Their voices seemed to come from the end of a tunnel.
“I’m so sorry. I’m really sorry.”
Her own voice seemed to come from the end of the same tunnel. Her hands felt numb on the handle of the shopping cart. Her legs felt like water.
“Are you all right, ma’am?”
The store manager loomed over her.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, hyperventilating. She was sweating and cold at the same time. “I wasn’t looking where I was going. I’m so sorry. Do you have a ladies’ room?”
“In customer service.”
Before he could say anything more, she grabbed her purse out of the cart and hurried past him. In the restroom she went into a stall and sat on the toilet with her bag in her lap, trembling, blinking back tears, trying to calm her breathing. Her heart was pounding. She felt light-headed. She thought she might get sick to her stomach.
What had she been thinking?
Had she really seen him? Had she imagined him? Was he in the store? Had she simply turned down the wrong aisle?
What would she have done if the man she hit head-on with her grocery cart had turned out to be the man she believed had stolen her daughter? Would she have screamed? Would she have attacked him? Would the police have come and taken her away?
No answers came as she sat there listening to the piped-in music.
The bathroom door swung open and a woman’s voice called out. “Ma’am? The manager sent me in. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. Thank you.”
She waited for the woman to leave, then let herself out of the stall and left the store. Her hands were trembling as she dug her car keys out of her purse. It was all she could do to keep from running to the car.
She felt like a fool. Dinner was forgotten. She started the engine and sat there letting the air-conditioning blow on her to cool the flush of embarrassment from her skin.
Outside, the world was going on. People walked by, went into the store, came out of the store. They didn’t look at her. They didn’t know what she’d done ten minutes ago. They didn’t know what she’d gone through four years ago, and every year since—
She did a good job of it for the most part. The average person looking at her would never have suspected she lived on the ragged edge of sanity much of the time. Just as the average person would never have looked at their neighbor and suspected his thoughts were full of dark desires of kidnapping, torture, murder . . .
Watching the people of Oak Knoll go on about their business mesmerized her after a while, like watching ants come and go from an anthill. She turned her thoughts back to the fact that she still had to do something about dinner.
She couldn’t bring herself to go back into Pavilions. Ralphs market was just a few blocks away. Or maybe it would be wiser to simply call for a pizza or something. Retreat, regroup, have a drink or two, put this afternoon behind her. Maybe tomorrow she would be able to go out in public without attacking someone with a shopping cart.
She took a big deep breath and let it out with the idea of clearing her head. As she tried to let go the last of the tension, a van drove slowly past her. An unremarkable brown panel van. The driver turned his head and looked directly at her, and Lauren’s heart stopped as she met the hooded dark eyes of Roland Ballencoa.
The man who had taken her daughter.
2
The van kept going. The driver didn’t stop, didn’t slow down, didn’t speed up. He seemed not to recognize her.
Lauren’s pulse was pounding in her ears, roaring in her ears. She felt like she had been suddenly submerged in water. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t breathe. The imagined pressure threatened to crush her chest wall.
She didn’t trust herself to believe what she thought she’d seen. Was it really him this time? Or had her memory once again superimposed Roland Ballencoa’s face on another man’s body?
The van was waiting to pull out onto the street. She couldn’t see the driver from this angle.
What if it was him? What if he was on his way home with a six-pack of beer and a box of frozen lasagna, just like anybody else?
As the van rolled out of the parking lot and into traffic, Lauren threw her car in gear and pulled out, not noticing that she nearly hit a woman with a cart full of groceries.
She needed to know.
She turned in front of several teenagers on the sidewalk and hit the gas to make it onto the street before she could lose sight of the van.
He was at the intersection already, turning left.
Lauren pulled into the turn lane two cars behind him, and made the left turn after the light had already gone red. Horns blasted at her.
If it was him, he had looked directly at her and hadn’t reacted at all. Did the mother of his victim mean so little to him that he couldn’t be bothered to recognize her?
Raw emotions coursed through Lauren like a tide of acid. Anger, fear, outrage, hate, disbelief, astonishment—all of it flooded through her like the swirling wave of a tsunami.
The van was turning again. Lauren wanted to blast past the two cars in front of her so she couldn’t lose him.
Even as the thought formed in her mind, a burgundy sedan came alongside her. She shot the driver a dirty look and her head swam.
The Hispanic man she had crashed her shopping cart into at the store. He was chasing her down for ramming into him in the pasta aisle. This had to be a dream, some crazy, absurd bad dream.
He gave her a hard glare, stabbing a forefinger in the direction of the curb. For the first time the flashing light on the dashboard registered.
A cop was pulling her over while she was trying to chase down the man who had abducted her daughter. If that was true, this was no dream but a nightmare.
She looked ahead to catch a last glimpse of the brown van as it turned right and disappeared down the street, wishing she could somehow reach out with a giant arm and pick it up like a toy. At the same time, the sane part of her brain moved her hand to the turn signal, and she pulled her car to the curb.
The burgundy sedan pulled in behind her.
Lauren sat there, watching in her rearview mirror as the driver got out, at the same time struggling with the notion that Roland Ballencoa had escaped her.
Was he alone? Did he have Leslie here? Was he hunting for other victims?
Or was the guy in the van just a local plumber picking up dinner for his wife and kids?
Which would mean she was crazy.
“I’m Detective Mendez with the sheriff’s office,” the cop said, holding his ID up to her open window. “Can I see your license and registration, please?”
She fumbled with her wallet, hands shaking as she pulled out her driver’s license and handed it to him. The registration was in the glove compartment. She couldn’t remember what it looked like.
“I’m going to ask you to step out of the car, ma’am.”
“I’m sorry,” Lauren said, getting out. “I’m really not a bad driver—with a car or a shopping cart.”
Detective Mendez was not amused. He had that flat, hard cop look she had come to know too well, like a
