The door to room 3 opened and Dr. Martha Fallon stepped out, pulling the door closed behind her. She smiled despite the circumstances.
“Hey, Renée,” she said.
“Martha,” Ballard said. “No holiday for you, huh?”
“I guess when rape takes a holiday, we’ll get one, too. Sorry, that sounded trite and I didn’t mean it that way.”
“How is Cynthia?”
“She prefers Cindy. She’s, uh, well, she’s on the dark side of the moon.”
Ballard had heard Fallon use the phrase before. The dark side of the moon was where people lived who had been through what Cindy Carpenter had just been through. Where a few dark hours changed everything about every hour that would come after. The place that only the people who had been through it understood.
Life was never the same.
“You may have heard — she bathed,” Fallon said. “We didn’t get anything, not that it really matters.”
Ballard took that last part to be a reference to the backlog of rape kits waiting to be opened at the Forensics Unit for DNA typing and other evidentiary analysis. That fact alone seemed to stand for where the department and half of society, let alone Officer McGee, located sexual assault on the spectrum of serious crime. Every few years, there was a political outcry and money was found to process the backlog of rape cases. But then the furor subsided and the cases started backing up again. It was a cycle that never ended.
Fallon’s report was no surprise to Ballard. There had been no DNA recovered in the other two Midnight Men cases either. The unknown perpetrators planned and executed their crimes carefully. The cases were connected simply by modus operandi and the rarity of a tag team pair of rapists. It was in fact so rare that it had its own acronym, MOSA — multiple offender sexual assault.
“Are you finished?” Ballard asked. “Can I talk to her?”
“Yes, I told her you were here,” Fallon said.
“How is she?”
Ballard knew the victim wasn’t doing well. Her question referred to the level of psychological trauma within the range known to Fallon from treating thousands of rape survivors over the years, with stranger rapes being the most difficult to deal with.
“She’s not good,” Fallon said. “But you’re in luck, because right now she’s angry, and that’s a good time to talk. Once she has more time to think, it will be more difficult. She’ll pull into her shell.”
“Right,” Ballard said. “I’ll go in.”
“I’ll get her some take-home clothes,” Fallon said. “I assumed you would take her walk-in clothes and bagged them.”
The women went in opposite directions. Ballard moved to the door to room 3 but stood outside for a moment and read what Officer Black had put down on the FI card he had filled out while transporting Cindy Carpenter to the RTC.
Carpenter was twenty-nine years old, divorced, and the manager of the Native Bean coffee shop on Hillhurst Avenue. Ballard suddenly realized she might recognize this victim because the coffee shop was in her neighborhood in Los Feliz, and while Ballard had only moved in a few months prior, Native Bean had become her go-to spot to pick up coffee and an occasional blueberry muffin in the mornings after work, especially if she wanted to stave off sleep and head to the ocean.
Ballard knocked lightly on the door and entered. Cindy Carpenter was sitting up on an examination table and still in a gown. Her clothes, even though she had dressed after bathing, had been collected as evidence and were in a brown paper bag on the examination room counter. It was protocol and the bag had been sealed by Dr. Fallon. There was a second evidence bag in which Black and McGee had had the presence of mind to place the nightgown Carpenter had on when attacked as well as the sheets, blanket, and pillowcases from her bed. That was standard procedure but it was often overlooked by patrol officers. Ballard had to grudgingly give McGee and Black high marks for that. Also on the counter was a prescription written by Fallon for the morning-after pill as well as a card with instructions for how to access the results of HIV and STD testing that would follow the RTC examination.
Ballard did indeed recognize Carpenter. She was tall and thin and had shoulder-length blond hair. Ballard had seen her through the take-out window many times at Native Bean. She had ordered from her on some of those occasions, though it was clear Carpenter was more than a barista and was in charge of the business. Ballard had been looking forward to the day when the interior of the shop would reopen post-pandemic and she could go in and sit at a table. She always did good work in coffee shops. It had been one of the things she missed most in the last year.
Nothing on the FI card or from what Fallon had said in the hallway had prepped Ballard for Carpenter’s physical condition. She had hemorrhagic bruising around both eyes from being choked and lacerations on her lower lip and left ear from being bitten. There was also an abrasion on one eyebrow that Ballard knew from the prior cases had likely occurred when a mask that had been taped over her eyes had been roughly pulled off. And lastly, her layered blond hair was imbalanced by a purposely haphazard cut by her attackers, an indignity that Ballard knew Carpenter would tell her came at the end, and was a creepy coup de grâce of the assault. The rapists would have taken the hair with them.
“Cindy, my name is Renée,” Ballard said, trying to be informal. “I’m a detective with the Hollywood Division of the LAPD. I’m going to be investigating this case and I need to ask you some questions, if you don’t mind.”
Left alone in the room, Carpenter had been crying. She was holding a tissue in one hand, her cell phone in the other. Ballard wanted to know who she had been calling or texting, but that could come later.
“I almost didn’t call you people,” Carpenter said. “But then I thought, what if they come back? I wanted someone to know.”
Ballard nodded that she understood.
“Well, I’m glad you did call,” Ballard said. “Because I’m going to need your help catching these men.”
“But I can’t help you,” Carpenter said. “I didn’t even see their faces. They were wearing masks.”
“Well, let’s start right there. Did you see their hands? Other parts of their bodies? Were they white, black, brown?”
“Both were white. I could see their wrists and other parts of their bodies.”
“Okay, good. Tell me about the masks.”
“Like ski masks. One was green and one was blue.”
This was consistent with the other two attacks. The connection between the three cases was now more than theory. It was confirmed.
“Okay, that is helpful,” Ballard said. “When did you see the ski masks?”
“At the end,” Carpenter said. “When they ripped the mask off my eyes.”
This was an unusual part of all three attacks. The Midnight Men brought premade tape masks they put on their victims, only to remove them at the end of the assaults. It indicated that they didn’t want to leave the masks behind as evidence. But more important, it was an indication that they weren’t masking the women to prevent them from seeing them. Their own ski masks protected their identity. It meant they wanted to hide something else from their victims.
“Did you see anything else about them? Or just the ski masks?”
“One of them was pulling on his shirt. I saw a bandage on his arm.”
“Which guy, green or blue?”
“Green.”
“What kind of bandage? What did it look like?”
“It was like one of the biggest ones you can get? It was square. Right here.”
She pointed to the inside of her upper arm.