“Whoa,” I say out loud. Chicken skin on my arms and legs. Creepy for no other reason than just knowing I laid eyes on a kid in his last days or hours. I should have looked harder. Poor kid seemed bored. Tired. Depression looks like that: boredom, fatigue.

I revisit the accident report. Responding officer: Michael Buchanan. Not a close friend, but friendly enough for me to feel comfortable visiting the Investigations Unit and interrupting his game of sudoku. “Hey,” I say. “Just saw your report about the fatality response yesterday.”

“Oh man.” He shakes his head. “Gruesome.”

“Mind if I ask what happened?”

“Waiting for the autopsy.”

“Accident?”

“Might be an accident. Probably suicide. Strange deal, the way he threw himself against the banister, but I’ve seen stranger.”

“Strange how?”

He crinkles his face and says, “Why are you so interested?”

“Not sure yet if I am interested. Strange how?”

He smiles, like I said something cute. Cute, like a little kid. “Well, okay. There’s no good reason for him to have been up there teetering at the steepest point if not to tempt fate and gravity. The homeowner says he called the roof a ‘death trap’ and ‘suicide central’ in front of the kid days earlier. Gave me a list of four witnesses, plus the man’s wife and son, who were all there and heard it. Jumping from thirty feet isn’t exactly a sure thing, but finding the key and sneaking up are deliberate moves, right? Sad either way you cut it. Walsh at the ME is the lead investigator. We’ll see what he comes up with.”

I nod. And then, I don’t know why, but I get curious. “Does the kid have family here?”

“Funny you should ask. Hardly any family at all. His life was one tragedy after another.”

Depression. Suicide. Serial tragedies. He was just a kid, too young for this shit. “Any chance I can take a peek at the report?”

“What’s up with you? Do you know the guy or something?”

“No, but I detained the homeowner the other day for a traffic stop and that kid was with him.”

Buchanan squints and tilts his head and says, “You should have led with that.” But I guess he’s curious, too, because he rotates his laptop so I can read the incident report, so he can watch me read it. “Doubt it was him,” he says. “Homeowner hadn’t seen the Carpenter kid since Friday.”

“That’s not true, actually. I saw them together on Saturday.”

“You ID the kid?”

“No. But it was him.”

“You should have asked for identification.”

“Well, I identified him with my eyeballs. Also, there’s probably dashcam footage.”

“Probably, but the son is the same age and build. Video from the rear of the vehicle won’t help much.”

“I mean, we could check.”

“Nah.”