Down the Darkest Road

by Tami Hoag

  As for Lauren Lawton, a radio car would cruise Old Mission Road regularly tonight—though Ballencoa was certainly too smart to go back to her house so soon. He would know they would be on the lookout for him tonight. If he was smart, tonight he would lay low. If he was cocky, he would go out trolling. But he wouldn’t go back to Lauren Lawton’s house.

  The lactic acid was building in the dense muscles of Mendez’s thighs and calves. His legs were starting to feel heavy as he turned onto Coronado.

  Dixon would have his ass for setting foot on Ballencoa’s street, but he didn’t intend on getting caught. He wouldn’t put so much as a toe on the bastard’s property, but the sidewalks belonged to the public. He was as free to roam the streets as any pervert window-peeping criminal.

  Even as he thought it, he could see the steam coming out of the sheriff’s ears.

  No lights burned in Ballencoa’s windows. There was no sign of the van. Mendez jogged past the house, across the street, and turned right down the side street, slowing to a walk. Hands on his hips, he walked up and down, breathing, checking his pulse, letting the acid flush out of his leg muscles.

  A small building sat at the back of Ballencoa’s yard. A second small garage. Mendez considered the wisdom of walking down the alley. That might be pushing it. If a neighbor caught a glimpse of him from a window, they might call him in as a prowler. He didn’t want to have to explain that to anyone. He wouldn’t be able to get into the building at any rate. For now, it was enough to know it was there. If the day came that he had to write an affidavit for a search warrant, he would want that building included.

  Guys like Roland Ballencoa kept souvenirs of their exploits. For a sexual deviant, a trinket from a victim could help him relive his fantasy. Ballencoa had gotten caught down in San Diego stealing women’s dirty underwear. Chances were good he had a stash of panties somewhere. If among that stash of panties he had a pair with Leslie Lawton’s DNA on them . . .

  The day was coming when prosecutors would be able to get a conviction with evidence like that.

  Ballencoa was living here now, but he still had the lease on Carl Eddard’s rental in San Luis. Who knew what he might have stashed in the attic rafters there? For that matter, who knew what other hiding places Roland Ballencoa might have?

  Mendez had known of killers who rented public storage lockers to keep human remains. He knew of a case where a killer had left a fifty-five-gallon drum in the basement of a house he sold. It wasn’t until two owners later that someone had opened the drum and discovered what was left of the man’s missing pregnant girlfriend.

  Was Leslie Lawton in a drum in the building at the back of Ballencoa’s rented home?

  He couldn’t know, and, as it stood, he had no legal grounds to find out. As frustrating as that was to him, he couldn’t imagine what Lauren Lawton lived with every day.

  With too many unsettling questions in the back of his head, Mendez jogged home.

  30

  Denise Garland, LPN, Mercy General Hospital, lived in a one-bedroom guesthouse that had undoubtedly begun its life as a garage—as had many small rentals in the downtown and McAster College neighborhoods of Oak Knoll. The home had the squat build of a garage, though it had been dolled up with shutters and siding, and the driveway had been replaced with a concrete sidewalk and a little patch of lawn. A weak yellow bug light burned beside the front door.

  The property sat on a corner lot, with the entrance to the rental on the side street around the corner from the front of the main house. Overgrown bougainvillea bushes offered privacy from the landlord’s backyard.

  One person’s privacy was another person’s cover. He was able to approach and move around the exterior of the house with little concern for being seen.

  He didn’t bother going to the front door. The front door would be locked. And if anyone happened by or looked out a window from one of the neighboring houses, their eyes would go to the front door. They would notice a man standing at the front door.

  He wasn’t concerned that anyone had followed him there. Always watchful, he had been particularly so after leaving the sheriff’s office. He had not returned home and had gone through his usual maneuvers of circling blocks and doubling back on his own trail to make certain they had not put an unmarked car on the job of tailing him. They had not.

  Eventually he had returned to Denise Garland’s neighborhood, finding a spot to watch her house until she left for her late shift at the hospital. Then he put on a pair of surgical gloves and walked across the street to begin his evening’s work.

  The two windows on the south side of Denise Garland’s house were closed tight. The transom window denoting the location of the bathroom was cracked open several inches. It wouldn’t have been the first time he had gone into a house that way. He was tall enough to access the window and thin enough to slide through it like a snake, but it wasn’t his first choice of entrances.

  He found his access on the back of the house, where a sliding glass door opened onto a little patio fashioned of inexpensive concrete pavers. Denise Garland had created a nice little entertaining area for herself there with a small, round, white plastic table with four white plastic chairs and a couple of white plastic lounge chairs for sunning. A short-legged Weber grill squatted off to one side of the patio.

  Several Diet Coke cans had been left on the table. A striped beach towel had been forgotten in a heap on one of the chairs. A dirty ashtray sat on the concrete between the chairs.

  He frowned at that. He couldn’t abide smoking. Filthy, stinking habit. He wouldn’t be interested in Denise Garland if she was a smoker. He hoped the ashtray belonged to the girlfriend who had come to visit her that afternoon while he had been watching the house from down the street.

  He had followed her home from the diner and made note of her address, then gone home to catch a few hours of sleep, amused at the notion that Denise Garland was probably also in bed in her little converted garage.

  He had imagined her naked in her bed fantasizing about the stranger from the diner, touching herself between her legs, then licking her fingers and sucking on them, imagining she was sucking on his cock. He had remembered the shy but flirtatious look she had given him from beneath her lashes. She would give him that same look as she knelt between his legs and took him into her hot, wet mouth.

  The screen portion of the patio door was locked. But the lock was flimsy and easily popped with a credit card slipped between the door and the frame. The sliding glass door had been forgotten and left unlocked—as they so often were—and slid open without protest.

  Denise Garland had left the fluorescent under-counter lights on in the tiny kitchen. They glowed bright white in the dark, illuminating the clutter of used drinking glasses by the sink, and clean dishes left in the drain basket on the counter.

  To his relief, the house did not smell of cigarettes. There was a lingering aroma of grilled meat. Hamburgers. A bag of buns sat out on a table the size of a postage stamp along with a bag of potato chips. He didn’t eat meat, and he didn’t like the smell of it, but he didn’t find it as offensive as cigarettes.

  He opened the apartment-sized refrigerator and took an inventory. Condiments, skim milk, Diet Coke, eggs, margarine, cans of chocolate Slim Fast. He would make note of these things when he got home.

  On the counter between the kitchen and living room lay the caricature he had done of the nurses at breakfast. Pleased, he picked up a pencil from the notepad by her phone and added the day’s date beneath his initials. She would probably never notice it, but it amused him to leave a sign that he had been there in her home.

  In the living area was a floral-print love seat, a pair of white plastic chairs that matched the ones outdoors, and a glass-topped coffee table piled with women’s magazines and catalogs. The television looked like a recent purchase. The VCR attached to it sat on the floor on top of the box it had come in.

  On top of the VCR lay two videos in their rental sleeves: Working Girl and Big. Sweet
movies. Sweet movies for a sweet girl.

  He liked that. Sweet girl. Young girl. Younger than she really was.

  The excitement began to stir in his blood.

  She had left her bed unmade, a tangle of flowered sheets. He could picture her lying there naked, looking up at him with her heart-shaped face and shy smile, the dimple winking in her left cheek. He pictured her body moving, slowly writhing as she stared up at him as she touched herself.

  He stripped his clothes off and went to the bed to join her. Naked, he rolled against the mattress, rubbing his body over the sheets, over the pillows. He breathed in the delicate scent of her.

  Open-mouthed, he kissed her pillow as if it was her face, thrusting his tongue against it until the pillowcase was wet with his saliva. Then he pulled the pillow down his body and thrust his cock against the wet spot, fucking it the way he would fuck her—hard, fast, violently.

  He dug his fingers against the mattress the way he would dig them into her small breasts, pinching the bedding between his fingertips the way he would pinch her nipples—hard, until she cried out in pain.

  As the fear came into her eyes, his excitement built, taking him to a higher level, filling him with a sense of power. He would fuck her harder, as if his cock was a battering ram and his intent was splitting her in two. She would try to fight against him then. He would have to teach her a lesson. She wouldn’t like it. But he would.

  His climax was explosive. He felt like a volcano erupting. Afterward, he lay on the bed like a corpse until the sweat had dried on his skin and dried on the sheets. A deep sense of calm came over him.

  He didn’t question any of it. He didn’t wonder why he had the fantasies he had. They had been a part of him for as long as he could remember. He didn’t believe he was a freak. He didn’t feel ashamed of himself. He accepted himself entirely. In fact, he felt superior to most people. He felt that in fully embracing who he was, he was more fully alive than most people could ever hope to be.

  He left Denise Garland’s bed the way he had found it—a pile of rumpled sheets. He went into her tiny bathroom and washed himself. He used her toothbrush to brush his teeth. Then he put his clothes back on and left the house the same way he had come in, a pair of her dirty underpants stuffed in his pants pocket for a souvenir.

  31

  Did you miss me?

  Lauren clutched the note so hard her hands began to tremble. She couldn’t breathe. Her emotions were like a trio of whips striking her, one, then the next, then the next. Over and over and over.

  She was upset. She was angry. She was frightened.

  Did you miss me?

  It upset her that he could so easily reach out and, with four simple words, make her blood run cold. It made her angry he had that kind of power over her. And it frightened her that there wasn’t anything she could do about it.

  What was she supposed to do? Call Mendez? And tell him what? Someone had left a note in her mailbox? She couldn’t prove Ballencoa had left it. It was ridiculous to think he would be so foolish as to leave something with his fingerprints on it. And what if he had? It wasn’t a threat. What could Mendez do? Arrest him for not using a stamp on the envelope?

  She could call Greg Hewitt and hire him back to watch over her. An idea she rejected immediately, mortified at the idea of facing him again.

  She was upset. She was angry. She was frightened.

  Did you miss me?

  How had he found her here? Only a few people had this address. She had been vague with the few people she had told about the move to Oak Knoll. She had said they needed a change of scenery, but that they hadn’t settled, didn’t have a permanent location, weren’t sure when they would be coming back. She had alienated so many of her former friends, none had pressed her for details. For a certainty, they had been relieved to have her gone.

  How had Roland Ballencoa known? When had he seen her? When had he followed her? Had he followed her home from the shooting range? How could she not have known? How could she not have seen him? How could she not have sensed he was there? There was one road to this property. If someone had followed her . . . Mendez had followed her that day and she hadn’t noticed.

  He was out there. For all she knew, he was watching her this minute. It was one thing for her to know where he lived. It was quite another for him to know where she lived—where she and Leah lived.

  Did you miss me?

  She dropped the note as if touching it was somehow making a connection to him, as if the card was made of his skin.

  She felt desperate in every way she could imagine.

  And she was on her own to deal with it.

  Once again she thought of Lance. The pain of not having him with her was like a knife to her heart, but instead of blood, hot fury boiled out of the wound.

  How could you leave me to this? How could you leave Leah? You should be the one dealing with this evil monster, not me.

  “God damn you, Lance,” she whispered bitterly. Doubled over, elbows on her thighs, she put her head in her hands. “God damn you. Why couldn’t you stay and fight? Why couldn’t you fight for us?”

  The tears that came burned her eyes like acid. The pressure of them made her feel like her head would burst. She was too exhausted to try to hold them back. Now was when she would have given anything to have a pair of strong arms around her, to have a broad shoulder to lean on, to have someone tell her she would be safe and Leah would be safe, and he would take care of everything.

  She was so tired of having to be strong.

  Now was when she was supposed to ask for help. Now was when she should have called Mendez and let him fill the role of protector. Now was when she could have called Bump Bristol and allowed him to ride over the mountains to her rescue. Now was when she might have once again made use of Greg Hewitt, the only man she’d slept with in two years—if she could have brought herself to face him.

  She was so tired. She couldn’t remember the last decent sleep she’d had this week. It was taking a toll on her mentally and physically. Yet she knew there would be no rest tonight either. An overwhelming sense of despair and panic crashed over her at the thought.

  As futile as it was to ask, the question still pounded at her: Why? Why? Why?

  Why Leslie? Why their family? Why her? Why did it never end? Why could she not let go? Why did she have to feel so guilty for wanting to be done with it?

  She was so tired of being upset and angry and frightened. It was exhausting physically, mentally, emotionally. The weight of it pulled on her. Every cell in her body felt filled with lead. She didn’t know how she was able to get up and move around. She didn’t know why she didn’t just fall to the floor.

  Because she couldn’t. Because there wasn’t anyone else to do her job. She had to get up. She had to do what she had to do. She had to make sure the house was secure and they were safe from their unwanted watcher.

  Did you miss me?

  She got up and went to the console table, to her purse, and took the Walther out. The gun felt unusually heavy in her hand. She didn’t know if she had the strength to raise her arm with it, yet she went to the kitchen door with it to check the locks again. She checked the locks on the doors, the locks on the windows.

  She almost expected to see Ballencoa staring in at her through the glass. In her mind’s eye she could see him standing right outside, his long narrow face expressionless, his heavy-lidded eyes as black and empty as the night.

  Was he there? Or was she imagining things and telling herself they were real? Or was he really there, and she was trying to convince herself she was imagining things? How would she know either way? Her mind swam in the conundrum.

  Her heart beat faster as she made the rounds of the house again, checking every door, every window. He might be circling the house. He might be circling the house one door ahead of her. He could be standing inside the last door as she came to it.

  Did you miss me, Lauren?

  She could hear his voice as if he was right
beside her, whispering the words in her ear, his mouth so close the heat of his breath scalded her skin.

  She bent her head and shrugged her shoulder against her neck, trying to wipe away the moisture.

  Did you miss me, Lauren?

  “You bastard.”

  No?

  “No. I didn’t miss you. I miss the beautiful daughter you took away from me. I miss the husband I loved like he was a part of my own heart. I miss the family I will never have again because of you. I miss me.”

  You missed me. You want me. That’s why you’re here.

  “I didn’t miss you,” she said bitterly. “I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!”

  She wanted him to be gone. She wanted him to be dead. She raised her arm, pointed the gun at his chest, and pulled the trigger.

  The explosion she should have heard sounded like her daughter’s voice crying: MOM!

  “MOM!”

  Leslie. Leslie was calling for her. Her daughter needed her.

  “Where is she?” she demanded. “Where is she, damn you!”

  He looked past her with his blank eyes as a slow, reptilian smile turned the corners of his mouth. Was it a trick?

  She turned suddenly, arm still raised, gun in hand.

  “MOMMY, NO!!”

  Leah.

  The look on her daughter’s face was horrified, stricken, lost. Her own mother had just turned on her with a loaded weapon.

  Leah woke to the sound of her mother’s shouts—I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!

  Terrified, she came awake, sitting bolt upright in bed, her heart banging against the wall of her chest like a huge fist.

  Who was in the house? Who was her mother fighting with? What was she supposed to do? Should she call 911 ? Should she get out of the house? Should she run downstairs and try to do something ?