Down the Darkest Road (8 page)

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Authors: Tami Hoag

BOOK: Down the Darkest Road
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“Her whole life has been this case,” Tanner said. “All day, every day. For the first two years she was in the office all the time, making her presence known. After that she would still come in once a month or more. She was always badgering the newspaper to run a story or the TV stations and radio stations to interview her.
“Over the years she went from being a concerned parent, someone you felt sorry for, to this obsessed, nasty, bitter, angry cunt—pardon my language.”
The well-dressed woman at the next table gasped and tsked and moved around on her chair like a chicken with its feathers ruffled.
Tanner turned to her and said, “Ma’am, if you don’t like what you’re hearing, stop eavesdropping. Otherwise I’m gonna sit here and say
cunt
over and over and over until you get up and leave.”
Mendez rubbed a hand over his face, mortified. Tanner turned back to him as if nothing had happened.
“You wait and see,” she said, shaking her fork at him. “You’ll be dropping the c-bomb like a champ before you know it.”
Not if I lived to be a thousand years old
, Mendez thought. His mother would have his ass for even thinking that word. And if he lived to be a thousand and used it, she would rise up out of her grave and have his ass.
“Wait until she starts in with the personal attacks on your intelligence and your integrity,” Tanner said. “That gets old fast.”
“She was pretty shaken up today,” Mendez said. “I mean, imagine: You move to a new town to escape all of that, and there’s the guy.”
“Did you see him?”
“I wouldn’t know him.”
She forked up some more crab cake with one hand and flipped open the file folder she’d brought with her with the other.
“Creepy dude,” she said, sliding a copy of Ballencoa’s photograph across the table. “Looks like he should play Judas in one of those life-of-Christ movies.”
Mendez stared at the photograph. Ballencoa had a long, narrow face and large, hooded dark eyes. His dark hair was shoulder length and he wore a neatly trimmed mustache and goatee. His eyes had that blankness in them he had come to associate with psychopaths. Shark eyes.
“He’s thirty-eight years old, about six-three and a buck-seventy-five,” Tanner said.
Mendez was five-eleven and built like a fireplug. About the only things he had in common with Roland Ballencoa were a dick, dark hair, and a mustache. And yet Lauren Lawton had mistaken him for Ballencoa in the pasta aisle at Pavilions.
“Do you think she’s unstable?” he asked.
Tanner shrugged. “Who could blame her if she was? When Ballencoa was still living here, she claimed he was stalking her, but we had absolutely no proof of that. Not one iota. Not a record of a phone call, not a fingerprint, nothing.”
“She just wants the guy behind bars for something.”
“For anything. At one point she all but told me to fabricate some evidence against him just so I could get him in the box and try to break him down for a confession.
“And let me tell you,” she added. “That guy wouldn’t give it up to save his own mother’s life. He’s as cold as they come.”
“Do you have his sheet in there?” Mendez asked.
Tanner fished it out and handed the pages to him.
“He’s got a history as a peeper, and some B and E charges down in the San Diego area where he was stealing women’s dirty underwear out of their laundry baskets. That got him a slap on the wrist.
“He’s a class-A perv,” she pronounced. “There’s no fixing that. If he didn’t do the Lawton girl, it’s only a matter of time before he does something else. Shoot him in the head and charge his family for the bullet.”
“If only it was that simple,” Mendez said. “I’ve got a sexually sadistic serial killer sitting in prison doing a quarter for attempted murder and kidnapping. The DA let him plead out.”
“Oh, that dentist,” Tanner said. “I read about that. What the fuck happened?”
“We had nothing on him for the homicides,” Mendez said. “No physical evidence except a necklace that may or may not have belonged to one of the victims. As sure as we’re sitting here, he killed at least three women and left another one blind and deaf. And we couldn’t even charge him. But if he hadn’t done it, there was no reason for him to kidnap and try to kill the woman who found that necklace.”
“I’ll never get the sentencing for attempted murder,” Tanner said, shaking her head. “Why should they get off light because they were incompetent? The idea was for the victim to die, right?
“Remember Lawrence Singleton?” she asked. “Kidnapped and raped a teenage girl, hacked her arms off with an ax, and left her to die in a drainage ditch outside Modesto. The guy got fourteen years and was out in eight. It was just a pure damn miracle that girl lived. Singleton should be doing life. Instead, he’s running around loose. It’s only a matter of time before he does it again.”
“We were lucky we got Crane for twenty-five,” Mendez said. “The guy had no record. He was supposedly an upstanding citizen. He had a wife and kid. We both know he’ll be out in half that for good behavior in the joint.”
“Jesus Christ,” Tanner said. “This is why some species eat their young. If only his mother could have seen that in him when he came out of the chute.”
They finished their dinner and Tanner ordered dessert and coffee.
“Doesn’t SBPD pay you well enough that you can afford to feed yourself?” Mendez asked.
Tanner looked at him. “What? I always eat like this. Maybe I’ll catch a case tonight and not get a chance to eat again for twenty-four hours. What are you, Mendez? Cheap?”
“Not at all. It’s just an observation,” he said. “I’ve only ever seen wild animals eat the way you eat.”
“I’m not ladylike, is that what you’re saying?” she asked, clearly enjoying putting him on the spot.
“I didn’t say that.”
“But you thought it.”
Mendez said nothing.
Tanner laughed, green eyes dancing.
“What happened to Mr. Lawton?” he asked as the coffee arrived.
“Car accident. Driving under the influence, he took his Beemer over the side of the Cold Spring Canyon bridge.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
The bridge was part of the route that connected the Santa Ynez Valley to Santa Barbara. The thing stretched for twelve hundred feet over one hellacious long fall to the canyon floor. It was a notoriously popular spot for people to commit suicide.
“It was a hell of a wreck,” Tanner said. “He had to be doing eighty or better. In my humble opinion, it was no accident.”
“You think he killed himself.”
“I think he couldn’t live with the grief anymore. Lauren channeled all her emotions into fighting the good fight and keeping the case in the news. Lance just fell apart. He just couldn’t deal with it.”
But he could leave his wife to deal with it
, Mendez thought, frowning. He could let her carry the whole load while he opted out of the pain. That didn’t sit well with Mendez. No wonder Lauren Lawton no longer resembled her driver’s license photo or that she was seeing things that weren’t really there.
“You looked at him in the beginning, didn’t you?” he asked.
“Yeah, of course. We always have to look at the family with something like this—and family friends as well. We heard Lance and the daughter had been butting heads. They’d had a big blowout the night before Leslie went missing.”
“About what?”
“She had just turned sixteen. She was a pretty headstrong girl trying to be independent. She wanted to go on a road trip with some friends up to San Francisco. Dad said no. They had a big argument in a restaurant and got asked to leave. Lance was a guy with a temper. Shit happens. There were a couple of holes in his time line the day the girl went missing.”
“But nothing came of it.”
“No, but the scrutiny was hard on him. He was well liked in the community, then suddenly people were looking at him sideways. According to everyone we spoke to, he adored his daughters and doted on them. He was just having a little trouble with the idea that his oldest was growing up. I think it was all more than he could take.”
“Or he did it and he couldn’t live with the guilt,” Mendez said.
“Meanwhile, Lauren soldiered on. No offense, but no guy could ever be as tough as a mother on a mission for her kid.”
“That’s a lot of tragedy for one family,” Mendez said. “Who else did you look at?”
“Of course we spoke to everyone Leslie had contact with, including her tennis coach, the softball coach, her parents’ friends. The night they got kicked out of the restaurant, they were having dinner with her old pediatrician’s family. The doctor was bent out of shape over the girl’s behavior that night too, and said a few things about her needing to learn a lesson.”
“And?”
“He didn’t have much of an alibi, but he didn’t have much of a motive, either,” she said. “If it was a crime to be angry with badly behaving kids in restaurants, I’d be doing life myself. Kent Westin is a well-respected physician. He offered to take a polygraph, and passed it.”
That didn’t necessarily mean anything, Mendez thought. He would have been willing to bet Peter Crane would have passed a polygraph too if he had consented to take the test. It wasn’t hard to fool the machine if you didn’t have a conscience.
“We questioned all of Lance’s polo buddies,” Tanner went on, “all the Lawtons’ social acquaintances. That was hard on the family too—having their friends put in that position.”
And no matter how you looked at it, the storm wasn’t over, Mendez thought. It had been four years since Leslie Lawton went missing. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be under that kind of pressure for such a long time.
“Do you know what Ballencoa is driving these days?” he asked as he signed the credit card receipt for dinner. He didn’t spend that much on groceries in a month.
“He used to have a white Chevy panel van.”
Which could have easily been repainted brown. And Lauren Lawton was right: People were free to come and go from San Luis Obispo. It wasn’t completely implausible that he could have been in Oak Knoll. But it seemed unlikely.
Given what Tanner had told him, and what he had observed for himself, it seemed more likely the Lawton woman was seeing things that weren’t there because she needed closure on a nightmare that wouldn’t end.
“Can I get a copy of that file?” he asked as they left the restaurant.
The pier was busy with tourists walking up and down, visiting the shops, heading to dinner. A saxophonist sat on a park bench, playing jazz for tips. A couple of hundred yards out to sea, three big yachts had dropped anchor for the night. On the horizon the sun appeared to be melting into a hot orange puddle as it touched the ocean.
“This is a copy,” Tanner said, handing him the folder. “You can have it.”
“Thanks.”
“No problem. Thanks for dinner.”
“You’re welcome. I hope it holds you over for a couple of days.”
She looked up at him and laughed, and he was struck by the fact that she was pretty and genuine.
“You’re okay, Mendez,” she said as they got to their cars. “I wish you luck with your new citizen, but I’ll say it again: Better you than me, pal.”
7
 
Leslie had just turned sixteen—that magic number when we all believe we know more than our parents and should be treated like adults. She was old enough to drive a car, but still slept in a bed full of stuffed animals. She was old enough to have a job, but still begged Daddy for money to go to the movies.
It was a time of contradictions for Lance and me as well. We were proud of the young lady our little girl was growing up to be, but terrified of the dangers she faced. Dangers like drugs and alcohol and horny teenage boys. The dangers an inexperienced driver faced on the California freeways. Dangers like peer pressure.
Stranger danger was something we had talked about with her since she was small. But as vigilant as we were, we never truly expected to confront the reality of it.
We lived in a gated community with guards monitoring who came and went. We lived in a city with a low crime rate and a high quality of life. The girls attended the best private schools, where everyone knew everyone’s kids and parents, and the parents were all connected socially. We all existed in the blissful bubble of a false sense of security. And while we were all diligent about looking for monsters in the shadows, none of us were looking for the snakes in the grass.
The week before it happened was a difficult one in our house. School was about to end for the summer. Some of Leslie’s older friends were planning a weeklong car trip up the coast to San Francisco, and she wanted to go with them. Neither Lance nor I thought allowing a sixteen-year-old to go off with high school seniors was a good idea. It was a recipe for disaster. Even though we knew the kids were good kids, they were still kids, and we weren’t too old to have forgotten fake IDs and the ready accessibility of pot and other recreational chemicals. The potential for disaster was too high.

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