Down the Darkest Road

50

“Ballencoa had to know she was here,” Tanner said. “Since when do we assume he ever tells the truth about anything?”

“The time line doesn’t lie,” Mendez said. “He moved here the beginning of May. How could he know Lauren was going to move here a month later? She didn’t send him a change of address card ahead of time.”

He remembered Lauren saying that very thing to him when he had pulled her over that first afternoon.

Do you have any reason to think he might know you’re here?

I didn’t send him the ‘We’re Moving’ notice, she had snapped. Do you think I’m an idiot?

Had Ballencoa seen her by chance—as Lauren had claimed she had seen him by chance in the Pavilions parking lot? Was it dumb luck that he had come across her?

“I don’t believe in coincidence,” Mendez muttered. “And if Lauren thought he knew she was here, she would have been looking over her shoulder. She would have noticed his vehicle when she came out of the shooting range that day.

“She didn’t think he knew she was here,” he said. “That’s why she was so freaked out when she found that photograph. If she was the one hunting him, how did he know where to find her?”

A bad feeling scratching at the back of his neck, he went to the phone and called Latent Prints.

“Did you guys lift anything usable off that photograph I brought you a couple of days ago?”

“Actually, yes. A thumb and two pretty good partials,” the tech told him. “We haven’t heard anything back yet.”

“Check on that, will you?” Mendez said. “ASAP, please. I’m at extension thirty-four.”

The call came back ten minutes later.

“I’ve got your hit, detective. The print is a probable match to a former guest of the state penal system.”

Mendez listened, a sick feeling curdling in his stomach like bad milk as he took in the information. He hung up the phone and looked at Tanner and Hicks.

“We’ve got a problem,” he said. “The print comes back Michael Craig Houston.”

The silence between the three of them swelled like a balloon as the implications set in.

“Oh my God,” Tanner murmured.

Michael Craig Houston. Roland Ballencoa’s former cellmate. His suspected accomplice in the unproven murder of his aunt.

The first thing Lauren did was go to a copy center near the McAster campus and photocopy every page of the journal dated 1985–1986. She put the copy in a manila envelope and mailed it to Detective Mendez at the sheriff’s office. Whatever might happen with Ballencoa, this would end up in the hands of someone who might be able to derive something from it.

She then went into a small electronics store and purchased a mini-cassette recorder, batteries, and cassette tapes. She kept her head down and her sunglasses on, and still she drew some curious looks from other shoppers. Her forearms were scratched and her clothes were dirty, she realized. She probably looked like she’d been living in a cardboard box.

Her suspicions were confirmed when she went into the ladies’ room and looked at herself in the small mirror above the sink. It didn’t matter. She had more important things to think about than her appearance.

She set up the cassette recorder, tested it, then went about finding a way to conceal it on her body, finally wedging it inside her bra beneath her right breast. It was uncomfortable, but it worked. The T-shirt she wore had been Lance’s and was several sizes too big for her, hanging loosely away from the slight curves of her body.

She checked the positioning of the Walther pressed snugly against her belly by the control-top panty. It had shifted some as she’d run away from Ballencoa’s house. She adjusted it now and thought back to her last day at the shooting range.

Body, body, head shot.

Body, body, head shot.

She held her hands out in front of her, fingers spread wide. She had expected the shaking to be much worse.

Would she be able to point and pull the trigger if she needed to?

She had imagined that moment so many times in the last four years. Roland Ballencoa had died a thousand deaths in her dreams. Was she really prepared to make that dream a reality?

I’m ready to be done with this, she thought.

She needed an answer from him. She couldn’t say with certainty what she might do when she got one.

How stupid are you, Lauren? she wondered. He’ll tell you what you want to hear if you have a gun to his head.

Her answer to herself was: I’ll know.

She would be able to see it, even in those cold, flat eyes. She would know. Because this was about Leslie, she would be able to sense a lie, or know the truth . . . or so she told herself.

This would be the moment everything had been building toward for the last four years. The final showdown. Good versus Evil. Mother versus child predator. A strange kind of excitement swirled through Lauren. She was going to know once and for all what had happened to her daughter . . . or die trying.