Down the Darkest Road

29

Mendez owned a small Spanish-style house less than a mile from Roland Ballencoa as the crow flew. The neighborhood, built mostly in the forties and fifties, was quiet and safe. His neighbors were a mix of young families and empty nesters. He knew most of them by name.

He had fixed the place up himself—and with the help of buddies and brothers-in-law—knocking down walls, remodeling the kitchen and bathrooms. The back door led out to a small walled courtyard garden with a fountain gurgling in one corner.

He had built a covered patio on the back side of his single-car garage for a workout area, and hung both his speed bag and heavy bag from a sturdy beam along with a chin-up bar bolted between a pair of posts.

He worked at the speed bag now, falling into the mesmerizing rhythm where his fists stroked the bag and his mind floated, almost as if in meditation. A fine sheen of sweat coated his bare chest as he channeled his anger and frustration into the focused energy needed to work the bag. The sweat beaded and ran down between his shoulder blades to pool in the shallow dip at the small of his back and soak into the back of his shorts.

He had begun the day doing the same thing. Too agitated to sleep, he had worked the speed bag and gone for a run. Now he would do the same thing to burn off his temper.

Two days without pay. Son of a bitch.

Two days without pay. His own damn fault.

Two days without pay. He would put them to good use.

He had spoken to Vince Leone on the phone about meeting to discuss Ballencoa. Vince was due back in town that night, but had put him off, wanting to spend the evening with Anne and the kids. Vince was very strict about his time with his family.

That was just as well. Mendez wanted to go back to Santa Barbara to look through more of the Lawton case files at the SBPD. He wanted all the background he could get on Ballencoa before he presented the case to Vince.

There was no doubt in his mind Vince was going to find Roland Ballencoa fascinating.

Mendez was still both astonished and pissed off that the man had come to the front door with a tape recorder in his pocket. He must have seen them from a window as they stood on his front porch waiting for him to answer the door. He would have made them for cops. And he had a litigious background, having sued or threatened to sue at least two agencies. This probably wasn’t the first time he’d had that tape recorder handy.

Ballencoa’s first adult conviction had been at the age of nineteen. He was now thirty-eight. He’d had two decades playing his sick games, honing his skills. Mendez wanted all of those intervening years accounted for. He wanted to know where Roland Ballencoa had lived, worked, slept, took a shit, and hunted his victims. If Roland Ballencoa had a head cold in Salinas in 1982, he wanted to know about it.

The best predictor of future behavior was past behavior. Mendez wanted nothing this creep might do to come as a surprise to him. He was about to become the world expert on Roland Ballencoa.

If Ballencoa thought he was going to play his games in Oak Knoll, he had picked the wrong town, and he had sure as hell picked the wrong cop to fuck around with.

Mendez hit the speed bag with one last hard pop and stepped back, blowing out a sigh and working his shoulders back. The sun had gone down a while ago, taking the heat of the day with it. Now the cool evening air chilled the sweat on his skin. He grabbed a towel and dried off, then pulled a clean black T-shirt over his head and went out of the side gate for a run.

His route took him past the Presbyterian Church on Piedra Boulevard, where the late AA meeting had taken a break to let attendees grab a smoke on the lawn. He waved as he went past, recognizing a couple of guys from work, a firefighter, and an EMT.

A few more blocks and he was passing the tennis courts at the city sports complex. Bugs swarmed around the high bright lights above the courts. Singles and doubles matches were going on. Kids were hanging around the concession stand enjoying the evening. A pack of smiling, giggling college girls waved as he passed. He waved back and tried not to think about the fact that he was now old enough to be their father.

Tanner had told him Ballencoa liked to photograph sporting events. That had been one of his angles to meet young women. He would photograph the athletes one day, then bring the proofs to the next event and let them order copies. Smart. Like a shark cruising seal beaches, passing out fish.

Witnesses had put him at the softball field the day Leslie Lawton had gone missing.

Groups of young women wouldn’t be as wary as individuals. Athletic girls tended to be self-assured and outgoing, and even less apt to be concerned about a guy with a camera. He would have been able to approach them, talk about their race, their dive, their ball game, their tennis match, and they wouldn’t have found that strange at all.

He probably gave them his business card. He probably got addresses and phone numbers from them on the excuse of wanting to send their photos to them. Girls who might not otherwise ever give that kind of personal information to a stranger would think nothing of it. He wasn’t really a stranger, was he? He was the photographer. They saw him at all the games . . .

And once Ballencoa had their addresses, he could go by their homes to see how they lived. Did they have roommates? Did they live with family? What was the schedule of the households? Who went to work early? Who came home late? When was the house empty?

When he knew the house would be empty, he could find a way in . . .

The last thing Mendez had done before leaving work for his suspension had been to write an alert to the watch sergeants. The patrol deputies needed to be on the lookout for Ballencoa’s van at the parks and sports fields in particular, and around town and the county in general. They wouldn’t be able to tail Ballencoa without him screaming harassment, but Ballencoa couldn’t stop them doing their jobs either.

As for Lauren Lawton, a radio car would cruise Old Mission Road regularly tonight—though Ballencoa was certainly too smart to go back to her house so soon. He would know they would be on the lookout for him tonight. If he was smart, tonight he would lay low. If he was cocky, he would go out trolling. But he wouldn’t go back to Lauren Lawton’s house.

The lactic acid was building in the dense muscles of Mendez’s thighs and calves. His legs were starting to feel heavy as he turned onto Coronado.

Dixon would have his ass for setting foot on Ballencoa’s street, but he didn’t intend on getting caught. He wouldn’t put so much as a toe on the bastard’s property, but the sidewalks belonged to the public. He was as free to roam the streets as any pervert window-peeping criminal.

Even as he thought it, he could see the steam coming out of the sheriff’s ears.

No lights burned in Ballencoa’s windows. There was no sign of the van. Mendez jogged past the house, across the street, and turned right down the side street, slowing to a walk. Hands on his hips, he walked up and down, breathing, checking his pulse, letting the acid flush out of his leg muscles.

A small building sat at the back of Ballencoa’s yard. A second small garage. Mendez considered the wisdom of walking down the alley. That might be pushing it. If a neighbor caught a glimpse of him from a window, they might call him in as a prowler. He didn’t want to have to explain that to anyone. He wouldn’t be able to get into the building at any rate. For now, it was enough to know it was there. If the day came that he had to write an affidavit for a search warrant, he would want that building included.

Guys like Roland Ballencoa kept souvenirs of their exploits. For a sexual deviant, a trinket from a victim could help him relive his fantasy. Ballencoa had gotten caught down in San Diego stealing women’s dirty underwear. Chances were good he had a stash of panties somewhere. If among that stash of panties he had a pair with Leslie Lawton’s DNA on them . . .

The day was coming when prosecutors would be able to get a conviction with evidence like that.

Ballencoa was living here now, but he still had the lease on Carl Eddard’s rental in San Luis. Who knew what he might have stashed in the attic rafters there? For that matter, who knew what other hiding places Roland Ballencoa might have?

Mendez had known of killers who rented public storage lockers to keep human remains. He knew of a case where a killer had left a fifty-five-gallon drum in the basement of a house he sold. It wasn’t until two owners later that someone had opened the drum and discovered what was left of the man’s missing pregnant girlfriend.

Was Leslie Lawton in a drum in the building at the back of Ballencoa’s rented home?

He couldn’t know, and, as it stood, he had no legal grounds to find out. As frustrating as that was to him, he couldn’t imagine what Lauren Lawton lived with every day.

With too many unsettling questions in the back of his head, Mendez jogged home.