“Mr. Lathrop?” Reid asked.
Again—the face reddening, growling groan, and in one quick motion, Pete whipped off his shirt. He stood facing Reid, breathing heavily. There was one nick, about an inch long and mostly healed, on the skin over his left collarbone.
Reid examined it. “From the rose bushes,” Pete said.
Other than that single mark, the front of his body was clear.
Reid walked behind him. Pete’s back was another story.
There were four deeply scored scratches, scabbed with dry blood, on his left scapula. There was just enough space between them to indicate they were made by fingernails. On the back of his upper right arm, the deltoid muscle, there was a bite wound. It looked severe. The area was a dark-red oval with small yellow beads of dried pus tracing the clearly delineated upper and lower teeth impressions.
“Looks like you had quite an infection back here,” Reid said.
“Nothing serious,” Pete said.
“Did you see a doctor?”
“No need.”
“How did you get these injuries?” Reid asked, holding himself back from adding, Rose bushes?
“Are you kidding me?” Pete asked. “It’s called sex.”
That could be true, but to Reid they looked like defensive wounds. He unlocked the cabinet behind him and removed a camera. His heart was banging hard. He pictured Beth, naked and lying on the bed. He saw the bruises around her neck, the gash in her head embedded with bone chips. He held the camera and checked both the battery and the date stamp.
“I’m going to photograph the wounds now if you don’t object,” he said.
Pete didn’t say anything, so Reid took the photos.
“Will you give a DNA sample?” Reid asked.
“Of course,” Pete said.
“Let me call the lab tech,” Reid said. “We’ll get your DNA, and you can be on your way.”
“Don’t forget the polygraph,” Pete said.
“We’ll get that scheduled for you, Pete,” Reid said.
But an hour later, after Pete had left the building and before the polygraph examiner had returned Reid’s call, Reid heard from Mackenzie Green, a well-known defense attorney from New Haven, who said that from then on he would be representing Peter Lathrop, and that all future Connecticut State Police inquiries should be directed to his office.
And that Pete would not be taking a polygraph.
PART II
15
July 22
Six days after Beth’s funeral, the hot weather continued, the air heavy and holding the constant promise of afternoon thunderstorms to cool things off. But the sky never seemed to break; it held the moisture and turned it to steam. Rolling white clouds would form and dissipate without ever raining.
Nicola Corliss had grown up on the first floor of a two-family house behind Mickey’s Pub in Groton, Connecticut. Her mother, Jean, still lived there, and Nicola had temporarily moved back in. While her son slept in his portable crib, Nicola sat at one end of the sofa, her mother at the other. The window air conditioner rattled, failing to cool the room, but Nicola shivered. She doubted she would ever look at a window air conditioner again and not think of Beth.
A docudrama about the royal family played on TV. Nicola glanced over at her mother, who was raptly watching a reenactment of Harry proposing to Meghan Markle. Her mother loved any show that featured English accents.
When Nicola was young, her mother had told her stories about the girl whose mother sold violets in the snow to send her to Oxford. The girl grew up to study in the Bodleian Libraries, live in Magdalen College, and dine in the fourteenth-century Old Kitchen Bar. The girl wasn’t a princess like some of her classmates, but she had her own family tartan, and she was the smartest girl at the university.
From the beginning, Nicola got the point: education would get her out of the neighborhood. Her mother hadn’t sold violets in the snow, but she’d trained as a pipe fitter and worked at Electric Boat. Building submarines for the US Navy, she worked third shift so she could take Nicola to school and be there when she got home.
They were Catholic and went to Mass every Sunday. Most kids from the parish attended Saint Mary’s from kindergarten through high school, but Jean had sent Nicola to the Williams School, a private day school across the river in New London, on the campus of Connecticut College. It cost a fortune, but she said it was worth it—and when Nicola began to hang out at the Lyman Allyn Museum, also on campus, she was all the more gratified.
Some parents would have wanted their children to gravitate toward business, engineering, science—subjects likely to lead to lucrative jobs—but not Jean. She had always believed that arts and humanities were the way to a good life. The people Nicola would meet, the enrichment of mind and soul, were what she wanted for her daughter. What she would have liked for herself.
She rode Nicola hard to make sure she got the grades for acceptance at Yale and every other college she applied to. After four years at Yale and graduate school at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies, Nicola was ready for launch. She had had the drive, the desire to learn, a curious mind that had led her in fascinating directions.
Yet here they were, two women with big visions, spending a summer day watching trashy television. Tyler sighed in his crib right beside Nicola and turned toward her, as if he could hear the sound of her breathing. Dreaming, his tiny fists tightly clenched, he shadowboxed the air. Nicola thought she would melt from love.
“Is he hungry?” her mother asked.
“No, just sleeping,” she said.
“Should we take him down to the beach?” her mother asked.
“It’s too hot.” Nicola glanced at the window. Her mother usually kept the thin white curtains open, but this morning Nicola had pulled them closed. Detective Reid had shown up yesterday. His questions had led Nicola to think about things she wanted to keep buried, and now they were all she could think about.
The detective had knocked on the door, asked if Nicola would be willing to talk to him.
“Does she need a lawyer?” her mother had asked.
“No, not unless she wants one. That’s certainly her right,” he had said.
“I’m fine, Mom,” Nicola said, because she knew she was innocent. The irony was, when Pete had called her after being interviewed by the detective, she had told him he had to get a lawyer, that he should have done it before talking. And fortunately he had been able to retain Mac Green, a legend in Connecticut.
She turned to Detective Reid. “Ask whatever you want.”
They sat in the living room. Her mother perched on the footstool beside her like a Drala warrior, a protector deity in the Tibetan art Nicola had studied at Yale.
“When is the last time you saw Beth Lathrop?” the detective asked.
“I’m not sure. I can’t remember exactly,” Nicola said. She’d never been good at lying, and she tried to keep her face inexpressive.
“Well, in general. This summer?”
“Spring, probably.”
“Before the baby was born?”
“It’s hard to remember—it’s been a blur, you know? Taking care of an infant?” she said, practically babbling so he wouldn’t ask any more.
“I see,” he said.