Down the Darkest Road

25

Roland Ballencoa did indeed have electricity.

He was living at 537 Coronado Boulevard.

Mendez hung up the phone and sat back in his chair. He felt like he’d just found a big fat poisonous snake living under the cushions of his sofa. A predator had slithered into his town and taken up residence with no one the wiser. If not for Lauren Lawton, Ballencoa could have lived there for who knew how long, establishing his territory, settling into his routine . . .

He got up from his chair and started shrugging into his sport coat, drawing a look from his partner.

“Got him,” Mendez said.

“Where?”

“Five thirty-seven Coronado. A target-rich environment. Three blocks from the high school in one direction. Seven blocks from McAster College in the other direction. Hot and cold running coeds all year round.”

And maybe half a mile from his own house. Mendez knew the neighborhood well. He jogged up and down those streets routinely.

“Oh, man . . .” Hicks muttered, rising from his chair. “That’s like turning on the kitchen light in the middle of night and finding a rat in the middle of the floor.”

“Only we can’t just shoot it and throw a rug over the hole,” Mendez said as they headed for the side entrance and the parking lot.

Mendez got behind the wheel. He was feeling aggressive now, protective of his city and, if he had to admit it, of Lauren Lawton too. Not for any romantic reason, but because he felt responsible for her—as he felt responsible for anyone else who might come to him for help.

He took the oath “To Protect and Serve” seriously. Maybe a little more seriously where women were involved, but that was how it was supposed to be—at least in his mind, and in his family culture, and in his Marine culture. The man protected the woman. Period.

Ballencoa’s house was on a corner lot, an unassuming bungalow with a detached one-car garage and a similar building at the back of the property on the alley. The yard was neat, and yet the place had a strange feeling of vacancy about it.

There was no car in the driveway. There were no potted plants on the steps, no bicycle parked on the front porch. The shades were drawn. Not unlike the house in San Luis Obispo, there was nothing to suggest anything about the inhabitant, if there was one. Mendez half expected to peek in a window and be struck by the same still emptiness he had felt there.

Hicks rang the doorbell, and they waited.

“How would you like to be a neighbor and find out this guy had moved in next door?” Hicks asked.

“Or worse,” Mendez said, “not know this guy had moved in next door.”

Of course Ballencoa’s neighbors didn’t know who had moved in next to them. His one conviction had been pled down to nothing, and it was so long ago, no one kept tabs on him. And, as convinced as Lauren or Danni Tanner or anyone else might have been of his complicity in the disappearance of Leslie Lawton, the man had never been charged with anything. By strict letter of the law, there was nothing to warn the neighbors about.

Hicks rang the bell again, and they waited.

Finally the door opened and they had their first look at Roland Ballencoa. Mid-thirties, olive skin, large dark eyes with heavy lids. His brown hair was straight, shoulder-length, clean, and parted down the middle. He wore a neatly trimmed mustache and goatee. He looked a little like John Lennon, Mendez thought, or, as Danni Tanner had said, like an extra in one of those life-of-Christ movies.

Mendez held up his ID. “Mr. Ballencoa. You’re a hard man to track down.”

“And why would you need to track me down, detective?” Ballencoa asked without emotion.

“May we come in, Mr. Ballencoa?” Hicks asked. “We have a few questions for you.”

“Or maybe you don’t mind if your neighbors see a couple of sheriff’s detectives on your front porch,” Mendez said.

“No, you may not come in,” Ballencoa said. “I haven’t done anything wrong. There’s no reason for you to come into my home.”

He was dead calm. He wasn’t going to be the kind who got nervous and overly solicitous in his attempt to make them believe he was a good citizen. Nor was he going to let them bluff their way in.

Mendez cut to the chase. “Can you tell us where you were last night between nine thirty and two this morning?”

While Lauren Lawton had told him she had gone into her home late in the afternoon, it seemed logical to assume her visitor had waited until cover of darkness to leave the photograph on her windshield.

Ballencoa blinked the big sloe eyes at him. “I was in my darkroom, working. Do you have somebody telling you I was someplace else?”

“Do you know a woman named Lauren Lawton?”

“I’m sure you already know that I do.”

“Have you seen her recently?”

“The last I knew, the Lawtons lived in Santa Barbara.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” Mendez said. “Have you seen her recently?”

“No,” Ballencoa said, “and I hope never to see her again. I had to take out a restraining order on her in Santa Barbara. She’s not mentally stable. Her harassment ruined my business. I had to move away.”

“Her harassment ruined your business?” Mendez said. “You don’t think your business suffered because you were suspected of abducting a sixteen-year-old girl?”

“Suspected is not convicted,” Ballencoa said evenly. “They had no evidence I did anything to that girl.”

Hicks and Mendez exchanged a glance, both of them very aware that Ballencoa hadn’t denied doing anything to Leslie Lawton. He had denied the existence of evidence to prove it. The hackles went up on the back of Mendez’s neck.

“Lauren Lawton and the Santa Barbara Police Department waged a smear campaign against me in the press,” Ballencoa said.

The muscles flexed in Mendez’s wide jaw. His eyes were flat as a shark’s. “Poor you. Let me tell you something here, Mr. Ballencoa. We’re very aware of your record and your history. We don’t like predators in our community.”

“Are you threatening me, detective?”

“I’m telling you how it is. If we get one complaint that you’re looking too long at some young lady or that you’re hanging around where you shouldn’t be, we’ll be all over you like stink on shit.”

Ballencoa didn’t so much as blink. “I’m a taxpaying, law-abiding citizen, detective. Unless I break a law, you don’t have any right to harass me or follow me or come into my home. And neither does anyone else.”

On that note, Ballencoa shut the door in their faces and they heard the dead bolt slide home.

“I don’t think he likes us,” Hicks said.

Mendez shrugged. “I thought I was charming. Didn’t you think I was charming?”

“Like a hammer between the eyes.”

“Oh well. I’ll try harder next time.”

“At least now we know he’s here,” Hicks said as they got back in their car.

“And he knows we’re here,” Mendez said as he started the engine.

But even if his threat kept Roland Ballencoa in line—which he doubted it would—he wasn’t going to be happy about the man’s presence in Oak Knoll. Something dangerous had come into their midst. They couldn’t turn a blind eye to it even if it was lying dormant. The threat would be there as long as Ballencoa was.

He took a right at the corner and took another right and another right, coming back onto Ballencoa’s block. He pulled in at the curb three houses down.

“Did you know he had taken out a restraining order on the Lawton woman back in SB?” Hicks asked, his gaze, like Mendez’s, focused down the block, waiting to see if Ballencoa would come out of his house.

“No. I knew he threatened to sue the PD.”

“There and in San Luis,” Hicks pointed out.

“And Mrs. Lawton personally. What an asshole,” Mendez grumbled.

“Too bad that’s not against the law,” Hicks said.

“We’d have to build prisons in outer space.”

“He didn’t seem surprised to see us,” Hicks pointed out.

“No. And he didn’t seem surprised when I mentioned Lauren Lawton’s name, either. He’s coming out.”

Down the block, Ballencoa came out of his house with a messenger bag slung over one shoulder and disappeared into his garage.

“He knows she’s here,” Hicks said.

A brown Dodge panel van backed out of the garage and went down the street away from them. Mendez let him get a good distance ahead, then pulled out and followed him. It was tough to tail a car in a residential neighborhood. There wasn’t enough traffic for anonymity, though it picked up as they neared the college.

Preparations were already under way for the upcoming music festival. Visiting musicians began to flow into Oak Knoll several weeks in advance. Pre-festival workshops had begun. Small concerts in the local parks and churches would be starting soon, leading up to the headline events.

As they followed Ballencoa down Via Verde, Mendez kept one eye on the van and one on the busy sidewalks outside the boutiques and coffee shops. Girls, girls, girls. College girls shopping, talking, laughing with each other. They were blissfully oblivious to the man in the van trolling past them.

“Where the hell is he going?” Mendez wondered aloud as they continued past the college, through another neighborhood, past Oak Knoll Elementary, onto Oakwoods Parkway.

To the sheriff’s office.