Down the Darkest Road

terrible consequences of her choices. She needed to tell about the things Ballencoa and Hewitt had done in order to purge the evil of them from her soul.

Tanner and Mendez pulled a pair of tall stools in beside Lauren’s bed, and settled in to listen, the pair of them madly scribbling notes in little spiral notebooks, even while a cassette recorder on the tray table absorbed every word she said.

“I let him into our lives,” she said of Greg Hewitt. The guilt was sharp and terrible.

“You couldn’t know what he was, Lauren,” Tanner said, her voice softer than Lauren remembered it. Her impression of Tanner had always been that she was brash and contentious. Or maybe that was me, she thought. “He was a predator, same as Ballencoa. That’s what they do. They take advantage of people.”

Lauren didn’t argue. She knew she could have checked Hewitt’s credentials. She would have known in a phone call whether or not he had his private investigator’s license. Would it have mattered? He had been willing to do what she wanted him to do. Her focus had been so set on Ballencoa, she would have made a deal with the devil himself.

Turned out, she had.

She wanted to go find Greg Hewitt’s body and kill him all over again for the beating he had given Leah. But at the heart of it, Lauren still believed it was her own fault. Her mission on behalf of Leslie had cost Leah a terrible price.

“Let me tell you something, Lauren,” Tanner said. She paused for a moment, glancing at Mendez out of the corner of her eye, as if weighing whether or not she wanted to share what she had to say with him as well. She took a deep breath and sighed, and began her story.

“When I was fourteen I was walking home from school with my best friend. Molly Nash. Molly was a really sweet girl. A girly girl. And I was . . . me. A tomboy. I picked the way home that day. I wanted to take a shortcut that took us through a not-so-great area. Molly didn’t want to go that way, but I teased her into it.

“So we were walking along and talking about boys, and we both had a crush on the same boy, and of course he didn’t know either one of us was alive,” she said, smiling at that part of the memory. Then the smile went away. “And . . . uh . . . these two men grabbed us off the street, and . . . we got raped. And I managed to get away, and I ran for help. But when I brought the police back to where it happened, the two men were gone, and my friend Molly . . . She didn’t make it. She died. And . . . um . . . the men were never caught. They got away with it. And I had to live with that. It had been my choice to go that way. If anybody should have died, it should have been me.”

“You were just a little girl,” Lauren said. A little girl Wendy Morgan’s age, a year younger than Leah.

“I made a bad choice. My friend died a terrible death because of it. I had to learn to live with that,” Tanner said. “That’s why I’m a cop. That’s how I pay back Molly Nash.

“I know people have told you to move on from losing your daughter Leslie,” she said. “And I have no doubt that people have told you not to let what happened be the defining moment of your life. I also know that’s all bullshit. You don’t let go of something like that, not ever. That tragedy will be one of the defining moments of your life. It has to be. Otherwise it was for nothing. And how tragic would that be?

“It’s what we learn and what we do to come out of that dark place that makes the difference,” she said. “For you, and for the daughter you have left.

“Anybody can pay penance, Lauren. That’s the easy part. Anybody can be a victim, and anybody can flog themselves. Big fucking deal. But you put one foot on a ladder and climb to the next rung. Then you’ve done something. Then you’ve made a difference. And then what happened matters. Otherwise, it’s just old news, and nobody wants to hear about it.

“There,” she said with a sheepish little smile as she slid off the stool and tucked her notebook in the breast pocket of the loose blazer she wore. “My big speech. We should let you get some sleep if you can. I’ve got to go find myself a hotel room.”

Lauren reached a hand out to her. “Thank you,” she said, really looking at Danni Tanner for perhaps the first time since she’d known her. “Really.”

Uncomfortable with the gratitude, Tanner made a funny little shrug and backed away. “Get some sleep.”

63

Mendez followed Tanner out of Lauren Lawton’s hospital room. They walked down the dark hall without speaking, then took the elevator together down to the ground floor. Unfamiliar with Mercy General, Tanner looked both ways up and down the hall, uncertain which direction they had come from earlier.

Mendez put a hand on her back and guided her toward the ER. They walked out of the big sliding doors into the night that had grown cool and damp, and headed to the short-term parking. Seemingly lost in her own thoughts, Tanner started around the car for the passenger’s side.

“Danni,” Mendez said, finding his tongue.

She turned around and looked up at him, her face open and vulnerable in the grainy filtered light of the parking lot.

He reached his hand up and touched her cheek. She gave an almost imperceptible shake of her head.

“Please don’t make a big deal,” she said quietly.

She was supposed to be tough, or so she thought. Kindness would be her undoing. Everything about that touched him. He leaned down and kissed her softly on the lips . . . just because.

Her breath caught. A little rush of excitement went through him despite the fatigue.

When he raised his head she looked up at him with a funny little smile and said, “About that hotel room . . .”

Dawn was just beginning to pink the sky in the east when Lauren woke to find Leah staring at her, her precious face bruised, one eye swollen nearly shut, the other as wide as a small child’s. Lauren tried to manage a smile despite the tightness of her own battered face. She slipped her hand through the railings of the beds and touched her daughter’s hand.

“Do you know how much I love you?” she whispered.

Leah nodded, not looking all that certain.

“You saved my life,” Lauren said, tears rising. “In ways you don’t even know. I owe you so much, Leah. You have been so brave, and so strong. I will never be as brave and strong as you.”

“I don’t want to be brave anymore, Mommy,” Leah said. “I just want us to be a family.”

“We will be,” Lauren promised. “We will be. We are.”

64

It wasn’t truly over for months. It took that long for the investigators to go through Roland Ballencoa’s journals and contact the girls and women he had stalked, and to identify and locate all the girls whose photographs he had filed away in boxes in the small shed at the back of his property. Photographs of unsuspecting potential victims and of actual victims as well.

In addition to photographs, they had found container after container of women’s lingerie—all very neatly organized by date with painstaking care to note the name of the woman it had belonged to, and her address, and her page number in the corresponding journal.

In many cases Ballencoa had also photographed himself modeling the feminine articles of clothing.

Many of the victims found were unaware Ballencoa had ever had an interest in them. Some had known and liked him. Others met the news of his demise with relief.

Seven were never found at all.

Seven young women listed in his journals, seven young women Roland Ballencoa had photographed from northern California to San Diego County, had simply disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again. Ballencoa had never been considered a person of interest in six of those cases.

Detectives Mendez and Tanner would head the joint task force and organize a central clearing