The Book of Cold Cases(6)
Beth was photographed coming out of the Claire Lake police station after an interview, looking beautiful and cold and carefree. No one liked her; her neighbors said she was standoffish, and she tended to have unsavory people at her house. Her car was seized and her mansion searched, but no evidence was found. No one could come up with a reason for a rich girl with no problems to start killing random men. But someone had. And Beth Greer sold papers.
The Portland papers ran a story with a photo of Beth Greer laughing, looking beautiful and sexy. It was a photo from a year before, but no one cared. They ran it with the headline is she the female zodiac killer? Then the New York Times picked up the story, though the photo it ran was more recent and the headline was subdued: murders by apparent female killer baffle oregon police. The article said: “local socialite Beth Greer has been identified as a person of interest,” and Beth Greer became the most famous murder suspect in America.
The woman who had sold all of those papers was sitting in my waiting room right now, quietly reading a book.
I remembered the photos of her from 1977—Beth was sleek and gorgeous, her body in tight-fitting seventies tops and high-waisted pants, her long red hair cascading over her shoulders and down her back. She had big, dark, perfectly even eyes that were hypnotic and somehow sexual. Even as she was being led from jail to the courthouse and back, wearing an ill-fitting jumpsuit, she looked like a movie star.
My fingertips were numb as I moved files around, as I typed patient information on my computer and answered emails. Beth Greer glanced at her watch briefly, then turned another page. They had arrested her as the Lady Killer and taken her to trial, which had been covered in a nationwide spectacle. She was acquitted, but that didn’t stop the headlines: has a deadly female killer gone free?
No one knew the answer. I’d written an article about the Lady Killer case for the Book of Cold Cases, and all I’d found was an endless spiral of speculation. There were so many details, so many what-ifs. So many questions. Why those two men? Had they known Beth? Was she a young woman grieving her parents’ tragic deaths or a seething psychopath with a sexy body? Did the notes even mean anything, and if so, what? Why had the state gone to trial with no murder weapon and no forensic evidence? If the killer wasn’t Beth Greer, why had the killings stopped when she was arrested? The killer had written Catch me! Had they caught her? Was Beth an innocent victim or a femme fatale?
I’d spent five weeks writing the article for my website, and three times I’d taken the bus to Arlen Heights so I could walk past the Greer mansion. I’d found Beth’s birth certificate, her DMV records, her property taxes. I’d read the local newspaper coverage and compared it with the national coverage, including articles in Newsweek. I’d read every rumor—there were hundreds—and every wild conspiracy theory. I’d looked at every photo of her, including the baby and childhood pictures I could find. I’d even tracked down a pirated copy of the 1981 TV movie made about the case, starring Jaclyn Smith, and bought a ripped DVD that cost me $300 because the movie wasn’t available digitally. I’d dug up every scrap, searching for answers, just like so many others before me. I’d been obsessed. I still was. And Beth Greer was at the center of it, in all her unreadable complexity.
I glanced up through the Plexiglas and watched her absently scratch her temple. She was still beautiful, there was no doubt of that. Still fascinating, at least to me.
No one else in the room noticed her. For most people, the Lady Killer murders were ancient history, a curious footnote, if they had heard of them at all. The frightened fall of 1977 was a long-ago memory or a rumor of a time before you were born. After the trial and the sensational acquittal, Beth had dropped out of the public eye. Information about her over the past forty years was thin, though I knew she hadn’t married or had kids, that she still lived in the mansion, presumably all alone. Whether she was innocent or guilty, there were no more Lady Killer murders. The story seemed to be over.
Beth crossed one leg over the other, turning the pages of her novel.
I wondered if the book was about murder.
“Miss Greer?” One of the nurses poked her head out the door from the exam rooms. Beth put her book away and stood. I looked at her and saw the young woman who had been photographed being led to and from the courthouse, the acquitted prisoner standing next to her attorney, wearing a red shawl and red lipstick. I saw a woman, and I also saw the biggest mystery in the history of Claire Lake.
No one watched as she crossed the waiting room. No one except me.
CHAPTER FIVE
September 2017
SHEA
“I’m taking my lunch break,” I said.
It was early for lunch, but Karen shrugged. I was entitled, and the sooner I went, the sooner I could come back and relieve her. I pulled my purse from under the desk and grabbed my coat.
Beth Greer had taken forty-five minutes for her appointment. Then she’d walked through the waiting room, disappearing into the elevator without a backward glance. I couldn’t have said what possessed me to follow her, but I had the impulse not to let her out of my sight.
The rain had let up today, the sky a chalky gray-blue, the wind carrying the scent of ocean. On the street, people sat at the outdoor cafés or window-shopped, taking pictures of the houseboats on the water. Claire Lake had a neighborhood of citizens who lived on their boats, docked in the marina. They had walkways and window planters, garden gnomes and pinwheel birds, like any other home. In some past decade, the city had made the houseboats legal residences, and subsequent attempts to change the zoning had failed. Now it was one of Claire Lake’s tourist attractions, a pretty spot for people to stroll and enjoy their fancy take-out coffee. People came here to stay in the B&Bs, stroll the tidy, cobblestoned streets, and get away from the bigger, more crowded cities.