Instead, she tiptoed carefully back to her room, where she grabbed a pillow off the bed to muffle her sobs as she curled into the upholstered chair by the window and let the emotions go.
She sobbed for herself, for her loneliness, for the feelings that she wasn’t important, that she didn’t matter. She sobbed in grief for the father she had lost and for the sister who had left her alone. She sobbed in grief and in pain and in anger. The emotions were so huge and overwhelming she felt both crushed by them and stuffed with them. The pressure came from within and without, inescapable. She didn’t know what to do with it. She thought— as she had thought many times before—that she might die from it.
Desperate to put a stop to it, she threw the pillow aside and opened the drawer in her nightstand where she kept a paperback book she had been pretending to read for almost two years now. She grabbed the book and went into her bathroom, where she pulled down her pajama bottoms and sat down on the edge of the bathtub.
Thin, dark, angry-looking scars ran in inch-long horizontal lines across the otherwise smooth, soft skin of her lower abdomen. Each scar looked exactly the same as the one before it, above it, below it. There were many— some old, some newer, some had been healed over and reopened. She had stopped counting them long ago.
Buried between pages deep inside the book was a razor blade. Leah removed it, holding it delicately between thumb and forefinger. Looking at it, the anticipation of the relief it would bring instantly calmed her. As she looked at the light gleam against the blade, her breathing slowed. Her heart rate slowed. She placed the steel against her skin and drew the next line.
The physical pain was bright and sharp. The sight of the rose-red blood that bloomed from the gash was mesmerizing. The emotional pain seemed to burst out of her with it, like a bloodred scream. The terrible feeling of pressure in her chest deflated like a burst balloon.
The relief was enormous. It left her feeling weak and light-headed, and breathing like she had just run a hard sprint.
But, as always, the relief was also short-lived. After the sick, familiar euphoria washed through her, it was followed by shame and disgust.
What was wrong with her that she did this sick, disgusting thing to herself? If anyone found out, they would think she was a freak. If her mother found out, she would be so disappointed that Leah couldn’t even stand the thought of how she would feel.
But despite the feelings of shame, she knew she would do it again . . . and again. Because the yawning emptiness and self-loathing she felt afterward was nothing compared to the terrible emotions that pushed her to do it.
Exhausted by the vicious cycle, Leah cleaned the cut and covered it with a Band-Aid, then cleaned the razor blade and returned it to its hiding place inside the book. Then she crawled into bed and curled into a ball, hugging her pillow as if it was a teddy bear, and tried to fall asleep.
9
Roland Ballencoa liked to work at night. There was something intimate about the night. The world was less populated. With fewer conscious beings tapping into the energy fields of life, there was more for him. He felt stronger at night, more powerful at night.
At night the whole world was his darkroom. He spent the first few hours of the evening developing film he had shot during the day. Then it was time to go out, and his eyes became his camera.
The night was cool. He was glad for the dark hooded sweatshirt jacket he had grabbed on his way out the door. He got in his van and drove a few blocks to a neighborhood he had been to earlier in the day. Near the college, lights still burned in a few windows despite the hour, but there was no one on the street. Roland parked at the curb of a side street, near the alley, got out and began his stroll.
He enjoyed exploring. He enjoyed looking at the styles of the houses. Most of the architecture in this part of town was a mix of old Victorian, Spanish revival, and Craftsman built in the late twenties and early thirties. The odd fifties ranch-style house stuck out like a sore thumb.
It was a neighborhood of mature trees and hedges, a place that was easy to move around without standing out or being noticed at all. He could be invisible, which was a very good thing for an observer to be.
Roland had come to this neighborhood earlier in the day, and two days before, and just parked his van and watched the comings and goings of residents—mostly college students, many of them very pretty.
McAster College was unique in that it was nearly as busy in summer as during the school year. Renowned for its music program, McAster hosted an annual summer music festival that drew people from literally all over the world. Many well-known classical musicians came to Oak Knoll in advance of the festival and stayed for weeks after to teach in the summer artists-in-residence program.
Roland had discerned through observation that many of the residences in this neighborhood had been cut up into apartments for the students. The big Victorian on the corner was a sorority house.
He turned off the sidewalk, flipped up the hood of his sweatshirt, and walked down the alley.
There was no fence or gate along the back of the property. There was a hedge for privacy, but it ended at the driveway to the large garage, which had been converted to an oversized laundry to serve the residents of the house.
The side door was not locked. The lights were off. No sound of washers or dryers tumbling. Roland let himself in and slipped his small flashlight from his pocket. The dot of pale yellow light showed two washers and two dryers, and a pair of long stainless steel tables down the center of the space for sorting and folding clothes.
A laundry basket sat on the table with a load of towels that had been washed and dried but not folded. Sitting on the floor near one of the washing machines was a bag of laundry with the name Renee Paquin written in permanent marker down the side.
Bag in hand, he took a seat in one of the mismatched stuffed chairs congregated at the end of the room. He held the flashlight between his teeth, opened the bag, and began pawing through the garments.
T-shirts, a pair of khaki shorts, a pair of jeans, white tennis clothes. At the bottom he found what he wanted: several pair of pastel silk bikini underpants. Jackpot.
Roland turned the flashlight off and put it back in his jacket pocket. He took one of the panties and held it to his face, breathing deep the scent of a girl. He rubbed the silk against his face, found the crotch of the panties and pressed it to his nose and mouth. With his free hand he unzipped his jeans, took out his erection, and began to stroke it with the other pair of underwear.
This scent was heaven and hell, pleasure and torment. Intoxicating. He filled his head with it. He licked the fabric and tasted it. He took it into his wet mouth and sucked on it, all the while rubbing his cock with the other pair. After a while his body went rigid and he moaned as he ejaculated into the handful of silk.
He allowed himself a moment to relax back into the chair and enjoy the sensations. He could smell his own sweat and semen. He felt wonderfully weak and euphoric.
After a few moments of bliss he wiped himself off on the panties and put them back into Renee Paquin’s laundry bag, stuffing them down in the bottom with a tangle of bras and panties. The other pair he stuffed down in the crotch of his jeans, under his balls.
Satisfied, he let himself out of the garage, walked back down the alley, got in his van, and drove home. He had work to do.
10
“If the guy is here, we should know about it,” Mendez said.
He sat in the office of his boss, Sheriff Cal Dixon. Pushing sixty, Dixon still cut a sharp figure in his starched and pressed uniform. He trained like a Marine six days a week—running, lifting weights, swimming. The guy was a freaking iron man.
Dixon had recruited him to the SO and had been the catalyst that sent him to the FBI National Academy course. Mendez had enormous respect for the man, and felt lucky to be able to call him a mentor and a friend as well as a boss.
With a stellar career as a detective in the LA County Sheriff’s Office under his belt, Dixon had taken the
