Down the Darkest Road

by Tami Hoag

  But she was afraid to ask for that. She was afraid of being told it wasn’t all right, that she shouldn’t feel the things that had been building inside of her all this time since Leslie had been taken.

  What would Anne Leone think of her if she confessed all of these ugly emotions? Leah had told her mother she wasn’t the crazy one, but she had a terrible suspicion that maybe she was. How else could she think to hate the sister she had loved so much? How else could she bring herself to cut herself and cause herself pain and make herself bleed? If that wasn’t crazy, what was?

  Unable to concentrate, Leah had asked to skip her riding lesson with Maria. She had thrown herself into her tasks—grooming horses and cleaning tack. These were jobs she usually enjoyed because they were simple and physical and let her see a result, and at the same time her mind was free to wander. Today she didn’t want her mind to wander because it wanted only to go down dark paths to places that frightened her.

  She didn’t want to be alone with her thoughts. She didn’t want to interact with other people. She wanted just to go home, but she didn’t really have a home anymore. The house they were living in wasn’t home. The home she had grown up in was being sold. Her life had no anchor. She felt like she was trapped in a clear balloon floating aimlessly while she suffocated inside it. And the people around her were watching it happen, but seeing nothing.

  She was afraid to be by herself. She was afraid of herself. She was afraid now for her mom after the things her mother had talked about in the car. She was just plain afraid.

  She went into the stall with Bacchus, just to be near him. He was so calm and seemed so wise. He didn’t think she was crazy. He was always happy to see her, and welcomed her with a nicker and a nuzzle from his big soft nose.

  In a weird way, going to Bacchus had taken the place of going to Daddy for comfort. Bacchus was big and strong. He didn’t judge her. He loved her unconditionally. Nothing ever seemed as bad when she was next to him.

  She stroked his face now as she struggled against the need to cry. The pressure was building and building inside her until she felt like she would explode. Her whole body was shaking from the very core outward. She wanted to run away from the feeling or curl up into a tiny ball and disappear. But she felt unable to do either one of those things. She put her hands over her face as if to hide.

  Bacchus put his chin on her shoulder and gently pulled her to him until she was tucked against his shoulder, and he curved his big, thick neck around her as if to hold her there. Leah pressed her face against the horse’s warm body and sobbed and sobbed until she thought she would drown in her own tears.

  Then Maria Gracida was there beside her, putting an arm around her shoulders, drawing her back away from her horse and into the comfort of a human embrace.

  Leah struggled to rein in the flood of emotions. She was embarrassed to cry in front of Maria. She felt stupid, but she couldn’t help it. When Maria asked her what was wrong, she said she just didn’t feel well. It wasn’t exactly a lie. She told her she had stomach cramps and she just wanted to go home.

  Maria tried to call her mom, but got the answering machine, and drove Leah home herself.

  “Do you want me to wait with you until your mom gets back?”

  Leah already felt like a fool. She knew Maria had lessons to give and horses to ride. She’d been enough of an inconvenience. All she really wanted to do was go back to bed and pull the covers over her head, and not come out until the world changed for the better.

  “I’ll be fine,” she said. “I’m just really tired, that’s all.”

  Her boss looked unconvinced, but torn at the same time. She glanced at her watch and frowned. “I should wait.”

  “I’m just going to go to bed,” Leah said. “I’ll make sure all the doors are locked. Mrs. Enberg will have a cow if you’re not there for her lesson.”

  The Gracidas were not wealthy people. They made their living from their ranch, from Maria’s teaching and training business and Felix’s polo school. They couldn’t afford to lose a fussy wealthy client because Maria was a no-show for a lesson. And the last thing Leah wanted was to be the cause of more trouble.

  “I’m going to call and check on you,” Maria said, reluctantly moving toward the door. “I want your mom to call as soon as she gets home. Okay?”

  Leah promised.

  She locked the door behind Maria Gracida as she left.

  The house was quiet. The tension that had filled the air that morning was gone. Leah welcomed the calm. She felt a little better since she’d had her meltdown. The pressure inside her had gone. Now she mostly felt empty and tired.

  Maybe she would do what she had told Maria—just go to bed and sleep, and hope the world looked brighter when she woke up. Although she dreaded having to face her mother again after all the rotten things she’d said that morning, now she just wanted to apologize and beg forgiveness, and pretend it never happened.

  She went upstairs and lay down across her bed, too tired to change out of her riding clothes other than to let her clogs fall off her feet onto the floor. She still had sugar cubes in the pocket of her breeches, and her steel hoof pick hung from a snap attached to a belt loop.

  The Gracidas’s farrier had given it to her to clean the horses’ feet. He had forged it himself, and he gave one to every groom who worked with the horses he shod. Lauren unsnapped it from her belt loop and looked at it just to occupy her attention for a few moments.

  The slender steel had been formed into a unique curve that mimicked the number 5. The top bar of the 5 had the sharp end designed to dig the debris from the crevices of the horse’s foot. The curve of the 5 shape fit perfectly in the hand to give just the right leverage. All the grooms at the Gracidas’s wore their picks clipped to a belt loop, at the ready. No horse came out of a stall in their stables with dirty feet.

  Leah clipped hers back onto the snap.

  She wanted to sleep. She wanted to sleep but not dream. She wanted her mom to come home. She wanted not to be alone.

  If Leslie hadn’t been taken, she wouldn’t have been alone, she told herself. Even when they hadn’t been together, they had still been sisters. She had known that no matter what happened during the day, at the end of the day Leslie would be there for her, and they would talk, and everything would be all right.

  “I’m sorry I said I wished you were dead,” she murmured now as she stared at the photograph she kept on her nightstand—of the two of them sitting together on one of Daddy’s horses with Daddy, so handsome, standing holding the bridle. Leslie had been nine at the time, Leah five and missing two front teeth. Leslie sat behind Leah with her arms wrapped around her. She remembered how safe it made her feel to have her sister’s arms around her. How sad it made her feel now to think that she would probably never have that again.

  She shivered as the emotions began to rise inside her once more. She got up and began to pace, wrapping her arms tightly around herself.

  She wished her mom was home. She wondered where she’d gone. What if she’d done something crazy again? Leah had been terrified to see her attack Ballencoa at the tennis courts. It had seemed like something out of a terrible movie, like her mother had been possessed or something. What if something like that happened again? What if she’d gotten arrested?

  The idea made Leah angry. No one had arrested him. No one seemed to care that he’d taken Leslie. No one seemed to care about what was right. They only cared about what they could prove. It was like a game, and he knew how to play it better than anyone.

  Frustration and anger rejoined her other emotions, and the pressure inside her built and built. She wanted it to go away. She thought about the razor blade hidden in the book on her nightstand. She could cut herself. She didn’t want to, but she hated this feeling so much. It scared her so badly. But what would happen if she cut herself and the pressure didn’t go away? Then what? Would she cut herself again and again? Would she cut herself so badly she might bleed to death?

 
It scared her that she would even think that could happen.

  Why couldn’t her mom come home?

  Suddenly the telephone rang and Leah jumped a foot in the air. It wasn’t the normal ring of a phone call. It rang three times in quick succession, which was the intercom for the front door.

  No one could come to the door without first coming through the gate. Only people with the code could come through the gate. But no one with the gate code would ring the doorbell.

  Leah stared at the telephone on her nightstand, afraid to answer it. But as it rang again, she thought again of her mother. What if something had happened to her?

  On the third ring she picked up the phone. The man on the other end spoke with authority.

  “Leah, I’m with the sheriff’s office. There’s been an accident. I’m here to take you to the hospital.”

  The sheriff’s office probably had some kind of code to get through gates, Leah thought. That made sense.

  “Was it a car accident?” she asked, thinking a million things at once. Was her mother dead? Was she alive? Had she been drinking and driving? She drank too much. Leah had told her.

  “Yes, a car accident,” the man said.

  She could hear her mother’s voice from just hours ago: You know you would never be left alone, her mother 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—

  “Oh my God,” Leah said, fear grabbing hold of her like a hand closing around her throat. She wasn’t supposed to open the door to strangers, but he was from the sheriff’s department and he knew her name. He wouldn’t know her name if he was a stranger. Someone had to have told him.

  “She’s in pretty bad shape, Leah,” he said. “We need to go now.”

  Her mother needed her. What if she died? What if she died before Leah could get to her and tell her how sorry she was for all the hateful things she’d said that morning?

  She had to go.

  50

  “Ballencoa had to know she was here,” Tanner said. “Since when do we assume he ever tells the truth about anything?”

  “The time line doesn’t lie,” Mendez said. “He moved here the beginning of May. How could he know Lauren was going to move here a month later? She didn’t send him a change of address card ahead of time.”

  He remembered Lauren saying that very thing to him when he had pulled her over that first afternoon.

  Do you have any reason to think he might know you’re here?

  I didn’t send him the ‘We’re Moving’ notice, she had snapped. Do you think I’m an idiot?

  Had Ballencoa seen her by chance—as Lauren had claimed she had seen him by chance in the Pavilions parking lot? Was it dumb luck that he had come across her?

  “I don’t believe in coincidence,” Mendez muttered. “And if Lauren thought he knew she was here, she would have been looking over her shoulder. She would have noticed his vehicle when she came out of the shooting range that day.

  “She didn’t think he knew she was here,” he said. “That’s why she was so freaked out when she found that photograph. If she was the one hunting him, how did he know where to find her?”

  A bad feeling scratching at the back of his neck, he went to the phone and called Latent Prints.

  “Did you guys lift anything usable off that photograph I brought you a couple of days ago?”

  “Actually, yes. A thumb and two pretty good partials,” the tech told him. “We haven’t heard anything back yet.”

  “Check on that, will you?” Mendez said. “ASAP, please. I’m at extension thirty-four.”

  The call came back ten minutes later.

  “I’ve got your hit, detective. The print is a probable match to a former guest of the state penal system.”

  Mendez listened, a sick feeling curdling in his stomach like bad milk as he took in the information. He hung up the phone and looked at Tanner and Hicks.

  “We’ve got a problem,” he said. “The print comes back Michael Craig Houston.”

  The silence between the three of them swelled like a balloon as the implications set in.

  “Oh my God,” Tanner murmured.

  Michael Craig Houston. Roland Ballencoa’s former cellmate. His suspected accomplice in the unproven murder of his aunt.

  The first thing Lauren did was go to a copy center near the McAster campus and photocopy every page of the journal dated 1985–1986. She put the copy in a manila envelope and mailed it to Detective Mendez at the sheriff’s office. Whatever might happen with Ballencoa, this would end up in the hands of someone who might be able to derive something from it.

  She then went into a small electronics store and purchased a mini-cassette recorder, batteries, and cassette tapes. She kept her head down and her sunglasses on, and still she drew some curious looks from other shoppers. Her forearms were scratched and her clothes were dirty, she realized. She probably looked like she’d been living in a cardboard box.

  Her suspicions were confirmed when she went into the ladies’ room and looked at herself in the small mirror above the sink. It didn’t matter. She had more important things to think about than her appearance.

  She set up the cassette recorder, tested it, then went about finding a way to conceal it on her body, finally wedging it inside her bra beneath her right breast. It was uncomfortable, but it worked. The T-shirt she wore had been Lance’s and was several sizes too big for her, hanging loosely away from the slight curves of her body.

  She checked the positioning of the Walther pressed snugly against her belly by the control-top panty. It had shifted some as she’d run away from Ballencoa’s house. She adjusted it now and thought back to her last day at the shooting range.

  Body, body, head shot.

  Body, body, head shot.

  She held her hands out in front of her, fingers spread wide. She had expected the shaking to be much worse.

  Would she be able to point and pull the trigger if she needed to?

  She had imagined that moment so many times in the last four years. Roland Ballencoa had died a thousand deaths in her dreams. Was she really prepared to make that dream a reality?

  I’m ready to be done with this, she thought.

  She needed an answer from him. She couldn’t say with certainty what she might do when she got one.

  How stupid are you, Lauren? she wondered. He’ll tell you what you want to hear if you have a gun to his head.

  Her answer to herself was: I’ll know.

  She would be able to see it, even in those cold, flat eyes. She would know. Because this was about Leslie, she would be able to sense a lie, or know the truth . . . or so she told herself.

  This would be the moment everything had been building toward for the last four years. The final showdown. Good versus Evil. Mother versus child predator. A strange kind of excitement swirled through Lauren. She was going to know once and for all what had happened to her daughter . . . or die trying.

  51

  Michael Craig Houston had been released from the minimum security section of the California Men’s Colony prison in San Luis Obispo in January after serving two years of a six-year sentence for larceny. His rap sheet was long. Mostly, it seemed he liked to swindle women, but he wasn’t above burglary, and he had been known to carry a gun and to use it as a threat.

  Even in his mug shot he exuded the cockiness of a guy who believed he could get by on his looks alone. Just another smart-ass would-be mastermind con man too lazy to do real work. The only thing significant about Michael Craig Houston’s life as far as Mendez was concerned was his connection to Roland Ballencoa.

  They had served time together in the Humboldt County jail in Eureka, California, and had both been questioned in the death of Ballencoa’s aunt. They had given each other alibis for the weekend the woman had died.

  Because of Ballencoa’s personal proclivities for solitary perversion, Mendez hadn’t given any
serious thought to the prior partnership. The name Houston had never come up again after Ballencoa had moved to San Diego. He figured the murder of the aunt had probably been a one-off for the money. Ballencoa wasn’t the sort of man to have friends. Yet Michael Craig Houston was here in Oak Knoll. He had left a photograph of Lauren Lawton on the windshield of her car.

  “I’ll contact the Men’s Colony and have them check the visitation records,” Hicks said. “Ballencoa has been in San Luis for the past two years. Let’s see if he was in contact with Houston before he got out.”

  “How the hell does he figure into this?” Mendez wondered aloud, pacing up and down the length of the time line they had stretched across the whiteboard at the front of the room.

  “Crime makes strange bedfellows. Could be they stay connected through the money from the aunt,” Hicks offered. “If Houston killed the aunt or helped Ballencoa kill the aunt, that’s a tricky partnership. Ballencoa couldn’t just say thanks and good-bye. The other guy knows the truth. They’ll always be connected.”

  “Maybe Houston is like one of those remora fish that hang on sharks,” Tanner suggested. “They’re not exactly friends, but it’s a symbiotic relationship.”

  “But how would Houston benefit from stalking Lauren Lawton?” Mendez asked.

  “He’s a con man,” Hicks pointed out. “He must see an angle to play. There has to be money in it for him one way or another.”

  “There’s a reward,” Tanner said. “The Lawtons established it early on in the investigation. Fifty grand for information leading to the recovery of Leslie and the prosecution of her abductor.”

  “Houston knows Ballencoa did it and he’s going to rat him out? Set him up?” Mendez said. “Why not just pick up the phone and call your department, Danni? Why the charade?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “You asked for money. There it is. Fifty thousand reasons for somebody to do something.”

  Mendez rubbed the back of his neck where the muscles had gone as hard as petrified wood. “Forget the money. Ballencoa likes to play games. How does Houston fit in to that scenario?”