Down the Darkest Road

by Tami Hoag

  She looked up and around the room, spotting the air vent, and her hopes lifted. She climbed on a chair, used her screwdriver to pry the cover off. Nothing.

  She turned around, ready to give up, but found herself staring at the old, outdated electric heater built into the wall. The unit was tall and narrow, ugly dented metal painted the same color as the wall, rust crusting over the dents like old scabs. The thermostat knob was missing. It looked like it probably hadn’t worked in years.

  Lauren found herself fixed on the screws. Old screws that had been painted over half a dozen times. She could tell because the paint had been chipped. Scraped by a screwdriver. Recently. He had been careless here. Finally. The screws were loose. They came free easily, and the front panel lifted away.

  Lauren’s heart began to pound. Wedged in behind the old heating coils was a collection of journals, four bound books with fine leather covers, each with a date carefully hand-lettered on the front.

  A feeling of dread washed over Lauren as she reached for one dated October 1985–October 1986.

  Her hands were shaking as she opened it. The page was dated October 1, 1985. At a glance it looked like an address book of sorts, the entries made in strangely precise, small square printing.

  Angela Robeson: 11711 Mooreland Drive, 17, junior @ Santa Barbara High School. Cross country. Blonde, thin, narrow hips. 5’7”. Too like a boy. Body: 6 Risk: 7

  Stacey Connors: 18, senior @ San Marcos. Volleyball, beach volleyball. Green eyes. Dimples. Flirtatious. Promiscuous? Small bikini exposes breasts. Lives with single mother: 759 West Mesa. Phone: 805-555-7656 Body: 9 Risk: 3

  Della Rosario: Waitress @ Taco Lando. 5’3”. Big tits. Shows cleavage. Short skirt. Too short. Too ethnic. Body: 7 Risk: 2

  The entries went on, page after page, interspersed with carefully drawn maps and diagrams of houses.

  Lauren’s skin crawled. She wanted to fling the book away from her as she realized what it was: a catalog. A catalog of every girl Ballencoa had encountered, his impressions of them, the details he had learned about their lives. These were women and girls he had watched and studied and followed. He knew where they lived, with whom, the schedules of their families.

  She turned the pages to entries made in April of 1986 and her blood ran cold and her breath caught in her throat.

  Leslie Lawton: 15, 5’7”, long dark hair, long legs, elegant. 12707 Via De La Valle. Softball, tennis. Hot. Flirtatious. Bold. Sexy mouth . . .

  The writing blurred as Lauren’s head swam. She wanted to be sick. Here was a predator’s view of her child. What he liked, what he didn’t. There was a note about Leah, a mention of Lance on the sidelines after a softball game. He listed her risk factor at 7 and noted that she seemed to have a lot of independence coming and going from the home.

  Leslie was a young woman, sixteen. Lauren and Lance had given her a certain amount of freedom and with that freedom, responsibility. Leslie had always been good about letting them know where she was, who she was with. It had only been just before her abduction that she had begun to push against their boundaries. Normal teenage rebellion. She had never experimented with alcohol or drugs. She had yet to go on anything other than a group date with a boy. One time she had snuck out when she had been forbidden to.

  And Roland Ballencoa had been waiting.

  Fighting tears, Lauren closed the book and just stood there in the middle of Roland Ballencoa’s bedroom wondering what to do. If she took the book to Mendez, what would he do with it? He would want to know how she had come to have it.

  What did it matter how she had come by it? The real question was: What did it prove? That Ballencoa had had an interest in Leslie? He had had an interest in many girls. Only one of them had gone missing.

  But at the same time as she told herself the book proved nothing, she knew Ballencoa would be upset to lose it. He had taken pains to hide it. If she took it, he would want it back. What would he do to get it?

  Lauren tore a page from the journal and wrote on it with a pen she had found in the drawer of the nightstand. She placed the note on the center of the naked box spring as a car door slammed outside.

  The sound went through her like a gunshot.

  If Ballencoa was coming, she couldn’t go back through the living room to get to the kitchen, to get to the back door.

  She grabbed all four journals and tucked them into her tote. Her heart was beating so wildly that her head was spinning. There was nowhere in the room to hide.

  She went to the window that looked out on the backyard. Her hands felt weak as she fumbled with the latch.

  Maybe the car door was someone parked at the curb. Maybe it was a neighbor. Maybe it was a salesman or a missionary coming to spread the good news.

  A key rattled in the front door lock.

  The old window stuck and struggled against her as she struggled to lift it.

  Then it was up and she was out.

  She hit the ground hard, bouncing off a shoulder, rolling, grunting, scrambling to get her feet under her. Out of balance, she ran stumbling for the shed at the back of the property and ducked behind it.

  The air was like fire billowing in and out of her lungs. Her heart beat wildly. Her legs felt like columns of water beneath her. She pressed a hand to her belly, feeling the gun still strapped to her middle. She still had her tote bag.

  She wanted to know where Ballencoa was. Had he gone into his bedroom? Had he seen the mess? Had he seen the note? Had he seen her running from the scene?

  She couldn’t know, nor could she stay to find out. For all she knew, he was coming across the backyard as she stood there sucking wind.

  If she ran to the left and took the shortest route to her car, she exposed herself to Ballencoa’s backyard. If she ran to the right and kept to the alley, she had the better part of the block to go. He could easily run her down.

  Thinking fast, she dashed another thirty feet down the alley, cut left and lost herself between two hedges that snatched at her as she ran. She fought her way down the narrow trail and popped out onto the sidewalk maybe fifteen feet from her car.

  She didn’t know if anyone saw her. She hoped to God no one had called the sheriff’s office to report a suspicious person running through the neighborhood.

  She felt safer inside the car, though her hands were shaking violently as she fumbled to get the key in the ignition. The engine caught and purred. Lauren put the car in gear and let it slide away from the curb, resisting the urge to hit the gas and call more attention to herself.

  She was safe now. For the moment that was all that mattered, though she knew it wouldn’t last.

  In her mind’s eye she could see the note she left on Roland Ballencoa’s bed: Now I have something you want.

  47

  Mendez turned his car around at the end of Old Mission Road and parked. Lauren Lawton’s phone had gone unanswered. Her BMW wasn’t in the driveway. An uneasy feeling churned through him.

  He kept seeing the words she had written on the note Ballencoa had brought in: I’d rather see you in hell than see you at all.

  A threat, Ballencoa said. Mendez had the terrible feeling it was more a promise.

  His own words to Vince Leone kept echoing in his head: This story isn’t going to have a happy ending.

  Everyone had failed Lauren. Law enforcement had failed her. Her husband had failed her. God had failed her. In her mind there had to be only one person she could rely on: herself.

  She had come to Oak Knoll because she had known Ballencoa had set up shop here.

  She drank too much.

  She had a gun.

  “You can’t help me,” she’d said. The look in her eyes haunted him. The word desperation came to mind, but that wasn’t even it. There was something beyond that. Resignation. She had accepted the fact that she was alone in her fight.

  He got out of the car and found a way over the fence. Easily done. So much for her sense of security behind the gate.

  Maybe her car was in t
he garage. Maybe she was in the house—in which case he needed to make himself known before she shot him.

  “Lauren?” he called. “Mrs. Lawton? It’s Tony Mendez. Are you home?”

  He went to the door and rang the bell, hearing it sound inside the house.

  Damnit. Where was she? Was she stalking Roland Ballencoa while he stood here like a moron ringing her doorbell?

  He got back in his car and headed toward Ballencoa’s neighborhood.

  Lauren drove around the block and parked at the far end of Ballencoa’s street. She wanted to know what he was doing. How was he reacting to her having violated his space? Not well, she suspected. She remembered the rage that had spewed out of him the night before at the tennis courts when she’d broken his camera.

  He liked to be in control. He wanted to be the one trespassing on boundaries. That a woman had turned the tables on him had infuriated him.

  The rush she got from knowing that was exhilarating.

  She watched his front door. Was he inside calling the sheriff’s office? What would he tell them? The same thing she had had to tell the police after he had broken into her home: that someone had broken in but had taken nothing. He couldn’t tell them she had stolen his stalking journals.

  She imagined with pleasure his frustration as the detectives gave him their blank cop looks. Someone had broken into his house and messed up his neatly made bed. Some crazed person had come into his home and torn his clothes from the hangers.

  She hoped Mendez answered the call. He would see the significance. He would probably know it had been her doing.

  The front door of the bungalow opened then and Ballencoa came out. She was too far away to see if he was red in the face. She hoped he was. She hoped he was choking on his rage.

  He went to the garage and backed out in his van. Lauren’s pulse picked up as she waited for him to turn in her direction, but he turned the other way.

  She started her car and followed.

  Mendez pulled up in front of Ballencoa’s house and got out, knowing he would be risking Cal Dixon’s wrath by coming here. Ballencoa was already feeling paranoid. He would be ringing his attorney’s phone off the hook with lawsuits to file.

  But he didn’t care about Ballencoa or his threats. He cared about Lauren Lawton. The irony wasn’t lost on him. He would try to protect Lauren by warning Ballencoa she might be a danger to him.

  Ballencoa, however, didn’t answer the door. His van was gone.

  Mendez took a walk around the house, trying to look in the windows. This house looked as empty as the one in San Luis Obispo—until he got to the bedroom, where it looked as if a bomb had gone off. The bed had been stripped and ripped and torn. Feather pillows had been gutted. Clothes were strewn everywhere. The front panel of an old wall heater had been removed. Someone had tossed the place. He had a sinking feeling he knew who.

  Oh, Lauren . . .

  He walked around the back of the house and went to the back door. A glass pane had been broken out near the doorknob.

  He wanted to go inside. He had observed evidence a crime may have been committed. He could have cited a concern for the occupant. Exigent circumstances could override the need for a warrant . . .

  And a clever defense attorney could turn his probable cause into a pile of Fourth Amendment rights violations.

  He went back to his car and drove back to the sheriff’s office.

  Tanner and Hicks were still in the war room, going over old B&E reports with a fine-toothed comb.

  “Did you give her hell?” Tanner asked, looking up.

  “I couldn’t find her.”

  She frowned, reading his unease. “Maybe she’s with her daughter somewhere.”

  “Maybe,” he said, walking up to the whiteboard to stare, as if some clue might write itself like something from an Ouija board.

  “Are you okay?” Tanner asked.

  He was sweating. He felt a little sick. Adrenaline.

  “Someone broke into Ballencoa’s house,” he said.

  “Uh-oh.”

  “I can’t get hold of Lauren. She’s not home. I came past Ballencoa’s. He’s not there, but there was a broken window in the back door and an open bedroom window, and the bedroom was tossed. I looked in.”

  “Shit,” Hicks muttered.

  “I guess she wasn’t going to wait for the warrant this time,” Tanner said.

  Hicks got up. “I’ll go tell the watch commander to put out a BOLO on her car.”

  Mendez looked at the time line for the past week, beginning with the day Lauren Lawton had tried to mow him down with her grocery cart at Pavilions. He had noted the night she called him when she had found the photograph on the windshield of her car. The photograph taken of her leaving the shooting range.

  He and Hicks had spoken to Ballencoa the following day. Ballencoa had claimed not to know Lauren was in Oak Knoll. They hadn’t believed him because Lauren had given the impression Ballencoa had followed her to Oak Knoll, not the other way around. It had to have been the day after that when Lauren found the note in her mailbox: Did you miss me?

  Tanner watched him closely. She got up and came around the table to stand beside him. She looked over the time line as he had done, but she didn’t see it.

  She looked up at him. “What?”

  “If Lauren followed Ballencoa here, and not the other way around, how did he know where to find her to leave the photograph ?”

  48

  Lauren followed Ballencoa to a 7-Eleven near the college, where he parked his van, got out, and used a pay phone on the side of the building.

  Who would he call? Why wouldn’t he call from home? She tried to remember if she had seen a telephone as she had prowled through the house. Of course there must have been a phone. Who didn’t have a telephone in 1990? Why would he use a pay phone?

  Because he was a criminal, she supposed. Calls made from a pay phone would never come back to haunt him. There would be no phone records definitively tied to him or to his house.

  Who would a man like Roland Ballencoa call anyway? He wasn’t the kind of person who had friends. She couldn’t imagine him having family, although she supposed he must have had. While he seemed like something that had hatched from a serpent’s egg, she knew he had had a mother. She knew he had been raised by an aunt who had ended up dead.

  Lauren had read the story in the newspaper when the Santa Barbara police had named Ballencoa a person of interest in her daughter’s disappearance. She had taken it upon herself to find out everything she could about him, and had found a couple of old newspaper articles on microfiche at the library. She remembered the headline: NEPHEW QUESTIONED IN SUSPICIOUS DEATH.

  Ballencoa had been just out of jail for his first sex offense. He had been questioned. Nothing had come of it. That had probably been his first success as a killer. Not only had he gotten away with it, he had profited from it.

  He had lived most of his life without consequences. She was going to put an end to that, one way or another.

  She had thrown her canvas tote with her burglar tools on the floor of the passenger’s side. She had his journals. If they didn’t prove outright that he had taken Leslie—or some other girl—surely his own writing would link him somehow to some crime.

  Lauren contemplated taking them to Mendez. But she could see it happen all over again: Ballencoa brought in and questioned, released for lack of evidence, free to do what he wanted, free to stalk someone else’s daughter, empowered by society’s seeming inability to stop him.

  Ballencoa’s lawyer would argue that the journals had been obtained illegally. A judge would rule them inadmissible at trial. Ballencoa would get them back and destroy them.

  Lauren felt sick at the thought. Should she have left them where Ballencoa had hidden them? Should she have gone to Mendez and told him about the journals? By the time the police had been able to get a search warrant to enter Roland Ballencoa’s home in Santa Barbara, he had long since gotten rid of anything that might have
incriminated him.

  No, she thought, as Ballencoa got back in his van and pulled out of the parking lot. She couldn’t let that happen again. She needed to make a plan and implement it. She needed to do it now while Leah was safe at the Gracidas’. She now had something Roland Ballencoa would want. A bargaining chip. She would trade it for the truth. What happened after that would be justice . . . one way or another.

  49

  Leah felt terrible. She went about her chores on the brink of tears, shaking inside, feeling sick over the terrible things she had said to her mother. The most terrible thing was she had meant all of it.

  She was angry. She was so angry. She was angry with her sister for being so headstrong and so stupid and so careless. She was angry with her father for being so selfish and so weak that he would leave them just to end his own pain and not think anything about the pain Leah or her mother had to deal with after he was gone.

  She was angry with her mother for holding on so tightly to the misery, and for fighting and fighting and fighting when it would have been so much easier for them both to just forget and go on.

  And more than anything, she was angry with herself for having all of those feelings. What kind of terrible person was she that she could resent her sister, who was probably dead, who had probably been tortured and gone through unspeakable things at the hands of Roland Ballencoa? How could she hate the father she had loved so much and missed so badly? She would have given anything to have him back, to feel his strong arms around her as he told her everything would be all right. How could she lose patience with her mother, who had been left to deal with everything with no help from anyone?

  Leah thought she would choke on the guilt that rose up inside her. And at the same time she wanted someone to feel sorry for her. She wanted someone to agree with her. She wanted someone to tell her it was all right to have these terrible feelings and to allow them to tear out of her like a pack of wild animals.