Майкл Коннелли - Dark Sacred Night

“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.

By three a.m. Ballard had cleared the scene of the death investigation and was back at Hollywood Division, working in a cubicle in the detective bureau. That vast room, which housed the workstations of forty-eight detectives by day, was deserted after midnight and Ballard always had her pick of the place. She chose a desk in the far corner, away from spillover noise and radio chatter from the watch commander’s office down the front hallway. At five, seven she could sit down and disappear behind the computer screen and the half walls of the workstation like a soldier in a foxhole. She could focus and get her report writing done.

The report on the residential break-in that she had rolled on earlier in the night was completed first and now she was ready to type up the death report on the bathtub case. She would classify the death as undetermined pending autopsy. She had covered her bases, called in a crime scene photographer, and documented everything, including the cat. She knew a determination of accidental death might be second-guessed by the victim’s family and maybe even her superiors. She was confident, however, that the autopsy would find no indications of foul play and the death would eventually be ruled accidental.