Down the Darkest Road

10

“If the guy is here, we should know about it,” Mendez said.

He sat in the office of his boss, Sheriff Cal Dixon. Pushing sixty, Dixon still cut a sharp figure in his starched and pressed uniform. He trained like a Marine six days a week—running, lifting weights, swimming. The guy was a freaking iron man.

Dixon had recruited him to the SO and had been the catalyst that sent him to the FBI National Academy course. Mendez had enormous respect for the man, and felt lucky to be able to call him a mentor and a friend as well as a boss.

With a stellar career as a detective in the LA County Sheriff’s Office under his belt, Dixon had taken the opportunity to move to Oak Knoll to run his own outfit. He was an excellent sheriff, well respected both by his cops and by citizens. Still a detective at heart, he had set up his office such that his second in command saw to a lot of the administrative duties so Dixon himself could oversee the detective division.

Mendez had brought coffee and started the workday by telling Dixon about Lauren Lawton, Roland Ballencoa, and his illuminating evening in Santa Barbara with Danni Tanner.

“I’ve got a call in to the San Luis PD,” he said. “They should be keeping tabs on Ballencoa.”

“Who has never been charged with anything.”

“No. Santa Barbara didn’t have enough to hold him.”

“They didn’t have anything,” Dixon corrected him.

“They had enough to suspect him. He’s still a person of interest,” Mendez said. “They’re hanging on to some blood evidence, waiting for the DNA technology to advance a little more. The sample is too small to test at this point in time.”

He had been reading about the development of techniques to multiply DNA samples so that a small piece of evidence would be able to yield much more information. But those techniques were still tantalizingly out of reach for law enforcement.

Dixon frowned, silver brows slashing down over blue eyes. Mendez always felt like Dixon’s laser gaze could probably cut steel if he put his mind to it.

“He was a person of interest four years ago in another jurisdiction,” he said. “As far as we know, if he is here, he hasn’t done a damn thing wrong.”

“As far as we know,” Mendez agreed. “But I don’t like coincidences. If the Lawton woman is here and Ballencoa is here too . . . That makes me uncomfortable. Lawton accused him of stalking her in Santa Barbara.”

“But the detective there said they had no proof of anything,” Dixon pointed out.

“Maybe he’s really good at it,” Mendez suggested. “Lawton and her daughter moved here a month ago. If Ballencoa showed up after that . . . You have to wonder.”

“If,” Dixon said. He leaned his forearms on his immaculate blotter and sighed. Mendez could see the wheels turning as he weighed the pros and cons. “You have actual crimes to investigate.”

Mendez scratched his head and gave a little shrug. “I’m capable of multitasking. We’re nowhere on those B and Es. We’ve got no prints, no witnesses, and nothing of value was taken at any of the three scenes. They’re like the crimes that never were.”

“Breaking and entering is a crime all by itself,” Dixon reminded him.

“I know, but these feel more like kid pranks than serious crimes.”

“Until somebody confronts a perp and one of them has a knife or a gun. Then suddenly we’ve got an assault or a homicide on our hands.”

“That’s my point exactly with Lauren Lawton and Roland Ballencoa,” Mendez returned. “That’s a crime waiting to happen. Leslie Lawton went missing and never came back. If Ballencoa did it—and the SBPD believes he did—and now he’s here in Oak Knoll, is he going to try to take the younger sister? Is he going to stalk the mother? Is it all a game for him? That’s a game we need to shut down before somebody gets hurt.”

“Okay,” Dixon said with a nod. “Good point. You and Bill look into it. But don’t ignore your caseload. It’s not up to us to investigate that kidnapping, Tony.”

“I know.” Mendez got up and headed for the door. “I just want to prevent one of our own.”

“Man, I don’t know what I’d do if somebody took one of my kids.”

Bill Hicks sat in the passenger seat, eating trail mix as they headed north on the 101. A few years older than Mendez, Hicks was a tall, lean, redheaded guy with a wife and three redheaded daughters.

“You’d track that bastard down and feed him a gun, that’s what,” Mendez said.

“Yeah. I probably would.”

“I have to think the only reason Lauren Lawton hasn’t done that is that she doesn’t own a gun.”

“Maybe she wants justice, not revenge.”

“Revenge is justice,” Mendez said. “An eye for an eye, man.”

“She’d ruin her own life,” Hicks pointed out. “She’d end up in prison, and her other daughter would become an orphan for all intents and purposes—father dead, mother put away for life.”

“Hopefully we can head that off at the pass—that or something worse. If Ballencoa still has his eye on the family, there’s plenty more hell to put them through.”

“Seems to me he’d have to be stupid to mess with them,” Hicks said. “As it stands, he’s a free man. Why poke a stick at a hornet’s nest?”

“You know as well as I do, the guys who get off on this kind of thing . . . their brains don’t work like yours or mine. They get a rush playing with fire.”

“The SBPD never developed any other suspects?” Hicks asked.

“They looked at the father for a while, but it didn’t go anywhere.”

“But he ended up killing himself. Could be guilt drove him to it.”

“Could be,” Mendez agreed. “Could be grief.”

“Could be both.”

“Could be neither.”

San Luis Obispo was like Oak Knoll North. A town of thirty-five or forty thousand, not counting college students—it was home to the prestigious Cal Poly University. Like Oak Knoll, it had been built around a Spanish mission—the Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa—in 1772. Like Oak Knoll, the town was nestled between two mountain ranges—the Santa Lucia Mountains to the east and the Morros to the west. The surrounding countryside was dotted with farms and vineyards. The downtown boasted a charming shopping district with an array of boutiques, restaurants, coffeehouses, and galleries.

Unlike Oak Knoll, San Luis had its own police force. The city of Oak Knoll contracted with the sheriff’s office to protect and serve its residents. Though, as Oak Knoll continued to grow, there was talk that might change in the future.

The San Luis Police Department was a single-story building just off the 101 at Santa Rosa and Walnut. It housed fewer than one hundred personnel, with only about sixty or so sworn officers—only eight of whom were detectives. Two worked crimes against property. Three worked crimes against persons. Three had other duties.

Mendez and Hicks checked in at the desk and were asked to wait for their contact to come out and get them.

Detective Ron Neri was small, middle-aged, and rumpled in a way that suggested he had recently been trampled by a mob. He came down the hall, shuffling through a messy stack of papers that were barely contained in an open file folder. His pants were too long.

“Tony Mendez,” Mendez said, sticking a hand out for Neri. “This is my partner, Bill Hicks.”

Neri reached out for the handshake and nearly overturned his folder. “Ron Neri. Come on back.”

They followed along to an interview room and he motioned them to take seats.

Still fussing with his paperwork, Neri barely glanced up at them. “What can I do for you guys?”

“We’re looking for information on Roland Ballencoa,” Mendez said. “I left a message for you earlier. We came up from Oak Knoll.”

“Oh, right, yeah,” Neri said. “I meant to call you back. Did I call you back?”

Mendez shot a look at Hicks as if to say, Can you believe this guy? He was like some kind of poor man’s Columbo.

“No, actually,” Mendez said. “It doesn’t matter. I would have come up anyway. Have you seen Ballencoa lately?”

“Ballencoa,” Neri said. “There’s a name I wish I’d never heard in my life.”

“He’s been a problem?” Mendez asked, feeling that zip of electricity down his back that always came with the expectation of a hot lead.

Neri rolled his eyes. “Not him. That woman.”

“Mrs. Lawton?”

“I get that she wants to have this guy’s balls on a string around her neck,” he said, “but she wants mine too. I’m supposed to wave a magic wand and have him commit some chargeable offense. Or maybe I can pull her missing kid out of my ass.”

“You’re the soul of sympathy,” Mendez said flatly.

“Hey,” Neri said. “I’ve got as much sympathy as anybody. It’s terrible what happened to her family. But the SBPD can’t link Ballencoa to the crime. They can think whatever they want about the guy, but the bottom line is they’ve got jack shit to prove he did anything. Neither do we.

“What are we supposed to do?” he asked. “Ballencoa minds his own business; nobody complains about him; we don’t have any missing teenage girls here. But I’ve got Lauren Lawton on my back every week. Why don’t we do this, why can’t we do that.”

A puzzled look came over his face as a thought struck him. “She’s backed off lately. I haven’t heard from her in a while. Did she die or something?”

“She moved to Oak Knoll,” Mendez said.

Neri gave a hysterical laugh and slapped a palm against the table. “Tag. You’re it! Sorry, boys.”

Mendez frowned. It wasn’t that he couldn’t see Lauren Lawton out of control. It was that she had good reason to be a pain in the ass. She was trying to fight for her daughter. Nobody seemed to want to give her that. Or probably more accurately, they only wanted to allow her just so much time to do it, then she was supposed to shut up and go away.

First Tanner, now this idiot.

“Is Ballencoa still living here?” he asked bluntly.

Neri didn’t quite look at him. “Yeah.”

“Really?”

“The last I checked.”

“And when was that?”

“Like I said: It’s been a while since I’ve heard from Mrs. Lawton.”

“You’ve got a known child predator in your town and you don’t check up on him unless a citizen from another jurisdiction calls and pokes you?” Mendez asked, his temper ticking a notch hotter.

“We checked on him all the time when he first moved up here,” Neri said, defensive. “We checked on him so much he threatened to sue the department for harassment. Ballencoa came here a free man, and he’s never done anything to change that in nearly two years. We can’t just sit on the guy for no good reason.”

“When was the last time you saw him?” Hicks asked.

Neri shifted in his chair, uncomfortable with their scrutiny. “A couple of months ago. He had a booth at the Poly Royal art fair. He’s a photographer. He was selling his photographs.”

“What kind of photographs?”

“I don’t know,” Neri said on an impatient sigh. “Nature. Buildings. The mission. Kids on ponies. Who cares?”

Mendez ground his back teeth. A child predator was taking pictures of kids on ponies, and this asshole didn’t think anything of it.

“When was that?” he asked.

“In April,” Neri said. “We had a freaking riot that lasted for three days, in case you don’t watch the news. We had over a hundred arrests, a hundred injuries—fifteen of our own people.”

“You had a riot at an art fair?” Mendez said, just to be a jerk. Everyone in the state had been riveted to the news during the three days of riots in a town that normally lived at the speed of its nickname: SLO. Slotopia. “What the hell kind of town do you run?”

“It wasn’t at the art fair. That was just part of the Cal Poly open house weekend.”

“You had a riot at an open house?” Hicks said, also happily playing dumb.

Neri threw his hands up in frustration. “It’s the Poly Royal. It’s a fucking festival. Take a few thousand drunken college kids and throw in a pack of out-of-town troublemakers and a few hundred drunken migrant workers—”

“Oh, right,” Mendez said. “It’s the ’spics. We’re always drunk and disorderly.”

“I didn’t say that!” Neri looked at Hicks. “What the hell’s wrong with him?” he asked, hooking a thumb in the direction of Mendez.

Hicks shrugged, unconcerned.

“So you saw Ballencoa in April,” Mendez said. “Right before your hundred-arrest riot. That’s three months ago. What do you people do up here? Write one report a day? You can’t take the time to drive around the block to see if your resident child abductor is here or not?”

“I told you,” Neri said. “We don’t have the manpower or the cause to sit on a law-abiding citizen who wants to sue us. And that’s all Ballencoa has been since he moved here: law-abiding.”

“Whatever,” Mendez said, getting up from his chair.

“Do you have a current address on him?” Hicks asked.

“I’ll have to look it up.”

“That’d be great. Then we can get out of your hair.”

“What are you going to do?” Neri asked, suspicious. “I can’t have you guys running around half-cocked—”

“Why not? We should fit right in,” Mendez muttered.

Neri got up from his chair, clearly pissed off.

“We need to ask Mr. Ballencoa a few questions,” Hicks said easily.

“We’ll be sure to give him our cards,” Mendez said. “So he can sue the proper agency.”

“Good,” Neri said. “You do that, Mendez. Then go fuck yourself.”