“No.”
“Were the notes from you?”
“No.” Now the anger had drained, and she was exhausted. She needed a drink. She stood up. “I’m not answering any more questions. I’m leaving.”
They let her go—Washington with anger, Black with resignation. She felt the eyes on her as she walked through the station. The conversations quieted again. One cop gave a low whistle. She was almost at the front doors when someone said, “You’ll be back, sweetheart. Next time will be worse.”
She walked outside and paused on the station steps, inhaling the air infused with the smell of the ocean. Getting her equilibrium back now that she wasn’t in that stuffy room anymore, looking at those two men.
It was starting.
Maybe she wouldn’t survive it.
Maybe she deserved it.
She headed toward her car to go home.
CHAPTER NINE
September 2017
SHEA
There was a photo taken of Beth on October 20, 1977, the day after Paul Veerhoever’s murder. Beth was exiting the Claire Lake police station after being interviewed by the cops. They hadn’t arrested her yet—that would come later, when the police were more certain they had a case they could win.
Beth was wearing a dark green blouse tied in a knot at her waist and high-waisted jeans, her hair tied back in a ponytail, gold hoop earrings in her ears. She was alone. Beth’s face was turned as she caught sight of the camera, and in that fleeting moment her eyes were narrowed, the top lids drooping down over the irises, the pupils inky black. She looked beautiful and sexy, and at the same time she looked hard. She looked like a murderess.
Beth wasn’t arrested that day, but when that photo ran in the Claire Lake Daily, the town made up its mind. That woman—that uncaring, unfeeling woman—was guilty. Everywhere Beth went between the murders and the arrest, she was photographed.
That first photo was the one I pulled up on Saturday morning as I drank my coffee and got out the notes I’d kept from my research on the Lady Killer case. I looked at Beth’s face again, comparing it to the woman I’d talked to in the park. There was no doubt that even though she was beautiful, Beth Greer was not a sweet, innocent victim. There was a steeliness to her that people had found hard to reconcile in a twenty-three-year-old, and that steeliness was still there today. The woman I’d met in the park hadn’t been flustered or even angry to find me following her. She’d simply turned the tables on me until I answered her questions.
I’ve met sociopaths in my line of work, Michael had said. The smart ones are experts at deception.
Beth Greer, as far as I knew, had never been diagnosed as a sociopath. She had never been examined by a psychiatrist at all.
Sociopaths were good liars because they were empty of true human emotion. They knew how to mimic it, but they did so because they never felt it. Anger, grief, fear, empathy—the research suggested that a true sociopath couldn’t feel any of them.
When Ransom Wells, Beth’s lawyer, was asked about Beth in an interview in 1989, his only comment was, “I know pure evil when I see it.”
I clicked open my browser and played the video clip of Beth getting out of her car in the rain. For the hundredth time, the reporter in the plaid pants and trench coat pursued her, microphone in hand. For the hundredth time, Beth put her hands in the pockets of her coat and faced him.
“I’m just a girl who minds her own business,” she said.
Was she just tired?
Or deep down, was she trying not to smile?
* * *
—
When I looked out my window after my morning of research, there was a man I didn’t recognize reading in a car in the parking lot. The weather was unsettled, the last of summer giving in to the chill of fall, and clouds moved quickly past the sun, making its dim light dapple on and off. The man was in the small lot nearest my building, sitting in a black Jeep SUV. His face was obscured by a baseball cap. The car was off, and he was reading a book.
I wanted to mind my own business, but who sits and reads a book in a parked car? Parents waiting to pick their kids up from school, maybe. That was all I could think of. If he just wanted to read his book, there was a clearing with a park bench twenty feet away. I waited a minute, then two, then five, but the man didn’t leave.
Jesus, Shea. I heard my sister Esther’s voice in my head. You just answered your own question. He’s waiting to pick someone up. It’s Saturday morning, and people are living their lives. Mind your own business.
I knew I should. But in my mind’s eye, I still saw a car pull up next to me as I walked home from school, the tires crunching gently in the snow as the window rolled down. I heard a voice say, Hi there, are you cold? I heard my mother’s voice say, Always be polite to grown-ups, Shea.
That had been a lie—the worst lie I’d ever been told, that children should always be polite to adults. It was a lie that haunted me to this day. I picked up my phone and raised it, thinking to take a picture of the man, his car, and his license plate. Just in case.
As my finger hovered over the button, I heard Esther’s voice again, so calm and rational. Shea, have you seen your therapist lately?
I hadn’t. The last time was just before the divorce, over a year ago. Despite the fact that I had “lingering trauma issues,” as my therapist called them, she felt that I’d made tremendous progress. I was off the medication—her idea. At the time I quit, I had a stable career and a stable marriage, and was living a productive life. You can put this in the past, Shea, my therapist had said. You’re already doing it. It isn’t easy, but people do it all the time.
So I stopped going. A month later, my husband, Van, moved out. He had a new girlfriend now. The thought of that made me feel nothing.
Hi there, are you cold?
Now I lived alone, and a woman alone could never be too careful.
I snapped the photo and put my phone away.
* * *
—
When I left to pick up food for lunch, I smelled smoke. I opened the door of the stairwell to find a woman quickly putting a cigarette out. She was my neighbor from across the hall. We’d met once, briefly, on the day she moved in.
“Sorry,” she said sheepishly. “I’m trying to quit. I felt like if I snuck one in the stairwell it wouldn’t count, you know?”
“It’s okay,” I said, though it wasn’t. I didn’t have the heart to give her any grief. She was wearing stretched-out yoga pants and a tee, her graying brown hair scraped back into a ponytail. It was the uniform of the recently broken up, yet for some reason she had taken the trouble to put on mascara and line her eyes with dark, precise eyeliner. I’d been in that place, spinning hopelessly between I should do something and I don’t care.
“It’s Alison, right?” I said.
She nodded. “And you’re Shea.” We both smiled. “I won’t smoke anymore, I promise. It’s just been a hard week.”
“I get it.” I took a chance. “Your hard week doesn’t have to do with the man sitting in his car in the parking lot, does it?”
She looked surprised, then dismayed. “Is he still there?” She dropped her gaze to the floor. “Yeah, that’s my ex. We made plans, but then we had a fight and I changed my mind. Now he’s here and he says he’s waiting for me to come to my senses.” She looked back up at me. “Don’t tell me you’re divorced, too.”
“I am.”
She gave an awkward laugh. “You’re too pretty to be divorced.”
It was an odd comment, but again, I understood. She was feeling self-conscious about her yoga pants, her messy hair. I wasn’t looking very glamorous myself—I had on jeans, a tee, a fitted cargo jacket, my long hair in its ponytail, almost no makeup—but I was further along this rough road than she was.
“My ex thinks his new girlfriend is prettier,” I said, even though I had no resentment that Van had moved on. I watched Alison’s shoulders relax a little, the crinkles around her eyes ease as she nodded.