Shame (5 page)

“Let me in then,” Elizabeth said. “You’ll get my silence in return for giving me the inside track.”

Her threat was implicit. If they didn’t involve her in the case, they had no hold on her silence. The men exchanged glances again.

“It won’t be a one-way street,” she said. “I can help you.”

“How?” This time the sheriff did his own talking.

“If this is a copycat killer,” she said, “no one knows more about the original homicides than I do.”

Elizabeth could feel them wavering, but she also knew how very conservative law enforcement was. They protected their closed doors and resisted letting strangers into their inner circle. Especially women.

“I’d like to hear about the death of Teresa Sanders,” she said.

The men reacted uncomfortably, moving in their seats, saying nothing.

“In particular, I’m interested in knowing about the crime scene.”

Elizabeth could see she had pushed too hard. The men folded their arms, held them tight to their chests. The doors were closing on her.

She had to say something and took a chance: “Were there any balloons at the crime scene?”

Both men tried not to react. Both men did.

“Balloons?” the sheriff asked.

“Yes.”

“That’s an odd question,” he said. “Yes.”

It was her turn to stonewall. She had considered the possibilities and thrown out the most likely.

The sheriff tried to draw her out. “If you have any information about this homicide...”

“Am I in?” she asked.

After a long moment’s hesitation, the sheriff said, “We’ll cooperate with you.”

His remark was open to interpretation, but Elizabeth decided to take him at his word.

“Kathy Franklin was strangled while a flotilla of hot-air balloons sailed over her head. At her outdoor memorial service, balloons were released. Your copycat would have known that.”

The sheriff and the sergeant looked at each other for the briefest moment. There was something furtive about their glance, something guilty.

“Mrs. Sanders’s autopsy will be performed in the morning,” the sheriff said, “but there was a preliminary examination of her body this afternoon.”

His unsaid “and” hung in the air. The sheriff sighed, shook his head, then met Elizabeth’s eyes.

“There were balloons found in her vagina. Seventeen of them. All different colors.”

O
NCE MORE UNTO
the breach, thought Elizabeth. She felt like Daniel going into the lions’ den, only without Daniel’s faith. As the detectives entered the room, she reminded herself to smile, though she figured that tactic worked about as well on cops as it did on lions.

The Sheriff’s Department homicide detail was located in a building several blocks away from the administrators in Ridgehaven. Everyone seemed to like that arrangement.

Elizabeth’s participation in the new Shame murders had been shoved down the throat of Lieutenant Jacob Borman. The Shame murders were considered so hot that all three homicide teams, each with four sheriff’s homicide investigators and one sheriff’s homicide sergeant, were working them.

Lieutenant Borman and Elizabeth sat at opposite ends of the Central Intelligence Division conference room. As the sixteen homicide detectives trickled inside, the first thing they noticed was the stranger in their presence. What Elizabeth noticed was the dark circles under their eyes and their dark moods. Most had been working all night; none was in a mood to hear a lecture.

“Let’s get to it,” said Borman, calling to a few men standing at the doorway.

Most of the men took seats in the mismatched chairs at the long, rectangular table. One investigator showed his disinterest by lying down on the sofa and offering Elizabeth only one open eye. Elizabeth noticed that there was only one other woman in the room. She smiled at her, hoping to engage at least one sympathetic face, but the detective turned away.

From across the table, Lieutenant Borman nodded in her direction. “Elizabeth Line is our guest this morning,” he said. “You’re going to be seeing her around.”

Borman’s announcement sounded more like a warning than an endorsement. His tone made it clear that he wasn’t thrilled to have her among them. He patted the crown of his head, found a slight cowlick, and worked on smoothing it down. With his brown, bloodshot eyes, curly brown hair, drooping face, and perpetual lip curl, Borman looked like a basset hound with an attitude.

“
Ms
. Line,” he said, “is a writer. In front of each of you is her book
Shame.
That’s what she’s here to talk about.”

Elizabeth debated whether to stand up and decided the room was too small. She understood their collective tiredness and their distrust of her. She was the outsider let in on their ugly secrets.

“I appreciate how extremely busy all of you are,” she said, “so I will try to keep my comments very brief. As you probably gathered from the title of my book, I wrote about the original Shame murders. As to what relevance ancient history has to the homicides you’re working on, my best answer is that your murderer has apparently read my book very carefully. He also seems to know quite a bit about the life of Gray Parker.

“I have not yet had the chance to get up to speed on your investigations, but it’s my understanding that in many ways your two homicides parallel Parker’s first two murders. Rather than compare notes, I thought I’d tell you what I know about those earlier deaths and let you draw your own comparisons.”

The eyes weren’t so hostile now. Encouraged by that, Elizabeth told them about Alicia Gleason and Kathy Franklin.
She didn’t need to refer to notes; the memories surfaced readily. Whether that was a blessing or a curse, she wasn’t sure. She had visited where the women had lived and died, had in fact done that for all of Parker’s victims. His trail of death had taken her from New Mexico to Florida. In many ways, Parker had been her guide. Before leaving on her trips she had asked him questions, and he had answered them matter-of-factly. She always tried to come away from her pilgrimages with three sets of impressions: her own, the victim’s, and Parker’s.

“I hope your murderer isn’t as naturally elusive as Gray Parker,” she said. “There was one detective who called him ‘the man of a thousand faces.’ He was wrong: Parker didn’t disguise himself; he knew how to be invisible. Most of the time he passed himself off as a college student. That gave him license to keep odd hours. It also gave him a certain anonymity, with people seeing him as a student more than as an individual.”

She didn’t want to overload her audience with too many details, and yet there were so many things she wanted to say.

“What distinguished Parker’s first three homicides from those that followed is that there was significantly more posing involved. By this I don’t only mean his signature—his postmortem ritualized writing of
Shame
on their flesh—but his purposely situating the victims in specific spots.

“The first placement was in White Sands. Parker was a regular visitor there and knew the area well. He was fixated on how ephemeral life was and how White Sands showcased that. ‘Until the next dune buries them,’ was a favorite expression of his, words he had lifted from one of the White Sands exhibits. In a convoluted leap of logic, Gray decided he was that next dune and that his calling was to take life. The very act of placing Alicia Gleason’s body inside the monument revealed the extent of his compulsion. The road into White Sands is closed at night, and to get her body to the preselected spot, he had to carry her for two miles.

“Parker was similarly obsessed with the posing of his second victim, situating her at the Three Rivers Petroglyph Site. He was fascinated by the rock drawings. I suspect he saw them as tablets with messages as clear as the Ten Commandments. His fascination with Indian drawings wasn’t anything new; whenever he was at his wife’s home in Eden, Texas, he always visited the neighboring community of Paint Rock to look at its renowned Indian pictograph site. It’s a pretty spot, a half-mile bluff that overlooks the Conchos River, a place where a number of Indian tribes have left artifacts for over a thousand years. Some have even offered up their stories in relatively modern times. In 1865 Apache warriors kidnapped a fourteen-year-old girl named Alice Todd. They were fleeing pursuit but took the time to paint symbols of what they’d done on the rocks. They drew two crossed lances, which is the warpath symbol, and next to that they painted two long-haired scalps, which depicted the killings of Alice’s mother and a black slave girl. A third drawing showed a girl posed horizontally, a typical depiction of a captive. What ultimately happened to Alice is not known. Her body was never discovered, and she was never seen by the white community again. The last evidence of her existence is that drawing.”

Elizabeth paused in her telling. They didn’t need to hear about Parker’s fascination with Alice Todd. It would be more helpful to them to hear about Kathy Franklin. Elizabeth had extensively toured the Three Rivers Petroglyph Site, had spent two full days walking up and down the ridge and studying the area where the Franklin girl’s body had been posed. Anthropologists had documented more than twenty-one thousand rock carvings at Three Rivers, drawings more than a thousand years old. Many of the petroglyphs told stories; the bighorn sheep pierced with three arrows; the representations of mountain lions, bears, and game birds; the staring faces and masks; the mysterious crosses, circles, and patterns—all believed to have religious significance.

She had never felt exactly alone at Three Rivers. It was an easy place to be spooked. The weather always seemed to be changing, and the wind constantly tugged and talked. Even immutable objects never looked the same. From one moment to the next the Godfrey Hills to the north, the Sacramento Mountains and Sierra Blanca to the east, and the San Andres and Oscura Mountains to the west seemed to alter in stature and color. And below, looking northwest to the Chupadera Mesa, Elizabeth always thought she was on the verge of seeing visions.

She had hinted to a BLM ranger how she felt, how the spot seemed to her to be alternately holy and eerie, and he told her he often felt the same way. He took her down the trail and showed her what he called The Little Man but what he said others called the God of the Petroglyph.

“He’s the watcher,” the ranger said. “He’s the holy man looking out for this site. I’ve come up here some nights, and I’ve seen these weird lights in the area, sort of bluish and green. The Little Man puts on quite the light show.”

Something else the detectives didn’t need to hear about. “Parker didn’t leave a drawing at Three Rivers,” said Elizabeth, “no picture of Alice Todd. He left Kathy Franklin’s body.”

Back then, there had only been a dirt road out to the petroglyph site. Gray had brought Kathy at night, had laid her down beneath a petroglyph of one of the goggle-eyed beings. The figure looked alert, even afraid, its hands raised in alarm and its eyes wide open. Elizabeth wondered if that was how Kathy had reacted as Parker had put his hands around her neck. She coughed, not sure if it was out of reflex or sympathy, and remembered her audience.

“It’s clear the recent homicides have somewhat paralleled the original murders. I don’t have an opinion as to whether the San Diego homicides are copycat killings, ritualized murders based on the Shame MO, or whether the killer is staging these homicides for as-yet-unknown reasons. At this juncture, though,
I think it’s important that Parker’s third murder be examined. Looking back might give you the opportunity to plan ahead.”

Elizabeth stopped talking, ostensibly to take a sip of water, but in reality to gather her thoughts about Heidi Ehrlich, another name from her personal memorial wall.

“Heidi Ehrlich was a woman who liked to help others. She was a college student who chose to be a Good Samaritan to the wrong person. She met Gray Parker in an Albuquerque park late one afternoon. She heard him calling out, ‘Anubis, Anubis.’ Then he approached her and asked if she’d seen his dog. Heidi helped him look. When she ventured into some brush, he strangled her with a leash.

“For those who know their Egyptian mythology, Anubis was the jackal-headed god who escorted the dead to judgment. Perhaps that had some bearing on where Parker transported the body. He took Heidi to the El Santuario de Chimayo, a famous shrine, sort of the Lourdes of New Mexico. For almost two hundred years people have been taking pinches of clay from a small well there, believing it has healing properties. And during Easter weekend a few tons of local dirt are brought in and blessed by the priest. Miracle dirt, people call it. They take it home in plastic bags.”

Elizabeth remembered the room at the church that was overflowing with crutches, braces, and medical equipment, items left behind by those who thought the clay had cured them. She had visited on a warm summer day, had gone inside and marveled that there were so many lit candles in such a small shrine. Then, as now, there was no shortage of people looking for a miracle. Inside and outside were signs of heartfelt offerings: beads, makeshift crucifixes, photos of loved ones, cut-out pictures of the Baby Jesus, and drawings of the Virgin Mary.