The Book of Cold Cases(24)

“Which was?”

“A true, bona fide female serial killer.” Black put his glass of water on the counter and stared at it, unseeing. “It’s difficult to explain how hard that was to process for us in 1977. It’s still hard now. We had no context, no idea what we were dealing with, no idea what to expect. None of us had the slightest bit of training or education in serial murder, let alone female serial murder. It was so unusual that we haven’t had another case like the Lady Killer in forty years. A woman driving around shooting people for fun. We live in a very different society than we did in 1977, but that part hasn’t changed.”

“And then Paul Veerhoever was killed,” I said.

Black nodded, seeming to remember I was there. “Veerhoever had two kids,” he said. “He’d served six years in the military before an honorable discharge. His wife had had three miscarriages, and he’d been by her side for all of them. The first bullet didn’t kill him—only hit him in the jaw. He was in unimaginable agony until the Lady Killer put a second bullet in his temple and left him by the side of the road.”

My mouth was dry. This was what they thought Beth had done. It was this murder that a witness had said he’d seen Beth drive away from.

Detective Black walked to the only chair, on the other side of the coffee table, and sat down. Outside, I could hear birds calling over the ocean. The boat rocked gently, and I felt like I was a little drunk. I couldn’t see how anyone could live here—too many ways for someone to break in, too many strangers walking by, no alarm system that I could see—but I had to assume he liked it. Cops, even former cops, could live in places I couldn’t and not worry about it.

“The first time I met Beth was at our first interview,” he said, though I hadn’t asked a question. “The day after Veerhoever was killed. We had a witness identification by then. I knew who Beth Greer was, though I’d never met her. I knew who her parents were. I knew she lived in Arlen Heights. It seemed unlikely that she was a killer, but, like I say, we had no idea what we were looking for. We didn’t know what a female Zodiac was supposed to look like. And Beth wasn’t like any woman any of us had met.”

“She was young and sexy and smart,” I said. “Rich. So that made her a murderer?”

Detective Black leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees. “Aside from the witness identification, think about this,” he said. “This killer, whoever they are, can get away scot-free. There’s no connection to the victim, no fingerprints, no hair or fiber evidence, no blood or DNA. No witnesses. This person has just literally gotten away with murder. And she decides to leave a note with her handwriting on it. Paper that could be traced, handwriting that could be analyzed, possibly even fingerprints. Who would do that? Someone with an ego. Someone who thinks she’s smarter than the cops. Someone who thinks she’ll never be caught.”

“Someone who wants to be caught,” I countered. “Deep down, even if she can’t admit it. She wants to be stopped.”

“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.