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.”

Chapter 59

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.