“What about Taylor? He have a key?”
“I don’t think so but I don’t remember.”
“So, I want to be sure I’m clear. When Mallory was passed out in that room, anybody with a key could get access to the room. Is that right?”
“Yes, but I wish you would tell me what is going on here. You’re making it sound like we did something wrong and we didn’t.”
Ballard ignored the plea. She was too locked in on checking boxes with her questions.
“When Mallory got sick, was that in the bed or did she go into the bathroom?”
“The bathroom. She jumped up and ran in there. After a while I checked on her and she was leaning against the bathtub, passed out. I got her up and cleaned her up a little bit and then I helped her to the bed.”
Ballard wanted to say sarcastically that he had shown some real chivalry, but she kept editorial comments out of her questions.
“And this was after you two had had consensual intercourse, correct?” she asked.
“Yes, definitely consensual,” Van Ness said.
“What was she wearing at the time? When she got up to go into the bathroom after sexual relations and when you brought her out.”
“Uh, well, nothing. She had taken off her clothes.”
“When you got her back to the bed, did you cover her up with a blanket or something?”
“Of course. I put her head on a pillow and pulled the covers over her. I’m not an asshole.”
“And then you went downstairs to the dance.”
“Yes.”
“And did you give your key back to the person you borrowed it from?”
“Probably. I don’t remember if it was Andy or Victor.”
“Could you have given it to anybody else?”
“I mean, I don’t know. I doubt it. It was their room; they got the keys.”
While Ballard was able to hold her emotions in check, Maddie apparently could not.
“So you left a naked girl passed out in a room that just about any boy at that dance had access to,” Maddie said in a heated tone. “Do we have that right?”
“Look, she got drunk,” Van Ness protested. “What was I supposed to do?”
“Maybe protect her? Did you ever think once about how vulnerable she was?”
“I covered her up and locked the door. She was safe and nothing happened to her.”
“Are you sure about that?”
Van Ness did not answer. He shook his head, then turned his gaze as if looking out of the booth into the distance. But the curtain was closed.
“Are you saying something happened to her?” he asked in a quiet voice.
Ballard put her hand on Maddie’s arm to stop her from blasting him again.
“Yes, something happened to her,” she said. “She got pregnant and nine months later she had a baby.”
Van Ness turned to face them. Ballard could tell this was new information. He was stunned.
“Well, it wasn’t me!” he said. “We used protection. I had a rubber and I used it.”
“You sure about that?”
“I’m damn sure. She made me use it.”
“Then good news, Rodney. If you’re telling the truth, you’re in the clear. Because the man we’re looking for is the father of her baby.”
Van Ness’s mouth dropped open in surprise. This wasn’t remotely how he had anticipated this going.
“Well, it wasn’t me,” he finally said.
“Then your quickest way out of this is to give us your DNA,” Ballard said. “You volunteering to let us swab you would go a long way toward convincing us that you’re not the man we’re looking for.”
Ballard held back on telling him they already had the straw with his DNA on it. Van Ness shook his head like he should have known better than to come with them.
“Why are you looking for him?” he asked.
“A murder,” Ballard said. “And several rapes.”
Van Ness leaned his elbows on the table and ran his hands through his hair.
“Oh my God, oh my God,” he said. “That’s not me. You can’t believe...”
He didn’t finish.
“Then let us swab you and cross you off our list,” Ballard said.
Van Ness nodded.
“Where do we go for that?” he asked.
“We do it right here,” Ballard said. “Officer Bosch can do it.”
Van Ness hesitated, then nodded again.
“Okay, let’s do it,” he said. “I’m not your man.”
45
They dropped Van Ness off at his apartment building with a warning not to communicate with anyone from St. Vincent’s, especially the men he had shared the hotel room with on the night of the senior prom. Ballard told him that should he alert anybody to the investigation, he would be charged with aiding and abetting murder and rape. It seemed to properly scare him.
Ballard and Maddie then got in the car and headed to the freeway. They didn’t start to debrief until the neon glow of the Strip was in the rearview mirror. Maddie was the first to speak.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what?” Ballard said. “You did good. We did good.”
“I know, but I shouldn’t have let my anger go like that. It was unprofessional. You were so good, holding it in the whole time. It kept him talking.”
“Maybe, but when you said what you did, it worked. He showed his guilt over how he’d left her that night and that made me think that he’s not our guy. Did you feel that?”
“I did, actually. He’s definitely a loser and will always be one, but I don’t think he’s our guy either. He wouldn’t have given us the swab.”
“Still, we give it to the lab and nail it down.”
“Right.”
“He was still hiding something he knew.”
“How so?”
“He lied by omission at first, supposedly not remembering Mallory was his date. That tells us he knew something had happened that night. When he did that, I thought he was our guy. But then no hesitation about the swab. That means he lied for some other reason. He probably told those guys that she was passed out in the room. He made her an easy target, whether he realized that or not.”
“Isn’t there some way we can nail his ass for that?”
“Maybe, but we may need him for the bigger picture.”
“Which is?”
“Prosecutors hate going into court with just DNA. Too many jurors either don’t trust it or don’t understand it. They want a person to tell the story, somebody who can connect the dots. Prosecutors want what they call DNA-plus cases. So the bigger picture here is the Pillowcase Rapist, not what Rodney Van Ness did or didn’t do the night of the prom. If we make a case on one of these other guys as the Pillowcase Rapist, we may need Rodney as a witness to tell a jury about the room and the keys and who had access.”
Maddie nodded. “You think two or three moves ahead,” she said.
“You have to,” Ballard said. “Do you have Colleen’s number?”
“Sure. She’s already texted three times today asking what’s happening.”
“Better you than me. Text her and see if she can start running down Victor Best in Hawaii. I take it you already found Andrew Bennett and Taylor Weeks?”
“I’m not sure about Weeks but I remember Bennett we found. I think he’s down in Orange County.”
“Not bad. A lot closer than Hawaii.”
Maddie pulled her phone and opened the text app.
“You might want to ask her to also do a media search in Oahu or wherever she finds Best,” Ballard said. “See if they’ve had a serial-rapist case in the last fifteen to twenty years there.”
“Got it,” Maddie said.
She typed the message on her phone. When she was finished, she had more questions.
“You think Taylor Weeks could be the guy? He had a date that night and now they’re supposedly married.”