Last Day Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 whitishcrust 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.
    Whenever he drove by this house—not as often as he patrolled Kate’s loft, but at least once a week—he noticed that the windows were always wide open. The curtains might be rippling in the breeze; he’d hear voices from inside, or music coming from the daughter’s room, or the TV on in Pete’s study. Beth liked fresh air. Kate did too. Reid figured the preference came, partly, from having been shut up in that dank cellar for nearly twenty-four hours.
    The killer had left the UPS note on the door, had turned up the AC, had wanted everyone to think Beth had been alive longer than she actually had. Reid would be checking for sex offenders in the area, but why would a rapist care about messing with the time of death?
    His gut told him this was something else. The killer had needed to build in time, enough for him to establish his alibi—such as getting onto a sailboat with his buddies and heading offshore, hundreds of miles away, where he couldn’t possibly have killed his wife.
    Gazing into Beth’s face, Reid couldn’t stop shaking. He was in the process of breaking a cardinal rule of investigation: making up his mind before reviewing all the facts. Two men who were supposed to have loved Beth—her father and now her husband—had destroyed her. Reid glanced across the room at the empty picture frame and wondered if Pete had gotten ideas from the earlier crime. He turned back to Beth.
    Suspicion wasn’t enough. He needed hard evidence, and he started by looking at Beth’s hands. Her fingernails had been manicured recently; there were no scratches or bent or broken nails, no obvious skin or blood caught under the nail tips. Why hadn’t she grabbed for him while he was strangling her? Why hadn’t she scratched and slashed and tried to break his grip, to yank the ligature away from her throat, snagging some of his DNA under her nails? Perhaps she had, and Reid simply wasn’t seeing it. The coroner would tell him.
    Outside the bedroom, in the upstairs hall, the forensics team was getting impatient. He could hear them talking. Although he knew they would document the scene with detailed video and photographs, he removed his iPhone from his jacket pocket and took photos of Beth, the bloodstained pillowcase, and the owl. Before leaving the room, he walked to the wall where the empty picture frame hung. The gilded frame itself gave him a jolt. It brought back the past; he would know it anywhere.
    On the bureau a sketch pad lay opened to a page with small ink drawings of a sailboat, a row of beach umbrellas, and an ornate antique key. There were notations beside each sketch, and he recognized Beth’s handwriting from the note downstairs:
    The husbands go sailing away—Pete and