “And there are no benefits,” Anne added.

  “Aren’t we lucky?” Lauren said, giving a little toast with her glass.

  “Speaking for myself,” Anne said, “yes. My alternative was to be dead. I’d rather be a live victim than a dead one. At least there’s room for things to improve.”

  And I’d rather be dead if it meant bringing Leslie home safe, Lauren thought, but didn’t say. She’d shared enough for one night.

  6

  “She didn’t start out a bitch,” Tanner said. “I’ll give her that. You had to feel for her. I can’t imagine going through that—your kid just disappears, you don’t know what happened, you don’t know if she’s alive or dead or what some sick son of a bitch is doing to her. What else would matter to you? Nothing. Fuck everybody.”

  She took a long drink. Vodka and tonic with three wedges of lemon.

  They sat at a prime window table at one of the best restaurants on Stearns Wharf. Tanner’s choice. A well-dressed older woman at the next table gave Tanner a dirty look for her language. Tanner rolled her eyes.

  “I’d be the same or worse,” she admitted. “If somebody tried to do something to my kid, I’d be like a tigress with her claws out. I wouldn’t care who got in my way.

  “If I were in her place and believed what she believes, I would have fucking killed Roland Ballencoa with my bare hands. I would have cut his tongue out, tore his balls off, then pulled his beating heart from his chest and eaten it while he died watching.”

  “I’ll remember not to piss you off,” Mendez said. “Tell me about Ballencoa. Obviously you think he did it.”

  Tanner played with her fork, frowning. “I liked him for it. So did everyone else. But we’ve got nothing on him. No one saw anything. No one heard anything. There was never any sign of the girl.”

  “Did he have an alibi?”

  “The ever-popular ‘home alone.’ ”

  “Did he have a history with the girl?”

  “He’s a freelance photographer by trade. He had taken pictures of the Lawton girl—and a lot of other girls her age—at sporting events, concerts, on the street.

  “He makes me want to go take a shower,” Tanner confessed, “but the teenage girls seem to think he’s got that sleazy/sexy, angst-ridden artist thing going on. Teenage girls are stupid. What can I say?”

  “Did he take any of them home with him?” Mendez asked.

  “Not that we know of. He’s wicked smart, this guy. He got in trouble before, and he learned from his mistakes. He never tried that old ‘I can make you a supermodel’ game. He always took his pictures in public, never anything too provocative. His business was legit.”

  “He has a record?”

  “Lewd acts on a minor. He was nineteen, the girl was fourteen. He was sentenced to two years. He did fifteen months up in the Eureka area.”

  “How did you connect him to the Lawton girl?”

  “His name came up a couple of times with Leslie’s friends—and we’re talking about conversations that happened months apart. And we discovered Leslie had purchased some photographs he had taken of her and her tennis partner playing in a tournament. But it wasn’t until well after the fact someone put them together talking on the sidelines after a softball game the day she went missing. And then it took months longer to pull together enough information to get a search warrant.”

  “You didn’t find enough to put him in a cell,” Mendez said. “Did you find anything at all?”

  “By the time we finally got the warrant, he had long since gotten rid of anything incriminating. We crawled over that place like lice on rats. We found photographs of the girl, but he’s a photographer—so what? We found photographs of girls, guys, young people, old people. It didn’t mean anything. Finally, we found one tiny sample of blood under the carpet in the back of his van.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing. The sample is too small to test. Maybe we could get a blood type. Maybe. There’s not enough for a DNA profile, considering where th
e science is right now. If we test it, we destroy it, and there’s no guarantee we’d learn anything at all. Then the sample is gone and we truly have nothing.

  “All we can do is wait,” she said. “The DNA technology is getting more sophisticated every day. We have to hope that continues. Maybe six months from now or a year from now, that sample will be more than enough to get a profile. For now, we would be insane to try it.”

  “I imagine that doesn’t sit well with Mrs. Lawton,” Mendez said.

  “No. She wants to know if it’s her daughter’s blood. If we could test it and we found out it’s not her daughter’s blood, she’s not going to care that the sample is lost.

  “We have to care,” Tanner said. “What if we can’t get him on the Lawton case, but down the road we could get him on some other crime committed against some other young girl? We have to keep that sample intact.”

  “That leaves her in limbo.”

  “Unfortunately, yes. And that’s taken a toll on her over the years.

  “She calls all the time,” Tanner said. “What are we doing. Have we looked into this tip or followed up on what that psychic said. Why aren’t we doing this or that. Why aren’t we watching Ballencoa around the clock 24/7/365.

  “She doesn’t want to hear that the guy has rights or that we have a budget or that her daughter’s case isn’t the only case we’re working on—or that after four years her daughter’s case isn’t even the most important case we’re working on.”

  “It’s the most important case in her life,” Mendez pointed out.

  Tanner spread her hands. “Hey, I’m not saying I don’t feel for her. I do. Believe me, I do. But you know the reality of the situation. At this point, unless we find the girl’s remains and can get something from them, or a witness comes forward, or Ballencoa—or whoever—steps up and makes a confession, this is going down as an unsolved cold case. Those files are going to sit in that storage room ’til kingdom come.”

  Mendez sipped at his beer and turned it all over in his mind. Small wonder Lauren Lawton was on the ragged edge. She was stuck in a living hell that looked like it would go on forever. There wasn’t anything she could do about it.

  “I met Mrs. Lawton today,” he said, choosing to leave out the part where she had run her shopping cart into him with a maniacal look in her eyes. “She thinks she saw Roland Ballencoa in Oak Knoll.”

  Tanner’s brows knitted. “He’s in San Luis Obispo. Despite what Lauren Lawton will say about me, I do keep tabs on the guy.”

  “The San Luis PD knows he’s there?”

  “Of course. He moved up there almost two years ago. I let them know. I didn’t know Lauren had moved to Oak Knoll or I would have called you guys and given you the heads-up on her.”

  The waiter brought their dinners. Tanner stabbed a crab cake like it was still alive. She ate like she hadn’t seen food in a week.

  “I’m surprised she left,” she said when she came up for air.

  Mendez shrugged as he contemplated his fish. “What’s here for her? Her husband is dead. Her daughter’s case is at a standstill. Everywhere she turns, there’s got to be a reminder of something she doesn’t have anymore. Why would she stay?”

  “Lauren has always clung to the idea that Leslie is still alive somewhere. Wouldn’t she want to stay in the house Leslie would come home to if by some miracle she could come home?”

  “It’s been four years,” he countered. “Maybe she’s letting go of that hope. You said yourself this has taken a toll on her. And she’s got the younger daughter to consider. They could come to Oak Knoll, get a break from the bad memories, have a fresh start. Friends offered them use of a house . . .”

  “Her whole life has been this case,” Tanner said. “All day, every day. For the first two years she was in the office all the time, making her presence known. After that she would still come in once a month or more. She was always badgering the newspaper to run a story or the TV stations and radio stations to interview her.

  “Over the years she went from being a concerned parent, someone you felt sorry for, to this obsessed, nasty, bitter, angry cunt—pardon my language.”

  The well-dressed woman at the next table gasped and tsked and moved around on her chair like a chicken with its feathers ruffled.

  Tanner turned to her and said, “Ma’am, if you don’t like what you’re hearing, stop eavesdropping. Otherwise I’m gonna sit here and say cunt over and over and over until you get up and leave.”

  Mendez rubbed a hand over his face, mortified. Tanner turned back to him as if nothing had happened.

  “You wait and see,” she said, shaking her fork at him. “You’ll be dropping the c-bomb like a champ before you know it.”

  Not if I lived to be a thousand years old, Mendez thought. His mother would have his ass for even thinking that word. And if he lived to be a thousand and used it, she would rise up out of her grave and have his ass.

  “Wait until she starts in with the personal attacks on your intelligence and your integrity,” Tanner said. “That gets old fast.”

  “She was pretty shaken up today,” Mendez said. “I mean, imagine: You move to a new town to escape all of that, and there’s the guy.”

  “Did you see him?”

  “I wouldn’t know him.”

  She forked up some more crab cake with one hand and flipped open the file folder she’d brought with her with the other.

  “Creepy dude,” she said, sliding a copy of Ballencoa’s photograph across the table. “Looks like he should play Judas in one of those life-of-Christ movies.”

  Mendez stared at the photograph. Ballencoa had a long, narrow face and large, hooded dark eyes. His dark hair was shoulder length and he wore a neatly trimmed mustache and goatee. His eyes had that blankness in them he had come to associate with psychopaths. Shark eyes.

  “He’s thirty-eight years old, about six-three and a buck-seventy-five,” Tanner said.

  Mendez was five-eleven and built like a fireplug. About the only things he had in common with Roland Ballencoa were a dick, dark hair, and a mustache. And yet Lauren Lawton had mistaken him for Ballencoa in the pasta aisle at Pavilions.

  “Do you think she’s unstable?” he asked.

  Tanner shrugged. “Who could blame her if she was? When Ballencoa was still living here, she claimed he was stalking her, but we had absolutely no proof of that. Not one iota. Not a record of a phone call, not a fingerprint, nothing.”

  “She just wants the guy behind bars for something.”

  “For anything. At one point she all but told me to fabricate some evidence against him just so I could get him in the box and try to break him down for a confession.

  “And let me tell you,” she added. “That guy wouldn’t give it up to save his own mother’s life. He’s as cold as they come.”

  “Do you have his sheet in there?” Mendez asked.

  Tanner fished it out and handed the pages to him.

  “He’s got a history as a peeper, and some B and E charges down in the San Diego area where he was stealing women’s dirty underwear out of their laundry baskets. That got him a slap on the wrist.

  “He’s a class-A perv,” she pronounced. “There’s no fixing that. If he didn’t do the Lawton girl, it’s only a matter of time before he does something else. Shoot him in the head and charge his family for the bullet.”

  “If only it was that simple,” Mendez said. “I’ve got a sexually sadistic serial killer sitting in prison doing a quarter for attempted murder and kidnapping. The DA let him plead out.”

  “Oh, that dentist,” Tanner said. “I read about that. What the fuck happened?”

  “We had nothing on him for the homicides,” Mendez said. “No physical evidence except a necklace that may or may not have belonged to one of the victims. As sure as we’re sitting here, he killed at least three women and left another one blind and deaf. And we couldn’t even charge him. But if he hadn’t done it, there was no reason for him to kidnap and try to ki
ll the woman who found that necklace.”

  “I’ll never get the sentencing for attempted murder,” Tanner said, shaking her head. “Why should they get off light because they were incompetent? The idea was for the victim to die, right?

  “Remember Lawrence Singleton?” she asked. “Kidnapped and raped a teenage girl, hacked her arms off with an ax, and left her to die in a drainage ditch outside Modesto. The guy got fourteen years and was out in eight. It was just a pure damn miracle that girl lived. Singleton should be doing life. Instead, he’s running around loose. It’s only a matter of time before he does it again.”

  “We were lucky we got Crane for twenty-five,” Mendez said. “The guy had no record. He was supposedly an upstanding citizen. He had a wife and kid. We both know he’ll be out in half that for good behavior in the joint.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Tanner said. “This is why some species eat their young. If only his mother could have seen that in him when he came out of the chute.”

  They finished their dinner and Tanner ordered dessert and coffee.

  “Doesn’t SBPD pay you well enough that you can afford to feed yourself?” Mendez asked.

  Tanner looked at him. “What? I always eat like this. Maybe I’ll catch a case tonight and not get a chance to eat again for twenty-four hours. What are you, Mendez? Cheap?”

  “Not at all. It’s just an observation,” he said. “I’ve only ever seen wild animals eat the way you eat.”

  “I’m not ladylike, is that what you’re saying?” she asked, clearly enjoying putting him on the spot.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But you thought it.”

  Mendez said nothing.

  Tanner laughed, green eyes dancing.

  “What happened to Mr. Lawton?” he asked as the coffee arrived.

  “Car accident. Driving under the influence, he took his Beemer over the side of the Cold Spring Canyon bridge.”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  The bridge was part of the route that connected the Santa Ynez Valley to Santa Barbara. The thing stretched for twelve hundred feet over one hellacious long fall to the canyon floor. It was a notoriously popular spot for people to commit suicide.