Down the Darkest Road

argued. “But that’s okay. He was only using a camera—this time.”

“You can’t take matters into your own hands,” he said, miserable because that was exactly what he would have wanted to do himself.

“But you people won’t do anything to stop him!” she shouted. “Whose hands am I supposed to leave it in? He put a note in my mailbox yesterday. It said, ‘Did you miss me?’ It’s like a game to him. He gets to break the law, then hide behind it, then twist it around and use it against his victims. I can’t stop him, and you won’t stop him. What the hell am I supposed to do?”

“Why didn’t you call me about this note?” Mendez asked. “Where is it?”

“I threw it away,” she said, annoyed. “Why would I call you? What would you have done about it? Nothing. You probably would have told me it’s not your jurisdiction and maybe I should call a postal inspector.”

“If we can prove he’s harassing you—”

“He didn’t sign it, for Christ’s sake! He didn’t even address it. He just left it. And now he’s taking pictures of me and my daughter in a public place, in front of witnesses, but that’s not proof he’s stalking me? That’s ludicrous!”

“I know you’re frustrated, Lauren—”

“You know?” she challenged. “You know? You don’t know jack shit!”

“What I meant—”

“You don’t know what this monster has cost me,” she said angrily. “You don’t know what it is to carry a child inside you for nine months, give birth to it, nurture it, love it, then have someone take that child away from you for their own perverted pleasure.”

“No.”

“You don’t know what it’s like to watch that man walk around free while your child is gone, while your husband is dead.”

“No.”

“You don’t know what it’s like to have him claim his rights while I have none,” she said bitterly, tears now streaming down her face. “I have no recourse. I have nothing left except my only remaining child, and I’m supposed to just stand there and watch him take her picture for his catalog of victims?”

In that moment Mendez felt so ashamed of the system he was sworn to protect that he couldn’t even meet Lauren Lawton’s eyes. What was wrong with a world where a predator had more rights than the people he preyed upon?

He could feel the hot contempt in her stare.

“Don’t tell me you know my frustration, detective,” she said. “I am trapped in this fucking nightmare and you are part of the problem, not the solution!”

She turned away from him then, putting her hands and her forehead against the wall as if perhaps she might be able to push her way through to the other side. Or maybe it was that the world was reeling so beneath her feet, she needed the wall to remain upright.

“I can’t believe this is happening!” she cried with such raw despair it cut through Mendez like a knife.

He went to stand beside her and spread one hand between her shoulder blades in some stupid feeble attempt to offer her comfort.

“I want to help you, Lauren,” he said quietly. “I do.”

She gave him a cutting sideways look. “You can’t help me.”

She was trapped in a hell he could only imagine. What good was he with his platitudes and his empty promises? She was locked in an epic battle between good and evil, and he was little more than a spectator, ineffectual and impotent to help her.

She shrugged his hand off her back like she couldn’t stand the feel of it, went to the corner farthest from him, and sank down to sit on the floor with her face buried against her knees.

Mendez went out into the hall and paced up and down for a minute, trying to clear his head. He was upset in a way he didn’t know quite what to do with. He was a goal-oriented problem solver by nature, but he didn’t see a good way to solve Lauren Lawton’s problems. He felt hamstrung by the rules and regulations he was bound to follow. He felt as useless as a boy in the face of her fury and pain.

He went into the break room, where Vince sat watching the Ballencoa interview on the closed-circuit TV. Out of habit he went to the coffeemaker, but the idea of coffee seemed pointless to him. He wanted a stiff drink—but probably not half as much as Lauren did, he thought.

Vince flicked a glance at him.

“This guy’s a piece of work,” he said, nodding toward the screen.

Mendez flung himself into a chair with a sharp sigh and looked up at the television. Ballencoa sat at the table facing the door, wearing the sour expression of a petulant child. Trammell sat across from him, laid back, his body language calm and relaxed. Just having a chat with a citizen.

“He’s been telling Trammell how Lauren Lawton is stalking him and he wants to get a restraining order against her.”

“Fucking piece of shit,” Mendez growled. “He was taking pictures of the daughter at the tennis courts.”

“Which he says is his right and his livelihood.”

“His rights.” The words were bitter in his mouth. “Like he’s a victim. Lauren needs the protection order against him. He’s the fucking criminal. The fucking nerve of that guy—taking pictures of the daughter! If I’d been in her place, he’d be talking out the other side of his head right now.”

“And you’d be under arrest,” Vince pointed out.

“It’s not right.”

“If somebody looked funny at one of my kids . . . I don’t want to know what I’d do,” Vince admitted. “But there’s what’s right, and there’s the law. And unfortunately, the two don’t always go together.”

“Try explaining that to Lauren,” Mendez said. “I tried. I felt like something you’d scrape off the sole of your shoe. She lost her daughter to this dirtbag. She doesn’t even have the peace of knowing what he did to her.”

“How’s she doing in there?” Vince asked.

“She’s furious, she’s scared. She just handed me my ass,” Mendez said. “And it wasn’t any less than I deserved—or than our system deserves, I should say. When we threaten to arrest her for protecting her own child, where’s she supposed to turn?”

“What are you going to do with her?”

Unable to sit still, he got up again and started to pace. “I don’t know. It’s up to Cal. What can I do?”

Dixon arrived then from an interrupted evening and came into the break room, all business, with a dark scowl on his face. He was dressed for some fund-raising dinner in a smart gray suit with a blue tie that intensified the color of his eyes.

He looked at Mendez. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

“It’s not by choice,” Mendez said.

“I don’t like that either,” Dixon snapped. “Mrs. Lawton asked for you specifically, and Ballencoa has already filed a complaint against you. Tell me Ballencoa hasn’t seen you.”

“No. Good for him. At this point I’d be happy to finish what she started.”

“Don’t even start with me, talking like that,” Dixon said. “You’re a sworn officer of the court. Act like it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Vince, what’s your role here?”

Leone got to his feet slowly, the deliberate quality of his movement immediately slowing down the hot energy in the room. “Observing,” he said. “Tony filled me in on the history. I wanted to see Ballencoa for myself.”

“And?”

“Based on what little I know and what little I’ve seen, I don’t like him,” he said. “He’s manipulative, narcissistic, vindictive—”

The sheriff looked impatient. “So far you’ve described my ex-mother-in-law.”

“Your ex-mother-in-law isn’t a sexual predator, is she?” Vince asked.

“No. That’s one thing she’s not.”