My mouth was dry. This was what they thought Beth had done. It was this murder that a witness had said he’d seen Beth drive away from.
Detective Black walked to the only chair, on the other side of the coffee table, and sat down. Outside, I could hear birds calling over the ocean. The boat rocked gently, and I felt like I was a little drunk. I couldn’t see how anyone could live here—too many ways for someone to break in, too many strangers walking by, no alarm system that I could see—but I had to assume he liked it. Cops, even former cops, could live in places I couldn’t and not worry about it.
“The first time I met Beth was at our first interview,” he said, though I hadn’t asked a question. “The day after Veerhoever was killed. We had a witness identification by then. I knew who Beth Greer was, though I’d never met her. I knew who her parents were. I knew she lived in Arlen Heights. It seemed unlikely that she was a killer, but, like I say, we had no idea what we were looking for. We didn’t know what a female Zodiac was supposed to look like. And Beth wasn’t like any woman any of us had met.”
“She was young and sexy and smart,” I said. “Rich. So that made her a murderer?”
Detective Black leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees. “Aside from the witness identification, think about this,” he said. “This killer, whoever they are, can get away scot-free. There’s no connection to the victim, no fingerprints, no hair or fiber evidence, no blood or DNA. No witnesses. This person has just literally gotten away with murder. And she decides to leave a note with her handwriting on it. Paper that could be traced, handwriting that could be analyzed, possibly even fingerprints. Who would do that? Someone with an ego. Someone who thinks she’s smarter than the cops. Someone who thinks she’ll never be caught.”
“Someone who wants to be caught,” I countered. “Deep down, even if she can’t admit it. She wants to be stopped.”
“Psychopaths don’t want to be stopped,” Black said. “They want to keep doing what they’re doing for as long as it gets them off. But they want to laugh at everyone at the same time. They can’t help it. They’re certain that no one will catch them, and a lot of times, they’re right.”
“The second note said ‘Catch me.’?”
“The second note wasn’t a plea; it was a taunt. Because the writer didn’t believe we could do it. Her ego didn’t let her think it.”
I thought of Beth’s commanding rich-girl voice, the way she gave orders like someone who has had money and confidence all her life, and I didn’t answer.
“Beth was like an unknown species of bird,” Black said. “She wasn’t a wife or a mother or a daughter, or even a true wild child, despite what the rumors said. She wasn’t anything, which meant she could be anything. She wasn’t man-hungry or money-hungry or any other kind of hungry. She drank too much, but she wasn’t on drugs and she didn’t gamble. She was beautiful, she was smart, and she was cold. Self-contained, impossible to crack, at only twenty-three. She had the means and the opportunity. A car and no alibi. And then we ran the ballistics.”
The ballistics tests had showed that the gun used to kill Armstrong and Veerhoever had also been used in the home invasion that killed Beth’s father, Julian, when Beth was nineteen.
The only time they took me seriously was when they thought I might blow their brains out, Beth had told me. That was the only time I had them scared.
“She didn’t have a motive for any of it,” I said.
“You don’t always get a motive,” Black replied. “That’s something you learn in police work. You don’t always get the why, especially with stranger killings. I had a long career after the Lady Killer case, and I worked a lot of cases I didn’t fully understand. But I still closed them.”
I thought of the fact that he had worked the Sherry Haines case, and I dropped my gaze to the coffee table. Black had a cop’s knack for reading people, and I didn’t want him to read me.
Then I went over what he’d said, ran through the words in my mind. Detective Black had been very careful. He’d talked about the Lady Killer and he’d talked about Beth. But he hadn’t put the two of them into the same sentence.
“You don’t think she did it,” I said, realizing as I spoke that it was true.
I looked up to see those cop’s eyes watching me, and I had the feeling they missed nothing. “I was a detective,” he said. “I saw things that no one ever wants to see. I was there that first night, when we were called to Thomas Armstrong’s body at the side of the road. I dedicated my career to fighting evil. Do you honestly think I would take Beth Greer’s phone calls, her requests, if I thought she had killed those men? Do you think I would have any kind of relationship with a serial killer?”
He had such conviction, even now, all these years later. “No,” I said. “I don’t.”
“I spent months investigating Beth,” Black said. “I dug up every part of her life, because someone shot Julian Greer, then used the same gun to commit two more murders. After the ballistics report came back, Washington and I found everything we could find on Julian Greer, looking for the connection. Greer’s murder had looked like a straightforward home invasion—the back door of the house was broken open and Greer was shot in the kitchen, his wallet and cash stolen. It was eleven o’clock on a Saturday morning. Mariana was with her bridge club, and Beth said she was out shopping. No one even double-checked her alibi.” He shook his head. “I tried every way possible to believe that a nineteen-year-old girl shot her own father, then made it look like a breakin. That would have taken planning, cold blood, and the kind of hate that burns for years.”
“Maybe her father was abusive,” I said.
“That’s just it. Washington and I went over everything about the man. He was clean. His marriage was unhappy, by all accounts, but that was all we could find. He didn’t have any enemies, personal or professional. His former secretary sobbed when we interviewed her. She still wasn’t over his death. She said that Julian was a wonderful man, but she hated Mariana. She said Mariana had ruined Julian’s life.”
I thought that over. I knew almost nothing about Beth’s parents, except that both had had their lives cut short. Beth had told me she didn’t want to end up like her mother—no, she’d said she was terrified of ending up like her mother. She’d said that Mariana was trapped. That sounded pitiful, and it didn’t line up with the secretary’s description.
“So you never figured it out,” I said.
“Some detective I am, right?” He actually sounded regretful, as if he hadn’t solved cases and saved people’s lives for thirty-five years. “The only connection I ever found between the two cases was Beth. Beth lived in that house, and a witness said he saw Beth at Veerhoever’s crime scene. This case outsmarted me in the end. Or maybe Beth did.”
“And yet you don’t think she’s a serial killer.” My mind was spinning. “My head hurts.”
“Welcome to the Lady Killer case,” Black said wryly.
There was a moment of quiet as I rubbed my eyes and thought things over. Black was right—the ballistics match meant that Julian Greer was a part of this somehow. He was, in a way, the first Lady Killer victim. “Is the secretary still alive?” I asked, my eyes still closed.
“I have no idea,” Black said. “She was a young woman then.”
“What was her name?”
“Sylvia Bledsoe.”
Of course he remembered a name from forty years ago off the top of his head. He was that kind of cop. I dropped my hands and opened my eyes again to find him looking at me. The expression on his face was quietly happy, paternal. My own father had never looked at me like that. When my father looked at me, his expression was either bewildered or tensely pained.
“You’re going to interview her, aren’t you?” he said.