Tami Hoag - Down the Darkest Road

Her daughter’s face was swollen, her left eye almost swollen shut. She was visibly shaking. To Lauren she looked so much younger than fifteen. She was a child, and Lauren wanted to take her in her arms and hold her and try to comfort her.

Comfort her by getting her killed, she thought. Comfort her by trading her life for one last shot at finding Leslie.

God help me. What have I done?

“Where are my journals?” Ballencoa asked again.

Greg Hewitt grabbed hold of her ponytail with his left hand and jerked her up off the floor like a rag doll. She grabbed the back of a chair to steady herself as he shouted at her. “Answer the question !”

Lauren wanted to spit in his face, but she refrained, afraid her defiance would be taken out on Leah. She had to think. She had to be smart.

If she’d been smart, none of this would be happening.

“They’re in my car,” she said.

“I want them back.”

“He wants them back,” Hewitt said.

He was pasty white beneath the blood on his face, and beginning to sweat profusely. He went to lift his right arm as if to strike her, but his shoulder seemed not to work. Instead, he cuffed her in the side of the head with his left hand, knocking her back to the floor. He kicked her in the ribs as she hit the ground.

Lauren curled into herself to protect her ribs, and the mini-cassette recorder she had hidden in her bra pressed into her breast and rib cage. She moved onto her knees, tucked into a tight ball with her arms pulled in tight to her sides. Surreptitiously she pushed the Record button. For all the good it would do her.

Hewitt kicked her again. “Get up!”

“Bring her outside,” Ballencoa ordered.

Hewitt grabbed her roughly by the arm, yanked her to her feet, and pushed her toward the door.

Ballencoa had parked his van on the back side of the garage, out of sight from the road and about twenty feet from Lauren’s car. The back doors of the van stood open wide, waiting.

“The cops come by every half an hour,” Hewitt said. “We have to get out of here ASAP.”

A shiver went through his body. Lauren felt it as it came through his hand like an electrical shock. He seemed a little unsteady on his feet. The pressure he was exerting against her seemed more to utilize her as a cane than to intimidate her.

He marched her to her car and shoved her against it.

“Where are the journals?”

“They’re in the bag on the floor,” Lauren said.

“Then get the goddamn bag!” he snapped, steadying himself against the vehicle. His eyes were on the street.

Lauren opened the passenger-side door and retrieved the canvas tote, heavy with the journals and with the tools she had taken with her to Ballencoa’s house—a screwdriver, a box cutter, a hammer. If she could get her hands on any one of those things . . .

Ballencoa was nervous now. He kept his hold on Leah, but his attention was divided as he glanced toward the road again and again.

“We’ll put them in the van,” he said. “You can bring her car.”

“Where are you taking us?” Lauren asked.

“You’re going to have an accident,” Ballencoa said. He looked meaningfully from Lauren to Leah, his heavy dark eyes hungry. “After a while.”

A chill went through Lauren. She had wanted to know. Every day for the last four years she had wanted to know what he had done to Leslie. She was about to find out.

And so was Leah.

The horror of that realization was huge and terrible.

“I’m a little dizzy,” Hewitt remarked. A shudder went through him.

“You’re going into shock,” Lauren said quietly, relishing the idea. She spoke to him in the tone of a lover. “You’re probably dying.”

Hewitt glared at her. “Shut the fuck up!”

“You’re pale, Greg,” she whispered seductively, finding a perverse power in planting the seeds of fear in him. “Are you feeling weak?” she asked. “Cold?”

As if on cue, he shivered again.

“Put her in the van,” Ballencoa ordered. “Hurry up.”

Hewitt grabbed hold of her by the back of her neck and half-dragged her to the back of the panel van. He shoved her inside facedown and came in after her, pushing her down on the floor, pressing a knee into her kidneys.

He produced a plastic zip tie and put it around her left wrist and through a U-bolt screwed into the floor of the van. The canvas tote was beneath her. She could feel the head of the hammer pressing into her belly.

Hewitt bent down and spoke directly into her ear, his lips touching her so that she wanted to twitch away from the feeling. His blood dripped on her from the wound in his shoulder. “I’ve changed my mind about that mother-daughter threesome,” he said. “I wonder if she’ll be as hot a fuck as you are.”

The suggestion made Lauren want to retch. Instead, she scraped together another bit of bravado.

“You’re not going to have enough blood left in you to get it up, Greg,” she said. “I killed you. You just don’t know it yet.”

She knew no such thing, but if she could rattle him, distract him, get him worried about himself, she might buy them a crucial second or two.... He had already been careless. She was lying on a bag full of weapons. He had bound her to the U-bolt by only one wrist.

“Hurry up!” Ballencoa snapped at him then from the back of the van. “Get the girl in!”

In the next moment Leah was tossed into the van beside her, her right hand bound to the U-bolt. The terror on her face was almost unbearable for Lauren to see. This was all her fault. But she kept her eyes locked on her daughter’s.

“Stay calm, honey,” she whispered. They were almost nose-to-nose, forehead-to-forehead. “Stay calm. Do you understand me?”

“Mommy, I’m so scared!”

“Shhhh . . . We’re going to get out of this,” Lauren promised, even while her mind was filling with the nightmare images of what was probably going to happen to them in these next hours before they died. They would know exactly what had happened to Leslie. It was about to happen to them too.

The doors slammed shut on the back of the van like the lid coming down on a coffin.

57

“I’ve got a bad feeling,” Mendez said. He had jerked his tie loose and shed his sport coat. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up, exposing forearms that were thick with muscle. His body was burning energy like a furnace.

Lauren’s phone had gone unanswered. Ballencoa wasn’t at his house. Michael Craig Houston aka Gregory Hewitt was driving a blue Chevy Caprice. The BOLO had produced no sightings of it.

Tanner rode shotgun. Bill Hicks sat in the backseat.

“If Lauren is dealing with that guy thinking he’s her employee, and he’s what we think he is,” Tanner said, “that’s like thinking you’re playing with a garter snake and it’s really a cobra.”

“What’s with you and snake analogies?” Hicks asked. “Is it Freudian?”

“I don’t get enough sex.” She tossed a look back at him. “Was that Freud’s problem too?”

“That’s not right,” Mendez said as they neared the end of Old Mission Road.

“Tell me about it,” Tanner muttered.

“The gate,” Mendez specified. “It’s open. That’s not right.”

Lauren’s BMW was nowhere to be seen.

On the far side of the garage, hidden from plain view of the road, sat a Plain Jane blue Chevy Caprice.

“Shit,” he said under his breath.

He grabbed the radio and called in the tag number of the Caprice, then sat drumming his fingers on the steering wheel as he waited. Tanner got out and started to walk around the suspect car.

“Tony, we’ve got blood out here,” she called back at him, pointing to the ground.

Mendez felt sick. Vince had called him with a list of open cases from San Diego County, San Bernardino County, and Orange County. Missing women. A long list. Maybe some of them could have been Ballencoa’s work, maybe not. They would have to wade through a river of reports, talk to dozens of detectives. It would take weeks, months.