“Beth!” Kate called. She was on the stairs, mounting them two at a time, McCabe just behind her. McCabe heard the air conditioner humming behind a closed door at the top of the staircase. Kate started to grab the knob, but McCabe clamped her wrist to stop her. Kate’s hand was shaking.
“Wait out here, Kate,” McCabe said.
Kate took a step back, letting Hawley pass, seeming to comply.
McCabe turned the brass knob—even through her glove, the metal felt like ice.
Inside, the bedroom was freezing cold, the air conditioner running hard. The room smelled sickly sweet and rotten. Beth lay on her right side facing the window, her back to the door. Flies, sluggish in the chilled air, buzzed around her head. Kate ran past both officers to her sister.
“Beth,” Kate said, crouching down to look into her face. She let out a sharp, instant shriek of wild, immediate grief. “No, Beth, don’t let it be this—don’t let it.”
“Don’t touch her,” McCabe said.
“Oh, Beth,” Kate said.
Hawley and McCabe approached the bed.
Beth’s eyes were half-open, her lips parted and protruding tongue blue and swollen. There was a purple line around her neck, a lace pattern imprinted into her skin. The left side of her face was bruised, her head split open behind her ear, her hair caked with dried blood. The blue sheets were disheveled and stained with fluids, the top one pulled up just enough to cover Beth’s pregnant belly. Black bikini panties, the filigreed elastic stretched and torn, lay bunched on the floor. A lacy black bra, sides and straps ripped, hung off the side of the bed.
Kate stood still, fists pressed to her chest, weeping. McCabe put her arm around her shoulders, led her to the bedroom door. Kate didn’t put up a fight. Her body felt rigid, her chest heaving with sobs.
“Who should I call?” McCabe said. “To come and get you?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Kate said.
“You can’t be in the room, though,” McCabe said.
She looked into Kate’s tear-flooded green eyes to make sure she understood, really got it. Kate shook her head, paced back and forth a few times, went into the hall, and sat heavily on the top step.
McCabe started to tell her she couldn’t, that the stairs were part of the crime scene, but instead she just tapped Kate’s arm.
“Don’t touch anything, Kate,” she said. “Not the wall, not the banister, not anything.”
Kate didn’t reply, just sat there crying.
McCabe returned to the bedroom, closing the door behind her.
“Jesus,” Hawley said.
McCabe glanced at him and nodded. She knew it was his first murder scene—hers too. Black Hall was one of the quietest, most affluent towns on the Connecticut Shoreline, and nothing like this ever happened here.
“You want to call it in, or should I?” he asked.
McCabe unclipped the radio from her belt and called Marnie, the dispatcher.
“We have a homicide at 45 Church Street,” McCabe said.
“The Lathrops’ house?” Marnie asked, taking in a sharp breath. This was a small town. “Good Lord. Is it Beth? Or Pete? Not the girl; gosh, what’s her name—she’s two years behind Carrie. I can’t remember ...”
“Call Major Crime for us, Marnie,” McCabe said, referring to the Connecticut State Police’s squad of detectives assigned to murders and kidnappings and bank robberies and deliberately not answering the question.
“Roger. I’ll do that now,” Marnie said.
McCabe disconnected.
She glanced down at the iPhone beside the bed, touched the home button with her gloved thumb, and saw the screen light up. It didn’t ask for a password, which told McCabe that Beth had trusted the people around her. “Look at all these calls and texts. Two days’, three days’ worth?” There was a slew of messages and missed calls from Kate, but the three most recent came up as “Pete.”
“And the dog hadn’t been out in a while, from the looks of all that shit by the door.”
