by Tami Hoag
Toward the front of the restaurant the same group of night shift nurses he had been watching all week were getting ready to leave—Denise Garland among them. They had gotten up from their table, talking and laughing. One of the older fat ones spotted him and waved. He waved back.
As the nurses headed for the front door, he put a ten and a five down next to his plate to pay his bill and leave Ellen Norman, twenty-four, with the curly strawberry blond hair and receding chin, a nice tip.
“Pervert at two o’clock!” Tanner said as Ballencoa came out of the diner.
He walked out into the sunshine, settled a pair of sunglasses on his nose, hitched at the waist of his baggy cargo pants, and looked around like he was pleased with himself.
“Oh, yeah, Roland,” Tanner said. “You’re all that. King of the Panty Whackers.”
“What’d you find in your files?” Mendez asked. “Was he up to that shit in SB?”
“I found half a dozen cases that fit the B and E MO, spread out over eighteen months before Leslie Lawton went missing. Nobody gave them much attention because nothing of value was taken, nobody was home at the time of the break-ins, there was no violence involved.”
“Any fingerprints?”
“Nope. But one of the homeowners mentioned that clothes had gotten run through the washing machine,” she said. “The reason it got mentioned was that the machine was broken, it wouldn’t drain. The homeowner hadn’t used it in a week. That was the woman’s first clue that someone had been in her house.”
“And he ran a load of laundry at the Lawtons’ house too,” Mendez said, putting the car in gear, waiting for Ballencoa to drive out of the parking lot and pick a direction. Two other cars pulled out onto La Quinta—nurses who had left the restaurant ahead of him.
“Right,” Tanner said. “Underwear. As soon as she told us that, I knew what he’d done. Just another big fuck-you from Roland. He could be in that house, be comfortable enough to play milk the snake with her panties, then wash the evidence away in a way everyone would notice, and no one could do anything about. Like a dog pissing on a fence.”
Ballencoa took a right, pulling out behind a red Toyota Corolla with a nurse in it. Mendez let two cars fall in behind him before pulling out into the flow of traffic.
“You guys do the most disgusting things,” Tanner commented.
“Don’t look at me!” Mendez said, offended.
“Well, maybe not all of you,” she conceded. “But you gotta admit you never see women breaking into guys’ houses to masturbate with their underwear. Not that I’ve ever heard of.”
They passed Mercy General Hospital and took a left on Third Avenue.
“Although,” Tanner mused, “I suppose if a guy came home and found that going on, he probably wouldn’t call the cops. He’d call himself a lucky son of a bitch!”
“Now who’s disgusting?” Mendez complained.
“Am I embarrassing your delicate sensibilities?”
“As a matter of fact . . .”
One of the cars acting as a buffer between them and Ballencoa’s van turned off to the right. Mendez swore under his breath and eased off the gas. There were half a dozen reasons he couldn’t have Ballencoa see them or suspect them—not the least of which would be having Dixon kick his ass for following the guy.
“Sorry,” Tanner said. “I’m too used to working with assholes.”
The red Toyota ahead of Ballencoa took a right. The car behind Ballencoa pulled over and parked. Ballencoa went straight, but took the following right. Mendez slowed to a crawl, waiting, then took the same turn.
They made a big loop, coming back onto the street the Toyota had turned down from the opposite direction.
“Ho-ly shit,” Tanner murmured excitedly. “He’s following her. That nurse.”
Mendez felt a little rush of adrenaline. The Toyota had parked in front of a little cracker box house. There was no sign of the nurse. Ballencoa cruised slowly past, then made a right. Mendez went straight onto the next block, did a three-point turn, and doubled back, parking at the corner with a sight line to the red Toyota.
Ballencoa’s van came back onto the block from the opposite direction and pulled over and parked maybe twenty yards from the Toyota.
Neither Mendez nor Tanner said anything. They waited. They held their breath. They waited for Ballencoa to get out of the van, to approach the little square house the Toyota had parked in front of.
“Do you think he made us?” Tanner asked softly, as if there was some chance of Ballencoa hearing her a block away.
“I don’t think he would have stopped if he’d made us,” Mendez said.
“Or he would—just to yank our chains.”
“Maybe.”
“This is like watching one of those nature shows,” Tanner murmured. “Watching the tiger stalk some poor unsuspecting whatever the hell tigers stalk.”
They sat there for nearly ten minutes before Ballencoa pulled away from the curb and came toward them. Shit, Mendez thought. He was going to come right past them. No way he wouldn’t see them. Tanner slid down in her seat and ducked her head. Mendez twisted around and pretended to look for something in the backseat.
But Ballencoa turned left at the corner just in front of them, never looking their way.
Tanner and Mendez exhaled together. They waited another ten minutes to make sure he didn’t come back, then went to knock on the door of the nurse with the red Toyota.
42
Mendez ran the tag on the Toyota before they went to the door. It came back to Denise Marie Garland, twenty, no wants or warrants.
He checked his watch as they went up the sidewalk. He was due in Dixon’s office in seventeen minutes. He rapped his knuckles hard on the door and said, “Miss Garland? Sheriff’s office.”
Denise Garland came to the door clutching her bathrobe closed at the throat, her mousy brown hair hanging in wet strings around her head, her brown eyes wide.
Mendez showed her his badge. “Miss Garland, I’m Detective Mendez, this is Detective Tanner. We need to ask you a few questions. May we come in?”
She stepped back from the door. “Did I do something? I know I’m not supposed to park in the doctors’ lot, but I was so late—”
“You haven’t done anything, ma’am,” Mendez said. “We’re investigating a string of break-ins in your neighborhood. We’d like to ask you some questions, that’s all.”
“Break-ins?”
“Have you noticed anyone strange hanging around the neighborhood lately?” Tanner asked, drawing the girl’s attention to her, allowing Mendez to move a little farther into the room.
The kitchen was to his left, the living room to the right. The place was the size of a postage stamp. It was clean with a normal amount of clutter. A pile of mail here. A stack of magazines there. Some dishes in the sink.
“No,” she said. “But I work nights. I just got home.”
“You’re a nurse?” Tanner said.
“Yes. I work in the ER.”
Half of her furniture was white plastic. The kind that was always on display on the sidewalk outside of Ralphs market and Thrifty drugstores. He could see a small table and four chairs of the same white plastic out on a little patio area on the other side of a flimsy-looking sliding glass door.
“Have you noticed anything out of place?” Tanner asked. “Anything missing?”
Denise Garland frowned as she thought. “No.”
“Do you keep your doors locked, Ms. Garland?” Mendez asked, walking over to the patio door.
Even as she said yes he pushed the door open with a finger.
“Well,” she said, flustered. “Sometimes I forget that one. I have to be more careful, I know. My mom is always harping at me about locking my doors. I accidentally left it open the other night. Stupid.”
“Did you?” Mendez asked, looking at Tanner. “Are you sure you forgot to close it?”
The girl looked puzzled by the question. “I thought I closed it. It was ope
n when I got home. You don’t think . . . ?”
“Did anything seem disturbed?” Tanner asked. “Is anything missing?”
“No . . . I don’t think so . . .” Now she seemed unsure of everything as she tried to recall. “My friend Candace came over in the afternoon. We cooked out. I was late leaving for work. I was in a hurry. I figured I just didn’t remember to close the door.”
“Do you have a washing machine?” Tanner asked.
Now every question sounded strange and sinister to her. “No. Why?”
“Have you noticed any articles of your clothing missing?”
“No. What kind of question is that?” she asked, getting more agitated by the second.
A drawing on the counter between the kitchen and living area caught the eye of Mendez as he came back toward the front door. A pencil drawing. A cartoon. A caricature of a group of nurses, Denise Garland with her heart-shaped face among them. The artist had signed it in the lower right-hand corner: ROB.
A memory scratched at him. From the afternoon Ballencoa had come to the SO to file his complaint. Him asking Hicks what had been in Ballencoa’s messenger bag. A sketch pad, a notebook, a couple of rolls of film . . .
“Ms. Garland,” he said, “do you know a man named Roland Ballencoa?”
“No.”
He picked up the drawing and held it so Tanner could see it. “Where did you get this?”
“Oh, that’s from Rob,” the girl said, relaxing. This was something that wasn’t scary to her. A pleasant memory.
“Who’s Rob?”
“The guy at the diner,” she explained, finding a little smile. “He’s always there for breakfast. He does those and gives them to people. Just for fun. He’s nice.”
“Nice,” Tanner said.
“Nice,” Mendez repeated.
Denise Garland didn’t know whether she was supposed to be happy or cry.
Mendez took a business card out of his wallet and handed it to her.
“Miss Garland,” Tanner said. “I have to be careful how I word this, but I want you to know that man has been a person of interest in a felony investigation in Santa Barbara.”
The girl’s eyes went impossibly wide. “Oh my God. What did he do? Do you think he broke into my house?”
“Double-check your locks,” Mendez suggested.
“And check your underwear drawer,” Tanner suggested. “Thank you for your time, Ms. Garland.”
“You’re late,” Cal Dixon said sharply as Mendez walked into his office.
“Roland Ballencoa is stalking a nurse from Mercy General Hospital,” Mendez returned.
Dixon sat back. “What?”
Mendez told him what had happened, weathering the scowl that came when he told the sheriff about tailing Ballencoa away from the diner. In this case, he felt the end more than justified the means.
“You’re sure he didn’t see you?” Dixon asked.
“Ninety-nine point nine percent. I think he would have already called you and raised a stink if he’d made me for a tail.”
Dixon cursed under his breath. That spot between the rock and the hard place was never comfortable. They had no legitimate call to tail Roland Ballencoa. They had nothing on him to link him to any of the B&Es. He had in fact been a victim of a crime with Lauren Lawton attacking him at the tennis courts. While they may have had their suspicions, he was not officially a suspect in anything.
Mendez had followed him to Denise Garland’s street, but they had nothing to link him to any crime committed against the nurse. As far as Denise Garland knew, there had been no crime committed. She couldn’t say anyone had been in her home without her consent. She couldn’t even swear that she hadn’t left her patio door open herself. And yet Mendez would have bet a week’s pay Ballencoa had been the one to leave that door open.
They couldn’t even follow Ballencoa on the excuse that he was a known predator because nothing had ever been proven against him in the Leslie Lawton case. They had no legitimate call to follow him, and yet in following him they now had every reason to find his behavior suspicious.
Hicks had pegged it right the day they had gone up to San Luis Obispo to begin their investigation into Roland Ballencoa: This isn’t even a whodunit. This is a what-the-hell?
Dixon huffed a sigh, got up from his chair, and paced behind his desk. He was a politician more by necessity than nature. By nature he was a cop first, a detective with a storied record in LA County. Yet he had to balance the two aspects of his job, Mendez knew. He didn’t envy his boss.
“We’ve got to run our investigation like we know he’s already done something,” Mendez said.
“But we can’t make a move against him without probable cause to believe he’s committed a crime,” Dixon countered. “I’ve already been on the phone with his attorney this morning. He wants to know what charges are going to be brought against Lauren Lawton.”
“He’s got balls,” Mendez grumbled. “He comes here to stalk the woman and make her life a misery, and he wants her in jail on top of it.”
“Vince is right,” Dixon said. “It’s a game to him.”
“The DA won’t charge her, will she?”
“I brought Kathryn Worth up to speed already,” Dixon said. “She’s not inclined to do anything, but she’s got a plan if Ballencoa presses the issue. The most Mrs. Lawton would be charged with is a petty misdemeanor. She’d plead out and get probation. A day or two of community service.”
Mendez bobbed his eyebrows but held his tongue. No part of that would sit well with Lauren. He had to hope, for everyone’s sake, Ballencoa let the issue die on the vine.
Dixon gave Mendez a sharp look. “What’s your plan, detective ?”
“We’ve got to link him to the B and Es.”
“Yes,” Dixon said drily. “Those non-crimes you didn’t want to bother with.”
“Lesson learned,” he conceded. “I’ve got Tanner here for the day from SB. She and Bill and I are going over everything. We’ll lay it all out and hope he’s left a loose thread dangling somewhere.”
“Yes,” Dixon said. “And we’ll hope it’s long enough Roland Ballencoa can hang himself with it.”
43
They moved around each other like two ghosts, each floating on their own plane, never touching, never speaking.
Leah ate a hard-boiled egg and half a grapefruit, went and brushed her teeth, came back to the kitchen, and sat down in silence.
Lauren drank a cup of coffee, picked at a blueberry muffin, took a couple of Tylenol, and sat at the table, silent.
She thought she should have been trying to draw her daughter out of her shell, into conversation, but every scenario she ran through in her head ended badly so she didn’t even try. The effort would have come across as desperate and phony. She didn’t want to put either of them through the awkwardness.
Leah had every right to be upset. Lauren had no words of wisdom. She had put the two of them in this place. She had no excuses. She had no solutions. She had made all of her promises and had promptly broken most of them. What was there to say?
She desperately wished she could think of something. She found herself absurdly thinking of the black-and-white wisdom of the television moms she had grown up on—Donna Reed and June Cleaver—who always managed to come up with some pearl of wisdom by the end of the half hour to reassure their children that all was right with the world.
All wasn’t right with the world. And it seemed like half of what was wrong was either directly or indirectly her own fault. Donna Reed had never been arrested for assault. June Cleaver had never contemplated hiring a hit man.
She was still stunned Greg Hewitt had made the offer. Twenty-five thousand dollars to end the life of Roland Ballencoa. She was even more stunned that she hadn’t rejected the idea on the spot. She knew the only reasons she hadn’t said yes were that her first priority was to find Leslie, to know what had happened to her, and second, that she wanted the satisfaction of killing Roland Ballencoa herself.
Their world had gone mad. How was she supposed to explain that to her fifteen-year-old daughter? She couldn’t, and so they left the house as they did every morning, going through the motions of what passed for normal. The usual twenty-minute drive to the Gracida ranch stretched out before them like the Bataan Death March, the silence between them as heavy as an anvil.
Lauren stood beside the door of the car, looking at her daughter across the black expanse of the roof. Leah looked back at her, wary, waiting. Unable to stand it any longer, Lauren finally blurted out: “I’m going to make an appointment with Anne Leone. For you.”
Leah gasped. “I’m not the crazy one attacking people!”
“I didn’t say you were crazy,” Lauren said. “But you have to deal with me, so we should just head that off at the pass. You can go to Anne and complain about me all you like. Tell her what a bad mother I am, and how I am single-handedly trying to ruin your life and mine.”
“It’s not funny,” Leah snapped.
“I’m not being sarcastic,” Lauren protested. “I know you’re miserable. You’re miserable. I’m miserable. We’re the Lawtons Les Misérable.
“I don’t know what to do about it, Leah,” she confessed. “The scary thing is I’m doing the best I can, which is truly pathetic. You should be able to go to someone and complain at the very least.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Leah argued. “I just want it to stop. I just want you to make it stop!”
“How?” Lauren asked, frustrated. “How am I supposed to make it stop when it’s never over? Are we just supposed to pretend none of it ever happened? Am I supposed to forget you had a sister, a father? Are we supposed to pretend it’s okay that Roland Ballencoa is walking around a free man, free to stalk us? That’s not okay, Leah. Am I supposed to pretend he couldn’t take you away from me if he had the chance? What am I supposed to do?”
“I don’t know!” Leah cried, pounding her fists on the roof of the BMW. “I hate it! I hate that we have to live this way! It’s all Leslie’s fault! None of this would have happened if she wasn’t such a brat! I wish she was dead! I wish we knew she was dead so we could just get on with our lives!”