That stung, but he was right. I wasn’t an author or a reporter or an investigator. I was no one. Why would Beth Greer choose no one? “I guess if she agrees, I’ll ask her,” I said.
“She knows you want information, so she’s going to give some things and withhold others. She’s going to meet with you on her terms. She’s going to lead you where she wants you to go.”
Logically, I knew he had a point. I wrote about sociopaths and psychopaths almost every night; I had a layman’s understanding of how they worked, like any normal woman who had a first edition of Small Sacrifices on her bookshelf. I knew that even though Beth was a woman over sixty, there was no guarantee that she wasn’t dangerous. The problem was that I wasn’t completely convinced she was a killer in the first place.
“If Beth were a man,” Michael said, “you would never have approached her.”
I laughed, even though his insight was as sharp as always. “I can’t even approach you, and I’ve been working with you for over a year.”
“I’m not a serial killer,” he said.
“See, that’s exactly what a serial killer would say.”
“A fair point. Do you want to run my fingerprints and DNA? I can probably arrange something.”
The oven timer beeped, and I turned it off. “That’s what a serial killer would say, too,” I said. “Make a grandiose promise he can’t keep, because it sounds so convincing.”
“All right. I’m offended, but at least you’re thinking the way I want you to think when it comes to Beth Greer.”
I promised him I would be careful, and I hung up. But as I pulled my lonely dinner out of the oven, listening to the wind splatter rain against my windows—as I prepared for yet another lonely night in the darkness—I admitted to myself that anywhere Beth Greer led me, I was more than willing to go.
* * *
—
The call came at one in the morning. I had just drifted off when the phone rang on my nightstand. It was a number I didn’t recognize.
My heart in my throat—a one a.m. call had to mean Esther or my parents were dead—I answered it. I recognized the voice on the other end immediately.
“It’s Beth.”
I sat up. “Beth?”
“I’ve been reading your website,” she said, ignoring the fact that she’d woken me up. “I’ve been reading what you wrote about me.”
I rubbed my face in the darkness. When I wrote the article, I’d never imagined it being read by the real Beth Greer. “What did you think?” I asked.
“You got some things right and some things wrong. You didn’t talk to Detective Black. Or to Ransom.”
Detective Joshua Black had worked the Lady Killer case. Ransom Wells had been Beth’s attorney. Both were still alive, and both were still in Claire Lake. “I tried. Neither of them would talk to me.”
“They will when I tell them to,” Beth said. Her voice carried the perfect confidence of a woman born rich and beautiful, who even now was used to people doing what she wanted.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Are you telling me you’ll get me access to both of them?”
“Yes, because I’m going to grant your interview,” Beth said. “We’ll start on Sunday. Be at the mansion at ten. I don’t cook, I don’t make coffee, and I don’t have servants, so bring your own shit.” There was a click. She had hung up.
I stared into the darkness, the dead phone against my ear.
It was happening.
I was going to talk to Beth Greer.