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.’