by Tami Hoag
Lauren gasped as if her daughter had slapped her. If not for the car between them, she probably would have slapped her back.
“It’s not fair!” Leah went on. “She’s gone and we have to suffer and suffer and suffer!”
“It’s not Leslie’s fault she was taken!” Lauren countered.
“Yes, it is!” Leah shouted. “She wasn’t supposed to leave the house and she did it anyway. And she wasn’t supposed to talk to strange men, and she did that too. And she probably just got in his car because she wanted a ride. And it’s all her own stupid fault because she thought she was smarter than everybody!”
“Leah!”
“It’s true! And I hate her!” she cried, tears streaming down her face. “She ruined all our lives, but we’re supposed to go around saying ‘poor Leslie, poor Leslie.’ I’m sick of it!”
Lauren staggered back as if from a blow. She turned her back on her daughter because she didn’t know what else to do. Leah was her sweet one. Leslie had been headstrong. Leslie had been vocal. Leslie would have fought with her, not Leah.
Yet she could hear her youngest’s cries from just a day ago—What about me?
What about Leah? The daughter she had brought with her on this mad quest, putting her in harm’s way, depriving her of what childhood she should have had left. What about Leah . . .
A car door slammed behind her and Lauren jumped as if a gun had gone off. Leah was sitting in the BMW, angrily swiping the tears from her cheeks.
Lauren got in the car because she didn’t know what else to do. This is what we do, she thought. We pretend to be normal. Their world had come so far off its axis she didn’t know what normal was anymore.
Normal had become carrying a gun.
Normal had become pills to sleep and alcohol to numb the pain of being awake.
Normal had become the obsession with a daughter she didn’t have, and the neglect of the daughter she did have.
Normal had become raw, dirty sex with a man she didn’t like, and an offer to murder a man she hated.
I just want it to stop, Leah had said.
Me too, Lauren thought.
The silence fell between them again like an iron curtain as Lauren started the car and drove out the gate.
They were halfway to the ranch before she spoke again.
“I love you, Leah,” she said. “Don’t ever think that I don’t love you just as much as I love Leslie. If you were taken from me, I would fight just as hard for you.”
Leah stared down at her hands in her lap. “I’m afraid, Mommy. I’m afraid something bad is going to happen to you,” she said in a small voice.
Lauren didn’t answer her right away. She weighed what she was about to say, deciding it was necessary to say it.
“You know you would never be left alone,” she said. “If something ever did happen—and I’m not saying that anything will—but you need to know you will always be taken care of, sweetheart. Your aunt Meg would take care of you—”
“Don’t say that!” Leah snapped. “You’re scaring me!”
“I’m not trying to scare you. You said you were already afraid. I don’t want you to be afraid.”
“Stop it! I don’t want to talk about it!”
Once at the ranch, Leah got out of the car, slammed the door, and ran for the stables. Lauren watched her go, her daughter’s earlier words echoing in her head: I just want you to make it stop.
She needed to make it stop. For both their sakes. Roland Ballencoa had destroyed half her family in a single act. She couldn’t let him destroy what was left of it by allowing this madness to go on. That was why she had come here after all. To end it.
A strange calm settled over her as she turned out of the Gracida ranch gate and headed toward Oak Knoll.
44
“I finally got a line on that rental car,” Hicks said, coming into the war room.
They had decided to set up just as they did for a homicide investigation, utilizing the giant whiteboard at the front of the room to lay out a time line.
“What rental car?” Tanner asked as she organized the files she had brought with her from Santa Barbara.
“Ballencoa’s neighbor in San Luis spotted a guy parked outside Ballencoa’s house,” Hicks said. “He told her he was some kind of special investigator with the police, but we know the SLOPD wasn’t watching Ballencoa anymore.”
“The tag on the car he was driving came back to Avis,” Mendez said.
“Who rents a car to go on surveillance?” Tanner asked.
“Gregory Hewitt,” Hicks answered.
“Who’s Gregory Hewitt?”
“Gregory Hewitt is the guy whose car was in the shop at McFadden Autobody in Santa Barbara that week,” he said. “The rental was a loaner.”
“And I’ll ask again,” Mendez said. “Who is Gregory Hewitt?”
“No idea,” Hicks said, “but he doesn’t work for the San Luis PD or the Santa Barbara PD or the Santa Barbara County SO or any other agency. He’s not a cop.”
“But the neighbor lady said he showed her some kind of ID,” Mendez said.
He dug his little spiral notebook out of the breast pocket of his sport coat and flipped through the pages, looking for the notes he had taken when they had spoken with Mavis Whitaker. “She couldn’t read it. She didn’t have her glasses on.”
“Sounds like a private investigator,” Tanner said.
Hicks agreed. “I thought so too, but there’s no California PI license to anyone by that name.”
“Who cares, anyway,” Mendez said. “Ballencoa is here now. That’s what matters to us.”
“Right. The house he’s renting here is managed by a property firm,” Hicks said. “His lease began May first.”
“When was your first B and E?” Tanner asked.
Mendez consulted the first of the files. “May fifth.”
“He made himself right at home.”
Mendez went to the whiteboard and entered the information on the time line. The date, the name of the victim, the address. He did the same for each of their cases.
Tanner took the far left section of whiteboard and did the same with the Santa Barbara cases, leading the time line up to the abduction of Leslie Lawton.
“I called a guy I know in San Luis,” she said. “He works crimes against property. He thought they might have cases to add. He’s checking into it.
“We all know, B and Es aren’t uncommon in a college town,” she went on, “what with a certain recreational drug element in place. People steal drugs. People steal money to buy drugs, and stuff to pawn to get money to buy drugs. We’ve got it in SB. San Luis has it. I’m sure even the hoity-toity kids at McAster smoke pot.”
“Better-than-average pot,” Mendez said. “But someone comes in and steals your weed, you don’t call the cops. And I’ve sorted out the cases where money was taken or property with value was stolen. These cases reported a break-in only. Things messed with but not taken or things of seemingly little value missing.”
“Souvenirs,” Tanner said. “We need to go back and ask if their friendly neighborhood burglar did any laundry for them. Did you get prints at any of your scenes?”
“Nope,” Mendez said. “Nada. He’s been doing this too long to be careless. Did you get anything at any of yours?”
“Nothing that panned out.”
They compared each case, each detail, each meager scrap of evidence. They looked at the households that had been victimized, the sex and ages of the family members. In all cases, at least one girl living in the home had been between the ages of fourteen and nineteen.
“If we can go back and interview them,” Tanner said, “and we find these girls were athletes . . . Ballencoa might have photographed them . . . There’s our first connection.”
Or he might have connected with them through some other means, as he had with Denise Garland—through his art, Mendez thought.
“If this nurse, Denise Garland, is an example, he doesn’t pick his victim
s at random,” Mendez said. “He knows who lives in those houses. He does his homework. He establishes a connection.”
“We need to go to the girls who live in these houses and find out if they know him, if they’ve seen him,” Hicks said. “But even if the answer is yes, what do we have? Coincidence.” He looked to Tanner. “Did you establish a connection between Ballencoa and the Lawton girl?”
“He had photographed her,” Tanner said. “She had actually purchased photos from him—herself and her tennis partner in a tournament.”
“So you had that connection and he’s still walking around free.”
“He didn’t make any mistakes with Leslie Lawton,” she said. “If he’s made a mistake, it’s somewhere else, with someone else.”
“It only takes a crack to break a dam,” Mendez pointed out. “He’s got to have a flaw somewhere. He’s only human . . . I hope. Vince Leone is contacting ViCAP today, looking for open abduction cases in the San Diego area while Ballencoa lived there. He’s convinced this guy is too slick to be a first-timer with the Lawton girl.”
“There’s a comforting thought,” Tanner said.
The door opened and Detective Hamilton stuck his head inside. “Your guy Ballencoa is here.”
“For what?” Mendez asked, his heart picking up an extra beat. Had Ballencoa made them as they sat parked down the block, watching him stalk Denise Garland? Was he there to file another complaint? Bastard, he thought, stalking women, then having the gall to complain about getting caught at it.
“He’s claiming he’s being stalked.”
“Again?” Tanner said. “We should all be as popular as Roland. He gets more action than a Hollywood starlet.”
“What the fuck?” Mendez grumbled. “Where is he?”
“Interview one with Dixon. The boss told me to put you in the break room to have a look.”
The four of them went down the hall and into the break room, Mendez going to stand directly in front of the television set with his arms crossed over his chest and a hard frown pulling down the corners of his mustache.
Ballencoa was pacing the interview room, agitated, impatient, glaring at the door as he waited for someone to tend to him. His messenger bag sat on a chair at the end of the table.
Detective Trammell entered the room.
“Mr. Ballencoa,” he said. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”
“No,” Ballencoa snapped. “I would not like a cup of coffee. I would like to see Sheriff Dixon.”
Unconcerned with what Ballencoa wanted, Trammell took a seat at the table and opened the file folder he had brought with him into the room. “He’ll be along. He’s a busy man.”
“He should be busy in here,” Ballencoa said, irritated that he wasn’t being given due consideration.
“I’m your detective of record,” Trammell said. “You have to tell everything to me anyway. I’ll be the one writing the report. Why don’t we get started with that?”
“Because I don’t want to waste my breath speaking to you,” Ballencoa said. “I want to deal with Sheriff Dixon directly.”
“What a bitch,” Tanner muttered, tucking herself in front of Mendez for a better view of the television. He could have rested his chin on top of her head.
Trammell was unimpressed. “Yeah, well, I’d pull him out of my ass for you, but he doesn’t happen to be there. So why don’t we get to it, Roland? You think somebody’s stalking you?”
“I told you last night that woman is stalking me,” Ballencoa snapped, still pacing.
“Well, technically speaking, last night she was beating you up,” Trammell corrected him.
Ballencoa thrust a finger at him. “This is why I’m not wasting my breath talking to the likes of you! I will see Sheriff Dixon. Now!”
Trammell heaved a sigh, got up from the table, and disappeared off the television screen. Seconds later he walked into the break room and went to the coffee machine, glancing over at the crowd that had gathered.
“What a fucking girl,” he muttered. “Can you believe this piece of dirt? First he lets a woman beat him up, now he’s crying because she’s picking on him. He should have been drowned in his own placenta at birth.”
He poured himself a cup of coffee and doctored it with cream and sugar, then came to stand with the rest of them, looking at Roland Ballencoa on the monitor.
“He knows we’re watching him,” Mendez said. “He keeps glancing up at the camera.”
Trammell sipped his coffee. “The boss said you caught him following some nurse home this morning.”
“The guy’s a perv,” Tanner said.
“Just because he’s a pervert doesn’t mean he can’t be a taxpaying citizen free to verbally abuse us,” Hamilton commented.
“He’s lucky Lauren Lawton didn’t pull a gun and shoot him last night,” Mendez said. “He should be more grateful.”
“I’ll tell him that,” Trammell said. “We can watch the top of his head blow off.”
“When you go back in, touch his bag,” Tanner said.
Trammell gave her a look. “Excuse me? Who’s the perv?”
“The messenger bag,” she specified. “He’ll start twitching. Roland doesn’t like anyone touching his stuff.”
Trammell arched a brow at her. “Tony, who’s your little friend?”
Tanner introduced herself. “Detective Danni Tanner, SBPD.”
“You’re a girl,” Trammell said stupidly.
“The last I checked. I thought about growing a dick, but then none of my pants would fit right.”
“Huh.” Trammell didn’t know what to make of her. He stuck with safer ground. “You know Ballencoa?”
“Enough to hate him.”
“Good enough for me,” Trammell said, walking away. He spat in the coffee cup, then topped it off and went back into the interview room.
“The sheriff is on his way,” he said. “I brought you a cup of coffee, anyway.”
He set the coffee cup on the table and reached for the messenger bag on the chair. “Let me hang this up for you.”
Ballencoa snatched the bag away. “I’ll keep it.”
“My girlfriend keeps telling me men in Europe are carrying purses now,” Trammell commented.
“It’s a messenger bag,” Ballencoa corrected him, setting the bag on the seat of the chair across from Trammell, out of easy reach. He continued his pacing.
“Yeah?” Trammell said. “Maybe I should get one to carry my paperwork. Can I have a look?”
He reached across the table, backhanding the coffee cup, sending hot coffee spewing across the tabletop and onto the bag.
“You fucking idiot!” Ballencoa shouted, diving back toward the table, just getting his hands on the bag before Trammell could snatch it off the chair.
“Sorry,” Trammell said, grabbing up napkins with one hand, reaching for the bag with the other. “Let me help you with that. I hope it didn’t get wet inside.”
Ballencoa pulled the bag against himself like he was pulling a child out of harm’s way. “Don’t touch it!”
A knock sounded on the door and Cal Dixon let himself into the room.
“Mr. Ballencoa. I’m sorry to keep you waiting. I was on a call with the head of the detective division in the Santa Barbara PD. I wanted to get some background on your allegations against Mrs. Lawton.”
Ballencoa, frantically swiping the coffee off his bag, arched a brow at the sheriff. “My allegations? The woman stalked me. She attacked me last night. Now this.”
He reached into the bag and pulled out a small square envelope, and thrust it at Dixon.
Dixon pulled a note card from the envelope and looked at it, frowning.
“She put that in the mailbox on my front porch,” Ballencoa said. “I found it this morning.”
“Did you see her do it?” the sheriff asked.
“No.”
“Then how do you know it was her?” Dixon looked at both sides of the note and the envelope. “There’s no signature. If you di
dn’t see her do it, and there’s no signature or anything else to indicate the note came from Mrs. Lawton, I don’t see how we can help you, Mr. Ballencoa.”
“Her fingerprints will be on it,” Ballencoa said. “You must have fingerprinted her last night when she was arrested.”
“Mrs. Lawton hasn’t been processed,” Dixon said. “We’re waiting for word from the district attorney.”
Ballencoa went very still, like a snake ready to strike. “You didn’t charge her? She attacked me. She destroyed my camera and a lens worth more than five hundred dollars. Now she’s threatened me.”
“It’s a case of simple assault, Mr. Ballencoa,” Dixon said. “A misdemeanor. And Mrs. Lawton can make a damn good argument that she feared for her child. It’s the DA’s discretion whether or not to charge that out. You can press the issue with Kathryn Worth if you like, but frankly, I don’t think she’ll touch it. You are, of course, free to pursue the matter of any monetary loss in the civil courts.”
“This is outrageous!” Ballencoa snapped. “You’ll be hearing from my attorney, sheriff. That woman should be arrested and put away.”
“She says the same thing about you, Mr. Ballencoa,” Dixon returned. “My suggestion is for you each to stay away from the other or I’ll see you both in jail. My detectives have actual crimes to investigate. I don’t appreciate wasting manpower on something as juvenile as this note.”
“It’s a threat,” Ballencoa argued.
Dixon frowned at the note and shrugged. “That’s a matter of interpretation,” he said, “just as you may construe this however you like, Mr. Ballencoa: Don’t waste my time or the time of my office with petty game playing and bullshit.”
On that note, Dixon turned and left the room.
Sitting relaxed at the table, Trammell looked up at Ballencoa and spread his hands. “That didn’t really work out for you, did it?”
Dixon entered the break room and handed the note to Mendez. “File that somewhere.”
“Under ‘Pain in the Ass,’” Tanner suggested.
Mendez looked at the note.