Shame

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