Down the Darkest Road

41

“Are you having fun yet?”

Tanner had a smirk on her face as Mendez walked into the reception area to get her. It was barely seven in the morning, and she had put a good hour’s drive behind her, but she looked fresh and bright-eyed. Even after the drive her khaki slacks looked crisp and her raw silk blazer looked fresh off the hanger.

Mendez grimaced. He had come in at five off a fitful bit of sleep. Even though he had showered and shaved, he already felt rumpled. “Do I look that bad?”

“Well, it sounded like you got a big dose of Lauren Lawton last night. I know what that feels like.”

He gave her a crooked, sheepish smile. “I can’t say you didn’t warn me.”

“No, you can’t,” she agreed, the green eyes twinkling. “She gave it to you with both barrels?”

“Me and my boss. Two separate loads of double-ought attitude.”

“I’ll bet that didn’t sit well with your sheriff.”

“You got that right. Now I’m here and suspended.”

“No good deed goes unpunished. So how about you buy me breakfast, slick?” she suggested with a bright smile. “It was a long hike over the mountain. I need some greasy diner food, and you look like you could use a pot of coffee.”

“God help me if you worked up an appetite,” Mendez said, holding the door. “I’m already out two days’ pay.”

He had called her the night before to ask when she might finish looking at the B&Es in her jurisdiction during the time Roland Ballencoa had lived there, thinking it might take her a day or two to get to it. But she had spent the better part of the day and evening going through the files after he had left Santa Barbara. She had offered to bring what she had to Oak Knoll so they could get going.

“How’d you get away without your charming partner?” Mendez asked as they walked to his car.

“It’s my day off,” she said. “You’d better make it worth my while.”

He went to open the passenger door for her, but she beat him to it.

“I would have done that for you,” he said.

She looked up at him, puzzled. “What?”

“Opened the door.”

She laughed. “Oh, Christ, I forgot you’re a gentleman! That’ll take some getting used to.”

As he drove he filled her in on the details of the previous night’s excitement. She listened intently, frowning when he told her Ballencoa had been at the sports complex photographing Leah and Wendy.

“Fucking slimy piece of shit,” she said. “That’s exactly what he did in SB. It’s a hell of a front, you’ve gotta say. He takes pictures—and you’ll find out he takes pictures of everybody: girls, boys, old people, little kids. So if you look at his proofs or his negatives, you can’t say he’s a perv targeting teenage girls. It’s brilliant, actually. And he makes money doing it. That’s what gets me. He makes money at it. He’s good at it.”

“Well, he won’t be making any money at it today,” Mendez said. “She busted that camera in about five pieces.”

Tanner laughed an evil laugh. “Good for her. I’ll bet Roland about ruptured his spleen over that. He doesn’t like people touching his stuff. That’s how you can tweak him: touch his stuff, move it, handle it. He can’t stand it. He’ll blow a gasket.”

“My partner and I went into the house he rents in San Luis. It looks like no one has ever lived there.”

“That’s Roland. He’s got a place for everything and everything is in its place. It was some kind of incredible miracle that we got that blood sample out of his van. Eventually we’ll hang him with that.”

“Not soon enough,” Mendez said, pulling into the parking lot of the diner on La Quinta. The place was a favorite haunt of hospital personnel, EMTs, and cops. His tastes ran more to huevos rancheros with jalapeños and black beans, but for good old American grease, this was the place to come.

“I can smell it already!” Tanner said as she got out of the car. She started for the building like a bloodhound on a trail.

Mendez started after her, then spotted the van parked in the back corner of the lot next to the Dumpsters. He pulled up short.

“Wait.”

“What?” Tanner asked impatiently. “I’m starving!”

She turned around to look at him, but kept moving toward the diner.

“That’s Ballencoa’s van back in the corner,” he said. “I memorized the tag number.”

Tanner stopped in her tracks, then slowly began to move toward the van. “No shit? I guess pervs like pancakes and bacon too.”

Keeping one eye on the diner, Mendez followed her toward the van.

“There’s probably nothing in it,” Tanner muttered, raising up on tiptoe, as if that might help her see farther into the vehicle. “He doesn’t leave things to chance. I swear he probably wipes his prints down every time he gets out of it. He probably wipes his prints off the toilet seat when he puts it down.”

Mendez stole a look inside the cab of the van. If Ballencoa caught him near the vehicle, that news would go straight to Cal Dixon’s ear. His heart skipped a beat as the diner’s side door opened. A couple of doctors in surgical scrubs came out.

“We can’t go in the restaurant,” Mendez said. “If he sees me, he’ll flip. If he sees you, he’ll flip. If he doesn’t see either one of us, we can tail him.

“How hungry are you?” he asked Tanner.

“I could live on air,” she said, already starting for the car, as eager as he was to find out what Roland Ballencoa would do after his breakfast.

They drove around the block, finding a spot along the curb in sight of the diner, but not near enough to be conspicuous. Tanner opened her purse, pulled out a couple of Snickers bars, and handed one to Mendez.

“Breakfast of champions,” she said.

Mendez reached into the backseat and snagged a case with a pair of binoculars in it. It took a moment to get the focus right and to scan what he could see of the restaurant through the front window, but he finally caught a glimpse of Ballencoa in a booth toward the back.

“What’s he doing?” Tanner asked.

“Drinking coffee. Eating eggs.”

“Bastard,” Tanner muttered. “I want eggs. Let me see.”

Mendez handed her the glasses, and they settled in to wait. He studied her as she stared intently through the binoculars. She was a funny little puzzle. He’d certainly never met another woman like her. He could feel the intensity of her energy just sitting there. She was like a bird dog on point, muscles taut, her focus on her prey. He had a feeling she probably did everything like that—full-on, balls-out—if she’d had balls. He didn’t know that many guys with that kind of intensity.

“Can I ask you a question?”

She didn’t break her concentration. “Shoot.”

“How’d you get to be a cop?”

“I went to the academy, same as you.”

“I didn’t mean that. I mean . . . you’re a woman—”

“Glad you noticed.”

“I know it can’t be easy,” he said, “working your way up the ranks—”

“Oh, well,” she said, “I slept with all my bosses.”

She shot him a look then, unable to resist seeing his reaction, and laughed out loud at the look on his face.

“Jesus, you’re serious,” she said. “It was a joke.” She turned back to the binoculars and her vigil, then added, “I only slept with a couple of them.”

“I am serious,” Mendez said, ignoring her last remark. “You picked a tough row for a woman to hoe. Why?”

“Beats digging ditches.”

“So does being a nurse or a teacher,” he said.

She sighed in resignation at his unwillingness to let her get by with glib answers. She turned and looked at him again, and Mendez could sense her weighing very carefully what she might say.

Finally she tilted her head to one side and gave a little shrug. “I like solving puzzles. I like helping people. I read a lot of Nancy Drew as a kid.”

Stock answers. She watched him from the corner of her eye to see if he would accept them. He decided he would—for now. She didn’t want to let him in. He imagined she didn’t let anybody through that gate easily—or maybe at all. But eventually he would try again. Danni Tanner would be his next mystery to solve—after Roland Ballencoa.

He was angry. He was agitated. He was excited. He had decided to stick to his routine because it calmed him somewhat. He went to the diner and sat in his usual booth, and ordered his eggs and toast and coffee. He didn’t eat meat, but he ate eggs for the protein. His usual waitress, Ellen Norman, twenty-four, with the curly strawberry blond hair and receding chin, waited on him. The routine helped, but not entirely.

On the one hand he was angry over the destruction of his camera. His camera was his instrument. What he did with it was his art. He never allowed anyone to handle his cameras or his lenses. Seeing that camera hit the ground, seeing the lens wrench off the body, had been like watching his own limb being torn off. Having it destroyed by Lauren Lawton—by a woman he just seconds before had control over—had infuriated him. The rage he had felt had almost overwhelmed his control. The prospect of losing control left him feeling agitated.

Control was essential. Control equaled success. Losing control meant making mistakes. Mistakes equaled failure. Failure was not an option. Failure meant going to prison. He wasn’t going to prison again. Ever.

He was an intelligent person. A highly intelligent person. He was certainly more intelligent than any of the cops who had investigated him. Over the years he had learned from his mistakes and perfected his methods.

Success was all about control.

Control was the sensation that had filled him as he had photographed Leah Lawton and her little blonde friend. They had been unaware of him. The control had been his as he captured their images: their slender tanned legs and arms, their budding breasts, the sliver of belly the blonde girl showed every time she raised her tennis racquet. Each separate piece of girl was controlled by him as he captured it on film.

Control was what he had felt as Lauren Lawton had raced toward him, her face twisting in anger. He had created that emotion. He had captured the images of that emotion and frozen them in time.

Every time he closed his eyes he could see her expression, the raw hatred, and that excited him. There was his challenge: to create that hatred and to manipulate it and turn it around on her. The potential power in that success was enough to give him a hard-on.

Overall, he decided he was feeling good. Not just good. Great. He had almost everything he wanted. Almost.

Toward the front of the restaurant the same group of night shift nurses he had been watching all week were getting ready to leave—Denise Garland among them. They had gotten up from their table, talking and laughing. One of the older fat ones spotted him and waved. He waved back.

As the nurses headed for the front door, he put a ten and a five down next to his plate to pay his bill and leave Ellen Norman, twenty-four, with the curly strawberry blond hair and receding chin, a nice tip.

“Pervert at two o’clock!” Tanner said as Ballencoa came out of the diner.

He walked out into the sunshine, settled a pair of sunglasses on his nose, hitched at the waist of his baggy cargo pants, and looked around like he was pleased with himself.

“Oh, yeah, Roland,” Tanner said. “You’re all that. King of the Panty Whackers.”

“What’d you find in your files?” Mendez asked. “Was he up to that shit in SB?”

“I found half a dozen cases that fit the B and E MO, spread out over eighteen months before Leslie Lawton went missing. Nobody gave them much attention because nothing of value was taken, nobody was home at the time of the break-ins, there was no violence involved.”

“Any fingerprints?”

“Nope. But one of the homeowners mentioned that clothes had gotten run through the washing machine,” she said. “The reason it got mentioned was that the machine was broken, it wouldn’t drain. The homeowner hadn’t used it in a week. That was the woman’s first clue that someone had been in her house.”

“And he ran a load of laundry at the Lawtons’ house too,” Mendez said, putting the car in gear, waiting for Ballencoa to drive out of the parking lot and pick a direction. Two other cars pulled out onto La Quinta—nurses who had left the restaurant ahead of him.

“Right,” Tanner said. “Underwear. As soon as she told us that, I knew what he’d done. Just another big fuck-you from Roland. He could be in that house, be comfortable enough to play milk the snake with her panties, then wash the evidence away in a way everyone would notice, and no one could do anything about. Like a dog pissing on a fence.”

Ballencoa took a right, pulling out behind a red Toyota Corolla with a nurse in it. Mendez let two cars fall in behind him before pulling out into the flow of traffic.

“You guys do the most disgusting things,” Tanner commented.

“Don’t look at me!” Mendez said, offended.

“Well, maybe not all of you,” she conceded. “But you gotta admit you never see women breaking into guys’ houses to masturbate with their underwear. Not that I’ve ever heard of.”

They passed Mercy General Hospital and took a left on Third Avenue.

“Although,” Tanner mused, “I suppose if a guy came home and found that going on, he probably wouldn’t call the cops. He’d call himself a lucky son of a bitch!”

“Now who’s disgusting?” Mendez complained.

“Am I embarrassing your delicate sensibilities?”

“As a matter of fact . . .”

One of the cars acting as a buffer between them and Ballencoa’s van turned off to the right. Mendez swore under his breath and eased off the gas. There were half a dozen reasons he couldn’t have Ballencoa see them or suspect them—not the least of which would be having Dixon kick his ass for following the guy.

“Sorry,” Tanner said. “I’m too used to working with assholes.”

The red Toyota ahead of Ballencoa took a right. The car behind Ballencoa pulled over and parked. Ballencoa went straight, but took the following right. Mendez slowed to a crawl, waiting, then took the same turn.

They made a big loop, coming back onto the street the Toyota had turned down from the opposite direction.

“Ho-ly shit,” Tanner murmured excitedly. “He’s following her. That nurse.”

Mendez felt a little rush of adrenaline. The Toyota had parked in front of a little cracker box house. There was no sign of the nurse. Ballencoa cruised slowly past, then made a right. Mendez went straight onto the next block, did a three-point turn, and doubled back, parking at the corner with a sight line to the red Toyota.

Ballencoa’s van came back onto the block from the opposite direction and pulled over and parked maybe twenty yards from the Toyota.

Neither Mendez nor Tanner said anything. They waited. They held their breath. They waited for Ballencoa to get out of the van, to approach the little square house the Toyota had parked in front of.

“Do you think he made us?” Tanner asked softly, as if there was some chance of Ballencoa hearing her a block away.

“I don’t think he would have stopped if he’d made us,” Mendez said.

“Or he would—just to yank our chains.”

“Maybe.”

“This is like watching one of those nature shows,” Tanner murmured. “Watching the tiger stalk some poor unsuspecting whatever the hell tigers stalk.”

They sat there for nearly ten minutes before Ballencoa pulled away from the curb and came toward them. Shit, Mendez thought. He was going to come right past them. No way he wouldn’t see them. Tanner slid down in her seat and ducked her head. Mendez twisted around and pretended to look for something in the backseat.

But Ballencoa turned left at the corner just in front of them, never looking their way.

Tanner and Mendez exhaled together. They waited another ten minutes to make sure he didn’t come back, then went to knock on the door of the nurse with the red Toyota.