“Psychopaths don’t want to be stopped,” Black said. “They want to keep doing what they’re doing for as long as it gets them off. But they want to laugh at everyone at the same time. They can’t help it. They’re certain that no one will catch them, and a lot of times, they’re right.”
“The second note said ‘Catch me.’？”
“The second note wasn’t a plea; it was a taunt. Because the writer didn’t believe we could do it. Her ego didn’t let her think it.”
I thought of Beth’s commanding rich-girl voice, the way she gave orders like someone who has had money and confidence all her life, and I didn’t answer.
“Beth was like an unknown species of bird,” Black said. “She wasn’t a wife or a mother or a daughter, or even a true wild child, despite what the rumors said. She wasn’t anything, which meant she could be anything. She wasn’t man-hungry or money-hungry or any other kind of hungry. She drank too much, but she wasn’t on drugs and she didn’t gamble. She was beautiful, she was smart, and she was cold. Self-contained, impossible to crack, at only twenty-three. She had the means and the opportunity. A car and no alibi. And then we ran the ballistics.”
The ballistics tests had showed that the gun used to kill Armstrong and Veerhoever had also been used in the home invasion that killed Beth’s father, Julian, when Beth was nineteen.
The only time they took me seriously was when they thought I might blow their brains out, Beth had told me. That was the only time I had them scared.
“She didn’t have a motive for any of it,” I said.
“You don’t always get a motive,” Black replied. “That’s something you learn in police work. You don’t always get the why, especially with stranger killings. I had a long career after the Lady Killer case, and I worked a lot of cases I didn’t fully understand. But I still closed them.”
I thought of the fact that he had worked the Sherry Haines case, and I dropped my gaze to the coffee table. Black had a cop’s knack for reading people, and I didn’t want him to read me.
Then I went over what he’d said, ran through the words in my mind. Detective Black had been very careful. He’d talked about the Lady Killer and he’d talked about Beth. But he hadn’t put the two of them into the same sentence.
“You don’t think she did it,” I said, realizing as I spoke that it was true.
I looked up to see those cop’s eyes watching me, and I had the feeling they missed nothing. “I was a detective,” he said. “I saw things that no one ever wants to see. I was there that first night, when we were called to Thomas Armstrong’s body at the side of the road. I dedicated my career to fighting evil. Do you honestly think I would take Beth Greer’s phone calls, her requests, if I thought she had killed those men? Do you think I would have any kind of relationship with a serial killer?”
He had such conviction, even now, all these years later. “No,” I said. “I don’t.”
“I spent months investigating Beth,” Black said. “I dug up every part of her life, because someone shot Julian Greer, then used the same gun to commit two more murders. After the ballistics report came back, Washington and I found everything we could find on Julian Greer, looking for the connection. Greer’s murder had looked like a straightforward home invasion—the back door of the house was broken open and Greer was shot in the kitchen, his wallet and cash stolen. It was eleven o’clock on a Saturday morning. Mariana was with her bridge club, and Beth said she was out shopping. No one even double-checked her alibi.” He shook his head. “I tried every way possible to believe that a nineteen-year-old girl shot her own father, then made it look like a breakin. That would have taken planning, cold blood, and the kind of hate that burns for years.”
“Maybe her father was abusive,” I said.