What about Leah? The daughter she had brought with her on this mad quest, putting her in harm’s way, depriving her of what childhood she should have had left. What about Leah . . .
A car door slammed behind her and Lauren jumped as if a gun had gone off. Leah was sitting in the BMW, angrily swiping the tears from her cheeks.
Lauren got in the car because she didn’t know what else to do. This is what we do, she thought. We pretend to be normal. Their world had come so far off its axis she didn’t know what normal was anymore.
Normal had become carrying a gun.
Normal had become pills to sleep and alcohol to numb the pain of being awake.
Normal had become the obsession with a daughter she didn’t have, and the neglect of the daughter she did have.
Normal had become raw, dirty sex with a man she didn’t like, and an offer to murder a man she hated.
I just want it to stop, Leah had said.
Me too, Lauren thought.
The silence fell between them again like an iron curtain as Lauren started the car and drove out the gate.
They were halfway to the ranch before she spoke again.
“I love you, Leah,” she said. “Don’t ever think that I don’t love you just as much as I love Leslie. If you were taken from me, I would fight just as hard for you.”
Leah stared down at her hands in her lap. “I’m afraid, Mommy. I’m afraid something bad is going to happen to you,” she said in a small voice.
Lauren didn’t answer her right away. She weighed what she was about to say, deciding it was necessary to say it.
“You know you would never be left alone,” she said. “If something ever did happen—and I’m not saying that anything will—but you need to know you will always be taken care of, sweetheart. Your aunt Meg would take care of you—”
“Don’t say that!” Leah snapped. “You’re scaring me!”
“I’m not trying to scare you. You said you were already afraid. I don’t want you to be afraid.”
“Stop it! I don’t want to talk about it!”
Once at the ranch, Leah got out of the car, slammed the door, and ran for the stables. Lauren watched her go, her daughter’s earlier words echoing in her head: I just want you to make it stop.
She needed to make it stop. For both their sakes. Roland Ballencoa had destroyed half her family in a single act. She couldn’t let him destroy what was left of it by allowing this madness to go on. That was why she had come here after all. To end it.
A strange calm settled over her as she turned out of the Gracida ranch gate and headed toward Oak Knoll.
44
“I finally got a line on that rental car,” Hicks said, coming into the war room.
They had decided to set up just as they did for a homicide investigation, utilizing the giant whiteboard at the front of the room to lay out a time line.
“What rental car?” Tanner asked as she organized the files she had brought with her from Santa Barbara.
“Ballencoa’s neighbor in San Luis spotted a guy parked outside Ballencoa’s house,” Hicks said. “He told her he was some kind of special investigator with the police, but we know the SLOPD wasn’t watching Ballencoa anymore.”
“The tag on the car he was driving came back to Avis,” Mendez said.
“Who rents a car to go on surveillance?” Tanner asked.
“Gregory Hewitt,” Hicks answered.
“Who’s Gregory Hewitt?”
“Gregory Hewitt is the guy whose car was in the shop at McFadden Autobody in Santa Barbara that week,” he said. “The rental was a loaner.”
“And I’ll ask again,” Mendez said. “Who is Gregory Hewitt?”
“No idea,” Hicks said, “but he doesn’t work for the San Luis PD or the Santa Barbara PD or the Santa Barbara County SO or any other agency. He’s not a cop.”
“But the neighbor lady said he showed her some kind of ID,” Mendez said.
He dug his little spiral notebook out of the breast pocket of his sport coat and flipped through the pages, looking for the notes he had taken when they had spoken with Mavis Whitaker. “She couldn’t read it. She didn’t have her glasses on.”
“Sounds like a private investigator,” Tanner said.
Hicks agreed. “I thought so too, but there’s no California PI license to anyone by that name.”
“Who cares, anyway,” Mendez said. “Ballencoa is here now. That’s what matters to us.”
“Right. The house he’s renting here is managed by a property firm,” Hicks said. “His lease began May first.”
“When was your first B and E?” Tanner asked.
Mendez consulted the first of the files. “May fifth.”
“He made himself right at home.”
Mendez went to the whiteboard and entered the information on the time line. The date, the name of the victim, the address. He did the same for each of their cases.
Tanner took the far left section of whiteboard and did the same with the Santa Barbara cases, leading the time line up to the abduction of Leslie Lawton.
“I called a guy I know in San Luis,” she said. “He works crimes against property. He thought they might have cases to add. He’s checking into it.
“We all know, B and Es aren’t uncommon in a college town,” she went on, “what with a certain recreational drug element in place. People steal drugs. People steal money to buy drugs, and stuff to pawn to get money to buy drugs. We’ve got it in SB. San Luis has it. I’m sure even the hoity-toity kids at McAster smoke pot.”
“Better-than-average pot,” Mendez said. “But someone comes in and steals your weed, you don’t call the cops. And I’ve sorted out the cases where money was taken or property with value was stolen. These cases reported a break-in only. Things messed with but not taken or things of seemingly little value missing.”
“Souvenirs,” Tanner said. “We need to go back and ask if their friendly neighborhood burglar did any laundry for them. Did you get prints at any of your scenes?”
“Nope,” Mendez said. “Nada. He’s been doing this too long to be careless. Did you get anything at any of yours?”
“Nothing that panned out.”
They compared each case, each detail, each meager scrap of evidence. They looked at the households that had been victimized, the sex and ages of the family members. In all cases, at least one girl living in the home had been between the ages of fourteen and nineteen.
“If we can go back and interview them,” Tanner said, “and we find these girls were athletes . . . Ballencoa might have photographed them . . . There’s our first connection.”
Or he might have connected with them through some other means, as he had with Denise Garland—through his art, Mendez thought.
“If this nurse, Denise Garland, is an example, he doesn’t pick his victims at random,” Mendez said. “He knows who lives in those houses. He does his homework. He establishes a connection.”
“We need to go to the girls who live in these houses and find out if they know him, if they’ve seen him,” Hicks said. “But even if the answer is yes, what do we have? Coincidence.” He looked to Tanner. “Did you establish a connection between Ballencoa and the Lawton girl?”
“He had photographed her,” Tanner said. “She had actually purchased photos from him—herself and her tennis partner in a tournament.”
“So you had that connection and he’s still walking around free.”
“He didn’t make any mistakes with Leslie Lawton,” she said. “If he’s made a mistake, it’s somewhere else, with someone else.”
“It only takes a crack to break a dam,” Mendez pointed out. “He’s got to have a flaw somewhere. He’s only human . . . I hope. Vince Leone is contacting ViCAP today, looking for open abduction cases in the San Diego area while Ballencoa lived there. He’s convinced this guy is too slick to be a first-timer with the Lawton girl.”