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.
“You think they’ll come back?” Carpenter asked.
There was the tightness of fear in her voice.
“It’s not that,” Ballard said quickly. “I want to look for anything the patrol guys may have overlooked. And I want to figure out how the bad guys got in. You’re sure nothing was left open or unlocked?”
“Nothing. I’m OCD about locking the doors. I check them every night, even when I know I haven’t gone out through them.”
“Okay, just give me a few minutes.”
Ballard started moving around the house alone, pulling on a pair of latex gloves from her pocket. There was a door in the kitchen that she assumed led directly to the attached single-car garage. It had a simple push-button lock on the knob and no dead bolt. The door was currently unlocked.
“Does this door in the kitchen go to the garage?” she called out.
“Yes,” Carpenter called back. “Why?”
“It’s unlocked. Is that the way you had it?”