Down the Darkest Road

“How?” Lauren asked, frustrated. “How am I supposed to make it stop when it’s never over? Are we just supposed to pretend none of it ever happened? Am I supposed to forget you had a sister, a father? Are we supposed to pretend it’s okay that Roland Ballencoa is walking around a free man, free to stalk us? That’s not okay, Leah. Am I supposed to pretend he couldn’t take you away from me if he had the chance? What am I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know!” Leah cried, pounding her fists on the roof of the BMW. “I hate it! I hate that we have to live this way! It’s all Leslie’s fault! None of this would have happened if she wasn’t such a brat! I wish she was dead! I wish we knew she was dead so we could just get on with our lives!”

Lauren gasped as if her daughter had slapped her. If not for the car between them, she probably would have slapped her back.

“It’s not fair!” Leah went on. “She’s gone and we have to suffer and suffer and suffer!”

“It’s not Leslie’s fault she was taken!” Lauren countered.

“Yes, it is!” Leah shouted. “She wasn’t supposed to leave the house and she did it anyway. And she wasn’t supposed to talk to strange men, and she did that too. And she probably just got in his car because she wanted a ride. And it’s all her own stupid fault because she thought she was smarter than everybody!”

“Leah!”

“It’s true! And I hate her!” she cried, tears streaming down her face. “She ruined all our lives, but we’re supposed to go around saying ‘poor Leslie, poor Leslie.’ I’m sick of it!”

Lauren staggered back as if from a blow. She turned her back on her daughter because she didn’t know what else to do. Leah was her sweet one. Leslie had been headstrong. Leslie had been vocal. Leslie would have fought with her, not Leah.

Yet she could hear her youngest’s cries from just a day ago—What about me?

What about Leah? The daughter she had brought with her on this mad quest, putting her in harm’s way, depriving her of what childhood she should have had left. What about Leah . . .

A car door slammed behind her and Lauren jumped as if a gun had gone off. Leah was sitting in the BMW, angrily swiping the tears from her cheeks.

Lauren got in the car because she didn’t know what else to do. This is what we do, she thought. We pretend to be normal. Their world had come so far off its axis she didn’t know what normal was anymore.

Normal had become carrying a gun.

Normal had become pills to sleep and alcohol to numb the pain of being awake.

Normal had become the obsession with a daughter she didn’t have, and the neglect of the daughter she did have.

Normal had become raw, dirty sex with a man she didn’t like, and an offer to murder a man she hated.

I just want it to stop, Leah had said.

Me too, Lauren thought.

The silence fell between them again like an iron curtain as Lauren started the car and drove out the gate.

They were halfway to the ranch before she spoke again.

“I love you, Leah,” she said. “Don’t ever think that I don’t love you just as much as I love Leslie. If you were taken from me, I would fight just as hard for you.”

Leah stared down at her hands in her lap. “I’m afraid, Mommy. I’m afraid something bad is going to happen to you,” she said in a small voice.

Lauren didn’t answer her right away. She weighed what she was about to say, deciding it was necessary to say it.

“You know you would never be left alone,” she said. “If something ever did happen—and I’m not saying that anything will—but you need to know you will always be taken care of, sweetheart. Your aunt Meg would take care of you—”

“Don’t say that!” Leah snapped. “You’re scaring me!”

“I’m not trying to scare you. You said you were already afraid. I don’t want you to be afraid.”

“Stop it! I don’t want to talk about it!”

Once at the ranch, Leah got out of the car, slammed the door, and ran for the stables. Lauren watched her go, her daughter’s earlier words echoing in her head: I just want you to make it stop.

She needed to make it stop. For both their sakes. Roland Ballencoa had destroyed half her family in a single act. She couldn’t let him destroy what was left of it by allowing this madness to go on. That was why she had come here after all. To end it.

A strange calm settled over her as she turned out of the Gracida ranch gate and headed toward Oak Knoll.

44

“I finally got a line on that rental car,” Hicks said, coming into the war room.

They had decided to set up just as they did for a homicide investigation, utilizing the giant whiteboard at the front of the room to lay out a time line.

“What rental car?” Tanner asked as she organized the files she had brought with her from Santa Barbara.

“Ballencoa’s neighbor in San Luis spotted a guy parked outside Ballencoa’s house,” Hicks said. “He told her he was some kind of special investigator with the police, but we know the SLOPD wasn’t watching Ballencoa anymore.”

“The tag on the car he was driving came back to Avis,” Mendez said.

“Who rents a car to go on surveillance?” Tanner asked.

“Gregory Hewitt,” Hicks answered.

“Who’s Gregory Hewitt?”

“Gregory Hewitt is the guy whose car was in the shop at McFadden Autobody in Santa Barbara that week,” he said. “The rental was a loaner.”

“And I’ll ask again,” Mendez said. “Who is Gregory Hewitt?”

“No idea,” Hicks said, “but he doesn’t work for the San Luis PD or the Santa Barbara PD or the Santa Barbara County SO or any other agency. He’s not a cop.”

“But the neighbor lady said he showed her some kind of ID,” Mendez said.

He dug his little spiral notebook out of the breast pocket of his sport coat and flipped through the pages, looking for the notes he had taken when they had spoken with Mavis Whitaker. “She couldn’t read it. She didn’t have her glasses on.”

“Sounds like a private investigator,” Tanner said.

Hicks agreed. “I thought so too, but there’s no California PI license to anyone by that name.”

“Who cares, anyway,” Mendez said. “Ballencoa is here now. That’s what matters to us.”

“Right. The house he’s renting here is managed by a property firm,” Hicks said. “His lease began May first.”

“When was your first B and E?” Tanner asked.

Mendez consulted the first of the files. “May fifth.”

“He made himself right at home.”

Mendez went to the whiteboard and entered the information on the time line. The date, the name of the victim, the address. He did the same for each of their cases.

Tanner took the far left section of whiteboard and did the same with the Santa Barbara cases, leading the time line up to the abduction of Leslie Lawton.

“I called a guy I know in San Luis,” she said. “He works crimes against property. He thought they might have cases to add. He’s checking into it.

“We all know, B and Es aren’t uncommon in a college town,” she went on, “what with a certain recreational