Last Day (21 page)

A marble fireplace, laid with logs, dominated one walnut-paneled wall. Chest-high overflowing bookcases lined two more, and the fourth had French doors. Hung with thick draperies of expensive fabric, Clarence House’s Tibet pattern—playful striped tigers in shades of cinnabar, sage green, and pale citron—the doors overlooked the boxwood
hedge maze; stone garden ornaments, including gigantic spheres from an eighteenth-century Irish castle; and a lawn sloping into various crags and valleys down toward the river. The effect was both exotic and very New England. This was how the upper class lived. Nicola had never felt more like a girl from the sketchy side of Groton.

Small paintings by Willard Metcalf, Matilda Browne, Benjamin Morrison, William Merritt Chase, Henry Ward Ranger, and William Chadwick filled the walls above the bookcases; Childe Hassam’s
Fifth Avenue in December
hung above the mantel. It depicted New York at twilight under snow. The avenue was quiet; the day’s traffic had ceased. The sky seemed heavy yet charged, as if a blizzard had just passed. The painting’s electric quality came from the American and French flags flying from every building. The tableau was patriotic, but Nicola felt it warned that joy would be misplaced—World War I had ended, but the world remained uneasy. The blizzard could circle around, and another war was coming.

The baby monitor crackled. It was Tyler fussing. Nicola left the library and walked up the wide center stairs. She looked into the room where she and Pete had slept. Their son lay peacefully in the white cradle. He was quiet, deep in slumber; he must have been dreaming.

Why had Kate allowed Nicola to stay? Why had she accepted? She knew Pete had been furious by the way Kate had treated him. Perhaps, in a way, she was glad. He had swept her off her feet, but then he’d seemed not to have the foggiest idea of what to do about it. And it had made him angry.

The smart, ambitious woman he’d fallen in love with had slipped under the weight of his dark moods. She didn’t like who she was becoming—quick to please him just to stop his anger, less likely to listen to herself than to him. Accepting Kate’s invitation had felt delicious, a reclamation of who she wanted to be, just as her rebellions against her mother had always helped her draw the line between their strong personalities.

Nicola knew Detective Reid thought Pete had killed Beth, and most of the time Nicola fought that theory. She told herself that if she really believed it, she’d know physically; she’d be constitutionally unable to stay with him. So why, as her mother had asked, had she moved back home for those days in July? And why had she decided to stay here at Mathilda’s instead of letting him create another temporary nest for them at a hotel?

The dumbwaiter was still exerting its gravitational force. She walked to the end of the second-floor hall, entered the small upstairs kitchen. Unused now, it must have been useful for household staff. It had a gas stove, old-fashioned icebox, and a cupboard full of Spode china with an inordinate number of eggcups. Perhaps the Harkness family, and whoever had lived here before them, had enjoyed breakfast in bed.

Three days after Beth’s murder, Nicola had watched Pete enter this room with a canvas bag and a large claw hammer. When she heard the sound of nails being wrenched from the wall, she stood quietly in the hall, watching him. The dumbwaiter had been boarded up, and he removed the plywood. There in the opening was a small rectangular wooden box that could be raised or lowered between kitchens by a rope and pulleys.

When he reached into the canvas bag, her pulse began to race because she knew what was coming out—it was going to be
Moonlight
, the stolen Morrison cut out of its frame, and it was going to prove to her that Pete had killed Beth.

But it wasn’t the painting. One by one, Pete removed toys from the bag. They were for a baby boy: a stuffed blue bunny, a blue teddy bear, a striped ball, a turquoise plastic teething ring. They weren’t Tyler’s. Pete glanced over his shoulder and saw Nicola. His eyes were blank. He showed no hint of emotion—the chill made Nicola want to cry out.

He stared at her for a full minute. Then he turned back to what he was doing. She watched him tug on the ropes to lower the box full of what had to have been Matthew’s things, bought perhaps by Beth in
anticipation of his birth, into the dark shaft. When he had begun to nail the boards back over the door, the hammer blows echoing down the hall, she had walked away. They hadn’t spoken about it then or since.

He had completely replaced the wood covering the dumbwaiter, and she stared at it now. She could see the nailheads, the steel bright silver, polished by the recent hammer strikes. They glinted, calling attention to themselves. Through the baby monitor in her pocket, she heard Tyler waking up. She turned and walked down the hall to lift her son from the cradle and feed him.

24

Reid’s desk at the Major Crime Squad overflowed with photos of the Beth Lathrop crime scene, the report from the coroner, and a binder filled with transcribed interviews with witnesses. He cleared space and leaned on his elbows, a cup of coffee by his side, to read the autopsies of Beth and her baby, Matthew.

The coroner had ruled that Beth had died of asphyxia by strangulation. She had received blunt force trauma to the head, the contours of the skull fracture consistent with being struck by the marble owl. But her death had been caused by someone using his hands, thumbs crushing Beth’s larynx.

The details of murder, the small ones, were the most piercing. Beth’s fingernails had been lacquered pearl white, her toenails hot pink. A rainbow had been painted on the nail of her left index finger, the colorful lines slightly wobbly as if she had done it herself. She had dressed to please someone, most likely her killer, in sexy underwear, and he had torn off her bra and panties, wrapped the lacy waistband so tightly around her throat that it had left deep, purple-red impressions.

The coroner had examined her hair and fingernails, the orifices of her body, and the surface of her skin. Trace evidence had been collected—including hair, fibers, dirt, and soil—and analyzed. There had been no DNA found under her fingernails—the head injury had disabled her to an unknown extent and could have prevented her from fighting back.

Reid thought of the deep scratches on Pete’s back. They hadn’t been made by Beth. Dental impressions had been taken of her mouth; the deep bite marks on Pete’s shoulder were not a match either.

No semen had been found during the course of the autopsy.

She had been covered with bruises, as if she had been battered around the head and shoulders and the forearms, perhaps during a struggle before the killer had landed the head wound. Her legs had also been bruised, including her thighs.

Full-color autopsy photos revealed U-shaped bruises on her shoulders and chest where her killer had knelt while choking her. Her blood had settled in postmortem lividity on her left side. Although she had died on her back, the killer had posed her facing the window. Perhaps that was the position she had slept in, and he had known it. The medical examiner would testify to clear-cut classic signs of strangulation—fractured hyoid bone, petechial hemorrhages in her eyes—if the killer was ever brought to trial.

Some sadistic murderers choked their victims to the point of death, then released the ligature and brought them back to consciousness, giving them hope of life, repeating the sequence over and over. Reid didn’t believe Beth’s killer had done that. The sureness of the marks showed that once he had started, he’d worked hard and steadily to bring about death.

It had taken minutes for Beth to die. The killer had administered a devastating blow to her head. Then he had used his hands, and then he had twisted the ligature around her neck. Beth’s adrenaline would have been pumping. The coroner had questioned whether she had fully lost consciousness after the head wound. To some extent, she would have felt terror and the atavistic instinct of fight or flight. She would have had ringing in her ears, vertigo, cyanosis, drastic weakening of her muscles. She had bled from her nose and ears. The salt of her tears had crystalized on her eyelashes. Her hands would have involuntarily clenched. She would have been aware of the baby struggling inside her.

One or more seizures would have occurred. Her heart would have continued beating for several minutes. At or before the moment of death, she would have lost control of her bladder and bowels.

Reid turned to the section on Matthew. He had died from lack of oxygen. He would have lived slightly longer than Beth. His heart would have continued circulating oxygenated blood for over a minute after his mother stopped breathing.

At six months, Matthew had been considered viable—if delivered, he could have lived on his own. That meant that by killing Beth, the suspect had committed double, or capital, murder. In the years before Connecticut’s death penalty statute had been repealed, the murderer, if convicted, could have been sentenced to death by lethal injection.

Reid looked through the file for information on Matthew’s DNA. He was surprised not to find it. Dr. Garcia, the state medical examiner, was very thorough. Reid would have expected to find a paternity test here. Not that there was any question about Pete being the father, but still, for the sake of trial, if and when it came to that, Reid liked having every base covered. It was the kind of detail a defense lawyer like Mac Green could attack.

He picked up the phone and rang the ME’s office. Sally Driscoll, Dr. Garcia’s assistant, answered.

“Hey, Sally. It’s Conor Reid.”

“How’re you doing, Conor?”

“Everything’s good. I’m just looking at the Beth Lathrop autopsy, and I don’t see paternity results for the child.”

“Huh, let me check,” she said.

Reid hung on the line, receiver pressed to his ear. His coffee had gotten cold, but he drank it anyway. He heard music playing through the line, as if Sally had a radio on at her desk.

“Conor, did you request a paternity test?” she asked.

The question was a punch in the gut. “No,” he said. “But I never do—I always assume it’s protocol.”

“Dr. Garcia said you didn’t make the request, so he didn’t perform one,” Sally said. The music had been turned down, and her tone had become more formal. Reid pictured Humberto Garcia in the same room, perhaps glaring at her in his famous, heavy-browed way.

“Okay, thanks, Sally,” Reid said and hung up. He tapped a pen on the page of Matthew’s autopsy conclusions and thought about it. A test would have been pro forma, would have been nice to have one, but they didn’t need it. Not really, anyway. But the lack of it made Reid’s stomach churn—it was his fault for not specifying.

Reid didn’t want to leave Kate without answers. He had driven past her loft last night, seen the windows lit up and warm against the dark. The last few days, he’d gone to the Groton-New London Airport, where she kept her Piper Saratoga, and watched planes take off and land. He told himself it was meditative, a way to clear his mind and let ideas about the case come in sideways.

Now, sitting at his desk, Reid considered the lack of DNA and believed that indicated a staged, rather than authentic, sexual assault.
Sideways,
he told himself. He still wanted Pete for the murder, but he was determined to stop focusing on any one suspect and not rule anyone out.

The bedroom had been full of fingerprints: Beth’s, Pete’s, and Sam’s, of course, but also Kate’s, Lulu’s, Scotty’s, and Isabel’s. There were also several made by an unknown person. Most of Beth’s friends’ prints had been in the seating area, where a sofa and two chairs were arranged by a fireplace, where French doors opened onto a small balcony overlooking the distant beach and sea. It would make sense for Beth and her friends to sit there, enjoying the view. But he would check on that.

He had looked at sex offenders in Southeastern Connecticut and found one of real interest.

Twenty years ago, Martin B. Harris had been an astronomy professor at a community college in Baxbury. He had been married with two children. There had been a string of home invasions in the suburbs
around the school. The crimes were violent, sexual in nature, but not always rape. The victims were white women ranging in age from eighteen to thirty-eight.

The attacks always occurred early in the day, mostly during the summer. They took place in the woman’s house, on her own bed, and the scene was always strewn with lingerie—some owned by the victim, but most of the racier pieces brought by the perpetrator. DNA was everywhere, but it didn’t match anything the police had on file.

Harris was arrested on a fluke. A witness had seen a blue Toyota driving away from the scene of one of the attacks, and she reported that it had a Baxbury Community College parking sticker on the bumper. Investigators scoured the college parking lots and found plenty of blue Toyotas. The owners were painstakingly cleared. But during one interview, a student reported that he sometimes parked his car next to his astronomy professor’s, and he noticed Dr. Harris almost always had a Frederick’s of Hollywood bag in his back seat.

The police arrested him in his classroom. They had warrants for his home, office, and vehicle and found trophies taken from every home he had entered. His DNA matched. He had a penchant for black lace underwear and always brought some to his crime scenes, in case his victims had other taste.

He’d accepted a plea deal for fifteen years. His wife had divorced him and taken the kids. The college had fired him.

Reid read through Harris’s parole records and saw he had been released from prison two years ago and was living in a residence hotel in Silver Bay—one town over from Black Hall. He checked in with his parole officer once a week and was subject to unannounced drop-ins.

Reid called Robin Warren, Harris’s parole officer, to give her a heads-up that he’d be stopping by Osprey House to question Harris.

“Thank you for letting me know,” she said. “May I ask, why is he of interest to you?”

“The Beth Lathrop case,” he said.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “That was a terrible thing.”

“So you know the details?”