“No. It’s brilliantly written and quite unbreakable. Pete is out of the business, will only be able to stay in the house if Kate, as trustee, allows it, and will walk away with a sum that, from what I gather by looking at his rather extravagant expenses, will be gone in two years. Unless he receives wise investment advice.”
“So this means he would have been better off ... ,” Reid said.
“With Beth alive. A divorce would have been in his interests. Not murder,” Winnie said.
“There goes his financial motive,” Reid said.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I have the feeling this isn’t what you wanted to hear. It doesn’t help your case against him.”
And neither did the search of Pete’s hard drives,Reid thought. Ahab’s white whale had killed him in the end. That’s what obsession could do. He shook his head hard, as if he could clear out the fog. Winnie was right; her work was easier: numbers didn’t lie, and they didn’t care.
“Eye on the ball,” Reid said out loud.
“I’ve heard that before,” Winnie said.
“Yeah. Dad always said it.”
“You can do this,” she said. “You’re going to solve this case.”
“I appreciate you thinking that,” he said.
“I have no way of knowing whether Pete is your killer or not. He still might be, Conor. There are motives other than money.”
“True,” Reid said, but his heart wasn’t in it. He didn’t want to talk anymore. He felt as if he had been building his whole case on a ton of emotions and not enough evidence. The opposite of keeping his eye on the ball. His father wouldn’t be proud of him, and Reid certainly wasn’t proud of himself.
He hugged Winnie and walked her down the hall to the front door. Then he returned to his office and stared at his desk.
It was time to start again.
44
Kate walked Popcorn along the city waterfront while Sam did homework upstairs in the loft. Dark water swirled with reflected orange light. The rusty bulkhead and rocky shore were littered with old tires, broken pilings, the fiberglass core of a foundered boat, all exposed by the outgoing tide. Waves from the wakes of passing ferries sloshed the shore. Amid the cacophony of trains and ships, Kate sought white noise, but nothing stilled her thoughts ofMoonlighthidden in the beehive oven, hearts of blood scrawled more than twenty years apart.
On her way back from the walk, she saw someone sitting on the steps of the Maritime Museum across the street from her loft. When she got closer, the man stood. The streetlights illuminated him, and she recognized Jed. Popcorn hustled over, wriggling with pleasure as he reached down to pet him.
“Hey, boy; hey, boy,” he said. Then, looking up at Kate, “I was waiting for you.”
“How did you know where I lived?” she asked.
“Beth showed me,” he said. “We’d take walks after finishing up at the soup kitchen, and she’d always steer me down here. She loved you, Kate.”
Kate looked up at the sky at the mention of her sister.
“I know,” she said.
“She wanted to be closer to you,” Jed said. “She wanted you to know about us. Every time we walked by, she hoped you’d be coming out your door, leaving the building, and that you’d see us.”
“Why didn’t she just bring you upstairs?”
“She was afraid of how you would react. An accidental meeting would be okay, but she thought it would be too aggressive to throw it in your face.”
Kate glanced up at the tall windows of her apartment. The lights were all on; Sam was still up.
“What made you come here now?” Kate asked.
“You’re the only other person in the world,” he said, “who loved her as much as I did. Sam, of course, but I can’t talk to her. I can’t stand how much I miss her, Kate. I just want to talk about her.”
“Yes, I want that too,” Kate said.
