Down the Darkest Road (11 page)

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Authors: Tami Hoag

BOOK: Down the Darkest Road
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San Luis Obispo was like Oak Knoll North. A town of thirty-five or forty thousand, not counting college students—it was home to the prestigious Cal Poly University. Like Oak Knoll, it had been built around a Spanish mission—the Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa—in 1772. Like Oak Knoll, the town was nestled between two mountain ranges—the Santa Lucia Mountains to the east and the Morros to the west. The surrounding countryside was dotted with farms and vineyards. The downtown boasted a charming shopping district with an array of boutiques, restaurants, coffeehouses, and galleries.
Unlike Oak Knoll, San Luis had its own police force. The city of Oak Knoll contracted with the sheriff’s office to protect and serve its residents. Though, as Oak Knoll continued to grow, there was talk that might change in the future.
The San Luis Police Department was a single-story building just off the 101 at Santa Rosa and Walnut. It housed fewer than one hundred personnel, with only about sixty or so sworn officers—only eight of whom were detectives. Two worked crimes against property. Three worked crimes against persons. Three had other duties.
Mendez and Hicks checked in at the desk and were asked to wait for their contact to come out and get them.
Detective Ron Neri was small, middle-aged, and rumpled in a way that suggested he had recently been trampled by a mob. He came down the hall, shuffling through a messy stack of papers that were barely contained in an open file folder. His pants were too long.
“Tony Mendez,” Mendez said, sticking a hand out for Neri. “This is my partner, Bill Hicks.”
Neri reached out for the handshake and nearly overturned his folder. “Ron Neri. Come on back.”
They followed along to an interview room and he motioned them to take seats.
Still fussing with his paperwork, Neri barely glanced up at them. “What can I do for you guys?”
“We’re looking for information on Roland Ballencoa,” Mendez said. “I left a message for you earlier. We came up from Oak Knoll.”
“Oh, right, yeah,” Neri said. “I meant to call you back. Did I call you back?”
Mendez shot a look at Hicks as if to say,
Can you believe this guy?
He was like some kind of poor man’s Columbo.
“No, actually,” Mendez said. “It doesn’t matter. I would have come up anyway. Have you seen Ballencoa lately?”
“Ballencoa,” Neri said. “There’s a name I wish I’d never heard in my life.”
“He’s been a problem?” Mendez asked, feeling that zip of electricity down his back that always came with the expectation of a hot lead.
Neri rolled his eyes. “Not him. That woman.”
“Mrs. Lawton?”
“I get that she wants to have this guy’s balls on a string around her neck,” he said, “but she wants mine too. I’m supposed to wave a magic wand and have him commit some chargeable offense. Or maybe I can pull her missing kid out of my ass.”
“You’re the soul of sympathy,” Mendez said flatly.
“Hey,” Neri said. “I’ve got as much sympathy as anybody. It’s terrible what happened to her family. But the SBPD can’t link Ballencoa to the crime. They can think whatever they want about the guy, but the bottom line is they’ve got jack shit to prove he did anything. Neither do we.
“What are we supposed to do?” he asked. “Ballencoa minds his own business; nobody complains about him; we don’t have any missing teenage girls here. But I’ve got Lauren Lawton on my back every week. Why don’t we do this, why can’t we do that.”
A puzzled look came over his face as a thought struck him. “She’s backed off lately. I haven’t heard from her in a while. Did she die or something?”
“She moved to Oak Knoll,” Mendez said.
Neri gave a hysterical laugh and slapped a palm against the table. “Tag. You’re it! Sorry, boys.”
Mendez frowned. It wasn’t that he couldn’t see Lauren Lawton out of control. It was that she had good reason to be a pain in the ass. She was trying to fight for her daughter. Nobody seemed to want to give her that. Or probably more accurately, they only wanted to allow her just so much time to do it, then she was supposed to shut up and go away.
First Tanner, now this idiot.
“Is Ballencoa still living here?” he asked bluntly.
Neri didn’t quite look at him. “Yeah.”
“Really?”
“The last I checked.”
“And when was that?”
“Like I said: It’s been a while since I’ve heard from Mrs. Lawton.”
“You’ve got a known child predator in your town and you don’t check up on him unless a citizen from another jurisdiction calls and pokes you?” Mendez asked, his temper ticking a notch hotter.
“We checked on him all the time when he first moved up here,” Neri said, defensive. “We checked on him so much he threatened to sue the department for harassment. Ballencoa came here a free man, and he’s never done anything to change that in nearly two years. We can’t just sit on the guy for no good reason.”
“When was the last time you saw him?” Hicks asked.
Neri shifted in his chair, uncomfortable with their scrutiny. “A couple of months ago. He had a booth at the Poly Royal art fair. He’s a photographer. He was selling his photographs.”
“What kind of photographs?”
“I don’t know,” Neri said on an impatient sigh. “Nature. Buildings. The mission. Kids on ponies. Who cares?”
Mendez ground his back teeth. A child predator was taking pictures of kids on ponies, and this asshole didn’t think anything of it.
“When was that?” he asked.
“In April,” Neri said. “We had a freaking riot that lasted for three days, in case you don’t watch the news. We had over a hundred arrests, a hundred injuries—fifteen of our own people.”
“You had a riot at an art fair?” Mendez said, just to be a jerk. Everyone in the state had been riveted to the news during the three days of riots in a town that normally lived at the speed of its nickname: SLO. Slotopia. “What the hell kind of town do you run?”
“It wasn’t at the art fair. That was just part of the Cal Poly open house weekend.”
“You had a riot at an open house?” Hicks said, also happily playing dumb.
Neri threw his hands up in frustration. “It’s the Poly Royal. It’s a fucking festival. Take a few thousand drunken college kids and throw in a pack of out-of-town troublemakers and a few hundred drunken migrant workers—”
“Oh, right,” Mendez said. “It’s the ’spics. We’re always drunk and disorderly.”
“I didn’t say that!” Neri looked at Hicks. “What the hell’s wrong with him?” he asked, hooking a thumb in the direction of Mendez.
Hicks shrugged, unconcerned.
“So you saw Ballencoa in April,” Mendez said. “Right before your hundred-arrest riot. That’s three months ago. What do you people do up here? Write one report a day? You can’t take the time to drive around the block to see if your resident child abductor is here or not?”
“I told you,” Neri said. “We don’t have the manpower or the cause to sit on a law-abiding citizen who wants to sue us. And that’s all Ballencoa has been since he moved here: law-abiding.”
“Whatever,” Mendez said, getting up from his chair.
“Do you have a current address on him?” Hicks asked.
“I’ll have to look it up.”
“That’d be great. Then we can get out of your hair.”
“What are you going to do?” Neri asked, suspicious. “I can’t have you guys running around half-cocked—”
“Why not? We should fit right in,” Mendez muttered.
Neri got up from his chair, clearly pissed off.
“We need to ask Mr. Ballencoa a few questions,” Hicks said easily.
“We’ll be sure to give him our cards,” Mendez said. “So he can sue the proper agency.”
“Good,” Neri said. “You do that, Mendez. Then go fuck yourself.”
11
 
“You had to be an asshole?” Hicks said as they got back in the car.
“He’s slacking on the job, he’s disrespectful to the mother of a victim, he can’t return a goddamn phone call, and
I’m
the asshole?” Mendez said. “That’s fucked up.”
“Two wrongs don’t make a right, Anthony,” Hicks said without rancor.
Mendez scowled and started the car. “I already have a mother.”
“I’m just saying.”
“You’re the navigator. Navigate.”
“Aye, aye, Captain Chivalry.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Hicks chuckled. “Nothing. You just can’t resist a damsel in distress, that’s all.”
“Very funny. I don’t happen to think it should be considered out of the ordinary to have some compassion for a woman who’s been through what this woman has been through.”
“You’re absolutely right,” Hicks said diplomatically. “Take a right on Santa Rosa. Like my wife says: You’ll make some lucky girl a fine husband one day.”
Except that day never seemed to come around, much to the dismay of his mother. And to a slightly lesser degree to his sisters, who were forever trying to fix him up with nice Spanish girls. He was the lone marriage holdout of the Mendez family. Not that he didn’t like the idea. It was just that he’d always been focused on his career, and the rest hadn’t worked out.
“From what everyone is saying about Mrs. Lawton, it doesn’t sound like there’s much danger of you falling in love with her,” Hicks said.
“Can we let this subject go, please?”
“Sounds to me like she must have horns and a tail. Teeth and claws at the least. Didn’t you notice? Left on Higuera.”
When they found the address Neri had given them, the hair stood up on the back of Mendez’s neck. The house was within sight of the San Luis Opisbo high school. A rich potential hunting ground for a predator of teenage girls.
The house was a typical southern California bungalow—beige stucco and a barrel tile roof—with overgrown purple bougainvillea and brilliant orange birds of paradise flanking the front porch steps. The yard was thin and weedy. The place had that odd feeling of vacancy about it.
Hicks went up onto the little porch. Mendez took a stroll around the back of the house and tried the back door. Locked. Through the window he could see the small kitchen. The counters were bare. There wasn’t so much as a water glass by the sink. The sun splashed in through a window, illuminating the layer of dust and the odd dead bug on the Mexican tile floor.
“Hey, you!”
He jumped a little at the sharp sound of the voice. Turning around, he came into the full glare of a skinny elderly woman in denim overalls and a blue Dodgers cap. A wild head of gray hair fell to her shoulders. Standing in the yard a few feet back from the stoop, she carried what looked like an ax handle, hefting it and making small circles with it like it was a baseball bat and she was getting ready to swing for the bleachers.
Mendez started to reach inside his coat.
“Don’t even think about it, pervert!” the woman snapped, shouldering the axe handle. Her accent was British, he thought. She came a couple of steps closer to the stoop, her wrinkled little mouth knotted up like a prune.
“I’m a law enforcement officer, ma’am,” Mendez said. “I’ll show you my badge if you’ll let me.”
“How do I know you’re not packin’ heat?”
“I
am
packing heat,” he said, trying to keep a straight face.
“Show it to me, then,” she demanded. “And don’t try anything funny. This is a hickory handle and I know how to use it.”
Mendez gently opened his sport coat so she could see both the badge clipped to his belt and the nine millimeter in his shoulder holster.
The old lady deflated with a big sigh and lowered her weapon. “Crikey,” she said. “What are you doin’ skulkin’ ’round back here? You scared the livin’ piss out of me!”
“I could ask you the same thing, ma’am. What are you doing back here? Do you live in this house?”
“No,” she said. “I live right over here. I’m on the neighborhood watch. I keep an eye on things around here. You never know what might go on, considering.”
“Considering what?”
“Considering the pervert that lived here.”
“Roland Ballencoa?”
“That’s him,” she said. “I couldn’t believe he moved right in next to me, bold as brass,” she said with absolute disgust. “Outrageous.
“I had read all about him in the Santa Barbara paper,” she went on. “I take four papers and read ’em front to back:
The LA Times
,
The New York Times
,
The Tribune
, and
The Santa Barbara News-Press
. A person should be informed, I say.
“And I know they never arrested him or nothin’ down there, but I can read between the lines. He done somethin’ to that poor girl, sure as anything.”
Hicks came around the side of the house, missing a step as he caught sight of the old lady. His eyes got big for a split second.

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