Down the Darkest Road (47 page)

Authors: Tami Hoag

BOOK: Down the Darkest Road

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The doors slammed shut on the back of the van like the lid coming down on a coffin.

“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.

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?”

Even as she spoke, Lauren had the box cutter in her free hand. Lying facedown with her left wrist bound to the U-bolt, she had to twist awkwardly to get onto her right side so she could reach their bound wrists.

She glanced at the curtain, which gaped open enough that she caught the odd glimpse of their driver. His concentration was on the winding road. Lauren had no idea where he was taking them, but the road was on an incline, with turns and switchbacks.

Into the mountains. Somewhere remote. Somewhere he and Greg Hewitt could feel free to do whatever they wanted—rape them, torture them. Ballencoa would take photographs, recording their degradation and their deaths.

How many times in the last four years had she imagined what this monster had done to Leslie? Thousands. Now she would know firsthand. In a strange, sick way, she would have satisfaction. She would have the closure she had prayed for. The not knowing would be over.

At the same time, the idea that she would have to witness Ballencoa do those things to Leah was more than she could stand. She was willing to pay a price with her own life, not Leah’s.

She glanced again at the curtain, then put her attention to her task, trying to cut through the zip ties without slitting either of their wrists.

One gave way, and then the other.

“Don’t move,” she cautioned Leah.

Even with Hewitt partially incapacitated, they were still two men against two females much smaller than they were. She and Leah would need the element of surprise on their side.

Lauren worked the screwdriver from beneath her and passed it discreetly into her daughter’s hands.

“If you get a chance to use this, go for the head, go for the eyes,” she instructed. “If you get the chance to run, you run. Do you understand me? Don’t worry about me. If you can run, save yourself. Promise me.”

Big crystalline tears welled in Leah’s eyes. “But, Mommy—”

Lauren stared hard at her child. “Promise me.”

Leah nodded.

“I love you,” Lauren whispered, fighting tears of her own. “I’m so sorry, Leah. I’m so, so sorry.”

The van slowed and turned and lurched over rough ground, eventually rolling to a stop.

Ballencoa got out. Lauren’s heart was lodged in her throat. She heard another car door and the unintelligible voices of the two men.

How could she not have seen Greg Hewitt for what he was? Why hadn’t she questioned who he was when he had come to her?

Because she hadn’t cared. He had been a means to her end.

Literally, she thought.

The back doors of the van swung open.

Lauren turned her head and looked out, seeing sky and scrub and rocks. They were truly in the middle of nowhere.

Hewitt had parked the BMW just ten or fifteen feet back from the van. His skin looked gray as he came toward them. There was relatively little blood from the wound in his shoulder, but he cradled his half-useless right arm against his side, bent at the elbow. The hand was a gruesome flag of tattered, bloody flesh with shards of bone protruding.

At least she had the satisfaction of knowing she had damaged him.

“I’m not feeling so good,” he said to Ballencoa.

Ballencoa ignored him. His eyes were on Leah.

“I get the daughter first,” he said, climbing into the back of the van on his knees. He looked down at Lauren, his face the bony mask of pure evil. “Did you hear that, Mommy? I’m going to fuck your daughter and you’re going to watch.”

Lauren glared at him.

“I wonder how she’ll be, compared to her sister,” he mused. “That one was sweet. She liked it. She wanted it.”

Lauren wanted to scream at him. She wanted to attack him. She wanted to cut the tongue from his head and shove it down his throat.

“Oh yeah,” he said, his voice thick at the memory. “She was hot and wet and tight. She screamed and screamed and screamed.”

“Where is she?” Lauren demanded, as if she had any power at all. “What did you do with her?”

Ballencoa looked down at her and smiled like a snake. “It would spoil my fun to tell you. Do you think maybe she’s still alive? Do you think maybe I kept her?”

“Hey, Rol.” Hewitt’s voice broke the moment. “I’m serious.”

“Go sit down, then,” Ballencoa snapped over his shoulder. “What do you want me to do? I’m not a doctor. I can’t help you.”

“He’s going to die,” Lauren said.

Ballencoa smiled down at her. “So are you.”

“I want the chopper in the air before we lose any more daylight,” Mendez said. He stood with Tanner and Dixon in Lauren Lawton’s driveway.

The crime scene unit had arrived and parked its fancy new RV outside the gate on Old Mission Road. The evidence techs were like a swarm of ants in the house, and on the driveway, photographing, videotaping, collecting blood and tissue samples.

Mendez didn’t want to stop to imagine whose blood or whose tissue. Lauren’s Walther had been abandoned on the table in the great room. Two spent .380 shell casings were on the floor. He hoped she had fired the shots. He hoped she had hit something. He hoped at least some of that blood belonged to Houston or Ballencoa.

Even if she hit one or both of the men, the fact remained that Lauren and her daughter were gone.

“They could be long gone by now,” Dixon said.

“We can’t assume that,” Mendez said, knowing it was entirely possible. If Ballencoa had taken Lauren and her daughter, he had only to drive to the 101 freeway and be gone in either direction—north or south. They could have been well on their way toward Mexico or Canada or anywhere else.

He had alerted the CHP. Every highway patrol officer, every county cop for fifty miles around was looking for Ballencoa’s van and Lauren’s BMW. The CHP choppers were already in the sky cruising the big artery that ran California’s traffic from one end of the state to the other.

“Ballencoa’s too smart to take the freeway,” Tanner said.

Which left the mountain roads. Miles and miles of them. County roads and fire roads and pig trails that cut back into the wilderness. Rugged hills and deep canyons ran up and down the county on either side. It could take days to find a body. It could take years. It could take forever.

No one had ever found any trace of Leslie Lawton. Mendez hoped to God her mother and sister didn’t write the same ending to their story. The chances of him or anyone else riding to their rescue in time were slim to none.

“I want to kill her,” Greg Hewitt said. “Let me do her now. Before I fucking pass out.”

Ballencoa sighed impatiently and climbed back out of the van. The men began to argue over who would be allowed to commit what atrocity in what order.

Lauren wrapped her fingers around the handle of her weapon.

“Remember what I told you,” she whispered to Leah.

Her daughter nodded, clutching the screwdriver close to her chest.

“Where are my journals?” Ballencoa asked his cohort.