“Yeah,” McCabe said.
“Rape too?” he asked, gesturing at the torn panties and bra.
“Maybe,” McCabe said. She crouched by the bed. A marble sculpture of an owl lay half-under the fabric skirt. The bird’s head was smeared with red-brown dried blood.
“Murder weapon?” Hawley asked, pointing at the gash behind Beth’s ear.
She stood up, staring. Blood had coagulated around the wound, bizarrely bright red in the sunlight. Her gaze moved to the bruised indentation around Beth’s neck. “That or strangulation,” she said.
“Nice house for something like this,” Hawley said. “Expensive everything. Mercedes in the driveway.”
“I know,” McCabe said, looking around the room. The Lathrops obviously liked order. Except for the lingerie, there were no clothes strewn around. Books on the nightstand were perfectly stacked. The furniture looked to be antique—fine wood, burnished with age. Landscapes of local scenes, framed in museum-type gilded frames, hung around the room. McCabe looked at one, saw the signatureChilde Hassamin the lower-right corner. She had grown up in town and recognized the name of one of the most famous Black Hall artists—a fortune right here on the wall. There was also an empty frame, with ragged shreds of canvas fiber clinging to the wood.
“Look,” she said. “What was there? Think someone cut the painting out?”
“Could be,” Hawley said. “The husband owns the Lathrop Gallery, right?”
“Isn’t that a little sexist?” McCabe asked. “Assuming he owns all this?”
“He doesn’t?”
“It used to be called the Harkness-Woodward Gallery,” McCabe said. “It’s always been in the victim’s family.” A high-end art gallery in the center of Black Hall, it specialized in the same kind of paintings that hung on the walls. McCabe’s mother had taken the kids there on Saturdays, after their father had died—anything to distract them.
As soon as she’d heard Kate’s last name, it had all come back to her. The gallery had belonged to Kate and Beth’s grandmother. There had been a scandal associated with it, back when McCabe was just a kid. A robbery and a death, she remembered. Paintings stolen, a mother and her daughters tied up. People in town had talked about it nonstop. Even on the beach, on the most perfect days of summer, the whispers had been about cheating, greed, and murder. Sometimes she wondered whether that crime, burned into her consciousness at such a young age, had been the impetus for her to become a cop. And now, staring at Beth: Had she and Kate been those girls in the basement?
McCabe wondered what the missing painting might have to do with Beth’s murder. Seeing the torn lingerie made her feel sick; what had the killer put Beth through? “God, it’s freezing in here.” She shivered in the blast of icy air.
“Time to turn that thing off,” Hawley said, heading toward the air conditioner. The compressor cycled, pumping hard; it sounded ready to give out.
“No, leave it till the Staties get here.”
McCabe had two years more than Hawley on a force so small the selectmen were considering merging it with the department in the next town. She lived in Norwich now, a tougher place to work, and she felt lucky to have gotten a job in sleepy Black Hall. It was a postcard-beautiful village on Long Island Sound, a beach resort in summer, a place that had attracted artists since the late 1800s, and a bedroom town for executives of Electric Boat and professors at Yale, Connecticut College, and the Coast Guard Academy. Until today, her worst calls had been domestics and bad car accidents.
She leaned closer to Beth, looked at her injuries. The edge of the panties had left a pattern of lace in the deep-purple bruised circle around her neck. She cringed at the sight but couldn’t look away. It was at least as brutal as the cracked skull, even more disturbing with its hints of sexual violence.
“The husband is always the killer,” Hawley said. “But not this time. What did the sister say? He’s on a boat out in the Atlantic somewhere. Besides, I can’t imagine a husband doing this.”
McCabe didn’t answer. She’d learned early, from a case very close to home, that even nice-seeming people could do terrible things.
“We’ve got to notify him,” Hawley said. “That’s going to suck for him, off on a nice sailing trip, getting news like this. If we can even get through. There’s probably no cell reception. I go fishing in the canyons behind Block Island; there’s a major dead zone out there.”
“There’ll be a radio.”
“Yeah, forget that. A bunch of guys on vacation aren’t going to be listening to the marine band.”
“It’s Major Crime’s problem,” McCabe said. Kate had said Pete took the sailing trip every summer, with the same bunch of guys, and that this voyage would be the last before his new baby was born.
That thought made McCabe stare down at Beth’s belly.
The baby was dead too.
2
Detective Conor Reid parked in front of 45 Church Street, the Major Crime Squad van not far behind. He’d been investigating a credit union robbery in Pawcatuck until late last night, and he still had on the same blue blazer and gray slacks. He’d changed his white shirt, though, and put on a striped tie. His brown hair, a little too long for the Connecticut State Police, was salty from an hour spent fishing. Instead of going straight home after leaving the scene at dawn, he’d hit the Charlestown Breachway to go surf casting. It was the second week of July, and stripers were just starting to run. He had a heavy caseload, and there never seemed to be enough time for fishing or haircuts or much of anything but work.
The dispatch call had pulled him away from the fish. Hearing the Black Hall address was a bullet to his heart. He had sat in front of the house often enough, wondering about the woman inside. The fact a crime had occurred to this family hit him with a bolt from the past. The news was all he needed to throw his rod and tackle box into the trunk of his car. Speeding south toward Black Hall on I-95, he knew this case had to be his.
After getting out of his car, he took in the scene—a large white sea captain’s house, typical of this affluent part of Black Hall. A boxwood hedge surrounded the property. Mature oak and beech trees shaded the lawn, and blue hydrangeas bloomed along an old lichen-covered stone wall. He noticed pink gardening gloves, clippers, and a flat basket full of wilted cut flowers at the foot of the wall. A white canvas sun hat lay on the ground. A green hose was draped over the wall, water trickling from the spray nozzle, sending a thin stream down the hill toward a wild meadow. Someone had been interrupted while gardening.
