“Do you think it was to cover up a tattoo?”
“I don’t know. I only saw it for, like, half a second.”
“Okay, Cindy, I know this is difficult, but I want to go through what they did to you, and I also need to take my own photos of your injuries. But first I want to ask, Did they say anything to you, anything at all, that might mean that they knew who you were before last night?”
“You mean, like, that it wasn’t random? No, I didn’t know these guys. At all.”
“No, what I mean is, do you think they saw you somewhere, like the coffee shop or where you shop or anywhere else, and decided to target you? Or was it the opposite? They targeted your neighborhood and picked you that way.”
Carpenter shook her head.
“I have no idea,” she said. “They didn’t say stuff like that, they just threatened me and said shit. Like, you think you’re so cool and so high-and-mighty. They—”
She stopped to bring the tissue up as a wave of tears came. Ballard reached out and touched her arm.
“I’m sorry to put you through this,” Ballard said.
“It’s like I’m having to relive it,” Carpenter said.
“I know. But it will help us catch these two... men. And stop them from possibly hurting other women.”
Ballard waited a few moments for Carpenter to compose herself. Then started again.
“Let’s talk about last night before anything happened,” she said. “Did you go out or stay in for New Year’s?”
“Well, I worked till nine, when we closed the shop,” Carpenter said.
“You’re talking about Native Bean?”
“Yes, we call it the Bean. One of my girls has Covid and the schedule is all messed up. I had to work the last shift of the year.”
“I like your shop. I moved over to Finley a few months ago and I’ve been getting my coffee there. Your blueberry muffins are fantastic. Anyway, so you closed up at nine and then you went home? Or did you stop somewhere?”
Ballard guessed she would say she stopped at the Gelson’s supermarket on Franklin. It would be on her way home, and one of the other victims had shopped there the night of her attack.
“I went right home,” Carpenter said. “I made dinner — leftover takeout.”
“And you live alone?” Ballard asked.
“Yes, since I got divorced.”
“What did you do after dinner?”
“I just took a shower and went to bed. I was supposed to open this morning.”
“You open most mornings, right? That’s when I’ve seen you.”
“That’s me. We open at seven.”
“Do you usually take your shower in the morning, before going to work?”
“Actually, no, I’d rather sleep later, so I— Why is this important?”
“Because at this point we really don’t know what’s important.”
Ballard’s disappointment in not getting the Gelson’s connection had disappeared when Carpenter mentioned taking a shower. The two previous victims had said they showered before going to bed on the nights they were assaulted. With only two victims saying this, it could be coincidence. But three out of three became a pattern. Ballard felt her instincts stirring. She believed she might have something to work with.
10
Cindy Carpenter refused further medical attention to her physical injuries. She told Ballard she just wanted to go home. It was a long ride back from the RTC to the Dell, and Ballard used it to go through the story again. By now Carpenter was wrung out and tired but she cooperated, telling the story again in all its humiliating detail, telling what the rapists made her do, what she had heard, and what she had managed to see when the mask taped over her eyes began to come loose. From the first telling at the RTC to the second in the car, Carpenter told the same story, adding or subtracting a few details here and there, but not contradicting herself at any point in the narrative. This was good, Ballard knew. It meant she would be a good witness in terms of the investigation and at trial, should a case ever be made.
Ballard complimented her and told her why. It was important to keep Carpenter cooperating. Often victims grew reluctant when they started to weigh their psychic recovery against trusting the system.
Ballard had purposely not recorded either session. A recording taken in the hours after the assault could be gold in a defense lawyer’s hands. She — yes, smart rapists often employed female attorneys for jury optics — could take any inconsistency between court testimony and a first recounting to tear a hole in the case wide enough for a bus called reasonable doubt to carry the jury through. Ballard always had to think about the moves ahead while trying to solve the present case.
Carpenter had supplied numerous details that incontrovertibly connected her assault to the two previous cases. Chief among these were the time of the attacks, the specific acts of sexual assault the women endured, and the measures taken by the rapists to avoid leaving evidence behind. These efforts included wearing gloves and condoms and, notably, bringing with them a Dustbuster, which was swept over the victim and locations in the house before the suspects exited.
A couple new details did come up in Cindy’s telling of her story in the car. One was that Mr. Green, as they had taken to calling the suspect with the green ski mask, had red pubic hair, while Mr. Blue had dark, near-black pubic hair. Assuming their body hair matched their scalp hair, Ballard now had partial descriptions of both perpetrators. The previous two victims had never seen anything, because the tape placed across their eyes had never come loose. While all three of the victims had said that they could tell by the touch of the rapists that they wore gloves, Carpenter revealed during the drive that she had seen their hands when the tape had come loose, and the gloves they wore were disposable black latex. Ballard knew such gloves were widely available. It wouldn’t be strong evidence of guilt, but it was one of the many details that could be important if suspects were ever identified.
There was another piece of evidence connecting the three cases as part of the MO. During the car-ride questioning, Ballard had focused on how the men spoke and the instructions they gave Carpenter. Ballard did not prompt Carpenter with specific examples because that might lead to a false confirmation of connection. She had to ask Carpenter more generally to try to remember what had been said to her, but the young woman came through with a key connection.
“At the end, before they left, one of them — I think it was Mr. Blue — said, ‘You’re going to be all right, doll. You’ll look back on this one day and smile.’ Then he laughed and they were gone.”
Ballard had been waiting for this. The half apology at the end. The other two victims had reported the same thing, right down to the throwback vernacular of calling the victim “doll.”
“You’re sure he said that? He called you ‘doll’?”
“I’m sure. Nobody’s ever called me that before. It’s like 1980s or something.”
Ballard felt the same way, but that played against Carpenter’s estimate, based on what she had seen of her attackers’ bodies through the loose tape, that they were in their late twenties or early thirties.
There was still an hour or so of light by the time they pulled to a stop in front of the small bungalow where Carpenter lived on Deep Dell Terrace. Ballard wanted to check the house to see if she could find a point of entry and determine if it would be worth calling for a full forensic examination of the premises. She also wanted to walk the neighborhood in daylight and then return after midnight so she could judge the lighting conditions and vigilance of other residents of the hillside neighborhood.
Once inside, Ballard asked Carpenter to sit on the couch in the living room while she conducted a quick sweep of the house.