Tami Hoag - Down the Darkest Road

“Just because he’s a pervert doesn’t mean he can’t be a taxpaying citizen free to verbally abuse us,” Hamilton commented.

“He’s lucky Lauren Lawton didn’t pull a gun and shoot him last night,” Mendez said. “He should be more grateful.”

“I’ll tell him that,” Trammell said. “We can watch the top of his head blow off.”

“When you go back in, touch his bag,” Tanner said.

Trammell gave her a look. “Excuse me? Who’s the perv?”

“The messenger bag,” she specified. “He’ll start twitching. Roland doesn’t like anyone touching his stuff.”

Trammell arched a brow at her. “Tony, who’s your little friend?”

Tanner introduced herself. “Detective Danni Tanner, SBPD.”

“You’re a girl,” Trammell said stupidly.

“The last I checked. I thought about growing a dick, but then none of my pants would fit right.”

“Huh.” Trammell didn’t know what to make of her. He stuck with safer ground. “You know Ballencoa?”

“Enough to hate him.”

“Good enough for me,” Trammell said, walking away. He spat in the coffee cup, then topped it off and went back into the interview room.

“The sheriff is on his way,” he said. “I brought you a cup of coffee, anyway.”

He set the coffee cup on the table and reached for the messenger bag on the chair. “Let me hang this up for you.”

Ballencoa snatched the bag away. “I’ll keep it.”

“My girlfriend keeps telling me men in Europe are carrying purses now,” Trammell commented.

“It’s a messenger bag,” Ballencoa corrected him, setting the bag on the seat of the chair across from Trammell, out of easy reach. He continued his pacing.

“Yeah?” Trammell said. “Maybe I should get one to carry my paperwork. Can I have a look?”

He reached across the table, backhanding the coffee cup, sending hot coffee spewing across the tabletop and onto the bag.

“You fucking idiot!” Ballencoa shouted, diving back toward the table, just getting his hands on the bag before Trammell could snatch it off the chair.

“Sorry,” Trammell said, grabbing up napkins with one hand, reaching for the bag with the other. “Let me help you with that. I hope it didn’t get wet inside.”

Ballencoa pulled the bag against himself like he was pulling a child out of harm’s way. “Don’t touch it!”

A knock sounded on the door and Cal Dixon let himself into the room.

“Mr. Ballencoa. I’m sorry to keep you waiting. I was on a call with the head of the detective division in the Santa Barbara PD. I wanted to get some background on your allegations against Mrs. Lawton.”

Ballencoa, frantically swiping the coffee off his bag, arched a brow at the sheriff. “My allegations ? The woman stalked me. She attacked me last night. Now this.”

He reached into the bag and pulled out a small square envelope, and thrust it at Dixon.

Dixon pulled a note card from the envelope and looked at it, frowning.

“She put that in the mailbox on my front porch,” Ballencoa said. “I found it this morning.”

“Did you see her do it?” the sheriff asked.

“No.”

“Then how do you know it was her?” Dixon looked at both sides of the note and the envelope. “There’s no signature. If you didn’t see her do it, and there’s no signature or anything else to indicate the note came from Mrs. Lawton, I don’t see how we can help you, Mr. Ballencoa.”

“Her fingerprints will be on it,” Ballencoa said. “You must have fingerprinted her last night when she was arrested.”

“Mrs. Lawton hasn’t been processed,” Dixon said. “We’re waiting for word from the district attorney.”

Ballencoa went very still, like a snake ready to strike. “You didn’t charge her? She attacked me. She destroyed my camera and a lens worth more than five hundred dollars. Now she’s threatened me.”

“It’s a case of simple assault, Mr. Ballencoa,” Dixon said. “A misdemeanor. And Mrs. Lawton can make a damn good argument that she feared for her child. It’s the DA’s discretion whether or not to charge that out. You can press the issue with Kathryn Worth if you like, but frankly, I don’t think she’ll touch it. You are, of course, free to pursue the matter of any monetary loss in the civil courts.”

“This is outrageous!” Ballencoa snapped. “You’ll be hearing from my attorney, sheriff. That woman should be arrested and put away.”

“She says the same thing about you, Mr. Ballencoa,” Dixon returned. “My suggestion is for you each to stay away from the other or I’ll see you both in jail. My detectives have actual crimes to investigate. I don’t appreciate wasting manpower on something as juvenile as this note.”

“It’s a threat,” Ballencoa argued.

Dixon frowned at the note and shrugged. “That’s a matter of interpretation,” he said, “just as you may construe this however you like, Mr. Ballencoa: Don’t waste my time or the time of my office with petty game playing and bullshit.”

On that note, Dixon turned and left the room.

Sitting relaxed at the table, Trammell looked up at Ballencoa and spread his hands. “That didn’t really work out for you, did it?”

Dixon entered the break room and handed the note to Mendez. “File that somewhere.”

“Under ‘Pain in the Ass,’” Tanner suggested.

Mendez looked at the note.

Typed across the center of the note card were the words: Did you miss me ?

And scrawled beneath in an angry hand: I’d sooner see you in hell than see you at all .

Heat crept up from his chest to his throat to his face. He could feel Tanner’s eyes on him.

“What’s wrong?”

He swore under his breath, handed her the note, and strode out of the break room and down the hall. In the war room he stood in front of the whiteboard with his hands on his hips, staring at the time line.

“I don’t understand,” Tanner said. “Ballencoa probably did this note himself just to stir up shit. What’s it got to do with anything?”

He could still see the look on Lauren Lawton’s face last night as she told him.

“She told me last night Ballencoa had left a note in her mailbox that said ‘Did you miss me?’ She told me she threw the note away because she knew we wouldn’t do anything about it.”

“So she wrote on it and gave it back to him,” Tanner said. “So what?”

“How does she know where he lives?” Mendez asked. “She let Bill and me spend two days trying to figure out if the guy was even here. But she drove to his house and put this in the mailbox on his front porch.”

And I want to fucking shake her , he thought.

“Damnit,” he muttered, staring at the time line. “Goddamnit.”

In mid-April someone had been poking around Ballencoa’s neighborhood, watching him. Roland Ballencoa had moved to Oak Knoll the first of May.

“When did the Lawtons move here?” he asked no one in particular.

“I don’t know,” Hicks said. “Her daughter would have been in school in Santa Barbara. It’s safe to assume they waited until the end of the school year, so . . . June.”

Mendez wanted to kick something.

“He didn’t follow her here,” he said. “She followed him.”

45

I need to end this. I need to take action. I can’t rely on someone else to do it. I can’t pay someone else to do it. I can’t hope someone else will do it.

I have to stop Roland Ballencoa from ruining my life and my youngest daughter’s life the way he ruined the life of my husband, and the life of our family, by taking the life of my firstborn.

That is what’s at stake: our lives.