Down the Darkest Road

35

“Uncle Tony! Uncle Tony!”

Mendez grinned as the Leone children came running for him. He bent down and caught Haley first, sweeping her up out of harm’s way as little Antony barreled into him like a battering ram.

“Hey, guys!”

“I’m not a guy!” Haley protested. “I’m a girl!”

“You’re not a girl,” Mendez said. “You’re a princess!”

Haley beamed.

Antony jumped up in the air and did his best ninja kick. “I’m all boy!”

Mendez ruffled his godson’s dark curls. “You sure are, sport.”

“Uncle Tony, we went to the zoo in Santa Barbara!” Haley said excitedly. “I got a giraffe and Antony got a gorilla. Not real ones, stuffed ones.”

Antony immediately began to hop around the entry hall making ape sounds.

“That’s cool!” Mendez said. “What else did you see?”

“We saw zebras and leopards, and I got to help Daddy feed a giraffe and it licked me! It was so gross!”

Mendez laughed. Haley Leone was as adorable and bubbly as a child could be—a far cry from how she had been the first time he’d seen her. At four years old she had been the only witness to her mother’s brutal stabbing death and mutilation. The perpetrator had choked Haley unconscious and left her for dead as well. When Mendez had first seen her in the hospital, she had just come out of a coma, screaming in terror. Only Anne had been able to quiet and calm her.

Anne Leone came into the hall now, smiling and wiping her hands on a bright yellow kitchen towel.

“You’re just in time,” she said, rising up on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. “They’re fresh from their naps.”

“I don’t nap, Mommy,” Haley corrected her. “Naps are for babies like Antony.”

“I’m not a baby, I’m a lion!” Antony announced. He made a fierce roar and clawed the air with his imaginary paws.

“You’re staying for dinner,” Anne said. “Vince is grilling.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Mendez said, setting Haley down. “Where is the boss anyway?”

“Out by the pool. Come on. I’ll get you a drink.”

She preceded him down the hall, herding her youngest ahead of her, calling a warning to him as Antony began to give chase to a striped tabby cat that darted ahead of them with its tail straight up in the air.

He had first met Anne during the investigation of the See-No-Evil murders, when she had been a schoolteacher at Oak Knoll Elementary. Pretty, quietly strong, and fiercely protective of her students, he’d had a mind to ask her out when the case was over. But Vince had swept into town and swept Anne off her feet—and he never let Mendez live it down.

At a glance they seemed an unlikely couple. Now fifty-two, Vince was twenty years Anne’s senior, but they were absolutely soul mates, and had the strongest marriage of any couple Mendez knew. Watching them with their growing family, he had to admit he envied them.

“I understand we have a new acquaintance in common,” Anne said as they went into the big bright kitchen. “Lauren Lawton.”

“She called you?” he said, surprised. “I gave her your card, but I didn’t think she’d use it.”

“She didn’t. I met her through Wendy. Wendy has become friends with Lauren’s daughter. They ride horses together.”

“What do you think of her?”

“Lauren? I think life hasn’t been very kind to her,” she said diplomatically.

“No. Is she going to see you professionally?”

“I wouldn’t look for that to happen any time soon. She’s too busy trying to hang on to the ledge to reach out for help,” Anne said. “We’ve talked. She knows I’m available when she’s ready. That’s the best I can do for now.”

“I don’t see how she can heal while those wounds are still open,” Mendez said. “Until the case is resolved one way or another, she’s left hanging.”

Anne nodded, her expression sad. “I remember watching the news coverage when her daughter was abducted. That’s the worst thing I can possibly imagine as a parent. And then she lost her husband too. It’s heartbreaking. It’s like watching somebody drowning and not being able to do anything for them.”

She shook her head as she opened the refrigerator. “Wine or beer?”

“I shouldn’t,” he started.

She gave him an arch look, a smile tugging at her mouth. “I know you’re not on duty.”

Mendez scowled a little. “I’ll have a Dos Equis then, thanks.”

“Hey, hothead. What are you doing in my kitchen with my wife?”

Vince Leone had come up the ranks of the Chicago PD and, while he had long ago left the Windy City, its accent had never left him.

He came into the room and immediately laid claim to Anne, wrapping his arms around her and kissing her forehead, winning himself a sweet smile. An athletic physical presence at six-three, he had a lion’s mane of wavy salt-and-pepper hair and a mustache meant to distract the eye from the small round scar on his cheek. The scar marked the entrance of a mugger’s .22-caliber bullet that had never left his head. Otherwise fit and happy, he was stronger and more vibrant now than he had been when he had come to Oak Knoll five years prior. Family life agreed with him.

“You talked to Cal?” Mendez said with a lopsided smile.

“I saw him at the gym this morning. He told me this Ballencoa clown threatened to sue,” he said. “You’d better mind your p’s and q’s, junior.”

“Meanwhile, Ballencoa can terrorize Lauren Lawton, and that’s okay. I can’t even put a tail on him for fear of him screaming harassment,” Mendez complained. “I found out today the city of Santa Barbara gave him fifty K to shut up and go away. He went up to San Luis Obispo and threatened to sue them too. Now we get him.”

“Imagine what a nightmare that is for Lauren,” Anne said, handing him his beer.

“I don’t have to imagine. I’ve seen firsthand what it’s done to her,” he said. “She’s hanging on to the ledge with broken fingernails. If we can’t head this off at the pass and get some kind of resolution for her, we’re going to have a bad outcome one way or another.”

“Uncle Tony! Look at my giraffe!” Haley called, coming into the room with a stuffed toy half as big as she was. Antony tagged along behind, holding his stuffed gorilla on top of his head.

Mendez squatted down for a closer look. “That’s beautiful, sweetheart.”

“Mine too!” Antony said.

“Yours too!”

“I’m not a sweetheart, though,” Antony said.

“Yes, you are, Vincent Antony Leone,” Anne declared, bending down and snatching her son close for a kiss.

“No, I’m not! I’m a g’rilla!”

Haley scrambled up onto a barstool at the island. “Daddy, tell Uncle Tony about how the giraffe licked me.”

“I will, Haley Bug,” Vince said, stroking a big hand over his daughter’s tousled curls. “We’ll both tell him all about it later. But right now Uncle Tony and I have to go talk some business. You stay here and help Mommy keep your brother in line, okay?”

Haley rolled her big brown eyes dramatically. “Oh, brother!”

Vince poured himself a glass of cabernet from the bottle on the counter and led the way out to the pool.

“Have I told you yet today what a lucky stiff you are?” Mendez asked, twisting the top off his beer.

“No, but I am,” Vince said with a grin. He took a seat on an L-shaped cushioned stucco bench that framed one corner of the swimming pool. “Life is good.”

Mendez sat on the other leg of the L. “How’s Anne feeling? She looks great.”

“A little morning sickness, a little tired, and quit looking at my wife,” Vince said, shooting him a half-joking, half-fierce look. “You need to find yourself a nice girl and settle down, Anthony.”

Mendez took a pull on his beer. “Yeah, well . . . I’ll get right on that.”

They were both silent for an uncomfortable moment.

“Sara just wasn’t ready, Tony,” Vince said gently.

Sara Morgan. Wendy’s mother. Beautiful Sara Morgan with her mermaid hair and cornflower blue eyes. A wounded bird for him to protect. He had certainly wanted to.

“That’s not to say she won’t come back around. She’s needed some time to just be herself. Steve did a lot of damage.”

Mendez shook his head. “No. It’s not going to happen, Vince. I’m okay with that. I was part of a bad time in her life. Every time she looked at me was a reminder of everything she went through. Hell, I put her through some of it myself when we thought that asshole husband of hers was a suspect,” he admitted.

He couldn’t say he hadn’t been half in love with her, though. Vince knew it too, but gracefully let the subject slide.

“So tell me about Roland Ballencoa.”

Mendez filled him in with the details he had learned going through the SBPD files with Tanner. Leone listened with laser-sharp interest.

“He’s classic in a lot of respects,” he said. “Tailor-made for trouble. Absent mother, emotionally distant female raising him. No male role model in his life.”

“For sure there’s some kind of aberrant sexual component in there when he was younger, I’m thinking,” Mendez said.

Vince nodded. “Most likely. Although I do know cases where the subject claimed to have had violent sexual fantasies at a young age with no remembered abuse preceding.”

“Abuse is a relative term.”

“Or maybe a terminal relative,” Leone played on the words. “At any rate, your boy Roland started young with the peeping and the lewd acts, and very possibly hastened the demise of his aunt.”

“And got away with it.”

“That kind of success is a dangerous thing,” Vince said. “I’d like to get my hands on a transcript of his interview with the police from back then.”

“If such a thing exists,” Mendez said. “We’re talking twenty years ago and some Podunk PD up in the hinterlands.”

“Twenty years isn’t that long ago, junior,” he said. “It’s not like we were chiseling our reports on stone tablets.”

“Nobody videotaped anything,” Mendez pointed out. “Probably no audio, either. 1970? I mean, Christ, what did you have back then? The gramophone?”

“I had a whole load of kick your ass,” Vince said, chuckling. “And I still do.”

“Yeah? Maybe someday you can put your bell-bottoms back on and show me,” Mendez challenged. “Just promise me you won’t fall and break a hip. I don’t want to be responsible for killing a legend.”

They had a good laugh—a necessary pressure release considering the business they dealt with on a daily basis. Mendez slugged back more of his Dos Equis. Vince sipped his wine.

“Okay,” Vince said. “So Ballencoa went away up there for how long on the lewd acts charge?”

“Fifteen months in the county lockup. He tried to force a fourteen-year-old girl to perform oral sex on him.”

“What was their relationship?”

“They didn’t have one. She was visiting some cousins who lived in his neighborhood. They had crossed paths at the beach a couple of times. The girl was cutting through a park alone one day, ran into Ballencoa. He pulled her into a storage shed and tried to make her give him oral sex. At some point she got away. He claimed it was consensual, but she was underage so that point would have been moot even if it was true.”

“Fifteen months is a good long while for a first offense,” Vince said. “Long enough to take a course or two on how to become a more successful criminal.”

“And make a friend—who was also questioned with regards to the aunt’s death,” Mendez said. “Michael Craig Houston—a rotten kid from a decent family with a sheet of small-time crime: a couple of simple assaults, burglary, drugs, petty theft. Nothing major, nothing sexual. The two of them got out of jail and were both staying in the aunt’s guesthouse. They alibied each other for the weekend the aunt died.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time two wrongs got together and made a catastrophe,” Vince said.

“For a tidy sum of money,” Mendez said. “Ballencoa took his inheritance and headed to San Diego, where he set himself up as a photographer and took up his hobby of peeping, B and Es, and snatching panties.”

“Anything violent?”

“No.”

“By that point he’s in his mid-twenties? Late twenties?” Vince asked.

Mendez nodded. “He came to Santa Barbara in eighty-four. He was thirty-two.”

“A violent sexual offense at nineteen, a possible murder after that, then he’s content sniffing underpants until he’s in his thirties?” He frowned and shook his head. “I have a hard time buying that.”

Mendez shrugged. “No violence that he ever got caught for, at any rate. I called down there and spoke to the detective who worked the case he went to jail for. He thought Ballencoa was your garden-variety perv. He lived alone, no girlfriend, stayed to himself. Unremarkable.”

“Then he moves to Santa Barbara and out of the blue commits the perfect crime?” Vince said. “He snatches a girl off the street and she’s gone like aliens sucked her up into a spaceship. No trace of her. No useable evidence of any kind. I don’t believe it.

“First-time kidnappers—especially if it was a crime of opportunity—their adrenaline is through the roof, they lose their heads, they make mistakes,” he said. “This guy didn’t take a wrong step.”

“He had a long time to perfect the fantasy,” Mendez said. “He’s a meticulous sort. Could be he’d done a hundred run-throughs in his head over the years, and when the opportunity presented itself, he was just that ready.”

“Possibly,” Vince conceded. “Just like he was ready with that tape recorder to nail your ass.”

“Clearly, he enjoys playing games with people,” Mendez said. “Going into the Lawtons’ home after he was already a suspect was a total fuck-you.”

“Absolutely,” Vince agreed. “He’s arrogant. He enjoys showing everyone how smart he is. If he took the Lawton girl and got away with it—that had to be the highest high for him. It’s hard to imagine he won’t do it again. It’s hard to imagine he hadn’t done it before.

“You need to go back and talk to the detectives in San Diego again,” he said. “Find out if they have any open abduction cases or attempted abductions that could be connected to Ballencoa in any way. I’ll call my buddies at ViCAP. They’ve been expanding their database to include kidnappings and sexual assaults.”

The original focus of the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program had been to gather data on transient serial killers who crossed jurisdictional lines. The database housed crime scene details, suspect details, signature aspects of the homicides. ViCAP’s analysts went over the information, looking for possible links between cases. That the program would become a national repository for information on violent crimes of all types was welcome news to law enforcement agencies across the country.

For the time being, the information was directly accessible only to FBI personnel. Even though Vince was officially retired from the Bureau, every door there remained open to him because of who he was. No one said no to Vince Leone.

“That’d be great.”

“And I know the special agent in charge of the San Diego field office. I’ll call him.”

“Thanks,” Mendez said. “So far Ballencoa really has been smarter than everybody else. We have to hope he gets cocky again. He followed Lauren Lawton here for a reason. I can’t believe he’ll be content to just fuck with her head.”

“No,” Vince said soberly. “He came here for a reason. Something’s going to happen. It’s just a matter of time. So what are you going to do about it?”

“Every deputy on patrol has an eye peeled for Ballencoa’s van. We’ve stepped up patrols on Lauren Lawton’s street. Bill and I are going to go back through what we have on those B and Es. Tanner is doing the same in Santa Barbara. If we can pick him up on one of those, he’s off the streets, at least.”

“I can’t tell you how many murderers have been arrested because they ran a red light,” Vince said. “Or had a taillight out.”

“If we can pick him up on a B and E, we can finagle a search warrant. Who knows? And if we could put him away on a B and E, it would buy us some time. Maybe the DNA technology advances enough that the blood sample from his van can be tested and it links him to the Lawton girl.”

“It’s a sad thing when we have to hope we find proof a sixteen-year-old girl is dead,” Vince said.

“Yeah,” Mendez agreed. “But I think you and I both know that no matter what happens, this story isn’t going to have a happy ending.”