“No,” Reid said. “Not at all.”
A ferry slid by, lights rippling on the black water.
“Remember, outside Beth’s house, I mentioned I let something bad happen to her before?” she asked.
“Yes,” Reid said.
“It was about Nicola.”
“What happened?” Reid asked.
“Beth was determined to confront her and Pete—she called to tell me, when I was about to fly a family to Paris. I told her to wait till I got home, and I’d go with her. Beth couldn’t find any of Nicola’s contact info at the gallery—Pete had gotten rid of any trace of her. But Beth called the gallery’s accountant and told him to look at Nicola’s tax form. It had her address on it—my grandmother’s house.”
“You didn’t know where Nicola was staying?” Reid asked carefully, because he did know. Once he had realized Pete had a girlfriend, he had started watching him more often and had followed him to Cloudlands.
“I had no idea at the time—neither did Beth. She and I own the property. We sometimes rent it out to the Black Hall Art Academy—in the past they’ve used it for their acting president, or sometimes an important visiting professor. Pete handles a lot of Beth’s business matters. She put him in charge of renting the house.”
“She trusted him?” he asked skeptically.
“In that regard, yes,” Kate said. “The house seemed a safe job to give him—if it was leased at all, it was to someone in the art world. He made it seem the Academy had taken it again, but instead he put Nicola in there—he paid the rent from a bank account Beth didn’t know he had.”
“But she found out.”
“Yes, like I said, through Nicola’s tax form. While I was flying to Paris, she went to Mathilda’s house and let herself in. And she caught them in bed. And that’s a sight that burned in her brain, but it wasn’t the worst.”
Here it came, Reid thought. Kate knew. He made himself ask: “What was the worst?”
“Pete’s baby. The son he had with Nicola was sleeping in the cradle next to them. The cradle that Beth and I had slept in when we were babies. The one she had planned to bring home for Matthew.”
Reid watched her without expression, not wanting to show his emotions—they overwhelmed him, thinking of what Beth must have gone through in that instant and what Kate must be feeling now. Pete’s relationship with Nicola was a major reason Reid had instantly suspected him. But Reid wondered: Would he have killed Matthew, his own baby, as well?
“Beth had no idea?” he asked.
“That he had a kid with her? No. She didn’t even know Nicola was pregnant. She thought it was just an affair.”
Reid stared into the distance, trying to imagine how Beth had felt, finding out that way.
“That’s what I would have liked to protect her from,” Kate said. “Having to see that by herself. See it at all. I should have been there with her.” She paused a moment. “She got pregnant right after that. She hadn’t been planning on having another child, but I think . . . she needed Matthew.”
“Because Pete and Nicola had a baby?”
“Because my sister had so much love inside her. She needed someone else to give it to.” Kate wiped tears from her eyes. “If you think I helped him kill my sister . . .”
“Kate, I don’t think you did,” Reid said. “I know you didn’t.”
“Good. Thank you.”
He nodded.
“Will you get whoever it was?” she asked.
“I will,” he said.
“It had to be whoever stole Moonlight last year,” she said. “Right? He came back for more. Don’t you think?”
Reid’s mouth was dry. He knew exactly what he shouldn’t say and said it anyway. “If you think your brother-in-law staged an art theft, then yeah.”
“Pete? He hired someone? You checked his bank account?”
“He didn’t hire anyone.”
“So how did he do it? He swam from Nantucket to Black Hall?” she asked. “Wouldn’t the guys have missed him?”
“He killed her before he left,” he said.
“He couldn’t have,” she said.
His heart was thumping. Yes, he’d thought it was Pete from the beginning, especially knowing about Nicola, but the evidence he was seeing—including Sam saying she hadn’t seen her father—made his conviction even stronger.
“I think he left that note on the door for the UPS driver,” he said. “So no one would be suspicious if she didn’t answer.”
“It was in her handwriting!”
“Yes,” Reid said. “She wrote it herself. But she did it before—I don’t know when, but Pete saved the note to use when he killed her. To make it look as if she was alive longer than she was.”
“But he’s been gone for days—if he killed her—I mean, the forensics people can tell when. I know from my mother—they can tell to the hour.”
“You were in the room,” he said. “It was a refrigerator.”
“It’s been incredibly hot all month,” Kate said. “Beth’s pregnancy made her really sensitive to the heat—I know she loved fresh air, the sea breeze, but she turned on the AC so she could sleep.”
“No, Pete did that,” Reid said. “He sealed the windows and turned the air conditioner as high as it would go to affect her body temperature and trick the medical examiner. He planned this carefully, Kate.”
“You act like you know for sure. But how can you? Did you actually see him do it? Watch him kill my sister?”
“I wish I had,” Reid said. With all the times he had passed the house, followed Pete, observed Beth, why hadn’t he been there that day? The thought of it made him sick. “My job is to figure how he did it and to prove it. And I will.”
She stared at him, her eyes bright.
“You told me to call you Conor before,” she said.
“Yes, I did,” he said, watching the wild emotion in her face.
“So, catch him, Conor,” she said.
He nodded—a promise. He wanted to keep walking with her, to say more, but she abruptly turned. It was time for her to get back to Sam, so together they walked to her front door, and Reid watched until she and Popcorn went inside, until he heard the bolts slide into place.
He drove ten minutes home to Silver Bay. It had been a long day. When he pulled into the driveway of the white 1853 saltbox he had owned for fifteen years, he unloaded his surf rod, leaned it beside the back door, and entered the kitchen. The house felt stuffy from being closed up all day, so he opened a few windows and let the breeze cool things off. He brewed a single cup of coffee and took it into his home office.
He regarded the far wall above his desk. He had kept clippings of former cases and tacked them up to remind him of his purpose in life. There were articles about crimes that had been solved, others that hadn’t. His dad had been a cop, and he used to say, “Keep your eye on the ball.” To Reid, that meant remember the victim. Catch the bad guy.
Reid leaned back in his desk chair, coffee mug in hand. One of the biggest headlines on his wall had appeared in the Day twenty-three years ago: “Gallery Owner Implicated in Wife’s Death.”