Tami Hoag - Down the Darkest Road

“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.

Body, body, head shot.

Body, body, head shot.

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?

I’m ready to be done with this , she thought.

She needed an answer from him. She couldn’t say with certainty what she might do when she got one.

How stupid are you, Lauren? she wondered. He’ll tell you what you want to hear if you have a gun to his head.

Her answer to herself was: I’ll know.

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 to know once and for all what had happened to her daughter . . . or die trying.

51

Michael Craig Houston had been released from the minimum security section of the California Men’s Colony prison in San Luis Obispo in January after serving two years of a six-year sentence for larceny. His rap sheet was long. Mostly, it seemed he liked to swindle women, but he wasn’t above burglary, and he had been known to carry a gun and to use it as a threat.

Even in his mug shot he exuded the cockiness of a guy who believed he could get by on his looks alone. Just another smart-ass would-be mastermind con man too lazy to do real work. The only thing significant about Michael Craig Houston’s life as far as Mendez was concerned was his connection to Roland Ballencoa.

They had served time together in the Humboldt County jail in Eureka, California, and had both been questioned in the death of Ballencoa’s aunt. They had given each other alibis for the weekend the woman had died.

Because of Ballencoa’s personal proclivities for solitary perversion, Mendez hadn’t given any serious thought to the prior partnership. The name Houston had never come up again after Ballencoa had moved to San Diego. He figured the murder of the aunt had probably been a one-off for the money. Ballencoa wasn’t the sort of man to have friends. Yet Michael Craig Houston was here in Oak Knoll. He had left a photograph of Lauren Lawton on the windshield of her car.

“I’ll contact the Men’s Colony and have them check the visitation records,” Hicks said. “Ballencoa has been in San Luis for the past two years. Let’s see if he was in contact with Houston before he got out.”

“How the hell does he figure into this?” Mendez wondered aloud, pacing up and down the length of the time line they had stretched across the whiteboard at the front of the room.

“Crime makes strange bedfellows. Could be they stay connected through the money from the aunt,” Hicks offered. “If Houston killed the aunt or helped Ballencoa kill the aunt, that’s a tricky partnership. Ballencoa couldn’t just say thanks and good-bye. The other guy knows the truth. They’ll always be connected.”

“Maybe Houston is like one of those remora fish that hang on sharks,” Tanner suggested. “They’re not exactly friends, but it’s a symbiotic relationship.”

“But how would Houston benefit from stalking Lauren Lawton?” Mendez asked.

“He’s a con man,” Hicks pointed out. “He must see an angle to play. There has to be money in it for him one way or another.”

“There’s a reward,” Tanner said. “The Lawtons established it early on in the investigation. Fifty grand for information leading to the recovery of Leslie and the prosecution of her abductor.”

“Houston knows Ballencoa did it and he’s going to rat him out? Set him up?” Mendez said. “Why not just pick up the phone and call your department, Danni? Why the charade?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “You asked for money. There it is. Fifty thousand reasons for somebody to do something.”

Mendez rubbed the back of his neck where the muscles had gone as hard as petrified wood. “Forget the money. Ballencoa likes to play games. How does Houston fit in to that scenario?”

“Maybe Houston is Ballencoa’s beard,” Tanner offered. “Houston does the dirty work so Ballencoa can alibi himself. He can say he’s not stalking Lauren. He wasn’t anywhere near her at the time this or that happened. Now you’ve got a fingerprint on a photograph, but it’s not Roland’s fingerprint. You’ve got nothing on him even though you know he’s behind it.”

“It’s just a fucking game,” Mendez muttered.

“It’s payback,” Tanner said. “Lauren kept the spotlight turned up on him the whole time in Santa Barbara. First she made it impossible for him to leave because he would have looked guilty. Then she made it impossible for him to stay because she wouldn’t let it alone.”

“I don’t care what he calls it,” Mendez said. “We need to shut it down.”

He went back to the phone and dialed Lauren’s number again, tapping his foot impatiently while he listened to the phone ring unanswered on the other end. He needed to find her. He needed to show her Michael Craig Houston’s mug shot.