Tami Hoag - Down the Darkest Road

“I don’t have to imagine. I’ve seen firsthand what it’s done to her,” he said. “She’s hanging on to the ledge with broken fingernails. If we can’t head this off at the pass and get some kind of resolution for her, we’re going to have a bad outcome one way or another.”

“Uncle Tony! Look at my giraffe!” Haley called, coming into the room with a stuffed toy half as big as she was. Antony tagged along behind, holding his stuffed gorilla on top of his head.

Mendez squatted down for a closer look. “That’s beautiful, sweetheart.”

“Mine too!” Antony said.

“Yours too!”

“I’m not a sweetheart, though,” Antony said.

“Yes, you are, Vincent Antony Leone,” Anne declared, bending down and snatching her son close for a kiss.

“No, I’m not! I’m a g’rilla!”

Haley scrambled up onto a barstool at the island. “Daddy, tell Uncle Tony about how the giraffe licked me.”

“I will, Haley Bug,” Vince said, stroking a big hand over his daughter’s tousled curls. “We’ll both tell him all about it later. But right now Uncle Tony and I have to go talk some business. You stay here and help Mommy keep your brother in line, okay?”

Haley rolled her big brown eyes dramatically. “Oh, brother!”

Vince poured himself a glass of cabernet from the bottle on the counter and led the way out to the pool.

“Have I told you yet today what a lucky stiff you are?” Mendez asked, twisting the top off his beer.

“No, but I am,” Vince said with a grin. He took a seat on an L-shaped cushioned stucco bench that framed one corner of the swimming pool. “Life is good.”

Mendez sat on the other leg of the L. “How’s Anne feeling? She looks great.”

“A little morning sickness, a little tired, and quit looking at my wife,” Vince said, shooting him a half-joking, half-fierce look. “You need to find yourself a nice girl and settle down, Anthony.”

Mendez took a pull on his beer. “Yeah, well . . . I’ll get right on that.”

They were both silent for an uncomfortable moment.

“Sara just wasn’t ready, Tony,” Vince said gently.

Sara Morgan. Wendy’s mother. Beautiful Sara Morgan with her mermaid hair and cornflower blue eyes. A wounded bird for him to protect. He had certainly wanted to.

“That’s not to say she won’t come back around. She’s needed some time to just be herself. Steve did a lot of damage.”

Mendez shook his head. “No. It’s not going to happen, Vince. I’m okay with that. I was part of a bad time in her life. Every time she looked at me was a reminder of everything she went through. Hell, I put her through some of it myself when we thought that asshole husband of hers was a suspect,” he admitted.

He couldn’t say he hadn’t been half in love with her, though. Vince knew it too, but gracefully let the subject slide.

“So tell me about Roland Ballencoa.”

Mendez filled him in with the details he had learned going through the SBPD files with Tanner. Leone listened with laser-sharp interest.

“He’s classic in a lot of respects,” he said. “Tailor-made for trouble. Absent mother, emotionally distant female raising him. No male role model in his life.”

“For sure there’s some kind of aberrant sexual component in there when he was younger, I’m thinking,” Mendez said.

Vince nodded. “Most likely. Although I do know cases where the subject claimed to have had violent sexual fantasies at a young age with no remembered abuse preceding.”

“Abuse is a relative term.”

“Or maybe a terminal relative,” Leone played on the words. “At any rate, your boy Roland started young with the peeping and the lewd acts, and very possibly hastened the demise of his aunt.”

“And got away with it.”

“That kind of success is a dangerous thing,” Vince said. “I’d like to get my hands on a transcript of his interview with the police from back then.”

“If such a thing exists,” Mendez said. “We’re talking twenty years ago and some Podunk PD up in the hinterlands.”

“Twenty years isn’t that long ago, junior,” he said. “It’s not like we were chiseling our reports on stone tablets.”

“Nobody videotaped anything,” Mendez pointed out. “Probably no audio, either. 1970? I mean, Christ, what did you have back then? The gramophone?”

“I had a whole load of kick your ass,” Vince said, chuckling. “And I still do.”

“Yeah? Maybe someday you can put your bell-bottoms back on and show me,” Mendez challenged. “Just promise me you won’t fall and break a hip. I don’t want to be responsible for killing a legend.”

They had a good laugh—a necessary pressure release considering the business they dealt with on a daily basis. Mendez slugged back more of his Dos Equis. Vince sipped his wine.

“Okay,” Vince said. “So Ballencoa went away up there for how long on the lewd acts charge?”

“Fifteen months in the county lockup. He tried to force a fourteen-year-old girl to perform oral sex on him.”

“What was their relationship?”

“They didn’t have one. She was visiting some cousins who lived in his neighborhood. They had crossed paths at the beach a couple of times. The girl was cutting through a park alone one day, ran into Ballencoa. He pulled her into a storage shed and tried to make her give him oral sex. At some point she got away. He claimed it was consensual, but she was underage so that point would have been moot even if it was true.”

“Fifteen months is a good long while for a first offense,” Vince said. “Long enough to take a course or two on how to become a more successful criminal.”

“And make a friend—who was also questioned with regards to the aunt’s death,” Mendez said. “Michael Craig Houston—a rotten kid from a decent family with a sheet of small-time crime: a couple of simple assaults, burglary, drugs, petty theft. Nothing major, nothing sexual. The two of them got out of jail and were both staying in the aunt’s guesthouse. They alibied each other for the weekend the aunt died.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time two wrongs got together and made a catastrophe,” Vince said.

“For a tidy sum of money,” Mendez said. “Ballencoa took his inheritance and headed to San Diego, where he set himself up as a photographer and took up his hobby of peeping, B and Es, and snatching panties.”

“Anything violent?”

“No.”

“By that point he’s in his mid-twenties? Late twenties?” Vince asked.

Mendez nodded. “He came to Santa Barbara in eighty-four. He was thirty-two.”

“A violent sexual offense at nineteen, a possible murder after that, then he’s content sniffing underpants until he’s in his thirties?” He frowned and shook his head. “I have a hard time buying that.”

Mendez shrugged. “No violence that he ever got caught for, at any rate. I called down there and spoke to the detective who worked the case he went to jail for. He thought Ballencoa was your garden-variety perv. He lived alone, no girlfriend, stayed to himself. Unremarkable.”

“Then he moves to Santa Barbara and out of the blue commits the perfect crime?” Vince said. “He snatches a girl off the street and she’s gone like aliens sucked her up into a spaceship. No trace of her. No useable evidence of any kind. I don’t believe it.

“First-time kidnappers—especially if it was a crime of opportunity—their adrenaline is through the roof, they lose their heads, they make mistakes,” he said. “This guy didn’t take a wrong step.”

“He had a long time to perfect the fantasy,” Mendez said. “He’s a meticulous sort. Could be he’d done a hundred run-throughs in his head over the years, and when the opportunity presented itself, he was just that ready.”