“Hey, Sally. It’s Conor Reid.”
“How’re you doing, Conor?”
“Everything’s good. I’m just looking at the Beth Lathrop autopsy, and I don’t see paternity results for the child.”
“Huh, let me check,” she said.
Reid hung on the line, receiver pressed to his ear. His coffee had gotten cold, but he drank it anyway. He heard music playing through the line, as if Sally had a radio on at her desk.
“Conor, did you request a paternity test?” she asked.
The question was a punch in the gut. “No,” he said. “But I never do—I always assume it’s protocol.”
“Dr. Garcia said you didn’t make the request, so he didn’t perform one,” Sally said. The music had been turned down, and her tone had become more formal. Reid pictured Humberto Garcia in the same room, perhaps glaring at her in his famous, heavy-browed way.
“Okay, thanks, Sally,” Reid said and hung up. He tapped a pen on the page of Matthew’s autopsy conclusions and thought about it. A test would have been pro forma, would have been nice to have one, but they didn’t need it. Not really, anyway. But the lack of it made Reid’s stomach churn—it was his fault for not specifying.
Reid didn’t want to leave Kate without answers. He had driven past her loft last night, seen the windows lit up and warm against the dark. The last few days, he’d gone to the Groton-New London Airport, where she kept her Piper Saratoga, and watched planes take off and land. He told himself it was meditative, a way to clear his mind and let ideas about the case come in sideways.
Now, sitting at his desk, Reid considered the lack of DNA and believed that indicated a staged, rather than authentic, sexual assault.Sideways,he told himself. He still wanted Pete for the murder, but he was determined to stop focusing on any one suspect and not rule anyone out.
The bedroom had been full of fingerprints: Beth’s, Pete’s, and Sam’s, of course, but also Kate’s, Lulu’s, Scotty’s, and Isabel’s. There were also several made by an unknown person. Most of Beth’s friends’ prints had been in the seating area, where a sofa and two chairs were arranged by a fireplace, where French doors opened onto a small balcony overlooking the distant beach and sea. It would make sense for Beth and her friends to sit there, enjoying the view. But he would check on that.
He had looked at sex offenders in Southeastern Connecticut and found one of real interest.
Twenty years ago, Martin B. Harris had been an astronomy professor at a community college in Baxbury. He had been married with two children. There had been a string of home invasions in the suburbs around the school. The crimes were violent, sexual in nature, but not always rape. The victims were white women ranging in age from eighteen to thirty-eight.
The attacks always occurred early in the day, mostly during the summer. They took place in the woman’s house, on her own bed, and the scene was always strewn with lingerie—some owned by the victim, but most of the racier pieces brought by the perpetrator. DNA was everywhere, but it didn’t match anything the police had on file.
Harris was arrested on a fluke. A witness had seen a blue Toyota driving away from the scene of one of the attacks, and she reported that it had a Baxbury Community College parking sticker on the bumper. Investigators scoured the college parking lots and found plenty of blue Toyotas. The owners were painstakingly cleared. But during one interview, a student reported that he sometimes parked his car next to his astronomy professor’s, and he noticed Dr. Harris almost always had a Frederick’s of Hollywood bag in his back seat.
The police arrested him in his classroom. They had warrants for his home, office, and vehicle and found trophies taken from every home he had entered. His DNA matched. He had a penchant for black lace underwear and always brought some to his crime scenes, in case his victims had other taste.
He’d accepted a plea deal for fifteen years. His wife had divorced him and taken the kids. The college had fired him.
Reid read through Harris’s parole records and saw he had been released from prison two years ago and was living in a residence hotel in Silver Bay—one town over from Black Hall. He checked in with his parole officer once a week and was subject to unannounced drop-ins.
Reid called Robin Warren, Harris’s parole officer, to give her a heads-up that he’d be stopping by Osprey House to question Harris.
“Thank you for letting me know,” she said. “May I ask, why is he of interest to you?”
“The Beth Lathrop case,” he said.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “That was a terrible thing.”
“So you know the details?”
“Those that have been made public, of course,” she said.
“Did you think of Harris?”
She paused for a long moment. Reid had worked with her before, found her to be thoughtful and thorough, an excellent officer studying for a master’s in psychology. She had lived in Zimbabwe as a child, and her accent was elegant and formal.
“I saw similarities with Mr. Harris’s past crimes,” she said. “But no, I did not think of him in relation to this case.”
“Why’s that?”
“He willingly undergoes anti-recidivism treatment. He takes two testosterone-suppressing drugs, and he goes to therapy once a week.”
