by Tami Hoag
“I know I’m not exactly Mother of the Year material,” Lauren began.
“I didn’t say that,” Anne said. “I’m sure you’re a great mom; otherwise Leah wouldn’t be the sweet girl she is. And I’m sure you love her very much. I’m saying when one blind person is leading another they aren’t going to get where they want to go without banging into some walls. Let someone who can see do the steering.”
She watched Lauren carefully, hoping she hadn’t pushed too hard.
She plucked a muffin from the basket on the coffee table and tossed it to Lauren like a ball, surprising her out of her tormented thoughts.
“I’m not letting you out of here until you eat that.”
Lauren looked at the muffin like it was something to dread, but dutifully broke off a little piece of the top and put it in her mouth.
“So what did you do with your evening to yourself?” Anne asked. “I hope you had a chance to relax, soak in the tub, read a book, have a nice glass of wine. That’s what I would like to do, but being the mother of a toddler, I need to relax vicariously through other people.”
“Yeah, that was pretty much it,” Lauren said, still staring at the muffin.
A lie, Anne thought. She wondered if Lauren had sought any kind of help for the anxiety, the depression, the sleeplessness. It pained her to see someone suffering as much as Lauren Lawton appeared to be suffering, knowing that at least modern science could be helping her out if she wouldn’t allow a friend to do it.
“One night next week,” Anne said, “you and Leah are going to come for dinner. And I’ll tell you right now, I won’t take no for an answer, so don’t even think of trying to weasel out of it. Remember: I can always have a deputy pick you up and bring you,” she said teasingly.
Lauren didn’t look convinced, but Anne had made up her mind. She was going to be a friend to this woman whether she thought she wanted one or not. Anne was becoming convinced that two lives could hang in the balance.
25
Roland Ballencoa did indeed have electricity.
He was living at 537 Coronado Boulevard.
Mendez hung up the phone and sat back in his chair. He felt like he’d just found a big fat poisonous snake living under the cushions of his sofa. A predator had slithered into his town and taken up residence with no one the wiser. If not for Lauren Lawton, Ballencoa could have lived there for who knew how long, establishing his territory, settling into his routine . . .
He got up from his chair and started shrugging into his sport coat, drawing a look from his partner.
“Got him,” Mendez said.
“Where?”
“Five thirty-seven Coronado. A target-rich environment. Three blocks from the high school in one direction. Seven blocks from McAster College in the other direction. Hot and cold running coeds all year round.”
And maybe half a mile from his own house. Mendez knew the neighborhood well. He jogged up and down those streets routinely.
“Oh, man . . .” Hicks muttered, rising from his chair. “That’s like turning on the kitchen light in the middle of night and finding a rat in the middle of the floor.”
“Only we can’t just shoot it and throw a rug over the hole,” Mendez said as they headed for the side entrance and the parking lot.
Mendez got behind the wheel. He was feeling aggressive now, protective of his city and, if he had to admit it, of Lauren Lawton too. Not for any romantic reason, but because he felt responsible for her—as he felt responsible for anyone else who might come to him for help.
He took the oath “To Protect and Serve” seriously. Maybe a little more seriously where women were involved, but that was how it was supposed to be—at least in his mind, and in his family culture, and in his Marine culture. The man protected the woman. Period.
Ballencoa’s house was on a corner lot, an unassuming bungalow with a detached one-car garage and a similar building at the back of the property on the alley. The yard was neat, and yet the place had a strange feeling of vacancy about it.
There was no car in the driveway. There were no potted plants on the steps, no bicycle parked on the front porch. The shades were drawn. Not unlike the house in San Luis Obispo, there was nothing to suggest anything about the inhabitant, if there was one. Mendez half expected to peek in a window and be struck by the same still emptiness he had felt there.
Hicks rang the doorbell, and they waited.
“How would you like to be a neighbor and find out this guy had moved in next door?” Hicks asked.
“Or worse,” Mendez said, “not know this guy had moved in next door.”
Of course Ballencoa’s neighbors didn’t know who had moved in next to them. His one conviction had been pled down to nothing, and it was so long ago, no one kept tabs on him. And, as convinced as Lauren or Danni Tanner or anyone else might have been of his complicity in the disappearance of Leslie Lawton, the man had never been charged with anything. By strict letter of the law, there was nothing to warn the neighbors about.
Hicks rang the bell again, and they waited.
Finally the door opened and they had their first look at Roland Ballencoa. Mid-thirties, olive skin, large dark eyes with heavy lids. His brown hair was straight, shoulder-length, clean, and parted down the middle. He wore a neatly trimmed mustache and goatee. He looked a little like John Lennon, Mendez thought, or, as Danni Tanner had said, like an extra in one of those life-of-Christ movies.
Mendez held up his ID. “Mr. Ballencoa. You’re a hard man to track down.”
“And why would you need to track me down, detective?” Ballencoa asked without emotion.
“May we come in, Mr. Ballencoa?” Hicks asked. “We have a few questions for you.”
“Or maybe you don’t mind if your neighbors see a couple of sheriff’s detectives on your front porch,” Mendez said.
“No, you may not come in,” Ballencoa said. “I haven’t done anything wrong. There’s no reason for you to come into my home.”
He was dead calm. He wasn’t going to be the kind who got nervous and overly solicitous in his attempt to make them believe he was a good citizen. Nor was he going to let them bluff their way in.
Mendez cut to the chase. “Can you tell us where you were last night between nine thirty and two this morning?”
While Lauren Lawton had told him she had gone into her home late in the afternoon, it seemed logical to assume her visitor had waited until cover of darkness to leave the photograph on her windshield.
Ballencoa blinked the big sloe eyes at him. “I was in my darkroom, working. Do you have somebody telling you I was someplace else?”
“Do you know a woman named Lauren Lawton?”
“I’m sure you already know that I do.”
“Have you seen her recently?”
“The last I knew, the Lawtons lived in Santa Barbara.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” Mendez said. “Have you seen her recently?”
“No,” Ballencoa said, “and I hope never to see her again. I had to take out a restraining order on her in Santa Barbara. She’s not mentally stable. Her harassment ruined my business. I had to move away.”
“Her harassment ruined your business?” Mendez said. “You don’t think your business suffered because you were suspected of abducting a sixteen-year-old girl?”
“Suspected is not convicted,” Ballencoa said evenly. “They had no evidence I did anything to that girl.”
Hicks and Mendez exchanged a glance, both of them very aware that Ballencoa hadn’t denied doing anything to Leslie Lawton. He had denied the existence of evidence to prove it. The hackles went up on the back of Mendez’s neck.
“Lauren Lawton and the Santa Barbara Police Department waged a smear campaign against me in the press,” Ballencoa said.
The muscles flexed in Mendez’s wide jaw. His eyes were flat as a shark’s. “Poor you. Let me tell you something here, Mr. Ballencoa. We’re very aware of your record and your history. We don’t like predators in our
community.”
“Are you threatening me, detective?”
“I’m telling you how it is. If we get one complaint that you’re looking too long at some young lady or that you’re hanging around where you shouldn’t be, we’ll be all over you like stink on shit.”
Ballencoa didn’t so much as blink. “I’m a taxpaying, law-abiding citizen, detective. Unless I break a law, you don’t have any right to harass me or follow me or come into my home. And neither does anyone else.”
On that note, Ballencoa shut the door in their faces and they heard the dead bolt slide home.
“I don’t think he likes us,” Hicks said.
Mendez shrugged. “I thought I was charming. Didn’t you think I was charming?”
“Like a hammer between the eyes.”
“Oh well. I’ll try harder next time.”
“At least now we know he’s here,” Hicks said as they got back in their car.
“And he knows we’re here,” Mendez said as he started the engine.
But even if his threat kept Roland Ballencoa in line—which he doubted it would—he wasn’t going to be happy about the man’s presence in Oak Knoll. Something dangerous had come into their midst. They couldn’t turn a blind eye to it even if it was lying dormant. The threat would be there as long as Ballencoa was.
He took a right at the corner and took another right and another right, coming back onto Ballencoa’s block. He pulled in at the curb three houses down.
“Did you know he had taken out a restraining order on the Lawton woman back in SB?” Hicks asked, his gaze, like Mendez’s, focused down the block, waiting to see if Ballencoa would come out of his house.
“No. I knew he threatened to sue the PD.”
“There and in San Luis,” Hicks pointed out.
“And Mrs. Lawton personally. What an asshole,” Mendez grumbled.
“Too bad that’s not against the law,” Hicks said.
“We’d have to build prisons in outer space.”
“He didn’t seem surprised to see us,” Hicks pointed out.
“No. And he didn’t seem surprised when I mentioned Lauren Lawton’s name, either. He’s coming out.”
Down the block, Ballencoa came out of his house with a messenger bag slung over one shoulder and disappeared into his garage.
“He knows she’s here,” Hicks said.
A brown Dodge panel van backed out of the garage and went down the street away from them. Mendez let him get a good distance ahead, then pulled out and followed him. It was tough to tail a car in a residential neighborhood. There wasn’t enough traffic for anonymity, though it picked up as they neared the college.
Preparations were already under way for the upcoming music festival. Visiting musicians began to flow into Oak Knoll several weeks in advance. Pre-festival workshops had begun. Small concerts in the local parks and churches would be starting soon, leading up to the headline events.
As they followed Ballencoa down Via Verde, Mendez kept one eye on the van and one on the busy sidewalks outside the boutiques and coffee shops. Girls, girls, girls. College girls shopping, talking, laughing with each other. They were blissfully oblivious to the man in the van trolling past them.
“Where the hell is he going?” Mendez wondered aloud as they continued past the college, through another neighborhood, past Oak Knoll Elementary, onto Oakwoods Parkway.
To the sheriff’s office.
26
“What the hell?” Mendez asked, watching Roland Ballencoa pull into the parking lot in front of the sheriff’s office.
“I don’t know,” Hicks said, “but I don’t have a good feeling about it.”
Mendez punched the gas and pulled into the same lot rather than going around to the employee parking. That same feeling Hicks had expressed twisted like a worm in his gut.
He pulled into a reserved spot, got out of the sedan, and started for the building with Hicks right behind him. Ballencoa stood waiting by the front desk. He didn’t look surprised to see them.
“What are you doing here?” Mendez asked. It was more of a demand than a question. His temper was rising along with his suspicions.
Ballencoa, on the other hand, appeared cool and unconcerned. “I’m here to file a complaint.”
“Against us?” Mendez said, gesturing to his partner and himself.
Ballencoa looked from one to the other as he weighed his words. Hicks stood back a few feet, looking grave but calm. Mendez knew that wasn’t how he was coming across. He was angry, and he didn’t do a good job of hiding it.
Finally, Ballencoa said, “I don’t have to answer your questions.”
Mendez turned away from him abruptly, his dark gaze falling hard on the receptionist behind the counter, a plump middle-aged blonde woman in a purple pantsuit. “Who’s coming out to get him?”
Before she could answer, Cal Dixon emerged from the back in his pressed-perfect uniform, his expression as fierce as an eagle’s. He looked first at Mendez, then Hicks, then turned last to Roland Ballencoa.
“Mr. Ballencoa,” he said, offering his hand. “Cal Dixon.”
Mendez watched them shake hands, thinking he would rather pick up a turd.
“Come this way,” Dixon said, turning back to the door he had come through. He shot a look back over his shoulder. “Detectives: you too.”
“I would rather speak to you in private, sheriff,” Ballencoa said as they went down a hall to a conference room.
Dixon pulled open the door and stood back. “As I understand it, your complaint has to do with detectives Hicks and Mendez,” he said curtly. “I would sooner have all parties involved present. Have a seat, Mr. Ballencoa.”
Ballencoa went to the far side of the table and sat down, putting his messenger bag on the table in front of him. Mendez stepped into the room and put his back against the wall beside the door, standing with his arms crossed over his chest like some bad-ass bouncer. Dixon would undoubtedly tell him to sit down, but he was so angry he didn’t trust himself to sit across from Roland Ballencoa.
Bill Hicks took that seat. The sheriff sat at the head of the table, his back straight as a ramrod. He flicked a glance at Mendez, but said nothing. He was angry. The muscles at the back of his jaw were tight. A vein was standing out in his neck. Whatever Ballencoa had to say, there was going to be some serious ass chewing afterward. Cal Dixon ran a tight, clean ship, as straight as the crease in his trousers. Any hint of impropriety was unacceptable to him.
“It’s intimidating to have them here,” Ballencoa said, but he didn’t appear intimidated or afraid, or angry, or upset, or anything else.
“They have a right to face their accuser,” Dixon said crisply. “Anyway, I’m sure this is just a misunderstanding. We can get it straightened out here and now.”
Ballencoa grabbed the messenger bag he had placed on the table in front of him and stuck his hand inside, and everything changed in the blink of an eye.
Bill Hicks shot sideways off his chair. Dixon lunged for Ballencoa’s arm. Mendez pulled his Glock from his shoulder holster and leveled it at Ballencoa, shouting, “DROP IT!!”
Ballencoa didn’t move, except for the big hooded eyes, which went from one man to the next to the next.
“It’s not a weapon,” he said. Now he looked intimidated, his skin taking on a chalky pallor.
By then, there were half a dozen deputies at the door, ready for action.
“I don’t have a weapon,” Ballencoa said again.
Mendez held his position. “Take your hand out of the bag. Empty.”
Cal Dixon slowly let go of the man’s arm, but didn’t take his hand more than a few inches away. “Very slowly, Mr. Ballencoa,” he said.
Ballencoa did as he was told, slowly withdrawing his hand from the messenger bag, fingers spread wide.
The tension level in the room dropped a few degrees. Hicks grabbed hold of the bag’s strap and pulled it out of Ballencoa’s reach.
“Can I look inside, Mr. Ballencoa?”
Ballencoa hesitated, staring at the bag. “Yes,” he said at last.
Hicks looked inside, reached in, and came out with a mini-cassette recorder about the size of a pistol’s grip.
Mendez let the air out of his lungs and stepped back almost reluctantly, sliding his gun back into his holster. His heart was still pumping hard as the adrenaline surge began to subside.
Cal Dixon sat back in his chair, pressing his hands flat on the tabletop as if reestablishing his balance.
Ballencoa was without expression, but his eyes were on his bag and the cassette recorder now lying on top of it.
“If I could have my things back now . . . ,” he said quietly.
Hicks pushed the bag back in his direction.
“Your detectives came knocking on my door this afternoon,” he said to Dixon, “and proceeded to harass and threaten me.”
Dixon turned to Mendez. “Detective Mendez?”
“You’re aware of Mr. Ballencoa’s background,” Mendez said. “And his history regarding Lauren Lawton. I was called to Mrs. Lawton’s home last night because someone had come onto her property and left a photograph on the windshield of her car. She had reason to believe the intruder might be Mr. Ballencoa. Detective Hicks and I went to Mr. Ballencoa’s home to find out where he was during the time in question.”
“I wasn’t even aware the woman is living here,” Ballencoa said.
Mendez laughed out loud. “We’re supposed to believe that? Lauren Lawton moves here, then you move here. That’s supposed to be a coincidence?”
“I didn’t say it was a coincidence,” Ballencoa said. “I said I wasn’t aware the woman is living here. I can’t speak for her.”
“She’s stalking you?” Mendez said.
“I told you, she’s done it before.”
Mendez shook his head and paced, hands jammed at his waist.
“I haven’t committed any crimes, sheriff,” Ballencoa said. “I live a very quiet life—”