Down the Darkest Road

by Tami Hoag

  Typed across the center of the note card were the words: Did you miss me?

  And scrawled beneath in an angry hand: I’d sooner see you in hell than see you at all.

  Heat crept up from his chest to his throat to his face. He could feel Tanner’s eyes on him.

  “What’s wrong?”

  He swore under his breath, handed her the note, and strode out of the break room and down the hall. In the war room he stood in front of the whiteboard with his hands on his hips, staring at the time line.

  “I don’t understand,” Tanner said. “Ballencoa probably did this note himself just to stir up shit. What’s it got to do with anything?”

  He could still see the look on Lauren Lawton’s face last night as she told him.

  “She told me last night Ballencoa had left a note in her mailbox that said ‘Did you miss me?’ She told me she threw the note away because she knew we wouldn’t do anything about it.”

  “So she wrote on it and gave it back to him,” Tanner said. “So what?”

  “How does she know where he lives?” Mendez asked. “She let Bill and me spend two days trying to figure out if the guy was even here. But she drove to his house and put this in the mailbox on his front porch.”

  And I want to fucking shake her, he thought.

  “Damnit,” he muttered, staring at the time line. “Goddamnit.”

  In mid-April someone had been poking around Ballencoa’s neighborhood, watching him. Roland Ballencoa had moved to Oak Knoll the first of May.

  “When did the Lawtons move here?” he asked no one in particular.

  “I don’t know,” Hicks said. “Her daughter would have been in school in Santa Barbara. It’s safe to assume they waited until the end of the school year, so . . . June.”

  Mendez wanted to kick something.

  “He didn’t follow her here,” he said. “She followed him.”

  45

  I need to end this. I need to take action. I can’t rely on someone else to do it. I can’t pay someone else to do it. I can’t hope someone else will do it.

  I have to stop Roland Ballencoa from ruining my life and my youngest daughter’s life the way he ruined the life of my husband, and the life of our family, by taking the life of my firstborn.

  That is what’s at stake: our lives.

  The people in law enforcement want to solve a case. Their jobs are at stake. Greg Hewitt would solve my problem—for money. Their stakes aren’t high enough. The outcome doesn’t mean to them what it means to me or to Leah.

  It might be a game to Roland Ballencoa. He might enjoy cat and mouse. But the idea that any of this has been a game makes me furious. This is my life, the lives of my daughters, the life of my husband, the life of our dreams. I have to fight for those things.

  I am tired of waiting for someone else to find an answer, to find evidence, to find my daughter, to find her body. I can’t wait for technology to advance. Waiting has gained me nothing but a simmering hatred that burned away what was good in me.

  I used to be a good person, a good mother, a good wife. Now I am consumed with anger. Blinded by my obsession, I have put my youngest child in harm’s way. I have nothing left to give to anyone.

  Winston Churchill once said, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” I have been going, and have kept going. It’s time for that journey to reach its destination. I’ve been in hell too long.

  The Walther was clean, oiled, and loaded. Seven in the clip, one in the chamber.

  Lauren had cut the legs off a pair of control-top hose and fashioned a holster of sorts from the panty. She was able to slip the gun inside the stretchy waistband and have it held snugly against her belly. No chance of it falling from the loose waist of her jeans, which no longer fit.

  She put on one of Lance’s old black T-shirts and tied the overlong tail up in a knot at her right hip. The shirt was baggy enough to hide the outline of the gun and allow her quick access to it.

  She had a drink to steady her nerves, then got behind the wheel of her car and headed toward the home of Roland Ballencoa.

  “That’s crazy,” Hicks said.

  Mendez looked at Danni Tanner. She’d had a hand in this case from early on. She knew Lauren Lawton better than any of them.

  “That’s Lauren,” she said with resignation. “Oh, man . . . She really is stalking him.”

  Mendez went to the whiteboard and tapped a finger under the name Greg Hewitt. “A week’s pay says he’s a PI—license or no. He found out Ballencoa was moving here. Lauren followed him.”

  “That’s at least three different kinds of crazy,” Hicks said. “She bought a house here—”

  “She didn’t buy a house,” Mendez corrected him. “The place belongs to friends.”

  “She brought her daughter here,” Hicks said with more gravity.

  Mendez replayed the conversation they had had as they sat in his car that first day when he had pulled her over:

  Do you have any reason to believe Ballencoa is in Oak Knoll?

  Would I have brought my daughter here if I did? she challenged.

  “If she came here with a plan, she felt in control,” Tanner said. “If she came here knowing exactly where Ballencoa was, she probably felt safer than not.

  “If you knew there was a rattlesnake loose in your house but you didn’t know what room it was in, you’d be in a constant state of anxiety,” she said. “If you knew it was in the living room under the sofa, you’d close the door to the living room and go snake hunting. Maybe she’s decided it’s time to go snake hunting.”

  Mendez thought of the Walther PPK Lauren had told him about, and the photograph of her leaving the shooting range. If Ballencoa had taken the photo, he knew she had a gun. The fact that he had taken the photo and left it on her windshield told Mendez this was well and truly a game to him.

  How had Tanner described him? He was the kid in school who would turn you in to the principal for a stick of gum, then spend his free time pulling the wings off flies.

  He would torment Lauren Lawton by photographing her daughter, then turn around and try to get her in trouble with the SO for picking on him.

  “Now what?” Hicks asked.

  Mendez said nothing.

  “What’s changed?” Tanner asked. “Ballencoa is still the bad guy here. He’s the pervert, the predator. He’s probably a murderer. Christ knows none of us have stopped him doing anything. Who could blame Lauren for wanting to put a bullet between his eyes?”

  “The State of California,” Mendez pointed out. “She can’t break the law just because we’ve done a bad job enforcing it.”

  “Then we’d better find a way to get this dirtbag off the street,” Tanner said, turning back to the table and the files they had spread out. “Before Lauren Lawton does it for us.”

  46

  Lauren had no idea what kind of schedule he kept. She wanted to imagine that he lived like a vampire—asleep in the day, prowling by night. But the first time she had come to this house had been in the gray of predawn, and Ballencoa had come out of the house and driven away like a normal human being going off to a normal job.

  To suit her purposes, she had to hope he was out of the house now, off stalking some poor, unsuspecting young woman. And yet there was a place in her mind where she imagined him home, imagined him vulnerable, imagined herself holding the gun to his head as she demanded answers. She imagined the sweat beading on his brow and running in rivulets down the sides of his thin, bony face as the steel of the barrel kissed his temple again and again in a gentle reminder. I will kill you.

  The idea of having that kind of control over him was almost as intoxicating as the vodka she had consumed for the courage to do this.

  The day was hot and sunny. Daylight at its broadest and brightest. The odds of being seen by someone seemed dead-on. If she hadn’t been arrested for assault, she would probably be arrested for breaking and entering.

  She put the thought out of her head. Failure was not a
n option. If Roland Ballencoa could come and go at will from the homes of his victims, his intentions dark and disgusting, then she should be able do the same with a goal that was just.

  She parked on the back side of his block and approached his property via the side street, head down, baseball cap pulled low over her eyes. A canvas bag was slung over her shoulder and across her body, bouncing gently against her hip like something she might take to the farmer’s market to carry home fresh vegetables. In it she had stowed several tools—a hammer, a screwdriver, a box cutter. Things she imagined might be useful to a burglar.

  In her jeans and sneakers, T-shirt and ball cap, sunglasses hiding her eyes and the bruise on her cheek, she might have been mistaken for a student walking home from a summer class at McAster. She didn’t look out of place. She kept her hands in her pockets, her head down, shoulders slouched. As fast as her heart was tripping, she kept her walk slow and casual.

  The neighborhood seemed quiet. Most of the people here probably had day jobs. She had seen no sign of young children on this block—no toys in the yards, no dirt bikes racing up and down the street. There would probably be no young mothers home to look out their kitchen windows and see her creeping down the alley. This was a place where people cut their own grass in the evening or on the weekend. There were no armies of gardeners sweeping across the lawns.

  Lauren turned at the alley, resisting the urge to keep looking over her shoulder. She walked just past the tar paper shed at the back boundary of Ballencoa’s property, then turned and ducked around the end of it. Keeping close to the ficus hedge, she made a beeline for the single-car detached garage, hoping if Ballencoa was home he wasn’t looking out a window at the back of the house.

  The hedge grew nearly up to the far side of the building. She had to press herself flat up against the siding to edge toward the small window in the middle of the wall. Even then branches snagged at her clothes and scratched at the side of her face like a thousand cats’ claws.

  Her reward was a look inside an empty garage. If Ballencoa was home, he had parked in the street. But she had seen no van as she circled the block. Which meant she had time. How much time was the question no one could answer.

  Emerging from the hedgerow, she quickly crossed the yard to the back door of the house. It was an old wooden door with nine small rectangular panes of glass in the top half. Attractive, but not secure.

  Her hands were trembling as she dug inside the canvas bag. She had worn a pair of Leah’s riding gloves, supple leather as thin and tight as a second skin. She pulled out a roll of masking tape and began tearing off long strips and smoothing them over the small pane of glass nearest the dead bolt lock.

  Ballencoa’s backyard was fairly private, with the big hedges on either side and the shed at the back property line. Across the alley a wooden privacy fence overgrown with morning glories closed off the neighbor’s view. Unless someone came down the alley, she was relatively safe.

  She pulled the small hammer from the bag and hit it against the taped glass. Too lightly at first, then a little harder, then a little harder. On the third tap she felt the glass give way at the inner corner of the window. She worked her way around the pane, tapping the glass just hard enough to break it. The tape kept the pieces from falling.

  With one side of the little window completely broken free of the frame, she carefully folded the taped shards back behind the unbroken portion of glass, then kept working with the hammer until the entire windowpane was in her hand—a flexible sheet of masking tape filled with glass.

  Carefully, she wrapped the broken glass in a plastic bag and dropped it inside her canvas tote. With the glass out, she was able to reach inside the door and unlock the dead bolt.

  She stopped breathing as she let herself inside Roland Ballencoa’s house.

  The refrigerator humming was the only sound, save the pounding of Lauren’s pulse in her ears. She stepped into the tiny kitchen, taking in every detail—the original 1930s tile, the plain painted cabinets, the emptiness of the counters, the lack of ornamentation of any kind. There was not so much as a grocery list on the counter or a magnet on the fridge.

  Inside the refrigerator was a bottle of Evian, a bottle of apple cider vinegar, a head of lettuce, a carton of cottage cheese. In the cupboard, wheat germ, bran, vitamins.

  It struck her as odd that he was a health nut. It was hard to imagine him as being human with human needs like food and water. To her he was something . . . other. He fed on fear and drank in the despair of his victims. What did he need with vitamin B and a regular bowel? It seemed more likely that he slept hanging upside down inside a dark closet like a rabid bat.

  She didn’t know what she was looking for as she moved through the bungalow, but she didn’t find it. She didn’t find anything in the dining room or living room. The furniture was sparse and spartan. There wasn’t a plant. There wasn’t a magazine. There were no shoes by the front door. There was no mail on the table, not a bill or a flyer or a letter from Ed McMahon promising Roland Ballencoa he might already be a winner.

  There is no life here, she thought, pulling the cushions from the chairs and throwing them on the floor. There wasn’t even spare change or food crumbs in the creases of the sofa.

  What did he do when he wasn’t being a predator? Did he read? Did he listen to music? Did he watch television? There was no sign of any of that. She imagined he had an array of violent pornography stashed somewhere. He undoubtedly had photographs of the girls he had stalked. He probably had videotape.

  Her stomach turned at the prospect of finding photographs of Leslie, or movies of what he had done to her. As much as she wanted to find something here that could tie Roland Ballencoa to her daughter, she dreaded that prospect just as much.

  She moved down the narrow hallway, only pausing at the door to the bathroom, loath to go inside, though she imagined it would be as spotless and lifeless as every other room here. The imagined sense of intimacy in that room was too much. While he had certainly breached every boundary of Lauren’s own house when he had broken in, she didn’t want the same experience. She would not be fondling Roland Ballencoa’s dirty underwear or crawling naked between his sheets.

  His bedroom looked almost as uninhabited as the rest of the house. The bed was made with military precision. The first thing Lauren made herself do was get down on her hands and knees to look beneath it.

  She half expected to see a body, to come face-to-face with the lifeless stare of someone else’s daughter. Or, if not a body, a box containing a victim—alive or dead.

  There was no box. There was nothing beneath the bed. Not even dust.

  Clothes were hung neatly in the closet in order: shirts, pants, jackets, light colors to dark. Shoes were lined up neatly beneath. Three pair. Socks and underwear were organized in a dresser drawer. T-shirts were folded exactly alike and stacked like a display at the Gap.

  So orderly, Roland’s world. It irked Lauren that he could be this way when what he had done to her had thrown her inner life into chaos. He should have an idea of how that felt, she thought, and she began dismantling his orderly habitat, starting with the bed.

  She tore the coverlet off first and flung it to the side. Pillows sailed to the floor. She yanked the sheets free of the tightly tucked corners, dragged them off and threw them to the side, stomping on them, grinding the dirty soles of her sneakers against the fabric.

  It was juvenile, she knew. She was wasting time. But there was a certain rush and satisfaction in doing it. As she pulled his clothes from the hangers and out of the drawers, she briefly considered peeing on all of it, like a dog marking territory. But then it occurred to her that as perverted as Ballencoa was, he might find that exciting.

  He had been more subtle in his invasion of her home. And yet she had thrown out the load of laundry he had handled. She had smashed the wine glass he had drunk from. She had stripped every bed in the house and refused to sleep on her mattress or let Leah sleep on hers. The sense of violation
, of defilement, had been terrible, as bad as if Ballencoa had put his hands directly on her naked body.

  Lauren stood back and looked at the mess she’d made, imagining how he would feel when he saw it.

  How do you like that, Roland? I invaded your world. I touched your things. You couldn’t stop me.

  She felt a small rush of power at the thought, and imagined that was what he had felt as he had moved through her house, touching her things. Feeding off that power, she pulled the drawers out of the dresser and turned them over, looking for something to be taped to the bottoms. There was nothing. She stuck her head inside the empty shell of the dresser and looked at the underside of the top. Nothing. She pulled the thing away from the wall and looked behind it. Nothing. She tipped it over and looked at the bottom. Nothing.

  She went through the same process with the nightstands. Nothing. Sweating and cursing, she wrestled the mattress off the box spring, flipping it over. Nothing.

  Angry and frustrated, she took the box cutter from her bag and sliced the mattress open down the middle like she was gutting a fish. Nothing. She did the same with the pillows, sending feathers everywhere. Nothing.

  The disappointment drained the adrenaline out of her. She looked down at the mess she had made of the room, the upended dresser, the overturned mattress spilling its guts. She had dismantled the bed to its frame, looked under it, looked behind it. Nothing.

  Where would a man like Ballencoa hide something? It would have helped to know what that something was. She assumed because of the sexual bent to his activities he would keep souvenirs of his victims or photographs of his victims in his bedroom—the most private and comfortable space for him to amuse himself. He would want his mementos out of sight, but readily accessible—easy to get at and easy to put back in a hurry if necessary.

  She had looked at eye level and below—her eye level. Roland Ballencoa was six feet three inches tall. His reach would allow him to easily access probably—what?—another twelve to eighteen inches.