Down the Darkest Road ok-3 Read online

  Sudden tears burned the backs of Lauren’s eyes. She felt stupid and defeated and helpless.

  “Can I go now?” she asked in a small voice.

  Mendez gave her a long look that was like a silent lecture. She felt it on her like a ray of light, but she didn’t meet his eyes.

  Finally he handed her driver’s license back to her along with his business card.

  “If you think you see him again, don’t follow him,” he said. “Call the sheriff’s office.”

  “And tell them what?” she asked. “That I saw a man who isn’t wanted for anything shopping for groceries?”

  He let out a slow, measured sigh that might have been concession or frustration or impatience. His face gave nothing away. “Call me.”

  “Right,” she said, looking down at the card. Detective Anthony Mendez. She opened the door and got out of the car.

  “Drive safe, ma’am.”

  3

  Mendez watched Lauren Lawton walk back to her black BMW. She looked defeated and frail in a way. According to her driver’s license, she was forty-two. The photograph showed a vibrant woman with a beautiful smile, black hair, and ice-blue eyes. The woman who had been sitting in the seat next to him looked older, thinner, paler, as if the experience of losing her daughter had worn years of life out of her. He supposed it had.

  He had watched the case unfold in Santa Barbara. It was in the spring, just after Vince and Anne’s wedding, he recalled. His friends had gone off to Italy for a well-deserved honeymoon. The next day the supposed abduction of a teenage girl in Santa Barbara had led the news.

  He had been among a group from the sheriff’s office to volunteer on several searches for the girl. Between the Santa Barbara Police Department and the Santa Barbara County SO, there had already been a lot of manpower available, but search and rescue groups and volunteers from all over southern California had showed up to help.

  Their efforts had been futile. The only traces of the girl ever found had been her bicycle and a penny loafer found in a ditch alongside a quiet country road on the edge of town.

  He remembered seeing the parents from a distance at one of the searches, making a public plea for help in finding their daughter. It was a hard thing to watch—people in so much emotional agony it was as if they were being skinned alive for all the world to see.

  The case had been in the news all that summer. Then in the fall a brutal murder in Oak Knoll had taken the spotlight away, and Mendez had been immersed in running that investigation. The missing girl in Santa Barbara had faded from his attention.

  Every once in a while over the intervening years the Lawton case had come back into the spotlight on the evening news out of Santa Barbara. As far as Mendez knew, nothing had ever come of it. He had never heard of Roland Ballencoa.

  Lauren Lawton signaled and carefully pulled away from the curb. Mendez waited for a couple of cars to put distance between them, then pulled out and followed her.

  She took a right on Via Verde and drove so slowly down the residential section that one of the cars behind her honked at her, then jerked out of line and blasted past her. Mendez ignored the traffic violation. It wasn’t his job to dole out tickets. Her reckless driving had not been the reason he’d pulled Lauren Lawton over.

  The look on her face as she had rammed her shopping cart into his, and the look on her face as she had realized he wasn’t who she’d thought he was, had intrigued him. He had watched her come out of Pavilions looking pale and shaky. When she had pulled out of her parking spot and taken off, he had to follow.

  She was looking for the brown van now, he supposed. And what if she found it sitting in one of the driveways along Via Verde? Would she go up to the front door of the house expecting to find the man she believed had taken her daughter?

  He supposed so. And then what? No good scenarios came to mind. Mendez tried to put himself in her shoes. If he knew the guy who had taken his kid was walking around scot-free, what would he do?

  Track him down like a fucking dog and blow his brains out.

  He made a mental note to find out if Mrs. Lawton or her late husband owned a gun.

  Not finding the brown van, she continued down Via Verde, through the area lined with trendy boutiques and coffee shops, and on past the scenic campus of McAster College with its green lawns shaded by huge spreading oak trees.

  Mendez kept well back as they turned onto Old Mission Road and the residences became fewer and farther between. He pulled over and watched from a distance as Lauren Lawton drove to the very end of the road and into the gated driveway of a sprawling white house with elaborate flower beds in tiers down the front yard.

  The BMW disappeared into the garage.

  He checked his watch and contemplated what to do. Technically speaking, he had the day off. He was only riding around in an unmarked car because his personal vehicle had gone into the shop to have a dent taken out. He had spent a couple of hours in the morning at the courthouse to testify at a hearing. The rest of the day was his. If he wanted to spend it in Santa Barbara, he was free to do so. If he left now, he could stop in at the PD to get some questions answered, then treat himself to a nice dinner by the ocean.

  He drove back to Via Verde, bought himself a coffee, found a pay phone, called the Santa Barbara Police Department, and asked to speak with Detective Tanner.

  “Investigative Division, Detective Tanner speaking.”

  The voice belonged to a woman. It was a little hoarse and scratchy, but definitely a woman’s voice. Mendez looked at the receiver like maybe there was something wrong with it. “Detective Tanner?”

  “Yes? How can I help you?”

  “Uh . . . this is Detective Mendez in Oak Knoll.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “I have a couple of questions for you,” he said, manually shifting his brain into gear. “Regarding a case I was told you’re working.”

  “What case?”

  “The Lawton kidnapping. Lauren Lawton has recently relocated to Oak Knoll.”

  “Oh,” she said, then with great joy in her voice added: “Hallelujah!”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means better you than me, pal. Good luck with that.”

  “She’s difficult?” Mendez asked.

  Tanner’s laugh held a note of near-hysteria. “Ha! She ran one detective into early retirement, another moved to Barstow, and if I wasn’t related to a bad-ass attorney, she would have gotten me fired.”

  Maybe you deserved it, Mendez thought, not liking her attitude. Maybe the cops in SB spent too much time surfing. Maybe they were a bunch of incompetent assholes.

  “I’d like to get some background on the case,” he said. “Are you around for a while?”

  “I’m here.”

  “I’ll be there in an hour.”

  The view coming over the Santa Ynez Mountains to the Santa Barbara coastline never failed to take his breath away. The sky was clear and as blue as the ocean. The Channel Islands were plain in the distance, and Santa Barbara stretched along the beach like a mosaic necklace.

  It was a hell of a thing to live in this part of California and have to pick which incredible scenery to look at every day—the coast or the lush valleys that lay between the mountain ranges.

  There had been a time when all Mendez had thought about was relocating to Virginia to have a career as a profiler for the FBI. He had spent some weeks there in the early eighties attending the FBI National Academy course. There he had met his mentor, Vince Leone, who was nothing short of a legend with the Bureau, first in the Behavioral Sciences Unit, then the Investigative Support Unit.

  Vince had encouraged him to become an agent, but Mendez had returned to Oak Knoll, partly out of a sense of obligation to his boss, but partly because he loved it there. His family was around. He loved the town and the area and all it had to offer. Then Vince had ended up coming to Oak Knoll for the See-No-Evil murders, and had never left.

  Retired from the Bureau, Leone
now worked as a consultant to law enforcement agencies all over the world and raked in major bucks as a speaker. He pulled Mendez in on cases when he could, furthering his education. Tony knew that when he was ready to leave the SO, Vince would take him full-time.

  All that and he got to stay in a place he loved. He was a lucky guy.

  The streets of Santa Barbara were busy with residents and tourists. Mendez found his way to East Figueroa, parked, and went into the big white two-story building that housed the police department and went in search of Detective Tanner.

  He thought of himself as a modern kind of a guy, but he had to admit he hadn’t come across any women in detective divisions, and Tanner had come as a surprise to him.

  In recent years, the journals had been full of articles about women fighting for equality in what had always been the man’s world of law enforcement. He remembered guys at his own SO having their noses out of joint over Sheriff Dixon hiring female deputies. It was rarer still to see women in plainclothes divisions, and the stuff of headlines when a woman made it to the top ranks.

  For the most part, he didn’t see a problem with a woman being a detective. The job was mostly mental, not physical. But he had his doubts about a female detective sitting down across the table from the kind of scumbags detectives routinely had to question.

  As he came into the investigative division the door to an interview room opened and a petite blonde woman backed out, pointing her finger and shouting at whoever was still in the room.

  “—and you’re nothing but a fucking piece of dirt, you know that? You think you can sit there and snicker at me like you’re fucking twelve years old? Think again, asshole! Do that to me again and I’ll kick your fucking balls up to your ears!”

  Mendez stared like a deer in headlights.

  The woman had a badge clipped to her belt at the waist of a trim pair of black trousers. The black T-shirt she wore fit her like a second skin. Her dishwater blond hair was pulled back into a ponytail.

  She slammed the door to the interview room and turned to look square at Mendez. Her eyes were as green as a cat’s.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” she said with that same slightly hoarse voice he’d heard over the phone. “Can I help you?”

  “Tony Mendez,” he said.

  She had the grace to blush a little—or maybe that flush on her cheeks was still anger. Hard to say.

  She stuck a hand out at him and squeezed his fingers with the grip of a nutcracker. “Danni Tanner. Sorry you had to hear that.”

  “Interesting technique,” Mendez commented. “You got a tough one in there?”

  The door to the interview room opened again and a tall guy in a rumpled suit came out with a smirk on his face.

  Tanner glared at him. “Wipe that fucking smirk off your face.”

  “Go take a Midol.”

  “Fuck you and your whole fucking family, Morino.”

  “Mor-on-o,” she muttered half under her breath as Morino casually gave her the finger and walked away.

  Tanner made a face of utter disgust, then turned back to Mendez. “My partner,” she said. “How’d I get so fucking lucky? Come with me.”

  They walked past her desk, where she snagged a cream-colored raw silk blazer off the back of a chair. She shrugged into it as they went down a hall to a storage room that was lined with cardboard file boxes. There had to be fifty cubic feet of boxes, all of them labeled LAWTON, LESLIE.

  “You want background?” Tanner said, gesturing to the boxes like they were a glamorous game show prize. “Knock yourself out, slick.”

  “Wow,” Mendez said. “I was thinking to start with a conversation.”

  Tanner gave him a long look, sizing him up, then checked her watch.

  “Okay,” she said with a nod. “I’ll grab a couple of files and you can buy me a drink. If you want to talk more, you can buy me dinner. Let’s go.”

  4

  “I found a dead body once.”

  Leah looked over at her new friend, speechless. It had taken her a month to tell Wendy that her sister had been abducted. She had dreaded telling her because people always looked at her differently once they knew. They looked at her with pity, and sometimes with something almost like suspicion, like maybe there was something wrong with her or maybe whatever she had was catching. Wendy hadn’t even blinked. Her response had been: “Wow, that sucks.”

  They had met at the barn. One of the only bright spots in moving to Oak Knoll had been her mother allowing Leah to become a working student at the Gracidas’ ranch for the summer.

  Felix and Maria Gracida were family friends through polo. Felix, who had been a good friend of her father’s, had a polo school. Maria trained and competed in the sport of dressage, and ran a business boarding horses and giving riding lessons. Wendy came for lessons twice a week.

  They were riding in the hills above Rancho Gracidas, where miles of trails had been carved out and maintained by the Gracidas. Leah was on Jump Up, a sleek, seal brown Thoroughbred mare owned by one of the boarders. It was Leah’s job to exercise the horse while the owner was vacationing in Italy. Wendy rode a quiet little bay gelding called Professor, one of Maria Gracida’s lesson horses.

  Even though she was a year younger than Leah, Wendy was cool. Cooler than Leah imagined she would ever be. Wendy was always in the latest fashion. Her mermaid’s mane of blond hair was always done in some style Madonna favored. Leah lived in riding breeches and polo shirts, her straight dark hair pulled back into a simple ponytail.

  Her sister, Leslie, had been the cool one, the popular one, the center of attention. Leah didn’t like to call attention to herself. She’d never really had the opportunity, at any rate.

  She had been twelve when Leslie disappeared. Leah had lost her big sister, but in a way Leslie had become larger than life in her absence. Every day was about Leslie. Where was Leslie? Who had taken Leslie? Was Leslie dead or alive? Every day of their lives had been about Leslie and the search for Leslie.

  Leah had stayed in the background—both by her parents’ design and by her own choice.

  “When I was in fifth grade,” Wendy went on, “I was walking home from school with a friend. We were cutting through Oakwoods Park and this creepy kid, Dennis Farman, started chasing us, and we ended up practically falling on a dead body.”

  “Oh my God,” Leah said. “That’s horrible!”

  “It was. It was gross and freaky and scary.”

  “Why was the person dead?”

  “She was murdered by a serial killer who turned out to be my best friend’s dad.”

  “No way!”

  “Way.”

  “Oh my God! That’s crazy!”

  And in a totally sick way, fantastic. Not fantastic that the person had been murdered, or that Wendy’s friend’s dad was a serial killer, but that something equally bizarre had happened in Wendy’s life as had happened in Leah’s. She didn’t have to feel like such a freak. Wendy had gone through something insane too.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “It’s a long story,” Wendy said, “but Tommy’s dad went to prison.”

  “That has to be tough on your friend.”

  “I suppose so. But his mother took him and left town, and no one ever heard from them again. Nobody knows where they went,” she said. “I always thought I would hear from him, you know, like a postcard or a phone call or something, but I never have.”

  She looked over at Leah. Her eyes were bright blue like cornflowers. “You must wonder about your sister all the time.”

  “Yeah,” Leah said, though that wasn’t exactly true.

  Most of the time she tried hard not to think about Leslie. It was too painful. It was too upsetting to imagine what might have happened to her sister or what was happening to her even now. Those thoughts came to her often enough in dreams and nightmares.

  Sometimes she imagined the worst, that the man who had taken Leslie had done terrible things to her, then killed her and dumped her body some
place to rot. Sometimes she imagined her sister was living an exciting life in some exciting place, and that she had amnesia, and that was why they hadn’t heard from her in all these years.

  People got amnesia all the time on the soap operas.

  It probably didn’t happen in real life, though. In fact, her mother had told her in no uncertain terms that it didn’t happen, and that it hadn’t happened to Leslie.

  A horse whinnied in the distance and the horses the girls were riding picked their heads up higher and pricked their ears. The ranch was just below them, a quarter of a mile or so by the trail. Their ride was almost done.

  “Do you think a lot about finding the dead woman?” Leah asked. “Like, do you have nightmares and stuff?”

  “Sometimes. Do you?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “You should meet Anne,” Wendy said.

  “Who’s Anne?”

  “Anne Leone. She was my fifth-grade teacher, but now she does counseling and stuff. Anne’s cool. Tommy’s dad tried to kill her, but she got away. She knows what it’s like to go through sick stuff like that. And she really listens.

  “She’s picking me up today,” Wendy said. “I’ll introduce you.”

  “Why is she picking you up?”

  “I babysit for her. It’s date night for Anne and Vince. They’re the coolest couple.”

  They rode into the stable yard, greeted by half a dozen dogs of different sizes, shapes, and colors, a mixed family of Jack Russell terriers, Welsh corgis, and Australian cattle dogs, all happily wagging their tails and announcing the arrival of the riders.

  The Gracida ranch wasn’t fancy by any means. The stables were simple, clean, and open, two different U-shaped stucco buildings set around a courtyard with a fountain in the center. The horses’ stalls looked out on the courtyard. One of the barns housed Maria’s horses and the clients’ horses. The other housed Felix’s polo ponies.

  Wendy hopped down off Professor and handed his reins to one of the grooms, flashing him a sunny smile. Leah dismounted and led Jump Up to a grooming stall to see to the mare’s care herself.