Down the Darkest Road

by Tami Hoag

  She ran to the head of the stairs and listened, straining to hear over the roaring of her pulse in her ears. She held her breath, her hands pressed over her mouth as tears welled up in her eyes.

  She expected to hear another voice shouting. She expected to hear a man’s voice. The man who had taken Leslie, maybe. But Leah couldn’t make out the other voice. Then her mother shouted again: “Where is she?”

  Where is who? She had to be talking about Leslie, and that meant she had to be yelling at Roland Ballencoa.

  Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!

  The tears spilled over her lashes and down her cheeks. She still didn’t hear another voice. Maybe they were on the phone. If her mother was on the phone, then they weren’t in any danger.

  There was only one way to find out.

  Fighting her fear, Leah made her way cautiously down the stairs. The sun was coming up, giving everything in the house a strange gray-yellow cast. Her heart was in her throat.

  “Where is she, damn you!” her mother shouted.

  No one answered. Who would she be on the phone with at this hour? That didn’t make sense.

  “Mom?” she asked, her voice tentative and not loud enough to be heard in the next room. Her mouth was dry as dust as she tiptoed across the dining room.

  Boom, boom, boom her heart throbbed in her ears.

  She peered around the doorway into the great room. She couldn’t see anybody—not her mother, not Roland Ballencoa. The room was empty.

  Confused, she took a step into the room, then another.

  “Mom?”

  Suddenly her mother came up off the sofa like some fierce wild animal, the look on her face terrifying, one arm outstretched in front of her. She stared at Leah like she had never seen her before.

  Leah screamed and jumped back. “MOMMY, NO!!”

  As if she was coming out of a spell, her mother blinked several times quickly. At first she looked disoriented, then suddenly aware of her surroundings.

  “Oh my God,” she whispered. She looked down at her hands, expecting to see something that wasn’t there. “Oh my God,” she murmured again, pressing a hand to her chest. She was breathing hard. Tears filled her eyes. “I’m so sorry, baby. I’m so sorry.”

  Leah moved toward her then. Her heart was still fluttering like a trapped bird beneath her ribs. “Are you all right? I heard you yelling. I came downstairs. I didn’t know what to think.”

  “I guess I was dreaming,” her mother said. She looked sick. She was pasty white and sweating. The loose gray T-shirt she wore was soaked down the chest as if she’d been working out for hours. She raked her hair back from her face with both hands and sank back down on the sofa in a way that made Leah think she didn’t have the strength to continue to stand.

  “Are you okay?” Leah asked again.

  Her mother nodded and tried to smile, and patted the cushion next to her. “Come sit, sweetheart. I need to tell you something.”

  Leah was instantly afraid all over again. That sentence never came before good news. It was always followed by something terrible.

  We need to tell you something: Your sister is missing. We think somebody took her . . .

  I need to tell you something: Daddy had a car accident. It was really bad . . .

  It seemed to take her forever to get to the sofa. Her knees didn’t want to bend so she could sit down.

  “Leah,” her mother began. “The man who took Leslie . . . He’s here.”

  Leah’s stomach did a backflip. She jerked her head around, expecting to see him.

  “Not here in the house,” her mother corrected herself, patting Leah’s hand. Her fingers were like icicles. She was still breathing hard, as if she had been running. “He’s here in Oak Knoll. He’s living here.”

  Leah didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know whether she should be afraid or angry or what. Why was he here? Had he followed them here? Why couldn’t he just fall off the earth? Why couldn’t he just die? She would never understand why the police couldn’t have put him in prison. Everyone believed he had taken Leslie. Most everyone believed he had killed her.

  “I’m telling you because I want you to be aware, sweetheart,” her mother said. “I want you to be careful. If you see him, don’t go near him. Go to the nearest adult and tell them. Call me. Call nine-one-one. The sheriff’s office knows about him.”

  “Why is he here? Why does he have to be here?” Leah heard herself say. “It’s not fair!”

  She sounded stupid, she thought. She sounded like a stupid little kid, but she couldn’t help it. Roland Ballencoa had ruined their lives in Santa Barbara. Leslie was gone because of him. Daddy had died because of him. They had left Santa Barbara because of him. Now he was here.

  “I don’t know, honey,” her mother said.

  “Did he follow us here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Does he know we’re here?” she asked.

  Her mother glanced down at something on the coffee table. Leah’s eyes followed, going wide at the sight of the gun lying there on top of a pile of mail.

  “Why is Daddy’s gun here?” she asked, her eyes filling with tears.

  “I took it out last night,” her mother said. “It needs to be cleaned, but I fell asleep.”

  “You’re lying.” The words were out of Leah’s mouth before she even realized she was going to say them. She jumped up from the sofa. “You’re lying! I can tell. Don’t lie to me! I’m not a baby!”

  “Leah!”

  “You think you’re protecting me, but you’re not!” Leah cried. “All you do is make me feel like I’m some stupid child, like I can’t understand anything that’s happening, and if you lie about it, I’ll just pretend nothing is wrong. But everything is wrong! Everything ! You can’t protect me from that! Leslie’s gone and Daddy’s dead, and—and—you drink too much, and now you have a gun! And you’re scaring me! You scare me! And you don’t care about me at all!”

  “Leah, that’s not true!” her mother said. She was on her feet now too. She looked hurt, like Leah had reached out and slapped her. Leah didn’t care.

  “Yes, it is!” she argued as all the pent-up emotion came boiling out of her like hot lava. “All you care about is what happened to Leslie, and how terrible life is without Leslie, and now you have Daddy’s gun, and you’re going to kill yourself like Daddy killed himself, and what’s supposed to happen to me? What about me?!”

  With that, the last dam burst and all the grief came in a flood of tears. Everything she’d been holding inside her for all this time came crashing like waves dashing themselves on jagged rocks. She fell on the sofa and buried her face in a pillow, sobbing like she might die of it.

  She cried for the little sister she had been when Leslie went missing. She cried for the little girl she had been when Daddy had died. She cried for who she was now—a lost, frightened, angry young woman who felt like the only thread holding together what was left of her family was fraying down to nothing.

  She would be left alone, with no one. She would be the one punished for what Leslie had done that day when she was supposed to have been grounded and she went to the softball game anyway. She would be punished because she hadn’t called Mom to rat her sister out. She would be punished because she had watched Leslie go and hoped she would get in trouble.

  “Leah.”

  She heard her mother’s voice. She felt her mother’s hands on her shoulders.

  “Baby, I’m so sorry,” her mother whispered. “I’m so sorry. I won’t leave you, sweetheart. I promise I won’t ever leave you. I love you so much. I’m so, so sorry.”

  Leah turned and buried her face against her mother’s shoulder, sobbing. They held each other, both of them crying, both of them miserable.

  Leah wanted to feel comforted, but she didn’t. She wanted to feel safe, but she didn’t. And she still felt alone, and that scared her most of all.

  32

  “You didn’t get enough the first time?” Detective
Tanner’s partner, Morino, arched an overgrown eyebrow. He looked like he’d crawled out of a laundry basket. Prewash cycle. His shirt was wrinkled and there was an oily spot the size of a quarter on his tie.

  “Is Detective Tanner here or not?” Mendez asked. He had no patience for slobs. Sloppy man, sloppy work.

  Even though he was technically not on duty, Mendez had dressed appropriately in pressed khaki slacks and a tucked-in black polo shirt with the FBI National Academy crest embroidered on the left chest.

  “Sure,” Morino said, motioning him to follow as he headed down the hall. “It’s your lucky day—if you’re a masochist.”

  “You don’t like having a lady for a partner?”

  Morino laughed as they walked into the detective division and toward the small sea of steel desks where Tanner sat. “She’s no lady. She’s a vagina with a gun.”

  “That’s better than being a hairy asshole with a big mouth,” Tanner said, unperturbed by her partner’s disrespect.

  “Stick a tampon in it,” Morino sneered.

  Tanner sneered back. “Go fuck yourself with a broom.”

  “The one you flew in on?” he asked as he walked on past her.

  “Yeah,” she called after him. “I sharpened the end just for you.”

  Mendez took the seat at the side of her desk. “It doesn’t bother you that he talks that way to you?”

  Tanner rolled her eyes. “I grew up with four brothers in a family of longshoremen. Nothing that one comes up with is going to faze me.”

  “He should have some respect,” Mendez said, peeved enough for both of them. “Where’s your boss? He ought to put a stop to that.”

  She huffed an impatient sigh. “I didn’t sign on to be a cop because I thought all the guys would open doors and hold my chair for me, detective,” she said. “I’ve had my ass kicked on this job. Seriously. Morino’s mouth is only a problem for me if I let it be. And believe me, in the battle of wits, he is by far outmatched. I don’t need a white knight to ride in and save me.”

  Mendez scowled, shooting a look across the room where Morino was half sitting on another detective’s desk. The pair of them were sniggering like ninth graders.

  “Thanks anyway,” Tanner added, getting up from her chair. “You want to look at the Lawton files?”

  He wanted to go over and smack Morino upside the head. Instead, he stood up and put his attention on Tanner. “Yeah. I specifically want to see everything you have on Ballencoa himself,” he said, falling in step beside her. “My partner and I paid him a visit yesterday.”

  “In San Luis?”

  “In Oak Knoll. Lauren Lawton wasn’t seeing ghosts. He’s there.”

  “Boy, this is your lucky week,” Tanner said.

  “Tell me about it. The bastard got me suspended.”

  Surprised, she arched a brow. “What’d he do? Make you forget to dot an i or cross a t?”

  “He pissed me off,” Mendez admitted. “I said something he misconstrued as a threat.”

  “Like what?”

  “Basically, I told him if he took a step wrong in my town, I’d have his ass.”

  Tanner chuckled as she opened the door to the small room with the Lawton case files stacked up inside. “So you’re not so buttoned-up all the time, Mr. National Academy? You have a little hot side, do you?” she teased. “I like that.”

  Mendez pretended not to notice the flirtatious look she gave him as he walked into the room. “Ballencoa had a tape recorder in his pocket. He played the tape for my boss.”

  “Ouch,” she said, wincing. “He’s an asshole like that, you know? He’s like that creepy little shit that everybody went to school with and nobody could stand. The kid that would rat you out to the teacher for a piece of gum, then spend his free time pulling the wings off flies. Fucking little weirdo.

  “He’s an asshole all the way around,” she said. “A puckered, shriveled-up, cancerous asshole. Here he threatened to sue the department and the lead detective on the case at the time. He actually started proceedings. The town council offered him a settlement to make him go away.”

  “How much of a settlement?”

  “Fifty K, I heard. He would have sued for six figures. I guess they thought they would get off cheaper this way.”

  “That explains how he can afford to rent two places,” Mendez said.

  “Oh, that’s walking-around money for Roland. He inherited a tidy sum from the aunt that raised him.”

  “What did she die of?”

  “Personally, I think she died of being Roland’s aunt,” Tanner said as she scanned the file boxes for the one she wanted.

  “The official cause of death was head trauma due to an accidental fall down a flight of stairs. She was dead on the floor for four or five days during a heat wave before she was found. Major decomp. It would have been hard for the coroner to tell the difference between a fall and a beating. Ballencoa was her sole heir.”

  “To how much?”

  “Around two million.”

  “How old was he at the time?”

  “Twenty-one. Fresh out of the can from his lewd acts conviction.” She tapped the end of a box stacked taller than she was. “That’s the one you want.”

  Mendez reached up to get it. The room was so small they were almost body to body. She ducked under his arm and sidled toward the door to get out of his way, briefly putting a hand against his side to keep her balance. He was more aware of her touch than he should have been.

  “Did the cops look at him?” he asked.

  “They talked to him and a pal of his from jail—Michael Craig Houston, another budding psychopath. The local press made them out to be Leopold and Loeb, but nothing came of it. They gave each other alibis, and nobody ever proved murder anyway, so if they did it, they got away with it.”

  “What happened to Ballencoa’s parents?” he asked, following her back out into the hall.

  “Mom OD’d when he was ten or twelve,” she said, leading him into a conference room. “There was no father in the picture as far as I know.”

  “Where’d all this happy family stuff go on?”

  “North of Eureka,” she said. “Where the odds are good that the goods are odd. The gene pool is a puddle in some of those little logging towns up there.”

  Mendez set the box on the table and took the top off. Tanner ran a fingertip back over the files and pulled out the one she wanted. Her nails were short and neat with no polish. She wore no rings.

  “There isn’t a ton of stuff in here. It’s a little more than I gave you the other night. There’s a couple of old news clippings on the aunt’s death, and some contact numbers for the other agencies that have dealt with him,” she said with a shrug. “We got called off, you know.”

  “So did I,” Mendez said, flipping the folder open.

  Tanner’s chuckle had a slightly evil quality to it. “I like you, Mendez. You’re my kind of cop.”

  She boosted herself up to sit on the table as he took a seat. As she had been the first time he’d met her, she was in black slacks and T-shirt, this time with a gold blazer that set off the green of her eyes. Her blond hair was slicked back in a no-nonsense ponytail.

  “Are you looking for anything in particular?” she asked.

  “Whatever jumps out at me. I want to know as much about this guy as I can. I’m meeting with Vince Leone this afternoon to talk about him.”

  Tanner looked impressed. “Wow. Cute, a hard-ass, a gentleman, and connected. I may have to start fanning myself soon.”

  Mendez felt himself blush, and he fought the little smile that wanted to go with it, reminding himself that he was here on business. He put his eyes back on the file, knowing Tanner was amused with his reaction.

  “You’re into the whole profiling thing?” she said.

  “What? You don’t believe in it?” There were still plenty of meat-and-potatoes cops who thought it was a waste of time.

  “I don’t personally care if Roland’s auntie played wit
h his pee-pee when he was twelve and that’s why he needs to control women,” she said. “But I’ll use every tool in the box if it gets me my bad guy. If you can find something in his past that connects him to our present, I’m all for it. I’d be thrilled to be the one to close this case, if you don’t mind sharing.”

  “I don’t mind sharing,” he said, skimming the pages in front of him. “If he did the Lawton girl, he needs to go away. I don’t give a shit about jurisdiction. As far as we know, he hasn’t done anything serious in Oak Knoll, but already I don’t want him there.”

  He flicked through the pages, looking for the information regarding Ballencoa’s trouble in San Diego.

  “Ballencoa did a few months in a San Diego jail for breaking and entering—”

  “Stealing ladies’ undies.”

  “Did you ever connect him to any B and Es here?” he asked.

  “No,” Tanner said. “Our focus was the abduction. But Lauren Lawton was pretty adamant that he had been in her home not long before he moved out of town.”

  “You didn’t believe her?”

  “Actually, I did believe her, but it wasn’t my call,” she admitted. “Guys don’t get this, but a woman knows when somebody’s been touching her stuff. We’ve got a different instinct for that. I believed her. But we had nothing to go on. He didn’t leave any trace of himself. And by then the lead detective was so sick of Mrs. Lawton, I think he would have been just as happy to have her disappear.”

  “That’s a great attitude,” Mendez said sarcastically. “No wonder she got herself a gun.”

  Tanner’s eyes went wide. “Oh, Jesus. Lauren Lawton has a gun? That’s a bad idea.”

  “She believes she had Ballencoa sitting in her house jerking off in her underwear while she was at the supermarket, and your people couldn’t be bothered to help her. Can you really blame her?”

  “No. I can’t,” she conceded. “Like I said the other day: If I was her, I would have tortured that son of bitch until he gave up my kid, and then I would have killed him anyway.”

  “She said he was stalking her,” Mendez said. “From a psychological standpoint, that makes sense. He got whatever thrill he got taking the daughter. Tormenting the mother furthers the kick for him. He gets to keep reliving whatever he did to the girl plus cause the mother to have to relive it and worry about the child she still has, to say nothing of being concerned for her own safety. Big bonus points for a sick fuck like him.”