Down the Darkest Road

by Tami Hoag

  “Maybe Houston is Ballencoa’s beard,” Tanner offered. “Houston does the dirty work so Ballencoa can alibi himself. He can say he’s not stalking Lauren. He wasn’t anywhere near her at the time this or that happened. Now you’ve got a fingerprint on a photograph, but it’s not Roland’s fingerprint. You’ve got nothing on him even though you know he’s behind it.”

  “It’s just a fucking game,” Mendez muttered.

  “It’s payback,” Tanner said. “Lauren kept the spotlight turned up on him the whole time in Santa Barbara. First she made it impossible for him to leave because he would have looked guilty. Then she made it impossible for him to stay because she wouldn’t let it alone.”

  “I don’t care what he calls it,” Mendez said. “We need to shut it down.”

  He went back to the phone and dialed Lauren’s number again, tapping his foot impatiently while he listened to the phone ring unanswered on the other end. He needed to find her. He needed to show her Michael Craig Houston’s mug shot.

  “If Houston went onto Mrs. Lawton’s property and planted that photograph, we can pick him up on the trespassing charge,” Hicks said.

  “If we can find him,” Mendez said. “We need to find out what he’s driving, where he’s staying. Let’s get Trammell and Hamilton on that.”

  If they could find Michael Craig Houston and question him, maybe they could pluck loose a thread to connect Ballencoa—although Tanner was right: Having Houston’s print on the photograph only served to distance Ballencoa from a stalking charge—which brought him right back to the idea that Ballencoa was playing a game. And Michael Craig Houston was his ringer.

  52

  Lauren looked at her watch, nervous at the time. She needed to call Maria Gracida and ask her to keep Leah, make up some kind of plausible excuse for being late to pick her up.

  What would she say? I’m on my way to confront the man who stole Leslie. I might be a little late? There was the very real possibility she might not come back at all.

  She told herself she couldn’t think that way. For once, she had the upper hand. She was the one with the leverage—and the gun.

  She went back to the 7-Eleven and used the same pay phone Ballencoa had used to make his mystery phone call, wiping the receiver off with the tail of her T-shirt, grimacing at the idea that he had held it in his hand and put it to his face.

  The phone at the Gracida stables rang and rang. Lauren listened impatiently. She’d spent enough time in working barns to know there was no receptionist to take calls. The priority of the staff was the horses. If someone who spoke English happened to be near the phone, it would get answered. If Maria was teaching or riding, or there was no English-speaking groom, or a client kind enough to pick up nearby, the call would eventually be picked up by the answering machine in the office.

  “Rancho Gracida, Maria speaking.”

  “Maria, it’s Lauren Lawton.”

  “Oh, Lauren, you’re home. I’m so glad.”

  “I’m not home, actually,” Lauren said. “I was just calling to let you know—to let Leah know—I might be late.”

  “Oh . . . well . . . I took Leah home a while ago,” Maria said. “She wasn’t feeling well. I told her I would wait with her until you got back, but she just wanted to go to bed. I made sure she locked the door behind me.”

  A strange, cold sensation went through Lauren. Suddenly she wished she hadn’t been so hasty in turning down Greg Hewitt’s suggestion that he keep an eye on Leah. She felt her daughter was safe at the Gracidas’s; there were so many people around that nothing could happen and go unnoticed. And Ballencoa wouldn’t know to go there, anyway. Home alone was another matter.

  “I tried to call you before I took her home,” Maria said.

  “I wish you hadn’t left her,” Lauren said with an edge in her voice as fear seeped through the chill within her.

  “I asked her if she wanted me to stay. She said she would be fine.”

  “She’s fifteen.”

  “We thought you’d probably just run downtown for something. With the doors locked and the gate, she should be fine—”

  “Her sister was abducted, Maria. What the hell were you thinking?” Now came the anger from the deepest part of her. A mother needing to protect her young—and doing a piss-poor job of it.

  “I was thinking she would be fine inside a locked house behind a gate—”

  Lauren hung up on her, dug another quarter out of her pocket, fed the phone, and dialed home.

  The phone rang . . . and rang . . . and rang . . .

  53

  Leah could see the man through the glass in the door. He looked like a detective, she thought. He had broad, square shoulders and a broad, square jaw. He was dressed like Don Johnson on Miami Vice in a T-shirt with a linen jacket over it. A pair of aviator-style sunglasses hid his eyes.

  She pressed the intercom button beside the door. “I’m supposed to ask to see your badge,” she said nervously, afraid that she was just wasting valuable time. Of course the man was a detective.

  In the back of her mind she thought he looked familiar, but she didn’t know any detectives here, so that didn’t make sense to her. It didn’t matter anyway. The only thing that mattered was getting to her mom.

  Please, God, don’t let her die. I have to tell her I’m sorry.

  “Good girl,” the detective said with a nod. He lifted a badge and showed it to her through the glass. “I’m Detective Houston. You can open the door now.”

  Relief flooded through Leah and she opened the door.

  The second Detective Houston stepped inside, Leah had a bad feeling. Why would he come inside if he was supposed to take her someplace?

  Immediately, she tried to dismiss the bad feeling. She was nervous because something had happened to her mom. And she was always uneasy around men she didn’t know. She chided herself for being stupid. He was a detective. He’d shown her his badge. Not every man on the planet was a kidnapper.

  Instinct made her take a step back from him, just the same.

  Behind her the telephone began to ring.

  Leah took another step back and started to turn to go to it.

  The detective grabbed hold of her arm.

  “Let it ring,” he said.

  Leah thought he would draw her toward the door. They had to leave. Her mother was hurt. She had been taken to the hospital. They had to get to her.

  But the detective didn’t move toward the door, and fear burst into flame inside Leah.

  She tried to pull away from him. He held tight. “What are you doing? Let me go!”

  The phone rang again. The answering machine would pick up soon. Why would he not want her to answer the phone?

  Leah twisted and jerked her arm free, her hand swinging up and knocking the sunglasses off his face.

  It struck her then why he looked familiar. He had come to the barn. He had been dressed differently. He hadn’t been wearing sunglasses. He had smiled at her like she was supposed know him and be glad to see him. He hadn’t said anything about being a detective. He hadn’t used the name Houston.

  Leah bolted for the phone on the kitchen counter. The answering machine had kicked on, but the caller would still be able to hear her if she could only get to the phone. She could scream. She could yell to call 911.

  Houston grabbed hold of her ponytail with his left hand and jerked her backward off her feet. She fell back into him, arms swinging, flailing. She hit him in the mouth. She hit him in the chest with her elbow.

  “Stop it!” he snapped at her.

  Leah scrambled to get her feet back under her. Tears spilled from her eyes as he pulled her hair.

  “Let me go!” she screamed. She kicked him in the shin as hard as she could, the heavy toe of her clog hitting like a baseball bat against the bone.

  “Fuck!” he yelled. “You fucking little bitch!”

  He slapped her hard across the face, then a second time and a third.

  Leah felt like her head would
explode. The ringing in her ear was as loud as a gong. Her field of vision turned to black lace. The coppery taste of blood burst into her mouth.

  She was sobbing now, though she could barely hear herself. The sound seemed to be coming from someone else. She felt dizzy and weak. And then she was falling, backward and down. He had let go of her hair and shoved her away from him.

  She hit the floor and the back of her head banged hard against a thick table leg. She struggled to sit up, her fingernails digging for purchase against the floor. Her hand brushed against the steel hoof pick that hung from the belt loop of her breeches. Instinctively she pulled the tail of her polo shirt down over it to hide it.

  Houston’s big hand grabbed her by the shoulder, fingers digging in as he hauled her to her feet. He backhanded her across the other side of her face, then grabbed one small breast and squeezed as hard as he could.

  Leah cried out at the pain. “Stop it! Stop it!”

  He let go of her then and shoved her roughly down onto a chair.

  Hysterical with fear, with shock, with pain, she doubled over and wrapped her arms around herself, sobbing.

  “Sit there!” he shouted. He was bent over her, his mouth not a foot away from her ear. “Sit there or I will fucking rape you!”

  Leah choked on her tears and on her terror, and wished with all her heart someone would come and save her.

  54

  Tanner’s eyes narrowed as she stared hard at something on the page in front of her.

  “What was the name of the guy we thought might be a private dick?” she asked.

  “Gregory Hewitt,” Hicks said.

  “Michael Craig Houston,” Tanner read. “Aka: Michael House, Craig Michaels, Gregory Hewitt.”

  Mendez went to an empty section of whiteboard. His adrenaline was pumping. He wrote MICHAEL CRAIG HOUSTON/GREGORY HEWITT in the center of the board. From Houston’s name he drew a line to the left and printed out BALLENCOA, and to the right he put a question mark and LAUREN LAWTON.

  “If Houston is Gregory Hewitt, why would he have been watching Ballencoa in San Luis?” Hicks asked. “They know each other. They were in contact while Houston was finishing his stint at the Men’s Colony. Why would he tell the neighbor lady he was a cop?”

  “What’s he supposed to say?” Mendez asked. “I’m Roland’s friend from prison? He tells her he’s a cop, she goes away.”

  Tanner came up to the board and stood beside him. “So if we follow Houston, Houston knows Ballencoa is moving to Oak Knoll. If we follow the Hewitt thread under our original suspicion that he might be a private investigator, that potentially links him to Lauren.”

  She picked up a marker and made a broken line connecting Hewitt and Lawton with Mendez’s question mark in the center.

  “Lauren knows Ballencoa is in Oak Knoll because she got the info from Hewitt,” she said. “Ballencoa knows where Lauren lives through his connection to Houston.”

  “The con man is playing both sides,” Hicks said.

  “But which side is he really on?” Mendez asked. “And how did Lauren connect with him? If she was going to hire a PI, how would she happen to end up with this guy?”

  “He had to go to her,” Tanner said. “That’s the only thing that makes sense. He goes to her and says, ‘Hey, lady, I can help you out with this for a price. I know where Ballencoa is, I know where he’s going . . .’ It’s never been a secret that the Lawtons have money. Maybe he’s angling to somehow get his hands on the fifty grand.”

  “Double-crossing his old buddy?” Mendez said.

  “Or was it a setup from the get-go?” Hicks asked.

  “They couldn’t count on her moving to Oak Knoll to pursue Ballencoa,” Mendez said.

  “Maybe they didn’t,” Tanner ventured. “Maybe that was a bonus. If Ballencoa just wanted to screw with her head, and Houston just wanted to con her out of some cash . . .”

  “She upped the ante by coming here,” Mendez said.

  “And Roland raised by photographing the daughter.”

  Mendez stared at the names on the board, nerves curling and uncurling in his belly like a fist. He thought of the broken window in Ballencoa’s back door, and the fact that he hadn’t been able to reach Lauren. He thought of the desperation he’d seen in her eyes and heard in her voice. She needed this to be over. If they were right, she had come here to put an end to it.

  “It’s one thing to play a game when all the players know it’s a game,” he said. “It’s not a game to her. She’s dead serious.”

  55

  The gate to the property stood open. Lauren immediately recognized the car parked in the driveway. Greg Hewitt. Confusion shorted out her thought process for a moment. How had he gotten the gate open? More to the point—why? Why would he be here? Had he decided to watch out for Leah after all? Just as he’d taken it upon himself to follow Ballencoa, even though she’d told him she didn’t want his help.

  Even as she had one good thought about him, she was just as quickly irritated. She’d told him she didn’t want him anywhere near her daughter. Now not only was he in the vicinity, he was on the property.

  He had opened the gate. Did he think having sex with her entitled him to do as he pleased? Had he come to press her for the money to take out Ballencoa?

  Leah hadn’t answered the phone. Even if she had gone to bed, she was a light sleeper and there was a telephone on her nightstand. She should have answered.

  When the answering machine had picked up, Lauren had dropped the receiver of the pay phone outside 7-Eleven and abandoned her thoughts of Ballencoa. Leah was home alone, not answering the phone. Ballencoa could wait. She had his journals. She needed to know her daughter was safe.

  At the most basic instinctive level, fear had already built to a nearly intolerable degree. She could hardly wait for the car to stop before she was getting out of it. She ran to the front door, fumbling with her keys.

  The door stood ajar.

  Lauren barreled through it, not taking the time to wonder why or wonder what she would find on the other side.

  “Leah? Leah!”

  She saw Greg Hewitt first. He was bleeding from a cut on his cheek. His expression was ugly. Lauren’s brain was spinning. What was he doing here? Why did he look like that? None of this was making any sense.

  “What the fuck are you doing in my house?” Lauren demanded, a split second before she saw Leah, then there was no time or inclination to think, only to act.

  Her daughter was sitting on a chair, bent over, her face purple and swollen, her expression pure anguish.

  “Leah! Oh my God!”

  “Mommy!!”

  Hewitt grabbed Lauren by the shoulders before she could get past him. Acting on instinct, she dropped down almost to her knees, wrenching free of him, twisting away from him. He grabbed for her hair. She brought her elbow high and sideways and broke his nose.

  Blood spewed everywhere, splattering the pristine cushions of the sofa. Hewitt made a sound of rage, muffled by the hand he clamped to his face.

  Lauren kept moving toward her child. Leah was halfway out of her chair. Lauren grabbed her daughter’s arm and shoved her sideways.

  “Leah, run!!”

  Hewitt hit her in the back and she sprawled across the harvest table, her breath leaving her in a huff as she landed on the gun strapped to her abdomen beneath her clothes. Arms swimming, legs kicking, she fought to get out from under half of Hewitt’s weight as he pinned her.

  Pushing and pulling herself across the table, she fell to the floor on the other side, sending chairs toppling.

  Rolling onto her back, Lauren tore at her shirt, pulling it up, reaching her other hand for the gun. The Walther’s sight snagged on the fabric of the panty. Frantic, she tugged and fumbled, just pulling the pistol free as Greg Hewitt came over the table.

  He was on her before she could straighten her arm enough to shoot him. His body trapped her arm between them. Lauren pulled the trigger anyway, hoping to God the shot would g
o into him and not her.

  The explosion burned them both as the hot gases escaping the chamber came in contact with clothing and skin. Even muffled by their bodies, the sound was loud and it startled Hewitt just enough that he pulled his upper body away from her.

  Lauren clawed at his face with one hand as she moved her right arm and shoved the nose of the Walther into his solar plexus and tried to pull the trigger again. But the spent cartridge from the first shot had not been allowed to eject free of the chamber, and there was no second shot.

  But Greg Hewitt didn’t know she’d pulled the trigger. He knew the muzzle of a .380 was jammed up against him and that the next shot would surely kill him. He went very still.

  Their breathing was ragged and loud. The fleeting thought crossed Lauren’s mind that they had sounded like this after sex. She wanted to vomit.

  “Get off me,” she said. “Slowly.”

  He said nothing. His eyes were the eyes of a wolf—wary, watching, sharp for the next split second’s opportunity. Lauren held her left hand curved over the slide of the Walther so he couldn’t see the piece of brass that had caught on its way out of the chamber. She kept her gaze hard on his, afraid to so much as blink.

  “Get off or the next one goes straight through your spinal cord, Greg.”

  He moved in slow motion, lifting his weight from her, getting to his feet.

  “Hands out at your sides,” Lauren ordered, her eyes on his, the gun still trained on him. Using just her abdominal muscles and raw determination, she managed to sit up. The pain along the edge of her rib cage was like fire where she had landed on the gun. She curled her legs beneath herself and got to her feet.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked. “What did you do to my daughter?”

  His gaze went from her eyes to the gun in her hand and back. He said nothing.

  “That’s not a good answer,” Lauren said. “That makes me think I should just shoot you and let God sort it out.”