Dark Sacred Night (Harry Bosch Universe #31)(3)
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.
2
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.
She was working alone. Her partner, John Jenkins, was on bereavement leave. There were no replacements for detectives who worked the late show. Ballard was halfway through the first night of at least a week going solo. It all depended on when Jenkins came back. His wife had endured a long, painful death from cancer. It had torn him up and Ballard told him to take all the time he needed.
She opened her notebook to the page containing the details she had written about the second investigation and then called up a blank incident report on her screen. Before beginning, she dipped her chin and pulled the collar of her blouse up to her nose. She thought she picked up the slight odor of decomposition and death but couldn’t be sure if it had permeated her clothes or was simply an olfactory memory. Still, it meant that her plan to wear the suit again that week was not going to work out. It was going to the cleaners.