Kate stood still, fists pressed to her chest, weeping. McCabe put her arm around her shoulders, led her to the bedroom door. Kate didn’t put up a fight. Her body felt rigid, her chest heaving with sobs.
“Who should I call?” McCabe said. “To come and get you?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Kate said.
“You can’t be in the room, though,” McCabe said.
She looked into Kate’s tear-flooded green eyes to make sure she understood, really got it. Kate shook her head, paced back and forth a few times, went into the hall, and sat heavily on the top step.
McCabe started to tell her she couldn’t, that the stairs were part of the crime scene, but instead she just tapped Kate’s arm.
“Don’t touch anything, Kate,” she said. “Not the wall, not the banister, not anything.”
Kate didn’t reply, just sat there crying.
McCabe returned to the bedroom, closing the door behind her.
“Jesus,” Hawley said.
McCabe glanced at him and nodded. She knew it was his first murder scene—hers too. Black Hall was one of the quietest, most affluent towns on the Connecticut Shoreline, and nothing like this ever happened here.
“You want to call it in, or should I?” he asked.
McCabe unclipped the radio from her belt and called Marnie, the dispatcher.
“We have a homicide at 45 Church Street,” McCabe said.
“The Lathrops’ house?” Marnie asked, taking in a sharp breath. This was a small town. “Good Lord. Is it Beth? Or Pete? Not the girl; gosh, what’s her name—she’s two years behind Carrie. I can’t remember . . .”
“Call Major Crime for us, Marnie,” McCabe said, referring to the Connecticut State Police’s squad of detectives assigned to murders and kidnappings and bank robberies and deliberately not answering the question.
“Roger. I’ll do that now,” Marnie said.
McCabe disconnected.
She glanced down at the iPhone beside the bed, touched the home button with her gloved thumb, and saw the screen light up. It didn’t ask for a password, which told McCabe that Beth had trusted the people around her. “Look at all these calls and texts. Two days’, three days’ worth?” There was a slew of messages and missed calls from Kate, but the three most recent came up as “Pete.”
“And the dog hadn’t been out in a while, from the looks of all that shit by the door.”
“Yeah,” McCabe said.
“Rape too?” he asked, gesturing at the torn panties and bra.
“Maybe,” McCabe said. She crouched by the bed. A marble sculpture of an owl lay half-under the fabric skirt. The bird’s head was smeared with red-brown dried blood.
“Murder weapon?” Hawley asked, pointing at the gash behind Beth’s ear.
She stood up, staring. Blood had coagulated around the wound, bizarrely bright red in the sunlight. Her gaze moved to the bruised indentation around Beth’s neck. “That or strangulation,” she said.
“Nice house for something like this,” Hawley said. “Expensive everything. Mercedes in the driveway.”
“I know,” McCabe said, looking around the room. The Lathrops obviously liked order. Except for the lingerie, there were no clothes strewn around. Books on the nightstand were perfectly stacked. The furniture looked to be antique—fine wood, burnished with age. Landscapes of local scenes, framed in museum-type gilded frames, hung around the room. McCabe looked at one, saw the signature Childe Hassam in the lower-right corner. She had grown up in town and recognized the name of one of the most famous Black Hall artists—a fortune right here on the wall. There was also an empty frame, with ragged shreds of canvas fiber clinging to the wood.
“Look,” she said. “What was there? Think someone cut the painting out?”
“Could be,” Hawley said. “The husband owns the Lathrop Gallery, right?”
“Isn’t that a little sexist?” McCabe asked. “Assuming he owns all this?”
“He doesn’t?”
“It used to be called the Harkness-Woodward Gallery,” McCabe said. “It’s always been in the victim’s family.” A high-end art gallery in the center of Black Hall, it specialized in the same kind of paintings that hung on the walls. McCabe’s mother had taken the kids there on Saturdays, after their father had died—anything to distract them.
As soon as she’d heard Kate’s last name, it had all come back to her. The gallery had belonged to Kate and Beth’s grandmother. There had been a scandal associated with it, back when McCabe was just a kid. A robbery and a death, she remembered. Paintings stolen, a mother and her daughters tied up. People in town had talked about it nonstop. Even on the beach, on the most perfect days of summer, the whispers had been about cheating, greed, and murder. Sometimes she wondered whether that crime, burned into her consciousness at such a young age, had been the impetus for her to become a cop. And now, staring at Beth: Had she and Kate been those girls in the basement?
McCabe wondered what the missing painting might have to do with Beth’s murder. Seeing the torn lingerie made her feel sick; what had the killer put Beth through? “God, it’s freezing in here.” She shivered in the blast of icy air.
“Time to turn that thing off,” Hawley said, heading toward the air conditioner. The compressor cycled, pumping hard; it sounded ready to give out.
“No, leave it till the Staties get here.”
McCabe had two years more than Hawley on a force so small the selectmen were considering merging it with the department in the next town. She lived in Norwich now, a tougher place to work, and she felt lucky to have gotten a job in sleepy Black Hall. It was a postcard-beautiful village on Long Island Sound, a beach resort in summer, a place that had attracted artists since the late 1800s, and a bedroom town for executives of Electric Boat and professors at Yale, Connecticut College, and the Coast Guard Academy. Until today, her worst calls had been domestics and bad car accidents.
She leaned closer to Beth, looked at her injuries. The edge of the panties had left a pattern of lace in the deep-purple bruised circle around her neck. She cringed at the sight but couldn’t look away. It was at least as brutal as the cracked skull, even more disturbing with its hints of sexual violence.
“The husband is always the killer,” Hawley said. “But not this time. What did the sister say? He’s on a boat out in the Atlantic somewhere. Besides, I can’t imagine a husband doing this.”
McCabe didn’t answer. She’d learned early, from a case very close to home, that even nice-seeming people could do terrible things.
“We’ve got to notify him,” Hawley said. “That’s going to suck for him, off on a nice sailing trip, getting news like this. If we can even get through. There’s probably no cell reception. I go fishing in the canyons behind Block Island; there’s a major dead zone out there.”
“There’ll be a radio.”
“Yeah, forget that. A bunch of guys on vacation aren’t going to be listening to the marine band.”
“It’s Major Crime’s problem,” McCabe said. Kate had said Pete took the sailing trip every summer, with the same bunch of guys, and that this voyage would be the last before his new baby was born.