Pull it together, Lauren.
She did a good job of it for the most part. The average person looking at her would never have suspected she lived on the ragged edge of sanity much of the time. Just as the average person would never have looked at their neighbor and suspected his thoughts were full of dark desires of kidnapping, torture, murder . . .
He was such a quiet guy . . .
Watching the people of Oak Knoll go on about their business mesmerized her after a while, like watching ants come and go from an anthill. She turned her thoughts back to the fact that she still had to do something about dinner.
She couldn’t bring herself to go back into Pavilions. Ralphs market was just a few blocks away. Or maybe it would be wiser to simply call for a pizza or something. Retreat, regroup, have a drink or two, put this afternoon behind her. Maybe tomorrow she would be able to go out in public without attacking someone with a shopping cart.
She took a big deep breath and let it out with the idea of clearing her head. As she tried to let go the last of the tension, a van drove slowly past her. An unremarkable brown panel van. The driver turned his head and looked directly at her, and Lauren’s heart stopped as she met the hooded dark eyes of Roland Ballencoa.
The man who had taken her daughter.
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.”