Down the Darkest Road Read Online Free PDF Page B

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