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?”
“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.