Down the Darkest Road

by Tami Hoag

  20

  Lauren waited for a long time after Mendez left. She sat at the table in the great room, drinking and looking at her photograph of Leslie the night before she was taken.

  She was a beautiful girl. Leah was pretty. Leslie was beautiful. There was such a fire in her, and it glowed out of her blue eyes and shone in her long dark hair. That spirit had been a force of energy everyone in the room would feel when she turned it on as part and parcel of a strong emotion.

  Leslie would have done something extraordinary with her life.

  Sometimes Lauren wished she could feel that energy when she thought of her daughter or when she looked at her photograph. Sometimes she thought that would be a sign to her that Leslie was still alive somewhere. Sometimes she feared it would mean she was gone and her spirit was visiting in an attempt to offer her mother some kind of comfort. It was a torment either way.

  God, why can’t this ever be over? she wondered for the millionth time.

  And for the millionth time she thought Because there is no God to end it.

  There had been a time when that thought would have left her feeling upset and adrift. The belief system that had been the platform of her life had suddenly dropped out from under her. Now she just felt sad. Life had been so much easier when she was naïve to the cruel realities of the world. With experience came wisdom—also known as disillusionment.

  At least she had had nearly forty years of blissful ignorance. Leah hadn’t managed to even get out of childhood before the truth stripped the joy from her. Lauren wished she could have somehow spared her youngest from the experience. If she somehow could have put Leah into suspended animation that day before they realized Leslie was missing . . . Or if she could have erased any memory of her sister and the hell they had all been put through . . .

  But Leah was a victim as much as Lauren was a victim because Leslie had been victimized.

  She was so tired of it. Victim was not a word that she would ever have used to describe who she was. She would have said that she didn’t have it in her to be a victim, and yet she was—a truth made all the more bitter considering her reasons for coming to Oak Knoll.

  How had he found her? How had he known to come to this house?

  How dare he?

  The anger that rose up through her was enough to choke on.

  It was five after four in the morning. The world was still and dark. The wind had died. The universe seemed to be holding its breath so as not to wake the sleeping inhabitants of Earth.

  The shock and fear that had grabbed hold of her earlier in the night had faded as well. A strange calm fell through Lauren now.

  She sat quietly, sipping at her drink, thinking nothing would come of Detective Mendez’s good intentions. This was just another verse in a poem of futility, like a nightmare that returned again and again but with different players.

  Mendez would try to be helpful, but nothing would come of it. She would become angry and frustrated. Her fury would scorch the earth of Oak Knoll like Sherman’s march from Atlanta to the sea.

  Perhaps this was purgatory, or a living model of Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result.

  Perhaps the time had finally come to take a different path.

  Lauren took her wallet from her purse and dug a business card from a zippered compartment. GREGORY HEWITT, LICENSED PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR. She turned the card over and stared for a long time at what was written on the back. She should have given it to Mendez, but she couldn’t even if she wanted to. She shouldn’t have had it, but she had paid a price to get it. She had held on to it without acting on it because she believed if she did, she would be crossing a line.

  But there was no line, she realized. If she had believed in that line, she never would have come here. Her boundaries had been shattered a long time ago by Roland Ballencoa.

  She put the slip of paper back in her wallet and turned her attention to the gun on the table beside her bag. Without allowing herself to think at all, she picked it up and felt the familiar weight of it in her hand. It was still loaded, and there was still a round in the chamber.

  She checked the safety, then slid the gun inside the special zippered compartment on the side of her handbag. She got up and left the house, got in her car and drove.

  The streets were empty and quiet in this last hour before dawn. She felt as if she could almost hear the collective breathing of all the sleeping people in the houses she drove past.

  The address she was looking for was in an older, nondescript neighborhood between downtown and the college. She imagined a mix of people lived there—students, people who worked at McAster, people who worked at the lamp factory on the outskirts of town. No professors here. No doctors or lawyers.

  The house she was looking for was on a corner, a Craftsman-style bungalow. A plain brown wren of a house, it had a low porch and a detached one-car garage that shielded it from the neighbor.

  Her heart beating hard in her chest, she drove around the block, spotting a shed at the back of the property. She went around the block, crossed the main street, around the next block, and parked on the side street with a clear view of the house.

  The home of Roland Ballencoa.

  21

  The windows of the house were dark. There was no porch light on. No vehicle sat in the driveway. The garage door was closed.

  Lauren sat parked on the side street heavily draped by huge old maple trees, letting her dark sedan hide in the deep black shadows like a big cat. She sat staring at the house, picturing Ballencoa in his bed, oblivious to the fact that he was being watched. That knowledge gave her a small sense of power, and she wondered if it was anything like what he felt when he was watching her.

  The idea that they might have shared the same emotion made her uncomfortable. She was nothing like him, yet here she was . . .

  As if her body was not her own, she found herself getting out of her car and walking toward the bungalow. She kept her purse close to her body, her hand inside the pocket, resting on the Walther. Her heart was pounding like a fist against the wall of her chest. She kept her head down, the bill of her black baseball cap low over her face.

  She walked down the side street past Ballencoa’s house and turned down the alley.

  The property was the size of a postage stamp, blocked from prying eyes by ficus hedges on two sides. A dark, dingy tarpaper shed stood at the back of the tiny yard. It had probably been the original garage for a single car, now used for who knew what. The small windows had been painted black from the inside. The garage door was padlocked down to a piece of metal embedded in the concrete slab.

  Lauren crept around the building, one hand pressed to the wall as if she might feel the life force of someone trapped inside. She tried not to breathe. She willed her pulse to stop pounding in her ears. If there was someone inside, she wanted to hear them. She heard nothing but the whoosh, whoosh, whoosh of her blood rushing through her veins.

  Ballencoa might have kept anything in the shed. It might have been a home to lawn mowers and garden tools. He might use it for his darkroom. It could have been full of boxes, storage for whatever a man like Roland Ballencoa chose to keep with him but never use.

  Boxes of keepsakes from his victims (she had always imagined there were more than Leslie). Boxes of their clothes. Boxes of their bones.

  It could have been a place to keep a girl or hide a body.

  In the theatre of her mind, Lauren played a terrible movie of bondage and slavery, young women hanging by their bound hands from heavy hooks in the ceiling. One of the girls was Leslie. The terror in her eyes was enough to make Lauren feel physically sick.

  She tapped her knuckles against one of the darkened windowpanes and strained to listen for a sound, any sound.

  Nothing.

  She tapped a little harder and pressed her ear against the glass. She waited to hear a moan, a groan, a cry muffled by a gag.

  She heard nothing.
<
br />   She looked for a way to open a window, but they were solid, incapable of opening. There was a regular door on the side of the building that faced the back of the bungalow. It too was padlocked shut.

  She glanced up at the house, half expecting to see Ballencoa staring out a window at her, but no face looked out.

  A reckless part of her wanted to go to the house and look in at him. She wanted to startle him, stare at him, frighten him. That reckless side wanted to go inside and touch his things and violate his space.

  The other part of her was terrified at the prospect of having him catch her.

  She gave the butt of the Walther a reassuring squeeze.

  Somewhere nearby a car door slammed, and she jumped half a foot off the ground. The sky was beginning to lighten. The neighborhood was starting to awaken. The odds of being caught here increased with every minute. She needed to go soon.

  A small dog barked close by. A man’s not-too-distant voice tried to shush him. The dog barked again. Closer.

  A sudden rush of panic left Lauren dry-mouthed and weak-kneed as a short-legged Jack Russell terrier came bounding around the side of the shed, skidding to a stop at her feet. The dog threw its head back and started barking in earnest, its front paws bouncing off the ground with each bark.

  Oh, shit. Oh, shit.

  She glanced between the house and the dog. If the barking woke Ballencoa, he would look out and see her. If she ran, the dog would give chase and its owner would see her trying to flee the scene dressed like a burglar—like a burglar with an illegal concealed weapon in her handbag. She would end up incarcerated while Ballencoa walked around free.

  “Roscoe! Roscoe!”

  The man’s voice came closer. He was trying to whisper and shout at the same time.

  “Roscoe! Goddamnit, come here!”

  The dog hopped backward a couple of feet. He barked at Lauren again, then turned his head in the direction of his owner, torn.

  Lauren looked back up at the house.

  A light came on in a window at the back.

  “Roscoe!”

  Oh please, oh please, oh please . . .

  She closed her eyes and held her breath. When she opened her eyes again, the dog had gone.

  “You stupid little shit,” the owner grumbled, punctuating his statement with the click of a leash snap. He had to be in the alley. He couldn’t have been more than twenty feet away.

  Lauren slipped around the end of the building, out of sight of the house. She felt so weak she had to lean against the wall for a moment, her heart thumping crazily in her chest as she waited for the man and dog to be gone down the street. She waited for Ballencoa to come out his back door.

  Had he looked out? Had he seen her in that moment she had closed her eyes?

  She thought she was going to be sick. Cold sweat filmed her body and ran down between her breasts and between her shoulder blades.

  When she dared to move, her legs felt like rubber beneath her. She wanted to run all the way back to her car, but knew she couldn’t run. If she ran, she would draw attention to herself. If she tried to run, she was pretty sure her legs would buckle beneath her anyway.

  She forced herself to walk down the alley to the sidewalk. She willed herself to stay upright as she crossed the street. She kept her head down, kept her purse held tight against her body.

  As soon as she sat down in the driver’s seat of the BMW, she had to lean over and vomit on the street. When the nausea had passed, she leaned back in the seat, as weak as a kitten, and wondered what the hell she was doing.

  But even as she wondered that, she thought about the shed and what might be inside of it. She wanted to know. She wanted to get inside and see for herself. She wanted to get into the house, to go through his things and hope to find some evidence . . . of what? Her daughter’s life? Her daughter’s death?

  She remembered reading about a woman in north central California who had been kidnapped by a couple in 1977 and held as a sex slave until her escape in 1984. For the first year of her captivity she was kept twenty-three hours a day locked inside a wooden box under the couple’s waterbed.

  Lauren stared across the street at Ballencoa’s house and wondered if her daughter might be inside, in a box under his bed.

  That was why she was there. That was why she would take the risk. The constitution might prevent law enforcement from going into Roland Ballencoa’s house, but Lauren didn’t give a shit about the constitution. She didn’t care about unlawful searches or rules of evidence. She cared about her daughter.

  As she stared at the house, the front door opened and Roland Ballencoa emerged. He walked down the front steps and went to his garage. A moment later he backed out in his van and drove away.

  22

  Even though he worked nights, breakfast was Roland’s favorite meal of the day. He often stayed up all night, then took himself to breakfast and went to bed when he got home to sleep the morning away.

  He had found a diner he liked on La Quinta. An honest-to-goodness diner with red vinyl booths and chrome tables, and waitresses in cheap pink-and-white uniforms. He liked the uniforms.

  An interesting mix of people ate here. There were students—college students were inescapable in Oak Knoll, even in summer—but there were also ordinary citizens from all walks of life. The hospital was only a block away, which meant nurses came here for lunch and at the end of their shifts. He liked nurses. Young nurses.

  A group of them sat in a booth across the way from him, chatting and laughing, eating their eggs. They worked the night shift and would be on their way home soon. He found it disappointing that few nurses were wearing white uniforms these days. He liked the idea of opening the button front of a tight white uniform dress. He liked the idea of sliding his hands up under the skirt. It was still a good fantasy, even if the reality was becoming baggy hospital scrubs.

  Most of these nurses were older than suited him, but one looked young and sweet. He would follow her home and make notes about where she lived, if she lived alone, if she had a noisy dog. He didn’t like dogs.

  The beauty of this diner was that he could come for breakfast and stay to make his notes with a bottomless cup of coffee. No one bothered him. No one cared what he was doing. He even brought his sketch pad to make drawings of the patrons—his interest, of course, being the young women, but he knew if he drew ugly older women and men as well, no one would think anything of his hobby.

  He did a quick silly caricature of the nurses, giving them all big bright eyes and animated faces. When he had finished, he took it over to their table and introduced himself with an easy smile.

  “Ladies, I thought you might enjoy having this.”

  He held the sketch up for all of them to see. They were appropriately delighted.

  He signed his initials with a flourish. ROB. They immediately began calling him Rob, thanking him. The young one gave him a shy but flirtatious look from beneath her lashes. The name on her name tag was Denise Garland.

  When he returned to his table, he pulled his journal out of his messenger bag and turned to a fresh page.

  Denise Garland: LPN, Mercy General Hospital. Night shift. 20–22. Straight brown hair cut in a long bob. Brown eyes. Heart-shaped face. Dimple in left cheek. Small breasts.

  He blew on the page to help the ink dry, then packed up his things and left a nice tip for his waitress, Ellen.

  Ellen Norman: 24, waitress, morning shift. Hair: strawberry blond, curly, worn up. Hazel eyes. Receding chin. Lives at 2491 17th Ave, apartment 514. Car: 1981 white Chevy Corsica with damage to rear driver’s-side quarter panel.

  He went out to his van to wait.

  23

  “That plate came back to Avis,” Hicks said, coming into the break room.

  Mendez was busy stirring sugar into his third cup of coffee. He was tired. After leaving Lauren Lawton he had gone back to bed but hadn’t slept, finally turning the television on to stare at infomercials for spray-on hair and Veg-O-Matics. At five thi
rty he gave up and went for a run followed by fifty chin-ups, a hundred crunches, and ten minutes hitting the speed bag. Now he was tired and sore, and still brooding about Lauren Lawton.

  “What plate?” he asked.

  “The car Mavis Whitaker saw parked in front of Ballencoa’s house in San Luis,” Hicks said. “The guy who said he was a cop.”

  He selected a coffee mug and poured himself a cup, arching a brow at his partner as Mendez picked a chocolate-glazed doughnut from the opened pink bakery box on the counter. “You know you’re perpetuating a stereotype, right?”

  “We have them for a reason.”

  “Long night, hot date?”

  “Long night,” Mendez muttered. “Avis? It was a rental?”

  “Yeah. So for sure the guy wasn’t on the job. And I called the Avis office in San Luis. That car was never on their lot.”

  “What the fuck? Who rents a car to go to another town to spy on some dirtbag?”

  “It all goes right along with this business,” Hicks said. “Someone rents a car out of town to go spy on a dirtbag who rents a house in one town and lives someplace else.”

  Mendez fished a couple of Tylenol out of his pants pocket and tossed them back. “This is starting to sound like one of those long math word problems that used to make me want to puke in school.”

  He took a seat at the table and looked up at the TV monitor on the wall. Detective Trammell was in an interview room with a suspect on a domestic abuse complaint.

  “How much do you wanna bet he asks the guy if he still beats his wife?” he asked his partner.

  “Nothing. That’s a sucker bet.” Hicks turned the volume up on the monitor and sat down.

  In the interview room Detective Trammell sat back in his chair and regarded his suspect. Trammell was a guy’s guy, with a simple, straightforward style in an interview. Mano a mano. Let’s have a beer and talk shit.

  “So, Gary,” he said, “are you still beating your wife?”