Shame (32 page)

“‘All deaths were necessary,’” he said for a third time, “‘apparently even his own.’”

Not just any woman, Lola realized, but Elizabeth Line. “‘Apparently even his own.’”

Caleb’s mimicking ability was so uncanny that Lola felt uneasy. It was as if someone else were inside him. She was glad when he started listening to the recording again.

It was in New Orleans that Parker had first experimented with a victim. Jenny Lucas was found with the usual Shame MO, but he didn’t leave her body with only his signature. Her breasts were found ravaged with tooth marks, her right nipple almost completely severed. There were also bite marks all around Jenny’s labia.

Parker didn’t use lipstick to do the lettering on Jenny. Lab results confirmed what the police on the scene had guessed: that Parker had applied his signature with Louisiana hot sauce. Hot sauce was also found inside her vagina.

Caleb turned off the recording. He appeared agitated at what he’d heard. He kept smoothing his hair. His cheeks were flushed red, but the rest of his face was drawn and pale.

Lola went over to check his fever. She took away the washcloth. Steam all but rose from it. She put the back of her hand on his forehead.

“Oh, God,” she said. “You’re so hot.”

“Louisiana hot sauce,” he said but in Elizabeth’s voice.

Lola wished a priest were at her side. She thought Caleb was possessed and in need of an exorcism. It was all she could do not to run screaming from the room.

“Some Louisiana hot sauce,” he said, “that’s what I need.”

This time he didn’t speak in Elizabeth’s voice. But it wasn’t Caleb’s either. Lola felt chilled. She was sure it was Gray Parker voicing the request.

“C
AN’T ESCAPE ME
,” Feral said. “You know that, don’t you?”

Feral thought of Robert O. Pierce and how he had tried to escape his appointed destiny with death. On the night Pierce was due to be executed, he managed to get a piece of glass and cut his own throat. The wound had been too deep for the prison doctor to treat him successfully, but instead of taking Pierce to the hospital, the guards had carried him to the gas chamber. And there he had lived just long enough to die by gas.

It still bothered Feral that he’d had his hands around Queenie’s neck and she had gotten away. But like Pierce, she was about to go from the frying pan into the fire.

Feral started up his car and pulled away from the curb. He was taking his time scouting the exterior of the Amity Inn. He had already driven around the parking lot but hadn’t seen Queenie’s car. She probably had a new rental. Queenie had been suspicious enough to begin with, and after yesterday’s tête-à-tête, she would be even more so.

Didn’t matter, he thought. She and Robert O. Pierce could compare notes in hell.

Feral parked in the white zone in the front of the lodge. The Amity Inn wasn’t the kind of establishment that had bellmen
waiting at the curb. It was designed for the long-term business traveler. Perfect for Queenie’s anonymity and his own as well. At a hotel there would have been more employees and guests milling about, more potential witnesses.

From where he was sitting, Feral could see the lobby. He was tempted just to walk in and ask the clerk which room Vera Macauley was in, but he didn’t want to expose himself. The staff might be on alert to anyone asking for her, and even if they weren’t, most clerks were trained not to give out a guest’s room number. It was a suspicious world. Shame on it.

No, Queenie was going to make this as hard as possible. Feral whispered from an Andrew Marvell poem: “‘Had we but world enough, and time, / This coyness, lady, were no crime.’”

He would have liked to recite the words to Queenie herself. She was smart enough that she might even appreciate them. His former girlfriend had never liked his recounting couplets or ditties. She had thought him a pedant. That was one of her excuses for breaking up with him. Of course she hadn’t used the word
pedant
, not with her limited vocabulary. What she had said was, “You always talk about weird stuff, and creepy stuff.” He had accepted her rejection in a very understanding manner, but that had been easy for him to do. For rejecting him, Feral had known, she had to die.

No woman was ever going to reject him again.

Feral remembered a line from W. C. Fields: “’Twas a woman who drove me to drink, and I never even had the decency to thank her.” Feral felt much the same way. He had his girlfriend to thank for all the murders, but he hadn’t even had the decency to thank her. Instead, he had murdered her. And then he had emulated the Cave Man killings a second time. He’d killed again to allay potential suspicion. The second victim had been his insurance policy. Feral had known the Cave Man’s troglodyte luck would soon run out. But Feral thought it possible that after his capture the Cave Man might take credit for his murders, and
if not, the murders could always be attributed to one of those pesky copycats.

Funny how in such cases no one said imitation was the sincerest form of flattery.

As it had turned out, the Cave Man
had
initially claimed the kills as his own but later recanted. The police were looking into his change of heart, and so was Queenie. Feral had been thrilled when he first heard she was coming to Denver to write a book on the Cave Man murders. Her timing had been impeccable. She had saved him from having to seek her out. And how ironic it was that she asked him for an interview. How positively delicious. She had no idea of their ties to one another. To her, he was just another grief-stricken loved one of a victim.

Kismet had brought them together. When they had talked at his place of business, Feral had been tempted to drop hints of what he knew about her and make some allusions to their mutual past, but of course he hadn’t. He probably knew more about Queenie than anyone, for the detective who had researched his own history had also delved into hers.

The PI’s snooping hadn’t stopped there. The dick had proved quite adept at surreptitiously tracking down half a dozen other individuals. All had a common denominator: each and every one of them had been sired by some notorious serial murderer. Feral had explained to the PI that he was writing a book called
Cain’s Children.
Not that the detective had really cared about anything except getting paid. But the detective’s competence was offset by his attitude. He had presumed an annoying familiarity with Feral.

Feral still remembered the way the man had walked into his office and acted as if he owned it. The detective had finished all his background work and took pleasure in tossing his report down onto Feral’s desk. “Demon spawn,” he announced, showing him a cocky grin. “Everything you wanted to know about the children of serial murderers but were afraid to ask.”

His report, though, was professional. The man had no couth, but he was thorough. How unfortunate that the detective had recently been killed by a hit-and-run driver. But as it was best expressed in Ecclesiasticus, “He that toucheth pitch shall be denied therewith.” The detective had apparently touched too much pitch. And hadn’t he said it?

Demon spawn.

T
HE MORE
E
LIZABETH
tried to discount Lola’s words, the more they came back to haunt her.

The killer had manipulated her. He had known her weaknesses. And he had targeted her.

Other nagging doubts surfaced. Her sorority sisters had been Parker’s ninth and tenth victims. So why had the copycat attacked her out of sequence? He’d tried to make her his fourth San Diego victim. And if he wasn’t a copycat...

Maybe she was the target and had been all along. By doing her job well, Elizabeth knew, she had made her fair share of enemies, but there had been no overt death threats recently, unless you could count Ken’s poetry on talk radio.

Poetry. The connection with her past made Elizabeth wonder if Ken might have been an invention, yet another ploy by the killer, another false trail for the police to follow in the event of her death.

Caleb was right, she decided. The answers were in the past. She was the one who had been dragging her feet, afraid to look back. Now, unflinching, she needed to do just that.

Lola applied another cold compress to Caleb’s forehead. He wasn’t as delirious now, though his temperature was still over 103.

“Take another sip of this,” Lola insisted.

Caleb dutifully took a sip. But he was only giving lip service, literally, to being there. Between the fever and listening to the recording, he had been drifting in and out of consciousness.

At least he wasn’t doing those voices anymore, Lola thought. They had all but driven her from the house.

“How about another sip for your Aunt Lola?”

Caleb sipped again. And the MP3 player, and Elizabeth’s voice, played on.

“Because Gray Parker had been tried for murder in the state of Florida, he had a bifurcated trial. The first part of the trial was the criminal hearing; the second part the penalty phase. With the overwhelming evidence against him, and because Parker had already admitted his guilt and was an advocate for his own death, there was little in the way of courtroom suspense, but the courtroom still proved to be anything but a dull place.

“George Bernard Shaw wrote that ‘murderers get sheaves of offers of marriage.’ Parker, with his Hollywood looks and lively mind, was one of the first serial murderers to gain celebrity status. Despite the heinousness of his crimes, he was inundated with suggestive mail from women. His cell smelled like a perfumery from all the letters sealed with perfumed kisses, and his cell’s wallpaper consisted of hundreds of revealing photos that women had sent him. The prison turned away as much as it delivered, returning items it deemed obscene, along with a warning notice to the senders not to send such material again.

“Even seemingly respectable women lost their sense of reason when it came to Parker. Many felt they could save him with their love and were willing to forgive his horrid past. All of the attention amused Parker. He was even moved to write a poem about one woman’s proposition to him:

“Got another offer of marriage in the mail today,

Woman said she wanted my hand,

Said wasn’t no big thing where my hands had been before,

Said she could understand my strangling some no-good whore.

This woman sent along a photo of her in the raw,

Said it was worth a thousand words,

She had a body that would drop any jaw,

And said when I was sprung she’d let me eat my words.

All thousand of them.

“But many women were not content to be only pen pals with Parker. They became regulars at his trials, spectators who swooned at his every glance, laughed too long at his every witticism, and cried too loudly at his reflections.

“These trial groupies, what the press labeled as ‘Shame’s Dames’ or ‘Shame’s Gang,’ evidenced no respect for the victims or the families of victims. Their fawning over Parker mortified most observers. They appeared oblivious to reality. On those occasions when the prosecution took pains to detail the terrible things that Parker had done, their eyes remained dry and fixed on him even as the rest of the courtroom wept.

“‘It was as if they were all hypnotized,’ said Lonnie Green, bailiff for most of the court proceedings. ‘They were kind of like that Manson Family, except instead of blindly committing murders, they blindly forgave them.’

“To my mind the Shame gang were, and always will be, the ‘Tell Gray’ women. Because they knew I had access to Parker, virtually all of these women tried to enlist me as a go-between. ‘Tell Gray,’ they would always say to me. ‘Tell Gray.’ And though I reiterated time and again that I would pass on no messages, they never stopped asking me.

“Leslie Van Doren was the most forward of the Shame groupies. Van Doren’s fixation on Parker was such that she had moved from her home state of Colorado to live in Florida for both of his trials.

“Van Doren worked nights as a cocktail waitress, but by day she was a courtroom observer. Like so many other women in Shame’s Gang, she was quite attractive, a five-and-a-half-foot, curvaceous blonde. During the first trial her courtroom garb was very provocative. She liked wearing leather skirts and favored clinging, low-cut blouses. Van Doren rarely wore a bra. Usually she could be found leaning forward, showing off as much skin as possible, desperate to catch Parker’s eye.