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.