I hadn’t wanted to come back here; I’d dreaded it. But after seeking me out for lunch, Beth wouldn’t meet me anywhere else. It was either come, or give up the chance to talk to her. In the end, I couldn’t stay away.
At least I was rested. I had started to sleep properly for the first time in ages—Winston Purrchill liked to take half the bed, and I spent every night with his warm, solid presence beside me. I woke every morning with his calm face looking into mine as he pawed my cheek, insisting on breakfast. I’d never been as comfortable sleeping beside my own husband as I was sleeping beside that cat. I had no idea what that said about me.
“Then you know what the evidence was,” Beth said.
“There was enough evidence to bring an indictment,” I said. “It wasn’t nothing.”
Beth shrugged.
I glanced down at my notes, though I didn’t need to. I knew everything by heart. “There was the handwriting analysis. Comparing your handwriting to the Lady Killer notes.”
“That wasn’t a match,” Beth said.
“Actually, the results were inconclusive.”
She jangled the ice in her glass. “Which isn’t a match.”
I nodded. Handwriting analysis had been seen as gospel in 1977, but these days it had come under a lot of scientific fire. “What if I offered to pay for a new analysis?”
“It still wouldn’t be a match,” Beth said.
She was unreadable. I was far out of my league, dealing with someone who had been believed a killer for forty years. Still, I said, “The witness, Alan Parks, saw you leaving the second scene.” Parks lived in Alaska now, and he’d refused every one of my attempts to talk to him.
“He saw the back of a head with red hair,” Beth said. “For all we know, it was Ransom in a wig. And Alan Parks was drunk.”
“But he identified your photo. He admitted that he’d had two whiskey sours before leaving the house to walk his dog. It wasn’t exactly the kind of intoxication that would make someone hallucinate.”
“As an alcoholic myself, I think I can give expert testimony on this one. Two whiskey sours isn’t sober.”
“So if he didn’t see you that night, then what did he see?”
“I have no idea what he saw. It was forty years ago.” Beth’s voice went softer as she watched me. “Do you think you’re scaring me with this line of questioning, Shea? I don’t scare easily.”
“I’m not trying to scare you.”
“Then what are you trying to do?”
“Get your perspective on things. Like I said when we first met, I want to know what it’s like to be you.”
“All right, then. Do you want to know the most exciting day of my life? It was the day they arrested me.” She looked at my expression and said, “I’m being serious. I didn’t say it was a good day. I said it was exciting. You can’t read an accurate account of that day in any of the newspapers of the time, because none of them printed the real story. They only said I’d been arrested, and they ran that photo, the one with my tits in it.”
Her description was crude, but not entirely off base. She was talking about the photo of her in front of this very mansion, being led down the driveway with Detective Black on one arm and Detective Washington on the other. The photo in Who Was the Female Zodiac? in which she leaned toward the camera, her lips parted as if she were speaking. The pose and the angle, with her hands bound so tightly behind her, outlined the curves of her body, even beneath the trench coat. If she was a killer, she was the most sexual killer anyone had ever seen.
“It’s kind of a famous photo,” I said.