“He killed her before he left,” he said.
“He couldn’t have,” she said.
His heart was thumping. Yes, he’d thought it was Pete from the beginning, especially knowing about Nicola, but the evidence he was seeing—including Sam saying she hadn’t seen her father—made his conviction even stronger.
“I think he left that note on the door for the UPS driver,” he said. “So no one would be suspicious if she didn’t answer.”
“It was in her handwriting!”
“Yes,” Reid said. “She wrote it herself. But she did it before—I don’t know when, but Pete saved the note to use when he killed her. To make it look as if she was alive longer than she was.”
“But he’s been gone for days—if he killed her—I mean, the forensics people can tell when. I know from my mother—they can tell to the hour.”
“You were in the room,” he said. “It was a refrigerator.”
“It’s been incredibly hot all month,” Kate said. “Beth’s pregnancy made her really sensitive to the heat—I know she loved fresh air, the sea breeze, but she turned on the AC so she could sleep.”
“No, Pete did that,” Reid said. “He sealed the windows and turned the air conditioner as high as it would go to affect her body temperature and trick the medical examiner. He planned this carefully, Kate.”
“You act like you know for sure. But how can you? Did you actuallyseehim do it? Watch him kill my sister?”
“I wish I had,” Reid said. With all the times he had passed the house, followed Pete, observed Beth, why hadn’t he been there that day? The thought of it made him sick. “My job is to figure how he did it and to prove it. And I will.”
She stared at him, her eyes bright.
“You told me to call you Conor before,” she said.
“Yes, I did,” he said, watching the wild emotion in her face.
“So, catch him, Conor,” she said.
He nodded—a promise. He wanted to keep walking with her, to say more, but she abruptly turned. It was time for her to get back to Sam, so together they walked to her front door, and Reid watched until she and Popcorn went inside, until he heard the bolts slide into place.
He drove ten minutes home to Silver Bay. It had been a long day. When he pulled into the driveway of the white 1853 saltbox he had owned for fifteen years, he unloaded his surf rod, leaned it beside the back door, and entered the kitchen. The house felt stuffy from being closed up all day, so he opened a few windows and let the breeze cool things off. He brewed a single cup of coffee and took it into his home office.
He regarded the far wall above his desk. He had kept clippings of former cases and tacked them up to remind him of his purpose in life. There were articles about crimes that had been solved, others that hadn’t. His dad had been a cop, and he used to say, “Keep your eye on the ball.” To Reid, that meant remember the victim. Catch the bad guy.
Reid leaned back in his desk chair, coffee mug in hand. One of the biggest headlines on his wall had appeared in theDaytwenty-three years ago: “Gallery Owner Implicated in Wife’s Death.”
The facts were simple and ugly. Garth Woodward, the girls’ father, had had a gambling problem. He’d liked the roulette table at Foxwoods. He had also fallen in love with Francesca Conti, a young woman getting her PhD at Yale’s Department of the History of Art. To cover his debts and pay for a love nest in Wooster Square, he decided to stage a robbery at the Harkness-Woodward Gallery so that paintings could be stolen. He could double profit from both black-market resale and a large insurance payout.
He met Joshua and Sally Anderson at Art Basel when they tried to sell him what he quickly recognized as a forged Hassam. A criminal recognizes criminals. He hired them for the job.
Reid was certain Garth had not planned for his daughters to be at the gallery that day, but he was equally sure that he had known his wife would be. The plan had been to tie Helen up, but since Kate and Beth had stopped by on their way home from school that cold November afternoon, the Andersons determined that they had to be dealt with too.
Joshua shoved Helen and her daughters into the basement. He and Sally bound them together with nylon rope, shoved gags into their mouths. Whether they expected Helen to choke and die was beside the point.
At ten the next morning, Wade and Paula Banks—collectors and regular customers of the gallery—arrived from Greenwich for a meeting with Helen and Garth. They knew the Woodwards would never forget an appointment, and when they saw Helen’s car parked out front, and she did not answer the door, they became concerned and called the police.
Reid was the resident trooper and arrived within five minutes. He circled the gallery, brushing aside thick rhododendron branches to look into windows. There was a cellar hatchway in the back of the building, and he heard thumping coming from inside. He broke the lock and entered the basement.
He discovered the three of them—Helen, Kate, and Beth, still tied together, back to back. Kate was banging her feet as hard as she could, splattering fluids that had drained from their mother’s body, pooled around them. Beth was screaming through the fabric tied around her mouth. Helen was slumped over; blood had dried black on the gag and her chin, had run onto the concrete floor and coagulated. She had urinated and lost control of her bowels. By the fact that she had gone into rigor, Reid knew that she had been dead for hours. Her face was gray-blue, her eyes opaque.
His hands shook as he cut the family loose. He tried to help Beth stand, but she wouldn’t let go of her mother. Kate was pure white, her lips blue, in shock, backing away as if she wanted to melt into the wall.
Garth Woodward arrived minutes later. He had been on an ostensible art-buying trip to New York and had come straight to the gallery, instead of going home first, for the meeting with the collectors. The minute he ran down the stairs he cried out—either genuinely stunned to see that Helen was dead, or a great actor. Woodward had started pacing, holding his head, while Beth had cradled her mother’s cold body, and Kate had stood with her back pressed to the basement wall, staring into nothing, completely silent.
Twenty-three years later, Reid still saw Kate pressed against the cellar wall nearly nightly in his dreams. His training as a police officer had prepared him for all kinds of crime scenes. He had seen fatal accidents on I-95 and country roads, had been to houses on domestic violence calls and tended to victims with black eyes and broken bones, had had guns pulled on him twice—once on a domestic call, another at a beach bar where he had gone to break up a fight. The husband had dropped his shotgun; the drunk had held on to his pistol. Reid had shot the drunk. He had blown a hole in his chest. It hadn’t affected him the way Beth’s reedy screams and Kate’s blank stare had.
