As if on cue, he shivered again.
“Put her in the van,” Ballencoa ordered. “Hurry up.”
Hewitt grabbed hold of her by the back of her neck and half-dragged her to the back of the panel van. He shoved her inside facedown and came in after her, pushing her down on the floor, pressing a knee into her kidneys.
He produced a plastic zip tie and put it around her left wrist and through a U-bolt screwed into the floor of the van. The canvas tote was beneath her. She could feel the head of the hammer pressing into her belly.
Hewitt bent down and spoke directly into her ear, his lips touching her so that she wanted to twitch away from the feeling. His blood dripped on her from the wound in his shoulder. “I’ve changed my mind about that mother-daughter threesome,” he said. “I wonder if she’ll be as hot a fuck as you are.”
The suggestion made Lauren want to retch. Instead, she scraped together another bit of bravado.
“You’re not going to have enough blood left in you to get it up, Greg,” she said. “I killed you. You just don’t know it yet.”
She knew no such thing, but if she could rattle him, distract him, get him worried about himself, she might buy them a crucial second or two.... He had already been careless. She was lying on a bag full of weapons. He had bound her to the U-bolt by only one wrist.
“Hurry up!” Ballencoa snapped at him then from the back of the van. “Get the girl in!”
In the next moment Leah was tossed into the van beside her, her right hand bound to the U-bolt. The terror on her face was almost unbearable for Lauren to see. This was all her fault. But she kept her eyes locked on her daughter’s.
“Stay calm, honey,” she whispered. They were almost nose-to-nose, forehead-to-forehead. “Stay calm. Do you understand me?”
“Mommy, I’m so scared!”
“Shhhh . . . We’re going to get out of this,” Lauren promised, even while her mind was filling with the nightmare images of what was probably going to happen to them in these next hours before they died. They would know exactly what had happened to Leslie. It was about to happen to them too.
The doors slammed shut on the back of the van like the lid coming down on a coffin.
57
“I’ve got a bad feeling,” Mendez said. He had jerked his tie loose and shed his sport coat. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up, exposing forearms that were thick with muscle. His body was burning energy like a furnace.
Lauren’s phone had gone unanswered. Ballencoa wasn’t at his house. Michael Craig Houston aka Gregory Hewitt was driving a blue Chevy Caprice. The BOLO had produced no sightings of it.
Tanner rode shotgun. Bill Hicks sat in the backseat.
“If Lauren is dealing with that guy thinking he’s her employee, and he’s what we think he is,” Tanner said, “that’s like thinking you’re playing with a garter snake and it’s really a cobra.”
“What’s with you and snake analogies?” Hicks asked. “Is it Freudian?”
“I don’t get enough sex.” She tossed a look back at him. “Was that Freud’s problem too?”
“That’s not right,” Mendez said as they neared the end of Old Mission Road.
“Tell me about it,” Tanner muttered.
“The gate,” Mendez specified. “It’s open. That’s not right.”
Lauren’s BMW was nowhere to be seen.
On the far side of the garage, hidden from plain view of the road, sat a Plain Jane blue Chevy Caprice.
“Shit,” he said under his breath.
He grabbed the radio and called in the tag number of the Caprice, then sat drumming his fingers on the steering wheel as he waited. Tanner got out and started to walk around the suspect car.
“Tony, we’ve got blood out here,” she called back at him, pointing to the ground.
Mendez felt sick. Vince had called him with a list of open cases from San Diego County, San Bernardino County, and Orange County. Missing women. A long list. Maybe some of them could have been Ballencoa’s work, maybe not. They would have to wade through a river of reports, talk to dozens of detectives. It would take weeks, months.
Michael Craig Houston had been arrested several times over the years in proximity to where Ballencoa had been living.
In his mind, Mendez kept going back in time, imagining Ballencoa and Houston meeting in jail all those years ago. He could hear Vince saying that it wouldn’t have been the first time two wrongs had gotten together to make a catastrophe.
He kept flashing on Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris, a pair of criminals who had hooked up in the Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo in the late seventies. Separately they had been thugs. Together they had become sexually sadistic serial killers who had tortured and murdered five young women in five months in LA County.
They had trolled the streets in a cargo van they called Murder Mack, tricked out with a stereo system loud enough to drown out the screams of the girls as they tortured them.
Mendez wanted to vomit. If Lauren Lawton had unwittingly hired Michael Craig Houston, and Houston was partners with Roland Ballencoa . . .
Damn her. She couldn’t wait. He knew in his gut she had broken into Ballencoa’s house. She wanted it over.
Damn the system that had been powerless to help her.
The radio crackled back at him.
The Caprice came back to Michael Craig Houston.
Mendez called for a crime scene unit and headed for the house with his gun drawn, on the chance that Houston was still there, but he knew that wouldn’t be the case. There wouldn’t be anyone in the house. It felt too still. As he walked into the kitchen the acrid scents of gunpowder and blood filled his nostrils.
There was blood on the floor, blood spatter on the sofa . . . Chairs had been left overturned. Two shell casings had been ejected from a .380.
He thought of Lauren and her Walther PPK.
Other than their blood, there was no sign of the two people who lived in this house.
58
A curtain separated the cab of Ballencoa’s van from the back, where Lauren and Leah lay bound to a U-bolt screwed into the floor. It kept anyone casually looking into the cab windows from seeing into the back of the van. It also kept the cab’s occupants from seeing into the back—a design flaw Lauren was grateful for.
As their captors drove the winding canyon roads, Lauren worked her free hand into the canvas tote bag trapped beneath her body. One by one she worked the tools up from the bottom of the bag, past Roland Ballencoa’s precious stalking journals.
A screwdriver, a box cutter, a hammer.
Leah lay beside her, facing her, her whole body quivering, her expression terrified, tears leaking from her wide eyes in a continuous stream.
“This is what he did to Leslie, isn’t it?” she whispered.
“There’s two of us,” Lauren told her.
“And two of them.”
Lauren hoped she was right about Greg Hewitt, that the bullet she had put in him had done a lot more than gone straight through his shoulder. He followed behind the van in her BMW. She tried to imagine him slowly bleeding to death internally.
She used hollow-point bullets in the Walther, ammunition designed for maximum destruction. As it left the chamber of the gun, the hollow-point exploded into a vicious spinning little flower of twisted metal that took a corkscrew’s path through a victim’s body, tearing as much tissue as possible, shredding veins and arteries, nerves and tendons, ricocheting off bone to rip through organs.
She sincerely hoped that was the chaos her shot was wreaking through Greg Hewitt at that very moment.
“Mommy, I don’t want to die,” Leah whimpered.
“You can’t think about that,” Lauren said. “You have to be brave now, Leah. We have to think and we have to fight. Do you understand me?”