Last Day

Chapter 1

Outside, a salt breeze blew off the protected cove down the hill.

July in Black Hall could be humid, waves of damp heat rising from the marsh and tidal flats, but although it was already eighty-five degrees, the air was clear, and this was one of those sparkling summer days Beth loved so much, looked forward to all winter.

If the windows had been open, the white curtains would have lifted and rippled, and the cross breeze blowing across the marshes, off Long Island Sound, would have cooled the whole house.

But the house was closed up, the bedroom door shut tight, the window air conditioner running on the highest setting—so high that despite the hot day, a thin film of frost had formed on the vents and the sill.

Beth’s golden-red hair, loose and wavy, cascaded over her bare shoulders.

Her iPhone on the bedside table lit up with an incoming call from her sister, Kate.

The phone was set to “Do Not Disturb,” so it neither rang nor vibrated.

When Kate disconnected, a message banner showed on Beth’s screen.

It was the most recent of twenty-one missed calls.

Nearly as soon as the message appeared on the iPhone, the landline began to ring.

It was downstairs, in the kitchen, and the tone was muffled by the rooms and stairs and closed door in between it and Beth.

Through the closed bedroom door and over the air conditioner’s loud hum, the doorbell could barely be heard.

It rang three times. Popcorn let out a whooping yelp, bounded down the stairs, and ran back and forth in the entry hall.

Then came the sound of rapid closed-fist pounding on the front door.

Then the sharp clank-clank-clank of the brass door knocker. Popcorn barked wildly.

The noise at the front door stopped. Footsteps sounded on the brick walk along the side of the house, voices carrying as the white picket gate squeaked open.

Popcorn tore into the kitchen, wailing at the two women and a man who had entered the backyard and were standing just outside the back door.

They peered in, hands cupped around their eyes to block the sunlight.

Popcorn pranced with excitement, his tail thumping.

One of the women knew him well—Kate Woodward, Beth’s sister.

He reared up, front claws clicking on the glass.

Kate went to the gas grill, opened the lid.

The Lathrops usually hid a spare key inside, and although she had looked earlier, before she had called the police, before they had pulled up in their cruiser, she had to double-check to make sure it really wasn’t there.

The other two visitors were uniformed Black Hall police officers, Peggy McCabe and Jim Hawley. McCabe knocked hard, the rap of her knuckles sharp and staccato.

“Black Hall Police,” she called. “Beth, are you home? Anyone in there?”

“Is the dog friendly?” Hawley asked warily.

“Yes, very—Popcorn’s very friendly; don’t worry,” Kate said. “Just break the door, will you? Please?”

Hawley crouched down, looked the dog in the eye through the slider. “Hey, Popcorn; hey, Popcorn,” he said. “You’re not going to bite, are you?” Popcorn slimed the glass with his nose, his tail wagging.

“There’s nowhere else they could have hidden a key?” McCabe asked.

“I don’t think so. I don’t know. The spare is always in the grill. Beth would never go this long without calling me. Will you please get us in there? I should have broken in myself. Something’s wrong.”

“Did you have a fight?” McCabe asked.

“No!” Kate said.

McCabe knew they should get a search warrant, but Kate’s panic was compelling.

Beth Lathrop was six months pregnant and hadn’t been heard from in three days.

Her silver Mercedes was parked in the driveway, and at least two days’ worth of dog waste was visible through the window.

These facts, plus Kate’s demeanor, told McCabe that she and Hawley could claim exigent circumstances if they faced a problem in court later.

“Is there an alarm?” she asked. “Is it silent?”

“Yes, there is one. No, it’s not silent. It’s a siren,” Kate said. “But I know the code. I can disarm it.”

“Get back,” McCabe said. She pulled on latex gloves, took her baton from her black leather belt, and smashed the door.

The glazed glass shattered into a thousand tiny squares, but they held in place.

She gave it one extra-forceful tap with the butt of her baton, and the pieces rained down onto the blue tile floor.

She reached in to unlock the door from the inside.

The alarm didn’t go off. It hadn’t been set.

The officers stepped into the kitchen, but Kate pushed past them.

“Beth!” she shouted.

“Wait,” McCabe said, grabbing Kate’s arm. “Please step outside until I tell you to come in.”

“There’s no way,” Kate said and disappeared through the kitchen.

McCabe kept her hand on her hip holster, following Kate. Hawley petted the dog, let him outside into the fenced yard, and then followed the other two up the stairs.

“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.”

“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 signature Childe Hassam in 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.