“I’m going to send you a link to a white-noise machine you can get online. It has various settings, like ocean, wind, leaves blowing across a lawn. I think it could be helpful, but the bottom line is your sleep mechanisms are not working.”
“I know that. Isn’t that why I came here in the first place?”
“It is and we need to keep trying to figure it out. Is there anything new with your mother?”
Ballard shook her head. “Not that I know of, and that’s my fault. I haven’t had time to call Farley since we last talked.”
“Farley is...”
“Dan Farley on the ID team. He’s my contact and he’s taken a special interest in my case, probably because I’m in law enforcement. Or, I should say, he’s taken a special interest in my mother’s case.”
“Well, maybe you’ll have an update by our next session. We can move on. With this busy week you’ve been having, have you been on the water much?”
“Not at all. I haven’t been on a board since the day my badge got stolen.”
“So, a week ago.”
Talk of surfing made Ballard remember that she had Seth Dawson’s watch and needed to get it back to him.
“Renée?”
“Sorry, what was the question?”
“I don’t know if there was one, but you sort of went away there. What were you thinking about?”
“Nothing, really. I recovered a watch that was stolen from a surfer and I have to get it back to him, that’s all.”
“It seems that you’re so caught up in and busy with work that you’ve had no time for the one thing that you’ve told me keeps your sanity intact: being on the water.”
“No argument there. I miss it.”
“What was it you said to me before about the water?”
“It’s my salvation. I know.”
“If you know that, why haven’t you been able to get out there?”
“I’ve had no time. I see the water when I’m driving to work, but I haven’t had the time to get out and on it. But if it will make you happy, I promise to get out there tomorrow morning.”
“That would make me very happy. For you.”
“I’ll do it.”
“So, I want to talk to you about something I said last week. The more I think about it, the more I feel like I was wrong.”
“About what?”
“Well, I wrote something down and you asked what it was. I had written ‘vicarious trauma,’ and I proceeded to tell you that I thought it was at the root of the agitation and insomnia you’re encountering. I more or less said that you were a sin eater, that you took in all the horrors you saw on your job and kept them inside, and they came out in these symptoms we are seeing: insomnia, agitation leading to a short temper.”
“And now you’re saying that’s not it?”
“It’s part of it. But I want to get into abandonment issues with you. Is that all right?”
“I guess so.”
“Let me start with a question that might be difficult for you to answer.”
“Just what I need.”
“Tell me your thinking on this. I know you have this man Farley in Maui who keeps you updated about the search for your mother, and you have a very busy job here, but—”
“Why haven’t I gone there to look for her myself?”
Elingburg pointed her pen at her. “Exactly. Sounds like you’ve thought about this.”
“Yeah, I have.”
“And?”
“And I don’t know. Sometimes I think I don’t go there because she didn’t come looking for me. You know, after my dad... died, I was left on my own. I was alone and scared and she should have come looking for me. But it was Tutu who came for me. She saved me. And I can’t get past that, you know?”
“It’s a common response. Abandonment resentment. What comes up for you when you understand that’s what’s going on?”
“Well, it makes me feel guilty as hell. Like I should be over there looking for her.”
“It’s a cycle. Lather, rinse, repeat.”
“I guess so. That’s why I can’t sleep?”
“Partly, yes. You’re not sleeping because your mind can’t rest. This cycle keeps it active. You need to break the cycle. You can’t just keep lathering, rinsing, and repeating forever — you have to find the triggers that begin the cycle and deal with them.”
“I mean, I see the triggers all the time. I deal with families that have been shattered by the sudden loss of a daughter or son or mother or father. Doesn’t matter who it is, I see the loss and it doesn’t ever go away. I see how they’ve been hollowed out by it. All of them waiting for some form of closure they know in their hearts isn’t coming. And I think, Why wasn’t she like that? Why was she okay with leaving me and with me dealing with what happened alone out there?”
Elingburg said nothing. Ballard knew this was a way to keep her talking and revealing herself. She used the same technique with suspects. And it worked.
“This morning we had a Zoom call with a woman whose sister disappeared almost seventy-five years ago. This woman tried to be so stoic, but I could hear the pain in her voice. It never goes away. Never...”
She didn’t finish.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m just rambling.”
“You’re not rambling,” Elingburg said. “You’re digging down to the core of this.”
Ballard smirked.
“What?” Elingburg asked.
“I have a sign on my pod wall that says ‘Dig Down,’” Ballard said. “It’s from a song I like. That’s what we do in cold cases. We dig down into the past.”
“And what we do in here.”
“I guess so. Maybe that makes me a cold case. Too cold to get on a plane to go find my missing mother. Waiting for somebody else to do it when deep in my heart I know it should be me.”
Ballard watched Elingburg write that down.
36
Colleen and Maddie were still working when Ballard got back to the Ahmanson Center. They showed her the chart they had put together. They had located fifty-two of the sixty-six seniors listed in the 1999 St. Vincent’s yearbook. Of the remaining fourteen, five were boys and nine were girls; the girls were more difficult to find because their last names sometimes changed when they got married. Additionally, Maddie had run criminal record checks, but those produced only two former students who had been convicted of crimes, the one for financial fraud that Ballard had also found, the other for indecent exposure.
They spent the next half hour putting together an interview-priority list. The name at the top was Rodney Van Ness, Mallory’s date for his senior prom. Although he was first on the list, because he was located in Las Vegas, he was probably not going to be the first interview. Taking a road trip required planning and approvals.
Next on the list was Jacqueline Todd, one of Mallory’s two best friends. She was still living in Los Angeles, according to LinkedIn, and working as a screenwriter. Mallory’s other best friend, Emma, was third on the priority list, but she had not been located. They hoped that Jacqueline Todd would have her contact information.
Fourth on the list was Nathan Hyatt, the former student who had been arrested for indecent exposure a year after graduation. He was living in Venice, according to the DMV. He had no criminal record since that arrest but was an obvious choice for scrutiny, as the indecent exposure could have been a precursor to more serious sexually motivated crimes. Most serial offenders follow an escalating path of sex crimes, Ballard knew. Her only hesitation about Hyatt was that he had most likely been interviewed by the original Pillowcase Rapist task force. She would have to pull the records, but she knew that the task force had thrown out a wide net and interviewed almost all known sex offenders living in the county then.