The facts were simple and ugly. Garth Woodward, the girls’ father, had had a gambling problem. He’d liked the roulette table at Foxwoods. He had also fallen in love with Francesca Conti, a young woman getting her PhD at Yale’s Department of the History of Art. To cover his debts and pay for a love nest in Wooster Square, he decided to stage a robbery at the Harkness-Woodward Gallery so that paintings could be stolen. He could double profit from both black-market resale and a large insurance payout.
He met Joshua and Sally Anderson at Art Basel when they tried to sell him what he quickly recognized as a forged Hassam. A criminal recognizes criminals. He hired them for the job.
Reid was certain Garth had not planned for his daughters to be at the gallery that day, but he was equally sure that he had known his wife would be. The plan had been to tie Helen up, but since Kate and Beth had stopped by on their way home from school that cold November afternoon, the Andersons determined that they had to be dealt with too.
Joshua shoved Helen and her daughters into the basement. He and Sally bound them together with nylon rope, shoved gags into their mouths. Whether they expected Helen to choke and die was beside the point.
At ten the next morning, Wade and Paula Banks—collectors and regular customers of the gallery—arrived from Greenwich for a meeting with Helen and Garth. They knew the Woodwards would never forget an appointment, and when they saw Helen’s car parked out front, and she did not answer the door, they became concerned and called the police.
Reid was the resident trooper and arrived within five minutes. He circled the gallery, brushing aside thick rhododendron branches to look into windows. There was a cellar hatchway in the back of the building, and he heard thumping coming from inside. He broke the lock and entered the basement.
He discovered the three of them—Helen, Kate, and Beth, still tied together, back to back. Kate was banging her feet as hard as she could, splattering fluids that had drained from their mother’s body, pooled around them. Beth was screaming through the fabric tied around her mouth. Helen was slumped over; blood had dried black on the gag and her chin, had run onto the concrete floor and coagulated. She had urinated and lost control of her bowels. By the fact that she had gone into rigor, Reid knew that she had been dead for hours. Her face was gray-blue, her eyes opaque.
His hands shook as he cut the family loose. He tried to help Beth stand, but she wouldn’t let go of her mother. Kate was pure white, her lips blue, in shock, backing away as if she wanted to melt into the wall.
Garth Woodward arrived minutes later. He had been on an ostensible art-buying trip to New York and had come straight to the gallery, instead of going home first, for the meeting with the collectors. The minute he ran down the stairs he cried out—either genuinely stunned to see that Helen was dead, or a great actor. Woodward had started pacing, holding his head, while Beth had cradled her mother’s cold body, and Kate had stood with her back pressed to the basement wall, staring into nothing, completely silent.
Twenty-three years later, Reid still saw Kate pressed against the cellar wall nearly nightly in his dreams. His training as a police officer had prepared him for all kinds of crime scenes. He had seen fatal accidents on I-95 and country roads, had been to houses on domestic violence calls and tended to victims with black eyes and broken bones, had had guns pulled on him twice—once on a domestic call, another at a beach bar where he had gone to break up a fight. The husband had dropped his shotgun; the drunk had held on to his pistol. Reid had shot the drunk. He had blown a hole in his chest. It hadn’t affected him the way Beth’s reedy screams and Kate’s blank stare had.
Seeing what had happened to the Woodward sisters had changed him. He had taken in their pain through his skin. He was from a close family. He loved his parents and brother. The idea of having his mother die beside him, unable to help her, filled him with despair and rage, things he could imagine the Woodward girls feeling. Especially Kate. Her silence that day, the way her hand had felt like ice, had sliced his heart.
After the art was recovered, Francesca had been interviewed by the state’s attorney, and she had willingly provided evidence against Garth. Although she had not known his plan, her testimony about their town house and his trips to the casinos had made his motive clear.
The Andersons had taken plea deals and testified in court, each sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. Garth Woodward had gone to prison for life without the possibility of parole. Beth eventually had gotten married and had Sam, and Kate had taken to the sky.
Reid’s coping mechanism was wood carving. He had a workbench set up at the far end of his office. Narrow drawers held his knives, chisels, and adzes. Blocks of butternut, basswood, and aspen were stacked high. A few of his favorite pieces were displayed on shelves above the bench. They included a pair of mallards, a loon, a kingfisher, a striped bass, and, carved from cottonwood—the palest wood he had been able to find—an albino whale.
Just like Moby Dick.
He sat at his desk now, drinking coffee. What if he was wrong about Pete, if he went down the wrong track and didn’t get Beth’s killer? Maybe Tom was right, and Reid’s feelings were blinding him. He took out a yellow legal pad and made two columns. The first was for names of suspects, the second for possible motives.
In the first column he wrote Pete. Under it he wrote Nicola. Under that he wrote Stranger.
Then he crossed out Nicola and Stranger.
He exhaled and took out his cell phone. He had programmed Pete’s number in after the call to the Lathrops’ landline, and he dialed it now. He didn’t really expect an answer, just wanted to leave a message, and was taken aback when Pete picked up.
“Hello?” Pete said.
“Pete. This is Detective Reid.”
“Oh,” Pete said. “I was just going to call you.”
“Really, what about?”
“Well, I was pretty upset earlier. I’m sure you can understand. I wanted to tell you I’m ready to talk whenever you are. We’ve got to find who did this.”
Reid hid his surprise. He had expected to chase Pete. On the other hand, it was smart of Pete to seem to cooperate. “Great, that’s what I was calling about,” he said. “To schedule a time.”
“I’ll come tomorrow,” Pete said. “Can we make it afternoon? We have to make funeral plans in the morning.”
“Afternoon is fine,” Reid said. “Will you be bringing your lawyer?”
“Why would I need one? I’m innocent.”
I didn’t ask if you were innocent, Reid thought. “Okay, tomorrow. Three o’clock?” he asked, thinking of the alibi witnesses he planned to interview first.
“Fine,” Pete said.
“By the way,” Reid said, “how is your daughter?”
Pete let out a long exhale. “Not good. As you can imagine.”
Reid gave him the address to the Eastern District Major Crime Squad office. When they hung up, he sat down at his desk and started making notes about the day. After a few minutes, he paused and stared up at the yellowing twenty-three-year-old article on the wall.
Pete hadn’t exactly lied and said he had seen his daughter. But he hadn’t said he hadn’t, either.
9
The call came in the middle of the night. At 2:11 a.m. Kate fumbled for the phone next to her bed, saw the caller ID.