“It’s a goddamned murder arrest!” Washington barked at him. “I don’t care what she looks like, we’re handcuffing her!”
“You will not!” Ransom was climbing the front porch steps now. He was out of breath and his shoes were wet, but Beth could see instantly that he was in his element, that this kind of moment was the thing he lived for. He elevated his voice to a theatrical boom so the reporters could hear it. “The police will not mistreat my client!”
“Get out of the way, Wells!” Washington shouted. “And someone turn those fucking cherry lights off!”
Beth looked at the reporters’ faces and knew they’d all heard the profanity, that it had been caught on record on the TV camera.
“No handcuffs,” Black said as the uniformed cop took his handcuffs out. Beth kept her hands in the pockets of her trench coat. Ransom was standing beside her now. Flashbulbs were going off, mixing with the lights from the police car, and more reporters were shouting questions.
“We’re doing this,” Washington said. He grabbed the cuffs from the uniform and strode up the porch steps, reaching out to grasp Beth’s arm. His grip was hard and painful as he jerked her hand from her pocket.
“Elizabeth Greer, you’re under arrest,” he said, beginning to drone on about courts of law and rights to remain silent.
“Hands off my client!” Ransom shouted. “She is offering no resistance! Are you getting this on the tape? Did you get that?”
Beth let Washington spin her, yank her other hand out of her pocket. She let herself go limp, like a doll, as his grip bruised her. He cuffed one wrist, then pulled the other behind her back. Beth caught the wince of shocked disgust on Detective Black’s face and realized Washington was going far off the script. He wasn’t supposed to use handcuffs, and if he used them he was probably supposed to cuff her hands in front. With her hands cuffed in the back, she looked like a common criminal, like someone caught breaking windows or fondling children. Even though she was accused of two murders, Black didn’t think Beth was a common criminal. She could see it on his face.
The cuffs were cold, and they bit into her wrists. Beth didn’t wince. She rolled her shoulders, shifted her weight so the cuffs didn’t pull as hard.
This is all your fault, Beth. You could have stopped it.
“I want the record to show that my client is cooperating,” Ransom was bellowing. “We have here on the footage that the police are assaulting her. My client may file charges.”
Washington was pulling Beth down the steps now, and Black quickly took her other side as reporters crowded in. There were more flashes mixing with the police lights, microphones shoved in her face.
“Beth!” one reporter shouted. “Beth, do you have anything to say? Anything at all?”
She could feel Ransom’s wrath from three feet away, could feel Detective Black stiffen against her right side. Telegraphing to her to be quiet.
This was the moment, she realized. She wasn’t just a rumor anymore. She wasn’t just a headline. Now she was a murderer.
Lily had made her a murderer.
Beth leaned away from Washington, angling her body toward the microphone. The pose, with her hands behind her back, outlined her figure for the cameras, even with the trench coat on. She knew it as well as she knew her own body in the mirror. She kept her voice calm, as if she were talking to someone boring at a cocktail party. “The police can manhandle me all they want, but it still doesn’t make me guilty,” she said.
There was a murmur of reaction, more shouted questions, and then Washington was putting her into the back seat of the brown Pontiac, his hand on her head. “Watch it,” she heard Black say to him.
“Beth, I’ll follow you,” Ransom shouted. “Don’t say anything.” He turned and hurried back to his car, shaking his head as reporters followed him, trying to get him to comment.
It was awkward sitting in the car with her hands cuffed behind her back. Beth shifted on the seat, trying to brace herself without pinning her arms and twisting her shoulders as the detectives got in front and Washington put the car into gear.
“We need to switch her cuffs,” Black said as the car inched down the driveway, crowded with people.
“No, we don’t.” Washington shot back. “She’ll live. We’re not getting her back out of the car now.”
Black was silent as they finally pulled free of the crowd of people, which was starting to disperse. From the window, Beth could see reporters running back to their cars, the TV cameraman getting a last shot of the car backing out before lowering his camera and turning back to his van.
“Beth, are you all right?” Detective Black asked her.
She ignored him. The neighbors were talking, and thanks to the reporters her arrest would be all over the news by six o’clock. She had been arrested for murder, a catastrophe that meant life as she knew it was over. Everyone thought she was the Lady Killer. She was on her way to jail, and then to a trial, which she could very well lose. She had just been publicly humiliated, dragged from her front porch and pushed into a police car in a spectacle of an arrest. It was all because of Lily, who by now was probably on the road out of town, the pay phone she’d called from sitting empty.
And still, as Arlen Heights receded in the background, Beth could only think one thing:
That was goddamned fun.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
October 2017
SHEA
In the first days after my last visit to the Greer mansion, I was afraid.
I kept my cracked phone in the bottom of my purse, unable to look at it. I went to work and back in silence, sitting alone on the bus with my bag in my lap. I stopped listening to audiobooks, because I didn’t want to hear about death anymore. Instead I sat with a roaring in my ears, as if something were going to happen any second and I had to be ready.
I forced myself to concentrate at work. I never went out after dark. I checked my security system multiple times before going to bed. And when I finally slept, my dreams were full of blood and a familiar voice, saying: Hi there. Are you cold?
No matter how many times I awoke thrashing and sweating, Winston Purrchill was always on the bed next to me, regarding me with his sleepy eyes, drowsily wondering what was wrong. I fell asleep over and over with my hand on his soft fur or my face next to the solid curve of his back, watching the rise and fall of his breathing, listening as the low, uncouth rumble of his purr drifted off into sleep. I would have lost my sanity without my cat that week. If Alison or her ex-husband ever showed up to take him back, they would do it over my dead body.
And then something changed. Maybe I got tired of the fear; maybe it just lost its grip. But instead of being afraid, I got mad.
I thought about those blows against the door of Julian’s study, and instead of terror I only felt anger. I couldn’t explain it, and I couldn’t even trace it to a source—I was suddenly furious at everything. At Beth. At the man who had tried to abduct me when I was a child. At whoever had killed Thomas Armstrong and Paul Veerhoever and left them by the side of the road like trash. At all of the murderers—so many of them—who got away with it and left the victims to end up on the Book of Cold Cases, one after another. It all tumbled together in my mind. I’d never been this angry, and now I started to see what I’d been missing.
After I got home from work one day, I got a text from Michael. I had to pull my cracked phone from the bottom of my bag to read it. There’s some missing information in the online property records. We’ll have to try the records office downtown to see if they have the archive.
Okay, I texted back.
Sending you an email now, he wrote. There are two addresses that are missing records prior to 1960. I’m sending you everything I have.
Okay, I wrote again.
His next text came back right away: Are you all right?