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“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.”
