Down the Darkest Road (14 page)

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Authors: Tami Hoag

BOOK: Down the Darkest Road
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She knew in her heart what he had done, but she had no evidence.
Her heart was beating a little too fast. Anxiety was like a million needles pricking her skin. A fine mist of sweat rose from her pores.
“I should be going,” she said suddenly. She set the mug down on the table and got up without looking at Anne. “I’ll pick Leah up in the morning.”
“No, no,” Anne said. “I’m happy to drop her off at the ranch. Wendy has finagled another riding lesson for tomorrow morning. I’ll be taking her anyway.”
“Oh. Well,” Lauren stammered. “Thank you.”
She could feel Anne Leone’s eyes on her, but she didn’t meet them.
“Thanks for having her over,” she said. “I’m sure she’ll enjoy it.”
“It’ll be my pleasure,” Anne said.
If she thought Lauren’s behavior was strange, she didn’t mention it. She made no move to stop her from heading for the door.
Lauren let herself out of the exit at the end of the hallway. The sun blinded her. She fumbled for her sunglasses on top of her head. One of the nose pads was caught in her hair. Her hands were shaking as she struggled impatiently with the glasses.
“Fuck. Fuck!” she cursed half under her breath, flinging the sunglasses away from her as they came loose. They hit the pea gravel of the parking lot facedown, undoubtedly scratching the lenses.
Angry, Lauren kicked the glasses toward her car, then bent down and snatched them up and threw them at the passenger window of the BMW. They bounced off, fell to the ground, and she left them there, not caring that they were Gucci and had cost more than a hundred dollars.
She got in the car, started it, put it in reverse, hit the gas too hard, and spun the tires.
She kept her head down and didn’t look at the building as she pulled out of the parking lot. She didn’t have to look to know that Anne Leone was probably standing at the side door, watching her make a fool of herself.
She had to escape—not Anne, or Anne’s office, even though at the end there the walls had seemed to close in to make the space as small as a closet. What she needed to escape was herself and the tumult of her emotions.
The way she chose to do that was with a gun.
14
 
The Scum Lord, as Mavis Whitaker called him, was a wide-framed, stooped man in his seventies in baggy green shorts that looked to have at one time been a pair of dress slacks. Below his knobby knees, dark dress socks came halfway up his calves and were anchored in place by a pair of black sock garters. His shoes were brown oxfords, polished to a shine.
“Mavis Whitaker,” the old man growled, scowling at a spark plug he held pinched between a thumb and forefinger. His thick, red lower lip curved into a horseshoe of disapproval. “Nosy old bat. It’s none of her damned business who I rent property to.”
They stood in a shed that reeked of gasoline and oil out behind Carl Eddard’s modest home, only a few blocks from the house he rented to Roland Ballencoa.
“The man’s money is as good as anyone’s,” he said.
“Were you aware of the problems Mr. Ballencoa had had in Santa Barbara?” Mendez asked.
“Not interested. He paid first and last month’s rent up front. He pays on time. Never asks me for anything. Has never caused any trouble.”
“He was accused of abducting a sixteen-year-old girl,” Mendez pointed out.
“If he’d done it, then he’d be sitting in prison, wouldn’t he?” Mr. Eddard declared. “Nobody wanted to rent to him here, he said. He was willing to pay me nearly half again what I normally rent that place for.”
A premium for the choice hunting ground across the street, Mendez thought, disgusted by Carl Eddard’s disregard for the public safety.
“When did he move out?” Hicks asked.
Eddard wiped the dirty spark plug off with a dirtier rag, then shoved it back in its place on the lawn mower motor.
“I don’t know,” the old man said, irritated, pulling his head down between his shoulders like a turtle, like it physically pained him to be put upon this way. “I don’t know that he
has
moved out.”
“Do you have a phone number for Mr. Ballencoa?” Hicks asked, pen poised to jot the number in his notebook.
“No. He doesn’t keep a phone.”
“Can you tell us what bank he used?” Hicks asked.
“He didn’t. He always paid with a money order.”
“That seems strange.”
“Better than a check as far as I’m concerned,” the old man said. “You know it’s good.”
He made his way to a bench at the back of the shed, his bowed legs giving him an odd gait.
“When did he stop paying his rent?” Mendez asked, following.
“He hasn’t,” Eddard said, selecting a wrench from a hook on the pegboard above the workbench. “He’s paid up.”
“Through when?”
“End of the month.”
“He hasn’t given notice?” Hicks asked.
The old man crabbed his way back and fitted the wrench over a rust-caked nut on the old lawn mower. “No.”
Mendez exchanged a glance with his partner. According to Mavis Whitaker, Ballencoa had moved out sometime between the end of April and the beginning of June. But he had paid his rent through the month of July. Because he didn’t want anyone to know he had moved? Mendez wondered. Or had his exodus been so hasty he simply hadn’t bothered to try to get his money back?
“Has it occurred to any of you geniuses that maybe he hasn’t moved at all?” Carl Eddard asked, struggling to loosen the nut. “Maybe the man has just gone somewhere. People travel, you know.”
“Would it be possible to go into the house?” Mendez asked, ignoring the raised eyebrows Hicks gave him.
Carl Eddard gave him the stink eye. “Do you have a warrant, young man?”
“We don’t need one,” Mendez said. “You’re the landlord. You have the right to enter the property. We aren’t searching for anything other than evidence of whether or not Mr. Ballencoa is still using the house as his primary residence.”
Eddard scowled. “I’m a busy man.”
“We won’t take more than twenty minutes of your time, Mr. Eddard. And we won’t have to bother you again. It’s important that we establish whether or not Mr. Ballencoa has left town. If he has, then we’ll take our business elsewhere.”
The old man growled and grumbled, phlegm rattling in his throat. He wrung his hands in the greasy rag, then threw it at the lawn mower in disgust. “Oh, all right.”
Mendez and Hicks waited in their car for Carl Eddard to retrieve his house keys.
“Are you out of your mind?” Hicks asked as soon as they had closed their car doors.
Mendez pretended ignorance. “For what?”
“If Detective Neri gets wind of this, he’ll bellyache to his boss, who will bellyache to our boss. You’ll get both our asses in a sling.”
“For what?” Mendez asked again. “We’re not doing anything but having a look around. It’s not an illegal search because we’re not searching for anything. We won’t touch anything. We won’t take anything.”
“You’d better hope he hasn’t written a murder confession on the bathroom wall.”
“We came all the way up here to find this clown,” Mendez said. “I want to know if he’s packed his bags and gone. If all his shirts are still hanging in the closet, then he probably hasn’t moved to Oak Knoll and we don’t have to worry about it.
“If he’s gone out of that house lock, stock, and barrel with no notice to anybody . . . I’m not going to like that, are you?” he asked.
“I’m still not convinced there’s a lot of reason for us to care one way or the other,” Hicks said. “The guy’s got no wants, no warrants. The only person who claims to have seen him in Oak Knoll is arguably unstable.”
“Tell me this,” Mendez said. “Who sets up house one place, gets his mail someplace else, doesn’t keep a bank account, doesn’t have a telephone, leaves town in the dead of night without telling anybody . . . ?”
“A criminal,” Hicks conceded.
“A criminal that might be in our sandbox now. Maybe Mr. Eddard here doesn’t care about a convicted child predator living across the street from the high school. I do. You should. You’re the one with daughters.”
“I don’t want him in my backyard,” Hicks admitted, giving in as Carl Eddard made his way down the sidewalk to his red 1978 El Dorado.
“Let’s get on with it,” Hicks said. “You’re buying lunch after. I at least want to get my ass chewed on a full stomach.”
15
 
The handgun was a Walther PPK nine millimeter Kurz. The Baby Nine, Lance had called it. It took .380 ammunition and fit a woman’s hand comfortably. Yet its attraction to her husband had been a Walther’s claim to fame as the sidearm of James Bond—the PPK 7.65 mm—beginning with one of Lance’s favorite Bond movies,
Dr. No
.
Her husband could go on about Bond for hours, his eyes as bright as a boy’s on Christmas morning. The memory brought a bittersweet touch of warmth to Lauren’s heart. She didn’t allow it to take root or last for long. Fond memories had a way of becoming like hard stones that tripped her into a pit of despair. Today she already felt the tips of her toes slipping over that edge.
Unfinished justice was her hot button, her trigger. She couldn’t stand it for herself, nor could she deal with it as an onlooker. The outrage that rose up inside her was a hot, writhing thing that wanted to tear out of her like a wild animal.
She needed to do something to release the anger in a way that was both violent and controlled. Shooting her husband’s pistol was her answer. She could take the Walther in hand and feel its power, feel the hard cold steel and the no-nonsense, justice-starts-and-stops-here weight of it.
The gun accepted no excuses. Its perspective had no gray areas. What came out of it was truth—a terrible truth, a final truth, a truth
she
and she alone controlled. No buts. No what-ifs. No legal loopholes. She could pass sentence with the pull of a trigger, and no one could argue with her verdict.
Lauren had found two gun ranges on the outskirts of Oak Knoll. Down the road from the Oaks Country Club, the Oaks Gun Club was a proper gentleman’s club with a state-of-the-art indoor range as well as a rifle range and areas for shooting trap and skeet. The buildings were lovely, the grounds manicured.
Lance had belonged to just such a club, where the members dressed like models for the Orvis catalog, and a rifle was a serious monetary investment. Lauren still had his shotgun, custom-made in Italy with a beautiful exotic wood stock and intricately etched steel.
The club had been part of their social scene. Many of the same friends with whom they rubbed elbows at polo and tennis had been members.
But a social scene was the last thing Lauren wanted these days. She had no interest in dressing for the range in anything other than jeans and a T-shirt. She wore a black baseball cap with the bill pulled low over her eyes and her ponytail pulled through the opening at the back. Hers was the only BMW in the parking lot of the shooting range she had chosen.
Canyon Gun Range was located on the far side of Oak Knoll. And by far side she meant as far away from McAster College and the boutiques and pedestrian plaza as it could be. The area was industrial, with a lot of low, steel, warehouse-type buildings that housed welders and cabinetmakers and auto body repair places. The building that housed the gun range had a pro shop on one end and a sleazy bar with topless dancers on the other.
This was where Lauren chose to bring her dead husband’s elegant James Bond weapon to practice her marksmanship and try to appease the demons stirring within.
No one she would ever know would ever find her here.
The lot was half full of cars. She got her gun bag out of the trunk, hefted it over one shoulder, and went inside.
The heads of dead animals lined the wood-paneled walls of the shop. She could feel their sightless stares almost as strongly as she could feel the stares of the men in the store. If she’d had bigger breasts, they probably would have told her she had come in the wrong door and sent her to the other end of the building. She was the only female in the place. But there was no mistaking her for a stripper these days. Too thin, too old, too pale, too worn.
Exchanging as little conversation as possible, she checked in at the desk and took care of the paperwork. The clerk examined the Walther and offered her a deal on paper bull’s-eye targets. Lauren forked over the extra buck for the full-sized male silhouette.
Once inside the range itself, eye and ear protection in place, she clipped the target up and sent it zipping down the line to the fifteen-feet mark, then picked up the gun from the bench.
For the first time since she had rushed out of Anne Leone’s office Lauren felt a calm come over her. Her mind went clear and still. Her breathing evened out. Her hands steadied.
Taking a deep breath, she raised the Walther and began, quickly falling into a familiar rhythm.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Breathe. Bang! Bang! Bang! Breathe. Bang! Bang! Breathe. Reload. Bang! Bang! Bang . . .

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