Ballard held the card up as if to ask, is this all you’ve got?
“You’ll do the IR today, right?” she asked.
“As soon as we get out of here,” Black said.
Ballard nodded. She needed the incident report as the starting point of the investigation.
“Well, I’ve got it from here,” she said. “You can go back to the six and write it up.”
“And you can go to hell, Ballard,” McGee said.
He didn’t move. Black grabbed him by the arm and pulled him toward the door.
“Let’s just go, dude,” he said. “Let it go.”
Ballard waited to see how McGee wanted to play it. There was a tense moment of silence and then he turned and followed his partner out to the parking lot.
Ballard took a breath and turned toward the admittance desk. The receiving nurse, Sandra, smiled at her, having heard the exchange.
“You tell ’em, Renée,” she said. “Your victim’s in room three with Martha. I’ll let her know you’ll be in the hallway.”
“Thanks,” Ballard said.
Ballard went behind the desk and down the short hallway, which had doors to four examination rooms. Ballard had been there at times when all four contained victims of sexual assault.
The hallway was pastel blue and a mural of flowers had been added, growing from the baseboard, in an attempt to make things seem more pleasant in a place where horrors were documented. On the wall between rooms 1 and 3 was a billboard with various posted offerings of post-traumatic stress therapy and self-defense classes. Ballard was studying a business card tacked to the board that offered firearms instruction from a retired LAPD officer named Henrik Bastin. She found herself hoping that he got a lot of business out of this place.
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.