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.

Chapter 22

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.