He walked over to the hat, crouched on his heels, and saw that the fabric glistened with morning dew, as if it had been left on the grass overnight or longer. The crime techs had arrived, and he gestured at the hat and gardening equipment, letting them know to photograph and process them as part of the crime scene.
Black Hall police officers had been the first to arrive. He spotted two uniforms next to a cruiser and headed toward them. A dark-haired woman, clearly distressed, stood between them. The sight of Kate stiffened his spine. He stared at her, thinking how she had changed yet somehow looked the same.
The female officer caught his eye and broke away from the others.
“Hello,” he said, holding out his hand. “I’m Conor Reid.”
“I’m Peggy McCabe, and that’s my partner, Jim Hawley. Beth Lathrop is the victim here,” McCabe said. She nodded toward the woman standing with Hawley. “That’s Kate Woodward, her sister.”
Reid stared at Kate, wondering if she would recognize him. He tried to control his breathing.
“Who called you here?” he asked McCabe.
“Kate. Before I tell you anything else, we did break the door to get in. We went upstairs and discovered the body. We debated getting a search warrant.”
“Okay,” Reid said. He shoved his emotions aside, thinking down the road to some defense lawyer using it against them.
“Kate had been trying to reach Beth for three days. She was pretty frantic. The sisters were close. They spoke every day—sometimes many times a day. Beth was pregnant, and apparently the pregnancy wasn’t easy. Kate felt nervous after the second missed call, but at first she assumed Beth was working at the family business.”
“The art gallery,” Reid said.
“Yes,” McCabe said. “Or out on the beach with the dog, in the garden, whatever. She wasn’t a big cell phone user. She often left it at home.”
“But there were missed calls?”
“Oh, lots. The sister was out of town, calling and calling. Other numbers in the call log too, including from the husband. Kate couldn’t get here to check until this morning. She cut her trip short, flew home first thing to get here.”
“What kind of trip?” He felt dishonest asking questions to which he already knew the answers.
McCabe looked blank, then reddened. “Sorry, I didn’t ask.”
“Don’t worry,” Reid said. He looked past her toward Kate Woodward. He couldn’t keep his eyes away.
“Anyway, the husband is sailing—a yearly thing with the guys, several days offshore. And sorry, I didn’t ask where.”
“We’ll find out,” Reid said. He nodded with what he hoped was reassurance at McCabe. He had started out as a police officer in New London, then had spent two years as a trooper for the state police before becoming a detective with the Major Crime Squad. It wasn’t the local cops’ job to investigate a crime. It was his, and in the byzantine world of his relationship with the Woodward sisters, he knew more than he would ever tell this officer.
“She was hit here,” McCabe said, tapping her own head just behind her left ear. “And she was strangled.”
Reid nodded, trying to keep his composure.
“What else did you notice?” he asked.
“Marble owl statue, covered with blood, under the bed—obviously the weapon he hit her with.” She paused. “And a weird thing—an empty frame on the bedroom wall. Some threads stuck to the wood as if maybe a painting was cut out.”
“A painting?” he asked, electricity zapping his bones.But it couldn’t be the same one,he thought.
“Looks that way to me.”
“Okay,” Reid said. “Thanks.”
He walked toward Kate Woodward. He wanted to go into the house, to sit with Beth Lathrop. He always thought of his first encounter with a homicide victim as two people meeting. An encounter every bit as important in death as it would have been in life, as revelatory as a conversation—in some ways more so. But this would be different from any crime victim he’d ever met: he knew Beth and had rescued her after what, until today, had been the most traumatic event in her life.
He said hello to Officer Hawley, who was savvy enough to peel off and leave him alone with Beth’s sister. He took a deep breath, looked into Kate’s eyes. She stared at him, unrecognizing. He wanted to hold her hand, as he had that day in the art gallery twenty-three years ago. She had been sixteen, Beth a year younger. His heart beat so hard he figured she’d see the vein throbbing in his neck.
“Miss Woodward, I’m Detective Conor Reid. I’m very sorry about your sister.”
“I knew, I knew,” Kate said, digging the heels of her hands into her eyes. “I should have come home the minute she didn’t answer—I felt it.”
