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Authors: Tami Hoag

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BOOK: Down the Darkest Road
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“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 someplace 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.
Leslie would have been the Lawton sister tossing the reins with a smile. She had always been in the spotlight. She was a dancer. She was a singer. She was an actress. Leslie had been the star of everything. She couldn’t just sing in the choir; she had to be the soloist. She couldn’t just try out for the school play; she had to be the leading lady. It wasn’t enough for Leslie to ride; she had to play polo like Daddy.
Leah was happier caring for the horses and quietly studying dressage for the satisfaction of doing it well, not to ride in the show ring. She was content to sing in the chorus, to have a nonspeaking role in the class play. Life was calmer that way.
BOOK: Down the Darkest Road
12.37Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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