A small dog barked close by. A man’s not-too-distant voice tried to shush him. The dog barked again. Closer.
A sudden rush of panic left Lauren dry-mouthed and weak-kneed as a short-legged Jack Russell terrier came bounding around the side of the shed, skidding to a stop at her feet. The dog threw its head back and started barking in earnest, its front paws bouncing off the ground with each bark.
Oh, shit. Oh, shit.
She glanced between the house and the dog. If the barking woke Ballencoa, he would look out and see her. If she ran, the dog would give chase and its owner would see her trying to flee the scene dressed like a burglar—like a burglar with an illegal concealed weapon in her handbag. She would end up incarcerated while Ballencoa walked around free.
“Roscoe! Roscoe!”
The man’s voice came closer. He was trying to whisper and shout at the same time.
“Roscoe! Goddamnit, come here!”
The dog hopped backward a couple of feet. He barked at Lauren again, then turned his head in the direction of his owner, torn.
Lauren looked back up at the house.
A light came on in a window at the back.
“Roscoe!”
Oh please, oh please, oh please . . .
She closed her eyes and held her breath. When she opened her eyes again, the dog had gone.
“You stupid little shit,” the owner grumbled, punctuating his statement with the click of a leash snap. He had to be in the alley. He couldn’t have been more than twenty feet away.
Lauren slipped around the end of the building, out of sight of the house. She felt so weak she had to lean against the wall for a moment, her heart thumping crazily in her chest as she waited for the man and dog to be gone down the street. She waited for Ballencoa to come out his back door.
Had he looked out? Had he seen her in that moment she had closed her eyes?
She thought she was going to be sick. Cold sweat filmed her body and ran down between her breasts and between her shoulder blades.
When she dared to move, her legs felt like rubber beneath her. She wanted to run all the way back to her car, but knew she couldn’t run. If she ran, she would draw attention to herself. If she tried to run, she was pretty sure her legs would buckle beneath her anyway.
She forced herself to walk down the alley to the sidewalk. She willed herself to stay upright as she crossed the street. She kept her head down, kept her purse held tight against her body.
As soon as she sat down in the driver’s seat of the BMW, she had to lean over and vomit on the street. When the nausea had passed, she leaned back in the seat, as weak as a kitten, and wondered what the hell she was doing.
But even as she wondered that, she thought about the shed and what might be inside of it. She wanted to know. She wanted to get inside and see for herself. She wanted to get into the house, to go through his things and hope to find some evidence . . . of what? Her daughter’s life? Her daughter’s death?
She remembered reading about a woman in north central California who had been kidnapped by a couple in 1977 and held as a sex slave until her escape in 1984. For the first year of her captivity she was kept twenty-three hours a day locked inside a wooden box under the couple’s waterbed.
Lauren stared across the street at Ballencoa’s house and wondered if her daughter might be inside, in a box under his bed.
That was why she was there. That was why she would take the risk. The constitution might prevent law enforcement from going into Roland Ballencoa’s house, but Lauren didn’t give a shit about the constitution. She didn’t care about unlawful searches or rules of evidence. She cared about her daughter.
As she stared at the house, the front door opened and Roland Ballencoa emerged. He walked down the front steps and went to his garage. A moment later he backed out in his van and drove away.
22
Even though he worked nights, breakfast was Roland’s favorite meal of the day. He often stayed up all night, then took himself to breakfast and went to bed when he got home to sleep the morning away.
He had found a diner he liked on La Quinta. An honest-to-goodness diner with red vinyl booths and chrome tables, and waitresses in cheap pink-and-white uniforms. He liked the uniforms.
An interesting mix of people ate here. There were students—college students were inescapable in Oak Knoll, even in summer—but there were also ordinary citizens from all walks of life. The hospital was only a block away, which meant nurses came here for lunch and at the end of their shifts. He liked nurses. Young nurses.
A group of them sat in a booth across the way from him, chatting and laughing, eating their eggs. They worked the night shift and would be on their way home soon. He found it disappointing that few nurses were wearing white uniforms these days. He liked the idea of opening the button front of a tight white uniform dress. He liked the idea of sliding his hands up under the skirt. It was still a good fantasy, even if the reality was becoming baggy hospital scrubs.
Most of these nurses were older than suited him, but one looked young and sweet. He would follow her home and make notes about where she lived, if she lived alone, if she had a noisy dog. He didn’t like dogs.
The beauty of this diner was that he could come for breakfast and stay to make his notes with a bottomless cup of coffee. No one bothered him. No one cared what he was doing. He even brought his sketch pad to make drawings of the patrons—his interest, of course, being the young women, but he knew if he drew ugly older women and men as well, no one would think anything of his hobby.
He did a quick silly caricature of the nurses, giving them all big bright eyes and animated faces. When he had finished, he took it over to their table and introduced himself with an easy smile.
“Ladies, I thought you might enjoy having this.”
He held the sketch up for all of them to see. They were appropriately delighted.
He signed his initials with a flourish. ROB. They immediately began calling him Rob, thanking him. The young one gave him a shy but flirtatious look from beneath her lashes. The name on her name tag was Denise Garland.
When he returned to his table, he pulled his journal out of his messenger bag and turned to a fresh page.
Denise Garland: LPN, Mercy General Hospital. Night shift. 20–22. Straight brown hair cut in a long bob. Brown eyes. Heart-shaped face. Dimple in left cheek. Small breasts.
He blew on the page to help the ink dry, then packed up his things and left a nice tip for his waitress, Ellen.
Ellen Norman: 24, waitress, morning shift. Hair: strawberry blond, curly, worn up. Hazel eyes. Receding chin. Lives at 2491 17th Ave, apartment 514. Car: 1981 white Chevy Corsica with damage to rear driver’s-side quarter panel.
He went out to his van to wait.
23
“That plate came back to Avis,” Hicks said, coming into the break room.
Mendez was busy stirring sugar into his third cup of coffee. He was tired. After leaving Lauren Lawton he had gone back to bed but hadn’t slept, finally turning the television on to stare at infomercials for spray-on hair and Veg-O-Matics. At five thirty he gave up and went for a run followed by fifty chin-ups, a hundred crunches, and ten minutes hitting the speed bag. Now he was tired and sore, and still brooding about Lauren Lawton.
“What plate?” he asked.
“The car Mavis Whitaker saw parked in front of Ballencoa’s house in San Luis,” Hicks said. “The guy who said he was a cop.”
He selected a coffee mug and poured himself a cup, arching a brow at his partner as Mendez picked a chocolate-glazed doughnut from the opened pink bakery box on the counter. “You know you’re perpetuating a stereotype, right?”