“Did you call anyone to go check on her?”
“Our friend Scotty Waterston,” Kate said. “She had been over very early, gardening with Beth. Then she came back, with muffins or something—they were going to have coffee—and saw that Beth had left a note on the front door for the UPS driver. It said she’d gone out for the morning, that he should leave packages without a signature.”
“Where’s the note now?” he asked.
“It’s still there. Scotty left it.” Kate pointed at the yellow paper taped to the doorframe.
“Is it Beth’s handwriting?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Were there boxes?” he asked.
“What?” she asked.
“Left by the UPS driver,” he said.
“No,” she said and frowned. “But the note made Scotty feel okay—as if Beth had just stepped out and would be home soon. Her husband is on the trip with Pete.”
Reid stared at the note. The paper looked rumpled, and he figured it was an all-purpose note, one Beth had written at some point to reuse whenever she went out. Plenty of people did that in towns like Black Hall, where they thought they could trust their neighbors. But anyone could have stuck it to the door—not necessarily Beth. The killer could have put it there.
“I have to notify Pete, Kate,” Reid said. “Do you have his cell number?”
She scrolled through her phone’s contact list and gave it to him.
Instead of writing it down on his pad, he programmed it directly into his phone. He would make the call shortly.
“What’s the name of the boat?” he asked.
“Huntress,” Kate said.
“Thanks,” Reid said.
“What if I could have saved her?” Kate asked. Her green eyes glittered with tears, her face marked with despair. “She was my sister, my little sister. We were so close. Why wasn’t I here for her? How could I have let this happen? It’s the second time.” She grabbed his hand, squeezing it tight. Electricity ran up his arm, into his heart.
“You’re talking about the gallery? When you were kids?”
“No.” She gave him a sharp look as if shocked he’d say that. Then she shook her head.
“Second time for what, then?” he asked.
“I wasn’t there for her. And something terrible happened.”
“What was the first?” he asked.
She didn’t respond, just pulled her hand back a second time. Back then, in the basement, all emotion had seemingly drained from her—she had turned completely blank. Now she crackled with rage and grief. He noticed other differences and comparisons. Physical details: she was five six, slightly taller than she had been at sixteen. Her dark-brown hair was tied back in a ponytail, just as it had been that day long ago. Light freckles still dusted her cheeks. She was dressed in jeans and a sleeveless shirt, and her tan arms were toned and showing a serious devotion to working out. Right now, she seemed barely able to hold herself up. Reid fought back the urge to comfort her.
“I’m going to ask you to give your statement to Detective Miano,” he said, pointing toward his partner. Jennifer stood next to a pot of white geraniums with her pad open, talking to Officer Hawley. “I’ll send her over to talk to you, and then we’ll make sure you get home.”
“I have to tell Sam,” Kate said. “Before the news gets out.”
“Won’t her father do that?”
“We don’t know where he is, do we?” Kate asked.
“No,” he said.
“You have no idea how much I hate him,” she said.
“Tell me.” He stared at her hard and waited to hear how aware she had been of Pete’s secret life.
But she shook her head and turned away from him. He gestured for Miano to come over, then glanced back at Kate. What if I could have saved Beth? she had asked. How could I have let this happen? Maybe they were just aimless questions, but the second in particular implied power over the situation, as if she believed she could have stopped the murder.
Reid wondered how she thought she might have done that, what the relationship between the sisters had become. Had those hours when they’d been tied up in the gallery basement pulled them closer or driven them apart? Did they have any choice, controlling the course their lives took, or had they been programmed, even ruined, from the moment the intruder entered the gallery?
It had certainly controlled him. Standing close to Kate now, he felt his hands shaking and jammed them into his pockets so she wouldn’t see. The Woodward sisters’ pain was his white whale, his torment.
You have no idea how much I hate him, she had said about her brother-in-law. He actually did have an idea about that. Keeping an eye on the Woodward sisters meant he saw what the other people in their lives were up to. He felt uncomfortable, most likely knowing more about her sister’s marriage than Kate did.
“Did Beth and Pete have a good marriage?” he asked, keeping his tone steady because he knew the ugly answer.
“No,” she said flatly.
“Were there other people involved?”
“On his part—yes,” she said.
He waited for her to say the name Nicola, but she began to cry softly, burying her face in her hands.
The muffled sound of a ringing phone came from inside the house. He hesitated, hating to leave her in tears. Then he turned away, so she wouldn’t pick up on his fixation on her and her sister and their shared history. What had happened in that basement had happened to him too. He walked toward the front door, wondering what was the first time she’d let something bad happen.
It was time to go see Beth.
3
The forensics team had arrived and was ready to start processing the scene, but Reid wanted to enter the room first. He grabbed a pair of disposable gloves from a box on the sidewalk and snapped them on. The house smelled stale, as if no fresh air had entered in days. When he reached the top of the stairs and opened the bedroom door, he felt the blast of cold and tasted the sweet stench of decomposition.
He stood back, gazing at Beth. From this angle, looking at her from behind, he could almost imagine she was sleeping: her reddish-gold hair spread across the pillow, the curve of her hip, and the languid way her arm covered her eyes to block the morning light. But as he moved closer, the illusion was shattered.
Approaching the edge of the bed, he nearly tripped on the bloodstained marble owl. He circled around to the other side.
He saw that Beth’s skull had been cracked behind her ear, the wound deep and red with fine slivers of bone stuck in the dark blood. A bruise of ligature marks encircled her throat. There were impressions of lace; a torn bra and panties lay on the floor. He stared at them: evidence of a sex crime?
Her swollen tongue jutted between clenched teeth, and the whites of her clouded eyes were full of red-and-purple pinpoint dots, petechial hemorrhages indicating strangulation. Dry, almost invisible whitish crust had formed around her lips and run down her chin, and Reid knew the medical examiner would find amylase-rich saliva. Her legs were bruised.
“You were so young,” he said out loud.
He wasn’t talking to the teenage Beth he’d rescued all those years ago but to the thirty-something-year-old Beth who lay on the bed before him. He stared into her cloudy eyes as if she were looking back at him. He heard the air conditioner chugging so hard it rattled in the window frame. Instinctively, he knew Beth hadn’t turned it on—her killer had.