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.
“I think so,” Ballard said. “Just in case.”
“You see something?”
“No, not yet.”
Ballard spent another twenty minutes in the room looking for a note or anything else that would explain why the eleven-year-old girl would take her life. She checked the girl’s phone, which was not password protected — probably a parental rule — and found nothing of note in it other than the record of a twelve-minute call to a contact labeled DAD.
She finally went downstairs and entered the living room. Robards stood up immediately, obviously eager to pass this nightmare call on to Ballard.
“This is Mrs. Winter,” she said.
Robards stepped around a coffee table to get out of the way so Ballard could move in and sit on the couch in her stead.
“Mrs. Winter, I’m very sorry for your loss,” Ballard began. “Can you tell us where your husband is right now? Have you tried to reach him?”
“He’s in Chicago on business. I haven’t tried to talk to him. I don’t even know what to say or how to tell him this.”
“Do you have any family in the area, someplace you can stay tonight?”
“No, I don’t want to leave. I want to be close.”
“I think it’s better for you to leave. I can call out a counselor to help you too. Our department has a crisis—”
“No, I don’t want any of that. I just want to be left alone. I’m staying here.”
Ballard had seen the child’s name on the jewelry box and schoolbooks she had looked through upstairs.
“Tell me about Cecilia. Was she having trouble at school or in the neighborhood?”
“No, she was fine. She was good. She would have told me if there was a problem.”
“Do you have any other children, Mrs. Winter?”
“No, only her.”
This brought a fresh burst of tears and a wrenching moan. Ballard let her slide into it while addressing Robards.
“You have any pamphlets on counseling we could give her? Numbers to call to talk to somebody?”
“Yes, in the car. I’ll be right back.”
Ballard turned her attention back to Mrs. Winter. She noticed that she was barefoot but the bottom edges of the one exposed foot were dirty.
“Are you sure your daughter didn’t leave a note or send a text about what she was planning to do?”
“Of course not! I would have stopped it. What kind of horrible mother do you think I am? This is the nightmare of my life.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. I didn’t mean to imply that. I’ll be right back.”
Ballard got up and signaled Dautre to follow her. They went through the front door and stopped on the porch, just as Robards was coming up the steps with a pamphlet. Ballard spoke in a low voice.
“Look around the neighborhood and check the trash cans for a note. Start with this house and do it quietly.”
“You got it,” Dautre said.
The two cops headed down the porch steps together and Ballard went back inside and returned to the couch. Mrs. Winter spoke before she could sit down.
“I don’t think she killed herself.”
The statement didn’t surprise Ballard. Denial was part of the mourning process.
“Why is that?”
“She wouldn’t have killed herself. I think it was an accident. She made a mistake. She was playing around and things went wrong.”
“How was she playing around?”
“You know, the way kids do in their rooms. When they are alone. She probably was waiting for me to come home and catch her in the act. You know, to get attention. I would catch her and rescue her just in time and then it would be all about her.”
“She was an only child and she didn’t think she got enough attention?”
“No child thinks she gets enough attention. I didn’t.”
Ballard knew that people beset by trauma and loss processed grief in myriad ways. She always tried to reserve judgment on what people said in the throes of a life catastrophe.
“Mrs. Winter, here is a pamphlet that outlines all the services available to you at this difficult time.”
“I told you. I don’t want that. I just want to be left alone.”
“I’ll leave it on the table in case you change your mind. They can be very helpful.”
“Please leave now. I want to be alone.”
“I’m concerned about leaving you by yourself.”
“Don’t be. Let me grieve for my daughter.”
Ballard didn’t respond or move. Soon the woman looked up from her hands and fixed her with red and watery eyes.
“Leave! What do I have to do to make you leave?”
Ballard nodded.
“Okay. I’ll leave. But I think it would be good to know why Cecilia did what she did.”
“You can’t ever know why a child decides to do something.”
Ballard walked through the living room to the entranceway. She looked back at the woman in the chair. Her face was again cradled in her hands.