Chapter 34
“Hello, Kate,” Reid said, meeting her and Popcorn outside her loft on Bank Street at midnight, a few blocks from where he’d just left Tom at the Y-Knot. “Jed Hilliard.”
“My sister loved him,” Kate said with a note of despair in her voice. Reid was a little buzzed. He focused on her face, on the lines in her forehead, and he felt her unhappiness. “And she didn’t tell me.”
Ah, Kate, Reid thought. Close sisters, a secret between them. That could hurt. It could break a heart.
“Who was he to her?” Reid asked.
“An artist she met. And cared about, and encouraged. And . . . fell in love with.”
“And Pete found out?” Reid asked, checking another box in the motive column.
“That I don’t know. Not yet, but I will find out.”
“Take it easy, Kate. Tell me the details, and I’ll track it all down. Where did she meet him?”
“At Ainsworth,” she said. “Visiting our father. And later at the soup kitchen.”
Ainsworth. Martin Harris had been incarcerated there too, and Reid wondered if Harris and Jed had known each other. Or if Harris had known Garth Woodward, for that matter.
“You’re thinking something,” Kate said, grabbing Reid’s hand. “I can tell.”
Reid held her hand tighter. The whiskey was hitting him.
“You’re right; I am,” he said. Could she smell the whiskey on him? Did he seem too loose? He couldn’t seem to let go of her hand.
“I want to know—please tell me.”
“Did you ever hear of anyone named Martin Harris? Did Beth mention him? Or your father?”
“I don’t think so; why?”
“Someone from Ainsworth who might have run into Beth,” Reid said, deliberately vague.
“The name doesn’t sound familiar,” she said. “But, Conor, she was head over heels. I think Jed might have been the reason she was going to leave Pete. Now I wonder if Matthew was Pete’s baby at all. What if he was Jed’s?”
Reid thought of the screwup, how he hadn’t requested a paternity test during the autopsy.
He swallowed hard, couldn’t bring himself to tell Kate, and it seemed she hadn’t yet thought of it herself.
She seemed to be reeling, just coming to grips with the fact her sister had had a lover she hadn’t known about.
“This might sound out of left field,” he said, “but do you know if Pete is into celestial navigation?”
She seemed taken aback, thrown off course from thinking about Beth and Jed.
“Why?” she asked. “What would that have to do with the case?”
“I’m just curious.”
“He was interested in it,” Kate said. “Not seriously, but because of sailing, he thought it would be good to know.”
“Does he have a sextant?”
“No,” she said. “But I do. I need to navigate to fly. My grandmother thought it was just as important to be able to fly by the stars as it was by using instruments. I have the sextant she gave me, and I loaned it to Pete so he could practice.”
“When was that?” Reid asked, his pulse quickening.
“I’m not sure exactly. Maybe a year ago? Something like that,” Kate said.
Reid nodded. What if Pete had encountered Harris while studying how to steer by the stars?
Maybe Harris had been his teacher. Maybe Harris had figured out Pete’s crime because of something they had talked about.
Pete was the bragging type. He might have felt comfortable confiding in a guy who had committed atrocious crimes against women, a guy who might admire Pete for the way he had killed his wife.
Or what if Pete had used Harris to actually kill Beth?
Reid and Kate were standing on the sidewalk in the middle of New London, the ambient light from apartments and bars and streetlights filling the sky, making it hard to see stars.
But he looked up, and there were a few visible through the city’s bright haze.
He couldn’t identify them, but they were there.
Reid looked into Kate’s eyes. He wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t just had two scotches, but he brushed her cheek with the back of his hand. Was it his imagination, or was she leaning into it? There was so much he wanted to tell her.
He raised his gaze again, looking into the sky.
“Beth and I used to look up too,” Kate whispered. “And we’d make wishes.”
“You did?” he asked.
“Yes. They didn’t all come true, but some of them did.”
“What did you wish on?” he asked.
“The stars, of course,” she said.
Reid nodded. He stared into her eyes for a long time, thought of her and Beth, their wishes, their grandmother and her sextant, celestial navigation. He thought of his brother and what he had said barely twenty minutes ago.
The connection between Pete and Harris: the stars.