What I had given him was everything I knew about the existence of Lily Knowles, starting with her birth certificate. Lily Knowles, who had left no legal trace behind since aging out of the foster system at eighteen. It had taken Black maybe half a minute to ask himself if Beth’s missing half sister was connected to the remains found by the lake. Now he and the Claire Lake PD had taken over.
“I don’t know what she’s thinking, either,” I said, though that was a lie. I knew exactly what Beth was thinking. She wanted me off-balance, wondering what she was going to do next. She wanted me to understand how much power she had. And she wanted a fight. “Are you going to tell me what they found in the master bedroom?” I asked him. “The police will only say that any evidence they find will be sent for testing. It’s frustratingly vague.”
“You know I can’t tell you that,” he said, though I had no doubt that Joshua knew every detail of the investigation. “I will ask you again, though, how you knew exactly where to look and what we might find. You seem to know a lot about something that happened before you were born.”
“Beth told me,” I said. The nurse had pushed me into the elevator, and we were descending. “She told me about Lily Knowles in our interviews, and Ransom Wells gave me the documentation, including the birth certificate. According to Beth, Lily is responsible for the murders of Julian Greer, Thomas Armstrong, Paul Veerhoever, and Lawrence Gage. And there are likely others, too, including a groundskeeper. We just have to find the others.”
There was a moment of silence on the other end of the line. Joshua was playing it close to the vest, which he was so good at. How he’d felt when he’d learned, after forty years, that Beth had a half sister, he hadn’t told me. He was all business when he talked to me about the case. I suspected that maybe, for the first time in a long time, the legendary Detective Black was mad. Really mad.
“So you went to the Greer mansion alone,” he said to me on the phone now as the elevator doors opened and the nurse pushed me down the busy hallway.
“Yes,” I said.
“And you fell over the cliff.”
We’d gone over this before, more than once, but a cop is always a cop. “Yes. I fell.”
“And Beth wasn’t home at the time.”
“You know she wasn’t. She was getting a medical scan done. It’s an ironclad alibi. Beth didn’t push me, I swear.”
“It just seems odd that you would fall over a dangerous cliff on your own. You’re certain you weren’t intoxicated?”
“I’m certain. It was an accident, okay? I stood in the wrong place and leaned the wrong way, and over I went. They really should put a fence up there. It’s dangerous. Now, how about you tell me what the lab is testing and how long it will take?”
The change of subject worked. “I never said there was any lab testing.”
“It was in the statement in the news.”
“No, it said that anything that was collected would be sent for lab testing. You’re as bad as those reporters. There’s nothing to report.”
“No? Then why am I hearing that the DNA tests on the body that was found by the lake are being expedited?”
“Where are you hearing that?”
“Some of those emails in my inbox are from people who hear things. Is it true?”
“I’m hanging up now. Please be careful, Shea. That’s all I ask.”
I thanked him and hung up, thinking Of course I’ll be careful, but I’ve already survived Anton Anders and Lily Knowles, two of Claire Lake’s worst murderers. I can survive Beth Greer.
The nurse pushed me through the front doors of the hospital, and I inhaled the fresh air, taking it in deep even though it was cloudy and cold. The bite of fall felt good in my throat and my lungs. An SUV had pulled up to the curb, and a familiar figure got out.
I thanked the nurse as Michael De Vos took the crutches from her and helped me out of the wheelchair. He was bundled in a wool coat against the chill, and he’d left the stubble on his jaw at my request. He looked woodsy and masculine and all-over good. He smiled at me and kissed me sweetly as I leaned on the crutches.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
He opened the passenger door of the SUV. I hesitated for a moment, my gaze on the darkness of the passenger seat.
I glanced at Michael to see him watching me. He looked like he wasn’t in a hurry, as if he could wait all day. “You can do this,” he said.
“I know,” I replied.
I limped to the passenger seat and got in. I handed Michael the crutches as I swung my bad leg into the SUV. Then I took a breath and closed the door, ready to go home.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Five Months Later
April 2018
From the popular podcast Listening to True Crime, episode 109, released April 13, 2018:
PAULA WATTS (LTC host): I’ve done a deep dive into this. The Lady Killer case has been an obsession of mine for years—I know I’m not the only one. There are a million details, a million theories. And I mean, Beth Greer! You just look at her, and it’s like, “Could she have done it? Maybe she could. Maybe she shot two random men just because she was rich and bored and crazy.” You can see it, in a way. And then you wonder, am I thinking that because that’s what society has programmed me to think? That any woman who doesn’t fit inside a neat little box, any woman who has sexuality as blatant and unapologetic as Beth Greer’s, maybe that woman is dangerous. Maybe she should be shunned and put in a jail cell. For us as women, I think, we look at that case and it brings up so many questions.
SHEA COLLINS: I know. I agree. I’ve been obsessed with the case myself for a long time, which you can see from the articles on my site.
PAULA: But this is crazy, isn’t it? This is nuts. I read that they reopened the Julian Greer case. Jesus, they reopened it! Because now we know that Beth Greer’s mother had a baby out of wedlock, and Lily Knowles existed, and she, at the very least— We don’t know much, but we know she was a foster child in the system and that as an adult she was a psychiatric patient. And I’m not saying anything about people with mental illness, because they can’t help that, but this was the seventies, and the treatment Lily probably got was to get thrown in a room somewhere with some screwed-up antipsychotic drugs, and that’s it. She was a mess.
SHEA: They’ve found some of her psychiatric records and released them, though not all of them. They’ve also reopened the Lawrence Gage case in Arizona. Did you know they lost the bullet in that case? It’s just gone. Apparently there was a fire in one of their evidence storage spaces and some evidence was lost, including that bullet. So we’ll never know if the ballistics match the other murders. But I’ve heard they’re pursuing the case with DNA.
PAULA: There was DNA left at that crime scene?
SHEA: They found a couple of hairs, I think. And if they can get the DNA from the hairs, they can match it to—
PAULA: They might match it to Beth Greer, right? Because Lily was Beth’s sister.
SHEA: Yeah, I think that could happen. Or they can match it to the DNA from the body they found, which we think is Lily’s body.
PAULA: So have they matched the DNA from that body to Beth’s?
SHEA: I don’t know. No one will tell me.
PAULA: Come on! You’re the expert on this case. You know everything!
SHEA: There are lots of things the cops won’t tell me, though believe me, I ask. I’m a big pain in their asses. They pretty much hate me, but that’s fine.
PAULA: You’re so freaking brave it blows me away. Beth Greer must hate you, too. And maybe she isn’t the Lady Killer, but she’s a pretty intimidating person, even now.
SHEA: I don’t think she hates me. She agreed to have me interview her in the first place, and she told me about Lily. No one knew about Lily until she pointed me in the right direction.
PAULA: But because of you, she could be looking at new murder charges. Aren’t you a bit scared of her?
SHEA: I’ve been researching this case. I’ve seen some things. I had an accident it took months to recover from. Honestly, not much scares me anymore. I want the truth to come out.