The patrol officers had left the front door open. They thought they were doing her a favor, airing the place out. But that was a violation of crime scene protocol regarding evidence containment. Bugs could go in and out. Touch DNA could be disturbed by a breeze through the house. Odors were particulate. Airing out a crime scene meant losing part of that crime scene.
But the patrol officers didn’t know all of that. The report that Ballard had gotten from the watch lieutenant was that the body was two to three days old in a closed house with the air-conditioning off. In his words, the place was as ripe as a bag of skunks.
There were two black-and-whites parked along the curb in front of Ballard. Three blue suits were standing between them, waiting for her. Ballard didn’t really expect them to have stayed inside with the body.
Up above, an airship circled at three hundred feet, holding its beam on the street. It looked like a leash of light tethering the circling craft, keeping it from flying away.
Ballard killed the engine but sat in her city ride for a moment. She had parked in front of the gap between two houses and could look out at the lights of the city spreading in a vast carpet below. Not many people realized that Hollywood Boulevard wound up into the mountains, narrow and tight, to where it was strictly residential and far in all ways from the glitz and grime of the Hollywood Boulevard tourist mecca, where visitors posed with costumed superheroes and sidewalk stars. Up here it was money and power and Ballard knew that a murder in the hills always brought out the department’s big guns. She was just babysitting. She would not have this case for long. It would go to West Bureau Homicide or possibly even Robbery-Homicide Division downtown, depending on who was dead and what their social status was.
She looked away from the view and tapped the overhead light so she could see her notebook. She had just come from her day’s first callout, a routine break-in off Melrose, and had her notes for the report she would write once she got back to Hollywood Division. She flipped to a fresh page and wrote the time—01:47 a.m.—and the address. She added a note about the clear and mild weather conditions. She then turned the light off and got out, leaving the blue flashers on. Moving to the back of the car, she popped the trunk to get to her crime scene kit.
It was Monday morning, her first shift of a week running solo, and Ballard knew she would need to get at least one more wear out of her suit and possibly two. That meant not fouling it with the stink of decomp. At the trunk she slipped off her jacket, folded it carefully, and placed it in one of the empty cardboard evidence boxes. She removed her crime scene coveralls from a plastic bag and pulled them on over her boots, slacks, and blouse. She zipped them up to her chin and, placing one boot and then the other up on the bumper, tightened the Velcro cuffs around her ankles. After she did the same around her wrists, her clothes were hermetically sealed.
Out of the kit she grabbed disposable gloves and the breathing mask she’d used at autopsies when she was formerly with RHD, closed the trunk, and walked up to join the three uniformed officers. As she approached, she recognized Sergeant Stan Dvorek, the area boss, and two officers whose longevity on the graveyard shift got them the cushy and slow Hollywood Hills beat.
Dvorek was balding and paunchy with the kind of hip spread that comes with too many years in a patrol car. He was leaning against the fender of one of the cars with his arms folded in front of his chest. He was known as the Relic. Anybody who actually liked being on the midnight shift and lasted significant years on it ended up with a nickname. Dvorek was the current record holder, celebrating his tenth year on the late show just a month before. The officers with him, Anthony Anzelone and Dwight Doucette, were Caspar and Deuce. Ballard, with just three years on graveyard, had no nickname bestowed upon her yet. At least none that she knew about.
“Fellas,” Ballard said.
“Whoa, Sally Ride,” Dvorek said. “When’s the shuttle taking off?”
Ballard spread her arms to display herself. She knew the coveralls were baggy and looked like a space suit. She thought maybe she had just been christened with a nickname.
“That would be never,” she said. “So whadda we got that chased you out of the house?”
“It’s bad in there,” said Anzelone.
“It’s been cooking,” Doucette added.
The Relic pushed off the trunk of his car and got serious.
“Female white, fifties, looks like blunt-force trauma and facial lacerations,” he said. “Somebody worked her over pretty good. Domicile in disarray. Could’ve been a break-in.”
“Sexual assault?” Ballard asked.
“Her nightgown’s pulled up. She’s exposed.”
“Okay, I’m going in. Which one of you brave lads wants to walk me through it?”
There were no immediate volunteers.
“Deuce, you’ve got the high number,” Dvorek said.
“Shit,” said Doucette.
Doucette was the newest officer of the three, so he had the highest serial number. He pulled a blue bandanna up from around his neck and over his mouth and nose.
“You look like a fucking Crip,” Anzelone said.
“Why, because I’m black?” Doucette asked.
“Because you’re wearing a fucking blue bandanna,” Anzelone said. “If it was red, I’d say you look like a fucking Blood.”
“Just show her,” Dvorek said. “I really don’t want to be here all night.”
Doucette broke off the banter and headed toward the open door of the house. Ballard followed.
“How’d we get this thing so late, anyway?” she asked.
“Next-door neighbor got a call from the victim’s niece back in New York,” Doucette said. “Neighbor has a key and the niece asked him to check because the lady wasn’t responding to social media or cell calls for a few days. The neighbor opens the door, gets hit with the funk, and calls us.”
“At one o’clock in the morning?”
“No, much earlier. But all of PM watch was tied up last night on a caper with a four-five-nine suspect and on a perimeter around Park La Brea till end of watch. Nobody got up here and then it got passed on to us at roll call. We came by as soon as we could.”
Ballard nodded. The perimeter around a robbery suspect sounded suspect to her. More likely, she thought, the buck had been passed shift to shift because nobody wants to work a possible body case that has been cooking in a closed house.
“Where’s the neighbor now?” Ballard asked.
“Back home,” Doucette said. “Probably taking a shower and sticking VapoRub up his nose. He’s never going to be the same again.”
“We gotta get his prints to exclude him, even if he says he didn’t go in.”
“Roger that. I’ll get the print car up here.”
Snapping on her latex gloves, Ballard followed Doucette over the threshold and into the house. The breathing mask was almost useless. The putrid odor of death hit her strongly, even though she was breathing through her mouth.
Doucette was tall and broad-shouldered. Ballard could see nothing until she was well into the house and had stepped around him. The house was cantilevered out over the hillside, making the view through the floor-to-ceiling glass wall a stunning sheath of twinkling light. Even at this hour, the city seemed alive and pulsing with grand possibilities.
“Was it dark in here when you came in?” Ballard asked.
“Nothing was on when we got here,” said Doucette.
Ballard noted the answer. No lights on could mean that the intrusion occurred during the daytime or late at night, after the homeowner had gone to bed. She knew that most home invasions were daytime capers.
Doucette, who was also wearing gloves, hit a wall switch by the door and turned on a line of ceiling lamps. The interior was an open-loft design, taking advantage of the panorama from any spot in the living room, dining room or kitchen. The staggering view was counterbalanced on the rear wall by three large paintings that were part of a series depicting a woman’s red lips.
Ballard noticed broken glass on the floor near the kitchen island but saw no shattered windows.
“Any sign of a break-in?” she asked.
“Not that we saw,” Doucette said. “There’s broken shit all over the place but no broken windows, no obvious point of entry that we found.”
“Okay.”
“The body’s down here.”
He moved into a hallway off the living room and held his hand over the bandanna and his mouth as a second line of protection against the intensifying odor.
Ballard followed. The house was a single-level contemporary. She guessed it was built in the fifties, when one level was enough. Nowadays anything going up in the hills was multilevel and built to the maximum extent of code.
They passed open doorways to a bedroom and a bathroom, then entered a master bedroom that was in disarray with a lamp lying on the floor, its shade dented and bulb shattered. Clothes were strewn haphazardly over the bed, and a long-stemmed glass that had contained what looked like red wine was snapped in two on the white rug, its contents spread in a splash stain.
“Here you go,” Doucette said.
He pointed through the open door of the bathroom and then stepped back to allow Ballard in first.
Ballard stood in the doorway but did not enter the bathroom. The victim was faceup on the floor. She was a large woman with her arms and legs spread wide. Her eyes were open, her lower lip torn, and her upper right cheek gashed, exposing grayish pink tissue. A halo of dried blood from an unseen scalp wound surrounded her head on the white tile squares.
A flannel nightgown with hummingbirds on it was pulled up over the hips and bunched above the abdomen and around the breasts. Her feet were bare and three feet apart. There was no visible bruising or injury to the external genitalia.
Ballard could see herself in a floor-to-ceiling mirror on the opposite wall of the room. She squatted down in the doorway and kept her hands on her thighs. She studied the tiled floor for footprints, blood, and other evidence. Besides the halo that had pooled and dried around the dead woman’s head, an intermittent ribbon of small blood smears was noticeable on the floor between the body and the bedroom.
“Deuce, go close the front door,” she said.
“Uh, okay,” Doucette said. “Any reason?”
“Just do it. Then check the kitchen.”
“For what?”
“A water bowl on the floor. Go.”
Doucette left and Ballard heard his heavy footsteps move back up the hallway. She stood and entered the bathroom, stepping gingerly alongside the wall until she came up close on the body, and squatted again. She leaned down, putting a gloved hand on the tiles for balance, in an attempt to see the scalp wound. The dead woman’s dark brown hair was too thick and curly for her to locate it.
Ballard looked around the room. The bathtub was surrounded by a marble sill holding multiple jars of bath salts and candles burned down to nothing. There was a folded towel on the sill as well. Ballard shifted so she could see into the tub. It was empty but the drain stopper was down. It was the kind with a rubber lip that creates a seal. Ballard reached over, turned on the cold water for a few seconds, and then turned it off.
She stood up and stepped over to the edge of the tub. She had put in enough water to surround the drain. She waited and watched.
“There’s a water bowl.”
Ballard turned. Doucette was back.
“Did you close the front door?” she asked.
“It’s closed,” Doucette said.
“Okay, look around. I think it’s a cat. Something small. You’ll have to call Animal Control.”
“What?”
Ballard pointed down at the dead woman.
“An animal did that. A hungry one. They start with the soft tissue.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
Ballard looked back into the tub. Half of the water she had put in was gone. The drain’s rubber seal had a slow leak.
“There’s no bleeding with the facial injuries,” she said. “That happened postmortem. The wound on the back of the head is what killed her.”
Doucette nodded.
“Someone came up and cracked her skull from behind,” he said.
“No,” Ballard said. “It’s an accidental death.”
“How?” Doucette asked.
Ballard pointed to the array of items on the bathtub sill.
“Based on decomp, I’d say it happened three nights ago,” she said. “She turns out the lights in the house to get ready for bed. Probably that lamp on the floor in the bedroom was the one she left on. She comes in here, fills the tub, lights her candles, gets her towel ready. The hot water steams the tiles and she slips, maybe when she remembered she left her glass of wine on the bed table. Or when she started pulling up the nightgown so she could get in the tub.”
“What about the lamp and the spilled wine?” Doucette asked.
“The cat.”
“So, you just stood here and figured all this out?”
Ballard ignored the question.
“She was carrying a lot of weight,” she said. “Maybe a sudden redirection as she was getting undressed—‘Oh, I forgot my wine’—causes her to slip and she cracks her skull on the lip of the tub. She’s dead, the candles burn out, the water slowly leaks down the drain.”
This explanation only brought silence from Doucette. Ballard looked down at the dead woman’s ravaged face.
“The second day or so, the cat got hungry,” Ballard concluded. “It went a little nuts, then it found her.”
“Jesus,” Doucette said.
“Get your partner in here, Deuce. Find the cat.”
“But wait a minute. If she was about to take a bath, why’s she already in a nightgown? You put the nightgown on after the bath, don’t you?”
“Who knows? Maybe she comes home from work or dinner out, gets into nightclothes, gets comfortable, maybe watches TV…then decides to take a bath.”
Ballard gestured to the mirror.
“She also was obese,” she said. “Maybe she didn’t like looking at herself naked in the mirror. So she comes home, gets into nightclothes, and stays dressed until it’s time to get in the tub.”
Ballard turned to go past Doucette and step out of the room.
“Find the cat,” she said.