This was what he had done to Leslie. He had stolen her off the side of the road. He had brought her to a place like this and stolen her innocence in the most vile and violent way he could.
Lauren hadn’t been there to stop him.
She was here now.
In her blindness to gain justice for one daughter, she had put the other in exactly the same brutal, horrible place to face the same brutal, horrible death.
No.
No.
NO !
NOOO!!!!
Lauren didn’t know if the sound came out of her or exploded only in her brain. It didn’t matter. It came from the deepest part of her and brought with it a wave of strength.
She grabbed the hammer as she got to her feet and turned it in her hands.
Not my daughter, she thought. Not again. Never again.
She brought the hammer up with both hands.
His attention was on Leah. He turned too late.
Lauren brought the hammer down, claw side first, with every last ounce of strength she had.
The claw caught him between the temple and the ear, driving into flesh and bone and brain. The force of the blow knocked him sideways away from Leah, away from the van. The look on his face was one of stunned horror.
He stuck out his arms, flailing like a blind man to break his fall as his legs buckled and he went down, the hammer still embedded in the side of his skull.
The look in his eyes was both wild and blank, and the sounds coming from him were guttural alien babble. His body began to jerk and jump as the electrical system of his brain shorted out and seized.
Lauren leaned hard against the van, watching him die even as she felt her own life slipping out of her, running out of her with the blood that flowed from the knife wound in her back.
“Mommy!” Leah cried, hysterical, flinging herself into her mother.
Lauren wrapped her arms around her daughter and held her as tightly as she could.
“It’s over, baby,” she whispered again and again. “It’s over. It’s over.”
It’s over.
At last.
61
Like flies to carrion, the local media had already begun to arrive on Old Mission Road outside the gates of the home Lauren and her daughter had been taken from.
Mendez had set up a roadblock of two cruisers and four deputies to keep the media well back from the scene.
They were losing daylight. The sun had slipped over the far side of the western ridges, turning them purple and casting the valley into a light that was neither day nor night. In Santa Barbara, tourists would be sitting on the wharf, watching it float like an orange balloon above the Pacific horizon.
The county chopper had gone up to start a grid search above the hills to the west of town. They had already turned on the spotlight, but Mendez knew those hills as well as anyone, and he knew they would be fighting a futile battle as the shadows filled the steep canyons.
For the first time since he and Hicks and Tanner had arrived at the house, he was still, leaning back against the car, trying to quiet his mind and find a useful thought as Dixon addressed the media out on the road.
Tanner came and stood beside him. She looked as worried and grim as he felt.
“I hope she shot that asshole somewhere it hurts,” she muttered.
“I hope he dies from it.”
“We let her down,” she said, her voice cracking a little. “Goddamnit.”
“If she could have held out for us just a little longer,” Mendez said, fully aware he was talking about Lauren Lawton in the past tense.
Tanner shook her head. “She needed to do it. She never wanted it to be up to us. She needed to force his hand. We were just the excuse she needed to give herself permission to do it.”
Leah had never driven a car so fast in her life. Her mother’s BMW was too big for her and too strong for her and too powerful. It made Leah think of the first time she had snuck a ride on one of Daddy’s horses when she had only ever ridden a pony. She had been so scared. She was ten times as scared now. A million times more scared.
“Mommy,” she said loudly, glancing at her mother slumped in the passenger’s seat. “Mommy!! Mommy, talk to me!”
The steering wheel jerked in her hand and she shrieked and put her eyes back on the twisty road, turning the wheel the last second before running the car up on the rocks on the steep side.
Her mother was so pale she almost glowed in the darkening light of the car.
“Mommy, please don’t die,” Leah chanted. “Please don’t die. Please don’t die. Please don’t die.”
As if it would matter. As if chanting without stopping would make it so. She cursed herself for a stupid child.
Her mother’s left hand reached over toward her. The first sign of life Leah had seen in her in what seemed like hours.
It felt like forever because Leah didn’t know where they were. She had only known enough to point the car downhill and keep going. The rough path had joined with a narrow paved road. The narrow paved road finally came to a stop sign and a wider paved road.
And then she could see lights in the distance, and a place on the side of the road with chain saw totem poles and a gas pump, and a sign that read Canyon Café.
62
It was Leah Lawton who told them what happened. Leah, not quite sixteen, still more little girl than woman, who had put her injured mother into the car and managed to find her way out of the wilderness to get help.
Mendez called Anne Leone on his way to the hospital and she met him there in the ER not five minutes behind the ambulance. In full mother tigress mode, Anne had taken charge of Leah, seeing to her emotional needs and overseeing her medical needs, putting the needs of law enforcement at bay for hours.
Only when the girl’s wounds had been tended and she had been ensconced in a hospital room did Anne allow him to ask a single question. Even then she had sat on the bed with an arm around Leah Lawton, offering a mother’s comfort and support as Leah told the tale.
“You’re a brave girl, Leah,” he said when she finished.
“I don’t want to be brave,” she whispered, tears spilling over her lashes as Anne hugged her shoulders. “I want my mom.”
Lauren Lawton had still been in surgery when Mendez and Tanner had gone to locate the bodies of Roland Ballencoa and Michael Craig Houston in the hills west of town.
Coyotes had been there ahead of them, leaving the corpses half-eaten and covered in flies and vultures by the time the crime scene unit arrived. It seemed a fitting end for men who had preyed on others, Mendez thought. Nature’s justice was swifter and more appropriate than anything the courts would ever have handed Ballencoa or his partner.
By the time he and Tanner had processed the scene on the mountain and Ballencoa’s house in town, they had pulled nearly forty hours without sleep or a shower or a decent meal.
“Do you want me to take you to a hotel?” he asked as they walked away from Ballencoa’s house.
She dredged up a sarcastic half-smile. “I usually say no to sex until the second or third crime scene.”
Mendez managed a weary smile. “To the hospital?”
She nodded. Sleep, food, hygiene could all wait. Lauren Lawton was out of surgery, conscious and talking.
The hospital had settled into its quiet evening routine. The lights had been turned down low. The staff and visitors and the bustle they brought with them during the day had dissipated.