by Luanne Rice
“How did she coddle artists?”
“You know, they’re all so sensitive. A little crazy. Suffer for their art, you know? Pete would see her turning herself inside out, paying them more than their paintings were worth. Getting taken advantage of. She’d send them to the doctor if they were sick, including therapy in at least one case. She even paid for a sculptor to have a root canal. She’d get too involved with them.”
“Is that what Pete told you?”
“Well, yes,” Ackerley said, his brow furrowed. “But it was pretty obvious to anyone who knew her. She got more wrapped up in the artists than she was in her husband. Poor Pete.”
Reid looked at Ackerley’s troubled expression. Whether Pete was the killer or not, he was a manipulator. Guys like him wanted the world to feel sorry for them.
“Thanks for your time,” Reid said, handing him his card. “If you think of anything, don’t hesitate to call. And please text me that photo.”
“Yeah,” Ackerley said. He started the car. The engine gave a throaty roar as he pulled out of the parking lot. Within twenty seconds, Reid’s phone buzzed: Ackerley had texted the photo.
Reid drove up the I-95 entrance ramp, merging onto the highway and hitting normal summer-in-Southeastern-Connecticut traffic. As soon as he could, he sped up to eighty miles per hour and headed toward his office to meet Pete. He knew a lot more about him than he had at their first encounter, on the dock in Menemsha. He wasn’t sure what it added up to, but it made him all the more interested to hear what Pete would have to say.
14
“I want to take a polygraph,” Pete said the instant Reid walked into the lobby of the Major Crime Squad’s offices in Walboro. He was wearing pressed khaki pants and, as always, a long-sleeved shirt. He looked perpetually suntanned and windblown.
“You do?” Reid asked, surprised by the statement.
“Yes, absolutely,” Pete said. “Put this to rest so you can start looking for the person who really killed Beth.”
“Why don’t we go in here and talk about it,” Reid said, gesturing for Pete to follow him down the wide corridor, into an interview room.
Pete took a seat at the table. Reid told him to wait there, then walked into the control room next door to make sure the camera and microphone were turned on. Then he went to his office, picked up the accordion file in which he kept his case notes. He glanced into Miano’s office. She wasn’t in there, so he texted her:
Lathrop’s here for his interview. You coming?
Still at the ME’s. Talk later.
OK
She had told him she planned to stop by the medical examiner’s lab in Meriden because she wanted to push the coroner, Dr. Humberto Garcia, to speed up the autopsy, especially the DNA results.
Reid grabbed a notebook and two bottles of water. When he returned to the interrogation room, Pete was sitting very still, exactly as when he’d left, looking unperturbed. Reid always left suspects alone in here for a while before starting the interview. They almost invariably got nervous; it wasn’t unusual to return and find someone in a cold sweat, or pacing the floor, or asking to use the bathroom. But Pete seemed as comfortable as a man sitting on his own back deck in a summer breeze.
“Pete, before we start, I want to establish that you are here voluntarily, and you are not under arrest. You’re free to leave at any time,” Reid said, sitting across the table from him.
“Thank you,” Pete said.
Reid handed him a bottle of water. Pete didn’t open it. He let it sit on the table in front of him.
“So, Pete. Even though you’re not under arrest, I’m going to read you your rights. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. With these rights in mind, do you wish to speak to me?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Okay, then. Are you comfortable? Do you want anything besides water to drink? A Coke?”
“Now you’re being nice to me?” Pete asked. “What happened to ‘I know you killed your wife’?”
“Did you kill her?” Reid asked.
“No, I definitely did not. And I sincerely hope you will schedule that polygraph right away, so you can get on with the right kind of investigation.”
Reid took note: the first two ly words. He’d found that suspects who turned out to be guilty tended to use adverbs, thinking they were being more convincing. He also noticed the way Pete emphasized “the right kind of investigation,” marking his territory as a genius and the smartest person in the room. Reid would use that.
“Yes, I will contact our polygraph examiner, and we will get you in right away.”
“Today?”
“It might take a little longer.”
“Well, I am tempted not to waste either of our time by answering questions twice,” Pete said. He opened the bottle of water but didn’t drink from it.
“The more you can tell me, the more helpful it will be,” Reid said. He placed the notebook on the table and took a pen from his pocket. “So, since you and I are here now, why don’t we start with a very simple question. When did you last see Beth?”
Pete sighed. “It’s burned in my brain. The morning I left to go sailing with my friends. She’d gone back to bed, not feeling great. To the point I genuinely considered canceling the trip.”
“About what time?”
“Around 8:00.”
Reid jotted down the time. “She’d already been outside gardening, is that right?” he asked, thinking of Scotty Waterston’s account.
Pete frowned. “Maybe. I guess so. She liked to garden before the sun got too strong.”
“But you don’t remember?”
“No.”
“That seems odd to me. The last morning of your wife’s life, and you don’t remember whether she was out in the garden, planting flowers to make your house look pretty?” Especially since Scotty had been over. Could Pete really have missed that?
Pete glared at him. “You want me to make up something I don’t remember?” he asked.
Like you tried to coach Leland Ackerley to do? Reid thought but didn’t say.
“What made you decide not to cancel the trip?” he asked instead.
“Beth. She insisted I go. It was an annual thing with the guys. She knew I enjoyed it.”
“But you could have decided not to.”
“I loved my wife. But I’ll be honest. We needed a break. We’d both talked about it.”
Reid’s goal was to be objective, but I’ll be honest was an indication of guilt, right up there with ly words.
“When you say you ‘talked about it,’ what do you mean?” Reid asked.
Pete narrowed his eyes. “I’m sure you know about Nicola and Tyler.”
Reid nodded slowly. Often suspects threw out a fact, seemed willing to discuss something difficult or embarrassing. In fact, coming in for questioning at all was frequently wanting to learn what the police knew.
“I’d like to know more,” Reid said.
“Well, feel free to talk to Nicola. She’s expecting it. She’ll tell you the same thing I will: we all got along. Beth wasn’t thrilled at first—not at all. I could have handled it better, I admit. But Beth was a grown-up. She knows people make mistakes.”
“So having an affair with Nicola was a mistake?” Reid asked.
“Twisting my words,” Pete said with a sarcastic smile, shaking a finger at him.
“Was I doing that? Hmm,” Reid said.
“If you would simply stick to the facts as I am presenting them to you, if you actually listened to me, you would do better—you’d rule me out and solve the case faster, because you’d start looking in other places.” He grabbed the water bottle and drank.
Reid was silent, watching Pete’s body language change. The finger shaking, the fact he straightened his posture and rewarded himself with a long drink of water. If the interview was a chess game t
o Pete, he felt he was winning.
“Let’s go back to the last time you saw Beth,” Reid said. He pretended to consult his notes. “Around 8:00 a.m. What was she doing?”
“I told you, she was in bed.”
“Did she have breakfast?”
“Yeah. We had it together,” Pete said.
“What did you eat?”
“Scrambled eggs. Cantaloupe and blueberries.”
“Okay, so she’s back in bed by 8:00. What about you; what were you doing?”
“I was getting ready to leave . . .”
“Packing?”
“I had already packed. I sat on the edge of the bed, told her she should call me if she didn’t feel better, or for any other reason. Then I told her I loved her and kissed her goodbye.”
“Why don’t you remember if she was gardening?” Reid asked, hammering the point.
Pete sat there drumming his fingers on the table and frowning, as if deciding what to say next.
“I was Skyping with Nicola. Okay?”
Reid could just imagine how that had gone over with Beth. No wonder she’d wanted to get outside, needed her friend Scotty for support.
“Did you and Beth fight about it?” Reid asked.
“Absolutely not.”
“Any physical altercation at all?”
“No.”
“Pete, will you roll up your sleeves and show me your arms?”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Is that a yes or a no?”
“It’s an intrusion,” Pete said. “It’s a complete insult. I’ve already told you—there was no altercation.”
“Then why have you been wearing long sleeves, on the boat trip and every time I’ve seen you, in the middle of the summer?”
“I believe I recall telling you that these are sunproof shirts—bought for me by Beth. I had a couple of skin cancers removed last year, and she wanted me to be careful so I didn’t get more.”
“So then, what’s the problem with letting me see? You said you wanted to clear things up so the investigation can progress. One of the surest ways is to show me your arms. And pull down the collar so I can see your neck and chest,” Reid said.
“It makes me sick that you’re treating me this way. Like a common criminal,” Pete said. “I’ve just lost my wife.”
“You going to show me or not?”
Pete let out what started as a sigh but turned into a guttural groan. His face turned red, and his gray-blue eyes narrowed. He stood up fast, unbuttoned his left cuff, and pulled so hard on the right that he ripped the button off. Reid saw him go from controlled to rage in two seconds, and that told him a lot.
Composing himself, Pete rolled both sleeves up to his elbows and displayed his arms. Without touching him, Reid examined the backs of his hands and arms and saw no scratches.
“Other side, please,” Reid said.
Pete rolled his arms and showed him the pale insides of his wrists and arms. Two long scratches, nearly healed, ran the length of his left forearm, from his wrist to the crook of his elbow. Reid leaned closer.
“Those are from thorns. I helped Beth prune the rose bushes in June,” Pete offered, even though Reid hadn’t asked.
The scratches were pink and looked as if the scabs had healed. Could they have happened in June, possibly over a month ago? He would take a photo.
“Will you take off the shirt, please?” Reid asked.
Pete complied. Under his blue sun-protection shirt, he wore a gray T-shirt that said Harvard in red. As far as Reid knew, Pete hadn’t gone there, but he would save the question for later. He examined both outside and inside Pete’s upper arms—no signs of a struggle.
“Would you mind removing your Harvard shirt?” Reid asked.
“I was in Cambridge for a seminar, in case you’re wondering,” Pete said.
Reid could almost feel Pete wanting to tell him he got an A; the statement served as a delay technique. Pete stood still, making no move to take off the shirt. Reid’s pulse kicked up a notch. He knew there was something Pete didn’t want him to see. Pete was in a bind. He had complied with the outer shirt; if he failed to take this one off, he’d be indicating some sort of guilt.
“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.
