was like a game, and he knew how to play it better than anyone.
Frustration and anger rejoined her other emotions, and the pressure inside her built and built. She wanted it to go away. She thought about the razor blade hidden in the book on her nightstand. She could cut herself. She didn’t want to, but she hated this feeling so much. It scared her so badly. But what would happen if she cut herself and the pressure didn’t go away? Then what? Would she cut herself again and again? Would she cut herself so badly she might bleed to death?
It scared her that she would even think that could happen.
Why couldn’t her mom come home?
Suddenly the telephone rang and Leah jumped a foot in the air. It wasn’t the normal ring of a phone call. It rang three times in quick succession, which was the intercom for the front door.
No one could come to the door without first coming through the gate. Only people with the code could come through the gate. But no one with the gate code would ring the doorbell.
Leah stared at the telephone on her nightstand, afraid to answer it. But as it rang again, she thought again of her mother. What if something had happened to her?
On the third ring she picked up the phone. The man on the other end spoke with authority.
“Leah, I’m with the sheriff’s office. There’s been an accident. I’m here to take you to the hospital.”
The sheriff’s office probably had some kind of code to get through gates, Leah thought. That made sense.
“Was it a car accident?” she asked, thinking a million things at once. Was her mother dead? Was she alive? Had she been drinking and driving? She drank too much. Leah had told her.
“Yes, a car accident,” the man said.
She could hear her mother’s voice from just hours ago:
“Oh my God,” Leah said, fear grabbing hold of her like a hand closing around her throat. She wasn’t supposed to open the door to strangers, but he was from the sheriff’s department and he knew her name. He wouldn’t know her name if he was a stranger. Someone had to have told him.
“She’s in pretty bad shape, Leah,” he said. “We need to go now.”
Her mother needed her. What if she died? What if she died before Leah could get to her and tell her how sorry she was for all the hateful things she’d said that morning?
She had to go.
50
“Ballencoa had to know she was here,” Tanner said. “Since when do we assume he ever tells the truth about anything?”
“The time line doesn’t lie,” Mendez said. “He moved here the beginning of May. How could he know Lauren was going to move here a month later? She didn’t send him a change of address card ahead of time.”
He remembered Lauren saying that very thing to him when he had pulled her over that first afternoon.
Had Ballencoa seen her by chance—as Lauren had claimed she had seen him by chance in the Pavilions parking lot? Was it dumb luck that he had come across her?
“I don’t believe in coincidence,” Mendez muttered. “And if Lauren thought he knew she was here, she would have been looking over her shoulder. She would have noticed his vehicle when she came out of the shooting range that day.
“She didn’t think he knew she was here,” he said. “That’s why she was so freaked out when she found that photograph. If she was the one hunting him, how did he know where to find her?”
A bad feeling scratching at the back of his neck, he went to the phone and called Latent Prints.
“Did you guys lift anything usable off that photograph I brought you a couple of days ago?”
“Actually, yes. A thumb and two pretty good partials,” the tech told him. “We haven’t heard anything back yet.”
“Check on that, will you?” Mendez said. “ASAP, please. I’m at extension thirty-four.”
The call came back ten minutes later.
“I’ve got your hit, detective. The print is a probable match to a former guest of the state penal system.”
Mendez listened, a sick feeling curdling in his stomach like bad milk as he took in the information. He hung up the phone and looked at Tanner and Hicks.
“We’ve got a problem,” he said. “The print comes back Michael Craig Houston.”
The silence between the three of them swelled like a balloon as the implications set in.
“Oh my God,” Tanner murmured.
Michael Craig Houston. Roland Ballencoa’s former cellmate. His suspected accomplice in the unproven murder of his aunt.
The first thing Lauren did was go to a copy center near the McAster campus and photocopy every page of the journal dated 1985–1986. She put the copy in a manila envelope and mailed it to Detective Mendez at the sheriff’s office. Whatever might happen with Ballencoa, this would end up in the hands of someone who might be able to derive something from it.
She then went into a small electronics store and purchased a mini-cassette recorder, batteries, and cassette tapes. She kept her head down and her sunglasses on, and still she drew some curious looks from other shoppers. Her forearms were scratched and her clothes were dirty, she realized. She probably looked like she’d been living in a cardboard box.
Her suspicions were confirmed when she went into the ladies’ room and looked at herself in the small mirror above the sink. It didn’t matter. She had more important things to think about than her appearance.
She set up the cassette recorder, tested it, then went about finding a way to conceal it on her body, finally wedging it inside her bra beneath her right breast. It was uncomfortable, but it worked. The T-shirt she wore had been Lance’s and was several sizes too big for her, hanging loosely away from the slight curves of her body.
She checked the positioning of the Walther pressed snugly against her belly by the control-top panty. It had shifted some as she’d run away from Ballencoa’s house. She adjusted it now and thought back to her last day at the shooting range.
She held her hands out in front of her, fingers spread wide. She had expected the shaking to be much worse.
Would she be able to point and pull the trigger if she needed to?
She had imagined that moment so many times in the last four years. Roland Ballencoa had died a thousand deaths in her dreams. Was she really prepared to make that dream a reality?
She needed an answer from him. She couldn’t say with certainty what she might do when she got one.
Her answer to herself was:
She would be able to see it, even in those cold, flat eyes. She would know. Because this was about Leslie, she would be able to sense a lie, or know the truth . . . or so she told herself.
This would be the moment everything had been building toward for the last four years. The final showdown. Good versus Evil. Mother versus child predator. A strange kind of excitement swirled through Lauren. She was going
