Down the Darkest Road

6

“She didn’t start out a bitch,” Tanner said. “I’ll give her that. You had to feel for her. I can’t imagine going through that—your kid just disappears, you don’t know what happened, you don’t know if she’s alive or dead or what some sick son of a bitch is doing to her. What else would matter to you? Nothing. Fuck everybody.”

She took a long drink. Vodka and tonic with three wedges of lemon.

They sat at a prime window table at one of the best restaurants on Stearns Wharf. Tanner’s choice. A well-dressed older woman at the next table gave Tanner a dirty look for her language. Tanner rolled her eyes.

“I’d be the same or worse,” she admitted. “If somebody tried to do something to my kid, I’d be like a tigress with her claws out. I wouldn’t care who got in my way.

“If I were in her place and believed what she believes, I would have fucking killed Roland Ballencoa with my bare hands. I would have cut his tongue out, tore his balls off, then pulled his beating heart from his chest and eaten it while he died watching.”

“I’ll remember not to piss you off,” Mendez said. “Tell me about Ballencoa. Obviously you think he did it.”

Tanner played with her fork, frowning. “I liked him for it. So did everyone else. But we’ve got nothing on him. No one saw anything. No one heard anything. There was never any sign of the girl.”

“Did he have an alibi?”

“The ever-popular ‘home alone.’ ”

“Did he have a history with the girl?”

“He’s a freelance photographer by trade. He had taken pictures of the Lawton girl—and a lot of other girls her age—at sporting events, concerts, on the street.

“He makes me want to go take a shower,” Tanner confessed, “but the teenage girls seem to think he’s got that sleazy/sexy, angst-ridden artist thing going on. Teenage girls are stupid. What can I say?”

“Did he take any of them home with him?” Mendez asked.

“Not that we know of. He’s wicked smart, this guy. He got in trouble before, and he learned from his mistakes. He never tried that old ‘I can make you a supermodel’ game. He always took his pictures in public, never anything too provocative. His business was legit.”

“He has a record?”

“Lewd acts on a minor. He was nineteen, the girl was fourteen. He was sentenced to two years. He did fifteen months up in the Eureka area.”

“How did you connect him to the Lawton girl?”

“His name came up a couple of times with Leslie’s friends—and we’re talking about conversations that happened months apart. And we discovered Leslie had purchased some photographs he had taken of her and her tennis partner playing in a tournament. But it wasn’t until well after the fact someone put them together talking on the sidelines after a softball game the day she went missing. And then it took months longer to pull together enough information to get a search warrant.”

“You didn’t find enough to put him in a cell,” Mendez said. “Did you find anything at all?”

“By the time we finally got the warrant, he had long since gotten rid of anything incriminating. We crawled over that place like lice on rats. We found photographs of the girl, but he’s a photographer—so what? We found photographs of girls, guys, young people, old people. It didn’t mean anything. Finally, we found one tiny sample of blood under the carpet in the back of his van.”

“And?”

“And nothing. The sample is too small to test. Maybe we could get a blood type. Maybe. There’s not enough for a DNA profile, considering where the science is right now. If we test it, we destroy it, and there’s no guarantee we’d learn anything at all. Then the sample is gone and we truly have nothing.

“All we can do is wait,” she said. “The DNA technology is getting more sophisticated every day. We have to hope that continues. Maybe six months from now or a year from now, that sample will be more than enough to get a profile. For now, we would be insane to try it.”

“I imagine that doesn’t sit well with Mrs. Lawton,” Mendez said.

“No. She wants to know if it’s her daughter’s blood. If we could test it and we found out it’s not her daughter’s blood, she’s not going to care that the sample is lost.

“We have to care,” Tanner said. “What if we can’t get him on the Lawton case, but down the road we could get him on some other crime committed against some other young girl? We have to keep that sample intact.”

“That leaves her in limbo.”

“Unfortunately, yes. And that’s taken a toll on her over the years.

“She calls all the time,” Tanner said. “What are we doing. Have we looked into this tip or followed up on what that psychic said. Why aren’t we doing this or that. Why aren’t we watching Ballencoa around the clock 24/7/365.

“She doesn’t want to hear that the guy has rights or that we have a budget or that her daughter’s case isn’t the only case we’re working on—or that after four years her daughter’s case isn’t even the most important case we’re working on.”

“It’s the most important case in her life,” Mendez pointed out.

Tanner spread her hands. “Hey, I’m not saying I don’t feel for her. I do. Believe me, I do. But you know the reality of the situation. At this point, unless we find the girl’s remains and can get something from them, or a witness comes forward, or Ballencoa—or whoever—steps up and makes a confession, this is going down as an unsolved cold case. Those files are going to sit in that storage room ’til kingdom come.”

Mendez sipped at his beer and turned it all over in his mind. Small wonder Lauren Lawton was on the ragged edge. She was stuck in a living hell that looked like it would go on forever. There wasn’t anything she could do about it.

“I met Mrs. Lawton today,” he said, choosing to leave out the part where she had run her shopping cart into him with a maniacal look in her eyes. “She thinks she saw Roland Ballencoa in Oak Knoll.”

Tanner’s brows knitted. “He’s in San Luis Obispo. Despite what Lauren Lawton will say about me, I do keep tabs on the guy.”

“The San Luis PD knows he’s there?”

“Of course. He moved up there almost two years ago. I let them know. I didn’t know Lauren had moved to Oak Knoll or I would have called you guys and given you the heads-up on her.”

The waiter brought their dinners. Tanner stabbed a crab cake like it was still alive. She ate like she hadn’t seen food in a week.

“I’m surprised she left,” she said when she came up for air.

Mendez shrugged as he contemplated his fish. “What’s here for her? Her husband is dead. Her daughter’s case is at a standstill. Everywhere she turns, there’s got to be a reminder of something she doesn’t have anymore. Why would she stay?”

“Lauren has always clung to the idea that Leslie is still alive somewhere. Wouldn’t she want to stay in the house Leslie would come home to if by some miracle she could come home?”

“It’s been four years,” he countered. “Maybe she’s letting go of that hope. You said yourself this has taken a toll on her. And she’s got the younger daughter to consider. They could come to Oak Knoll, get a break from the bad memories, have a fresh start. Friends offered them use of a house . . .”

“Her whole life has been this case,” Tanner said. “All day, every day. For the first two years she was in the office all the time, making her presence known. After that she would still come in once a month or more. She was always badgering the newspaper to run a story or the TV stations and radio stations to interview her.

“Over the years she went from being a concerned parent, someone you felt sorry for, to this obsessed, nasty, bitter, angry cunt—pardon my language.”

The well-dressed woman at the next table gasped and tsked and moved around on her chair like a chicken with its feathers ruffled.

Tanner turned to her and said, “Ma’am, if you don’t like what you’re hearing, stop eavesdropping. Otherwise I’m gonna sit here and say cunt over and over and over until you get up and leave.”

Mendez rubbed a hand over his face, mortified. Tanner turned back to him as if nothing had happened.

“You wait and see,” she said, shaking her fork at him. “You’ll be dropping the c-bomb like a champ before you know it.”

Not if I lived to be a thousand years old, Mendez thought. His mother would have his ass for even thinking that word. And if he lived to be a thousand and used it, she would rise up out of her grave and have his ass.

“Wait until she starts in with the personal attacks on your intelligence and your integrity,” Tanner said. “That gets old fast.”

“She was pretty shaken up today,” Mendez said. “I mean, imagine: You move to a new town to escape all of that, and there’s the guy.”

“Did you see him?”

“I wouldn’t know him.”

She forked up some more crab cake with one hand and flipped open the file folder she’d brought with her with the other.

“Creepy dude,” she said, sliding a copy of Ballencoa’s photograph across the table. “Looks like he should play Judas in one of those life-of-Christ movies.”

Mendez stared at the photograph. Ballencoa had a long, narrow face and large, hooded dark eyes. His dark hair was shoulder length and he wore a neatly trimmed mustache and goatee. His eyes had that blankness in them he had come to associate with psychopaths. Shark eyes.

“He’s thirty-eight years old, about six-three and a buck-seventy-five,” Tanner said.

Mendez was five-eleven and built like a fireplug. About the only things he had in common with Roland Ballencoa were a dick, dark hair, and a mustache. And yet Lauren Lawton had mistaken him for Ballencoa in the pasta aisle at Pavilions.

“Do you think she’s unstable?” he asked.

Tanner shrugged. “Who could blame her if she was? When Ballencoa was still living here, she claimed he was stalking her, but we had absolutely no proof of that. Not one iota. Not a record of a phone call, not a fingerprint, nothing.”

“She just wants the guy behind bars for something.”

“For anything. At one point she all but told me to fabricate some evidence against him just so I could get him in the box and try to break him down for a confession.

“And let me tell you,” she added. “That guy wouldn’t give it up to save his own mother’s life. He’s as cold as they come.”

“Do you have his sheet in there?” Mendez asked.

Tanner fished it out and handed the pages to him.

“He’s got a history as a peeper, and some B and E charges down in the San Diego area where he was stealing women’s dirty underwear out of their laundry baskets. That got him a slap on the wrist.

“He’s a class-A perv,” she pronounced. “There’s no fixing that. If he didn’t do the Lawton girl, it’s only a matter of time before he does something else. Shoot him in the head and charge his family for the bullet.”

“If only it was that simple,” Mendez said. “I’ve got a sexually sadistic serial killer sitting in prison doing a quarter for attempted murder and kidnapping. The DA let him plead out.”

“Oh, that dentist,” Tanner said. “I read about that. What the fuck happened?”

“We had nothing on him for the homicides,” Mendez said. “No physical evidence except a necklace that may or may not have belonged to one of the victims. As sure as we’re sitting here, he killed at least three women and left another one blind and deaf. And we couldn’t even charge him. But if he hadn’t done it, there was no reason for him to kidnap and try to kill the woman who found that necklace.”

“I’ll never get the sentencing for attempted murder,” Tanner said, shaking her head. “Why should they get off light because they were incompetent? The idea was for the victim to die, right?

“Remember Lawrence Singleton?” she asked. “Kidnapped and raped a teenage girl, hacked her arms off with an ax, and left her to die in a drainage ditch outside Modesto. The guy got fourteen years and was out in eight. It was just a pure damn miracle that girl lived. Singleton should be doing life. Instead, he’s running around loose. It’s only a matter of time before he does it again.”

“We were lucky we got Crane for twenty-five,” Mendez said. “The guy had no record. He was supposedly an upstanding citizen. He had a wife and kid. We both know he’ll be out in half that for good behavior in the joint.”

“Jesus Christ,” Tanner said. “This is why some species eat their young. If only his mother could have seen that in him when he came out of the chute.”

They finished their dinner and Tanner ordered dessert and coffee.

“Doesn’t SBPD pay you well enough that you can afford to feed yourself?” Mendez asked.

Tanner looked at him. “What? I always eat like this. Maybe I’ll catch a case tonight and not get a chance to eat again for twenty-four hours. What are you, Mendez? Cheap?”

“Not at all. It’s just an observation,” he said. “I’ve only ever seen wild animals eat the way you eat.”

“I’m not ladylike, is that what you’re saying?” she asked, clearly enjoying putting him on the spot.

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you thought it.”

Mendez said nothing.

Tanner laughed, green eyes dancing.

“What happened to Mr. Lawton?” he asked as the coffee arrived.

“Car accident. Driving under the influence, he took his Beemer over the side of the Cold Spring Canyon bridge.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

The bridge was part of the route that connected the Santa Ynez Valley to Santa Barbara. The thing stretched for twelve hundred feet over one hellacious long fall to the canyon floor. It was a notoriously popular spot for people to commit suicide.

“It was a hell of a wreck,” Tanner said. “He had to be doing eighty or better. In my humble opinion, it was no accident.”

“You think he killed himself.”

“I think he couldn’t live with the grief anymore. Lauren channeled all her emotions into fighting the good fight and keeping the case in the news. Lance just fell apart. He just couldn’t deal with it.”

But he could leave his wife to deal with it, Mendez thought, frowning. He could let her carry the whole load while he opted out of the pain. That didn’t sit well with Mendez. No wonder Lauren Lawton no longer resembled her driver’s license photo or that she was seeing things that weren’t really there.

“You looked at him in the beginning, didn’t you?” he asked.

“Yeah, of course. We always have to look at the family with something like this—and family friends as well. We heard Lance and the daughter had been butting heads. They’d had a big blowout the night before Leslie went missing.”

“About what?”

“She had just turned sixteen. She was a pretty headstrong girl trying to be independent. She wanted to go on a road trip with some friends up to San Francisco. Dad said no. They had a big argument in a restaurant and got asked to leave. Lance was a guy with a temper. Shit happens. There were a couple of holes in his time line the day the girl went missing.”

“But nothing came of it.”

“No, but the scrutiny was hard on him. He was well liked in the community, then suddenly people were looking at him sideways. According to everyone we spoke to, he adored his daughters and doted on them. He was just having a little trouble with the idea that his oldest was growing up. I think it was all more than he could take.”

“Or he did it and he couldn’t live with the guilt,” Mendez said.

“Meanwhile, Lauren soldiered on. No offense, but no guy could ever be as tough as a mother on a mission for her kid.”

“That’s a lot of tragedy for one family,” Mendez said. “Who else did you look at?”

“Of course we spoke to everyone Leslie had contact with, including her tennis coach, the softball coach, her parents’ friends. The night they got kicked out of the restaurant, they were having dinner with her old pediatrician’s family. The doctor was bent out of shape over the girl’s behavior that night too, and said a few things about her needing to learn a lesson.”

“And?”

“He didn’t have much of an alibi, but he didn’t have much of a motive, either,” she said. “If it was a crime to be angry with badly behaving kids in restaurants, I’d be doing life myself. Kent Westin is a well-respected physician. He offered to take a polygraph, and passed it.”

That didn’t necessarily mean anything, Mendez thought. He would have been willing to bet Peter Crane would have passed a polygraph too if he had consented to take the test. It wasn’t hard to fool the machine if you didn’t have a conscience.

“We questioned all of Lance’s polo buddies,” Tanner went on, “all the Lawtons’ social acquaintances. That was hard on the family too—having their friends put in that position.”

And no matter how you looked at it, the storm wasn’t over, Mendez thought. It had been four years since Leslie Lawton went missing. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be under that kind of pressure for such a long time.

“Do you know what Ballencoa is driving these days?” he asked as he signed the credit card receipt for dinner. He didn’t spend that much on groceries in a month.

“He used to have a white Chevy panel van.”

Which could have easily been repainted brown. And Lauren Lawton was right: People were free to come and go from San Luis Obispo. It wasn’t completely implausible that he could have been in Oak Knoll. But it seemed unlikely.

Given what Tanner had told him, and what he had observed for himself, it seemed more likely the Lawton woman was seeing things that weren’t there because she needed closure on a nightmare that wouldn’t end.

“Can I get a copy of that file?” he asked as they left the restaurant.

The pier was busy with tourists walking up and down, visiting the shops, heading to dinner. A saxophonist sat on a park bench, playing jazz for tips. A couple of hundred yards out to sea, three big yachts had dropped anchor for the night. On the horizon the sun appeared to be melting into a hot orange puddle as it touched the ocean.

“This is a copy,” Tanner said, handing him the folder. “You can have it.”

“Thanks.”

“No problem. Thanks for dinner.”

“You’re welcome. I hope it holds you over for a couple of days.”

She looked up at him and laughed, and he was struck by the fact that she was pretty and genuine.

“You’re okay, Mendez,” she said as they got to their cars. “I wish you luck with your new citizen, but I’ll say it again: Better you than me, pal.”