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.”
59
“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.
60
“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.
“They’re in a bag. She’s laying on it.”
“I don’t want blood on them.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake,” Hewitt groused, pushing himself away from the car. “I’ll get the goddamn books. I told you you’re an idiot for keeping them.”
Lauren could hear him breathing hard, as if he’d been running. Please let him pass out, she thought. If Hewitt could be taken out of the equation, they might have a chance.
“I don’t care what you think,” Ballencoa said. “I’ll get them myself.”
He came back inside the van, muttering, a wicked long hunting knife in his hand.