Down the Darkest Road Read online

  She was forty-two years old, in the prime of her life. But the face that looked back at her from the mirror appeared so much older to her. Her skin was sallow, and lines flanked her mouth like a pair of parentheses. Gray streaked her once-black hair. She ran a comb through it and briefly considered having it colored. The thought was dismissed.

  She didn’t deserve to look good. She didn’t deserve to take time for herself. At any rate, she had earned every one of those gray strands. She wore them with a certain amount of perverse pride.

  Before Leslie had gone missing, Lauren had shown as much vanity as any average woman her age. She had liked to shop, always had the latest fashions. Now she pulled on jeans and a black T-shirt that was too big for her, slicked her hair back into a ponytail, and left the house in a pair of big sunglasses and no makeup.

  With a population of around thirty thousand, Oak Knoll was what Lauren thought of as a “boutique town.” Picturesque, charming, affluent. Not too big, not too small. The downtown was built around a pedestrian plaza studded with oak trees and lined on both sides with hip coffee shops, bookstores, art galleries, and restaurants. To the south and west of the plaza were the college and the beautiful old neighborhoods that surrounded it.

  Sissy Bristol had graduated from McAster in the sixties. One of the most prestigious private schools in the country, McAster was especially renowned for its music program. And it was that mix of the academic and the artistic communities that had drawn her back to Oak Knoll when she and Bump had decided on a country house.

  Located about an hour’s drive inland from Santa Barbara, and an hour and a half north and west of Los Angeles, Oak Knoll attracted well-educated retirees with disposable incomes and young professionals from the northernmost suburbs looking for a quiet, safe place to raise their families.

  The result was a healthy economy, an entrepreneurial spirit, excellent services and schools.

  Even the grocery stores were upscale. Lauren parked in the freshly blacktopped lot of the new Pavilions market with its stacked stone pillars and tinted windows. She grabbed a cart and wheeled it inside, where a staggering array of fresh floral displays greeted and tempted customers.

  Clever marketing. Begin with a bouquet, set a beautiful table, buy a bottle of wine. Why cook? Select something gourmet-prepared in the deli section.

  Lauren succumbed happily. An orzo salad. Poached salmon with dill. A fresh fruit tart from the bakery.

  Leah had recently decided to become a vegetarian, but Lauren insisted she at least keep fish and eggs in her diet for the protein. In turn, Leah had made Lauren promise to eat bread every night at dinner because she worried her mother was too thin. A fresh round loaf of sourdough went in the cart.

  Dinner was their declared peacetime. Nearing sixteen, Leah had not been in favor of the move to Oak Knoll. She was angry about leaving her friends and felt as if her mother hadn’t taken her feelings into account, which wasn’t true.

  Lauren had taken into account the fact that in Santa Barbara her youngest would always be looked on as the sister of an abducted child. She would always be the surviving child of a tragic family. Poor girl. What a shame. The taint of pity for what had happened would be a part of everything she ever did or achieved.

  Those were Lauren’s admitted thoughts/reasons/excuses for uprooting her youngest and bringing her here. That this year Leah would turn sixteen—the same age Leslie had been when she was taken—was also a reason was something she kept to herself.

  She had read somewhere that sick minds were drawn to significant dates—anniversaries of their past crimes, for instance. The milestone birthday of a victim’s sister didn’t seem like a stretch for the kind of man who had taken Leslie. There would be some kind of sick thrill in it.

  Did he know when Leah’s birthday was? Had he seen her on the news after he had taken Leslie, and the family had been in the media spotlight? Leah’s age had been mentioned in the newspapers. Journalists filled column inches with details like that.

  Santa Barbara architect Lance Lawton, 39 . . . his wife, Lauren, 38 . . . a younger daughter, 12 years old . . .

  Of course he had watched it all unfold on the news, in the papers. Four years had passed since he had taken Leslie. Had he kept tabs on them? Lauren was sure that he had. Did he know they had moved to Oak Knoll? Could he be here now? In this store?

  He had stalked Leslie with no one knowing. He had taken her and had gotten away with it. He had stalked the family after the abduction. No one had been able to catch him at it. Why wouldn’t he do it again?

  They knew who he was. The police, the sheriff’s department—they knew with ninety-percent certainty who he was. Lauren knew. She believed it with everything in her. But there was no evidence to prove it. They had nothing but conjecture and supposition. It was as if her daughter had been taken by an evil magician who had waved a wand and made her disappear. He walked around free, without consequence. Lauren was the one in prison.

  What if he came back into their lives? What if he decided he wanted Leah?

  A fist of fear pushed its way up her throat. The sensation of being watched crawled up the back of her neck. She turned quickly and looked behind her.

  A stock boy was stacking boxes of crackers on a display. He glanced at her.

  “Can I help you, ma’am?”

  Lauren swallowed and found her voice. “No. Thank you.”

  She turned at the end of the aisle and caught a glimpse of a man with shoulder-length dark hair turning two aisles down. Her breath caught. Her heart jumped. A million thoughts shot through her brain like machine gun fire as she turned down the next aisle and hurried to the end of it.

  Is it him?

  What will I do?

  Will I scream?

  Will people come running?

  What will I say to them?

  She took a left and another left, and ran her cart headlong into his.

  The man jumped back with a cry. “What the hell?”

  Lauren stared at him, speechless.

  The narrow face and hooded dark eyes—

  No. Oh, no.

  This man was stocky and Hispanic with a wide jaw. He wore a mustache. His hair was short.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, coming around the cart.

  “Is everything all right?” someone else asked.

  Their voices seemed to come from the end of a tunnel.

  “I’m so sorry. I’m really sorry.”

  Her own voice seemed to come from the end of the same tunnel. Her hands felt numb on the handle of the shopping cart. Her legs felt like water.

  “Are you all right, ma’am?”

  The store manager loomed over her.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, hyperventilating. She was sweating and cold at the same time. “I wasn’t looking where I was going. I’m so sorry. Do you have a ladies’ room?”

  “In customer service.”

  Before he could say anything more, she grabbed her purse out of the cart and hurried past him. In the restroom she went into a stall and sat on the toilet with her bag in her lap, trembling, blinking back tears, trying to calm her breathing. Her heart was pounding. She felt light-headed. She thought she might get sick to her stomach.

  What had she been thinking?

  Had she really seen him? Had she imagined him? Was he in the store? Had she simply turned down the wrong aisle?

  What would she have done if the man she hit head-on with her grocery cart had turned out to be the man she believed had stolen her daughter? Would she have screamed? Would she have attacked him? Would the police have come and taken her away?

  No answers came as she sat there listening to the piped-in music.

  The bathroom door swung open and a woman’s voice called out. “Ma’am? The manager sent me in. Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. Thank you.”

  She waited for the woman to leave, then let herself out of the stall and left the store. Her hands were trembling as she dug her car keys out of
her purse. It was all she could do to keep from running to the car.

  She felt like a fool. Dinner was forgotten. She started the engine and sat there letting the air-conditioning blow on her to cool the flush of embarrassment from her skin.

  Outside, the world was going on. People walked by, went into the store, came out of the store. They didn’t look at her. They didn’t know what she’d done ten minutes ago. They didn’t know what she’d gone through four years ago, and every year since—every day since. They didn’t care. Her life did not touch theirs.

  Pull it together, Lauren.

  She did a good job of it for the most part. The average person looking at her would never have suspected she lived on the ragged edge of sanity much of the time. Just as the average person would never have looked at their neighbor and suspected his thoughts were full of dark desires of kidnapping, torture, murder . . .

  He was such a quiet guy . . .

  Watching the people of Oak Knoll go on about their business mesmerized her after a while, like watching ants come and go from an anthill. She turned her thoughts back to the fact that she still had to do something about dinner.

  She couldn’t bring herself to go back into Pavilions. Ralphs market was just a few blocks away. Or maybe it would be wiser to simply call for a pizza or something. Retreat, regroup, have a drink or two, put this afternoon behind her. Maybe tomorrow she would be able to go out in public without attacking someone with a shopping cart.

  She took a big deep breath and let it out with the idea of clearing her head. As she tried to let go the last of the tension, a van drove slowly past her. An unremarkable brown panel van. The driver turned his head and looked directly at her, and Lauren’s heart stopped as she met the hooded dark eyes of Roland Ballencoa.

  The man who had taken her daughter.

  2

  The van kept going. The driver didn’t stop, didn’t slow down, didn’t speed up. He seemed not to recognize her.

  Lauren’s pulse was pounding in her ears, roaring in her ears. She felt like she had been suddenly submerged in water. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t breathe. The imagined pressure threatened to crush her chest wall.

  She didn’t trust herself to believe what she thought she’d seen. Was it really him this time? Or had her memory once again superimposed Roland Ballencoa’s face on another man’s body?

  The van was waiting to pull out onto the street. She couldn’t see the driver from this angle.

  What if it was him? What if he was on his way home with a six-pack of beer and a box of frozen lasagna, just like anybody else?

  As the van rolled out of the parking lot and into traffic, Lauren threw her car in gear and pulled out, not noticing that she nearly hit a woman with a cart full of groceries.

  She needed to know.

  She turned in front of several teenagers on the sidewalk and hit the gas to make it onto the street before she could lose sight of the van.

  He was at the intersection already, turning left.

  Lauren pulled into the turn lane two cars behind him, and made the left turn after the light had already gone red. Horns blasted at her.

  If it was him, he had looked directly at her and hadn’t reacted at all. Did the mother of his victim mean so little to him that he couldn’t be bothered to recognize her?

  Raw emotions coursed through Lauren like a tide of acid. Anger, fear, outrage, hate, disbelief, astonishment—all of it flooded through her like the swirling wave of a tsunami.

  The van was turning again. Lauren wanted to blast past the two cars in front of her so she couldn’t lose him.

  Even as the thought formed in her mind, a burgundy sedan came alongside her. She shot the driver a dirty look and her head swam.

  The Hispanic man she had crashed her shopping cart into at the store. He was chasing her down for ramming into him in the pasta aisle. This had to be a dream, some crazy, absurd bad dream.

  He gave her a hard glare, stabbing a forefinger in the direction of the curb. For the first time the flashing light on the dashboard registered.

  Oh my God. He’s a cop.

  A cop was pulling her over while she was trying to chase down the man who had abducted her daughter. If that was true, this was no dream but a nightmare.

  She looked ahead to catch a last glimpse of the brown van as it turned right and disappeared down the street, wishing she could somehow reach out with a giant arm and pick it up like a toy. At the same time, the sane part of her brain moved her hand to the turn signal, and she pulled her car to the curb.

  The burgundy sedan pulled in behind her.

  Lauren sat there, watching in her rearview mirror as the driver got out, at the same time struggling with the notion that Roland Ballencoa had escaped her.

  Was he alone? Did he have Leslie here? Was he hunting for other victims?

  Or was the guy in the van just a local plumber picking up dinner for his wife and kids?

  Which would mean she was crazy.

  “I’m Detective Mendez with the sheriff’s office,” the cop said, holding his ID up to her open window. “Can I see your license and registration, please?”

  She fumbled with her wallet, hands shaking as she pulled out her driver’s license and handed it to him. The registration was in the glove compartment. She couldn’t remember what it looked like.

  “I’m going to ask you to step out of the car, ma’am.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lauren said, getting out. “I’m really not a bad driver—with a car or a shopping cart.”

  Detective Mendez was not amused. He had that flat, hard cop look she had come to know too well, like a closed steel door with no window.

  “Have you been drinking, ma’am?”

  “No.” Not yet, though a good stiff vodka would have been welcome.

  “Ms. Lawton, you seem to be a little erratic today. Are you on medication of some kind?”

  Prozac, Ativan, Valium, Trazodone . . . The list of pharmaceuticals in her medicine cabinet went on.

  “No,” she said. She hadn’t taken any. She tried not to during the day. Most of them made her sleepy, and sleep brought nothing but nightmares.

  The detective looked her in the eyes, gauging the size of her pupils.

  Had she taken something and not remembered? Her thinking seemed to be taking place in the midst of a thick fog in her brain. Had she eaten lunch? She couldn’t remember. Probably not. Maybe her blood sugar was out of whack. Maybe this entire afternoon could have been avoided with a piece of cheese.

  “I watched you leave the parking lot,” he said. “You violated about half a dozen laws and endangered the public. Do you have an explanation for that?”

  “I thought I saw someone I knew,” she said, astonished at how stupid that sounded even to herself.

  The detective arched a thick brow. He was good-looking, forty-ish. He looked like a straight arrow. His pants were pressed. He wore a jacket and tie.

  “And you were going to chase that person down in your car?” Mendez asked. “We don’t do that here, ma’am.”

  “Of course not,” she said. “We don’t do that in Santa Barbara either.”

  This is real life, Lauren, not The French Connection. Car chases are for the movies. What the hell is wrong with you?

  Detective Mendez seemed at a loss. “Let’s have a seat in my car.”

  He used his radio to call in her driver’s license, speaking in cop code, no doubt asking for reports of past lunatic behavior. There had to be a thick file on her in Santa Barbara. She was well known at both the police and the sheriff’s departments. Anyone there would tell him she was a bitch and a pain in the ass—titles she wore with pride.

  “What brings you to Oak Knoll, Ms. Lawton?”

  “My daughter and I just moved here.”

  “What do you do for a living?”

  “I’m an interior decorator.”

  “And your husband?”

  He had caught sight of her ring finger. She had never taken off her wedd
ing band. It didn’t matter that Lance was gone. She would always be married to him.

  “My husband is dead.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She never knew what to say to that. Thank you sounded stupid. She didn’t appreciate automatic sympathy from people she didn’t know, people who had never known her husband. What was the point?

  Some unintelligible lingo crackled over the radio. Mendez acknowledged it with a brisk “10-4.”

  “Your name is familiar.”

  Lauren laughed without humor. This was where conversations always took a turn for the worse on so many levels. “Well, I am famous. Or infamous—depending on your point of view. My daughter Leslie was abducted four years ago.”

  Mendez nodded as the memory came to him. “The case is still open.”

  “Yes.”

  It sounded so clinical when he said it, so sterile. The case. Like what had happened was a book that could be opened and studied and closed again and put away on a shelf. Her reality was so much messier than that, ragged and torn and shredded, oozing and dripping. The case was still open. Her daughter was still missing.

  “You said you just moved here. Do you have friends in Oak Knoll?”

  “I hardly know anyone here.”

  “Then who did you think you saw?” he asked. “Who were you trying to follow?”

  “The man who took my daughter.”

  He was taken aback by that. “Excuse me?”

  “His name is Roland Ballencoa. I thought I saw him in the supermarket,” Lauren said, “and then he drove right past me in the parking lot.”

  “What was he driving?”

  “A brown van.”

  “Did you get a plate number?”

  “No.”

  “If you know he took your daughter, why isn’t he in jail?”

  Defeat weighed down on her in the form of exhaustion. The adrenaline rush had crashed. He wasn’t going to help her. No one would help her. Roland Ballencoa was a free man.