Tami Hoag - Down the Darkest Road

“He wants the homeowner to know he’s been there,” Tanner said.

“It’s his way of saying, ‘Fuck you, you can’t touch me.’ It’s a power trip. He can come and go as he pleases. He doesn’t leave anything behind. Nobody sees him. There’s nothing we can do.”

“I’ll go back in our records and see if there were any unsolved similar cases while he was here,” Tanner said. “If we had any cases like that prior to Leslie Lawton’s abduction, could be nobody ever looked for a link. Did you ask the San Luis detectives?”

“No,” Mendez said. “But the guy we talked to up there couldn’t connect the links in a chain.”

“Neri? He’s counting the days until he can retire and be a mall cop in his free time. Let me make a couple of calls. I know some people up there.”

“Thanks.”

“Thank you,” she said, sliding off the table. She looked a little uncomfortable, like the admission she was about to make wanted to stick to the roof of her mouth. “For including me,” she said. “I appreciate it.”

“It was your case first,” he said. “Why would I try to shut you out?”

Tanner laughed. “Christ, what planet are you from? Can I go there? In my world, doors wouldn’t open if I didn’t kick them down. I only got this case because it’s colder than a well digger’s ass. Nobody wanted it. Nobody wanted to deal with Lauren Lawton, and nobody thinks I have a snowball’s chance in hell of solving it. I was beginning to think they might be right.”

“Let’s hope not.”

She gave him a long look, but he couldn’t read her. She was probably a hell of a poker player—if the boys ever let her in the game.

“I’ll go make that call,” she said.

He watched her walk out of the door, thinking there was a story behind Danni Tanner, and maybe someday he would find out what it was. Later. After he put Roland Ballencoa behind bars.

33

Lauren felt like someone had beaten her from head to toe with a baseball bat. But the battery was more emotional than physical. Over and over her memory replayed Leah’s outburst, and her daughter’s pain was magnified many times by her own sense of guilt and grief.

What a mess she’d made of their lives. She should have been her daughter’s rock. Another mother would have focused on making her remaining child feel safe and loved in the wake of losing both her big sister and her father. Bound up in her own anger and grief and guilt, Lauren had left her daughter to deal with her own feelings.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, she had put her child in danger as well. She had brought Leah here, and now Ballencoa knew where they lived.

She tried to rationalize. Ballencoa had known where they lived in Santa Barbara. He could have come there any time. Instead, he had finally left town and gone to San Luis Obispo.

Those facts didn’t make her feel any better. Another fact remained: that she had come to Oak Knoll knowing he was here. She had brought Leah here knowing full well that she would at some point confront Roland Ballencoa.

Her intent had been clear in her mind. If no one was going to help her, if no one was going to do anything about him, if he was never going to give up the truth of what he had done to Leslie, then she was going to have to help herself, do something about him herself, get the truth out of him any way she could.

She had somehow managed to embrace that intent and believe that her actions would be somehow separate from her life with her daughter. Like they could live in a bubble from which she could come and go with her gun and her dark intentions, and none of that would touch Leah.

What a mess.

She felt mired in it now. Any decision she could make would be wrong because only wrong decisions had brought her to this place.

Was she supposed to be a mother to the daughter she had or the avenger for the daughter she had lost? Everything in her fought against the idea of letting Leslie go. She could never release the idea of what if? What if Leslie wasn’t dead? What if she gave up on her child one day too soon? She couldn’t do it. Then what did that make her to Leah?

The conundrums spun around in her brain like hornets trapped in a box. The one overriding thought she kept having was: Leah would be better off with no mother than with the mother that she was.

She and Leah had had their cry together. She had said all the right and motherly things. She had promised to do better, drink less, eat more, put Daddy’s gun away. Lies and lies and more lies.

They had gone through the motions of a family breakfast. Lauren had choked down the scrambled eggs Leah had made for her. She had allowed Leah to drive them into Oak Knoll because Leah’s birthday was coming and she would turn sixteen and want to get her driver’s license.

She had managed to seem like a sane person while meeting Wendy’s mother. The girls had decided to take the daylong art course Sara Morgan was teaching at the women’s center. Later in the day Wendy had a tennis lesson and had invited Leah to play. Sara would take them and Lauren would come back into town at the end of the day, and they would all go to dinner like normal human beings.

Lauren wasn’t sure how she would manage to pull that off, but she would try for Leah’s sake.

And yet no sooner did she pledge to do something for her daughter’s sake than she found herself driving away from the Thomas Center to Roland Ballencoa’s neighborhood. She parked under a tree on a side street and sat there staring at his house while the tug of war pulled and twisted and turned inside of her.

Did you miss me?

Even if she wanted to be rid of him, she couldn’t stop him from touching her life. He would always be part of her life.

Did you miss me?

She took the note out of her purse and looked at it.

At the heart of all her anguish, all her anger, all her guilt and despair stood Roland Ballencoa. The hate that burned through her thinking about him literally made her see red. The note turned as red as blood before her eyes.

Did you miss me?

She took a pen from her purse and wrote beneath the neatly typed line: I would sooner see you in hell than see you at all.

She put the note back in the envelope and sat there. Funny how calm she seemed, she thought. All the conflicting emotions screaming in her head had gone to white noise. Now she didn’t think, she acted.

As if her body was not her own, she got out of her car, walked across the street, up Roland Ballencoa’s sidewalk onto his front porch.

What if he saw her? What if he came to the door? What would he say to her? What would she say to him? What if he tried to grab her?

What if my daughter is in his house? What if she’s in a box under his bed? What if I pull a gun on him? What if I’m tired of being his victim?

There was, at the core of her obsession, an almost giddy excitement at the idea of confronting him. There was a part of her that wanted him to come to the door.

The Walther was tucked inside the waistband of her jeans, hidden by the tails of the shirt she wore—a shirt that belonged to the husband she had lost because of Roland Ballencoa.

What if she rang the doorbell? What if he came to the door and she shot him in the face and killed him like she had in her dream?

She could see it in her head. She had imagined it over and over. There was a part of her that wanted that confrontation to put an end to this nightmare once and for all. And there was a part of her that knew she should turn around and run away.

What about me?! Leah had cried. Lauren had spent the last hours berating herself for not caring enough, for not being a good mother to the one daughter she had.