“Then how do you know this?”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter.” Behind Michael, the door opened and a nurse came in. She pulled a wheeled tray with her: a blood pressure cuff, pills in a small paper cup. I ignored her and put my good hand on Michael’s arm. “Call your cop friends,” I said. “And call Joshua Black. Tell all of them that Beth killed Lily Knowles because Lily was the Lady Killer. It’s her remains that were found, that I messaged you about. DNA will prove it if they do a test. For all I know, Beth is going to try and find some way to stop all of this from happening. Call them now.”
“You’re awake,” the nurse said, coming along the other side of my bed. “We need a moment, please,” she said to Michael.
“Shea, this is crazy. If Beth didn’t confess, there’s no way you can know this.”
“Lily killed all of them, including Julian,” I said. “We’ll give them everything Ransom gave us. We have to re-create the timeline and look for murders we didn’t know about before. Mariana was an accident. She drank too much, or maybe took medication, after a fight with Lily. She thought she was going to find Lily, to apologize to her, when she got in that car.”
“Um,” the nurse said, probably shocked. But I wasn’t looking at her. I was looking at Michael.
His gaze held mine. He guessed how I knew, maybe. I had too many details. I had seen it.
But like he’d said before, if I wanted to tell him, I would.
“This is it, isn’t it?” he said. “This is the end after all these years.”
“This is the beginning,” I said as the nurse lifted my arm. “Call them. Now.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
From the Claire Lake News Online, October 2017:
POLICE INVESTIGATION IN ARLEN HEIGHTS SPARKS QUESTIONS
Police were recently seen entering the Arlen Heights home of Beth Greer, who was acquitted of a series of murders in 1978. They were inside the home for several hours, apparently with the authority of a warrant.
Carl Contreras, chief of police with the Claire Lake Police Department, declined to give a statement except to say, “I cannot comment on any ongoing investigation.”
Greer was arrested and tried for the murders of Thomas Armstrong, 31, and Paul Veerhoever, 36, in 1977. She was found not guilty. The murders have never been solved.
“She’s quiet,” a neighbor, Winifred Platts, said of Greer, who has lived in her childhood home since the acquittal. “The press used to hang around after the trial, but they went away and it’s been quiet ever since. We don’t see her much, just at the store or whatnot. She doesn’t seem to have any friends. We’re not happy to have a murderer in the neighborhood, but she had her day in court. If she didn’t do it, then I guess she didn’t. But I don’t like this police search at all.”
Claire Lake Police will not comment on whether the warrant is connected to the so-called Lady Killer murders. Because of double jeopardy laws, Greer cannot be charged with those murders a second time.
“So what does it mean, then?” asks Timothy Garge, another neighbor who was busy raking his lawn. “Did she kill someone else? That’s just great. If she doesn’t sell, we might have to.”
* * *
—
From the Oregon News, October 2017:
“There’s nothing to find at my house,” Beth Greer said.
. . . The law of double jeopardy would apply to the murders of Armstrong and Veerhoever, though it would not apply to any other crimes Miss Greer might be accused of that arise from the investigation at her home.
Miss Greer issued a statement through the office of her attorney, Ransom Wells: “The search of my home was legal persecution, pure and simple.” The statement was not given personally by Wells, who his staff say is in declining health, but sent by email to local media outlets. “I have lived a quiet life for forty years, ever since my acquittal at trial. I have harmed no one. This has been brought on by a blogger named Shea Collins, who is seeking fame based on lies about crimes she claims I’ve committed. All of it is categorically false, and I’m considering legal action to protect myself.”
Collins apparently runs a website called the Book of Cold Cases, which contains several articles about the Lady Killer murders along with articles about other famous unsolved crimes. Collins appears to be a Claire Lake resident, though attempts to reach her for comment were met with silence . . .
* * *
—
“She’s messing with me,” I said.
I was fully dressed in my hospital room, sitting in a wheelchair, talking on the phone as the nurse put my bag in my lap. I was being discharged after a monthlong stay that included surgeries on both my elbow and my knee. My arm was in a sling and I’d be on crutches for a few months at least, but I was finally going home. It should have been an exciting moment, but I was too busy talking to Joshua Black to notice.
“Messing with you?” he said. “She just seems angry to me.”
Of course Beth was angry. The full force of the Claire Lake PD had come down on her. What Joshua Black had to do with any of it, I could only guess; for a man who had been retired for a decade, he seemed to be central. No one in the department held more respect or more sway.
“She’s screwing with my head,” I said as the nurse started pushing my chair down the hallway. “She’s gone to the media to tell everyone who I am, and that she’s planning to sue me. She’s sent so much traffic to my website that the server crashed. I have over two hundred emails in my inbox, and my phone won’t stop ringing with requests for interviews. She’s just made me famous.”
“Sounds terrible to me,” Black said.
“It is terrible. I haven’t talked to my bosses yet, but I could easily get fired over the publicity. And I’ve never wanted to be in the public eye.” Even now, all I wanted was to go home to my condo and get Winston Purrchill back from Esther, who had taken him in while I’d been in the hospital. I wanted one of my quiet nights with my laptop, my cat, and my familiar anxieties, and I had the feeling I was never going to have one of those nights again. “And at the same time,” I said to Joshua, “I called my health insurance company this morning. I assumed I was going to be in debt for the rest of my life, but guess what? I’m not. Everything is paid for.”
“Wow,” Joshua said. “And you think that was Beth?”
“She’s the only rich person I know.” I’d had two surgeries, including titanium pieces inserted into my crushed left elbow. I’d had drugs and antibiotics and physical therapy, which I was going to continue for months as an outpatient. Even with the insurance from my job, I’d thought I’d be underwater forever. The bill for the deductibles alone was probably more than my annual salary. And yet I didn’t owe a penny.
I could practically hear Beth’s voice, dry and a little impatient: Well, my dead sister did try to kill you. I suppose I’m somewhat responsible.
She’d paid my hospital bill, and then she’d made a statement that threatened to sue me, and threw me to the publicity wolves. Game on, Beth.
“God only knows what she’s thinking,” Joshua said. “I’ve never known.”
He was angry, too. Since my accident, he’d visited me in the hospital a few times and we’d talked on the phone. I liked him so much it was a little scary, and I felt for him. He’d spent forty years believing that Beth wasn’t a murderer, and now he wasn’t so sure. I knew that his original intuition was right—Beth wasn’t a murderer, at least while she was accused and on trial. The murder had come after. But I couldn’t explain to him how I knew that, because Joshua Black didn’t seem like the type to believe in ghosts.