Down the Darkest Road (34 page)

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Authors: Tami Hoag

BOOK: Down the Darkest Road
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Mendez went out into the hall and paced up and down for a minute, trying to clear his head. He was upset in a way he didn’t know quite what to do with. He was a goal-oriented problem solver by nature, but he didn’t see a good way to solve Lauren Lawton’s problems. He felt hamstrung by the rules and regulations he was bound to follow. He felt as useless as a boy in the face of her fury and pain.
He went into the break room, where Vince sat watching the Ballencoa interview on the closed-circuit TV. Out of habit he went to the coffeemaker, but the idea of coffee seemed pointless to him. He wanted a stiff drink—but probably not half as much as Lauren did, he thought.
Vince flicked a glance at him.
“This guy’s a piece of work,” he said, nodding toward the screen.
Mendez flung himself into a chair with a sharp sigh and looked up at the television. Ballencoa sat at the table facing the door, wearing the sour expression of a petulant child. Trammell sat across from him, laid back, his body language calm and relaxed. Just having a chat with a citizen.
“He’s been telling Trammell how Lauren Lawton is stalking him and he wants to get a restraining order against her.”
“Fucking piece of shit,” Mendez growled. “He was taking pictures of the daughter at the tennis courts.”
“Which he says is his right and his livelihood.”
“His rights.” The words were bitter in his mouth. “Like he’s a victim. Lauren needs the protection order against
him
. He’s the fucking criminal. The fucking nerve of that guy—taking pictures of the daughter! If I’d been in her place, he’d be talking out the other side of his head right now.”
“And you’d be under arrest,” Vince pointed out.
“It’s not right.”
“If somebody looked funny at one of my kids . . . I don’t want to know what I’d do,” Vince admitted. “But there’s what’s right, and there’s the law. And unfortunately, the two don’t always go together.”
“Try explaining that to Lauren,” Mendez said. “I tried. I felt like something you’d scrape off the sole of your shoe. She lost her daughter to this dirtbag. She doesn’t even have the peace of knowing what he did to her.”
“How’s she doing in there?” Vince asked.
“She’s furious, she’s scared. She just handed me my ass,” Mendez said. “And it wasn’t any less than I deserved—or than our system deserves, I should say. When we threaten to arrest her for protecting her own child, where’s she supposed to turn?”
“What are you going to do with her?”
Unable to sit still, he got up again and started to pace. “I don’t know. It’s up to Cal. What
can
I do?”
Dixon arrived then from an interrupted evening and came into the break room, all business, with a dark scowl on his face. He was dressed for some fund-raising dinner in a smart gray suit with a blue tie that intensified the color of his eyes.
He looked at Mendez. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
“It’s not by choice,” Mendez said.
“I don’t like that either,” Dixon snapped. “Mrs. Lawton asked for you specifically, and Ballencoa has already filed a complaint against you. Tell me Ballencoa hasn’t seen you.”
“No. Good for him. At this point I’d be happy to finish what she started.”
“Don’t even start with me, talking like that,” Dixon said. “You’re a sworn officer of the court. Act like it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Vince, what’s your role here?”
Leone got to his feet slowly, the deliberate quality of his movement immediately slowing down the hot energy in the room. “Observing,” he said. “Tony filled me in on the history. I wanted to see Ballencoa for myself.”
“And?”
“Based on what little I know and what little I’ve seen, I don’t like him,” he said. “He’s manipulative, narcissistic, vindictive—”
The sheriff looked impatient. “So far you’ve described my ex-mother-in-law.”
“Your ex-mother-in-law isn’t a sexual predator, is she?” Vince asked.
“No. That’s one thing she’s not.”
“Well, by most accounts, this guy is,” Vince said. “And he thinks he’s got you all by the balls, and that you can’t or won’t do anything about it.”
“So far, he’s right,” Mendez said. “If I’d been able to put someone on this creep—”
“What?” Dixon challenged. “We could have stopped him from taking photographs? There’s no law against taking photographs. There is, however, a law against physically assaulting someone and destroying their property.”
Agitated by his boss’s turn of conversation, Mendez held up a warning finger. “If you tell me we’re arresting Lauren Lawton and charging her for trying to protect her child, I fucking quit!”
“Don’t you threaten me, detective,” Dixon barked back. “We haven’t charged anyone with anything.”
“No,” Mendez said angrily, gesturing toward the TV monitor. “Until that piece of dirt threatens to sue again, and then we’ll all jump through our little hoops to keep him out of the county coffers. A fucking child predator. A convicted felon. And you’re more worried about him than the mother of a stolen child.”
Dixon gave him a hard look. “Rein it in, detective. I’m warning you.”
“Tony.” Vince put a hand on his shoulder. “Step back and cool down. Come on.”
“Fuck this,” Mendez growled, shrugging him off. He started for the door. “Like you said, boss, I’m not even supposed to be here.”
“Where do you think you’re going?” Dixon asked.
“I’m taking Lauren Lawton home,” he said. “She’s been through enough. If you decide Roland Ballencoa is running this outfit, you can come and arrest her yourself.”
“You’re not taking her anywhere until I’ve spoken with her,” Dixon said, following him out into the hall. “You can introduce me now.”
She was sitting exactly where Mendez had left her—on the floor in the corner with her head on her knees. She looked up at them, bored to see them. She got up slowly. Stiff from her fall, but trying to hide it.
“Mrs. Lawton,” Mendez said. “This is Sheriff Dixon.”
Dixon offered his hand. She stared at it like it might be dirty, with no intention of shaking it.
“Are you charging me with something?” she asked pointedly.
“Not at the moment,” Dixon said.
She tipped her head. “Then I’m free to go.”
“I’d like to talk to you about what happened, and about the situation with you and Mr. Ballencoa.”
“And I would like to collect my daughter and go home.”
Dixon jammed his hands at his waist and sighed. “I’m aware of the history—”
“Then you don’t need me to tell you about it, do you?”
“But you have to understand my office is in a difficult position here,” he continued. “We can’t have citizens taking the law into their own hands.”
“Are you going to tell me, then, that Roland Ballencoa is going to be arrested for stalking my daughter and me?”
Dixon frowned. “As far as I know—”
“The answer is no,” she said. “Your office hasn’t protected us, isn’t going to protect us, and I’m in more danger of being arrested than the man who kidnapped Leslie.”
“Unfortunately, Mrs. Lawton, Mr. Ballencoa has never been charged, let alone found guilty of that crime,” Dixon said. “I can’t apply the law based on what might have happened. He’s a free citizen.”
“I’m sure you’ll have his vote in the next election,” she said with contempt.
Dixon’s face reddened. He wasn’t used to having his integrity questioned, and he didn’t like it. Still, he held his temper.
“You’re new here,” he said. “You don’t know me—”
Lauren cut him off. “The fact that we’re even having this conversation tells me everything I need to know about you, Sheriff Dixon.
“If you’re going to arrest me, then do it. But if you’re so worried about your office and what people think, then I suggest you consider that your public isn’t going to be very pleased to hear that you would take the side of a child predator and probable murderer over the side of a woman who has lost most of her family to this man.
“And you might also consider that my daughter’s case is not so cold that the press has forgotten about her. So if you think you should get on some semantic high horse over who was in the wrong tonight, then you had better be prepared, because I will rain a media shitstorm down on you the likes of which you have never seen.”
Cal Dixon looked like he might choke. Mendez had never seen him at a loss for words. He watched him now grapple with his temper, his pride, his position. At the same time, Lauren Lawton stood her ground, battered and fragile yet strong as tempered steel, her eyes as bright as blue flame.
“I don’t appreciate being threatened, Mrs. Lawton,” Dixon said with carefully modulated calm. “But I understand your position, and I understand your need to protect your daughter.
“I’m going to have Detective Mendez see you home tonight,” he said. “I don’t think it would be in the interest of justice to press charges against you, though ultimately that decision is at the discretion of the district attorney.”
“Thank you,” Lauren said, though if she felt relief she didn’t show it.
Dixon turned to Mendez, his expression unreadable. “See Mrs. Lawton home.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And I will see you in my office tomorrow morning at oh eight hundred hours on the dot.”
“Yes, sir,” Mendez said, not sure which of those orders he was dreading more.
39
 
“You don’t have to take me home,” Lauren said as they left the building by a side door. Mendez directed her toward his car in the parking lot. “My car is at the sports complex.”
Her car was at the sports complex, but she had no keys, she realized. She had nothing with her because she had handed her purse off to Leah. Her purse with the gun in the side pocket. She hoped to God Leah hadn’t looked inside.
Fear went through her like a cold wind. She had given her fifteen-year-old daughter a bag with a gun in it. In the blink of an eye she saw Leah as she had been that morning—crying, upset, angry, feeling lost and alone, worried that her mother was contemplating suicide.
What about me?
She thought about the concern Anne Leone had expressed, that Leah was holding too much inside, that kids like Leah were at risk for self-destructive behavior.
Lauren stopped in her tracks. “I don’t have my keys. I dropped my purse on the tennis court. My daughter has it.”
“Where is she?”
“I sent her with her friend Wendy Morgan and Wendy’s mother.”
“Sara Morgan?” he asked.
“I don’t know where they live,” she admitted. As if she didn’t already feel like a bad mother. Not only had she sent her daughter off with a gun, she had sent her daughter home with a woman she’d only just met, not even knowing where the Morgans lived.
“I do,” Mendez said.
They rode in silence. Lauren had no interest in small talk or breaking the uncomfortable feeling that hung in the air. She didn’t care what he thought about the way she had spoken to his boss—or to him, for that matter. She was long past caring what people in law enforcement thought about her.
She was more worried about Sara Morgan. What must the woman think of her? Hauled away for assault before they could even have dinner. Wendy was Leah’s only friend here. If her mother put an end to that friendship on Lauren’s account . . .
And why wouldn’t she? If Leah was a target of a predator, then Wendy could be in danger too. Almost certainly Ballencoa would have been photographing both girls at the tennis courts. And according to Anne Leone, Wendy had already been through more than any child should have been subjected to—involved in a murder investigation, attacked by a schoolmate . . .
In her mind Lauren kept going back to Ballencoa. It was his fault. He had chosen to photograph the girls. She had only put a stop to it. He had chosen to stalk the Lawton family. She couldn’t be held responsible for his choices . . . only her own.
She had chosen to come here. She had put them all in jeopardy.
“Just so you know,” Mendez said, breaking the silence, “we
are
working on Ballencoa. We’re not just sitting around with our thumbs up our asses.”
“Yeah. I could see that tonight while he was photographing my daughter,” she returned sarcastically. “You were all over it.”
“I want him off the streets for something we can prosecute him for,” he said, holding his temper. “If we can connect him to an actual crime and put him away, we get a warrant to search his property, and maybe we find something that links him to your daughter’s case. Maybe he’s locked up long enough that the DNA technology advances and the Santa Barbara PD can test the blood sample.”
“But in the meantime he’s free to do whatever he wants. Forgive me if I don’t seem enthusiastic for your plan.”
“That’s the system we have,” he said. “We can’t lock people up just because we don’t like them. There were plenty of people in Santa Barbara who thought your husband killed your daughter. Nobody locked him up either.”

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