15
Instead of staying with Hadley and CeCe again, Kate had slept in the Tower Suite on what should have been her wedding night.
She woke up, reached across the bed to touch Conor, and remembered.
Her heart fell, and she lay there staring at his pillow for a long time.
She heard his voice answering her question last night.
Yes. He had slept with Belinda. She turned over and tried to go back to sleep.
But of course, she couldn’t. She wanted to face him again and hear the whole story as soon as possible, and at the same time, she never wanted to hear another word out of his mouth.
She hated the way she was feeling: distrustful of the love of her life, jealous of a poor, murdered crazy woman.
She got out of bed and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. She looked nuts.
She had once had a therapist who advised her to practice self-acceptance, to gaze into her own eyes and say Hello, I love you, Kate.
That wasn’t happening this morning.
Get over it, idiot, she said instead. But that didn’t feel right either.
When she eventually went down to the lobby, she saw that the thunderstorms had cleared out the heavy air, and it was another sparkling blue-sky summer day.
She stepped outside, onto the verandah. It was the Fourth of July, and a row of American flags attached to the hotel’s south-facing side fluttered in the sea breeze.
The ocean was calm, with gentle waves tumbling onto the beach, advancing up to the tide line.
A crew of workmen was efficiently disassembling her wedding tent.
She leaned against one of the staid white columns, watching them lower the wooden poles, fold the enormous white sailcloth canopy.
It disappeared before her eyes into the back of a truck.
When the truck drove away, she returned to the lobby and walked to the sleek Italian coffee machine.
“Well, there you are,” Anne said, hurrying across the lobby before she could get herself a cappuccino. “Where’s Conor?”
“He’s with Tom and Joe. They’re working on a lead.”
“Mike is anxious to talk to him,” Anne said. “And his calls go straight to voicemail.”
“Why is Mike anxious?” Kate asked.
“You know him. He can’t relax until he knows everyone is all right. He was worried about Garrett bringing Conor into the station for questioning.”
“From what I hear, it went well,” Kate said.
Conor’s uncle Mike walked over with a tall, strong-looking man appearing to be in his early fifties.
“Kate, this is Leo Kennedy, the lawyer I told Conor about,” Mike said.
“Hello, Leo,” Kate said.
“Nice to meet you, Kate,” Leo said. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get back in time to go with Conor to the police barracks—I’m on vacation, and I was out fishing on my boat.
” He swiveled his head, and Kate noticed that he had the same Irish American sunburned skin as the Reids, along with curly brown hair and eyes the color of Galway Bay.
“Sorry you’re interrupting your vacation,” Kate said. “He’s with his brother and a friend, working on the case.”
“That concerns me, Kate,” Mike said. “Joe is a Rhode Island detective. He might be Conor’s friend, but this is an active investigation. Garrett Milne very much considers Conor a suspect, whether Joe does or not. I want to catch Conor before he says anything he shouldn’t to Joe.”
Good luck with that, Kate thought. “Conor has never turned away from a homicide investigation in his life,” she said. “Don’t expect him to start now. Especially with this one.”
“He won’t be able to investigate anything if he winds up in custody,” Leo said.
“Mike,” Kate said. “Given what happened at our dinner, Garrett has it in for Conor. He heard his girlfriend say that she and Conor have a child. I think he’s acting out of jealousy. It’s no basis for him to suspect Conor of anything.”
She was shaking as she spoke. She thought of how she had linked Belinda and Suzanne through the place cards and quill pen, and in spite of Conor’s denial, she couldn’t get the idea of Suzanne, with her blue eyes, out of her mind.
She had also started to wonder whether Garrett, who had been staying in the same room as Belinda, knew some of these things too. And whether he was ignoring—burying—them to make Conor his scapegoat.
“I’ll have my investigator look into Garrett,” Mike said. “And whyever he might be going after Conor.”
“You have an investigator?” Kate asked.
“Yes. Anne,” he said and chuckled. “Well, and the rest of our crew. Now that I’m retired, I’ve been branching out. We’re kind of like private detectives, sometimes working parallel to the police, other times in a completely different direction.”
“In this case, looking into Garrett Milne, it’s most certainly in a different direction,” Leo said. “The police will want no part of going after him.”
“A lot of jurisdictions take care of their own,” Mike said. “Cops don’t investigate cops. Mainly, I’d like to hear everything possible about his girlfriend. Belinda is the murder victim—she’s the key to everything.”
“She lived next door to Conor in New London when they were kids,” Kate said. “And then she seemed to fall off the face of the earth. Just disappeared, when she was very young.”
“Maybe she went away to school,” Anne said.
“I didn’t get that feeling,” Kate said. “Another thing—she was married once, and her husband died.”
An older couple approached, and the man raised his hand in greeting. Then he and the woman hugged Anne and Mike, and Mike introduced them.
“Kate, I’d like you to meet two of Anne’s and my dearest friends,” Mike said. “Edward and Nola Aldrich.”
“Lovely to meet you,” Nola said, and Kate shook hands with her and Edward.
“Listen, Kate,” Mike said. “We are here to help Conor. You can count on all of us—we’ll put our heads together.”
“Leo doesn’t talk about his cases, but most of them wind up in the news,” Nola said.
“So we do a lot of hypotheticals. Of course, the media is full of plenty of unsolved crimes, so mostly we just talk about them. I teach a course in criminal behavior at Brown, and some of my students are very good at profiling. Honestly, I learn a lot from them.”
“We weigh in on message boards, and we’ve done quite well on our cases,” Edward said.
“Some friends play bridge, we solve murders,” Mike said. “Or try to.”
“We’re lucky because Edward has all kinds of databases, connections with the right people,” Anne said.
“Databases?” Kate asked.
“Like Mike, I retired a few years back. I owned a private security firm,” Edward said. “And I keep up the subscriptions.”
“We’ll do our best,” Nola said. “One hundred percent for Conor’s defense.”
“Only if he needs a defense,” Anne said with strong emotion in her voice. “There is no way that Conor hurt that woman. Belinda. I don’t even want to say this . . .” She paused, then took a step closer to Kate.
“What?” Kate asked. “Tell me.”
Anne took Kate’s hand and looked into her eyes.
“I think the murder was a case of mistaken identity. Belinda was never the intended victim,” Anne said.
“Then who was?” Kate asked.
“The killer saw Belinda wearing your wedding dress and thought he was killing you,” Anne said.
“Conor thought it was me, when he found the body,” Kate said quietly. She felt a cold chill run down her spine. In spite of how she felt about Belinda, her heart seized to think of her so violently killed—even worse if it had been a mistake.
“What do we know about the actual murder?” Nola asked, pulling a notebook from her purse.
“From what Conor told me,” Mike said, “Belinda was attacked from behind. The killer reached around to cut her throat.”
Nola listened, taking notes.
“Exactly,” Anne said. “So the killer wouldn’t have seen Belinda’s face. And it was early morning.”
“The sun was just coming up,” Kate said slowly. “There would have been shadows in the room. The light would have been dim.”
“There are a few obvious issues,” Edward said. “What is Belinda’s height in relation to Kate’s? Kate, you’re what—five six?”
“About,” Kate said.
“So the murderer had to be at least that tall, probably taller—to reach around and make his cut,” Nola said.
“I’ll get the medical examiner’s report from one of my contacts on the state police,” Edward said. “That will tell us a lot. And I’ll get him to pull Belinda’s driver’s license. It will have her height. Does anyone have a photo of her?”
Kate scrolled through her phone, found a couple of shots she had taken the night before, with Belinda in the background. Edward gave her his number, and Kate texted them to him.
“Thank you,” she said, looking around the group. “For helping with this.”
“Of course,” Mike said. He put his arm around Kate’s shoulders. “We’re family, Kate. And our friends are very good at what they do. We’ll figure this out.”
Kate nodded, and then she left the five old crime-solvers to keep working on Conor’s case. She had to walk away from them before she cried.