Down the Darkest Road

48

Lauren followed Ballencoa to a 7-Eleven near the college, where he parked his van, got out, and used a pay phone on the side of the building.

Who would he call? Why wouldn’t he call from home? She tried to remember if she had seen a telephone as she had prowled through the house. Of course there must have been a phone. Who didn’t have a telephone in 1990? Why would he use a pay phone?

Because he was a criminal, she supposed. Calls made from a pay phone would never come back to haunt him. There would be no phone records definitively tied to him or to his house.

Who would a man like Roland Ballencoa call anyway? He wasn’t the kind of person who had friends. She couldn’t imagine him having family, although she supposed he must have had. While he seemed like something that had hatched from a serpent’s egg, she knew he had had a mother. She knew he had been raised by an aunt who had ended up dead.

Lauren had read the story in the newspaper when the Santa Barbara police had named Ballencoa a person of interest in her daughter’s disappearance. She had taken it upon herself to find out everything she could about him, and had found a couple of old newspaper articles on microfiche at the library. She remembered the headline: NEPHEW QUESTIONED IN SUSPICIOUS DEATH.

Ballencoa had been just out of jail for his first sex offense. He had been questioned. Nothing had come of it. That had probably been his first success as a killer. Not only had he gotten away with it, he had profited from it.

He had lived most of his life without consequences. She was going to put an end to that, one way or another.

She had thrown her canvas tote with her burglar tools on the floor of the passenger’s side. She had his journals. If they didn’t prove outright that he had taken Leslie—or some other girl—surely his own writing would link him somehow to some crime.

Lauren contemplated taking them to Mendez. But she could see it happen all over again: Ballencoa brought in and questioned, released for lack of evidence, free to do what he wanted, free to stalk someone else’s daughter, empowered by society’s seeming inability to stop him.

Ballencoa’s lawyer would argue that the journals had been obtained illegally. A judge would rule them inadmissible at trial. Ballencoa would get them back and destroy them.

Lauren felt sick at the thought. Should she have left them where Ballencoa had hidden them? Should she have gone to Mendez and told him about the journals? By the time the police had been able to get a search warrant to enter Roland Ballencoa’s home in Santa Barbara, he had long since gotten rid of anything that might have incriminated him.

No, she thought, as Ballencoa got back in his van and pulled out of the parking lot. She couldn’t let that happen again. She needed to make a plan and implement it. She needed to do it now while Leah was safe at the Gracidas’. She now had something Roland Ballencoa would want. A bargaining chip. She would trade it for the truth. What happened after that would be justice . . . one way or another.