The Book of Cold Cases(39)

They hadn’t arrested her yet. It was going to happen; she could feel it the way you can feel electricity in the air when a thunderstorm is coming, when you see the lowering clouds on the horizon and feel the wind kick up. She didn’t sleep much. Her life as she knew it would be over soon.

The Claire Lake papers had already convicted her: local heiress suspected of murders and did she kill them? No one came forward to say they didn’t believe it, that Beth would never do something like that. Except for Ransom—who was paid to defend her. Other than maybe her father, who was dead, Beth couldn’t think of anyone else who would say that.

Instead there was a long line of people—the neighbors, girls Beth had gone to school with, grocery clerks, a few of the people who had gotten drunk at Beth’s parties—who wanted to tell the press that Beth was strange, that she was frightening, that she had fits of anger. Stories were surfacing about noises at the Greer mansion while her parents were alive—shouting, furniture overturned, china broken. And of course they all said that Beth lived alone now, that she had no friends or husband, that she spent most of her time as a hermit except when she was partying. “She doesn’t seem to like people,” a girl who had known Beth briefly in seventh grade told the press. “I think she hates everyone.”

Hating people in seventh grade made her a killer. Living alone because both of her parents were dead made her a killer. The pieces fit so nicely together. Beth had gone driving a few more times, but when she noticed a car following her, she turned around and went home. Was it the press? The police? It didn’t matter.

Now Beth stayed home like Ransom had told her to, the curtains on the floor-to-ceiling windows closed, the TV on. She lay on her sofa and drank and thought about what had happened to her and why. About how neat it all was.

About how angry she was. People were right about that, at least.

She was sick of drinking alone on the sofa, so tonight she broke Ransom’s commandment. She got dressed, got in her car—a Cadillac, because the police had impounded the Buick—and drove to a bar to drink.

It was second nature. Both of her parents had drunk from morning to night, and Beth had snuck her first drink at eleven. Now she sat at the dim bar, wearing a ringer T-shirt and high-waisted jeans, her hair twisted back. She started with vodka and stuck with it. Men came on to her, which she’d expected. She turned them down. All she cared about was that no one recognized her, or at least that none of them would let on.

She wanted to get blind drunk, but three-quarters of the way there an alarm went off deep in her belly, warning her to stop. She couldn’t afford to lose control around strangers, couldn’t afford to end up crawling all over a man in the back seat of his car and telling him everything. No mistakes, at least not big ones. At one o’clock, she paid her tab and walked outside to the parking lot, trying to keep her steps in a convincingly steady line.

There was a figure leaning against her car, waiting for her.

Beth stopped, her heart hammering in her chest. Some of the drunkenness drained away, absorbed by adrenaline. Then she recognized him.

“You have got to be kidding me,” she said.

“You’re not driving home,” Detective Black said.

Beth closed her fingers around the keys in her hand. “What’s it to you?”

“I’m the police,” he said. “I’m not letting you get in an accident.”

Incredibly, he was wearing a suit, or parts of one. He had no jacket, and his tie was loosened past his clavicle, his shirt unbuttoned at the top. But his dress pants were barely wrinkled and his shoes were shiny. His face was tired and his hair was slightly mussed, but he watched her with cop’s eyes.

“Fuck off,” Beth said, because she was tired and drunk and couldn’t think of anything else to say. “Go away and leave me alone.”

“I’m not going to do that,” he said stoically. “My car is just over there. I’ll drive you home.”

“How did you know I was here?”

He didn’t answer, but she knew. With the suspicious instincts of the drunk, she knew.

“You were following me,” she said.

Black didn’t answer. He looked away, unable to meet her gaze. Even in a parking lot at one in the morning, he was handsome.

“Well, screw it,” Beth said. He was leaning against the driver’s door, blocking her way, so she walked around the car to the passenger side. She’d climb over the gearshift and drive off, leaving his nice-looking ass to fall to the concrete. But Black rounded the car the other way and blocked her again, putting his hand over hers as she reached out with her key.

“Nice Cadillac,” he said.

It was. It was big and black. It was a nice car if you were a man, a big stupid man who cared about idiotic cars. It had been her father’s—he had bought it because a man as rich as he was, as high up in the world as he was, should own a Cadillac. But he’d never loved this car, just like he never loved his expensive house or his expensive wife. His expensive daughter, even. This big, shiny car hadn’t prevented her father from ending up dead on the kitchen floor.

Beth pushed the words out at Detective Black like venom. “I have to drive it because I don’t have my other car. You do.”

Ransom had said that meant the cops were going to look for fingerprints, blood, hair. It was a waste of time. Beth wondered if they’d find her father’s fingerprints in that car, a shadow of him left over from when he was alive.