The Book of Cold Cases, page 14
“At least send me an invoice,” I said.
Michael shook his head. “I told you, the chance to crack the Lady Killer case after forty years is payment enough for me.”
He paused, and there was that moment—that one moment, perfect and still, when I could have told him everything. Michael had told me so much, given me so much. I could tell him about me. The reason I had so many hang-ups that he didn’t understand. The reason I’d been afraid to meet him. The reason I was alone. I could tell Michael that I was Girl A.
Hi there. Are you cold?
The blood in my mouth when the man hit me that day, my hands scrabbling on the car door handle as I tried to jump out into the snow.
The shocking impact when I hit the snowy pavement and the dry crunch as I got my boots beneath me and started to run.
The plumes of my breath in the air as I ran and hid, certain that the man was circling the block, getting out of his car, coming after me. The creeping cold as I ran into a garden shed and stayed still, trying not to make a sound.
I could tell Michael all of that, because for better or for worse, it was the truth about me. But we were sitting here face-to-face at last. He was handsome, and he understood me—at least part of me—and we were trying something new. It wasn’t the time to tell him.
It didn’t escape me that I could talk about any number of gruesome murders, but I couldn’t talk about the murder that had almost been mine. Actually, I could talk about those other murders because I couldn’t talk about the one that had almost been mine.
Besides, Michael wasn’t telling me everything about himself, either. No one did. Everyone kept secrets, at least for a little while.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
October 2017
SHEA
“Let’s talk about the evidence,” I said, turning on the recorder on my phone.
It was Saturday, we were at the Greer mansion, and Beth was sitting on the sofa. She was wearing black full-length yoga pants and a black tee, her feet bare. She was lithe and elegant, ageless. She looked like a movie star—Meryl Streep, perhaps—graciously submitting to an interview. “Why?” she asked me. “I think you’ve read the trial transcripts.”
“More than once,” I said. The house was silent around us—no pipes or electric hums, no far-off barking dogs. Except for the sound of a clock ticking on the wall, the Greer mansion was the quietest place I had ever been. My eyes kept traveling to the shadows in the corners, and my ears kept straining for any kind of sound.
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.
“Nothing about that photo is as it seems,” Beth said. “But then again, it made me look like a bitch. It played into the narrative that I was a serial killer. And it sold papers.”
“The gun,” I said, trying to stick to the topic of evidence. “There was the ballistics report that said the same gun killed your father and the two Lady Killer victims. How do you explain that?”
Beth looked at me evenly. “Do you think I killed my father?”
I stared back at her. “The truth?”
“Of course.”
I bit my lip, thinking. “I think it’s unlikely. You were nineteen, and it was a very violent crime. You didn’t need his money—you were already his heiress, and you had all the money you wanted. You told me Julian wasn’t abusive.”
Beth took a sip of her drink, listening. She looked tense, but if I had to guess, I thought part of her was enjoying this.
“The thing is, though, it’s possible,” I went on. “Your childhood wasn’t happy—you admit that. You were left alone a lot. You had no close friends. Most serial killers who have been studied can trace their tendencies back to childhood, and yours was definitely isolated. You’ve never been psychologically examined by court order, so no one knows if you’re a sociopath or not.”
“Gosh, you’re a charming date,” Beth said dryly.
I gave her a shrug that was pure Beth, the one that said, Maybe you have a point, but probably not. “You asked. What I come back to when I think about it is that if it was you, then it was almost the perfect crime. Because who was going to suspect the grieving teenage daughter?”
There was a moment of silence, both of us watching each other in the silent living room.
“The person who committed those murders,” Beth said, her voice low and calm, “was dangerous. Someone with no conscience and no fear. Someone who wanted to see people die. Someone who wouldn’t have stopped.” Her eyes met mine. “You’ve been asking about my parents, my childhood. Why don’t you go upstairs and see my childhood for yourself?”
“Upstairs?”
“Yes. The second door on the left was my childhood room. It’s been left as it was, so you can see what I saw as a little girl. My father’s study is up there—his papers are still there if you want to read them. My parents’ bedroom—now my bedroom—is at the end of the hall. My mother’s clothes are still in the closet. Look at anything you like.”
Sick dread settled in my stomach. “You still have your mother’s clothes?”
“I can never quite seem to get rid of them,” Beth said. “I get so far, and then . . . well. Not all of the answers you want so desperately are going to come from me. Some of them are going to come from this house.”
The air was still, as if the house were listening, waiting. I didn’t want to go upstairs, but I’d made a decision when I came here in the first place. I’d decided that despite whatever I’d seen the last time, despite the voice I’d heard on my phone, I wanted to risk it. I was tired of being so safe all the time. I was tired of being so afraid that I never lived my life.
I wanted to see what was upstairs.
I picked up my phone from the coffee table and turned off the recording. I was going to bring it with me and take pictures. I didn’t ask Beth’s permission.
I stood and walked to the stairs. They were worn hardwood, with a runner placed down the middle that was well cared for but obviously as old as the rest of the house. I put my hand on the hardwood banister and climbed.
The Greer mansion looked large from the outside, but the upstairs was a single hallway with a row of doorways on each side. The air was still, and there was carpet, a thin nap of dusty roses. There was no artwork on the walls, no family photos lining the hall. The boards beneath the flowers creaked softly under my feet.
The doors lining the corridor were all closed. I opened the second door on the left.
It was a small room, tidy, with a single twin bed made up with a gray blanket. An ornate desk sat against the other wall, the kind of desk a young girl might use. Next to it were bookshelves, empty. There was a rug in the middle of the floor. A wooden clock ticked on the wall.
Beth Greer had been born in 1954. Which meant this room, her little-girl room, had sat here unchanged for some sixty years.
Some families didn’t change their children’s rooms. They kept their kids’ beds, their bookshelves, long after the child in question had grown up and moved out. My own mother had kept my and Esther’s room intact until my parents moved to Florida. But that was a pattern born of love, of nostalgia, and the thought that maybe grandchildren would want to use the room someday.
That wasn’t what this was. This little girl’s room had never been changed because the space wasn’t needed in a house with so many rooms and only three people. It was unchanged because Mariana Greer couldn’t be bothered. And then it stayed unchanged because both Julian and Mariana were dead, and Beth had let it sit for another forty years.
What the hell was wrong with this place?
I moved past the bedroom and farther down the hall. The air was still, even stuffier than it was downstairs. Like fresh air was alien to this place. The next door I tried opened to a bathroom, but the one after that was a room with a heavy wood desk with a blotter on it and a leather chair. Julian Greer’s study.
I stepped inside. I felt like an intruder in this room, as if the man who owned it would walk back in at any minute. He’s been dead for over forty years, I reminded myself as I approached the desk and put my hand on one of the drawer handles. After a brief pause to inhale a breath, I yanked the drawer open.
Inside was a pack of cigarettes. Winstons, in the distinctive red and white package. Next to it was a heavy metal lighter. There was an empty ashtray on the desk.
I pushed aside the cigarettes, left here by a man dead for decades, and picked up a piece of paper from the stack beneath it. It was a phone bill dated January 3, 1972, listing the calls in and out of the house.
My God. Had Beth thrown nothing away in all these years? This was some kind of mental illness, maybe even a psychosis. How was it possible that she looked so modern and fashionable when she lived in this museum? How could she be mentally stable when for forty years her life had been lived in a shrine to her parents?
Beneath the phone bill was another, and another. On the third bill, I thought I saw the ghost of dark handwriting on the back of the paper. I turned it over and saw three words scrawled in ink:
I’m still here
The breath left my throat. Those were the words I’d heard whispered into my phone. I turned over the other two phone bills and saw the same three words written on the back. Suddenly, I’d hazard a guess that I’d see those words written on every piece of paper in this desk.
I grabbed my phone out of my back pocket with numb fingers and snapped photos of the scrawled words. Thinking of the way the last interview had vanished from my phone, I immediately texted the pictures to Michael. I didn’t even bother with a message. He knew I was at the Greer mansion right now.
I hit send, and then I noticed that the air was cold. And there was the soft sound of someone breathing right outside the open door of the study.
“Beth?” I called out.
The air grew colder, and there was a soft shh. I looked down and saw that all of the desk drawers were open.
I took a clumsy step back, then rounded the desk to bolt for the door. It slammed closed, and I saw the shadow of something moving in the crack beneath the bottom of the door and the floor. Not feet—something sliding smoothly across the door, from one side to the other and back.
I lifted my hand to the doorknob, and something pounded on the other side of the door. Bang. Bang. I stumbled back in shock, and my phone fell from my hand, spinning across the floor and under the desk. I dropped to my knees as the banging continued, heavy and rhythmic, almost a human sound but not quite. Flinching with each bang, I groped under the desk until my fingers found my phone. I glanced back over my shoulder and saw the smooth shadow still moving back and forth. It definitely wasn’t human feet.
I pulled my phone toward me. There was a crack across the screen. The banging stopped, and the room rang with silence. I rose to my knees and glanced beneath the door again. The shadow was gone.
In my hand, my phone lit up, and a voice came from the recorder. A harsh whisper, like I’d heard before.
“I’m still here,” the voice said.
That was when I got to my feet and ran.
* * *
—
Beth wasn’t downstairs. She wasn’t in the living room. Her empty glass with its melting ice was sitting on the table.
“Beth!” I shouted.
Upstairs, I heard footsteps in the hallway, heading for the stairs.
I grabbed my bag from the sofa and put it under my arm. The curtains in the living room were drawn, but I could see a shadow of something beyond them, out there on the grass.
In my hand, my phone lit up again. The recorder played, and this time it sounded like an old recording, or maybe an old answering machine.
“What do you think?” a woman said through my cracked screen. “Is she bitter, or is she sweet? I could never decide. Sometimes she was so sweet, but other times . . . Well, I don’t like to think about it.”
I wanted to run, but something drew me to the window instead. I stepped forward and yanked the curtain open.
There was the dead expanse of lawn outside, the empty ocean. A girl stood at the edge of the drop, her back to me. She was blond, slender, and young—a teenager, wearing jeans and a flowered blouse. Her feet were bare. Her hair lifted in the wind. She stood for a moment, and then she tipped forward and vanished over the edge in a whisper of fabric.
I shouted and pounded the glass.
“She can get so angry,” the voice on my dead phone said. “She loses control. But I think you should look behind you. She’s coming down the stairs.”
There were footsteps behind me. I turned from the window and bolted from the house, down the front steps to the driveway. The cool, damp air hit my face like a slap. I was almost at the sidewalk when I sank to the ground, frozen in panic, my breath heaving and my stomach turning. I stared at the grass as the moisture soaked through the knees of my jeans and a bird called overhead. In the distance, a car went by. The world going about its business.
Footsteps came toward me on the sidewalk. It was Beth. She had put on ballet flats and a trench coat—not the old coat from the seventies, but a newer one, dark blue, expensive Burberry. It was belted at the waist, and the hem fell past her knees. In the cloudy light, she looked like the woman in the YouTube videos and the photographs, and also like the woman I knew. Her eyes were unreadable.
When she came to my side, she lowered herself down to a crouch. She touched my cheek with her fingertip, dragging it lightly across my skin, tucking a loose strand of hair behind my ear.
“For someone so paranoid, you should choose your friends more carefully,” she said.
I was starting to breathe again. The fear was still there, but my stomach had slowed its nauseated turning. “Who is she?” I asked Beth.
“You’re so close,” Beth said. “You have so many questions, so many things you want to know. You’ve come closer than anyone else ever has. You’ve almost finished the game, Shea. You’ve almost won. Just use your brain and figure out the last part.”
Then she stood and walked to the Greer mansion. When she got to the steps, the front door swung open.
Then Beth went inside, and the door closed behind her with a click. And she was gone.
