Chapter 3
The forensics team had arrived and was ready to start processing the scene, but Reid wanted to enter the room first. He grabbed a pair of disposable gloves from a box on the sidewalk and snapped them on.
The house smelled stale, as if no fresh air had entered in days.
When he reached the top of the stairs and opened the bedroom door, he felt the blast of cold and tasted the sweet stench of decomposition.
He stood back, gazing at Beth. From this angle, looking at her from behind, he could almost imagine she was sleeping: her reddish-gold hair spread across the pillow, the curve of her hip, and the languid way her arm covered her eyes to block the morning light.
But as he moved closer, the illusion was shattered.
Approaching the edge of the bed, he nearly tripped on the bloodstained marble owl. He circled around to the other side.
He saw that Beth’s skull had been cracked behind her ear, the wound deep and red with fine slivers of bone stuck in the dark blood. A bruise of ligature marks encircled her throat. There were impressions of lace; a torn bra and panties lay on the floor. He stared at them: evidence of a sex crime?
Her swollen tongue jutted between clenched teeth, and the whites of her clouded eyes were full of red-and-purple pinpoint dots, petechial hemorrhages indicating strangulation.
Dry, almost invisible whitish crust had formed around her lips and run down her chin, and Reid knew the medical examiner would find amylase-rich saliva. Her legs were bruised.
“You were so young,” he said out loud.
He wasn’t talking to the teenage Beth he’d rescued all those years ago but to the thirty-something-year-old Beth who lay on the bed before him.
He stared into her cloudy eyes as if she were looking back at him.
He heard the air conditioner chugging so hard it rattled in the window frame.
Instinctively, he knew Beth hadn’t turned it on—her killer had.
Whenever he drove by this house—not as often as he patrolled Kate’s loft, but at least once a week—he noticed that the windows were always wide open.
The curtains might be rippling in the breeze; he’d hear voices from inside, or music coming from the daughter’s room, or the TV on in Pete’s study.
Beth liked fresh air. Kate did too. Reid figured the preference came, partly, from having been shut up in that dank cellar for nearly twenty-four hours.
The killer had left the UPS note on the door, had turned up the AC, had wanted everyone to think Beth had been alive longer than she actually had. Reid would be checking for sex offenders in the area, but why would a rapist care about messing with the time of death?
His gut told him this was something else. The killer had needed to build in time, enough for him to establish his alibi—such as getting onto a sailboat with his buddies and heading offshore, hundreds of miles away, where he couldn’t possibly have killed his wife.
Gazing into Beth’s face, Reid couldn’t stop shaking.
He was in the process of breaking a cardinal rule of investigation: making up his mind before reviewing all the facts.
Two men who were supposed to have loved Beth—her father and now her husband—had destroyed her.
Reid glanced across the room at the empty picture frame and wondered if Pete had gotten ideas from the earlier crime. He turned back to Beth.
Suspicion wasn’t enough. He needed hard evidence, and he started by looking at Beth’s hands.
Her fingernails had been manicured recently; there were no scratches or bent or broken nails, no obvious skin or blood caught under the nail tips.
Why hadn’t she grabbed for him while he was strangling her?
Why hadn’t she scratched and slashed and tried to break his grip, to yank the ligature away from her throat, snagging some of his DNA under her nails?
Perhaps she had, and Reid simply wasn’t seeing it. The coroner would tell him.
Outside the bedroom, in the upstairs hall, the forensics team was getting impatient.
He could hear them talking. Although he knew they would document the scene with detailed video and photographs, he removed his iPhone from his jacket pocket and took photos of Beth, the bloodstained pillowcase, and the owl.
Before leaving the room, he walked to the wall where the empty picture frame hung.
The gilded frame itself gave him a jolt.
It brought back the past; he would know it anywhere.
On the bureau a sketch pad lay opened to a page with small ink drawings of a sailboat, a row of beach umbrellas, and an ornate antique key. There were notations beside each sketch, and he recognized Beth’s handwriting from the note downstairs:
The husbands go sailing away—Pete and Nick and their pals—so Beth and Scotty and Kate and Lulu get to be beach girls for a week!
Reid pictured Pete somewhere off the coast, on a beautiful boat sailing on the deep blue sea, feeling safe and smug. The gallery president who didn’t do anything. Another husband who wanted it all—just like Kate and Beth’s father—and figured it was his for the taking.
He photographed the empty frame and the page of drawings.
He stood beside the bed, his gaze moving from Beth’s head wound to the strangulation marks around her neck to the ripped lingerie on the floor.
Had she been hit or strangled first? If it had been a rape-murder, would Beth’s attacker have stolen the painting as a trophy?
Again, his instinct told him that a stranger had not done this.
Reid heard the house phone ringing downstairs.
He left the bedroom, and the techs entered.
He hurried downstairs, and just as he got to the kitchen door, the landline stopped ringing.
He imagined the call going to voice mail.
He pulled out his cell phone, and, reading the house phone number printed on the telephone base, he dialed and heard Beth’s voice:
Hi, you’ve reached the Lathrops, and we’re probably out walking Popcorn, so leave your message, and we’ll call you just as soon as we get back from the beach! Then BEEP.
A few seconds after he hung up, the phone rang again. Reid picked up but didn’t say anything. He just held the receiver to his ear.
“Hello?” a man’s voice said. “Beth? Bethie! Are you there? Why haven’t you been answering? You having too much fun with the girls? I’ve called your cell, and you’re not calling me back, and I’m going a little crazy . . .”
“Who is this?” Reid asked, although he already knew.
“Who the hell is this?” the voice asked.
“Detective Conor Reid of the Connecticut State Police. Who am I speaking to?”
“Pete Lathrop. Did I dial a wrong number? I’m calling my wife.”
“You have the right number,” Reid said.
“Where is she?”
Reid paused for a beat. “Mr. Lathrop, I am very sorry to tell you that your wife is deceased.”
“Christ, no!” Pete shouted. “You’re lying. You’ve got to be. God, Beth!” The phone clattered, as if he had dropped it.
Over the course of Reid’s career, he had had occasion to play 911 tapes to juries: perpetrators phoning in supposed discoveries of their own crime scenes. You could almost always tell real from manufactured shock. Pete’s reaction was so instantaneous, so canned, it came off as rehearsed.
“What is your position?” Reid asked.
“We’re approaching Oak Bluffs, on Martha’s Vineyard,” a different voice said.
“Who’s on the line?”
“Leland Ackerley. A friend of Pete’s. And Beth’s.”
“What’s the nearest Coast Guard station?” Reid asked.
“Menemsha.”
“Okay, then. Go to Menemsha, and I’ll meet you there,” Reid said.