Down the Darkest Road

2

The van kept going. The driver didn’t stop, didn’t slow down, didn’t speed up. He seemed not to recognize her.

Lauren’s pulse was pounding in her ears, roaring in her ears. She felt like she had been suddenly submerged in water. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t breathe. The imagined pressure threatened to crush her chest wall.

She didn’t trust herself to believe what she thought she’d seen. Was it really him this time? Or had her memory once again superimposed Roland Ballencoa’s face on another man’s body?

The van was waiting to pull out onto the street. She couldn’t see the driver from this angle.

What if it was him? What if he was on his way home with a six-pack of beer and a box of frozen lasagna, just like anybody else?

As the van rolled out of the parking lot and into traffic, Lauren threw her car in gear and pulled out, not noticing that she nearly hit a woman with a cart full of groceries.

She needed to know.

She turned in front of several teenagers on the sidewalk and hit the gas to make it onto the street before she could lose sight of the van.

He was at the intersection already, turning left.

Lauren pulled into the turn lane two cars behind him, and made the left turn after the light had already gone red. Horns blasted at her.

If it was him, he had looked directly at her and hadn’t reacted at all. Did the mother of his victim mean so little to him that he couldn’t be bothered to recognize her?

Raw emotions coursed through Lauren like a tide of acid. Anger, fear, outrage, hate, disbelief, astonishment—all of it flooded through her like the swirling wave of a tsunami.

The van was turning again. Lauren wanted to blast past the two cars in front of her so she couldn’t lose him.

Even as the thought formed in her mind, a burgundy sedan came alongside her. She shot the driver a dirty look and her head swam.

The Hispanic man she had crashed her shopping cart into at the store. He was chasing her down for ramming into him in the pasta aisle. This had to be a dream, some crazy, absurd bad dream.

He gave her a hard glare, stabbing a forefinger in the direction of the curb. For the first time the flashing light on the dashboard registered.

Oh my God. He’s a cop.

A cop was pulling her over while she was trying to chase down the man who had abducted her daughter. If that was true, this was no dream but a nightmare.

She looked ahead to catch a last glimpse of the brown van as it turned right and disappeared down the street, wishing she could somehow reach out with a giant arm and pick it up like a toy. At the same time, the sane part of her brain moved her hand to the turn signal, and she pulled her car to the curb.

The burgundy sedan pulled in behind her.

Lauren sat there, watching in her rearview mirror as the driver got out, at the same time struggling with the notion that Roland Ballencoa had escaped her.

Was he alone? Did he have Leslie here? Was he hunting for other victims?

Or was the guy in the van just a local plumber picking up dinner for his wife and kids?

Which would mean she was crazy.

“I’m Detective Mendez with the sheriff’s office,” the cop said, holding his ID up to her open window. “Can I see your license and registration, please?”

She fumbled with her wallet, hands shaking as she pulled out her driver’s license and handed it to him. The registration was in the glove compartment. She couldn’t remember what it looked like.

“I’m going to ask you to step out of the car, ma’am.”

“I’m sorry,” Lauren said, getting out. “I’m really not a bad driver—with a car or a shopping cart.”

Detective Mendez was not amused. He had that flat, hard cop look she had come to know too well, like a closed steel door with no window.

“Have you been drinking, ma’am?”

“No.” Not yet, though a good stiff vodka would have been welcome.

“Ms. Lawton, you seem to be a little erratic today. Are you on medication of some kind?”

Prozac, Ativan, Valium, Trazodone . . . The list of pharmaceuticals in her medicine cabinet went on.

“No,” she said. She hadn’t taken any. She tried not to during the day. Most of them made her sleepy, and sleep brought nothing but nightmares.

The detective looked her in the eyes, gauging the size of her pupils.

Had she taken something and not remembered? Her thinking seemed to be taking place in the midst of a thick fog in her brain. Had she eaten lunch? She couldn’t remember. Probably not. Maybe her blood sugar was out of whack. Maybe this entire afternoon could have been avoided with a piece of cheese.

“I watched you leave the parking lot,” he said. “You violated about half a dozen laws and endangered the public. Do you have an explanation for that?”

“I thought I saw someone I knew,” she said, astonished at how stupid that sounded even to herself.

The detective arched a thick brow. He was good-looking, forty-ish. He looked like a straight arrow. His pants were pressed. He wore a jacket and tie.

“And you were going to chase that person down in your car?” Mendez asked. “We don’t do that here, ma’am.”

“Of course not,” she said. “We don’t do that in Santa Barbara either.”

This is real life, Lauren, not The French Connection. Car chases are for the movies. What the hell is wrong with you?

Detective Mendez seemed at a loss. “Let’s have a seat in my car.”

He used his radio to call in her driver’s license, speaking in cop code, no doubt asking for reports of past lunatic behavior. There had to be a thick file on her in Santa Barbara. She was well known at both the police and the sheriff’s departments. Anyone there would tell him she was a bitch and a pain in the ass—titles she wore with pride.

“What brings you to Oak Knoll, Ms. Lawton?”

“My daughter and I just moved here.”

“What do you do for a living?”

“I’m an interior decorator.”

“And your husband?”

He had caught sight of her ring finger. She had never taken off her wedding band. It didn’t matter that Lance was gone. She would always be married to him.

“My husband is dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

She never knew what to say to that. Thank you sounded stupid. She didn’t appreciate automatic sympathy from people she didn’t know, people who had never known her husband. What was the point?

Some unintelligible lingo crackled over the radio. Mendez acknowledged it with a brisk “10-4.”

“Your name is familiar.”

Lauren laughed without humor. This was where conversations always took a turn for the worse on so many levels. “Well, I am famous. Or infamous—depending on your point of view. My daughter Leslie was abducted four years ago.”

Mendez nodded as the memory came to him. “The case is still open.”

“Yes.”

It sounded so clinical when he said it, so sterile. The case. Like what had happened was a book that could be opened and studied and closed again and put away on a shelf. Her reality was so much messier than that, ragged and torn and shredded, oozing and dripping. The case was still open. Her daughter was still missing.

“You said you just moved here. Do you have friends in Oak Knoll?”

“I hardly know anyone here.”

“Then who did you think you saw?” he asked. “Who were you trying to follow?”

“The man who took my daughter.”

He was taken aback by that. “Excuse me?”

“His name is Roland Ballencoa. I thought I saw him in the supermarket,” Lauren said, “and then he drove right past me in the parking lot.”

“What was he driving?”

“A brown van.”

“Did you get a plate number?”

“No.”

“If you know he took your daughter, why isn’t he in jail?”

Defeat weighed down on her in the form of exhaustion. The adrenaline rush had crashed. He wasn’t going to help her. No one would help her. Roland Ballencoa was a free man.

“Because there isn’t a shred of evidence against him,” she said, resigned. “If you’re going to write me a ticket, detective, can we get on with it? I have things to do.”

“I’m not exactly sure what to do with you, Mrs. Lawton,” he admitted. “I’m not sure I should let you get back behind the wheel of a car.”

“You want me to walk a straight line heel-to-toe?” she asked. “Close my eyes and touch the tip of my nose? I’m as sober as a judge,” she said. “I’ll take a Breathalyzer test. You can have my blood drawn if you want. I’m not on anything.”

“You thought you saw this man in the supermarket, but you rammed your cart into me,” he pointed out. “You took after a man in a van and nearly hit half a dozen pedestrians. You tell me this guy abducted your daughter, but that there’s no evidence to prove it.”

“I didn’t say I was in my right mind,” Lauren admitted. “But lucky for me, it’s not against the law to be a little crazy. In fact, a lot of people would say I get a free pass to be mentally unbalanced. That’s one of the perks of being a survivor of tragedy.”

He didn’t react to her sarcasm. He reached a thick hand up and rubbed the back of his neck, as if to stimulate thought by increasing circulation to his brain.

He got back on the radio and requested information on Roland Ballencoa. Wants, warrants, physical address.

“Where are you living?” he asked.

“Twenty-one Old Mission Road. The house belongs to friends from Santa Barbara—the Bristols,” she explained, as if he would care.

“Your phone number?” he asked, jotting her answers into a little spiral notebook he had taken from the inside breast pocket of his sport coat.

“You’ll want to speak to Detective Tanner at the Santa Barbara Police Department,” she said, assuming he would follow through. He had that air about him—that he would be a stickler for details. “The detective in charge of my daughter’s case.”

“Do you have any reason to believe Ballencoa is in Oak Knoll?” he asked.

“Would I have brought my daughter here if I did?” Lauren challenged.

Mendez didn’t react—another irritating cop trait. “Do you have any reason to think he might know you’re here?”

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

“No, ma’am.”

“No. You think I’m a lunatic.”

“No, ma’am.”

“You are infuriatingly polite, detective,” she said. “You have every reason to think there’s something wrong with me. And I’m being a bitch on top of it.”

Mendez said nothing.

Lauren found an ironic smile for that. “Your mother raised you well.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The radio crackled and spewed out another short stream of information. Roland Ballencoa’s last known address was in San Luis Obispo, almost two hours away. No wants. No warrants.

Mendez gave her a look.

“That doesn’t mean he couldn’t be here,” Lauren argued. “The last I knew, people were free to come and go from San Luis Obispo.”

“You think he came down here to shop at Pavilions?” the detective asked.

Sudden tears burned the backs of Lauren’s eyes. She felt stupid and defeated and helpless.

“Can I go now?” she asked in a small voice.

Mendez gave her a long look that was like a silent lecture. She felt it on her like a ray of light, but she didn’t meet his eyes.

Finally he handed her driver’s license back to her along with his business card.

“If you think you see him again, don’t follow him,” he said. “Call the sheriff’s office.”

“And tell them what?” she asked. “That I saw a man who isn’t wanted for anything shopping for groceries?”

He let out a slow, measured sigh that might have been concession or frustration or impatience. His face gave nothing away. “Call me.”

“Right,” she said, looking down at the card. Detective Anthony Mendez. She opened the door and got out of the car.

“Drive safe, ma’am.”