Chapter 41
Reid’s heart was racing—this painting hadn’t been stolen by art thieves.
Its existence in the gallery was evidence that someone close to home had placed it here.
Reid had mostly ruled Jed out. Although Harris was intelligent, or at least had been before he’d pickled himself, and capable of violence against Beth and stealing the painting, why would he hide the artwork here? It had to be Pete.
“Who had the key?” Reid asked.
Kate acted as if she hadn’t heard him. She leaned over, face practically touching the painting, as if she was examining every brushstroke.
“Beth,” she said after a minute. Without looking up, she tried to hand him the key. He didn’t touch it. He pulled a clear plastic evidence bag from his pocket and had her drop it in.
He felt the weight of the odd, square-shaped key. “How long have you had this?” he asked, trying not to sound frustrated.
“A few weeks. It was in Beth’s desk.”
“Would Pete have hidden it there?”
“No,” Kate said. “He didn’t even know it existed. It was in a box I gave her, along with a sketch, beneath a false bottom. I had no idea it was there until that day I came back here with you.”
“Then how did Moonlight get locked in here?”
“Beth. She stole it herself,” Kate said in a flat voice. She sounded hypnotized.
Why would Beth steal her own painting? Pete staging a theft made sense, but not Beth.
What was she trying to accomplish? Finding Moonlight was the most significant part of the case in weeks, and Reid knew he had to get it to the lab.
But he was still overwhelmed by how Kate had acted upstairs.
She’d gone into a fugue state when he’d tried to kiss her, and she’d led him down into the basement like a sleepwalker.
Standing at the workbench, thinking about the wood engraver, she’d come out of the trance.
But once the bottle of wine had broken, the spell had overcome her again, and she had gone straight to the metal door and unlocked it.
Had she known the painting would be there? Had she experienced a waking dream?
Did Kate’s actions, like Lady Macbeth’s, reveal a guilt-ridden mind?
He stared at her, wondering if he’d been blind all along.
He went back to that first day, at the house when she’d discovered Beth’s body and asked if she was a suspect.
Had she killed her sister and hidden the painting here? The thoughts rattled his bones.
“Kate, why would Beth steal it from herself?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“She couldn’t have put it here after she died,” he said.
“Then maybe before. I don’t know,” she said.
She turned away from him, held her head in her hands, leaving him to stare at the painting.
He knew that the initial examination should be done by a state police lab technician, perhaps with the help of an art conservator, but he put on latex gloves and turned it over anyway.
On the back of the canvas was a rust-colored drawing in the shape of a heart. It looked as if it had been made with blood. At the very bottom was a small smudge, barely a dot.
Kate glanced back, over her shoulder, and fixed her gaze on the heart. She stood beside him, staring down, reaching out with a trembling hand. He felt her wanting to trace the lines with her finger, but she didn’t.
Perhaps the blood—he was pretty sure that’s what it was—belonged to the artist who had painted Moonlight a century ago, but Reid didn’t think so.
He believed that heart was the signature of whoever had cut the canvas free just months earlier, in July, leaving the blank frame on the wall of Beth Lathrop’s bedroom, within sight of her body.