by Tami Hoag
The county chopper had gone up to start a grid search above the hills to the west of town. They had already turned on the spotlight, but Mendez knew those hills as well as anyone, and he knew they would be fighting a futile battle as the shadows filled the steep canyons.
For the first time since he and Hicks and Tanner had arrived at the house, he was still, leaning back against the car, trying to quiet his mind and find a useful thought as Dixon addressed the media out on the road.
Tanner came and stood beside him. She looked as worried and grim as he felt.
“I hope she shot that asshole somewhere it hurts,” she muttered.
“I hope he dies from it.”
“We let her down,” she said, her voice cracking a little. “Goddamnit.”
“If she could have held out for us just a little longer,” Mendez said, fully aware he was talking about Lauren Lawton in the past tense.
Tanner shook her head. “She needed to do it. She never wanted it to be up to us. She needed to force his hand. We were just the excuse she needed to give herself permission to do it.”
Leah had never driven a car so fast in her life. Her mother’s BMW was too big for her and too strong for her and too powerful. It made Leah think of the first time she had snuck a ride on one of Daddy’s horses when she had only ever ridden a pony. She had been so scared. She was ten times as scared now. A million times more scared.
“Mommy,” she said loudly, glancing at her mother slumped in the passenger’s seat. “Mommy!! Mommy, talk to me!”
The steering wheel jerked in her hand and she shrieked and put her eyes back on the twisty road, turning the wheel the last second before running the car up on the rocks on the steep side.
Her mother was so pale she almost glowed in the darkening light of the car.
“Mommy, please don’t die,” Leah chanted. “Please don’t die. Please don’t die. Please don’t die.”
As if it would matter. As if chanting without stopping would make it so. She cursed herself for a stupid child.
Her mother’s left hand reached over toward her. The first sign of life Leah had seen in her in what seemed like hours.
It felt like forever because Leah didn’t know where they were. She had only known enough to point the car downhill and keep going. The rough path had joined with a narrow paved road. The narrow paved road finally came to a stop sign and a wider paved road.
And then she could see lights in the distance, and a place on the side of the road with chain saw totem poles and a gas pump, and a sign that read Canyon Café.
62
It was Leah Lawton who told them what happened. Leah, not quite sixteen, still more little girl than woman, who had put her injured mother into the car and managed to find her way out of the wilderness to get help.
Mendez called Anne Leone on his way to the hospital and she met him there in the ER not five minutes behind the ambulance. In full mother tigress mode, Anne had taken charge of Leah, seeing to her emotional needs and overseeing her medical needs, putting the needs of law enforcement at bay for hours.
Only when the girl’s wounds had been tended and she had been ensconced in a hospital room did Anne allow him to ask a single question. Even then she had sat on the bed with an arm around Leah Lawton, offering a mother’s comfort and support as Leah told the tale.
“You’re a brave girl, Leah,” he said when she finished.
“I don’t want to be brave,” she whispered, tears spilling over her lashes as Anne hugged her shoulders. “I want my mom.”
Lauren Lawton had still been in surgery when Mendez and Tanner had gone to locate the bodies of Roland Ballencoa and Michael Craig Houston in the hills west of town.
Coyotes had been there ahead of them, leaving the corpses half-eaten and covered in flies and vultures by the time the crime scene unit arrived. It seemed a fitting end for men who had preyed on others, Mendez thought. Nature’s justice was swifter and more appropriate than anything the courts would ever have handed Ballencoa or his partner.
By the time he and Tanner had processed the scene on the mountain and Ballencoa’s house in town, they had pulled nearly forty hours without sleep or a shower or a decent meal.
“Do you want me to take you to a hotel?” he asked as they walked away from Ballencoa’s house.
She dredged up a sarcastic half-smile. “I usually say no to sex until the second or third crime scene.”
Mendez managed a weary smile. “To the hospital?”
She nodded. Sleep, food, hygiene could all wait. Lauren Lawton was out of surgery, conscious and talking.
The hospital had settled into its quiet evening routine. The lights had been turned down low. The staff and visitors and the bustle they brought with them during the day had dissipated.
Two beds had been pushed together in Lauren’s room, and Leah lay sleeping the blissful, dreamless sleep that was drug-induced in the bed farthest from the door.
Lauren was awake in her bed. She kept her left hand, IV needle taped in place, just touching her daughter, to reassure herself that her child was really there, alive and safe. And that she herself was alive and safe.
Her head felt as heavy and hard as a bowling ball. Her breathing was shallow by necessity. Even with drugs it felt like the knife was still jammed between her shoulder blades, and she could feel the instability of her broken ribs as her chest expanded and contracted.
The surgeon had told her that she was as lucky as someone who had been stabbed in the back with a hunting knife could be. She had lost a lot of blood, but the knife had missed every major artery and organ it could have pierced. A millimeter in any direction and she would have been dead.
She would have been dead, and her daughter—the only daughter she had left—would have been raped and murdered as her sister had probably been.
Even though Ballencoa hadn’t given Lauren the satisfaction of the confession she had always wanted from him, there was something inside her that told her it was done. Leslie was gone. Lauren was glad for the drugs that would keep the worst of the pain of that at bay for a few more days.
She had seen herself in the mirror on the wall. She knew she was pale and battered. One eye was swollen nearly shut. A long gash sliced across one cheek from her temple to the corner of her mouth. Some miracle of modern medicine had glued the flaps of skin back together.
She was going to have scars, but none of the visible ones would be anything compared to what damage had been done to her emotionally over the course of the last four years. Nor would even those scars compare to what she felt for having put Leah through this hell.
Anne Leone had been there in the room when Lauren had finally come around. Lauren learned Anne had been there for Leah from the moment they had been brought into the ER.
“I told you you wouldn’t get rid of me,” Anne said quietly. “I’m here for both of you. Whenever you need me.”
Lauren fought tears. “We’re going to need you a lot,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper. “I’ve messed this up so badly. What I did—What I put her through—”
Anne pressed a finger to her lips and shook her head. “No. Something evil came into your lives, and you did the best you could.”
“That’s not saying much.”
“You’ll deal with your choices, Lauren. I’ll help you. But for now be glad you’re alive and be glad you have this incredible daughter,” Anne said, nodding toward Leah, who lay sleeping in the next bed. “She saved your life. Don’t waste it on regret. You get to start over—the two of you. That’s a gift. That’s what you have to focus on.”
She told Lauren to rest and slipped out of the room as Mendez and Tanner arrived.
Lauren looked up at the Santa Barbara detective. “Do you believe me now?” she asked.
“I always believed you, Lauren,” Tanner said quietly. “I just couldn’t do much about it. I’m sorry.”
“It’s done now,” Lauren said. “It’s done.”
“You’re sure
you’re up to this now?” Mendez asked.
“I need to.”
Even though she was exhausted and breathless, she needed to confess the mistakes she had made and the terrible consequences of her choices. She needed to tell about the things Ballencoa and Hewitt had done in order to purge the evil of them from her soul.
Tanner and Mendez pulled a pair of tall stools in beside Lauren’s bed, and settled in to listen, the pair of them madly scribbling notes in little spiral notebooks, even while a cassette recorder on the tray table absorbed every word she said.
“I let him into our lives,” she said of Greg Hewitt. The guilt was sharp and terrible.
“You couldn’t know what he was, Lauren,” Tanner said, her voice softer than Lauren remembered it. Her impression of Tanner had always been that she was brash and contentious. Or maybe that was me, she thought. “He was a predator, same as Ballencoa. That’s what they do. They take advantage of people.”
Lauren didn’t argue. She knew she could have checked Hewitt’s credentials. She would have known in a phone call whether or not he had his private investigator’s license. Would it have mattered? He had been willing to do what she wanted him to do. Her focus had been so set on Ballencoa, she would have made a deal with the devil himself.
Turned out, she had.
She wanted to go find Greg Hewitt’s body and kill him all over again for the beating he had given Leah. But at the heart of it, Lauren still believed it was her own fault. Her mission on behalf of Leslie had cost Leah a terrible price.
“Let me tell you something, Lauren,” Tanner said. She paused for a moment, glancing at Mendez out of the corner of her eye, as if weighing whether or not she wanted to share what she had to say with him as well. She took a deep breath and sighed, and began her story.
“When I was fourteen I was walking home from school with my best friend. Molly Nash. Molly was a really sweet girl. A girly girl. And I was . . . me. A tomboy. I picked the way home that day. I wanted to take a shortcut that took us through a not-so-great area. Molly didn’t want to go that way, but I teased her into it.
“So we were walking along and talking about boys, and we both had a crush on the same boy, and of course he didn’t know either one of us was alive,” she said, smiling at that part of the memory. Then the smile went away. “And . . . uh . . . these two men grabbed us off the street, and . . . we got raped. And I managed to get away, and I ran for help. But when I brought the police back to where it happened, the two men were gone, and my friend Molly . . . She didn’t make it. She died. And . . . um . . . the men were never caught. They got away with it. And I had to live with that. It had been my choice to go that way. If anybody should have died, it should have been me.”
“You were just a little girl,” Lauren said. A little girl Wendy Morgan’s age, a year younger than Leah.
“I made a bad choice. My friend died a terrible death because of it. I had to learn to live with that,” Tanner said. “That’s why I’m a cop. That’s how I pay back Molly Nash.
“I know people have told you to move on from losing your daughter Leslie,” she said. “And I have no doubt that people have told you not to let what happened be the defining moment of your life. I also know that’s all bullshit. You don’t let go of something like that, not ever. That tragedy will be one of the defining moments of your life. It has to be. Otherwise it was for nothing. And how tragic would that be?
“It’s what we learn and what we do to come out of that dark place that makes the difference,” she said. “For you, and for the daughter you have left.
“Anybody can pay penance, Lauren. That’s the easy part. Anybody can be a victim, and anybody can flog themselves. Big fucking deal. But you put one foot on a ladder and climb to the next rung. Then you’ve done something. Then you’ve made a difference. And then what happened matters. Otherwise, it’s just old news, and nobody wants to hear about it.
“There,” she said with a sheepish little smile as she slid off the stool and tucked her notebook in the breast pocket of the loose blazer she wore. “My big speech. We should let you get some sleep if you can. I’ve got to go find myself a hotel room.”
Lauren reached a hand out to her. “Thank you,” she said, really looking at Danni Tanner for perhaps the first time since she’d known her. “Really.”
Uncomfortable with the gratitude, Tanner made a funny little shrug and backed away. “Get some sleep.”
63
Mendez followed Tanner out of Lauren Lawton’s hospital room. They walked down the dark hall without speaking, then took the elevator together down to the ground floor. Unfamiliar with Mercy General, Tanner looked both ways up and down the hall, uncertain which direction they had come from earlier.
Mendez put a hand on her back and guided her toward the ER. They walked out of the big sliding doors into the night that had grown cool and damp, and headed to the short-term parking. Seemingly lost in her own thoughts, Tanner started around the car for the passenger’s side.
“Danni,” Mendez said, finding his tongue.
She turned around and looked up at him, her face open and vulnerable in the grainy filtered light of the parking lot.
He reached his hand up and touched her cheek. She gave an almost imperceptible shake of her head.
“Please don’t make a big deal,” she said quietly.
She was supposed to be tough, or so she thought. Kindness would be her undoing. Everything about that touched him. He leaned down and kissed her softly on the lips . . . just because.
Her breath caught. A little rush of excitement went through him despite the fatigue.
When he raised his head she looked up at him with a funny little smile and said, “About that hotel room . . .”
Dawn was just beginning to pink the sky in the east when Lauren woke to find Leah staring at her, her precious face bruised, one eye swollen nearly shut, the other as wide as a small child’s. Lauren tried to manage a smile despite the tightness of her own battered face. She slipped her hand through the railings of the beds and touched her daughter’s hand.
“Do you know how much I love you?” she whispered.
Leah nodded, not looking all that certain.
“You saved my life,” Lauren said, tears rising. “In ways you don’t even know. I owe you so much, Leah. You have been so brave, and so strong. I will never be as brave and strong as you.”
“I don’t want to be brave anymore, Mommy,” Leah said. “I just want us to be a family.”
“We will be,” Lauren promised. “We will be. We are.”
64
It wasn’t truly over for months. It took that long for the investigators to go through Roland Ballencoa’s journals and contact the girls and women he had stalked, and to identify and locate all the girls whose photographs he had filed away in boxes in the small shed at the back of his property. Photographs of unsuspecting potential victims and of actual victims as well.
In addition to photographs, they had found container after container of women’s lingerie—all very neatly organized by date with painstaking care to note the name of the woman it had belonged to, and her address, and her page number in the corresponding journal.
In many cases Ballencoa had also photographed himself modeling the feminine articles of clothing.
Many of the victims found were unaware Ballencoa had ever had an interest in them. Some had known and liked him. Others met the news of his demise with relief.
Seven were never found at all.
Seven young women listed in his journals, seven young women Roland Ballencoa had photographed from northern California to San Diego County, had simply disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again. Ballencoa had never been considered a person of interest in six of those cases.
Detectives Mendez and Tanner would head the joint task force and organize a central clearing house for the cases. Their efforts would receive national attention, and serve as a model for future multijurisdictional investigations across the count
ry.
My focus in those months was divided between healing and helping. Healing physically had been the easy part. Both Leah and I had managed that within weeks of our ordeal. We help each other with the rest. I have a remarkable daughter, alive and with me. And I now can focus on being a mother to that precious child I have while I say good-bye to the daughter I lost.
Photographs of Leslie had been found along with those of the other victims. I never saw them. A part of me thought I should look at them, that as her mother, I should have to see what she had been put through, that I should have to suffer as Leslie had suffered. But to what end? We had all suffered enough. Nothing would bring Leslie back. I choose to remember Leslie as I knew her—a beautiful vibrant girl, a gift born of love.
Life is about choices, good and bad, and the consequences of those choices. Roland Ballencoa and Greg Hewitt chose evil. I chose revenge. Now I choose a second chance for Leah and me, for the two of us to be a family and to move forward with our lives.
As Winston Churchill said, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” I know from hard experience that can be the longest journey down the darkest road. And I have learned that sometimes the shortest distance isn’t forward, but up.
As Danni Tanner told me, you put one foot on the ladder and climb to the next rung. Then you do it again . . . and again . . . and again . . .
My daughter and I try every day to climb another rung on the ladder. Some days we make it. Some days we don’t. The most important thing is that we don’t look down. The important thing is to climb.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tami Hoag’s novels have appeared on national bestseller lists regularly since the publication of her first book in 1988. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages worldwide. She is a dedicated equestrian in the Olympic discipline of dressage and shares her home with two English cocker spaniels. She lives in Palm Beach County, Florida.