He and Hicks had spoken to Ballencoa the following day. Ballencoa had claimed not to know Lauren was in Oak Knoll. They hadn’t believed him because Lauren had given the impression Ballencoa had followed her to Oak Knoll, not the other way around. It had to have been the day after that when Lauren found the note in her mailbox: Did you miss me?

Tanner watched him closely. She got up and came around the table to stand beside him. She looked over the time line as he had done, but she didn’t see it.

She looked up at him. “What?”

“If Lauren followed Ballencoa here, and not the other way around, how did he know where to find her to leave the photograph ?”

Chapter 48

48

Lauren followed Ballencoa to a 7-Eleven near the college, where he parked his van, got out, and used a pay phone on the side of the building.

Who would he call? Why wouldn’t he call from home? She tried to remember if she had seen a telephone as she had prowled through the house. Of course there must have been a phone. Who didn’t have a telephone in 1990? Why would he use a pay phone?

Because he was a criminal, she supposed. Calls made from a pay phone would never come back to haunt him. There would be no phone records definitively tied to him or to his house.

Who would a man like Roland Ballencoa call anyway? He wasn’t the kind of person who had friends. She couldn’t imagine him having family, although she supposed he must have had. While he seemed like something that had hatched from a serpent’s egg, she knew he had had a mother. She knew he had been raised by an aunt who had ended up dead.

Lauren had read the story in the newspaper when the Santa Barbara police had named Ballencoa a person of interest in her daughter’s disappearance. She had taken it upon herself to find out everything she could about him, and had found a couple of old newspaper articles on microfiche at the library. She remembered the headline: NEPHEW QUESTIONED IN SUSPICIOUS DEATH.

Ballencoa had been just out of jail for his first sex offense. He had been questioned. Nothing had come of it. That had probably been his first success as a killer. Not only had he gotten away with it, he had profited from it.

He had lived most of his life without consequences. She was going to put an end to that, one way or another.

She had thrown her canvas tote with her burglar tools on the floor of the passenger’s side. She had his journals. If they didn’t prove outright that he had taken Leslie—or some other girl—surely his own writing would link him somehow to some crime.