“Miss Greer,” the handsome cop said, and even though his voice was gentle and understanding, the numbness fell away for a second. It was replaced with fear, toxic and wrenching, so consuming that Beth felt like screaming. This wasn’t a nightmare she was going to wake up from. These were the police, and this was real. She was here all alone.
She looked at Detective Black, waiting for him to say something, unable to speak while she wrestled with the fear.
“You need to think very carefully,” Detective Black said. “I know you say you had a few drinks, that things are fuzzy.” He ignored the derisive snort from his partner. “But you need to think back very carefully to where you were that night, whether you were with anyone. Whether anyone saw you. Think hard.”
Suddenly she could see the whole scene like a photograph: Black sitting at the table wearing a dark brown suit and navy tie, Washington standing against the wall in his shirtsleeves, his striped tie loosened half an inch. It smelled like cigarette smoke in here, though no one was smoking right now. She saw the tape recorder, the bleached lighting, the scratched table. The pen that Black held in his hand, hovering over the notepad on the table as he waited for her to speak. And her, sitting with her arms crossed. She was wearing a deep green blouse and high-waisted jeans, high-heeled zip-up ankle boots on her feet. She had her red hair in a ponytail and gold hoops in her ears.
Every cop had watched her as she followed Black and Washington through the station to the interview room. The place had gone silent, conversations hushing in waves. Beth looked like a rich girl, she knew. She was a rich girl. Not the kind of girl who gets hauled into a police station. Rich didn’t mean happy, but no one cared about that, least of all the cops who looked at her and saw the girl who would turn them down if they talked to her in a bar. The girl who would laugh at them if they tried to sleep with her. The girl who might have shot two good family men in the face just for something to do.
If she’d done that, she must be crazy. Did they all think she was crazy?
“What about last night?” Detective Black asked, polite and persistent. “Do you remember where you were last night?”
Yes, this was real. Definitely real. She felt the same squeeze of panic she’d felt when she’d seen the aftermath of her father’s dead body on the kitchen floor, the blood everywhere. He’d been taken away by then, but she’d had the feeling that this was really happening, that it wasn’t going to stop, that she couldn’t just close the book or turn off the TV and walk away. That this was the beginning of something bad.
“I was home last night,” she said, because it was important. She had to be clear. She couldn’t tell the truth. She couldn’t.
Another man had been murdered last night. It was all over the papers.
Detective Washington stood forward from the wall he was leaning on. His hand slipped into his pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “Do you own a black 1966 Buick?” he asked, his voice harsh.
They knew the answer already. They must have known before they came to her door. “Yes, it’s one of my cars.” She had three. That was how rich she was. It was enraging. She could see it in his eyes.
“Did you drive it on October fifteenth?”
“No.”
“You just said you were drinking and you don’t remember.”
“I would know if I drove it.” She’d remember getting in the car, turning the key in the ignition, even if she was drunk. She’d done drunken joyrides before, and she never completely forgot them, no matter how much she’d had. Besides, the morning after the murder the Buick had been parked neatly in the garage alongside the other cars. No way she’d be able to do that while so drunk she had no memory.
It was the same this morning. She’d parked the Buick like she always did last night. She definitely remembered that.
“Perhaps you wouldn’t know. Perhaps you drove it and don’t remember,” Detective Black said. He really sounded quite sorry that she was here at all, that he was bothering her with this. Along with his good looks, this was probably a tactic that worked on every female murder suspect. She had the thought before she remembered that Claire Lake didn’t have any other murders she could think of, let alone any female suspects. Just these murders. And her.
Washington flipped the cigarette pack open, and Black looked at his partner. Just a brief, dark glance, and Washington put the cigarettes away again. There was a mottled flush on his face as he did it—but he did it. Black turned back to Beth and waited for an answer.
“I was home,” she said.
“Did you know Thomas Armstrong?”
“No.”
“Did you know Paul Veerhoever?”
“No.”
Washington took another step forward. Now he was standing next to his partner, looming over Beth, still angry because his partner had forbidden him to smoke. “Do you own a gun?” he asked.
“No.”
“A man walking his dog heard the shots,” Detective Washington said. “He saw a car that resembled a Buick driving down Claire Lake Road away from the murder. There was a woman driving.”
Icy sweat was trickling down her back. “That wasn’t me,” she said.
“Claire Lake Road doesn’t get much traffic,” Detective Black said. “The woman had long hair and a trench coat. He believes her hair was red. He identified a photo of you.”
The fear broke then, like a fever. It reached a certain pressure point, and then it just stopped. It was replaced by anger, the cold rage that seemed too big for her body to contain, too big for her mind. She’d always had a temper, though she rarely let it off its leash. She said the words again, trying not to spit them at him: “That wasn’t me.”
“Except you don’t know that, because you claim you can’t remember.” Detective Washington’s tone was tight and harsh. “You were too drunk, or so you say. So how do you know it wasn’t you?”
She looked up at him and met his eyes. The anger broke loose, and for a second she thought about how stupid he was. How he had no idea what he was dealing with, and now he was in the way. The words came out of her, cold with fury: “It wasn’t me, you idiot. I wasn’t in that fucking car.”
There was a second of stunned silence from both men. Panic, they could deal with; trembling fear, they were used to. They even expected lying and clumsy attempts to dodge questions. But anger was something they didn’t expect. It burned pure inside her, like fire fed with oxygen. She knew she should put it out, but instead she held Detective Washington’s gaze and she let it burn.
He looked back at her with shocked disgust, as if she were a zoo animal who had pissed on the floor. Anger and profanity. She should have stayed quiet.
But the anger was loose now, and she couldn’t find it in herself to be sorry.
Detective Black cleared his throat and took over again. “Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Veerhoever were shot with .22-caliber bullets. And I know this is confusing to you, because normally we wouldn’t question a nice young lady like yourself about something like this. Normally, you’d be the last person we’d think of.”
Beth held still, waiting. In the silence of the room, she could hear the whirring of the tape recorder.
Detective Black continued. “Your father died in 1973 in a home invasion. He was shot in the kitchen of your house while he was home alone. He was killed with a .22-caliber weapon. We’re going to pull the ballistics report from those bullets and compare it to these bullets. Do you understand?”
This wasn’t happening.
Oh, yes, it was.
“Perhaps there’s something you’d like to tell us,” Detective Black said.
“There’s nothing I want to tell you,” she said.
A lie, maybe. Part of her wanted to tell him what her life was like. That being drunk kept the ghosts away most of the time, but not all of the time. That the fear ate away at her sometimes, and so did the anger. That she had moments when she wasn’t sure what was real and what wasn’t.
But she wasn’t going to talk. Not about her father’s death. Not about anything. Some things needed to stay buried.
Some things had to stay buried.
“Did you know Thomas Armstrong?” Washington asked her again.
“No,” she said through numb lips.
“Did you know Paul Veerhoever?”
“No.”
“Were you seeing either of them?”