The Night Fire (Renée Ballard, #3)(28)

The house was a block north of Franklin on Van Ness. It was an old Craftsman that looked like its wood siding was being chewed up from the inside out by termites. There were two patrol cars out front and a white van with a blue stripe down the side that belonged to the coroner’s office. Ballard pulled behind it and got out.

Two officers were waiting on the front porch. Ballard had seen them earlier at roll call and knew their names were Willard and Hoskins. They had long-distance looks in their eyes and had been horrified by whatever the scene was inside.

“What have we got?” Ballard asked.

“Eleven-year-old girl hung herself in the bedroom,” Willard said. “It’s a bad scene.”

“Her mother found her when she came home from work around eleven,” Hoskins added.

“Anybody else in the house?” Ballard asked. “Where’s the father?”

“Not here,” Hoskins said. “We don’t know his story.”

Ballard walked past them and opened the front door. Immediately she heard a woman crying. She stepped in and to her right saw a female officer named Robards on a couch next to a woman whose face was buried in her hands as she wept. Ballard nodded to Robards and pointed to the stairway in the front hall. Robards nodded—the body was upstairs.

Ballard went up the stairs and heard a commotion from the open door on the right of the landing. She entered a pink-walled bedroom and saw the body of a girl hanging from a noose made of neckties looped over a crossbeam. On the floor in front of a queen bed was a kicked-over chair that came from a small homework desk. There was urine on the rug beneath the body and the odor of excrement in the room.

An officer named Dautre was in the room, his hands in his pockets to make sure he didn’t touch anything, as well as a forensic criminalist named Potter and two coroner’s investigators whom Ballard did not know. They had stuck a thermometer into the body through an incision to take liver temperature and determine an estimated time of death.

“Ballard,” Dautre said. “This is fucked up. She’s just a girl.”

Ballard had been at death scenes before with Dautre—she had told him the trick of keeping his hands in his pockets—and he had never seemed fazed by what he saw. But he did now. He was of mixed race but his face was blanched nearly white and his eyes were wide. She nodded and started to move in a circle around the room. She didn’t want to look at the dead girl’s face but knew she had to. It was contorted, her eyes slits. Ballard’s gaze moved down the body looking for any sign of a struggle, getting to the fingers last. Many times suicides changed their mind and grappled with the rope or strap around their neck, breaking fingernails or leaving lacerations. There was no sign of this. The girl apparently never wavered in her decision.

The girl was wearing a plaid green skirt and a white blouse. There was an insignia from a private school on the blouse’s pocket. She was overweight by about thirty pounds and Ballard wondered if she had been bullied because of it.

She also noticed that two men’s ties had been knotted together to loop over the crossbeam and make the noose the girl had put around her neck. Ballard assumed that the girl had to go into her parents’ bedroom to get the ties and wondered if that was significant.

“All right if we take her down now?” one of the coroner’s investigators said.

Ballard nodded.

“Are you calling it?” she asked.

“Yes,” the same man said. “We don’t see any indication of a setup. Do you confirm?”

“Did you find a note?”

“No note. But her cell phone’s on the dresser. Looks like she made a call to her dad about nine last night. That was it.”

“I want a full tox screen, fingernail scrapings, and a rape kit, just to cover the bases.”

“I’ll put it in. You confirming suicide?”

Ballard paused. Her hesitation was that the mother didn’t cut her down. She found her daughter hanging and didn’t hold her up and cut her down just in case.

“I confirm. For now. Send me those reports, okay? Detective Ballard, Hollywood third watch. And nobody talks to the mother and father about that.”

“You got it.”

Ballard and Dautre stepped back as one of the coroner’s men opened a stepladder while the other unfolded a body wrap on the floor. Then one man climbed up to cut the upper tie at the beam so as to have the entire ligature in one piece. The other man stood behind the body, spread his feet to brace himself, and then wrapped his arms around the dead girl. The ligature was cut and the man on the floor held the body until his partner came off the ladder and helped lower it onto the body wrap. They did the burrito wrap and then moved the body into a yellow bag that was zipped up around the package. Because of the unwieldiness of the house’s stairs they had not brought in a stretcher. The two men lifted the yellow bag at either end and took it out of the room.

Ballard stepped over to the dresser and searched for a note. She gloved up and started opening drawers and a jewelry box. No note.

“You need me here, Renée?” Dautre asked.

“You can go downstairs,” Ballard said. “But don’t clear the scene just yet. Tell Willard and Hoskins they’re clear.”

“Roger that.”

That left Ballard and Potter in the room.

“You want the full workup?” Potter asked.