The refrigerator humming was the only sound, save the pounding of Lauren’s pulse in her ears. She stepped into the tiny kitchen, taking in every detail—the original 1930s tile, the plain painted cabinets, the emptiness of the counters, the lack of ornamentation of any kind. There was not so much as a grocery list on the counter or a magnet on the fridge.
Inside the refrigerator was a bottle of Evian, a bottle of apple cider vinegar, a head of lettuce, a carton of cottage cheese. In the cupboard, wheat germ, bran, vitamins.
It struck her as odd that he was a health nut. It was hard to imagine him as being human with human needs like food and water. To her he was something . . . other. He fed on fear and drank in the despair of his victims. What did he need with vitamin B and a regular bowel? It seemed more likely that he slept hanging upside down inside a dark closet like a rabid bat.
She didn’t know what she was looking for as she moved through the bungalow, but she didn’t find it. She didn’t find anything in the dining room or living room. The furniture was sparse and spartan. There wasn’t a plant. There wasn’t a magazine. There were no shoes by the front door. There was no mail on the table, not a bill or a flyer or a letter from Ed McMahon promising Roland Ballencoa he might already be a winner.
What did he do when he wasn’t being a predator? Did he read? Did he listen to music? Did he watch television? There was no sign of any of that. She imagined he had an array of violent pornography stashed somewhere. He undoubtedly had photographs of the girls he had stalked. He probably had videotape.
Her stomach turned at the prospect of finding photographs of Leslie, or movies of what he had done to her. As much as she wanted to find something here that could tie Roland Ballencoa to her daughter, she dreaded that prospect just as much.
She moved down the narrow hallway, only pausing at the door to the bathroom, loath to go inside, though she imagined it would be as spotless and lifeless as every other room here. The imagined sense of intimacy in that room was too much. While he had certainly breached every boundary of Lauren’s own house when he had broken in, she didn’t want the same experience. She would not be fondling Roland Ballencoa’s dirty underwear or crawling naked between his sheets.
His bedroom looked almost as uninhabited as the rest of the house. The bed was made with military precision. The first thing Lauren made herself do was get down on her hands and knees to look beneath it.
She half expected to see a body, to come face-to-face with the lifeless stare of someone else’s daughter. Or, if not a body, a box containing a victim—alive or dead.
There was no box. There was nothing beneath the bed. Not even dust.
Clothes were hung neatly in the closet in order: shirts, pants, jackets, light colors to dark. Shoes were lined up neatly beneath. Three pair. Socks and underwear were organized in a dresser drawer. T-shirts were folded exactly alike and stacked like a display at the Gap.
So orderly, Roland’s world. It irked Lauren that he could be this way when what he had done to her had thrown her inner life into chaos. He should have an idea of how that felt, she thought, and she began dismantling his orderly habitat, starting with the bed.
She tore the coverlet off first and flung it to the side. Pillows sailed to the floor. She yanked the sheets free of the tightly tucked corners, dragged them off and threw them to the side, stomping on them, grinding the dirty soles of her sneakers against the fabric.
It was juvenile, she knew. She was wasting time. But there was a certain rush and satisfaction in doing it. As she pulled his clothes from the hangers and out of the drawers, she briefly considered peeing on all of it, like a dog marking territory. But then it occurred to her that as perverted as Ballencoa was, he might find that exciting.
He had been more subtle in his invasion of her home. And yet she had thrown out the load of laundry he had handled. She had smashed the wine glass he had drunk from. She had stripped every bed in the house and refused to sleep on her mattress or let Leah sleep on hers. The sense of violation, of defilement, had been terrible, as bad as if Ballencoa had put his hands directly on her naked body.
Lauren stood back and looked at the mess she’d made, imagining how he would feel when he saw it.
She felt a small rush of power at the thought, and imagined that was what he had felt as he had moved through her house, touching her things. Feeding off that power, she pulled the drawers out of the dresser and turned them over, looking for something to be taped to the bottoms. There was nothing. She stuck her head inside the empty shell of the dresser and looked at the underside of the top. Nothing. She pulled the thing away from the wall and looked behind it. Nothing. She tipped it over and looked at the bottom. Nothing.
She went through the same process with the nightstands. Nothing. Sweating and cursing, she wrestled the mattress off the box spring, flipping it over. Nothing.
Angry and frustrated, she took the box cutter from her bag and sliced the mattress open down the middle like she was gutting a fish. Nothing. She did the same with the pillows, sending feathers everywhere. Nothing.
The disappointment drained the adrenaline out of her. She looked down at the mess she had made of the room, the upended dresser, the overturned mattress spilling its guts. She had dismantled the bed to its frame, looked under it, looked behind it. Nothing.
Where would a man like Ballencoa hide something? It would have helped to know what that something was. She assumed because of the sexual bent to his activities he would keep souvenirs of his victims or photographs of his victims in his bedroom—the most private and comfortable space for him to amuse himself. He would want his mementos out of sight, but readily accessible—easy to get at and easy to put back in a hurry if necessary.
She had looked at eye level and below—
She looked up and around the room, spotting the air vent, and her hopes lifted. She climbed on a chair, used her screwdriver to pry the cover off. Nothing.
She turned around, ready to give up, but found herself staring at the old, outdated electric heater built into the wall. The unit was tall and narrow, ugly dented metal painted the same color as the wall, rust crusting over the dents like old scabs. The thermostat knob was missing. It looked like it probably hadn’t worked in years.
Lauren found herself fixed on the screws. Old screws that had been painted over half a dozen times. She could tell because the paint had been chipped. Scraped by a screwdriver. Recently. He had been careless here. Finally. The screws were loose. They came free easily, and the front panel lifted away.
Lauren’s heart began to pound. Wedged in behind the old heating coils was a collection of journals, four bound books with fine leather covers, each with a date carefully hand-lettered on the front.
A feeling of dread washed over Lauren as she reached for one dated October 1985–October 1986.
Her hands were shaking as she opened it. The page was dated October 1, 1985. At a glance it looked like an address book of sorts, the entries made in strangely precise, small square printing.
The entries went on, page after page, interspersed with carefully drawn maps and diagrams of houses.
Lauren’s skin crawled. She wanted to fling the book away from her as she realized what it was: a catalog. A catalog of every girl Ballencoa had encountered, his impressions of them, the details he had learned about their lives. These were women and girls he had watched and studied and followed. He knew where they lived, with whom, the schedules of their families.
She turned the pages to entries made in April of 1986 and her blood ran cold and her breath caught in her throat.
