The Kept Woman (Will Trent 8) (2 page)

‘The victim is an Atlanta cop.’ Faith grabbed his seat belt and buckled him in like he was one of her kids. ‘Detective First Grade Dale Harding, retired. Ever heard of him?’

Will shook his head. ‘You?’

‘My mom knew him. Never worked with him. He was in white-collar crimes. Took early medical leave, then popped up doing private security. Mostly knuckle-dragging and knee-breaking.’ Faith had been with the APD for fifteen years before she’d partnered with Will. Her mother had retired as a captain. Between the
two of them, they were familiar with practically everyone on the force. ‘Mom says that knowing Harding’s reputation, he probably pissed off the wrong pimp or missed the vig with his bookie and got a bat to the head.’

The car jerked as the light changed. Will felt a sharp jab in his ribs from his Glock. He tried to shift his weight. Despite the frigid air conditioning, sweat had already glued the back of his shirt to the seat. The skin peeled away like a Band-Aid. The clock on the dash read 7:38 AM. He couldn’t let himself think about how sweltering it would be by noon.

Faith’s phone chirped with a text. Then chirped again. And again. ‘Amanda,’ she groaned. ‘Why does she break up the lines? She sends three separate sentences in three separate texts. All caps. It’s not fair.’ Faith drove with one hand and texted back with the other, which was dangerous and illegal, but Faith was one of those cops who only saw infractions in other people. ‘We’re about five minutes out, right?’

‘Probably closer to ten with traffic.’ Will reached over to steady the steering wheel so they wouldn’t end up on the sidewalk. ‘What’s the address on the warehouse?’

She scrolled back through her texts. ‘It’s a construction site near the warehouses. Three-eighty Beacon.’

Will’s jaw clamped down so tight that he felt a lightning bolt of pain shoot into his neck. ‘That’s Marcus Rippy’s nightclub.’

Faith gave him a startled look. ‘Are you kidding me?’

Will shook his head. There was nothing about Marcus Rippy that he would kid about. The man was a pro basketball player who’d been accused of drugging and raping a college student. Will had spent the last seven months building a pretty solid
case against the lying asshole, but Rippy had hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on lawyers and specialists and experts and publicists, who had all made sure that the case never went to trial.

Faith asked, ‘What’s a dead ex-cop doing inside Marcus Rippy’s club less than two weeks after Rippy walks on a rape charge?’

‘I’m sure his lawyers will have a plausible explanation by the time we get there.’

‘Jesus.’ Faith dropped her phone into the cup holder and put both hands back on the wheel. She was quiet for a moment, probably considering all the ways this had just turned bad for them. Dale Harding was a cop, but he’d been a bad cop. The hard truth about murder in the big city was that in general, the deceased rarely turned out to be a shining, upstanding citizen. Not to blame the victim, but they tended to be involved in activities—like pissing off pimps and not paying bookies—where it made sense that they would eventually end up murdered.

Marcus Rippy’s involvement changed everything.

Faith slowed the car as morning traffic thickened like paste. ‘I know you said you didn’t want to talk about your case crapping out, but now I need you to talk about it.’

Will still didn’t want to talk about it. Over a five-hour period, Rippy had repeatedly assaulted his victim, sometimes beating her, sometimes strangling her into unconsciousness. Standing beside her hospital bed three days later, Will could make out the dark lines where Rippy’s fingers had gripped her neck the same way he would palm a basketball. There were other bruises documented in the medical report. Cuts. Lacerations. Tearing.
Blunt-force trauma. Bleeding. The woman could not speak above a whisper, but she still told her story, and she kept telling it to anyone who would listen until Rippy’s lawyers shut her up.

Faith asked, ‘Will?’

‘He raped a woman. He paid his way out of it. He’ll do it again. He probably did it before. And none of that matters because he knows how to handle a basketball.’

‘Wow, that’s a lot of information. Thank you.’

Will felt the pain in his jaw intensify. ‘The day after New Year’s Eve. Ten in the morning. The victim was found unconscious inside Marcus Rippy’s house by one of the maids. The maid called Rippy’s head of security, who called Rippy’s business manager, who called Rippy’s lawyers, who eventually called a private ambulance to take her to Piedmont Hospital. Two hours before the victim was reportedly found, around eight AM, Rippy’s private jet left for Miami with him and his entire family on board. He claims the vacation was on the books all along, but the flight plan was filed half an hour before take-off. Rippy said he had no idea the victim was in the house. Never saw her. Never talked to her. Didn’t know her name. They’d had a big New Year’s Eve party the night before. A couple of hundred people were in and out of the residence.’

Faith said, ‘There was a Facebook post of—’

‘Instagram,’ Will said, because he’d had the pleasure of trawling the internet for hours of party footage that people had filmed with their phones. ‘Someone at the party posted a GIF of the victim slurring her words before she threw up into an ice bucket. Rippy’s people had the hospital do a tox screen. She had pot, amphetamines and alcohol in her system.’

‘You said she was unconscious when they brought her into the hospital. Did she give permission for Rippy’s people to see her drug screen?’

Will shook his head, because it didn’t matter. Rippy’s team had paid off someone at the hospital lab and leaked the results of the blood test to the press.

‘You gotta admit, he’s got a great name for it. Rapey/Rippy.’ Faith twisted her lips to the side as she thought it out. ‘The house is huge, right?’

‘Sixteen thousand square feet.’ Will’s head called up the layout he’d studied for so many hours that it was still imprinted in his brain. ‘It’s shaped like a horseshoe, with a swimming pool in the middle. The family lives in the main section, the top of the horseshoe. The two wings off the back have a bunch of guest suites, and there’s a nail salon, an indoor basketball court, massage room, gym, movie theater, playroom for his two kids. You name it, they have it.’

‘So, logically, something bad could happen in one part of the house without someone in the other part knowing.’

‘Without two hundred people knowing. Without the maids and the butlers and the valets and the caterers and the cooks and the bartenders and the assistants and the whoever else knowing.’ Will had been given a two-hour tour of the Rippy estate by the family’s chief of security. Cameras were mounted at every possible angle around the exterior of the house. There were no blind spots. Motion sensors detected anything heavier than a leaf landing in the front yard. No one could go in or out of the estate without someone knowing about it.

Except for the night of the assault. There had been a bad storm. The power kept cutting in and out. The generators were state-of-the-art, but for some reason the external DVR that recorded footage from the security cameras was not jacked into the backup power grid.

Faith said, ‘Okay, I saw the news. Rippy’s people said she was a nutjob looking for a payday.’

‘They offered her money. She told them no.’

‘Could’ve been waiting for a higher number.’ Faith drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. ‘Is it possible her wounds were self-inflicted?’

That had been the contention of Rippy’s lawyers. They’d even found an expert who was willing to testify that the giant finger marks around her neck and back and thighs were made by her own hand.

‘She had this bruise here—’ Will indicated his own back. ‘Like a fist print between her shoulder blades. A big fist. You could see the finger marks, same as the bruises on her neck. She had a severe contusion on her liver. The doctors put her on bed rest for two weeks.’

‘There was a condom with Rippy’s semen—’

‘Found in a hall bathroom. The wife says they had sex that night.’

‘And he leaves the used condom in the hall bath, not the master?’ Faith frowned. ‘Was the wife’s DNA on the outside of the condom?’

‘The condom was on a tile floor that had been recently mopped with a cleaner that contained bleach. There was nothing we could use on the outside.’

‘Any DNA found on the victim?’

‘There were some unidentified strands, all female, probably picked up at her dorm.’

‘Did the victim say who invited her to the party?’

‘She came with a group of college friends. None of them can remember who got the initial invite. None of them knew Rippy personally. Or at least none of them claimed to. And all four of them immediately distanced themselves from the victim when I started knocking on doors.’

‘And the victim positively ID’d Rippy?’

‘She was standing in line for the bathroom. This was after she threw up in the ice bucket. She says she only had one drink, but it made her sick, like something wasn’t right. Rippy approached her. She recognized him immediately. He was nice, told her there was another bathroom down the hallway in the guest wing. She followed him. It was a long walk. She was feeling a little dizzy. He put his arm around her, kept her steady. He led her into the last guest suite at the end of the hall. She went to the toilet. She came out and he was sitting on the bed with his clothes off.’

‘And then what?’

‘And then she woke up in the hospital the next day. She had a bad concussion from being punched or hit in the head. She’d obviously been strangled repeatedly, lost consciousness a few times. The doctors think she won’t ever completely recover her memory of that night.’

‘Hm.’

Will felt the full weight of her skepticism in the sound.

Faith asked, ‘The hall bath where the condom was found?’

‘Six doors down from the guest suite, so they passed it on the way there, and he passed it on his way back to the party.’ Will added, ‘There’s video evidence from phones that show Rippy at the party off and on all night, so he went back and forth to work his alibi. Plus, half his team backed him up. Jameel Gordon, Andre Dupree, Reuben Figaroa. The day after the assault, they all showed up at the APD, lawyers in tow, each of them telling the exact same story. By the time the GBI caught the case, every single one of them declined to be interviewed again.’

‘Typical,’ Faith noted. ‘Rippy said that he never even saw the victim at the party?’

‘Correct.’

‘The wife was pretty vocal, right?’

‘She was a megaphone for his defense.’ LaDonna Rippy had gone on every talk show and news program that would have her. ‘She backed up everything that her husband said, including that she never saw the victim at the party.’

‘Hm.’ Faith sounded even more skeptical.

Will added, ‘And people who saw the victim that night said she was drunk and falling all over every basketball player she could get her hands on. Which, if you look at the GIF of her puking and combine that with the tox screen, makes sense. But then you look at the rape kit and you know that she was brutally raped, and the victim knows that Rippy was sitting on that bed, totally naked, when she came out of the bathroom.’

‘Devil’s advocate?’

Will nodded, though he knew what was coming.

‘I can see why it fell apart. It’s he said/she said and Rippy gets the benefit of the doubt because that’s how the Constitution works.
Innocent until blah-blah-blah. And let’s not forget that Rippy is filthy rich. If he lived in a trailer park, his court-appointed lawyer would’ve pled him down to five years for false imprisonment to keep him off the sex-offender registry, end of story.’

Will didn’t respond, because there was nothing else to say.

Faith gripped the steering wheel. ‘I hate rape cases. You don’t throw a murder case to a jury and they ask, “Well, was the guy
really
murdered or is he lying because he wants the attention? And what was he doing in that part of town? And why was he drinking? And what about all those murderers he dated before?” ’

‘She wasn’t sympathetic.’ Will hated that this even mattered. ‘Her family’s a mess. Single mom with a drug habit. No idea who the dad is. She had some drug issues in high school, a history of self-cutting. She was coming off academic probation at her college. She dated around, spent a lot of time on Tinder and OkCupid, like everybody her age. Rippy’s people found out she had an abortion a few years ago. She basically wrote their trial strategy for them.’

‘There’s not much daylight between being a good girl and a bad one, but once you cross that line—’ Faith blew out a stream of air. ‘You can’t imagine the shit people said about me when I got pregnant with Jeremy. One day I was a junior high school honor student with her entire life ahead of her, and the next day I was a teenage Mata Hari.’

‘You were shot for being a spy?’

‘You know what I mean. I was a pariah. Jeremy’s dad was sent to live with family up north. My brother still hasn’t forgiven me. My dad got forced out of his Lodge. He lost a ton of customers. None of my friends would speak to me. I had to drop out of school.’

‘At least it was different when you had Emma.’

‘Oh, yeah, a single thirty-five-year-old woman with a twenty-year-old son and a one-year-old daughter is constantly praised for her excellent life choices.’ She changed the subject. ‘She had a boyfriend, right? The victim?’

‘He broke up with her a week before the assault.’

‘Oh, for godsakes.’ Faith had worked enough rape investigations to know that a defense lawyer’s dream was an accuser with an ex-boyfriend she was trying to make jealous.

‘He stepped up after the assault,’ Will said, though he wasn’t a fan of the ex-boyfriend. ‘Stayed by her side. Made her feel safe. Or at least tried to.’

‘Dale Harding’s name never came up during the investigation?’

He shook his head.

A news truck sped by, dipping into the oncoming traffic lane for twenty yards before taking an illegal turn.

Faith said, ‘Looks like news at noon has its lead story.’

‘They don’t want news. They want gossip.’ Up until Rippy’s case had been dismissed, Will couldn’t leave GBI headquarters without some well-coifed anchor trying to bait him into a career-ending sound bite. He got off light considering the death threats and online stalking Rippy’s fans lobbed at his accuser.